2004

Joe Cinque’s Consolation by Helen Garner #ABookADayInMay Day 5

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Helen Garner Joe Cinque's Consolation Audio Book mp3 on CD | eBay

Today I had an action-packed day in London, and I did get through quite a lot of a book on the train to and from, but not a whole book. Luckily I only had 40 minutes left on an audiobook of Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) by Helen Garner, and I finished it as I was driving into the railway station.

I’m making my way through everything available by Garner on audiobooks – well, everything non-fiction – and Joe Cinque’s Consolation has a lot in common with This House of Grief, published ten years later. It is about a tragic death and the impact it has on those in horrendous mourning, and it closely follows the trial of somebody accused of murder. In this case, though, it’s pretty unambiguous that they committed the killing: one of the central questions is whether or not they have diminished responsibility.

Joe Cinque was in his 20s when Anu Singh, his girlfriend, drugged him with rohypnol and injected large quantities of heroin into him while he slept. During the night, he dramatically died. I’ll spare you some of the more graphic details (which Garner does not spare the reader). Anu Singh had told various friends that she planned to kill him and then kill herself – various motives flew around, from her fear that he would leave her, to her own hypochondriacal (and incorrect) obsession that she had a muscle-wasting disease. None of the friends reported what Anu had said until it was too late, and one of the friends (who had been involved in getting the heroin) is also tried for murder.

Garner got involved in the story after a previous joint trial of both murder-accused broke down, and the decision was made to do separate cases. The book is very Garner: she is interested in the minutaie of the trial, down to the expressions and foibles of each witness. She is as compelled by the way in which people on the stand might make a half-hearted joke as she is with the finer points of law.

Beyond the courtroom, she interviews various people, including Joe Cinque’s distraught parents. (Anu Singh refused to be interviewed.) The scene where she first meets them is fascinating – not only for what she learns from them, but for how she frames it and reflects on it. “Her voice was heavy with the authority of suffering” is a brilliant and concise observation of Mrs Cinque. And afterwards she goes over the mistakes she made as an interviewer – and for sitting, unawares, in the chair that had usually been Joe. Garner takes us so far behind the scenes of reporting that the reporting becomes almost the heart of the book – without retracting from the seriousness of the crime.

A mix of criminology, psychology, elegy and character study, almost nobody else could have written a book like this – Janet Malcolm is the only other name who comes to mind (someone Garner is often compared to, and she does mention The Silent Woman, Malcolm’s brilliant book about the aftermath of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes). I think I’ve almost run out of Garner’s full-length non-fiction, but it’s been a fascinating journey.

Ghosting by Jennie Erdal

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The first book I started this year was one I bought for a treat in Woodstock’s independent bookshop – Ghosting (2004) by Jennie Erdal. I’ve been lucky enough to have quite a few review copies from Slightly Foxed, but hadn’t had this one – so it was a nice one to reward myself for… well, something last July. Who knows what.

All I knew about the memoir was that it was about ghostwriting, and that Slightly Foxed Editions pretty much never put a foot wrong. And Ghosting turns out to be no exception – what an extraordinary book.

Erdal was the ghostwriter for ‘Tiger’, a man who is not named in the book but who was apparently Naim Attallah. That name means nothing to me, but he is certainly a character and not in a particularly positive way. More on that later. And when I say that Erdal was a ghostwriter, it seems that she wrote more or less anything that Tiger needed to claim as his own – whether letters, newspaper columns, or full-length novels.

She got the job by having done some Russian translation – Tiger asked her to come on board at his publishing house, in charge of the Russian list. She doesn’t go into his backstory, so I don’t know how somebody as supremely unqualified as Tiger came to own a publishing house – but, dizzied, she does accept this role. She’s allowed to work from her home in Scotland, only occasionally coming down to London for meetings. When her role expands into writing up and editing interviews Tiger does with hundreds of women for a ‘book about women’, she finds that she has morphed into a ghostwriter.

I was ready to be fascinated by her account of ghostwriting and was a bit annoyed when she started talking about her upbringing. But, my goodness, she’s very good at it. Hers was a family where appearances mattered more than anything, and the abiding horrors of her parents were (a) shaming themselves before their neighbours and (b) Catholicism.

In our house it was usually easy to work out what was good and what was bad. Some things were regarded as good in themselves: for example, eating slowly, Formica, curly hair, secrecy, patterned carpets, straight legs, Scotch broth, bananas, going to the toilet before leaving the house, not crying whatever the circumstances – the goodness of these things was not open to challenge. Thus a child with curly hair who liked bananas and never cried was praised to the skies. By the same token, eating fast, straight hair, plain carpets and so on were bad things and, where possible, not allowed. If it was not possible to ban them, they were simply frowned upon. All this was clear-cut and easy to follow. However, in the way we spoke and the words we used, it was much harder to know good from bad, right from wrong. The rules seemed not to be fixed. Working out what was allowed, or when it might not be, was something of a leap in the dark.

Erdal doesn’t treat the memoir chronologically, covering childhood before moving onto adulthood, but rather draws links between her background and what’s going on with Tiger. It’s all done very elegantly and impressively – though in the second half of the memoir, it’s just about Tiger and working for him.

Tiger. Good grief. What an appalling man. Erdal is never vituperative, and seems to have been under the spell of his apparent charm – but beneath this, the reader can see what a monstrous man he is. Tiger is completely selfish, expecting everyone to bend to his will. He is devoted to ‘beautiful women’, but doesn’t seem particularly bothered about their minds or personalities, or even what they think of him in return. The portrait of Erdal working with him isn’t far off an abusive relationship, particularly when she starts to want to change the arrangement.

And yet she treats it lightly, and Ghosting is often funny. Tiger is as ridiculous as he is awful. And Erdal focuses on the ridiculous when she starts writing a novel ‘with’ him. He seems to believe he has come up with the idea of it – because he says it should involve a passionate affair. That’s it; that’s the plot. It’s left to Erdal to craft something from that premise – and her description of the editing process is funny, frustrating, and bizarre. What’s so impressive is that she doesn’t give up trying to do well, and she writes brilliantly in Ghosting about the process of trying to satisfy Tiger’s whims while also satisfying her artistic nature.

The fact that I was writing as someone else – with a mask on, as it were – inevitably added yet another layer of complexity. I did and did not feel responsible for the words on the page, I did and did not feel that they belonged to me; I did and did not feel that I could defend them in my heart.

Erdal writes so well about her inner philosophy – and, in the same volume, writing movingly about her childhood and her divorce, as well as drawing a portrait of the outlandish, absurd, and appalling Tiger. And she even finds pity for him.

Ghosting holds together many disparate elements brilliantly and it’s another success for the Slightly Foxed Editions series. A great start to the reading year.

A Reading Diary by Alberto Manguel

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Alberto Manguel is up there with Oliver Sacks as one of those writers who exudes so much warmth and humanity in simply writing about himself and the world he observes. I’ve loved reading his books about reading – and he seems to have an inexhaustible store of them – and stalled in his book on curiosity, but I had yet to read A Reading Diary: A Year of Favourite Books (2004). In it, he revisits twelve of his favourite books – from June to the following May, slightly oddly. Maybe he had the idea in June and couldn’t wait.

Manguel has an amazingly eclectic taste. While my favourite books would span a couple of countries and the best part of a century, Manguel’s cover centuries and the whole globe. Margaret Atwood mingles with Goethe; Cervantes with H.G. Wells; Sei Shonagon with Adolfo Bioy Casares.

Each chapter is an enjoyable, curious meander through a book and Manguel’s life – heavy on the book and light on the life, but certainly a bit of both. Often Manguel will throw us right into the middle of his thoughts, not pausing to explain what the book is (and I’d be very impressed if anybody was familiar with all twelve disparate books). It feels a bit like a notebook of jottings – rather like Wittgenstein’s notebooks – because observations follow observations; a few pages of analysis are followed by a couple of quotations and then the gossip from the postwoman. What holds it all together is Manguel’s inquisitive personality – his clear love of literature, and the vitality he sees in it, and passes on to the reader.

Undeniably, I enjoyed the chapters most where I’d read the book in question. That was only three – The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, Kim by Rudyard Kipling, and The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. I was familiar with a couple of others (who doesn’t know Sherlock Holmes?) but some meant nothing to me at all. That made me feel a bit more lost at the opening of each chapter, but I wasn’t here for specific literary criticism – more for the immersion in the delight of a life of reading. On that front, Manguel more than delivers.

Nabokov’s Butterfly by Rick Gekoski

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Nabokov's ButterflyDid I write, when I bought Nabokov’s Butterfly (2004) in the US, that it was called Tolkien’s Gown in the UK? It was one of those facts that I kept telling people when I was jet-lagged. Sorry to all those people.

Anyway, it was one of the books I bought from the books-about-books shelves in the US, and I believe Gekoski is American. So it felt a little less exotic than expected when I opened it to find Iffley Road, Oxford mentioned early on – since I live off it. He also mentions Cowley Road bookshop, which no longer exists, perhaps unsurprisingly.

This book has quite a lot in common with Old Books, Rare Friends by Leona Rostenberg & Madeleine Stern, in that Gekoski is a rare books dealer. Indeed, the Radio 4 series from which this book derives was called Rare Books, Rare People. Unlike those ladies, though, his main interest is the 20th century, rather than incunabula and the like. And it will come as no surprise that that was rather more up my street. This collection looks at 20 different famous works of the modern period, from The Picture of Dorian Gray (sneaking into the ‘long’ 20th century bracket) to Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – discussing the genesis of each book, and also any notable copies that had ever passed through Gekoski’s hands.

I loved so much about it, even if a lot was already familiar. Those of us who love 20th-century literature – and particularly those of us who have studied it – will probably already know how Ulysses came about, or the events that surrounded The Satanic Verses. But, then again, I knew little about the background to Lord of the Flies or the little-known Graham Greene work After Two Years. And I am always willing to read somebody enthusing about A Confederacy of Dunces.

The potted histories of these works (and Lolita, Bridehead Revisited, Animal Farm, On the Road, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, etc. etc.; there is a lovely variety) is done extremely well. Nothing would astound a fan of each individual work, but having details together, concisely and well-managed, is a treat. And then we get to hear how Gekoski spent time with Graham Greene, was indirectly mentioned in the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, ordered a limit edition of a book and bought all of them, and so on. There is a personal angle that is unique to Gekoski’s perspective.

And that perspective is certainly unusual. I bemoaned, in Old Friends, Rare Books, that they prized books for their monetary value over the content; it didn’t sit well with a bibliophile like myself who cares little for condition or edition. And Gekoski is fighting this in himself, in seems. Early on, he says almost exactly that:

I knew very little about first editions at the time, and if you had told me I would spend a good part of my adult life dealing with them, I would have been astonished and horrified. Who cared about what edition you read? It was content that mattered.

And, later, when discussing why books must be pristine to be worth a lot of money, he writes:

All I ask, in the gleaming light of such perfection, is: why? With antique furniture we value the effects of time on the surface of an object, and call it patina; with paintings, we howl when inept restorers reproduce the way an oil painting would have looked on the day it was painted. The criterion that an object be in perfect, original condition is usually reserved for the collecting of piffling doo-dahs – of stamps, teddy bears, or dinky toys. But books? Books?

How did this happen? And for what reason? What, as an analyst might inquire, is the pathology behind it? because this ludicrous insistence on perfect condition strikes one more as a symptom than a rational goal.

He doesn’t have any answers. He is not a renegade in the book industry – at least not in this way. The nearest he gets in these laments, and pointing out that children’s literature that does well in the rare books world now must never have been appreciated properly by its intended audience.

So, yes, I didn’t much care when he listed how much various books had sold for at different points in his career – not least because (a) it’s at least ten years ago, and will all have changed, and (b) each time the amount was given in dollars in brackets, which got tedious. (Somehow the editors were able to do those exchanges, but didn’t bother removing various references to Tolkien’s Gown in the introduction.) (Did I mention it had a different title?) (Yes, of course I did.)

Basically, it would be difficult to find a book about books that I didn’t like a lot. Throw in humour and a focus on the 20th century, and I’m sold. It was also a perfect book to read on the aeroplane, because I could read it in bursts of concentration between bad films (Horrible Bosses 2 is fabs, guys) and being given endless tiny cups of water.

This review ended weirdly. Sure, ok. YAY BOOKS!

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim – David Sedaris

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Ok, confession time.  I’ve often seen David Sedaris’s book Me Talk Pretty One Day in bookshops, and thought it was a good title.  At some point along the way, this noticing must have developed into delusion, because for some reason I was sure it was a novel about a girl with mental development problems.  Erm… nope.  Turns out it’s memoir.

A similar thing happened with Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004) which I received from my friend Laura in a book group Secret Santa in 2011.  I took it up to the Lake District with me, thinking it was a novel.  Indeed, I was about thirty pages into it before someone referred to the narrator as David, and I suddenly realised that (a) the narrator wasn’t a woman, and (b) it was autobiographical.  I felt somewhat justified in my false assumption, though, scouring the blurb, because nowhere does it say that it’s autobiographical.  Lots of talking about him being a humorist par excellence (more on that anon), comparing him to Woody Allen and Oscar Wilde (because they have so much in common…), and talking about ‘his world’, which I suppose is a clue, but could equally apply to the world created by a novelist.  Eventually, in tiny letters by the barcode, I found the word ‘autobiography’, and all was solved.

As when I read Ali Shaw’s The Girl With Glass Feet and only discovered halfway through that Ali was a man, it was an instructive lesson in how such things influence my reading.  When I thought it was a novel, I was quite enjoying it; when I discovered it was a sequence of autobiographical essays, I started to really like it.  And I wouldn’t be able to tell you quite why that was, except that true events don’t need to be as sparklingly innovative or well-structured – they have the virtue, instead, of being true.

Many of the anecdotes do have the ring of fiction, though – truth stranger than fiction and all that.  I found the tales of Sedaris’s life in his first apartment away from home rather unnerving, with the kleptomaniac young girl next door – then there is the time he is mistaken for an erotic cleaner.  As you are.  But the word ‘family’ is in the title for a reason, and it is Sedaris’s vivid depiction of his family which makes this book so extraordinary (and, one presumes, the same is true of his other memoirs – indeed, I don’t know how he had this many stories left to tell after publishing all those other essay collections).

Don’t go thinking this is Swiss Family Robinson or Little Women, though – Sedaris’s family is a pretty bizarre bunch, with many unpleasant elements.  And Sedaris doesn’t sugar coat.  His sporty, brash, vulgar brother is no treat; there is more affection when he discusses his sister Lisa, and her feelings about potentially being portrayed in a film of his books.  There is, of course, an irony in publishing an essay about choosing to shield his family from intrusion, but it is still a beautiful moment nonetheless.

There are a couple of misfires in the collection.  I could have done without his story of manipulating children to undress and sit on his knee – not (to my mind) wholly redeemed by the fact that he was also a child at the time.  The vignette of house-hunting and finding the ideal home in Anne Frank’s attic was a one-line dark joke which didn’t work as an essay.  But that is not a bad hit rate, out of 22 essays.

What makes these essays special, and wonderfully readable, is Sedaris’s eye.  He lets us into his family circle – with every blemish well known, and every annoying trait magnified through repetition, but also with a glow of affection – sometimes, for Sedaris, reluctant – which cannot truly evaporate.  How he gets this into words, and through the most eccentric anecdotes, I have no idea.  But it works brilliantly.  I am far from the first to discover the wonder of Sedaris’s tone, but perhaps I am not the last – and I want to encourage you, particularly if you are in the US where his books are everywhere (why didn’t I buy any when I was there?!) to pick this up and see what you think.  The good personal essay, the expertly wry memoir, are seldom found.  My thanks are due to Laura, for giving me a copy of this at a Secret Santa and giving me a chance to find an excellent practitioner of that rare form!

The Compleat Mrs. Elton – Diana Birchall

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I wouldn’t normally count a book from the author as a Reading Presently candidate, but in the case of The Compleat Mrs. Elton (2004) by Diana Birchall (consisting of The Courtship of Mrs. Elton, A Defence of Mrs. Elton, and Mrs. Elton in America) things are different – because Diana is a friend of mine, and you may know her blog.  We first met online – through a book discussion email list – but have now met at least three times in person, and Diana gave me a present of this book (and the biography she wrote of her grandmother Onoto Wantana) at a lovely riverside tearoom in Oxfordshire.  Photographic evidence…

I suspect most of you will already have worked out what the book is about, if you do not know already, for – yes- it is Mrs. Elton from Emma, once Augusta Hawkins, the fairly ghastly woman who ends up marrying the vicar.  If any of Austen’s characters ever needed a defence, it is she, with her ‘caro sposo’ and ‘Mr. K’ and vulgarities here and there.

At least, that is the generally agreed line.  Diana disagrees.  Of the three, I found the Defence of Mrs. Elton both the most intriguing and the most controversial – but I will come to that in time, starting at the beginning with Augusta’s courtship.

Firstly, I should say that Diana writes Austen beautifully.  A long time ago I wrote about Diana’s sequel to Pride and Prejudice, Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma (which is brilliant) and there is no doubt in my mind that Diana is among Jane’s most faithful imitators – and it is a joy to read her taking on Austen’s mantle.  The courtship between Mr. Elton and Augusta Hawkins shows the future Mrs. Elton to be as aware of her age and singleness as Austen’s better-loved heroines… it’s a nice tale, and starts the defence:

If our lovers were in fact a venial pair, marrying only in a spirit of self-seeking, how much worse were they than half the world?  It was such a perfect case of like marrying like, that the most elevated love between two pure souls could be no more perfectly matched.  With a strong mutual wish for matrimony, and for each finding a partner who could bring benefits to the other, and a determination and resolve to be bettering themselves, Mr. Elton and Miss Hakwins stood a great chance of finding as lasting a happiness as exists in this mutable world.
Which leads me onto In Defence of Mrs. Elton.  Scenes from Emma, from Mrs. Elton’s arrival onwards, are shown again from that lady’s perspective, away from the satirical and subjective slant of the narrator.  In my opinion (and I would love to enter into a debate), Diana doesn’t so much defend Mrs. Elton’s character as give her a different one…

Augusta knew, even as she was speaking, that everything she was saying was wrong […]
Did she?  Hmm… of course, people often say one thing and mean another, or don’t come across in the way they intend, but it is perhaps too easy a defence to take a character’s objectionable qualities and say they were not really there.  Diana does, however, is more convincing and does a very good job when attacking the other characters – I hadn’t really noticed quite how awful Emma et al are to the newcomer, and Augusta’s plea swayed me…

They were all her enemies, yet what had she done to any of them?  Her ways, her manners, were not like theirs; she knew that well enough.  She was not capable of their sort of superior insolence, the exquisite politeness that only pointed up the disdain beneath: when she thought a thing, she said it.  If they were so pretty and exacting as to mind such a difference in her, and disapprove of the manner when the heart was right, what hope had she of ever living in harmony with any of them.
Onto the next and final story – whizzing through these, but hard to write about three novellas in one post!  Well, it’s the one where things go a bit mad, and it’s great fun.  Not only does Mrs. Elton go – with husband and children – to America, they travel among the Native Americans.  There is scalping…  From anybody who loved Austen less, I might not have forgiven the narrative world Diana takes her characters to, away from the English village life they call home, but I know that Diana would fall down dead rather than be disrespectful to Jane Austen.  The writing is good enough to support the scenario.  There is even much discussion of slavery – a wry comment on those who see slavery hidden behind Mansfield Park, I wonder?

“Yes – it is very painful,” agreed her husband, shaking his head.  “We cannot be glad enough that there is not such an evil institution in England as slavery; and hope that it can be removed from this country in the natural operations of time, so that America may one day be as fair and untainted a land as ours.”
From an English writer, this might come across as snobbery – but Diana is an American gal born and bred, which makes her tour of early America through the Eltons’ eyes particularly intriguing.  It’s a crazy idea, but it somehow works – and is a darn sight more entertaining than the next Lizzie-and-Darcy bonkfest penned by every author fixated with the 2005 film…

So, there you have it!  For those of us who adore Austen’s novels and are on the look-out for intelligent, sensitive, and adventurous explorations of her characters – look no further.  Now, in the comments… thoughts on Mrs. Elton?

Is there no balm in…

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Has there ever been a more convincing review than Rachel’s post on Gilead (2004) by Marilynne Robinson? Seriously, schoolchildren should analyse it as a piece of persuasive writing. Even so, my reading demands and tbr piles meant it took a month or two before the copy I already owned (bought at a church fair in Middle Chinnock, Somerset) worked its way to the top of my pile. And thank goodness it did. Gilead has probably got the most perfectly rendered ‘voice’ of any novel I’ve ever read. Actually, before I go any further, I’m simply going to give you the opening paragraph:

I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old. And you put your hand in my hand and you said, You aren’t very old, as if that settled it. I told you you might have a very different life from mine, and from the life you’ve had with me, and that would be a wonderful thing, there are many ways to live a good life. And you said, Mama already told me that. And then you said, Don’t laugh! because you thought I was laughing at you. You reached up and put your fingers on my lips and gave me that look I never in my life saw on any other face beside your mother’s. It’s a kind of furious pride, very passionate and stern. I’m always a little surprised to find my eyebrows unsinged after I’ve suffered one of those looks. I will miss them.

And so it begins. Gilead is in the form of one long letter, written in Iowa in 1956, from Reverend John Ames to his young son, for his son to read when he is an adult and Ames is dead. For Ames is a very old father, and one with a weak, dying heart. This letter is his attempt to put down all he would ever want to tell his son – stories; history; wisdom; love.

In the hands of a lesser writer, that would be a ruthlessly maudlin concept, but from that first paragraph onwards the reader is swept along by the gentle, lilting, genuine voice of Ames. His story starts with the histories of his father and grandfather – both, like him, clergymen, but with clashing ideals and tempestuous disagreements. He tells of his youthful memories of travelling with his father, to find the place his grandfather died. He tells of the pain his brother caused to the family, and of forgiveness. Throughout the letter he skips about with chronology – as we all do when thinking – and often returns to the events of present day. His son’s voice is rarely heard, but his actions are mentioned – with the deep affection of a father who waited long to become one:

I’d never have believed I’d see a wife of mine doting on a child of mine. It still amazes me every time I think of it. I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.

For a long time, Gilead doesn’t seem to have much plot. It is a mark of a great author that they can captivate you solely with characters and words, rather than events – Robinson certainly does that. But when the reader has settled into assuming that little will unsettle the memories and emotions of an old man, he turns to his oldest friend Robert Broughton – and, more particularly, John (Jack) Ames Broughton. Ames’ namesake is Broughton’s prodigal son, who returns to Gilead after bringing disgrace on the family. The nature of his wrongdoing is held a mystery from the reader, as Ames debates whether or not it is right to disclose it to his son – and so Robinson artfully adds yet another reason to read on.

But that is not the main reason. What makes Gilead so compelling is Ames himself. His voice is gentle, wise, kind, and sad. He is desperate at the idea of losing the opportunity to watch his son grow up, but he is equally amazed that God has granted him a son at all. Wonder fills him so often. Ames writes lovingly of his wife, and deprecatingly of his own failings. He is unfailingly honest and thoughtful – an utterly, utterly good man, and an incredibly lovable one. If Robinson were not a 60 year old woman (when this was written), I’d have assumed it was autobiographical – so convincing and enveloping is the voice of the narration.

Gilead is also an inspiring book to read as a Christian. I am surprised that it has been so successful, since it is such a deeply faith-filled book. I wasn’t sure whether it would appeal to a non-Christian – for, to me, so much of the novel’s richness lies in its incredible depiction of the beauty and depth of a life lived for God – but it seems I was wrong. A reader I met who was affirmedly atheist said she loved Gilead nonetheless. Robinson certainly doesn’t preach, except by example, and I suspect the honesty and accuracy of Ames’ letter would appeal to anybody – although perhaps some of the Biblical allusions would be lost. I especially liked his reference to himself as ‘one of the righteous for whom the rejoicing in heaven will be comparatively restrained’ – a reference to Luke 15:7: ‘I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.’ If you’re not a Christian, please, please don’t let that put you off reading this beautiful novel – any lover of great writing will still love Gilead, I am sure.

I shan’t spoil the end of the novel, except to say that there is no real twist or change; just something simple, beautiful, and sad. I cried a tiny little bit, in the library, as I turned the final page. Gilead is truly one of the best pieces of writing I’ve ever encountered. Perhaps I shan’t remember all the details of the story, or the characters, but I doubt I’ll ever forget Ames, or the feeling of being submerged in his life and his words. It’s certainly a novel to which I will return – and it seems only fitting to leave you with his voice rather than my own, with another excerpt which touched me.

When you are an old man like I am, you might think of writing some sort of account of yourself, as I am doing. In my experience of it, age has a tendency to make one’s sense of oneself harder to maintain, less robust in some ways.

Why do I love the thought of you old? That first twinge of arthritis in your knee is a thing I imagine with all the tenderness I felt when you showed me your loose tooth. Be diligent in your prayers, old man. I hope you will have seen more of the world than I ever got around to seeing – only myself to blame. And I hope you will have read some of my books. And God bless your eyes, and your hearing also, and of course your heart. I wish I could help you carry the weight of many years. But the Lord will have that fatherly satisfaction.

The History Book On The Shelf…

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Sorry to start this post by setting the cultural barrier quite low… if you don’t recognise the lyric in the post title, then consider yourself much more highbrow than me.

As promised, The History Boys by Alan Bennett. I did the unthinkable and came to this play through the film first – in fact, I still haven’t seen it on stage, but I have read it. What first attracted me to the film was the shots of Magdalen in the trailer – I thought it would be fun to see my place of residence on the big screen. As it turned out, the shots from the trailer were about all you saw of Magdalen in the film. Which makes sense, as they only go to Oxford towards the end…

A bit of plot synopsis, for those who don’t know. It’s a 1980s boys’ school, and eight students are going for a place studying History at Oxford. They have a wise, quirky, lonely teacher Hector – and in is brought a savvy, slightly awkward teacher Irwin. In between is the quite wonderful feminist teacher Mrs. Lintott. The play is really about different styles of knowledge and uses of it, and the purposes of education. Hector has taught them enormous amounts of interesting facts, but focuses equally on re-enactments of famous film scenes, and practising French through rather bizarre scenarios. Irwin is all about getting them into Oxford, teaching them the way to answer interview questions which is a little edgy, a little conspicuously different. Hector thinks examinations ‘the enemy of education’, and thinks with the boys that he has ‘lined their minds with some sort of literary insulation, proof against the primacy of fact’ – Irwin sees this trivia as ‘gobbets’ to be sprinkled into any exam or interview answer.

I didn’t think much of the film. All the acting was great, but the fact that almost everyone was lusting after each other (which I missed out of the synopsis because it’s complicated and quite dull) rather ruined it. Reading the play, there are so many fascinating ideas in it – alongside genuine wit – and it isn’t all clear-cut. It seems that Hector is right to start with – but so much of the entertainment of the play comes from these ‘gobbets’, out of context, out of passionate discovery. Tricky. The depiction of Oxford is hideously out of date, even for the 1980s, but Bennett’s introduction detailing his own application experiences is worth the cover price alone.
Bennett’s major achievement is having so many distinct schoolchildren. So many in fiction are good or disruptive or clever-but-misunderstood, and so forth – these are all intelligent creations and memorably characterised. Dakin – cheeky, bright, canny – is the most impressive, perhaps, but I grew fond of vulnerable Posner and authentic Scripps. Having seen the original cast members in the film, they are inextricably linked in my mind – especially Frances de la Tour’s beautifully sardonic portrayal of Mrs. Lintott – and this helped a reading of the play.

Do seek out a copy to read, or hopefully a local theatre will put it on (is someone still touring with it? I don’t know. Obviously the original cast aren’t). And you could watch the film, but it doesn’t do The History Boys justice at all.

Postjudiced

StuckinaBook All , , 9 Comments

It seems Mrs. Darcy has been a busy woman, paying calls on more or less every blog in the neighbourhood, and Stuck-in-a-Book is no different. In fact, despite Diana Birchall (whom I know from an online literary discussion list) contacting me a while ago, her book Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma has been hither and thither, all around Oxfordshire and most of the departments of the Bodleian. Hallowed company indeed. Finally she landed at my doorstop (or, more precisely, the janitors’ desk) and I read this lovely novel in little under a day.

I have a healthy scepticism of prequels and sequels and so forth, if not written by the original author, and no author comes more sacred than our Jane. Advocacy has bordered on obsession ever since the earliest days of general access to her writings, and though national Jane-addiction comes in peaks and troughs, it has never truly been absent. I came to Pride and Prejudice in 1995 along with so many others, through the BBC TV version, when I was nine or ten. Though I’ve only read the novel once, I have listened to an unabridged cassette and watched a fairly faithful television version probably some hundred or so times. There is not a book in the world I would less like to see sullied.

Lucky Diana Birchall feels the same, isn’t it?
What shines from every page of Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma is a love of Jane Austen, a respect for her great craft, and a deep affection for every single one of her characters, whether likeable or not. We have moved on twenty-five years, the wedding which concluded Pride and Prejudice has become a lengthy marriage and produced three children – Fitzwilliam, Henry and Jane. When Lydia’s progeny, Bettina and Cloe, come to visit their Aunt, Uncle and Cousins, romance, scandal and a sororal reunion cannot be far behind.
Within the first few pages, I had to make a decision – as will any reader, and it is the only way to read a sequel, I think. That decision was to read Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma as a exercise in hypothetical speculation; a diverting game of “what if?”, not “and then…” For there were a hundred times when I thought “No! She wouldn’t have ended up like that”, or “Surely they would have…” and so forth. I am certain that Diana would welcome such a response – she is not laying down Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma as a definitive continuation of Pride and Prejudice, but rather a skilful and witty piece of fantasy. If I were writing (or, rather, plotting) a sequel, then I’d have been kinder to Lydia and Kitty, certainly given Jane a pleasing and humble daughter, and maybe even… no, you see, each reader has her/his projections, affinities and affections.

To return to the novel. It has been many months since I read something so addictively, so keen to dedicate all my spare time to reading it. Yes, it even entered read-whilst-walking-to-work territory, which only happens once or twice a year. This was helped by the fact that Diana cleverly divides the narrative focus between revisiting old characters, and exploring the antics of their children. Most of P&P’s characters appear, or are at least mentioned. We see Lizzy and Lydia making the same mistakes as their father and mother respectively, and watch the good ‘uns and bad ‘uns (as usual in Jane country, the bad ‘uns are foolish more than wicked) from the next generation make a mess of things, and, of course, sort themselves out.

Naturally, Diana Birchall isn’t as good a writer as Jane Austen – it would be an odd coincidence if she were, since nobody else has achieved that in the last two centuries – but I can think of no finer hands into which to place this playful task. Playful in theory, of course, but I daresay terribly difficult in practice. Diana gets the tone so right: witty and ironic and moving and very, very Austen. I think the greatest compliment I can pay Mrs Darcy’s Dilemma is that I was left not mourning the handling of beloved characters who appeared, but wondering what she’d have done with the ones who did not.