Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

This is a masterpiece of story-telling. It is short - about 130 pages - and tells the tale of a man living an isolated life in New England. The time is not specific, but the feel is always contemporary with the date of publication, which was 1911. The narrator met Ethan Frome in Starkfield, Massachusetts and immediately his countenance made its impression. He is described as already looking “as if he was dead and in hell.” The narrator sets about telling the story of Ethan Frome, a story that apparently is hard to extract from the laconic people who inhabit this part of New England. The structure of the novel, we are told, reflects this local habit, but by the time we are half way through, the reticence seems to have eased.

Starkfield is a harsh place. Winters are particularly difficult, and people measure lifespan by the number of winters they have survived. This is not a sociable community, we are told, and people live isolated lives. It is an isolation that in some ways is dictated by their environment. “Beyond the orchard lay a field or two, the boundaries lost under drifts; and above the fields, huddled against the white immensities of land and sky, one of those lonely New England farmhouses that make the landscape lonelier.” It is thus a place where the distance between people renders everything lonelier.

Ethan Frome has a sick wife. She needs a home help, live-in assistance. Mattie Silver is hired. She is young, full of life and frankly not much of a help. She is a relative of Ethan Frome’s wife, Zelda, and so is tolerated. Ethan is attracted. Mattie changes his life.

What happens is so important to the story that how it happens cannot be described. Let it be said that what appears to be a simple love triangle does not turn out to be so. Though reticent, these people live charged emotional lives and conflict is never far removed from the cold. 

Edith Wharton’s prose is wonderfully evocative of this isolated and inward-looking community. In her fiction, she is generally an urban creature, wandering the society events of New York, describing the nuances of class politics among the well-to-do. The fact that in Ethan Frome she inhabits a quite different environment with fundamentally different people living different lives is testament to her skill as a writer.

Dialogues and Natural History of Religion by David Hume

These extracts from the writings of David Hume concentrate on his views on religious belief. The Dialogues are clearly inspired by the writings of Plato in that, at least ostensibly, they are arranged as a discussion between three people of differing views. The Natural History Of Religion, on the other hand, is a more conventional analysis of several aspects of belief.

As ever, David Hume comes across as a logical positivist of the eighteenth century. For him, it seems that there are three possible positions to take on any natural phenomenon, belief or custom. First, something may be known. Where science has trod, where theory has been discussed and where findings have been demonstrated and then reproduced, Hume will admit no deviation of interpretation. Everything else is folly. Secondly, something may be widely assumed but as yet it remains unproven. Though he regularly alludes to such phenomena, he actually rarely analyses consequences of taking a particular standpoint, or pronounces on whether such things, perhaps at a later date, might become known. Throughout his pronouncements on such topics, he reveals himself to be as unquestioning of his assumed culture as anyone who espouses religion. An illustration of this tendency would be his regular reference to “savages”, people who don’t really qualify as human beings. These beings tend to live in Africa, in “jungles” or even in Asia. These are, of course, my own tongue-in-cheek words. He does not question the labels he uses, or their existence as such. But he repeats the position and clearly sees no reason to question it, despite the fact that it is not a “known” fact, in terms of there existing any kind of proof – or, for that matter, even evidence.

The third category in Hume’s thought relates to things that are unknown. Not only do these phenomena exist outside his concept of science in that they cannot be tested, but also, they defy description in a way that human beings can comprehend them. It is in this third category, the unknown, that human beings find fertile ground for their pronouncements of religion.

What is known is adequately described by this passage: “if the cause be known only by the effect, we never ought to describe to it any qualities beyond what our precise the requisite to produce the effect: nor can we, by any rules of just reasoning, return back from the cause, and other effects from it, beyond those by which alone it is known to us.” Here the process of scientific inference is raised to the status of a rational god, perhaps. But it is rational…

What is assumed but not proven is illustrated by this assertion: “I am sensible, that, according to the past experience of mankind, friendship is the chief joy of human life, and moderation the only source of tranquility and happiness. I never balance between the virtuous and the vicious course of life; but I’m sensible, that, to a well-disposed mind, every advantage is on the side of the former.” The assertion exists because he believes it, and can cite evidence, but he does not have proof. But equally he does not admit belief, believing that at some point the quality may be tested and proven, perhaps.

What is unknown, outside of human inference facilitated by a scientific method, then becomes explained by speculation, or invention. Human beings hold up a mirror to the universe, and in its see themselves and interpret phenomena beyond their understanding as mere aspects of themselves. “…there is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities with which they are familiar acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious. We find human faces in the moon, arm is in the clouds; and buy a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe, malice, or goodwill to everything, that hurts or pleases us. Hence the frequency and beauty of […] poetry; where trees, mountains and streams are personified, and the inanimate parts of nature, acquire sentiment and passion. although these poetical figures and expressions gain not on the belief, they may serve, at least, to prove a certain tendency in the imagination, without which they could neither be beautiful nor natural… philosophers cannot entirely exempt themselves from this natural frailty, but have often described it to inanimate matter the horror of a vacuum […] and sympathies, and other affections of human nature. The absurdity is not less, while we cast our eyes upwards; and transferring, as is to usual, human passions, and infirmities to the deity, representing him as a jealous as jealous and revengeful, capricious and partial, and, in short, a wicked and foolish man, in every respect, but his superior power and authority.”

Personally, I have often wondered why, given our knowledge of the universe and our place within it, why the religious continue to use personal pronouns and human labels to refer to gods. “He, Father, Lord” are common: “it” and “thing” are not. In a reconstructed terminology, “The Lord is my Shepherd” would thus become “It is a thing”. Without the completely human dimension, the phrase becomes meaningless. With the human dimension raised to a status of essential, the phrase no longer describes anything that might not be earth-bound.

Hume expands on this elsewhere: “…the great source of our mistake in this subject, and of the unbounded license of conjecture, which we indulge, is, that we consider ourselves, as in the place of the Supreme Being, and conclude, that he will, on every occasion, observe the same conduct […] in his situation, would have embraced as reasonable and eligible. But, besides that the ordinary course of nature may convince us that almost everything is regulated by principles and maxims very different from ours, besides this, I say, it must evidently appear contrary to all rules of analogy to reason, from the intentions and projects of men, to those of Being so different, and so much superior.” He also equates the tendency to adopt religious believe to ignorance: “…it seems certain, that, according to the natural progress of human thought, the ignorant multitude must first entertain some groveling and familiar notion of superior powers, before they stretch the conception to that perfect Being, will be stowed order on the whole frame of nature.” He does however admit that there are possibilities for the committed: “A little philosophy, says Lord Bacon, makes men atheists: a great deal reconciles them to religion.”

Dialogues and Natural History of Religion are a superb illustration of what drove David Hume towards his eighteenth-century version of logical positivism. They come here with copious notes, where the numerous classical illusions are clarified, and where the author’s references to contemporary writers and texts, now forgotten, are referenced.

I do, however, find the format of the Dialogues gets in the way of the argument. I realize that Hume wanted to emulate the form of such writings as Plato’s Symposium, but here the structure becomes an imposition on the reader. There is no obvious stylistic difference between the three characters involved in this argument, so it is often confusing for the reader. This apart, the essays are a wonderfully enlightening read, even though they may present what, for some, may be a tough encounter with reality

The Children Act by Ian McEwan

 

Ian McEwan’s novel The Children Act is probably as close to the label masterpiece as any piece of fiction might get. Having just read David Hume’s ideas on religion, where the all-powerful takes on a human face, where rational thought is raised the status of an ivory tower, and where human prejudice regularly masquerades as potentially rational opinion, this novel provided a perfect fit to counterbalance and contextualise continued thought about these fundamental issues.

The novel immediately introduces Fiona. She is married, her adopted surname of Maye appearing sometime later. She is a judge. She has risen to a significant pinnacle within her profession. Married to Jack, for who knows how long, she shares a relationship which is both childless and lately unsteady, largely because Fiona’s work seems to take over her life.

She is very thorough. The law requires judgments to be correct, justifiable within the confines of the law, itself, especially in the UK according to precedent, but they must also at least approach the concept of natural justice, in that they must at least appear to be morally as well as legally justifiable. The process of reconciling these two demands often results in conflict. Complication arises when the subject of the legal action is a child, because, when that child is below the age of majority, eighteen years of age, the child is not deemed mature or responsibly enough to make up its own mind.

Fiona specializes in cases involving children. These may be to determine custody after divorce, protection against a malevolent parent or merely an absent one. They may involve a care order, where a child is judged to need the safety or stability of institutional care when parents are abusive, drug addicted, negligent, alcoholic, or merely absent. The issues may be fairly clear, but nothing is more complicated than human relationships. And even when these are simple, we seek to complicate them. But when seventeen-year-old is the subject of legal action, the situation is more complex. Especially when religion has reared its complicated head…

Adam has leukaemia and needs a blood transfusion. Without it, his chances of survival are limited because the drugs that form half of his treatment only work if a transfusion is carried out. Alan, like his parents, however, is a Jehovah’s Witness, to whom blood transfusions are anathema, simply not allowed. The question for Fiona to judge upon is whether the child can refuse treatment, whether his parents are denying him a chance of life for ideological reasons and whether the professionals involved should countermand the parents’ and the patient’s wishes. Fiona decides to visit Adam in hospital to inform her position. This happens against the backdrop of her own marriage failing, her husband walking out and an approaching eighteenth birthday for Adam, meaning that then he will be able to decide for himself what happens. She finds Adam interesting. Adam finds Fiona slightly more than captivating.

What happens is the book’s plot, and a reader will just have to discover it by reading the book. What I can write to conclude my review is the fact that these issues of the correctness or rationality or otherwise of belief come into sharp focus when ideology becomes a life and death issue. And Ian McEwan deals with these issues in a highly complex and transparent manner, which is also highly creative. What will always be dilemmas without resolution are presented as such, but somehow, they are never complicated. Decisions taken always seem justified by circumstance. What people do scene by scene makes sense, but then overall everything is driven by the moment, by assumption and by personal identity that we cannot control, because it grows within us, apparently independently. Fiona approaches every situation with a judge’s eye for the law, with an eye for accuracy and correctness. Internally, she reveals herself as vulnerable, open to instinctive and irrational thoughts.

What Ian McEwan does is portray character supremely well, providing a balance between the professional, the personal, and the social elements that contribute to make a human being. David Hume’s quote from Bacon really does ring true, that when we become really involved in the issue, then the case for religion strengthens. As for Fiona, life must go on. But how?

The Stories of Eva Luna by Isabel Allende

 

In The Stories of Eva Luna, Isabel Allende presents a collection of stories ostensibly told by Ralph Carlé’s partner. Ralph is a television journalist and features in the last story of the set when he tries to free a young girl trapped by mud after a landslide.

Before the prologue in which Ralph Carlé asks to be told stories, Isabel Allende refers to Sheherezade of Arabian Nights fame. Her task was to keep the Grand Vizier entertained all night until dawn so that she might survive the telling, unlike all who had previously been similarly tasked. A footnote informs the reader that Sheherezade did indeed succeed in her quest. “At this moment in her story, Sheherezade saw the first light of dawn, and discreetly fell silent.” This surely implies that a woman with a gift of language might just escape the nightly attentions of a man. Such attentions feature large throughout the The Stories of Eva Luna and all the usual and perhaps inevitable consequences follow to form the central focus of almost every one of these tales.

These stories are written in the magical realism style of much Latin American fiction. The language is quite dense, but often not as dense as the fusillade of events that attach themselves to the lives of these people in this provincial, quiet and often rather boring town. The lives described in the stories, however, are surely never dull. Indeed, so full of detail are they that these short stories would be difficult to digest as suggested over a single night.

Try, for instance, this passage about an English couple. “The large headquarters of Sheepbreeders Ltd rose up from the sterile plane like a forgotten cake; it was surrounded by an absurd lawn and defended against the depredations of the climate by the superintendent’s wife, who could not resign herself to live outside the heart of the British Empire and continued to dress for solitary dinners with her husband, a phlegmatic gentleman buried beneath his pride in obsolete traditions.” There are many who might understand something general in this particular description.

I read these stories in a first English paperback edition, and, it has to be said, there were several misprints. When reading magical realism, however, one is never sure if the misprint might just have been intended. On board ship, for instance, Maria just might have been interested in her desk. “Several days after the tragedy, Maria emerged with unsteady step to take the air on the desk for the first time. It was a warm night, and an unsettling odour of seaweed, shellfish, and sunken ships rose from the ocean, entered her nostrils, and raced through her veins with the effort of an earthquake. She found herself staring at the horizon, her mind a blank and her skin tingling from her heels to the back of her neck, when she heard an insistent whistle; she half-turned and beheld two decks below a dark shadow in the moonlight, signalling into her.”

Local politics aften figures large in the stories. There are corrupt local officials, some honest ones, dictators called benefactors and revolutions, bandits and thieves. There is even a man who maintains his respectability by virtue of the existence of buried gold which, when push comes to shove, is no longer where he put it.

A theme that reemerges several times is the eventual payback by a woman badly treated, misused or merely abused. Some of the twists and turns of plot, nay of lives, are too unexpected to have been imagined. Many of these events would have probably been true, but perhaps not so vividly embroidered. In fact, some of these tales are so densely woven that a reader might want a rest here or there! But they are superb and no doubt better if read in Spanish.

I usually don’t start book reviews with a warning, but this time I have to break the habit of a lifetime and issue one. If you are a Christian, you might find what follows offensive.

The She-Apostle by Glyn Redworth is a tale of self-harm, ideological control, and international terrorism. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, when the book is set, the social medium within which the self-harm of especially young women was perpetrated was the Church. The ideological control in question was also perpetrated by the Church, a control so absolute, misguided and complete that individuals often suffered hallucination as a result of the guilt that was heaped upon them by what they were taught. International terrorism, in the case of The She-Apostle, is manifest in the Gunpowder Plot, when a group of ideologically driven fanatics tried to blow up the entire political leadership of a sovereign state, being England under James the First. If this were a review of a contemporary novel, the fact that it featured self-harm promoted by social media, hallucinations and violence, and international terrorism might be merely par for the course. When, as is the case of Glyn Redworth’s book, it is associated with the life of a seventeenth century saint, it may seem strange. It might just be that little has changed in human society in the intervening four hundred years, except, of course, our appreciation of just how brutal life was at that time.

Doña Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza was born in Extremadura into a Spanish nobility that was enjoying the country’s Golden Age. Colonies overseas were disgorging their riches towards the seat of imperial power, the nobility were gobbling up the proceeds and Spanish priests were at work, saving the souls of a whole continent by converting them to Christianity, whilst at the same time sending them to heaven at the double by infecting them with smallpox, influenza, and typhoid. Europe was riven by ideological differences between Catholics and Protestants that to an outsider seem about as consequential as disagreeing about how many angels would fit on a pinhead. If you are a Christian, I accept, angels matter. If you are not, they don’t exist. The evidence, surely, lies on that side, but whenever did the ideologically committed ever trouble themselves with evidence? Unless, of course, it could be twisted into a case against someone who thought differently from oneself…

Born with several silver spoons already in her mouth, Luisa sought solace in faith. She was regularly abused by her guardian, in the name of God, of course, and regularly harmed herself with instruments of torture. Eventually, she adopted a life of frugality, continued to self-harm, and to pioneer a life of religious devotion that was personal rather than institutionalized. She never became a nun. She also decided to free the English from the manacles of Protestantism and, soon after the armada had failed to do the same by force, moved to England to follow her mission.

Glyn Redworth’s The She-Apostle is more than a biography of Luisa. It perhaps stops short of being a conventional hagiography. The author does describe the personal and societal consequences of Luisa’s campaign to promote Roman Catholicism in Protestant England, but quite often a reader might feel that the author stopped short of delivering the criticisms of her actions that he himself felt. Luisa may indeed have sought martyrdom, but her crime in the end was to steal the remains of already butchered Roman Catholics, put to death by a state that arrogated absolute power because of the terrorism they threatened.

As a reminder, it must be pointed out that the method of choice by which the just imposed their will on dissenters was as follows. “Hung, drawn and quartered” might sound like it might apply to a Spanish ham. But in that age, it meant being hung by the neck until you are almost dead. Then you were cut down and disembowelled, your intestines being trailed onto a fire as you watched. Then your arms, legs and head were cut off and then the final ignominy was that your torso was cut into quarters, each part of you destined for a different resting place. The idea, of course, was ideologically driven in that admission to heaven needed intact remains, so once quartered, a person was to be damned forever.

Louisa, herself, was indeed arrested for stealing the remains of executed Catholics, although she herself died eventually in bed. She wanted to pass on the dried-out flesh and bones of the martyred as relics to consecrate holy places. But she was spared the ignominy of the gallows and axe so there was no obvious martyrdom for her. Glyn Redworth’s book, though superficially adulatory, does give a vivid portrayal of the political and social life of the time, and as such it is worth reading. For a believer, I suppose it provides joyous example of a pious life. For a nonbeliever, like me, it portrays the shockingly violent absurdity of the irrational.

Aaron’s Rod by D H Lawrence

Aaron’s Rod by DH Lawrence is a perplexing novel. It seems to represent two quite different aspects of the writer’s creativity. One side has him reflecting on working class life in the English midlands, whilst in the other he is very much the sophisticated traveller and philosopher. These apparently reflect his own origins and reality. The book’s duality is not surprising, when one considers the fact that the early part of the book dates from 1918 and represents an abandoned project. Only three years later did Lawrence return to the work and write the second, more substantial part.

First, the title needs interpretation. Aaron’s Rod, historically, refers to the sacred staff carried by the brother of Moses. It was Aaron who persuaded the flock to worship the golden calf. The rod was used as both symbol of office, and as a means of summoning spiritual power. In the novel, the term is used to refer to the flute which is played competently and professionally by the principal character, Aaron Sisson. Frankly, and in keeping with Lawrence’s preoccupations, it is also a sexual reference to the character’s maleness.

The first part of the book describes Aaron Sisson’s background, upbringing an early life. Thus, rooted in a working-class English midlands mining town at the turn of the twentieth century, Aaron’s aptitude for music makes him stand out, makes him at least seem to have rebelliousness in him. He marries locally. Children come. Love goes. Perhaps desire dies not, however, as this passage illustrates. “…sometimes when she put down her knitting, or took it up again from the bench beside him, her fingers just touched his thigh, and the fine electricity ran over his body, as if he were a cat tingling at a caress.” He leaves his wife and his home area to travel first to London, then to Italy.

It is in London that he meets Lilly. Lilly is the surname of a man, Rowan Lilly. The character features large throughout the rest of the book and might be seen as expressing some of the writers own ideas. He starts by nursing Aaron and back to health after an illness and then departs on his travels. On his invitation, Aaron follows, despite not having much money. On arrival, he finds that his friend Lilly has absented himself.

Life in London had been interesting, both professionally and socially. Aaron pursued his music and even found time and funds to go to the opera. His working-class origins allowed him to make fun of the audience. “Not being fashionable, they were in the box when the overture began…” As a musician, he explores music that such fashionable audiences might shun. There is evidence that Lawrence intended thus to place Aaron on the outside of ‘middle-class society’. When he is asked, later on, about his musical preferences, Aaron expresses his liking for Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, which at time of the book’s writing had received only one London production.

Eventually, Aaron ends up in Florence, where the book really comes to life. Aaron is befriended by an upper-class family, and he meets a countess, who has a suppressed love of music. They make music together, without any really real commitment from either of them, except to their individual needs. Having regained contact with Lilly, Aaron and a group of acquaintances analyse their lives, their estrangement from wives they no longer love, from a past that the Great War has seemed to render irrelevant and estranged.

Eventually, an anarchist’s bomb destroys the front of a café where Aaron is seated, taking out the front windows and destroying the coat rack at the entrance., His flute was in the pocket of the coat and is ruined. Aaron himself survives. But what is he now? He is both penniless and his source of employment is destroyed. Where can a man go when his rod is taken from him?

It is the almost constant reference to the effects of the Great War that is the enduring impression of the novel. Unlike many writers, Lawrence does not appear to take sides. He is probably against war, per se, but he does not slip into a common trap of identifying those who benefited from the conflict and contrasting them with those whose lives were destroyed. For Lawrence, it seems, everyone has suffered. War only destroys, as do all acts of violence, as does the final act of violence, perpetrated for political ends. It achieves only destruction. War also changes social relations, as evidence by the passage “…what should you like to drink? Wine? Chianti? Or white wine? Or beer?” The old-fashioned “sir” was dropped. It’s too old-fashioned now, since the war.”

A reader starting Aaron’s Rod must bear in mind that the book’s opening chapters do not reflect where it will take you. Eventually, it is a thoroughly challenging and complete experience for the reader. Its enduring message that the only things that drive human existence are love and power is itself powerful. It is a complex relationship, however, between the two, because to seek love is often to exert power, and that power can often be controlled, but can also be associated with violence, which is only destructive. It is, say several of the characters, a power exerted primarily by women.

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.