England, 1939. Grace Allingham, a young, affluent Englishwoman is engaged to be married to Hughie. But when she meets Charles-Edouard de Valhubert, a French Air Force officer, she is swept off her feet, Hughie is dumped unceremoniously and Grace and Charles-Edouard quickly marry. After a brief honeymoon he returns to the war, leaving Grace pregnant but content to wait out the months and years of war for his return. Seven years pass, and when he finally returns to England it is to collect his wife, son and the family nanny and take them back to France, to finally begin married life.
Life in France is not without its challenges. The principal characters of the novel, with the exception of the nannies who look after the children before they are sent off to boarding school, are all upper class if not aristocratic, independently wealthy, who don’t have to work, have multiple houses, staff and spend their summers in Italy. But their relationships are a mess. The comedy of the novel derives largely from stereotypes about English and French aristocrats and their very different lifestyles. The main difference between the countries is their attitude towards infidelity. The French have a ‘laissez-faire’ approach, where affairs are seen as a private matter rather than a moral failure, and even accepted as part of long-term relationships. Charles-Edouard’s problem is that he is a enthusiastic adulterer who seems untroubled by being caught in the act. Eventually Grace realises he is never going to change. She returns to England and divorces him. He is remarkably untroubled by this, continuing with his long-term affairs, confident that his wife will sooner or later see sense and return to him.
As Charles-Edouard is a man-child driven by his libido above all else, it is hardly surprising that his son, Sigi, easily outwits him. Sigi likes his parents being separated – it means that all the potential new husbands and wives in their lives have to seek his approval, and approval means treats. He is spoilt rotten and frustrates Charles-Edouard’s lacklustre attempts to woo his wife into returning to France by simply not delivering his messages. Potential suitors for his mother’s newly available hand are equally easily disposed of given Sigi’s veto over their selection. Balls are attended, afternoon tea is drunk, French properties left unlooted by the Nazis are toured, and of course assignations are conducted more or less in the open. The comedy is dated, and I suspect it felt so even in the early 1950’s when the novel was first published, being more suited to the carefree times of the 20’s and 30’s. I even wonder whether this might have been a returned-to manuscript from the 30’s, updated with scant details of the slightly longer second world war?
The only indication we are in post-war Europe is a short discussion on homosexuality. Dexter, an obnoxious American, (it is almost a given that Americans in novels of this kind are obnoxious) is ranting about the link between homosexuality, which he calls ‘perversion’, and communism. Hughie, who by this point in the novel has overcome his break-up with Grace and is courting Albertine, who is one of Charles-Edouard’s mistresses. replies “But, old thing, they’re not sick. They just happen to like boys better than girls. You can’t blame them for that, it’s awfully inconvenient, and they’d give anything to be different if they could…I probably know more about them than you, having been at Eton and Oxford“. The revelation towards the end of the novel, that Dexter was a Russian spy and life-long communist, further undermines his credibility as a judge of public morality. Other than this brief defence of ‘perversion’ the social attitudes prevalent throughout the novel are those of earlier decades, when the Mitford’s had some relevance beyond historians of English class identities.
I have finally finished this year’s Dickens, Little Dorrit, with what I am embarrassed to admit was a sense of relief! It took me around two months to complete it. As will be obvious, at no point in the nine hundred pages did the novel ever really engage me. There were some characters who were more interesting, but their stories frequently fizzled out and were incomplete. I found the main plot line mechanical and dull, and most of the peripheral characters were two-dimensional. There were one or two elements of the novel that were unexpected, which I will expand upon below, but despite this I found it flawed and disappointing. As is probably too often the case, I am going to devote the bulk of this review to working out why I found it so.
Taking a step back for a moment, why do we read Dickens? It can’t really be for his plots – they are drawn out, driven by the demands of publication by instalment. They usually include hackneyed and repetitive plot devices: profoundly unlikely coincidences, long lost relatives reappearing after decades, lost wills, hidden identities and sudden reversal of fortunes. Little Dorrit has all these tropes and more, assembled in a slightly random order. When the myriad plot lines are resolved at the end of the novel the explanation given is baffling complex and improbable – the reader could never in a million years have worked out what was really going on behind all the subterfuge. Nor, frankly, would they have cared. The events of Little Dorrit pivot (we eventually find out) on a codicil to a will that passes through many hands before ending in those of a blackmailer, but by the time the intentions of the deceased are revealed it has long since ceased to matter.
Or do we read Dickens for his characters? Here the case is stronger – many of his creations live on in popular culture: Fagin, the Artful Dodger, Sam Weller, Mr Micawber and so on. But I would struggle to make this claim for any of the characters in Little Dorrit. The heroine, Amy Dorrit, is a kind and loving daughter, but her relationship with Arthur Clennam, the novel’s hero, if he can be called such, is one of Dickens many rather creepy much older man/young woman relationships which are so problematic in the light of the author’s personal life. Throughout the novel Clennam refers to Amy as ‘my child’, ‘my daughter’, or variations on this idea, and even though their eventual marriage is one of the least surprising events of the novel, it still feels uncomfortable. Of the novel’s other principal characters, the villain, Rigaud, is an appalling caricature, with his satanic smirk and twirling moustache. He is introduced to the reader from the outset as a cynical murderer and he never once shows any redeeming features nor any sign that he is going to defy the role he is cast in. He flits in and out of the narrative occasionally without ever progressing the plot, only to finally re-emerge to meet a grisly if fitting end.
Some of the novel’s minor characters showed more promise. John, the lovelorn junior warden of the Marshalsea pines away for Amy Dorrit with surprising dignity. Daniel Doyce is an entrepreneur who invents a mechanism – we ever never told anything more about it than it is potentially very useful – which is throttled by the bureaucracy of the Circumlocution Office. (In his essay on Dickens, to which I return every time I read anything by the latter, Orwell says “Nothing is queerer than the vagueness with which he speaks of Doyce’s “invention” in Little Dorrit. It is represented as something extremely ingenious and revolutionary, “of great importance to his country and his fellow-creatures”, and it is also an important minor link in the book; yet we are never told what the “invention” is!) Dickens is making a somewhat clumsy point about the dead hand of the Government service upon the spirit of industry and the absence of any effective intellectual property legislation. As the UK was at the height of the industrial revolution at this time, driven by innovation and enterprise, the satire barely lands a blow, despite the effort Dickens put into the portrait. Doyce eventually travels abroad – to Russia no less, which in the 1820’s (the novel’s setting) was not particularly problematic, but in the 1850’s the UK was at war with Russia in the Crimea – to find more rewarding work. There he prospers, only to finally return to London at the novel’s conclusion. We never really find out what happens to him, what his patent was for, whether it was granted, nor whether his new business succeeds (we can infer that it does).
Perhaps my favourite minor character was Flora Finching. Many years earlier she was engaged to be married to Arthur Clennam. His return from working in the far East finds her a widow. She cares for a truculent aunt of her late husband, nurtures a hope that her relationship with Arthur might be rekindled and speaks in a stream of consciousness that is one of the joys of the novel:
My Goodness Arthur! cried Flora, rising to give him a cordial reception, ‘Doyce and Clennam what a start and a surprise for though not far from the machinery and foundry business and surely might be taken sometimes if at no other time about midday when a glass of sherry and a humble sandwich of whatever cold meat in the larder might not come amiss nor taste the worse for being friendly for you know you buy it somewhere and wherever bought a profit must be made or they would never keep a place it stands to reason without a motive still never seen and learnt now not to be expected for as Mr F himself said if seeing is believing not seeing is believing too and when you don’t see you may fully believe you’re not remembered not that I expect you Arthur Doyce and Clennam to remember me why should I for the days are gone but bring another teacup here directly and tell her fresh toast and pray sit near the fire.”
Many reviewers accept that Little Dorrit is a sprawling mess, populated by thinly sketched characters and with a plot that manages to be both predictable and full of improbable coincidences. But “look at the social commentary” we are told. So let’s. The two main targets Dickens takes aim at in the novel are Government bureaucracy, in the form of the Circumlocution Office, and the practice of imprisoning people for debt, in this case in the very personal description of the Marshalsea debtor’s prison (Dickens’ father had served time in the Marshalsea and it clearly had a significant impact on Charles’s childhood. He was forced to leave school at the age of 12 to earn his keep).
The Circumlocution Office, Dickens’s attack on Government bureaucracy, is introduced in Chapter 10, ‘Containing the Whole Science of Government”:
“The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.”
This is just a small part of the description of the operation of the Office – Dickens writes at considerable length about the inefficiency and bloody-mindedness of the people who run the Office purely as a means of lining their own pockets without any consideration for the wider interests of the country. Nepotism is the key driver of this form of government. Reading the descriptions and Clennam’s relentless efforts to navigate the system, first to find a way to have Mr Dorrit released from debtor’s prison, and subsequently to secure a patent for Doyce’s mysterious invention, no-one who has ever struggled with bureaucracy, who has ever been put on hold for hours on end, or who has written countless letters in pursuit of a simple reply, could fail to empathise with the frustration described. Dickens was pushing at an open door here. The Northcote-Trevelyan Report into the operation of Government business had been published in February 1854 and to this day remains the founding document of the British Civil Service, enshrining it with “core values of integrity, propriety, objectivity and appointment on merit, able to transfer its loyalty and expertise from one elected government to the next”. The report accepted that the administration of Government was being crippled “both in internal efficiency and in public estimation”. I am not convinced this is effective satire. It’s taking a swipe at an easy target where the problem has already been recognised and was being addressed. It’s powerfully done, more with a steamroller than a scalpel.
Imprisonment for debt is portrayed as an everyday part of life in Victorian England. You fall into debt, you suffer the consequences. For some that included a lifestyle better than that enjoyed outside the walls of the prison. The reader is left to decide for themselves whether this is a sensible method of collecting money from people who don’t have any. (It is not widely known that while the 1869 Debtors’ Act largely abolished prison as a sanction for non-payment of debt in the UK, the Judgment Summons procedure still exists and includes imprisonment as a possible if little used sanction available to the Court:
” A judgment summons is an application by a creditor under s 5 of the Debtors Act 1869 requiring the debtor to attend court in circumstances where payment is due under an outstanding debt. If the creditor can prove to the satisfaction of the court, beyond reasonable doubt, that (a) the debtor either has or has had since the date of the original order or judgment the means to pay the sum owing under the original order or judgment and (b) has refused or neglected to pay, or refuses or neglects to pay, the debtor may be committed to prison for a period of up to six weeks or until payment of the sum which is owing.”)
Did Dickens’ portrait of the Marshalsea lead to the passage of the Debtors Act (which largely removed imprisonment as a sanction for debt)? I think we take it for granted that the answer to the question is largely yes, even if the impact of Little Dorrit was more to create a general perception that debtors’ prisons were cruel and ineffective, rather than leading directly to the reform legislation itself. It’s worth noting incidentally that the Marshalsea had closed in 1842, long before Little Dorrit was published (as Dickens explicitly acknowledges). I think this might be worth a deep dive one day, because I fear the truth might be more complicated. We know Dickens hated debtors’ prisons, because of what happened to his family and the impact it had on the trajectory of his own life. But if you take that out of the equation, is the portrait of the Marshalsea that harsh? Is being locked up there as bad as being in a criminal prison? To be honest, life in the Marshalsea actually seems quite comfortable. The warders are polite to the prisoners and happy to run them errands, rather than brutalising them. Perhaps this needs a separate post – were Victorian debtors prisons really that bad? (And if they were, why does Dickens make them sounds so bearable?)
It is usually fairly obvious in what overall direction Dickens’ novels are heading. But I got one thing seriously wrong in my anticipation of the plot of Little Dorrit. At the end of the first book, Mr Dorrit, having been locked away in the Marshalsea for decades, is, through the efforts of Clennam and Mr Pancks, discovered to be heir to a large fortune. We are told no more about it than that – he is going to inherit lots of money. I thought at this point that fate would intervene to prevent him from ever receiving his inheritance – most likely that he would die just before the will passes Probate, delayed by the incompetence or malevolence of the Circumlocution Office. But surprisingly no, it all goes completely smoothly and he leaves the Marshalsea with his head held high, spending most of the rest of the novel with his family and a vast entourage in Venice and Rome, trying all the while to bury his ignominious past. He is haunted by any suggestion that he was once a debtor, and takes offence at the slightest imaginary suggestion of his former life. He is accepted into this new strata of society without hesitation – his money is as good as anyone’s. Dickens seems to suggest that a life of wealth has parallels with the Dorrit’s former life of poverty, constrained as both were by society’s expectations. I am not so sure this point lands – spending one’s life on holiday without any restrictions on what one can buy or do seems pretty nice compared to the Marshalsea of Bleeding Heart Yard.
The novel’s meandering predictable plot, its unlovable or unbelievable characters, its ineffective satire and loose threads, illuminated only occasionally by flashes of humour, probably explain why Little Dorrit ranks below many of Dickens great novels. At least in my totally unscientific ranking system anyway!
The third of the Austen novel fragments I have been reading recently is her last, incomplete work, Sanditon, written in the months prior to her tragically early death in 1817. As with the other fragments (The Watsonsand Lady Susan) the interest of the text lies more in its composition than its status as a story. As such we have the advantage of the original draft (see below) with all its revisions and hesitations. You can see the manuscript online here. Someone has kindly transcribed the manuscript amendments and all, showing every change Austen made. We can see the creative process at work. Only twelve chapters long, the manuscript shows that Austen edited as she wrote – rather than writing the full text then going back to the beginning and editing, she has made substantial changes to each page. This would have meant that once complete the manuscript would have been largely ready for type-setting and publication.
The novel fragment focuses on Charlotte Heywood, one of the daughters of the Heywood family from Willingden, Sussex. The narrative opens in uncharacteristically dramatic fashion when the carriage of Mr and Mrs Parker of Sanditon crashes near the Heywood home. Mr Parker is slightly injured in the crash, and very kindly the Heywoods offer hospitality to the Parkers for two weeks until his ankle is healed. Mr Parker is what we would now think of as a property developer – he has ambitious plans to transform Sanditon, a fishing village, into a fashionable seaside resort. Once his foot is healed the Parkers return to Sanditon, taking Charlotte with them as their guest. This is in part a return of the hospitality shown them by the Heywoods, but it is also possible Mr Parker wants to show off Sanditon to as many people as possible.
The residents of Sanditon are introduced in familiar slightly breathless Austen fashion. Lady Denham, a twice-widowed woman who received a fortune from her first husband and a title from her second, lives here with her niece Clara Brereton, as does Sir Edward Denham and his sister Esther, nephew and niece to Lady Denham by her second husband. The Parkers are joined by two of Mr Parker’s sisters, his younger brother, Arthur, and finally his middle brother Sidney. There are indications that Austen planned to call this novel ‘The Brothers’ which some critics have interpreted as a potential shift of focus to a more male perspective. We will never know if that was going to be the case, but the extant chapters are all firmly written through Charlotte’s eyes as she meets this dazzling array of new characters. The whole Parker family appears to be part of the enterprise to develop Sanditon. News of a wealthy family from the Caribbean arriving shortly in the town and a girls school intending to relocate to the coast causes a stir, although it soon becomes apparent that these two parties are one and the same. The new arrivals consist of Miss Lambe, a teenaged Antiguan-English heiress, whom Austen describes as ‘half-mulatto’ and the two Miss Beauforts, English girls just arrived from the West Indies.
It is striking how complex this cast of characters is in so few chapters. Relationships between the eligible young people both planned and actual are suggested and as with the other fragmentary novels it is possible to speculate with some confidence the direction the novel was heading.
In addition to the speculation about the extent to which the novel’s original title was to be its focus, critics have also pointed to several other departures from Austen’s standard template. Sanditon, a speculative property development, is clearly going to be the novel’s primary location, and there is little to compare it to in the rest of the canon. It’s not a stately home (c.f. Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey) but a commercial enterprise. The ambitious Parker family, looking to profit from the sea-bathing enthusiasm of Regency Britain, don’t really have any parallels in Austen’s other stories. And the introduction of a mixed race character is also a departure for Austen. We see very little of Miss Lambe in the novel, but she is intriguing:
“Mrs. Griffiths … supported herself by receiving such great girls and young ladies as wanted either masters for finishing their education or a home for beginning their displays. She had several more under her care than the three who were now come to Sanditon, but the others all happened to be absent. Of these three, and indeed of all, Miss Lambe was beyond comparison the most important and precious, as she paid in proportion to her fortune. She was about seventeen, half mulatto, chilly and tender, had a maid of her own, was to have the best room in the lodgings, and was always of the first consequence in every plan of Mrs. Griffiths.”
Miss Lambe’s mixed race is clearly no objection to acceptance into Georgian society, and Lady Denham immediately starts to plan her engagement to her nephew by marriage, Sir Edward. It would have been fascinating to see how Austen handled this sensitive issue.
Austen was an extraordinary, subtle and skilful novelist, with a profound understanding of human nature and a wonderful sense of humour. There are plenty of flashes of her brilliance in this fragment. She has a lot of mischievous fun in describing the self-identified invalid Arthur Parker for example. It is in paragraphs such as this that we see glimpses of the author’s authentic voice. It opens with Arthur describing his health:
“I am very nervous. To say the truth, nerves are the worst part of my complaints in my opinion. My sisters think me bilious, but I doubt it.”
“You are quite in the right to doubt it as long as you possibly can, I am sure.”
“If I were bilious,” he continued, “you know, wine would disagree with me, but it always does me good. The more wine I drink in moderation the better I am. I am always best of an evening. If you had seen me today before dinner, you would have thought me a very poor creature.”
Charlotte could believe it. She kept her countenance, however, and said, “As far as I can understand what nervous complaints are, I have a great idea of the efficacy of air and exercise for them—daily, regular exercise—and I should recommend rather more of it to you than I suspect you are in the habit of taking.”
“Oh, I am very fond of exercise myself,” he replied, “and I mean to walk a great deal while I am here, if the weather is temperate. I shall be out every morning before breakfast and take several turns upon the Terrace, and you will often see me at Trafalgar House.”
“But you do not call a walk to Trafalgar House much exercise?”
“Not as to mere distance, but the hill is so steep! Walking up that hill, in the middle of the day, would throw me into such a perspiration! You would see me all in a bath by the time I got there! I am very subject to perspiration, and there cannot be a surer sign of nervousness.”
They were now advancing so deep in physics, that Charlotte viewed the entrance of the servant with the tea things as a very fortunate interruption.
It is probably an exaggeration to put it this way, by Hard Times invoked in me a strange sense of cognitive dissonance. Why? Well, on the one hand it is quintessential Dickens – an industrial setting, light social satire, and a series of over-written comic characters. But there are also some strikingly obvious differences. First, the novel was written for weekly publication, unlike almost all his other works which appeared monthly, and this is often cited as the reason for it being significantly shorter – under 300 pages – than his typical blockbusters.
Secondly, storylines are started and then peter out with either no resolution or an anti-climatic one. An example of this is where a character is adopted having been abandoned by their father. Nope, the father never returns. That’s just it, they are adopted, end of. Third the cast of characters is much smaller than a typical Dickens novel and their story-arcs are all truncated or abbreviated. By way of example, Mr Harthouse, is introduced halfway through the novel. He is a rather two-dimensional comic-book villain and sets out to seduce a married female character. She runs away from him when she realises what is happening. Disgruntled, he leaves. Again, that’s it. This pattern is repeated time after time – storylines start and then are aborted. It’s almost as if this is an outline for a Dickens novel rather than the real thing.
Are these elements – storytelling and characterisation in particular – neglected because Dickens was focussing on other elements of his story? Is Hard Times different from the standard Dickens novel because it is trying to do something different? The book is usually characterised as an ‘issues’ novel in which the author attacks utilitarianism, personified by Mr Gradgrind, school-board superintendent and spokesperson for the theory that all we need in life are facts, and that emotions and imagination are damaging:
“Suppose you were going to carpet a room. Would you use a carpet having a representation of flowers upon it?” The character Sissy Jupe replies, ingenuously, that she would because, “If you please, Sir, I am very fond of flowers.”
“Fact, Fact, Fact!” said the gentleman. And “Fact, Fact, Fact!” repeated Thomas Gradgrind
“And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have people walking over them with heavy boots?”
“It wouldn’t hurt them, Sir. They wouldn’t crush and wither, if you please, Sir. They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy….. -“ “Ay, Ay, Ay! But you mustn’t fancy,” cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to his point. “That’s it! You are never to fancy.” “You are not, Cecilia Jupe,” Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, “to do anything of that kind.”
This perspective is established in the novel’s first chapter and maintained throughout the first part of the novel. But once Gradgrind is reconciled with his daughter, it is largely forgotten. It is almost as if having demonstrated that lack of affection and imagination can be harmful to personal relationships, were such a demonstration really necessary, Dickens didn’t really know where to go with the idea – it’s certainly not enough to structure a whole novel around.
Dickens was never reluctant to write caricatures. Few of his characters could be called well-rounded. They usually have clearly identified idiosyncrasies of behaviour or, more commonly, speech, and these are repeated relentlessly long past the point where they are needed to establish the character in the reader’s memory. This pattern is adopted in Hard Times – Mr Bounderby talks relentlessly about the poverty of his childhood for example – but exceptionally a large number of other characters in the novel, not just the central personalities, aren’t burdened with these features. They are just people with a role in the story rather than sources of entertainment themselves.
Stephen Blackpool is an example of the underwritten nature of this novel. He is established as a prototype of the honest working man. He is burdened by an alcoholic wife who he is unable to divorce. He is a hard worker and refuses to join the trade union being formed in the mill at the time. His reasons for not joining are unclear – but nevertheless presented as heroic. Dickens may have had his concerns about the way the working classes were treated by industrialists, but he had no faith in trade unionism as a way to address those problems. Blacklisted and sacked, Blackpool leaves Coketown to find work elsewhere, and apart from a brief melodramatic reappearance at the end of the novel is seen no more. His role in the novel, as a contrast to the pompous and over-bearing industrialists who initially take centre stage, seems perfunctory.
I suppose where I am going with this critique is that short form novels, written for weekly publication, were not Dickens’s strength. He must have realised that the experiment had not worked, because although Hard Times was moderately successful and did the job it was intended for, to improve sales of his Household Words, it was not a format he ever returned to.
This novella is a comic pastiche of James Joyce’s Ulysses. That makes it sound more substantial than it actually is. Lodge was flexing his literary muscles as a professor of English literature here, and he did so by inserting throughout the novel a series of literary references. Ten distinct sections of the novel are written in the style of a range of authors including Conrad, Woolf and Kafka. I would argue that these actually add little to the novel overall. In other words there’s an element of showing off here, where the reader might be vaguely aware that the novel’s style has shifted and that they should be getting the joke, (the Kafka and the Joyce sections are unmissable; the others less so) but uncomfortably aware that they are failing the test being set by the much cleverer than them author.
Strip away the contrived literary references and this is simply a straightforward mid-sixties comic novel on that most sixties of themes, sex. Adam Appleby, a father of three and a student of English literature spends a single day failing to do any work at the British Museum (not) researching his thesis “The Structure of Long Sentences in Three Modern English Novels”. Instead he gets into a series of what it is hard to avoid calling ‘scrapes’ familiar to anyone who watched British sitcoms (especially those, ironically, from the 1970s) – he accidentally calls the fire brigade out to a non-existent fire at the museum, he is the subject of an attempted seduction by a frustrated seventeen year-old virgin (a common experience for the male subjects of English post-war comic novels), he gets drunk at a cocktail party, and his scooter bursts into flames. The scene where he tries to buy some condoms but can’t do so because his priest enters the medical appliances shop at precisely the wrong moment is appallingly cliched. Throughout the novel Appleby, a thinly disguised avatar for the author, is haunted by the fear that his wife is pregnant with their fourth child, because being Roman Catholics and this being before the widespread availability of the pill, they are forbidden from using any but the most unreliable methods of contraception. This leaves Appleby permanently frustrated and at the same time petrified that their personal complicated game of Vatican Roulette has been lost once again.
As well as the explicit references to other authors, there are some strong echoes of Kingsley Amis here. The ‘seduction’ scenes is an obvious example. Appleby’s persistent worries about money and the way these are resolved by the intervention of a wealthy American at the end of the novel was strongly reminiscent of the way Amis concludes Lucky Jim. The getting inappropriately drunk at a party scene, the ‘seduction’ scene, and the many petty minor frustrations of academic life, all echo the earlier Amis novel. So yes, in a nutshell, this is heavily derivative, so much so that by the end their is no attempt to disguise Lodge’s borrowing, and it is simply chalked up as pastiche.
In many ways this is a very typical mid-Sixties comic novel, but what sets it apart are Lodge’s literary pretentions. And in case you were wondering, no, the title doesn’t make sense – Lodge explains in an afterword written for a 1980 reprinting that he had originally wanted to call the novel “The British Museum Had Lost Its Charm” but as this is a quote from a Gershwin song and he couldn’t get permission to use it, the alternative title had to be used. There is a clearly late addition to the text to explain the alternative title he ended up using, with its reference to London Bridge, which Lodge may have got away with if he hadn’t written about the original title in the afterword.
Although Changing Places was written in 1975, it is set in 1969, and those six years are significant. The events of the novel take place in parallel on campuses in England and America, and the spirit of the sixties is abroad in both. Protest and counter-culture are in the air. By 1975 Nixon was out of the White House, the Vietnam War was coming to an ignominious end, the Beatles had split up and flower power was a distant memory.
To an extent this made Changing Places anachronistic even when it was published. It was looking back nostalgically at a period in time which was very close but also gone for good. That anachronism has inevitably widened over time. Professors sleeping with their students and one another’s wives may have been the height of liberation in the sixties – today it just looks creepy.
The novel is a classic trading places situation comedy. Two English professors, mild-mannered Philip Swallow, and charismatic American Morris Zapp, swap roles in their respective universities, thinly disguised versions of Birmingham, UK and Berkeley, California. They find themselves in very unfamiliar territory both academically and socially and much of the novel’s humour derives from their struggles in their new environments in traditional fish out of water manner. Both men almost inevitably have affairs while on their academic sabbaticals; more surprising is their involvement in the student protests that sweep their campuses. While Swallow finds himself accidentally involved in the demonstrations, Zapp is well-suited to his role as mediator between students and faculty.
Lodge has fun with the format of the novel, at one point continuing the narrative through news headlines and stories and later using a screenplay format. This serves to keep the story fresh and moves it along at pace. A significant time jump two thirds of the way through, moving quickly past some of the events that had been sign-posted and are now seen in hindsight, adds to the sense of pace. The novel ends with the two couples convened in a New York hotel room trying to decide their fates. The author has fun with the idea first articulated in Northanger Abbey that the reader knows the novel is coming to a close (and therefore a resolution of any outstanding plot points) by the “tell-tale compression of the pages” but chooses instead to leave issued unresolved – until the sequel of course.
The acid test for any comic novel has to be ‘is it funny?’. The quote on the front cover of the edition I read (shown above) has a comparison to Lucky Jim, a novel that I think has largely fallen out of fashion in recent years and is now equally anachronistic. There was a time when the Kingsley Amis novel would have been in my top ten novels list, but it hasn’t aged well. I think a more interesting comparison would be with Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man which was published in the same year as Changing Places and which takes a much more unblinking, less affectionate look at British academic life. Is Changing Places funny? It’s mildly amusing, nothing more; the satire is so gentle as to be hardly noticeable. I now need to decide whether to read the sequel, with a nagging suspicion that it might simply be more of the same. Only one way to find out I suppose.
Is there a better, more striking opening to a novel than this?
One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin*. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.
The Metamorphosis is wonderfully enigmatic. Of course the reader is invited to consider the story as an allegory about difference, but everyone will see it from their own perspective. For some it will be about how we treat the disabled, for others about race, gender, sexuality or religion. Its ambiguity is its strength, leaving the reader to interpret and reinterpret it without the constraints of simplistic X = Y parallels.
This is a powerful story in which not a word is wasted. Consider that opening line and the reference to waking from ‘troubled dreams‘ – did Gregor’s transformation cause the troubled dreams, or were the dreams the origins of his transformation?
Gregor Samsa is a travelling textile salesman, bullied by his boss and unable to leave his miserable job because of debts owed by his parents, with whom he lives. We know very little about Gregor other than at one point he was in the army – “On the wall exactly opposite there was photograph of Gregor when he was a lieutenant in the army, his sword in his hand and a carefree smile on his face as he called forth respect for his uniform and bearing“, which is obviously a dramatic contrast with his life as a travelling salesman, and even more so after his metamorphosis. He has made a sad attempt to brighten his room up by cutting a picture from a magazine and framing it: “It showed a lady fitted out with a fur hat and fur boa who sat upright, raising a heavy fur muff that covered the whole of her lower arm towards the viewer.” Perhaps this is being fanciful, but could it be that the three-fold repetition of the word ‘fur’ suggests this woman has undergone her own transformation? Change, metamorphosis, isn’t always a bad thing, it implies. We also see this idea at the end of the novel (novel not being the completely correct term – The Metamorphosis is barely fifty pages long) when after Gregor’s death, Grete, his younger sister, begins her own metamorphosis:
All the time, Grete was becoming livelier. With all the worry they had been having of late her cheeks had become pale, but, while they were talking, Mr. and Mrs. Samsa were struck, almost simultaneously, with the thought of how their daughter was blossoming into a well built and beautiful young lady. They became quieter. Just from each other’s glance and almost without knowing it they agreed that it would soon be time to find a good man for her. And, as if in confirmation of their new dreams and good intentions, as soon as they reached their destination Grete was the first to get up and stretch out her young body.
Gregor’s father is also transformed by the end of the novel, changing from the redundant aging tyrant of the opening chapters to something far more respectable and impressive:
He was standing up straight enough now; dressed in a smart blue uniform with gold buttons, the sort worn by the employees at the banking institute; above the high, stiff collar of the coat his strong double-chin emerged; under the bushy eyebrows, his piercing, dark eyes looked out fresh and alert; his normally unkempt white hair was combed down painfully close to his scalp. He took his cap, with its gold monogram from, probably, some bank, and threw it in an arc right across the room onto the sofa, put his hands in his trouser pockets, pushing back the bottom of his long uniform coat, and, with look of determination, walked towards Gregor.
The point of view of the narrator in this paragraph is interesting. The fact that the narrator recognises Mr Samsa senior’s uniform as coming from “probably, some bank” suggests this is Gregor’s perspective – an omniscient narrator would know which bank the uniform is from. This is not the consistent viewpoint, but often we see things through Gregor’s eyes.
His initial reaction to his metamorphosis is quite phlegmatic – he decides to go back to sleep and (despite the fact we have just been told his transformation is not a dream) thinks to himself “How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense” The dawning realisation that this is not nonsense at all, this is happening, is not narrated in the text – the reader is left to work gradually through that process themselves. We wait page after page for some explanation of Gregor’s situation, but it never comes. Instead we read in vivid detail about what it would be like to be a monstrous insect:
Hardly aware of what he was doing other than a slight feeling of shame, he hurried under the couch. It pressed down on his back a little, and he was no longer able to lift his head, but he nonetheless felt immediately at ease and his only regret was that his body was too broad to get it all underneath.He spent the whole night there. Some of the time he passed in a light sleep, although he frequently woke from it in alarm because of his hunger, and some of the time was spent in worries and vague hopes which, however, always led to the same conclusion: for the time being he must remain calm, he must show patience and the greatest consideration so that his family could bear the unpleasantness that he, in his present condition, was forced to impose on them.
Always thinking about his family, he gradually comes to terms with the changed world he is confronted by:
Out of consideration for his parents, Gregor wanted to avoid being seen at the window during the day, the few square metres of the floor did not give him much room to crawl about, it was hard to just lie quietly through the night, his food soon stopped giving him any pleasure at all, and so, to entertain himself, he got into the habit of crawling up and down the walls and ceiling.
The Metamorphosis is a powerful, disturbing book. it is available free online and can be read in little more than an hour. It’s also a great introduction to the dark, troubling world of Franz Kafka, who I think is rightly regarded as one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.
*This translation – ‘horrible vermin‘ – is a bit literal for my tastes. Other translations are available. Wikipedia tells me that the phrase “ungeheuren Ungeziefer”, describing the creature into which Gregor metamorphoses, has been translated many different ways. These include:
Short stories by Robert Louis Stevenson: The Body-Snatcher, A Lodging for the Night, Markheim, Thrawn Janet & The Misadventures of John Nicholson
These stories were included in the Vintage edition of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (and other stories), which I finally got round to reading several years after the event. (That is, I read the short stories long after having read Dr Jekyll). To what extent they were ‘padding’ to make the original novella into a fuller length text, or were stories worth republishing in their own right, is something I will consider in this review.
The website devoted to all aspects of Stevenson’s life and works, (‘The RLS website‘) says
“Stevenson has an important place in the history of the short story in the British Isles: the form had been elaborated and developed in America, France and Russia from the mid-19th century, but it was Stevenson who initiated the British tradition.”
Which is a bold claim when you think about the short stories and novellas Dickens wrote, to give just one example. The site also claims that many of his stories:
“have an affinity with the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in their setting in the labyrinthine modern city, and the subject matter of crimes and guilty secrets involving respectable members of society.”
The Body-Snatcher is definitely one such dark, gothic tale. The title tells you almost all you need to know – it is set in Edinburgh at the time of the Burke and Hare murders when corpses were in such demand for dissection by medical students that grave robbing become common-place and eventually led to murder to provide more bodies. The story is told from the perspective of a laboratory assistant who unwittingly becomes embroiled in the cadaver trade. The story’s climax comes on a ubiquitously dark and stormy night when a corpse is robbed from a remote country churchyard and supernatural events intervene. It’s a classic horror story that must have chilled Stevenson’s Victorian audience and would make a highly atmospheric radio play.
A Lodging for the Night, subtitled A Story of Francis Villon is another gothic morality tale. Rather far-fetched claims have been made by some critics that this story can be precisely identified as the first modern version of the genre – I have to say that sounds implausible. There’s nothing dramatically original about the form or content. The story opens with the narrator describing a snow-covered Parisian night in 1456. Francis Villon, a poet is drinking and gambling in a small cabin in the grounds of a cemetery with a few friends. While Villon tries to compose a poem, the gambling turns sour and one of the participants is stabbed and murdered. His corpse is robbed and although Villon apparently had no part in the murder he takes his share of the robbery. He flees into the night, but not before his purse is stolen, leaving him destitute. He eventually seeks refuge in a stranger’s home. The remainder of the story is a protracted exchange between the amoral Villon and his host, a former knight who lives by a strict code of conduct. When Villon finally leaves he appears to have learnt nothing from his host.
Markheim is set in a pawn shop. The titular character visits to buy a gift but when the opportunity arises he murders the pawnbroker with a view to stealing from him. While he tries to decide what to do next, someone enters the house, looks briefly into the room Markheim and the body are in, “looked at him, nodded and smiled as if in friendly recognition, and withdrew again.” Markheim cries out, and the stranger returns, asking “Did you call me?”. Again the rest of the story is an exchange between this other-worldly visitor and the murderer. The visitor offers to tell Markheim where the pawnbroker’s money can be found. It soon becomes clear that he knows all about Markheim’s descent into criminality, and has no faith in his ability to change the course of his life. He even offers to help him escape when the pawnbroker’s maid returns home unexpectedly early. But there is wonderful twist in the tale which I won’t spoil for you. This is a genuinely innovative story that subverts the readers expectations without a hint of sentimentality. It’s the gem of the collection.
Thrawn Janet is written in a broad Scottish dialect, and I have to admit at times I struggled with the language. It is not that it is impenetrable. In sentences such as “There was Janet … wi’ her neck thrawn … like a body that has been hangit, and a girn on her face like an unstreakit corp. ” most of the language is conventional English words, and others are simply transliteration of other everyday terms – “hangit” for “hanged”, “corp” for “corpse”, and so on. There are occasional words that need to be looked up – thrawn means twisted for example – but usually the sense is clear. (There is incidentally a version of the story available on the internet ‘translated’ into English, which seems a bit unnecessary!). Janet is housekeeper to a young Scottish preacher. The local people suspect her of being a witch. When they try to prove it by dunking her in the local pond, the preacher intervenes and makes her publicly swear she is not in league with the devil. From that point, Janet’s appearance is changed – twisted neck like someone who has been hanged. Later, after meeting a strange “black man” (the implication being this is the devil), the preacher finds Janet hanging dead in her room. As with Markheim, the supernatural is portrayed as being a tangible and real presence in people’s lives.
The collection ends with what is conventionally known as a shaggy dog story, although I can’t be sure it was conceived as such. The Misadventures of John Nicholson has the eponymous central character go through a series of mishaps, but always ends up on his feet, able to rely on either dumb luck or his family to bail him out. Even though his implicated in at least two series robberies and a murder, he walks away without any series consequences. It’s a weak ending to the collection with no gothic elements, a loose narrative structure and not much point.
So were these stories just padding, or are they worth reading in their own right? Yes and no. Dr Jekyll is such a powerful story because it has something to say about the nature of humanity, civilisation, and the duality of good and evil. It’s also a genuinely interesting story. Some of these shorter stories have interesting insights into similar issues. Clearly none have the same impact as Dr Jekyll, and some are disappointingly predictable, others, particularly Markheim with its clever subversion of the reader’s expectations, are definitely worth reading in their own right rather than simply as companion texts.
Orwell, A Man of our Time, by Richard Bradford, 2020
I can’t remember ever having so passionately agreed with the central premise of a book before – yet also found myself profoundly disagreeing with many of the conclusions the author draws. I know that might sound like a slightly artificial opinion adopted to make a good opening line to a blog post, but I mean it. (I’d rather be honest than interesting, although ideally I’d like to be both of course!).
Bradford’s thesis is summed up in the book’s subtitle – Orwell is a Man of Our Time. In other words his work has an immediate relevance to the 2020’s – to the era of Trump, Brexit, social media and the ever intrusive state. And that’s utterly unarguable – of course he does. Orwell has in many ways shaped the way we see the world. That’s why the media manages to find a dozen things a day ‘Orwellian’, from facial recognition software to social media cancel culture. So here’s the first problem – this thesis has already been written. In 2002 Christopher Hitchens wrote Why Orwell Matters adopting the same format as Bradford, or rather anticipating it, demonstrating vividly Orwell’s continuing relevance. Although Bradford has written in more detail than Hitchens, and obviously included more recent material, fundamentally the point has already been made, far more convincingly. (If you prefer there is a short YouTube video of a speech Hitchens made that covers his key points. I disagree with much of what he says – he argues that Orwell died of poverty, which is simply nonsense, and he has nothing to say about Orwell’s defining characteristic, his Englishness, but he is entertaining and persuasive).
There’s a second equally obvious problem with the biographical structure that Bradford adopts. He goes through Orwell’s life in the manner of a traditional biography and gives equal space to his childhood and early novels compared to for example his final great works. If you are trying to trace the origins of (say) Animal Farm in Orwell’s time at the village store in Wallington, fair enough, but that immediately begins to stray from the declared intention of the book, to demonstrate Orwell’s continuing relevance. I would argue (as Orwell himself does, in Why I Write) that his work really only begins to be distinctively in his voice after the Spanish Civil War. Almost everything before that is of minor interest only (I would exclude the Down a Mine section of Wigan Pier). Putting it another way, if that sniper’s bullet that bisected his throat in 1937 had been centimetres to the left or right, we would never have heard the term “Orwellian”. The biographical structure of this book therefore means that we spend a long time waiting for the main event, the major two novels and the classic political essays of the 1940’s, and that some earlier parts of the text feel like ‘filler’.
(Just a quick aside on the term Orwellian. It seems to me it is used in three distinct ways nowadays. Increasingly the first application has come to predominate – to describe totalitarian behaviour by the state or the agents of the state, particularly through the use of technology. Facebook’s algorithms are Orwellian, automatic number plate recognition is Orwellian, etc. The second use is in the ironic commentary on official language, referencing the slogans of Oceania – appointing a Minister for Brexit Benefits was quintessentially Orwellian. Finally, and this is more rare nowadays, is the use of the term to describe writing in Orwell’s distinctive style – as he famously put it in the essay just referenced, “Good prose is like a windowpane”. )
Bradford often strays from his original concept. Instead of demonstrating Orwell’s relevance to contemporary events, (‘our time’) he instead finds parallels between incidents in Orwell’s life and things that happened later. Oswald Mosley is compared to Nigel Farage, for example, a perfectly fair comparison but nothing to do with Orwell. Conditions in mines in the 1930’s were hard, as recorded in The Road to Wigan Pier, but in the 1980’s miners in the UK went on strike to save their jobs – again hard to argue with, although the two things are barely connected with one another let alone Orwell. Where Bradford’s argument nears breaking point is in his apparently preposterous claim that Orwell’s ‘foresaw Brexit‘. That might seem ridiculous given that the EU didn’t exist before Orwell died in 1950, but surprisingly Bradford does a good job of defending this point. Orwell thought a lot about what the world would look like after the end of the second world war and in a world dominated by nuclear weapons. He lived just long enough to see the beginning of the end of Empire and new post-war political and military structures emerge, one of which was likely to be a form of united Europe. IN the event such a body was created, Britain’s role in it would be uncertain. It is not much of a leap to imagine Orwell’s understanding of colonialism, imperialism and nationalism all coming together to predict Brexit. In England Your England (1941) for example, Orwell wrote about “the famous ‘insularity’ and ‘xenophobia’ of the English, and in 1947 recorded anti-Polish sentiment very similar to the prejudices that drove Brexit. Orwell also foresaw that it would be in America’s commercial interests to weaken a centralised United States of Europe.
Unfortunately, for every worthwhile observation there are far too many misses, irrelevancies or demonstrations of the author’s own prejudices. The television cook Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall is bizarrely attacked for no apparent reason than he went to Eton. Anti-Semitism within the Labour Party is bafflingly compared to the two-minute hate in 1984. Jacques Derrida’s syntax is attacked as overly complex, and claimed to be an example of something Orwellian, I am not quite sure what given that Newspeak was defined by its lack of complexity. The book’s analysis ends with a scattergun critique of Boris Johnson, Trump, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, political correctness, wokeism, cancel culture in universities, deconstructionism, and last but not least Islam.
There are some errors in this text, or at least things that I found debateable, although I make no pretence of authority on the issue. First, Bradford says that Orwell spent a year at Wellington college before going on to Eton (page 17) – Taylor’s far more authoritative work says he was there for just nine weeks (page 60). In his discussion on homelessness as presented in Orwell’s work Bradford appears to believe that anyone using the ‘tuppenny hangovers’ (the cheapest place to sleep, resting over a rope) were at risk from arrest under the Vagrancy Act because they were outside, which is simply incorrect. He later describes Orwell’s voice as indicating “irredeemable boredom and monotony” without acknowledging that no recordings of Orwell’s voice can be found. To give one final example Bradford criticises China’s one-child policy, citing it as an unexplained example of the state attempting to control the private lives of the citizenry (and being therefore Orwellian) without giving a moment’s thought to the famine in China less than a decade earlier which lead to the deaths by starvation of millions of people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine).
This might be a bit clumsy, but I found this edition’s front cover strangely apposite. It is illustrated (see above) with a print of Orwell’s head and shoulders, cut into segments then partially reassembled, leaving his face crooked and askew. In a way that is what Bradford has done with Orwell’s life work – he has broken them down into different constituent parts and then poorly reassembled them.
The Reading Bug 