Normal People by Sally Rooney

Sally Rooney’s Normal People is a hugely successful and very widely read novel about millennials. It concentrates on the relationships that develop in a group of school graduates as they transition from school to university, concentrating on and then majoring in their sex lives. It does this not to the exclusion of all else, but its preoccupation is overt and is as all-consuming for the reader as it probably was for the characters.

At the novel’s core are the ongoing, developing, changing, breaking, tortuous, steamy, lustful, intellectual, repeated, animal though never committed relationships between Connell and Marianne. They are from Sligo, went to school together and then migrated together to Trinity College, Dublin. So much for their similarities.

Amongst the differences one is of paramount importance. Connell is male and Marianne is female, a contrast that sees them come together fruitfully and often in combination to qualify several of the adjectives that described their relationship in the last paragraph. Important amongst the differences, but largely unexamined in the novel, is the fact that Connell is working class while Marianne is middle class. Connell’s academic interests are in literature, whilst Marianne specialises in politics though, it must be recorded, largely without focus, except for occasional side-forays into issues related to the Middle East. Both high-flying students seem to spend more time sleeping that is not sleeping and drinking that is drinking than they devote to reading, or indeed the thought of it.

Connell’s mother cleans for Marianne’s household and apparently is not overpaid. Strangely, though we never learn many of the details, neither Connell nor Marianne has a father in attendance. Connell’s mother might just have got pregnant on a short fling of youth, while Marianne’s father died, presumably some time ago, because she never really shares a memory of him. Whether this common heritage might have had some psychological effect on either of the two adolescents, we never learn.

Connell and Marianne come together, drift apart, take up with others, break off, re-encounter. It’s rather a procession at times. What seems to form a thread is that both always seem to be more worried about how their behaviour affects themselves rather than others. Noone ever seems to know what they themselves want, though everyone seems to get precisely what they ask for. There’s plenty of booze, plenty of sex, a change of personnel and more of the same. There’s an excursion to Sweden with stereotypical kinky photo shoots, more bust ups, arguments, reconciliations which never seem to refer to the past and occasionally there seems to be a kind of sincerity, though all without speech marks.

All pretty normal, perhaps, but always engaging.

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stewart

Douglas Stewart won the Booker Prize for Fiction with Shuggie Bain, an autobiographical novel about a child coping with an alcoholic parent. Shuggie is a wee lad - the novel is set largely in Glasgow - who becomes noted for his la-di-dah speech and his apparent desire to be different. Agnes, his mother, is an alcoholic. She does not try to hide the fact. Anything will do, but cans of Special Brew figure large and often. She earns whatever she can in whatever way she can to fund her habit and pools the family’s benefits to the cause. She obviously does not seek employment, because she could never be sufficiently dependable to be relied upon. And she knows it.

Shuggie and his much older brother Leek often go hungry. They are often cold, not only because there is usually not a fifty pence piece to feed the meter, but also because what was put into the meter has been recycled to buy more booze. The television often does not work either, because it’s a pay-slot type and it too has been emptied. The mother Agnes has a relationship with Shuggie’s father, who happens to be called Shug. She has another relationship with Eugene. Both men are taxi drivers, and both have increased in girth after years of sedentary labor. The action, if that be the right word, takes place in Glasgow and then in Pithead, a rundown and already depressed mining community, if that be a relevant label for the place described. It is in these two working-class communities that Shuggie and his brother grow up, mature before their years and cope, for that is the best thing they can achieve with so much stacked against them.

Shuggie Bain is a story of survival. It is, in its own way, a story of dignity and human perseverance in the face of adversity. It is, however, very one-dimensional. I persevered with the book more out of duty, more out of a desire to support it than a true interest in what might happen to his characters. Well before the end, I was not only rather tired of repeating the same scenario, but I had also lost interest in the outcomes. Perhaps that was the point. If so, it became laboured.

There is always a dilemma for a writer when characters speak in dialect or with an accent. How much of the sound of the speech should be written? Is it wise to change the spelling of common words to indicate a different pronunciation from standard English? A problem with much nineteenth century fiction is that the middle classes seem to talk proper, but as soon as the working-class character appears, then the apostrophes suddenly appear to obliterate all the aitches. Personally, I prefer writers not to write in accents. The problem is that often it doesn’t work. In Yorkshire, one might ask, “Wots tha doin’ wi’ thy pen?” and the answer might be “Raaatin”. I come from a place where the word bus is pronounced bus, not bas or even bis. With an upper-class character, would I ever write “Air hair lair, Ha-aa-yo?” “Em fen, thiyank yo.” to indicate privilege, except when I might want to humiliate them and their class?

In Shuggie Bain, Douglas Stuart chooses to write much of the quoted speech in a version of Glaswegian dialect, complete with alternative spellings to indicate the uniqueness of the sound. It does not work. It renders these characters sometimes unintelligible, sometimes comic. An example will illustrate. Precisely why “fitba” should be used instead of football, I have no idea. Would a novel set in London use a line like “Wew, vez an awfuw lo’ o’ wewwintns in vat sho”? Perhaps not, even if it were a gumboot shop.

I was genuinely willing the book to succeed. And it did, in its own way. It is worth reading and the progression of the characters does become interesting, if never truly engaging. Maybe that is its point. But there always seems to be a lot of wood to clear to get to the trees.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte

Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a much-reviewed and well-known classic novel. So can a novel that is a hundred and fiftyyears old still have anything to say about life that is relevant, let alone original? The answer to this obviously rhetorical question is obviously ‘yes’, hence this review.

Though it bears the same initials as her sister’s Wuthering Heights, Wildfell Hall is certainly a very different territory, albeit in a similar landscape. If you are the kind of reader that gets tired of nineteenth century matchmaking parading as literature then you share my impatience. How many times must we live through the apparent mental torment of a heroine wondering incessantly whether this gentleman or that might or might not be the right moral or social class, might or might not possess sufficient property, might or might not be acceptable to one’s family? The process, surely, is memorable. Whether it is worth recording repeatedly is open to question.

Some of the suitors, it has to be acknowledged, might turn out to be rather caddish, but too often this might imply he whips his horse rather too ferociously, or treats the lower classes too harshly. All too often, the family concerned lives in middle-class comfort as a result of their investments in the colonies. That means slavery, or the profits thereof. And it is usually the case that no one ever admits they are on the side of the abolitionists. Usually, the moral dilemma is not even recognised, let alone considered. As readers, and even film-goers, we have all been there and probably wished that an occasional non-matrimonial issue might have arisen.

None of this analysis applies to the Wildfell Hall of Anne Brontë‘s novel, however. In her book, this particular Brontë sister offers a tale in which no holds are barred. Her style often seems rather detached, perhaps taking even an alienated view of the society with which she is familiar. She mentions some things that mid-nineteenth century England regarded as unmentionable, especially amongst the middle classes. She also, for much of the book, convincingly presents a narrative from a male perspective that confronts and reacts to, for its time, the unlikely and novel image of female independence. In doing so, she confronts male attitudes that still today may block these concerns from a man’s understanding.

Gilbert Markham becomes infatuated with Helen Graham, the young widow who has moved in with her son into Wildfell Hall. She seems to be a propertied, but also determined to make her own way in life by selling her artworks to achieve financial independence.

In the second section, we learned of Helen Graham’s background. She had been married to an alcoholic and abusive husband and had stood up to him. Her demands that her rights be respected were not commonly expressed in the society, let alone observed. They are still to be fully realize the century and a half later. Drug abuse, alcoholism and extramarital sex, not to mention conspiratorial behaviour among a masculine clique are all addressed. The hypocrisy of middle-class male attitudes is drawn with considerable skill, rather than overstatement.

In the final section, Gilbert appears to absorb these issues and accommodate them. The scarring is permanent, however, and thus this is no simple happy-ever-after tale.

So what might The Tenant of Wildfell Hall have to say to contemporary audiences? Well, these issues of women’s rights, drug abuse, alcoholism and sexual exploitation are still being discussed a century and a half later. These issues were being discussed a century and a half ago. They are still in some places contentious. Need one say more? Read the book.

Snow by John Banville

John Banville’s Snow was resplendent at number one best seller in the airport bookstore. At the time, I hardly noticed, since I was immediately and irresistibly attracted to the author’s name, knowing that whatever the subject, the writing would be exquisite. It is. 

Snow is a novel that initially reminded me of a Gothic fantasy such as Gormenghast. Larger than life, or perhaps smaller than reality characters wander in and out of a plot, each displaying their own brand of quirkiness, their own brand of learned psychological deformity that in everyday circumstances we might consider normality. But under the soft-focus gaze of inspector Strafford - that’s Strafford with an ‘r’, by the way, not Stafford - they each seem to magnify into the unwanted status of potential suspect.

By now you will have gathered that Snow is a whodunit, or a murder mystery, as they are sometimes called. The book opens with Strafford’s arrival at a Protestant, somewhat less than stately home in county Wexford, Ireland, where a Catholic priest has been murdered. The circumstances are particularly gruesome.

No one, it has to be said, seems particularly surprised or even bothered, until surfaces are scratched. And so, Strafford sets about solving the crime. We are in the 1950s and religious divisions still characterize the culture and politics of life in this young republic. It’s Christmas or thereabouts and it’s snowing. Hence the title. The snow does contribute to the plot, by the way.

Strafford’s style is laid-back in the extreme. He tends to offer a little, waiting for those he questions to hang themselves on the rope he figuratively offers. Some do, some don’t, all non-definitively. To John Banville’s credit, it was sometime before I realized that I was reading what amounted to genre fiction. So beautiful was the style, so poignant were the observations of character and particularly of place that I began to drift with the snow, only gently realizing that these characters gradually were morphing into the stereotypes needed to feed the plot.

As with any whodunit, the plot is probably everything, though I must admit when I read such work, I really could not care less who might have done it because, as Tom Stoppard pointed out in The Real Inspector Hound, or the stage adaptation of the Mousetrap repeated, it could have been any of them. We know it will be one of the assembled characters, because for a writer to introduce a stranger at the end of a tale as the culprit might just get too close to reality to be called the make-believe of genre, despite its often-overdone realism.

What constitutes plot will not be revealed here. Neither will this review describe characters because, as is so often the case with genre fiction, quirks of character or behaviour feed the all-important plot. Suffice it to say that Strafford solves the mystery and identifies a culprit who, as it turns out, probably wasn’t the murderer.

Three quarters of the way in and still engaged with the scenario in the 1950s, however, John Banville jumps back ten years and introduces a section in a completely new style, written from a very point of view, a perspective that has not been suggested previously. When completed, it is immediately obvious that all of this could have been accomplished via allusions in the dialogue. The problem for genre is that the message conveyed would have to be suggested or implied and the form required something more explicit. For this reader, the section destroyed the flow of the book and was just too obvious to need stating at all. It dealt with the past of the priest victim, and, by the end, all the reader could ask was “Is the Pope Catholic”?

But then we then return to the 1957 of the principal story and realise that perhaps in that decade, the answer to the question might just have been debatable. The interlude, however, prepares the reader for a particular turn of events which, when it happens, is rendered a tad predictable.

Then, having identified the principal culprit, John Banville takes us forward ten years to re-encounter a character from that Protestant family in Wexford, who then offers a different story that has remained hidden for a decade. Strafford, of course, knew all along, though he never bothered to tell anyone. And as far as the current reader is concerned, this sudden drift towards the explicit and the truth seems to present a trait that, for the character concerned, might have appeared out of character. And what could possibly be gained by such a change of heart?

I was reminded I was in the realm of genre fiction, where the plot is all and ends have to be tied up. The overall effect was still satisfying, but for this reader the problems always associated with genre fiction had again become apparent, though still bearable. I could, however, always be wrong! I refer back to the start of this review. Had John Banville produced another literary work, it might not of been in the place where I found it, under the title No1 in an airport bookstall. At least it was worth reading.

Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse

 

Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse provided the latest foray into the world and mores of the late fifties. It’s yet another novel that resides firmly in northern English working class life. But unlike Alan Sillitoe, John Braine or Stan Bairstow, Billy Liar lives almost entirely in the comic. Until, that is, when it doesn’t.

A problem with nostalgia is that it tends to induce blindness. Shortcomings and limitations disappear when the warm glow of familiarity obscures everything but the positive. Perhaps I became infected with this unmentionable N word when I decided to re-read this book that I doubt I have touched in over fifty years. This may indeed be strange, because Stradhoughton, the fictional Yorkshire backwater where the novel is set could in reality have been close to where I was raised and indeed the city of my birth, Wakefield, is mentioned several times, where it might even be understood to be at some height of cosmopolitan sophistication. Perhaps not…

I had expected Billy Liar to have aged, perhaps grown stale now that its setting would no longer be ideologically either working class or Labour voting. But has anything changed? And if so, has it been for the better?  Might it be that the community in which Billy lived had convinced itself of its status and indispensability only to have come down to earth with a bump when reality intervened?

Billy Liar is a short book. Joyce’s Ulysses is longer. But they both inhabit similar territory in that they follow a principal character through one day’s eventless events. Viewed in this light, Billy Liar becomes potentially much more than a comic romp through northern English quaintness.

Billy is an employee in an undertaker. He spends the first part of his Saturday morning at work, as everyone did in that era. He strolls around town, goes to the pub, meets a girlfriend or two and then comes down to earth. It’s a special day for Billy because he’s convinced himself that he is about to enter the big time as a comedy writer for a name in London. From start to finish, however, Billy is deluding himself.

He and a workmate converse in what sounds like a double act. It’s supposed to be funny – and is. But before long, we are laughing at the two of them, not with them. It’s not original. Billy’s talent, it seems like that of everyone else, is mimicry., a cliched copying of what the mass media are feeding him.

Though he does tell fibs to all, the person he is really lying to is himself., since he has never stepped back from his surroundings to reflect how narrow and confined is his reality. He is not alone. Bad jokes are repeated. Multiple girlfriends believe they too are unique in his life. He is engaged to two of them – or so he thinks. Perhaps they do too.

After fifty years of separation, Billy Liar now seems more significant that it did first time round. Billy is convinced he is about to break out of his small-town straitjacket. He is convinced he is something special because he can mimic the received messages with which he has been fed. His self-delusion seems complete. He thus now becomes a metaphor for the continued subservience and indeed marginalisation of the way of life he represents. It’s comic, but in the end it’s a tragedy.

Saturday Night And Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe

“Once a rebel, always a rebel. You can’t help being one. You can’t deny that. And it’s best to be a rebel so as to show ‘em it don’t pay to do you down. Factories and labor exchanges and insurance officers keep us alive and kicking – so they say -but they’re booby traps and will suck you under like sinking sands, I you aren’t careful. Factors sweat you to death, labor exchanges talk you to death, insurance and income tax officers milk money from your wage packets and rob you to death. And if you are still left with a tiny bit of life in your guts after all this boggering about, the Army calls you up and you get shot to death. And if you’re clever enough to stay out of the Army you get bombed to death. Ay, by God, it’s a hard life if you don’t weaken, if you don’t stop that bastard government from grinding your face in the mock, though there ain’t much you can do about it unless you start making dynamite to blow the four-eyed clocks to bits.”

Just spoke Arthur Seaton, twenty-one when we first meet him and twenty-four by the time we leave his life. He turns a lathe in a bicycle factory in Nottinghamshire in England’s Midlands. He makes good money – as much as 14 quid a week on piecework. He could work harder to produce more, but if he did the time and motion man would penalize him, lower his piece rate and he would work harder for the same money. Mug’s game. So, despite the above rant about his status in life, he has already learned to do as he’s told, not stick his neck out and collect his pay on a Friday. At least that’s his technique at work. In private, he has less time for convention.

He lives with his mother and pays her rent, or board as we in the north of England call it. It’s a terraced house, in streets that hang around the factory like piglets being suckled by a sow, as he puts it. Much of his spare time is spent in the pub, where he drinks paint after pint of beer and often chases it down with a spirit or two.

Arthur is a big lad. He’s tall, fair, well-built and can look after himself, so he thinks. He’s already seeing Brenda, a woman older than himself and married to a senior colleague at work. She enjoys him and he enjoys her. He often has to leave her house by the front door when her husband comes home from the night shift. He is two-timing Brenda, seeing another married woman called Winnie, when he meets Doreen quite by chance in a pub. Doreen is single.

She likes to go to the pictures, wants to get married and feels on the shelf at nineteen. We are, by the way, at the end of the 1950s in working class England.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe was one of a series of books in that era that dealt with working class life, in all of its brash and uncultured detail. At the time, these works shocked people. They were repeatedly describing life as it was, without the patronizing lens of middle-class judgment or standards, so commonly applied in English writing. Room at the Top, A Kind of Loving and then Alan Sillitoe’s novel stand out because they became famous films. Albert Finney, the actor, made his name playing Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, albeit in monochrome, a quality that might just also have added comment to the one-dimensionality of the lives depicted. He played the part of the over-the-top, heavy-drinking, devil-may-care antihero of Alan Sillitoe’s novel, but he did not overplay it. The character in print is probably brasher, more uncouth than the screenplay might suggest. By the end, Doreen may just have reformed him, at least rendered him conventional, but only after he has been beaten up at the behest of the husbands he was cheating. What happened to the women involved, we are not told. We surely can guess.

The book is written in northern English dialect, not that far north, but certainly working class. For the record, the quote at the start of this review includes the term four-eyed clocks near the end. For the record, in that particular dialect, this means bespectacled faces. The implication, clear to anyone with the right background, is that the people are bookish, middle-class, grammar school types. In some ways, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is like D H Lawrence a few decades on. But where Lawrence claims a certain dignity for the poverty of working-class life, Alain Sillitoe merely lists its characteristics, being primarily consumerism, one-up-manship and materialism. There seems to be no community here, but much competition.

Some seventy years on, the text has dated. The racist assumptions of these people would not be publishable today but may still be prevalent. But, when all is said and done, they welcome Sam, a Ghanaian-origin sergeant in the British army, with open arms, perhaps because he has achieved a rank to which they aspire, or possible they simply dare not oppose him. And he sounds more civilized than his hosts.

But, as with many iconic works that summed up a bygone age and its assumptions, there remains a sense that, almost three quarters of a century after it was written, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning still resonates today. The material goods may have changed, along with the sums of money needed to acquire them. But the conflict of interests, the class and wealth divisions and the underlying assumptions that characterize antagonism are pretty much unchanged, though today they may appear in changed garb.

 

Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

 Half Blood Blues is a novel by Esi Edugyan. It deals with territory that is rarely successful for the writer, that of music and musicians. They have surely been many successful books about writers, painters, even sculptures. But novels where the composition and performance of music figure large are often rather less than significant and are often, frankly, unsuccessful. Perhaps it has to do with the non-visual, largely abstract and utterly personal nature of the effects of sound and our individual responses to it. It’s hard to avoid cliché when words have to describe music. Time, surely, also plays its part, since for the listener music exists within its own time that can neither be controlled or compressed into a phrase.

After such a preamble, the congratulations to Esi Edugyan for her convincing portrayal of jazz musicians in Half Blood Blues are significant. We are in the late 1930s, long before free expression or even bebop, in a period when Sydney Bechet was still cool and Louis Armstrong was the hot thing, but these characters assembled in prewar Berlin do form a convincing band. In the novel’s pages, we do feel what it might be like to play bass, horn, trumpet or bass. Drummers, perhaps, like guitarists have always been a race apart.

Half Blood Blues focuses on the life of Hiero, a German who happens to be both a jazz musician and black. With his fellow band members, Chip and Sid, he ekes out a living playing clubs in a city where the expression they choose is now seen as degenerate. Just a few years before, American music, even jazz played by black people, had been popular, but times have changed. The musicians sense that change, but Hiero feels it more deeply, because now he is doubly estranged from the country he must call home. Changing times, the onset of war and the threat of violence forces the band to flee to Paris, in the hope they can escape across the Atlantic.

Like stereotypical performers, the bohemians are somewhat scattered in their habits, seek casual sex, use drugs and eat sporadically. Delilah enters their lives. She presents a different approach to life, and almost surreal vision of what the men assume to constitute a woman and she thus seems to possess influence over these men’s lives as they pursue their expression, albeit personal, via the ensemble and its public sound.

The book opens in Paris in 1940 and revisits later. The band of had to flee their home in Germany. It also inhabits Berlin in 1939 to trace the origins of the band’s flight from Nazism and then it revisits the same city in 1992, as a couple of characters trace what might have this might’ve happened as a consequence of actions over 50 years earlier.

By the time they reach Poland in 1992 in an attempt to trace one of their number, they are thoroughly surprised, exonerated, if not actually forgiven. At the heart of the tale the influence of the music, especially the improvisation, is paramount. It’s what you do now at this instant that matters. You might plan, you can reflect, you might even rehearse. But the now is all that matters. Just play on.

Esi Edugyan uses a certain style of language here and there to characterize the protagonists as jazz musicians and in some cases foreigners and in others black. It is not overused and so achieves its intention, so it rarely intrudes between the character and the reader. The intention, however, successfully communicates the characters’ status as outsiders and it’s never over-used.

At the heart of this novel, whose plot is significant and so will not be described here, is an act of betrayal, selfishness and duplicity that lays on the conscience for decades. The victim, once traced, indicates that life went on and reasserts the importance of engaging with the here and now. Which all goes to show, you can contemplate to your heart’s content and even analyse endlessly, but the only real advice is to get on with it and life will create itself. Improvise.

Billy Budd by Herman Melville

Billy Budd is doubly famous. He is the eponymous principal character of Herman Melville’s novella and, by adoption via E M Forster’s hand, also the eponymous hero a Benjamin Britten’s opera. The contrasting if not contradictory words ‘character’ and ‘hero’ are important in the context of these two masterpieces.

Like all good stories, it cannot be spoiled, because it is in the way the story is told that the real experience lies. Billy Budd is a young man, rather handsome in a simple, lower status, ratings way. He is recruited from a merchant ship called The Rights of Man to HMS indomitable and so joins the King’s Navy as a foretopman. The previous ship’s owner with its explicitly political title is mentioned in the book as owned by someone who sympathises with Thomas Paine and presumably the American and therefore the French Revolutions. This point is merely referenced by Forster and Britten, probably because it might provide an alternative political motive for the antagonism that develops, an antagonism that, in the opera, focuses on sexuality.

The Indomitable embarks on its mission during the Napoleonic Wars under the direction of Captain Vere and is policed by a master-at-arms called Claggart, whom Vere only met on the return part of his last voyage, indicating that exists no personal friendship between them. Melville tells us that Claggart is around thirty-five, an age he generally exceeds by a considerable amount in most productions of Britten’s opera.

Billy Budd is a genial sort of giant. Everyone notices his good looks, his youth, his athletic stature and his obvious strength. But it is also noted that he is naïve, perhaps overly trusting. An old hand tries to warn him that Claggart has taken against him, but Billy insists that he himself has never spoken ill of anyone, so there can be no problem.

Claggart conspires to pin an accusation of recruitment for mutiny on Billy. The name of his previous ship and presumably the political associations of its owner play an important part, as does the impressed status, equals kidnapped, of some crew members. Already I fall into the trap of labelling the ‘bad’ guy with a surname and the foretopman with a forename. But that is the reality. For whatever reason, Claggart is out to get Billy.

Billy has one severe weakness. He stutters. He stutters more when stressed. And when, in the company of Captain Vere, Claggart publicly delivers his accusation against the young man, Billy becomes so incensed that he cannot defend himself verbally. The words will not come and in frustration he strikes Claggart and kills him. Billy is tried, found guilty of striking and killing an officer and is condemned to death. He hangs.

At the trial, Vere presents his version of events in a cold hearted, matter of fact manner that will admit no nuance. In effect, he merely recites the rulebook. In the opera, Vere’s ghost, still troubled by conscience, admits he could have saved Billy Budd, but chose not to. In Melville’s original, things are more complex. Vere must enact the demands of his office and so he behaves as he does. Stability, loyalty to King and country and the rightness of superior social class trump notions of justice, fairness or compassion. The obvious injustice almost creates sufficient reaction amongst the crew to itself provoke a mutiny, but the anger dissipates, defeated by continued enforced subservience.

And, by the way, all of this applies to the opera, as well as the novella. Forster and Britten make more of Vere, paradoxically, than Melville, despite the novella spending much more time on the actual trial than the opera. Vere is torn by conscience, but he is the apparently unwitting possessor of a responsibility that trumps personal judgment. In some ways, Vere is more of an order taker than those whom he orders. And at the end of the opera, Britain illustrates how the aspiring middle classes, those promoted and paid to populate a buffer zone between protest and power, eventually protect the status of their social betters, but cannot salve a collective conscience, a conscience that in any case does not care.

A theme which becomes central but not rarely explicit in the opera is the suggestion that Claggart is homosexually attracted to Billy Budd. The antagonism generated within him towards Billy is thus the result of an inner purging of guilt and self-loathing that the attraction itself generates. There is the mere hint of this in Melville’s words. For obvious reasons, it was a theme that interested Britten deeply.

But the opera’s amplification of the theme is justified. Melville distances himself from anything sexual. The topic clearly exists in the lives of the sailors. But Melville apparently refuses to enter the establishment, let alone the bedroom where implied acts take place. There is a clear reference to Claggart’s attraction, but the author also wrote of the highly ambiguous relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg at the start of Moby Dick. There is evidence enough of the author’s reluctance to enter the bedroom, even when he declares himself explicitly in attendance!

Perhaps the most moving experience in Billy Budd is to read the epilogue, which is a sailor’s poetic retelling of the story. Personally, I find it impossible to read these words without also singing Billy’s almost proud but frank lament from the opera. The story is, undoubtedly, a double masterpiece.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

I did not begin the two hundred thousand words plus of Moby Dick expecting to be surprised. Herman Melville’s book has been on my reading list shelf for years, always an intended read but never opened. Its iconic status has always proved too much of a barrier to its starting. The motivation eventually came, however, from a particularly moving production of Benjamin Brittten’s opera Billy Budd, itself based on a Herman Melville story, that prompted a decision to start Moby Dick, the whale sized book about whaling, and I had a whale of a time. A copy of Billy Budd, incidentally, was not to hand at the time. This must be remedied.

The bare whalebones of Moby Dick are very simply arranged. The story is told by Ishmael, who is seeking work as a sailor. Paradoxically, perhaps, we learn very little about Ishmael. It seems he is cast almost like some detached observer, able to discern the motives of others, but usually unable to declare his own feelings. He is, however, undeniably a character, not a mere vehicle for a writer’s declamation.

In Nantucket, Ishmael befriends Queequeg, a fellow sailor, who is ethnically and religiously different from himself. They soon share a room and even a bed. How the cultural difference and the male camaraderie are described is one of the more memorable aspects of this thought-provoking book. Both men are recruited onto the Pequod, a whaler under the command of the initially anonymous and even mysterious captain Ahab. Ostensibly, they are joining a factory ship on a standard mission to harvest whales for the extraction of profit via oil. The source of the profit and the means of realising it may run counter to our current assumptions, but the capitalist nature of the activity remains central to our contemporary interactions.

Once on board, however, they, along with the rest of the crew, discover that their now revealed captain has been all but destroyed in an encounter with a vast animal called a white whale and that their ship, the Pequod, is embarking upon a mission to extract vengeance. Captain Ahab is intent, nay single-mindedly obsessed with hunting down his attacker and repaying its compliment. A simple irony about Ahab is that having lost his leg in his encounter with Moby Dick, he now supports himself on a false leg made of whalebone, tapered at the base so it locks in a deck socket for stability. Thus anchored, supported by the very material he seeks to destroy, he surveys the sea for evidence of his prey. He does find his goal and pursues it for three days. Ishmael lives to tell the tale. But those particular events are more than one hundred and thirty chapters in the reader’s future after first encountering Ishmael seeking work in Nantucket.

In Moby Dick Herman Melville places us firmly in the middle of the nineteenth century. Modern readers must bear in mind that assumptions will be challenged by what has changed in the intervening decades. This was an age before electricity, before mass travel, before immediate communication over distance. But it was also an age when the industrial exploitation of the earth’s resources, animal as well as mineral, was not just under way, but was seen as an essential and desired end that might provide employment, generate wealth and benefit human life. As readers today, we must therefore attempt, for that is all we can do, to relieve ourselves of our novel positions on the activity the book describes. This was an era when killing whales for extraction of profit was quite normal, if, for most people, still a distant, dangerous, even fabulous activity. Reading a whodunnit does not indicate acceptance of murder, so exposure to Moby Dick does not imply support of whaling. And making this required mental shift will unlock the tremendous power, immediacy and indeed wisdom of this masterpiece.

That whaling happened, that a large industry grew up and was sustained by the activity and that people lived the life that it demanded is indisputable. Like all history, we are never condemned to repeat it, but we are also reminded that, though we remain free to reinterpret it, we are powerless to change it. And this book, almost like no other, is replete with the whaling experience which is now so foreign to us. We do, via Herman Melville’s magnificent narrative, enter into that world, that pursuance of life and death, and the experience is not for the faint hearted.

But what is most surprising about Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is its form, or indeed its lack of it. The effect is strikingly modern, in that the novel is not presented as a linear narrative. Instead, Moby Dick presents facts about whales, descriptions of the whaling process, details of its contemporary setting and, above all, portraits of the characters who populate the Pequod and are pressed into partnering Ahab’s mission. In some ways, Moby Dick presents a total experience of a microcosm, often so focused it does its subject literally to death, but in other ways so lacking in focus that a reader can profitably dig in and out of the book almost at random.

And despite the location of the subject matter in a particular time, some of its themes are also relevant to our contemporary society. For example, through Ishmael’s narrative Herman Melville addresses the question of what kind of animal the whale might be. He is aware of Linnaeus and the modern concept of species. He is aware of the evidence that whales, unlike fish, give birth and suckle their young with mother’s milk. The Bible, however, describes Jonah’s encounter as being definitively with a fish, and so that is that, and thus the question is unarguably answered. The whale has to be a fish, since God may not be contradicted. What more perfect example of fact-ignoring fake news or conspiracy theory could one imagine?

Ahab, certainly, is a tyrant, but he is perhaps not the totalitarian dictator that some interpretations demand. He is driven by a personal mission and recruits others, perhaps by deceit, perhaps by stealth, to further his ends. Now a flawed human being, he uses the able bodies of his recruits to pursue his ends and rise above his own limitations. But though he does conduct his pursuit on his own terms in his own autocratic way, eventually he leads his own chase, his personal vendetta and tunnel vision relieving him of his better judgment, whereas a modern dictator would have the exit strategy ready before any risk might be considered. Essentially, Ahab is the ultimate politician who recruits unquestioning and loyal followers who become part owners of individual drive. And then, like any politician who needs to exert pressure, he calls upon his followers to amplify himself, albeit unsuccessfully. All political careers, we are told, end in failure.

Overall, once the paradigm shift in the reader’s assumption is made, Melville’s Moby Dick presents a thoroughly modern and therefore a thoroughly surprising experience. The subject matter may not be fashionable today, but then it reminds us that today’s preoccupations and assumed values might soon themselves appear both pointless and, indeed, repulsive.

Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf

Between The Acts by Virginia Woolf is the author’s last novel. It is often described as a difficult read. And indeed, difficult it is, not because it is full of shocking scenes, tough language or improbable plot, but because it attempts to present what people think, as they think it, jumbled, processed only by passing experience, often random and disjointed.

The style might be called ‘stream of consciousness’ or ‘internal narrative’, but no stock phrase can sum up or adequately describe the abrupt changes in point of view, the disjointed time, the juxtaposition of sometimes unrelated material, the real with the invented, all imagined and suffused within the feared. One thing that does become clear as the book progresses is that this process is much more akin to poetry than narrative. Its images often flash past in opposite directions, apparently unrelated but thought by the same person, often in contradiction to what we have come to assume is the professed intent of the character.

Ostensibly, this is just a group of people coming together to see a play. They assemble in the open air, in the bucolic landscape of the English shires, on a long light summer evening to witness the performance of a drama conceived by one of their number and acted by their acquaintances. We learn that the proceeds from ticket sales and donations will go towards the installation of electric light in the parish church, probably to replace the now extinguished Light of The World which has now proved to be defunct. Thus, at least on its surface, Between The Acts seems to be a rural English, middle class comedy, where society folk gossip about one another while view while they remain baffled by amateur dramatics. After all, what might one expect from artists?

But that surface is mere illusion. Written in 1939 to 1941, Between The Acts senses war close at hand. There is potential for destruction, for disquiet, for foreboding. In addition, the characters who almost anonymously populate the book, relate their own histories, fears, hopes, prejudices and confusion, any of which might change by the moment. They are all complex in an ordinary and perhaps predictable way and, like all of us, they often think and act tangentially, with one person‘s utterance provoking perhaps unrelated responses in others.

Between The Acts is not a long book. Neither, on its surface, is its language difficult. But its myriad of associations, random shifts and passing associations make it impossible to follow for any reader intend on finding a one-dimensional narrative. It was obviously never Virginia Woolf’s intention to facilitate such an experience.

But any conventional route is not an appropriate way to approach this book. It is a work to be absorbed word by word, phrase by phrase, and then again, with the reader’s own imagination stimulated by the images supplied. In these pages we are presented with the play itself, with all of its non sequiturs and all of its deliberate imitation of well-known drama. But overall, we are amongst people who are as confused about their own identity as anyone, and we live through that confusion apparently as they live at themselves.

A rewarding activity for anyone interested is to read the book and then to work through the free course on the book available via a The Open University’s Open Learn website. What the course admirably achieves is a promotion of reflection on the text, and insistence that writing as dense as this needs a reader’s reflection and an imagination’s participation.

It has to be noted also, however, that the author herself was not in the best of mental health when the book was written. This surely is reflected in the text and, as such, Between The Acts probably offers at least some insight into what it must be like to suffer mental illness. The dividing line between coping with experience and being overwhelmed by it is a fine one, it seems, so narrow that any of these characters and indeed any reader may cross that boundary without really knowing it.

The Ambassadors by Henry James

Soft words butter no parsnips is an English saying that is, let’s admit, not overused, especially these days. It probably means get on with it and shut up. In many decades of reading, I have probably only ever ones come across the expression used seriously, rather than in jest, and that was in the Ambassadors by Henry James, who has a certain facility with language and a particular style of sentence construction. Here’s an example. Well, there was an example, but the bookmark went missing and I can’t remember where the evidence was located.

So there it is. And there was The Ambassadors, some thousands of words of story relating to late nineteenth century Americans who found Paris society and culture seriously challenging.

There is a plot. X is the son of Y. He is in Paris and has taken up residence with a woman of all things who might even not speak English as the first language. It seems that at least one of the protagonists in The Ambassadors night at least have twigged that some people in France speak French. X is really wants to go back at home, to be embraced in the family fold, guided to occupy the role others want him to play. He seems oblivious to these desires and seems to like France.

Y talks to Z, who comes across the Atlantic us to England and then to France. He seems to have time on his hands when he sets about persuading eggs to come home. Z is not a little taken with Y and agrees, though his motives may not be of the first order.

Strether visits Paris and finds that it is not precisely what his preconceptions might have predicted. And that, I’m afraid, is about it. Plot is developed largely via dialogue, which is often expressed in the kind of language but probably no one ever spoke.

Do these soft words really butter parsnips? On that issue the jury is still determinedly out, one feels.

 

Day by A. L. Kennedy is a complex at times perhaps over a complex novel about an individual’s experience of and response to war. It is set in the Second World War and crucially, its aftermath. It is a novel where the reader is presented with time shifts, changes in point of view and altered conscious states so quickly that only a slow, almost forensic progress seems possible. Though there is much to praise about the book’s non-heroic, matter-of-fact but at the same time respectful approach to its subject matter, it occasionally obfuscates rather than clarifies.

Alfred Day is the book’s eponymous principal character. He hails from Staffordshire, in the English Midlands, a place where coal mining meets ceramics factories, all within a recognizable older rural England. Alfred’s accent is working class and is often expressed phonetically, a practice that intends to preserve the sound of his voice, but often hides his complexity of meaning.

Alfred joins the Royal Air Force and becomes a gunner on a Lancaster bomber, the kind of airman who would sit alone in his glass cage trying to shoot down the fighters that came to attack the lumbering bomber. It was not a role that was often pensionable, and the regular deaths of Day’s colleagues are catalogued in all their gruesome reality.

But what is interesting about Alfred Day’s experience of war is his detachment from it. High up in the sky, his job is to defend a payload of bombs which, if the mission is to be a success, will be dumped anonymously by his aimer colleague on Hamburg, or whatever city might be the target today. The bombs are effectively dumped at random, despite their professed aim., all hitting targets that might or might not have been intended. In today’s jargon, this is where collateral damage becomes the objective. It is interesting in our language how carpet bombing is not the bombing of carpets.

Meanwhile, the airmen themselves must find ways of working together. They also must find ways of talking about what they do without ever really recognizing how gruesome or risky it will be. This often leads to a variety of euphemistic language, where expletives reign, but where expression is often lacking. The relationships made were often short-lived of necessity and, though they also had to form a team that could work together, it is generally the distance between the men that defines their fraternity. This aspect of Day is handled sensitively, even vividly throughout.

Alfred Day does find Joyce, a devoted and sincere partner. The presence of the ‘now’ in wartime seems to heighten their relationship. Neither partner seems to dream of life beyond the moment, whilst apparently constantly referring to it. War takes the relationship, as it does many others. It even seems to take the present, because when they were together it was war that dominated their thoughts, though their actions were timeless.

Alfred is eventually shot down but survives and spends time and the prisoner of war camp, where surprisingly he is quite well treated. But after the war, after his own liberation, he takes a position as an extra in a film about wartime prisoner of war experience. This later reconstruction of a reality he has in fact lived is interleaved with real experience, and for this reader, it was this juxtaposition that was the least convincing part of the novel. These different scenarios, before the war with its abusive family life, during the war flying missions and visiting Joyce, after the war on a film set, are often mixed together in a heady brew of complex flavours. Training the sense to discern location and time can be challenging. In one way, this is the book’s charm, but for many readers the experience may prove merely confusing.

Day is a moving book, but a book that does not give up in sensations easily. It is always challenging for the reader and is, nevertheless, fulfilling, though apparently never in a direct, uncomplicated way.

El balcón en invierno by Luis Landero

El balcón en invierno by Luis Landero is beautiful, if at times frustrating book. It could all be said much more simply, succinctly and perhaps with greater immediate power. But if it were written that way, it would lose what becomes its special and elegant appeal as a repeated motifs, by simple virtue of their repetition, actually take on the flavour of what the writer clearly intended to communicate.

Ostensibly an autobiography, El balcón en invierno often feels like a novel, a surreal experience couched in a style that approaches magical realism. Long before we reach the end of the book, its characters have attained for the reader the near mythical status they hold for the book’s narrator, ostensibly a child of the extended family described.

We are pitched into a world of memories. This remembered world is that of a college educated, Madrid resident, mature man, who still wants to be a professional jazz guitarist. Every element of that sought after and pursued identity would have been beyond not only the experience or even capability of the family that raised him, it would be beyond the limits of their encultured imagination. Guitarists certainly existed in this reality, but jazz was recorded music, internationally marketed and reliant upon participation in an economic system that was unknown to this community. It would have been unimaginable for the grandparents, so vividly recalled from the experience of times shared. It’s a measure of how much change can be foisted from outside on a mere generation of human existence that the grandson viewed as normal that which was beyond the imagination of the parents.

The principal character of El balcón en invierno was raised in a rural community in western Spain, near Badajoz in Extremadura, not far from the Portuguese border. The families in that area shared a common approach to life. They were all different, but they were all dependent on a local economy rooted in the soil, in agriculture, in small holdings, in the processing of the products of that soil and the servicing of the needs of the community. Ambition extended only as far as the next village. And it is this all embracing, all encompassing, almost closed, repeated and repetitive way of life that forms the backbone of nostalgia the stiffens the entire book.

But not for this writer the repeated daily responsibilities of chicken coop, the tending of goats, the drawing of water, the pruning of vines, the tethering of cattle, the leading of donkeys. Not for him the preparation of gazpacho, the making of bread, the stirring of an olla bubbling with cocido over a wood fire, the kneading of dough or the grinding of flour. Not for him the cutting or pressing of grapes, the picking of oranges, the drying of tomatoes or figs, nor the harvesting of nisperos. For him, the enduring ambition was to become a jazz guitarist. And that would require visiting a city. A city! A what? And for what would you need all that schooling, all those lessons and exams and prices of paper they call qualifications, when not one of them shows you how to milk a goat, make cheese or butter or press an olive?

And it is this access to schooling, to an education that certainly existed in his grandparents’ time, that truly offered the means of transforming a life and, by accessing it, the process that would end a lifestyle. Schooling was probably a commodity not accessed by grandparents and parents alike, because it could contribute nothing to the necessities of a life that was all demanding in its essential tasks. But, as the schooling also demonstrated, it was also something of a self-reproducing prison, which retained relevance only within its own, shrinking walls. There was a life elsewhere and it was beginning to invade.

In less able hands, the reliving of rural life via nostalgic images could have become a mere romanticized fantasy, a lost imagined ideal world which, in reality, was hard, unforgiving, often short-lived and, when truth be admitted, far from ideal. The reader is often walked through the recalled reality of this existence, but the lists of objects, of foods, of daily tasks might just have been culled from someone else’s nostalgia. But in the hands of Luis Landero, the processing of lists becomes a cultural experience, a filled-out landscape, rather than an ego-trip down memory lane.

El balcón en invierno’s beauty is not in its sensitivity, its compassion. Its message, however, is that the lives become what time and circumstance conspire to arrange and that, in the end, we may idealize only the life we have not lived. The one we have lived, on the other hand, becomes the mundane, the challenging struggle that life has always been, even that ideal, remembered, reimagined rural existence for those who lived it. Read it in Spanish, but ignore the fact that there are many old, archaic words. Just go with the flow and appreciate the contrast that the author draws between nostalgic imagination and brutal reality.

Europe Since Napoleon by David Thomson

 

Some time ago and in relation to a different book, I wrote a review that in essence began, “Occasionally, just occasionally, one comes across a book so impressive, so scholarly and so communicative that it leaves a reader both in awe of its achievement and completely rewarded by the experience of reading it.” I did not expect to encounter another book in the near future to which that description might also apply. I have done just that, and my life is immeasurably richer as a result.

The title, Europe Since Napoleon, communicates what the book addresses. This is not a history of the United States, Asia, China, South America or Africa. Europe is the focus, but the vision is in no sense myopic. During the period in question, history of course documents that some European powers were imperial powers, claiming ownership and rule of colonies across the globe, indeed on every continent. There was also the detail of two World Wars, which have been granted that title because the conflict was near global in scale. Hence Europe Since Napoleon addresses many aspects of history, politics and economics that relate to the global interests of the European nations and, as such, this book, at least in the opinion of this reader, becomes more of a Eurocentric view of world history, rather than a narrower discussion of a specific continent. And it must also be added that any Eurocentrism arises nearly out of the focus, and not from any form of bias or sense of superiority.

There is a problem with the book’s title, however. Europe Since Napoleon implies that it might begin at the end of the French Imperial era, but Europe Since Napoleon begins by analyzing the circumstances and events that allowed Napoleon to assume power. We start, therefore, with the discussion of pre-revolutionary France and the revolution, itself, because it was out of these events that the arose the opportunity for Napoleon to assume power.

The Napoleonic Wars, the peace, reform, revolution, socialism, labor, economy, Russian expansion, nationalism, the creation of Italy and Germany, the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune all pass by and we have yet to complete half of the book’s two centuries of coverage. Of course, there follows the Berlin Conference, the partition of Africa, the lording it over the rest of the world to shape it into European advantage zones, the Great War, another revolution, boom, depression, strike, greater war, atomic bombs, the Iron Curtain, the suggestion of international cooperation, the rise of science, the nuclear age and the molecular age.

Of course, Europe Since Napoleon, like any summary work cannot even address the claim of being comprehensive. But in his book, David Thomson regularly illustrates how the big issues of the day re-drew the map, forged new alliances, created opportunity and transformed people’s lives. The author wrote over 400,000 words spanning almost 1000 pages and at the end provides a thorough bibliography of works he has no doubt read to provide greater depth across most of the issues covered in the book.

But the real strength of Europe Since Napoleon is not its coverage, nor its description of the events it lists, but its narrative. Throughout David Thompson resists the temptation merely to list facts, opting instead for a fluid, narrative style that does, it has to be said, assume a modicum of prior knowledge. But what if the reader gains from this apparently stylistic ploy is quite brilliant contextualization, synthesis and thereby understanding. This is a thousand-page history book that is simply a joy to read, from page one to page 946, to be precise, not counting the appendices.

And, if the foregoing were not enough praise, the author’s final observations, written in the 1960s are ostensibly predictions of where the human race may go over the following decades and it is nothing less than revelatory. Not only does David Thompson have a bigger view of history, but he also demonstrates a true intellectual vision that is both breathtaking in its scope and exciting in its optimism. Reading this vision sixty years on, one can only ask the question, how on Earth did this happen, how on earth did we end up here? And, after reading this book, the one thing that history has taught us repeatedly, is that we may catalogue, describe and understand, but also that we should not predict, and we should not take anything for granted. History is a guide, but never repeats itself, never returns us to the familiar. That is how it happened. What a superb book!