1990s

Reality and Dreams – Muriel Spark

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I’m away with my family for a few days, out of range of internet – the vicar escaping, post-Christmas Day!  I’ve scheduled some posts to appear, but I shan’t be able to reply for a bit – and hopefully I’ll be back with internet in time to write a post about the only one of my Century of Books that I’ve not yet finished!

If you were thinking that I’d had enough of Muriel Spark during Muriel Spark Reading Week, then think again!  One of the final books I’ve read in 2012 is her last of the 20th century, and third last overall – Reality and Dreams (1996).


Tom Richards – presumably a deliberately bland name – is a famous film director.  The first line of the novel, and thus the line which kicks off our impression of him, is archetypical Spark: ‘He often wondered if we were all characters in one of God’s dreams.’  And, with Spark’s panache for combining surreality with restraint, she goes no further with that paragraph.  It hangs, so strangely, and we are shepherded straight to the second paragraph – where we learn that Tom Richards is recovering in hospital, having fallen out of a crane whilst directing a scene.  He broke nearly all his bones, but is lucky to be alive.

For the first few pages, reality and dreams swirl, as Tom fades in and out of lucidity.  I often have problems with the ways in which authors try to convey any mental distortion – whether disorientation or illness – as it usually seems clumsy and heavy-handed, or simply unreadable.  Spark, reliably, does it brilliantly.  Even something as simple as this conveys the disjointedness of time:

She poured out some milky tea.  He opened his eyes.  The tray had disappeared.
And then the complicated family arrive.  His wife Claire is patient and unshockable – and has affairs as often as he does, quite casually.  There is his angelically beautiful, but unvivid, daughter from his first marriage (Cora), and stolid, moaning, unattractive daughter from his current marriage (Marigold).  And there is the squabbling, self-absorbed cast of his film, originally called The Hamburger Girl – inspired by a brief sighting of a young woman at a campsite, who captivated Tom.

The various marriages in the family (some disintegrating), the cancelled and re-commissioned film production, the disappearance of one of his daughters and ensuing police search – all come together and interweave, creating a curiously mixed structure.  I think one of the most distinctive qualities in Muriel Spark’s writing is that everything is always on the same level.  She refuses to get overly-dramatic about anything – possible kidnap and murder is treated in the same matter-of-fact way as Tom’s physiotherapy, or the workings of the film shoot.  For it is, of course, the sphere of cinema which influences Spark’s title:

that world of dreams and reality which he was at home in, the world of filming scenes, casting people in parts, piecing together types and shadows, facts and illusions
Apart from the mental disorientation at the beginning of the novel, there is never any wider suggestion that reality and dream might have been exchanged – but there is the possibility that fictitious events are starting, in a distorted way, to become true.  It’s never overdone, but is a clever thread through a clever novel.  It’s all quintessential Spark, and a perfect reminder of why she’s one of my favourite authors.

Two Entirely Unrelated Reviews

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Normally, if I feature two reviews together, there tends to be a reason.  I try to find some links between them, and so forth.  Well, the only reasons that these books are combined is that I’ve finished them, and need to get all my Century of Books reviews out before the end of 2012.  Maybe unexpected connections will arise by the time I’ve finished writing about them?  At the moment the only thing I can think is that I didn’t really think either of them were great.

Sunlight on Cold Water (1969) is the second novel I’ve read by Francoise Sagan, after really liking her most famous novel, Bonjour Tristesse, last year.  That short novel focused on a young girl’s self-discovery, first love, and developing relationship with her stepmother.  It was all very introspective, but that was totally forgivable in the mindset of a teenager.  In Sunlight on Cold Water (title from a poem by Paul Eluard), this introspection is transferred to a middle-aged man…

Gilles Lantier is depressed.  Depression is such a difficult thing to convey, since it involves such listlessness and the deadening of emotions.  I was impressed that Sagan was going to give it a go and, if it didn’t make for very compulsive reading, at least it was sensitive and thought-provoking.  But… then it wasn’t.  He meets a woman.  He starts having an affair with her (she’s married).  He worries about his mistress back in Paris; he worries about being good enough for his new mistress.  And so on, and so on.  This sort of writing filled the book:

“That’s not it at all,” he said, “I’ve left out the main thing.  I haven’t told you the main thing.”The main thing was Nathalie’s warmth, the hollow of her neck when he was falling asleep, her unfailing tenderness, her utter loyalty, the overwhelming confidence he felt in her.  Everything that this semi-whore of a kept woman with her cockneyed perversions couldn’t even begin to understand.  But in that case, what was he doing here?
Lovely, isn’t it?  (Er, no.)  I’m afraid I am not remotely interested in the elaborate musings of a man who may or may not be in love, talking about the sight, sounds, and smells of his various love exploits.  It’s not Fifty Shades graphic or anything like that, but, boy, is it tedious.  This is the only excerpt I jotted down which I thought a bit clever:

“Could you love a man who was so rotten?””You don’t choose the people you love.””For an intellectual, you’re not afraid of platitudes.””I’m only too afraid of them,” she murmured, “they’re nearly always true.”
But, still.  Total dud for me, I’m afraid.  Only about 140 pages long, and dragged for ages.  Perhaps it’s my own lack of tolerance for this sort of novel, but I found it meandering, self-indulgent, whiney, and dull.  If I can find a Francoise Sagan that has nothing to do with introspective love affairs, then I’ll give her another go – because I so admired Bonjour Tristesse.

*  *  *

And onto the other novel.  I’m still not seeing any connections.  It’s The Simmons Paper (1995) by Philipp Blom.  I bought it in a charity shop, because the cover struck me as delightfully eccentric, and the topic appealed.

After his death, Simmons is discovered to have left behind a manuscript detailing his work in compiling the section P in a Definitive Dictionary.  Blom’s conceit is that the manuscript has become a famous, much-discussed piece of work – and this novella is framed as though it were an edition of the essay, footnotes and all.

Simmons is totally besotted with his work.  Most of The Simmons Papers concerns his daily life of researching words, philosophising about the role of dictionaries, and raging against neologisms.  He believes P to be ‘the most human letter in the alphabet’, and manoeuvres through various interesting facets of the letter and its history.  I love anything to do with linguistics, and it’s a rare novel that assumes you know all about Saussure.  I’m also rather drawn to novels where the main character gets obsessive and increasingly unbalanced (c.f. also Wish Her Safe At Home.)  Simmons certainly doesn’t disappoint in this regard – quite genuinely obsessed with the letter P (every section opens with a word beginning with P, and Simmons takes to eating mostly peas):

I must confess that in a sense even I am a victim of this daunting work.  Invariably the study of words, their history, meaning and evolution, etymology, connotations and formation, must impress on any mind its seal, especially since some words will resound for a certain person more than others and come to exercise a considerable influence of their own on any mind connected with them.  The long-winded proem which I am now engaging in now seems necessary before I can tell what I hardly dare admit: that I am subject to daydreams, voices and visions.  Words, p-words, emit and emanate images, stories, pictures and fantasies, which ultimately are impossible to keep at bay.
So, The Simmons Paper had all the ingredients of a novel I’d really like – and is packaged in a really attractive edition, incidentally.  So why didn’t it really work for me?  Well, it’s rather too close to what it is pretending to be.  The faux-introduction is amusing, some of the footnotes are really enjoyably silly if you spend a lot of time reading literary criticism – (cue interrupting my sentence for a long example of a footnote)

The pseudonym ‘P’ has been the cause of much controversy.  In the interpretation of Mandelbrodt and his followers, P designates ‘paradigm’, a notion which, in this reading, the text sets out to deconstruct by showing its inherent limitations and contradictions.  ‘The indefensible stronghold of the face of the dying Kronos falters from the owl, its death-ode on the phallus and His contemporaneous demise.  The giant turns back in agony and the very power against himself is the very powerlessness against this power’ (Mandelbrodt, The Question of Femininity, pp.345-6).  According to this reading, the destruction of the paradigm of male hierarchical order is what the text ‘which is by no means fiction, but an emanation of the act of writing in its existential peril itself’ (ibid.) sets out to prove.  While A. Rover takes P as quite simply Simmons’ own initial, Richard Silk suggests that it stands for ‘pater’.  ‘Simmons addressed his father with this name, traditionally used by public boys for “father”, throughout his life until “pater” died in 1946’ (The Dramatic Personae).
– but parody has to go further than imitation.  Examples like the quotation above do seem to work in this way, but, as a whole, the novel didn’t feel all that much like a novel.  It got a love interest towards the end (but not in the traditional sense) – but a lot of it read like critical theory.  And I read plenty of that for my day job!  There wasn’t enough novel in the novel.  I thought The Simmons Paper had real potential to be a little-known much-loved novella for me – have I ever told you about my fascination with dictionaries?  I wrote a thesis on them once – but I found the style a little clogging, and the thread of spoof rather one-note.  Good, but still disappointing.  Yet I will say this for it – it was much better than Sunlight on Cold Water.

La Grande Thérèse – Hilary Spurling

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La Grande Thérèse (1999) was one of those impulse purchases I sometimes make in Oxford’s £2 bookshop – the Matisse painting on the cover; the fact that Hilary Spurling wrote it; the subtitle ‘The Greatest Swindle of the Century’; its brevity.  I was sold.  And the book was sold.  To me.

La Grande Thérèse tells the true (amazingly!) story of Thérèse Daurignac, born into a fairly poor family, with no rich connections or impressive prospects, but who managed to become Madame Humbert, one of the most successful society women in fin-de-siècle Paris, with all the major players of the day visiting her home and paying her homage.  Three Frence presidents and at least five British prime ministers were amongst her friends.

How did she manage this?  By what talent or good fortune?

By lying.

Somehow, simply through deceit, ‘her ingenuous air and her adorable lisp’, and a ruthless selfishness, Thérèse elevated herself and her family to the highest ranks of society.  Spurling’s short book tells the story of her rise – and, in 1902, her catastrophic fall.   She started with small fry – in Toulouse she managed to outwit dressmakers and hairdressers with promises of an inheritance soon to be given her.   This was just small scale for what she would eventually do.  Thérèse married Frédéric Humbert, a shy man with a sharp legal brain, and together the plot continued apace.  Wherever she went, Thérèse spoke of a legacy that would be hers – over the years it escalated, until it was in the millions.  A strongbox, purportedly containing the legal papers of this legacy, was kept in its own locked room, occasionally shown to an important visitor.  Thérèse expertly built up a mystique around her fortune – and on the back of it bought an enormous home on the avenue de la Grande Armée.  She rarely paid for anything at all, and her family (including a rather violent – possibly, Spurling suggests, murderously so – brother) wangled loans of staggering amounts from people up and down the country.  Such were their powers of persuasion.

All her life Thérèse treated money as an illusion: a confidence or conjuring trick that had to be mastered.
Spurling goes through Thérèse’s family in a little more depth, exploring the characters of various siblings and children (and especially develops the nature of one relative by marriage, an avant-garde artist called… Henri Matisse!) but the outline is there – and, such is the brevity of La Grande Thérèse, that the outline isn’t expanded a huge amount.  It is astonishing that this trickster got so far – but, of course, it couldn’t last.  With hundreds of creditors wanting their money, it turned out to be a relatively minor court order (for the address of her mysterious American benefactor) which brought the whole house of cards down.  The family disappeared.  The nation was in outcry.  A lengthy trial eventually… but, no.  Although this is not a novel, I shall not spoil the ending.

The most curious thing about Spurling’s book is that such a thing could happen without everybody knowing about to this day.  She discusses, in an epilogue, the various reasons why this scandal has been covered up – ‘if the Dreyfus affair had knocked the stuffing out of the right wing and the army, the Humbert affair seemed likely to do the same for the Left and its civil administration’ – but   it still seems extraordinary that such a shocking tale could be all but forgotten.  The second most curious thing about Spurling’s book is the writing style she adopts.  From beginning to end, it is written almost as though it were a fairy tale.  Here is how it opens:

Thérèse Daurignac was born in 1856 in the far southwest of France in the province of the Languedoc, once celebrated for its troubadours and their romances.  Life for Thérèse in the little village of Aussonne, just outside Toulouse, was anything but romantic.  She was the eldest child in a poor family: a stocky, bright-eyed little girl, not particularly good-looking, with nothing special about her except the power of her imagination.  Thérèse told stories.  In an age without television, in a countryside where most people still could not read, she transformed the narrow, drab, familiar world of the village children into something rich and strange.
Our sympathies even seem to be nudged towards Thérèse and her family, admiring the audacity of her financial conjuring tricks.  In a fairy tale, perhaps she would be a heroine – because consequences in a fairy tale are not really consequences.  Yet her selfish ambition destroyed many, many lives – thousands of people were left ruined; a substantial number killed themselves.  They are not quite forgotten by Spurling, but this extraordinary tale could easily have been given a more tragic structure, rather than the they-do-it-with-mirrors account Spurling prioritises.

There are no footnotes in The Grande Thérèse, or even sourcing – no proper bibliography or indication where Spurling got individual facts and quotations from (although the illustrations are referenced properly.)  As I rather suspected, Spurling wrote The Grande Thérèse as a tangent while researching a book on Matisse, and perhaps she simply wanted a holiday from academic writing.  I was perfectly happy to be swept along by the bizarre facts Spurling presents – perhaps they suit this sort of storytelling, rather than a chunky, footnoted biography – but it does leave me with many unanswered questions, not least about Thérèse’s psyche and conscience.  But those are questions for the novelist, not the writer of non-fiction and The Grande Thérèse is far more striking as non-fiction than it could be as fiction.  If you fancy being shocked and surprised, and don’t mind being left a touch bewildered, then go and find this extraordinary little book.

Am I My Brother’s Reader?

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I’ve been very ruthless over the past couple days, and weeded out over 100 books which have gone to Barrington (a local National Trust property with a book barn) or The Honeypot (an even more local secondhand book seller – my Mum in our garage, for the church!)  I haven’t been quite as ruthless as Rachel, but I’ve been stern with myself and certainly managed to make a bit of room… and then immediately filled it with the books I sent home with Mum and Dad when I moved house.  But, whereas I’d usually keep books I’ve read unless I hated them, now they’re out if it’s unlikely that I’ll want to re-read them for years.

One book which probably won’t be finding its way back onto my shelves is The Eye of the World (1990), the first novel in The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, which I finished on the train home.  In early 2010, my brother Colin and I set each other a reading challenge.  Our tastes our not similar at all, as you’ll remember from his My Life in Books interview, and I wanted him to sample the wonder of Virginia Woolf.  Since she writes normal, sensible length books – and Robert Jordan first volume OF FOURTEEN comes in at an astonishing 782 pages – Colin had to read Orlando and To The Lighthouse, and would still get off far easier in terms of length.  As it turned out, he struggled with Orlando and called it the worst book he’d ever read.  Read more here (scroll down to August 25th 2010 entry).  I was sad but not surprised, and let him off reading To The Lighthouse.  Virginia Woolf is too brilliant to be everyone’s cup of tea, so we’ll sweep that under the carpet.

Well, The Eye of the World isn’t the worst book I’ve ever read, but it did take me 2.5 years to read it.  I actually read over 500 pages on a trip to and from Paris in March 2010, because it was the only book I took with me, but I only read in dribs and drabs until, determined that it should feature on A Century of Books, I took it with me on a 3.5 hour train journey, and blitzed the final 200 or so pages.

Rand, Mat, Perrin, Egwene, and Nynaeve live in a jolly place called The Two Rivers, which is attacked by Trollocs (wolf-type creatures), and Rand’s father is killed.  I forget quite how this leads to the quest, but it does…. in fact, looking back, I can’t really remember ever being told what the quest actually was.  It certainly involved walking a very long way, outwitting Dark Forces, and seeking the elliptical wisdom of an Aes Sedai  – prophetess-type – called Moiraine, who is rather pretty, if memory serves.  They wanted to get to The Eye of the World, but I don’t really remember it being mentioned until they actually got there.  Perhaps they’re just on the run from the Trollocs and sundry evil things?

And on they go.  And on.  And oooonnnn.

I will mention, before I go on, that The Eye of the World was better than I thought it would be.  At no point was the writing laughably bad, although for the most part it was pretty pedestrian.  It doesn’t hurry particularly, and one of the reasons the book is so. very. long. is that Jordan doesn’t have any sense of economising.  Here’s an excerpt chosen entirely at random, to give you a sense of the pace:

The stone hallway was dim and shadowy, and empty except for Rand.  He could not tell where the light came from, what little there was of it; the grey walls were bare of candles or lamps, nothing at all to account for the faint glow that seemed to just be there.  The air was still and dank, and somewhere in the distance water dripped with a steady, hollow plonk.  Wherever this was, it was not the inn.  Frowning, he rubbed at his forehead.  Inn?  His head hurt, and thoughts were hard to hold on to.  There had been something about… an inn?  It was gone, whatever it was.

He licked his lips and wished he had something to drink.  He was awfully thirsty, dry-as-dust thirsty.  It was the dripping sound that decided him.  With nothing to choose by except his thirst, he started toward that steady plonk – plonk – plonk.
So, as you see, nothing dreadful, nothing in Mary Webb territory.  But since we’re comparing Jordan with Woolf (which I can’t imagine has ever happened before)… well, you can’t imagine anybody reading prose like that simply for the joy of reading beautiful writing, can you?  It’s serviceable, though, and unobtrusive, which is no mean feat.  Plenty of novelists would give their left arm for that.

A book’s merits can be considered in terms of plot, character, and writing style, broadly speaking.  What The Eye of the World lacks in writing style it almost gains in character.  Although it took me the first hundred pages to disentangle Mat, Rand, and Perrin (and that gap of two years in my reading entangled them all over again) I was impressed by the complex relationships between the central characters – with jealousy, admiration, affection, rivalry, loyalty, and frustration all playing their roles.  It’s not always the most subtle character delineation, but it’s a good deal more subtle than I was anticipating.  As usual, there are forces that are plain Evil, without redeeming feature or clear motivation, but the Good characters weren’t annoyingly bland in their pursuit of all that is pure.  They did all seem as though they were about 15 years old, whereas the cover suggests they’re a decade or so older than that…?

So, the plot?  It didn’t grip me, to be honest, because it seemed just to be walk, obstacle, overcome obstacle, walk, obstacle, overcome obstacle, repeat as needed.  The heroes are trapped!  Will they die?  Er, no.  The heroes are lost!  Will they find their way?  Er, yes.  The heroes are trapped again!  Will they escape?  Can you guess?  When there are another thousand books in the series, you know that the main characters are going to live for at least another few books.

I love books where not much happens, as you know.  I love To The Lighthouse, for goodness’ sake, and bar a death and an argument or two, nothing really happens.  But The Eye of the World is so fixed on its quest plot, and its up-and-down attempts to heighten tension, that when it doesn’t grab a reader the foundations of the novel must collapse.  I think I’m just allergic to the artificiality of any quest-plot.  And – not that it’s relevant – covers like this.  Why do fantasy books so often have covers like this?  And silly names?  I’m put off when writers make up gibberish languages.  I think writers should be able to be creative within the bounds of the English language (or, y’know, whichever language[s] they speak.)  I don’t see how ‘Aes Sedai’ brings anything that ‘prophetess’ doesn’t, other than making me think (for some reason) of Anais Nin.

And while I’m moaning, goodness me, it’s slow.  Colin tells me that it’s the most pacey novel in the series – but no novel of 782 pages can claim to be fast-paced.  I think it could all easily be condensed into 300 pages, max.  I suppose part of the appeal to the sort of people who like lengthy fantasy series is that length. Perhaps it makes you feel like you’re on the quest too.  (It did make me chuckle that one of the cover quotations was “I read it in three days” – for most books, an indication of compulsive, compelling reading would be “I read it in three hours.”)  I was never hugely curious to find out what would happen next, partly because it was almost always glaringly obvious what would happen next and partly because it all happened at a glacial speed.

So, summing up… neither Colin nor I have converted the other to our much-cherished writers, but I fared better with Robert Jordan than he did with Virginia Woolf.  I shan’t be reading any other books in The Wheel of Time series, but I liked The Eye of the World more than I thought I would.  I just wish someone had hidden Jordan’s pen after 300 pages.

Wise Children – Angela Carter

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Twins. Theatre. Shakespeare. Eccentrics.  There was never really any chance that I wouldn’t like Wise Children (1991) by Angela Carter, was there?

Everything kicks off with 75 year old twins Dora and Nora Chance (with Dora as our narrator) getting an invitation to their father’s 100th birthday party.  Only he (Melchior) has always denied his parentage, instead claiming that his twin brother Peregrine is their father.  They’re understandably a bit miffed by this, but nothing keeps them down for long.  They really are eternal optimists – and delightfully over the top.  They prepare for going out…

Our fingernails match our toenails match our lipstick match our rouge.  Revlon, Fire and Ice.  The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle; haven’t had a man for yonks but still we slap it on.  Nobody could say the Chance girls were going gently into that good night.
That’s a pretty good example of the tone of the novel, actually.  It’s the heightened, slangy voice of Dora, a little coarse but endlessly cheery heroine, along with a good dose of literary references (but the sort that even someone with my rather fleeting familiarity with poetry will get.)  (Yes, I have studied English literature for eight years now – argh! – but I’ve always avoided poetry wherever possible.)

It took me about half the novel before I realised the significance of the title, but I’ll save you some time – it is a wise child that knows his own father, as the proverb goes.  Oh, and if you’ve got the edition pictured (and probably others) then there’s a Dramatis Personae at the back – I didn’t find that until the end, but it would have been VERY useful, as the family is complicated beyond measure.  Heaps of twins, heaps of multiple marriages, and all manner of possible and probable illicit parentages.  All very Shakespearean – which, of course, is precisely the point.  I learnt, in Susannah Clapp’s A Postcard From Angela Carter (which I’ll be writing about soon – maybe tomorrow?) that she intended to get in references to every one of Shakespeare’s plays, but missed out Titus Andronicus.  I wish I’d known that before I started – I’d have had my checklist!  Some are more obvious than others (they film A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance) but some are fun to try and spot (is the mysterious resurrection of a character presumed dead a reference to A Winter’s Tale?)

A little while ago I mentioned my literary bête noire, of novels starting in ‘present day’ and then going back to the beginning.  I would probably have loved Wise Children more if Carter had chosen a different narrative structure, but that is what happens here.  We reverse back to Dora and Nora’s youth, their early activities in theatre and film, and their various beaus.  Not to mention the increasingly complex family.  Melchior’s various wives make for fun reading.  Then there is Nora’s boyfriend whom Dora rather likes, so they swap perfumes (the only way they can be told apart, apparently) and Dora has her wicked way with him… and there is a fire.  Everything is gloriously over the top.  So much happens, to so many people, that it is a little dizzying in a short novel, and impossible to recount in detail.  But that is what I loved most about Wise Children – it is mad.  Dora Chance is wonderful – particularly in old age (which is why I wished we’d spent more time there, and less on the past) and the whole novel is wonderfully exuberant – mostly because of the inexhaustibly optimistic voice of Dora, and her turns of phrase, her cheekiness, and her ability to laugh at everything life throws at her.  And Carter is obviously having a whale of a time – it must be an author’s dream to be able to use the most excessive and absurd images all the time – par example:

Flash! A passing paparazzo took a picture of an old lady who looked like St Pancras Station, monumental, grimy, full of Gothic detail
– and to concoct the most extraordinary plots and interrelations, while still able to point over her shoulder and say “Well, it’s no more zany than Shakespeare.”

It’s such a fun book, and a good introduction to Angela Carter for me.  It was her last novel, and I have plenty more to explore now – maybe I’ll even work my way backwards?  But my second dip into Carter territory was, as mentioned, the book Susannah Clapp wrote about her postcards – more on that coming up shortly!

Others who got Stuck in this Book:

“Angela Carter’s last novel is an over-exuberant bear hug of a book; it’s the literary equivalent of being dragged into a conga line at a party, and it does this with such big-hearted, good-natured cheeriness that it is quite impossible to resist.” – Victoria, Tales From The Reading Room

“I think that Angela Carter is like what I imagine marzipan to be like, or maybe this particular sort of chocolate mint cake my father has: delicious and rich but you maybe wouldn’t want a massive lot of it at once.” – Jenny, Jenny’s Books

“The novel succeeds on multiple levels, and on a uncomplicated plane it sincerely argues for the recognition of simple joy under the long and often theatrical masks of seriousness and complexity.” – Leif, Leif and the Pages

The Island of the Colourblind – Oliver Sacks

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Every now and then I pick up something which couldn’t be further away from my dual comfort zones of 1920s-housewife and quirky-domestic, and end up being captivated.  So… now for something completely different!

I already knew that I loved Sacks’ book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, and I have one or two of his books in various places – including The Island of the Colourblind (1997) (sorry, I can’t bring myself to give the American title, blame my English student sensibilities).  I can’t remember what it was that catapulted the book from shelf to hand – perhaps one too many novels with teacups and maids? – but it did indeed find its way there, and I whipped through it in a day or two.

The title and blurb both offer slightly false information – suggesting that there is an entire community of colourblind people on the ‘tiny Pacific atoll’ Pingelap.  It turns out that the incident of achromatopsia (symptoms are complete colourblindness – i.e. everything in greyscale – and a high sensitivity to light) is in fact one in 12 of the population.  It’s still wildly more than the rest of the world – where achromatopsia is found in one in 30,000.  Even though it is not the isolated, uniform community which Sacks initially hoped to find, he does highlight the emotional benefits of this high incidence:

There was an immediate understanding and sharing between them, a commonality of language and perception, which extended to Knut as well. […] When a Pingelapese baby starts to squint and turn away from the light, there is at least a cultural knowledge of his perceptual world, his special needs and strengths, even a mythology to explain it.  In this sense, then, Pingelap is an island of the colourblind.  No one born here with the maskun finds himself wholly isolated or misunderstood, which is the almost universal lot of people with congenital achromatopsia elsewhere in the world.

Amongst that number is the mentioned Knut – a Scandinavian scientist who both has and investigates the condition.  When Sacks offers Knut the chance to accompany him, Knut leaps at the chance – and his experience with the condition proves invaluable as a point of connection between the outsider Westerners and the inevitably intimate island society.  (Sacks is occasionally rather scathing about other Westerners who have visited, especially missionaries, but I suppose I couldn’t expect him to share my views on them – and, unlike his view of other visitors, he never considers his own work and provisions as a colonial activity.)  Knut also provides a sophisticated, intelligent and thorough angle of living with achromatopsia amongst millions who don’t.

Not thinking, I enthused about the wonderful blues of the sea – then stopped, embarrassed.  Knut, though he has no direct experience of colour, is very erudite on the subject.  He is intrigued by the range of words and images other people use about colour and was arrested by my use of the word “azure.”  (“Is it similar to cerulean?”)  He wondered whether “indigo” was, for me, a separate, seventh colour of the spectrum, neither blue nor violet, but itself, in between.  “Many people,” he added, “do not see indigo as a separate spectral colour, and others see light blue as distinct from blue.”  With no direct knowledge of colour, Knut has accumulated an immense mental catalogue, an archive, of vicarious colour knowledge about the world.

It reminded me somehow of Helen Keller’s accounts of living as a blind, dumb, death woman in a world which is largely none of these things – and the sensitivity with which she perceives how others might perceive her world.

There is no cure for achromatopsia, but it is a condition which becomes much more manageable with the simple expedient of dark glasses and strong magnifying glasses.  The next island Sacks visits, Guam, has a more debilitating illness shared by much of the population: Lytico-Bodig disease.  (I’m just realising how unlike my normal posts this is!)  It’s a neurological disease which manifests itself in symptoms like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.  Despite decades of research, nobody has worked out what caused this – but nobody born in the past few decades has shown any symptoms.  Sacks gets a bit too involved in the history of research into the disease for my understanding, but more personal accounts of people living with the condition cannot but be moving.

Sacks is certainly a learned neurologist, but his books are not textbooks in their style.  He has the gift of interweaving the scientist and the storyteller.  His narrative is moving and personal, rather than the impersonal facts and figures one might anticipate from a scientific study.  Perhaps it is most poignant when Sacks realises the limitations of his work:

To calm her, the family started to sing an old folk song, and the old lady, so demented, so fragmented, most of the time, joined in, singing fluently along with the others.  She seemed to get all the words, all the feeling, of the song, and to be composed, restored to herself, as long as she sang.  John and I slipped out quietly while they were singing, suddenly feeling, at this point, that neurology was irrelevant.

I wouldn’t ever browse the science sections of bookshops, and I don’t remember how I first stumbled across The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, but I’m very glad I did.  The Island of the Colourblind (a play on Wells’ The Island of the Blind, which I should mention before this post ends) isn’t as captivating as that book, but it is a rather different kettle of fish.  Instead of many psychological disorders and fascinating patients, Sacks explores two communities – more slowly, more deeply, and even more sympathetically.  There was a danger in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat that it could feel a bit like giving a penny to see a freakshow (although I’m sure that’s not what Sacks intended.)  The Island of the Colourblind invites the reader onto two islands, to become, however briefly, a concerned member of two very different communities – not watching from the outside, but sympathising from the inside.  The fascinating statistical aberrations are still there, as are some as-yet unexplained mysteries, but this is primarily a very human study – and a narrative which treads the path between science and storytelling, almost always with impressive success.

Something Happened Yesterday – Beryl Bainbridge

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The Beryl Bainbridge Fest ain’t over yet, folks, and here’s my final review of the week – Something Happened Yesterday.  It isn’t a novel, it’s a selection of columns which Bainbridge contributed to the Evening Standard in the 1980s and ’90s, with short (often quite bizarre) introductory paragraphs to each column, written when the book was published (1993).

Well, although it takes a different format, Something Happened Yesterday has the same disjointed, playfully subversive tone that I have come to expect from Bainbridge.  Each column involves some event which has recently befallen Bainbridge, or recently come to her mind, suggested by something else.  It’s a whole mix – from visiting the village of her youth to a zoo trip to her time on a BBC children’s radio programme.  The occasion scarcely matters, for it is the eccentric musings on life which Bainbridge incorporates that make this book so distinctive.  The dark humour of her novels is definitely present.  Here’s a representative sample of her style:

It did however remind me of the cautionary tale of my son’s nursery school teacher, a lady named Miss Smith, referred to as Mith Mith by her lisping charges.  It’s a true story, albeit tragic.  A group of infants on a Tuesday morning just before Christmas in a house in Ullet Road, Liverpool, were discovered at home-time marching up and down swigging bottles of milk in an abandoned manner while Mith Mith lay slumped across the piano.  She had been dead for a quarter of an hour and had apparently passed on in the middle of The Grand Old Duke of York.  This shocking incident has remained fresh as a daisy in my memory because I hadn’t got round to paying the fees, whereas the rest of the mothers had stumped up the three guineas a term in advance.
Most amusing, probably, is the way in which Bainbridge can end up at the most curious of statements.  ‘A knowledge of sex and moths is no substitute for Latin, science and maths’, for instance, or, as an aside, ‘(I once knew a countess, an ex-theatre sister from Liverpool, who messed up my kitchen while trying to decapitate her husband, the Earl.)’  These statements are equally startling in context – not completely incongruous, because Bainbridge has more or less built up to them, but then takes a leap to something extraordinary.

Those introductory passages I mentioned – it’s a little odd to read them before reading the column in question, but often they feel no more normal afterwards.  They go off at tangents; they reveal less than they appear to, and add new questions rather than answers.  Sweet William could have written them.  Here’s one which prefixes a column which is mostly about Snow White:

I’m not going to enlarge on the events recounted here: they are too painful.  The moment he set eyes on me my ex said I looked very withered.  The last night he was here the cleaner confronted him.  How could he have walked out on his children all those years ago?  His response was pretty predictable, given the guilt we all feel.  He said, “This is all very boring”, and caught a taxi to the airport.
Which brings me onto another point.  Bainbridge makes pretty free with her relatives and friends.  Often her daughters and grandchildren are mentioned, but also talks about neighbours and acquaintances – surely they then read the Evening Standard, and recognised themselves?  But, but… sometimes Bainbridge’s introductory paragraphs make it clear that the anecdote she’s relating is not, in fact, wholly true… or is true in essentials, but happened with other people, in a different way…

Like some of Bainbridge’s characters, and like her own quirky narrative style, nothing can quite be trusted in her journalism.  I’m very glad that her style and tone didn’t get diluted by the demands of a newspaper column – it really is just an extension of the qualities I enjoy in her fiction, with a personal twist and a drier, acerbic view on life.  Great fun, very unusual, and a lovely way to finish off my first dive into Beryl Bainbridge territory.

Curriculum Vitae – Muriel Spark’s autobiography

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Another Spark review from me – three books reviewed in one day, gosh!  Although this one I actually read during Muriel Spark Reading Week, and I’m writing about it down in Somerset – where the book group my Mum runs have all been reading Muriel Spark.  I joined in their lovely lunch, chatting about Spark – everyone enjoyed reading her, although one lady (who had read The Abbess of Crewe, apparently one of Spark’s weirder novels) was rather bemused.  I’m hoping Mum will write some reviews of the Spark novels she’s read this week… hint hint…!

Once I’ve read a lot of an author’s novels, I like to look into their life a bit.  (You can do the same, very quickly, with Katherine’s piece.)  I prefer doing it that way around – so that I have formed my own opinions from the books, and can use biographical information to augment my interest, rather than act as a starting point.  Martin Stannard’s biography of Muriel Spark was looming in one corner of my room, but it’s enormous, so I went to the horse’s mouth – Spark’s ‘fragments of an autobiography’, Curriculum Vitae (1992).

I had been curious to discover quite how Spark would write an autobiography, since her novels so often eschew normal narrative structures and the reliable narrator.  Not that her narrators are particularly unreliable – just the question of reliability seems to be rather sidelined.  Well, in Curriculum Vitae she is very concerned with reliability (I’ve typed that so often it doesn’t feel like a real [reliable] word any more…) and refuses to trust her own memory: ‘I determined to write nothing that cannot be supported by documentary evidence or by eyewitnesses’.  But there are definitely signs of Spark-the-novelist in the structuring of the autobiography.  Her usual trick of playing around with time makes an appearance, but it’s the enticingly disjointed beginning which made me realise Spark-the-autobiographer was no real distance from Spark-the-novelist.  She starts by writing about bread, under its own little subheading.  And then butter.  And so on.  It’s an interesting way to structure a childhood, but I don’t think any other method would suit this most unconventional of novelists.

Spark grew up in beautiful Edinburgh, amongst family and neighbours who were fairly poorly-off, but with many strict manners and customs – although her own parents seem to have been pretty fun.  I can’t summarise Spark’s many details about this upbringing, but it demonstrates how incredibly observant she was from an early age – and who knows what she left out, because she couldn’t find corroborating evidence?  There are definite signs of the latent novelist in Spark:

I was fascinated from the earliest age I can remember by how people arranged themselves.  I can’t remember a time when I was not a people-watcher, a behaviourist.
A while later, whilst completing her education at Heriot Watt College, she notes:

I was particularly interested in precis-writing, and took a course in that.  I loved economical prose, and would always try to find the briefest way to express a meaning.
There, I think, you have the two keystones of Spark’s novelistic power.  She is endlessly perceptive, and always concise.

In the early section of the autobiography, the part which was of most interest to me (and might well be to others) was on Miss Christina Kay (‘that character in search of an author’) whose teaching inspired Spark, and helped inspire her most famous creation, Miss Jean Brodie.  Of course they are not the same – Spark is too good a writer to lift people straight from life, even if that were possible – but they shared a love of educating girls, of Mussolini, and art.  Spark shows how she used Christina Kay, and where she invented.  Indeed, Spark often finishes an anecdote by mentioning which short story or novel the event helped influence.  The following excerpt is an example of this, but also of the way Spark writes her autobiography with the same unusual, out-of-kilter twists she presents so often in her novels:

Just round the corner in Viewforth lived Nita McEwen, who resembled me very much.  She was already in her first year at James Gillespie’s School when I saw her with her parents, walking between them, holding their hands.  I was doing the same thing.  I was not yet at school.  It must have been a Saturday or Sunday, when children used to walk with their parents.  My mother remarked how like me the little girl was; one of her parents must have said the same to her.  I looked round at the child and saw she was looking round at me.  Either her likeness to me or something else made me feel strange.  I didn’t yet know she was called Nita.  Later, at school, although Nita was in a higher class and we never played together, our physical resemblance was often remarked upon.  Her hair was slightly redder than mine.  Years later, when I was twenty-one, I was to meet Nita McEwen in a boarding house in the then Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.  There, our likeness to each other was greatly remarked on.  One night, Nita was shot dead by her husband, who then shot himself.  I heard two girl’s screams followed by a shot, then another shot.  That was the factual origin of my short story ‘Bang-Bang You’re Dead’.
Perhaps I should elaborate on the self-confessed disastrous marriage which led to her life in (then) Rhodesia; her cunning escape back to Britain during World War Two; her hilarious account of working for the Poetry Society (which helped inspire Loitering With Intent); the various dramatic and often calamitous personal and professional relationships Spark had… but I want you to read Curriculum Vitae yourself, so I shan’t.

Spark finishes this autobiography at about the time her first novel, The Comforters, was published.  She talks of a second volume, and it is such a shame that this volume never appeared – I would love to see her take on literary circles and the trappings of fame – but what Spark has written is wonderful enough.  Curriculum Vitae has all the energy and unusual qualities of a Spark novel, with the added joy of acting as a centre from which all her other works are spokes.  Once you’ve read three or four (or so) Spark novels, I recommend you hunt this down and see her bizarre take on real life – it’s further evidence of her claim (I believe) to being one of the 20th century’s greatest writers, and certainly one of its most original.

Deadline Poet – Calvin Trillin

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When I wrote recently about his disengagement with poetry, and asked for your help (much appreciated!) I didn’t expect my next dalliance with poetry to be something quite like Calvin Trillin’s Deadline Poet.  I have Thomas to thank for introducing me to Trillin, and Nancy to thank for mentioning Deadline Poet on this post back here.  And now it has filled one of the tricky 1990s spots on A Century of Books.

Given my disinclination to read poetry, it was perhaps a surprising choice for me.  Even more surprising is that it’s about Trillin’s time writing weekly ‘doggerel’ (his word) for The Nation about contemporary political figures. Contemporary being, in this case, the 1990s.  Trillin always refers to his boss as ‘the wily and parsimonious Victor S. Navasky’, whose one condition for offering Trillin $100 a week for his verse was: “Don’t tell any of the real poets you’re getting that much.” – “Your secret is safe with me,” I assured him.

Now, I know nothing about politics in 1990s America.  Indeed, I know nothing about politics in any place, at any time, up to and including 2012 Britain…  Thankfully Deadline Poet isn’t simply a collection of verse – Trillin knows that, if a week is a long time in politics, a year is an eternity.  Light verse published in a newspaper necessarily relies upon topicality – so even those who know who Zoe Baird, Clarence Thomas, Robert Penn Warren etc. are (sorry, I don’t) might not remember the intricacies of various campaigns and speeches.  So Trillin prefaces his poems with explanations – or, rather, the poems occupy a lot of a journalist’s memoir.  The poetry and prose take up about equal amounts of page space, so it doesn’t feel like a collection with notes, nor like a traditional memoir, but a really engaging and funny combination of the two.

And the poetry itself?  Well, Trillin probably isn’t being unduly bashful when he calls himself a doggerelist.  There isn’t a lot of it that would make Wordsworth uneasy.  Scanning and syntax tend to fall below rhyming in Trillin’s list of priorities (then again, that never did Tennyson any harm) and even there he prefers an abcb rhyme scheme, rather than abab, which is a little lazy – still, there is plenty of ingenious rhyming and wittiness throughout.  Here’s one I enjoyed.  (I should add, I have no idea who Ross Perot is.  I don’t even know which is Republican and which is Democrat, since the words mean the same thing.  So sorry if Perot is ‘your’ party… you probably know by now that I am not seeking to offend.)

The Ross Perot Guide to Answering Embarrassing Questions

When something in my history is found
Which contradicts the views that I propound,
Or shows that I am surely hardly who
I claim to be, here’s what I usually do:

I lie
I simply, baldly falsify.
I look the fellow in the eye,
And cross my heart and hope to die – 
And lie.

I don t apologize. Not me. Instead,
I say I never said the things I said
Nor did the things that people saw me do.
Confronted with some things they know are true,

I lie.
I offer them no alibi,
Nor say, “You oversimplify.”
I just deny, deny, deny.
I lie.

I hate the weasel words some slickies use
To blur their pasts or muddy up their views.
Not me. I’m blunt. One thing that makes me great
Is that I’ll never dodge nor obfuscate.

I’ll lie.
I imagine those of you who were politically aware in the 1990s will enjoy Deadline Poet greatly (especially if you agree with Trillin’s views, which I think are liberal).  It is testament to Trillin’s humour and drollery that even I, entirely ignorant, found Deadline Poet a really entertaining read.  Perhaps it isn’t quite how I saw myself engaging with poetry, and political verse certainly isn’t an avenue I’ll be exploring further, but as the memoir of a weekly journalist and light verse writer, I found it a whole heap o’ fun.

The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver

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Well, I finished The Poisonwood Bible (1998) with a couple of hours to spare before book group… and, having worked out what I think about it, I am ready to write my review.  It’s quite difficult to formulate my thoughts on this novel, because these thoughts do not all lean in the same direction.  Reviews feel like they should be unified, and that’s rather tricky when I have both positive and negative responses to a book.  So… bear with me.  I’ll bear with you bearing with me.  Hopefully by the end of the page we’ll understand one another, no?

First things first, The Poisonwood Bible ought to be about 200 pages shorter.  I don’t mean that careful and judicious editing throughout is needed, to compress the narrative (although this wouldn’t be a bad idea) – I mean that it should have ended on p.427.  There are 616 pages in the edition I read (rather more than the supposed 350 page upper-limit of book group choices) and there shouldn’t be.  I am astonished that any editor let Kingsolver keep going for those final 189 pages.  It was self-indulgent and unnecessary.  But, now I’ve got that off my chest, I can return to the review proper.  It gets more positive soon, promise.
The Poisonwood Bible follows the Price family from 1959 to the 1990s – Nathan is a Baptist minister from Georgia (the US state, not the country), and has brought his wife Orleanna and daughters Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May to the Congo.  They are there as missionaries, but all is not going to go entirely to plan… to say the least.  This is the basic premise of Kingsolver’s novel – and from such a simple idea, she weaves a long and complex novel.  Complex in terms of emotions, interactions, and gradual self-discovery, that is.  Not a lot really happens.  (Another reason why The Poisonwood Bible is difficult to write about.  Honestly, Barb!)
Five voices make up the narrative, each in the first person.  Orleanna Price speaks briefly at the beginning of each section  – which are named after Biblical (and Apocryphal) books – Genesis, The Revelation, The Judges, Bel and the Serpent, Exodus.  She speaks wearily, always in retrospect, and keeps her cards close to her chest.  Doubtless this is partly so plot points aren’t revealed too early, and her melancholy ambiguity includes one momentous hint which kept me gripped and guessing for hundreds of pages.
But it is the four daughters who are the mainstay of the novel.  The narrative is passed between them, and Kingsolver constructs their four voices brilliantly, distinctly, and consistently.  Her fellow American novelist, Marilynne Robinson, hugely impressed me with Gilead because of her ability to ‘capture’ a voice – and while Kingsolver has a rather different slant on a minister, she certainly writes beautifully for his daughters.  Since they are so thoroughly depicted, it’s difficult to summarise their characters – but, broadly speaking, I’ll try.
Rachel is the eldest, a white-blonde ingenue whose Malapropisms (‘never the train shall meet’) and simple, unimaginative nature are initially endearing, but eventually rather concerning.  She never loses the all-American slang expressions she brings with her to Congo, and I rather liked her indefatigable sassiness, even if it is accompanied with a lack of cultural awareness.  
Leah and Adah are twins – Leah desperately seeks the approval of her father, and carries with her the guilt that, in the womb, she ’caused’ Adah’s disability.  Adah limps badly, and almost never speaks.  She also has a fascination with seeing things backgrounds, and especially palindromes.  Silent to others, her narration reveals her cynicism and bitterness, but also her humour.
Ruth May, finally, is the youngest – and the simplest.  Not in terms of intelligence, but in the simple, contented way she adapts to her surroundings, making friends amongst the neighbours, and doing her best to understand her father’s teaching in their new environment.
For Kingsolver is not subtle about the clash of cultures.  Here, the welcome party for the Prices is interrupted by Nathan:
“Reverend and Mrs. Price and your children!” cried the younger man in the yellow shirt.  “You are welcome to our feast.  Today we have killed a goat to celebrate your coming.  Soon your bellies will be full with our fufu pili-pili.”At that, why, the half-naked women behind him just burst out clapping and cheering, as if they could no longer confine their enthusiasm for a dead goat.[…]”Nakedness,” Father repeated, “and darkness of the soul!  For we shall destroy this place where the loud clamour of the sinners is waxen great before the face of the Lord!” No one sang or cheered anymore.  Whether or not they understood the meaning of ‘loud clamour,’ they didn’t dare be making one now.  They did not even breathe, or so it seemed.  Father can get a good deal across with just his tone of voice, believe you me. 
This is, firstly, a great example of Kingsolver’s exceptional ability to convey individuals’ voices through minor verbal tics.  Perhaps it isn’t clear from just this excerpt, but only Rachel’s narrative would have that ‘why’ in the second paragraph; only Rachel would finish ‘believe you me’.  If Adah’s sections have the most obvious stylistic identifications, the others are subtly tied to their narratives too.  That is the greatest strength of The Poisonwood Bible, and the strength that encourages me to read more by Barbara Kingsolver – the ability to create a character’s voice.

Which makes it all the more frustrating that, in Nathan Price, she has done nothing of the kind.  The women of The Poisonwood Bible are drawn so well, so cleverly.  And, in the midst of them all, is Nathan.  He never comes alive, he is scarcely more than a Bad Man Who Does Bad Things.  His motivations aren’t addressed, he has no depth whatsoever – it is a shambolic waste of an opportunity.  I don’t think it’s simply my Christianity (and the fact that I know a lovely, hard-working, deeply loving missionary in D.R. Congo) that makes me feel this – others at book group certainly agreed.  Nathan is angry, selfish, insensitive, violent… it was when he started hitting his children that my eyes rolled so much that I felt a little dizzy. Doubtless there are other novels where one meets ogres – Barbara Comyns’ The Vet’s Daughter, for example, or any novel by Dickens – but in those books they are in the midst of the surreal and exaggerated.  Nathan Price is not, and, though all his attributes are individually believable, as a composite, without any redeeming features, they are not.  It is such a pity that Kingsolver allowed herself this laziness.  Had she made Nathan a character, rather than a two-dimensional face of Wicked Colonialism, The Poisonwood Bible would have been more interesting.  Then again, perhaps she just wanted Nathan as a catalyst to explore the reactions of the female characters?  That’s the most charitable conclusion I can draw.

As I said before, very little happens.  We see the daughters try to adjust to their situation – their interactions with neighbours, who are variously kind or antagonistic and endlessly curious – and the gradually altering politics of Congo.  Pages and pages go by without anything particularly occurring, but they are somehow engaging.  Ruth May introduces ‘Mother May I’ to local infants; Rachel’s hair is a spectacle to all; Adah is presumed eaten by a lion (but is not); Leah grows more and more interested in the teacher Anatole… mostly Kingsolver attempts the miracle of winding a narrative through emotions and thoughts without hanging them on events – and she succeeds.  It is beautiful writing.  It is also nigh-on impossible to review.  There is one odd thing… usually I jot down resonant or stand-out quotations whilst I read, or excerpts I think will help structure a blog post.  For The Poisonwood Bible, I wrote down nothing.  Kingsolver’s writing is all even and constant – it all weaves into one.

But, as I noted at the top, something very weird happens.  The Prices’ time in the Congo comes to an abrupt, tragic end.  And then, p.427, they leave.  After that it is as though it were another novel.   We follow the various daughters at occasional intervals for another couple of decades.  It is tedious and politically heavy-handed.  The points Kingsolver had previously shown through her story are now told through dialogue.  Show, don’t tell, Barb.  All the unsubtlety in her portrayal of Nathan sweeps across the others.  I still can’t believe that a novel can peter out quite like this one did.

So, there you are.  A confusing review, I daresay, but also a confusing read.  At its best, The Poisonwood Bible is phenomenally good.  Barbara Kingsolver is obviously an exceptionally talented writer.  The Bean Trees, which I read years ago, is also testament to this.  But at its best, The Poisonwood Bible is lazy, clumsy, unsubtle and poorly edited.  Overall I will say that Kingsolver’s talents outweigh her occasional mismanagement of them, but it is always a shame when a novel could have been great (and, to be fair, a lot of people do consider it great) but, to my mind, failed to reach its potential.