Cakes And Ale by W Somerset Maugham

 

Cakes And Ale by W Somerset Maugham is a profoundly surprising book. Written in 1930, the novel begins its story in the Edwardian age prior to the First World War. It comes, therefore, with the inevitable expectation that it will depict English society as a rather stuffy, perhaps dusty entity, full of flock wallpaper and aspidistras, tired after so many years of Victoria, but not yet woken up to the new world that the war so painfully introduced. But this is precisely where expectations could be wrong. In fact Cakes And Ale takes a rather liberated view of British society’s values, pokes fun at stiff convention and generally offers no moral judgment where other writers would surely lay on the presumption.

Cakes And Ale carries the subtitle The Skeleton In The Cupboard, without being absolutely clear whose skeleton is described, while the book certainly does not list many cupboards. One must presume that what is being referred to is the relationship between the privileged character William Ashenden and Mrs. Rosie Driffield, the wife of a novelist. Their time together begins when Ashenden is a boy, at least in his own eyes, and concludes many years later by which time both characters have reinvented themselves several times. It is a relationship that starts in platonic fascination, graduates to physical adulthood and concludes in seeming admiration at distance.

But overall, this relationship is allowed to blossom without the judgment on might expect it to receive, so skeletons remain hard to justify or identify. Equally, it could be Mrs. Driffield‘s long-standing obsession with a certain Lord George, but eventually this turns out to be sincere and long lasting. Mrs. Driffield certainly liaised with enough men to create several skeletons, but they would not have been in cupboards.

We follow William Ashenden from a self-identified childhood through adolescence and into adulthood. He too wants to become a writer and at least initially it is Mr. Driffield the novelist who interests him. At one stage, Ashenden laments the burden of having to describe his own experience in the first person. All writers, one supposes, love to inhabit that special heaven which allows convenient detachment and can put words into anyone’s mouth and feelings into anyone’s experience. Being merely oneself can be utterly restricting.

We first encounter this life while he is visiting his uncle on the south coast, in Kent to be precise, where Driffield the writer and his wife Rosie have moved in and are in the process of causing quite a local stir. General opinion is that Mrs. Driffield is rather common, a bar maid or of that ilk, and the suggestions are that she does not need classes in anatomy.

The moral indignation of the chattering classes is apparently unanimous. Mrs. Driffield puts herself about, especially in the direction of Lord George who is no lord, and the judgment is that anything in trousers is deemed of interest to her. And the indignation is not related to class, since the servants of the household where Ashenden stays are as vehement in their opinions as the boss, until they meet the sad Rosie, that is, and then their tone changes, for some reason.

Maugham has such a lower-class people drop their aitches and modify their vowels to such an extent that one wonders how they manage to say so many apostrophes. But Rosie Driffield thoroughly captivates the young lad. He becomes infatuated with her though he doesn’t realize it at first. For him, it’s merely growing up.

But the relationship changes from one of curiosity and interest to one of physicality and sex, but never does Somerset Maugham have either Ashington or Rosie regret what they are doing. Guilt seems not to be a destination in the London where they meet. They are merely human beings being human. And this is what is so surprising about the book.

Rosie eventually runs off with Lord George to the United States, where he makes a fortune and she becomes as respectable as she can possibly be first in New York and then in Yonkers, atop a significant fortune, which all goes to show something at least.

Though it is not explicitly stated, the United States is portrayed in the book as a land where moralizing attitudes and gossip have no place. Both Lord George and Rosie have moved there and have lived their lives unaffected by social judgment. Back home in England, where one expects judgment to be available by the stone, physical life continues to be denied, but not in Cakes And Ale. The fact is that Rosie has risen above criticism, but one must assume that she can only continue in that life out of Albion. Perhaps it was her skeleton after all.

 

The Republic Of Love by Carol Shields

Republics do not have kings or queens, nor princes or princesses, so, we must assume, fairytales are out. Winnipeg is not exactly a republic, and, at least in terms of their love lives, two residents of the city, Fay and Tom, seem to inhabit a world where fairytales are inconceivable. But that place might not be Winnipeg: it might be closer in to themselves.

Despite – or perhaps because of - having had a multitude of mothers, Tom has been married three times, each attempt turning success into apparent and mildly painful failure, with or sometimes without associated acrimony.

For her part, Fay, at thirty-five, has had several relationships of varied length, but none has led to wedding bells, a fact that seems to trouble her, sometimes. Tom is a radio presenter. He hosts one of those late night phone-ins aimed at insomniacs, but usually attracting the opinionated.

His mood, his history, his takes on where life has taken him clearly influence his style. Rises or dips in his personal life are immediately apparent, communicated without trying. But do not assume that anything offers even influence to what the contributors say. Rest assured, they will offer precisely what they want, perhaps precisely what they have been fed, if only because they are all as self-absorbed as everyone else. Fay works more regular hours.

She is an ethnologist and works in a folklore centre. She is heavily into mermaids, and perhaps they are also into her. She researches the mermaid myth, catalogues sightings, interviews people who have seem them, travels the world giving papers on our social and psychological need to invent these creatures. Mermaids, though overtly sexual and obviously female, are eventually sexless, unless they have exaggerated tails. They are both alluring and inviting, but, being half fish, they are cold-blooded and cold. They tempt, but cannot satisfy. Obviously Tom and Fay are going to meet.

They, along with their accumulated baggage, join forces and, as a consequence, begin to see life differently. But each is still influenced by relatives, acquaintances, ex-partners, ex-in-laws, new partners, parents and anyone else who might have an opinion. They all count. They all influence, especially when stiffness of apparent resolve can be easily bent by contradiction, shock or surprise. And so Fay and Tom’s relationship develops to what Carol Shields deems it should become.

Throughout The Republic Of Love is beautifully written. Carol Shields’s prose is often witty, elegant, telling, funny, incisive or provocative all in one. A single sentence can turn on itself to frighten or mock its own beginning. This is a book worth reading for its style alone. But it offers more than elegance of expression. These characters have all the confused confident complexity, the undirected and variable resolve we would expect from non-ideological adults in the last decade of the twentieth century. It would be interesting to revisit them twenty years on to see where they are now, to know if anything might have lasted. In The Republic Of Love they certainly come to life.

Characters mutually fragmented - Trespasses by Paul Bailey

Trespasses by Paul Bailey presents the reader with an early challenge. The principal character, Ralph Hicks, or Ralphie to his mother, has suffered a breakdown and, during the book’s first fragmented section, we see the world from his disjointed, guilt-ridden, apparently random perspective.

Perhaps a sense of confusion was intended by the author, who might have assumed as much skill in the average reader as he possesses as a writer. As an introduction, the opening seems to work less than well. When the form is revisited later on, it works poignantly and wholly effectively.

Eventually, Trespasses is a beautiful, engaging, but deeply sad tale. Ralph, an academically gifted working class lad, meets Ellie, a quintessential lower middle class lass, and they marry with apparent happiness. But Ralph, perhaps because of a childhood experience of his parents’ not unhappy but woefully incomplete relationship, simply cannot love.

He always seems to need a motive, a clear reason for doing something that is not immediately physical. Ellie, not herself a victim, suffers the indignity of what she sees as a one-way trade in emotions. She takes her own way out. But perhaps Ralph did love. Perhaps that’s why he reacted as he did. Trespasses is a short novel that must be read slowly. Many of the apparently mundane passages seem to contain clues about the characters, none of whom exhibit any of the expected clichés.

There are neither heroes nor villains here, only people. But they are people portrayed almost in shorthand, in a way that any of us might meet them, incompletely, in real-life encounters. Thus some simple passages benefit from being read like poetry. There are multiple references to events that are described from different perspectives – a visit to the zoo, a sexual experience, a walk with a father and his lady-freind, a meal remembered.

Trespasses is in part an experimental novel, an attempt to blend innovative style and form with content to form a whole. It does not succeed completely, but it comes very close. Many readers will not cope with its initial demands first time of asking. But it is also a thought-provoking and deeply moving human story. The characters become thoroughly three dimensional but, like most people, they are likeable only in part. It takes real writing skill to bring such people to life, even via their deaths.

Marriage under scrutiny - A review of Jude The Obscure by Thomas Hardy

In the postscript to the preface of Jude The Obscure, Thomas Hardy quotes a German reviewer of the novel. Sue Bridehead, the heroine, was described there as “the first delineation in fiction of the woman … of the feminist movement – the slight pale ‘bachelor’ girl – the intellectualised, emancipated bundle of nerves” that modern conditions were producing. The book’s reception ‘cured’ Hardy of the desire to write another novel, and all of the above happened before the dawn of the twentieth century.

Jude The Obscure is a novel about relationships within marriage. Hardy’s opinion was that legal ties between men and women ought to be breakable once the union had achieved dysfunction. It was an opinion that differed from that expected by the age. It prompted a bishop to burn the book, rather than the writer, who was unavailable at the time. Thomas Hardy’s Jude Fawley was adopted into a baker’s family, and harboured an ambition to self-teach himself into a classical education in Christminster’s learned colleges.

His schoolmaster, Mr Phillotson helped a little. Jude’s ambition was always somewhat far fetched, though he applied himself diligently to his studies and achieved a great deal. In his formative years, he also learned the stonemason’s trade to allow the earning of a living. On a country walk he then took up with Arabella, the daughter of a pig farmer. Having found himself stuck, he tried to learn how to stick real pigs but somehow the penetration never came easy. The couple parted, apparently childless. Sue, Jude’s cousin and thus a co-member of a family reputed for its marital failures, was always a soul mate for the young man. But she never quite seemed up to the task of giving herself, giving of her self. Thus, when she married Phillotson, the much older, staid and perhaps already failed schoolmaster, his lack of demands on her fit exactly with her assumptions about how married life would progress. Sue certainly knew what she wanted from life and did everything in her power to secure it. Safety, security, respectability, perhaps property were top of her list.

Arabella, the pig farming barmaid who lured the naïve Jude, was similarly single-minded in pursuing her own, rather different interests. After leaving Jude, she takes up with a new man and hops it to Australia, apparently for good. Sue and Phillotson finally dissolve their marriage by mutual consent to allow Sue to pursue her desires. She and Jude, who love one another dearly, then make their lives together. They do not marry. They live as brother and sister, with lust on one side of the bed and revulsion on the other. A child arrives by train. The wizened-looking boy is Jude’s, Arabella claiming she was pregnant before the couple separated. Sue and Jude offer a home for the waif, and then two more whose family fortunes have fallen on bad times.

And then tragedy appears. Their world falls apart. Sue craves the responsibility of marriage, perhaps merely for the respectability she has lost, so she returns to a new marriage with Phillotson. As before, it’s just for the show of it. Jude develops consumption. What happens in Jude The Obscure is the meat of the book. How it happens is less important than how the characters justify their actions, effectively their reactions to what life offers in response to their imagined aspirations. How these people seek to justify themselves tells much of what they think is expected of them by others, by the society at large. Thus the novel appears to be a study – even a treatise - in selfishness melded with self-obsession, but this is always shrouded in a coded justification that cites the need for social, societal, even sanctified heavenly approval.

In many ways, Jude The Obscure’s men are its victims, its women coldly triumphant, its tone vaguely misogynist. It has little time for the establishment, which is often portrayed as a conspiracy to promote misery. Christminster, Oxford in other words, is thought of as a great centre of high and fearless thought. But in reality it is “a nest of commonplace schoolmasters whose characteristic is timid obsequiousness to tradition.” The alternative, self-congratulatory selfishness did not appear to be much better. Thus Jude The Obscure has much to say about our own time, about public virtue and the need to live according to the socially expected.

Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz

Like father, like son… This could be the motto that underpins Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz. This might be a rather flippant way of summarising a novel approaching 250,000 words, and yes, there is much more than this in the Egyptian Nobel Prize Winner’s book. But it should be said at the outset that it is family relationships that dominate the book. 

The work has a broad canvas, but its substance is generally writ small, often within the walls of the family home. Palace Walk is the first of Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, a series that spans that spans Egypt’s twentieth century. It features the family of al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al Jawad, a shopkeeper. Strangely, there seems to be little that is seen from his point of view, except of course that which he demands. Throughout he remains somewhat aloof, even inscrutable. I would not want to claim this to be a deliberate portrayal of paternal power. But whatever the case, planned or implied, these sketches of family relations are wonderfully credible as well as enlightening.

By contrast, we see much through the eyes of Amina, Ahmad’s long-suffering wife, who appears to tolerate her husband’s nightly excesses without either question or judgment. She even acts independently, just once, and is made to pay for it. There are two daughters, Khadija and Aisha. Khadija, the elder, has unfortunately inherited her father’s looks. Aisha, by contrast, is known for her beauty, and there is much discussion of potential husbands, associated with much anguish on the subject of who should marry first.

The sons are very different characters, but perhaps they each display different aspects of their father. The older ones of course develop an eye for the local talent and this leads to unexpected encounters with their father in unfamiliar surroundings in which he displays talents that no-one in the family suspected he had. The other talents on show are very much anticipated. When the youngest son befriends members of the British garrison in Cairo at the end of World War One, he is treated very much as a clown, a figure of fun, a role he seems to enjoy. This is clearly not dissimilar to the way the British appear to want to treat the country, not to mention the hated Australians.

Later, when this particular generation marches to demand political representation and power, it is British bullets that deny all rights. Like father, like son, the issues go round and round. Does anything change? If the reader approaches palace Walk as if it were a nineteenth century novel, its style, length and content will provide great enjoyment and insight. But don’t expect in this great work overt philosophy, analysis or comment. Egypt as described, especially within this family, was just not that sort of place.

None To Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer

Life often presents an illusion of constancy or even continuity. They are illusions, of course, because ultimately we can never take anything for granted. Just ask the last friend who died. Equally, however, there are always things that we work towards, goals whose continued non-achievement gives life both meaning and direction. Surely we fear their achievement, because everything would then have to be redefined, a process that would prove at least messy.

This is the territory of Nadine Gordimer’s novel None To Accompany Me. For me the title signifies how every individual, when confronted with the necessity for change, must pursue personal, perhaps even selfish goals.

In None To Accompnay Me Nadine Gordimer presents characters in a newly-liberated, but as yet ill-defined South Africa. The struggle has been long. It has also been defining for its participants. It allowed differences to be ignored, splits to be papered over. It convinced some of a necessity to over-react, to over-compensate. 

And then, when the uniting goal is achieved, all realise that opposing is a less complicated act than supporting. We all know what we are against, but what we are for can only be argued. Like Byron’s Prisoner Of Chillon, experiencing the security of captivity can seem reassuring when the unknown of freedom is finally achieved.

Vera is as central a character as any. She’s white, married to Ben, has a daughter and has worked for liberation. She devoted just less than her life to the cause, less because she has retained an element of selfishness in her personal relations. So loosely intertwined are all of the strands of her life that change in one can apparently unravel all of them. And then there’s Dydimus and Sibongile, also lifelong devotees of the cause. Opportunity begins to divide them. So does their past. There are new positions of responsibility to be adopted, politics to be worked out, compromises to be made. But there are also deeds from the past lacked away, skeletons that can be marched out for other’s convenience.

And not all of them are personal. The major issues of the time appear in the book. Cultural and economic differences between black and white cannot be escaped. Neither, it seems, can the prevalence of violence and crime. A pressing need to redistribute land will have to engage in battle with those who own it and want to exploit it. A nation whose majority has never been asked its opinion has to learn to live with the fact that the question’s answers now promote division above the assumed unity of the past. And, if this is not already sufficient complication, those released from struggle must also come to terms with a generational shift.

Progeny do not seem to have the same values. Whereas community was demanded by struggle, freedom promotes the individual, allows personal decisions that the older generation would not have tolerated. A reader looking for a linear experience with characters wheeled on and off the set in order to assist a plot’s continued progress will truly hate None To Accompany Me. A reader with the patience to get to know people, to empathise with them and share their dilemmas will appreciate the non-linearity, non-literalness of Nadine Gordimer’s book. It is certainly a novel of its time, a period of uncertainly presenting perhaps an illusory cusp between a known past and an unknown future. Eventually we must ask if this state is anything unusual.

Worst Fears by Fay Weldon

Fay Weldon’s novel Worst Fears starts and finishes with bereavement. It examines how a woman deals with simultaneous loss and revealed betrayal. Alexandra is an actress, if I might be excused such gender specificity. She is also quite successful. She is currently appearing in a London West End production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. She is therefore away from home a lot. Her husband Ned has just died, apparently discovered on the floor of the family home by a visitor. It was a sudden and massive heart attack. Alexandra wonders what might have brought it on. She takes time off work, thus allowing an understudy temporarily to take her role. 

She returns to the rickety, old, antique-stuffed cottage in the country. It is perhaps a rural idyll that now has to be rewritten. Her worst fears are that there is more than meets the eye. She also has some hopes, but from the start it seems unlikely they will be realised. She is greeted by the dog, Diamond, who seems to know something is wrong. She contacts local acquaintances, Lucy and Abbie, whom she suspects know more than they are saying. Hamish, her husband’s brother, comes to stay to help sort things out. Sascha, Alexandra and Ned’s little boy is with Irene, Alexandra’s mother. It happens often when Alexandra is away at work. 

Her husband Ned, as usual needed space at home to concentrate. He was, by the way, was an authority on theatre, a critic, an expert on Ibsen and also interested in costume design. As Alexandra delves into recent events, she discovers a tangle of interests, relationships and liaisons. All of them have implications for her, despite the fact that she was often not directly involved. The protagonists relate directly to one another. They socialise, if that might be the right word. They interact. They act. They play-act. Alexandra’s worst fears begin to materialise. Ned’s surname is Ludd. It is surely not a coincidence that he shares a name with one of the wreckers of history. He is the only developed male character in the novel, despite his being dead. He never speaks, but his presence pervades, perhaps even controls everything that the still living can do. The truths of his life have been at best partial, his interests specifically personal. It seems that the women are positioning themselves to lay claim to ownership of his memory. 

And thus recollection, rumour and revelation unfold their tangle. The above may suggest a rather one-dimensional approach towards a feminist moral, but it is much more subtle than that. This thread is there, of course, and is epitomised when Alexandra’s part in A Doll’s House – itself a play about women and emancipation – is exploited to success by her understudy via sexual stereotyping. And Worst Fears opens with two of the women involved viewing Ned’s body, their attention drawn to a part of his anatomy that is to become one of the book’s main actors. Their reverence is sincere as they genuflect before their flaccid altar. This accepted, it seems also that the book deals more fundamentally with the more universal issues of self-interest and selfishness. All of these characters, despite their often social or private relations, are in conflict. They compete with one another and even with themselves. When liberation becomes a possibility, it is revealed as no more than an opportunity for even greater self-obsession, a means of shutting out the interest of others. 

 As the plot of Worst Fears unfolds, the impression it leaves is that these accomplished, middle-class, apparently comfortable people are all still engaged in a primeval struggle for raw animal dominance. The currency that is hoarded in the process remains the same as it would have been if the characters had never evolved from quadruped apes in a forest gang. There is no liberation here, for anyone, except, that is, via their words, the very weapons they use to prod, punch, pierce the reality that effectively confines them to themselves. These could be anyone’s worst fears. View the book on amazon Worst Fears

Love, etc by Julian Barnes

It’s hard to imagine a more perfect marriage of form and content than Love, etc, in which Julian Barnes continues the story of characters that came to life in Talking It Over. If, however, this marriage is fine, then equally the marriage of Gillian and Oliver is not. And neither, for that matter, was the previous one that temporarily joined Gillian and Stuart.  

Julian Barnes tells the story of this love triangle entirely in the first person. Gillian, Oliver and Stuart appear like talking heads on a screen to relate their own side of things. Since we left them at the end of Talking It Over, Stuart has moved to the States, where he has become a successful businessman and has found a new partner. Oliver, meanwhile, having won the hand of fair Gillian, has started his family but has fallen on hard times, an experience he seems to regard merely as a passing phase, except that it’s clearly not a phase and neither does it pass.

Re-enter Stuart, and thus the situation progresses. Occasionally, especially when the principal actors mention them, minor characters appear to have their often substantial say. There is an ex, a new girlfriend, an occasional mother. Also, the children have their say, their naiveté as confused as it is innocent, their vagueness inherited, perhaps, from their personal environment.

And so a story unfolds. Oliver is as full of theatre and bravura as he was throughout Talking It Over, but now it rings more of a bluff, a screen erected for self-protection rather than an extrovert’s sheen. Unemployment and illness seem to have exhausted him. Stuart, having made his fortune, is on an up and begins to reassert his desire to occupy the position he has always coveted, the space by Gillian’s side.

There are surprises in store, surprises for the characters and for the reader. But what Julian Barnes communicates with such subtlety, skill and ease are the inconsistencies of human character, the incongruities of events, the contradictions and deceptions of behaviour, and the illusions these confusions create. These people all act primarily out of self-interest. But then who doesn’t? That’s the point. And thus the process takes all of us to places we have all been, but have often failed to notice or acknowledge, even if we have admitted and recognised our motives, which most of us have not.

Love, etc is a brilliant book, brilliantly conceived and brilliantly executed with a lightness of touch that leaves us wholly surprised when we encounter a fundamentally serious point. The plot? Who cares?

 View this book on amazon Love, etc

Lives In Time - The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler

For me, The Amateur Marriage represents the sixth time I have read one of Anne Tyler’s novels. On the surface it’s the story of Michael and Pauline. They meet by chance in 1941 in Anton’s, the grocery store run by Michael’s family. 1941, perhaps incidentally, is the year Anne Tyler was born. There was a war to be fought, of course, a war that affected both of their lives. But there’s a marriage, and a child, a daughter named Lindy. Others follow, a boy and another girl.

For Michael and Pauline, life progresses, as does their marriage. But twists and turns take them to places they have never visited. As with other novels by Anne Tyler, there is an obvious and consistent linearity about its time.

A reviewer has to be careful with detail, because what happens to this novel’s characters is a large part of how it happens, and thus an integral part of the book’s rationale. To some extent, a listing of the plot, event by event, would render a reading unnecessary.

But after a handful of Anne Tyler’s books, I am now convinced there is much more going on in them than mere story-telling. In the past I have found her characters shallow, rather self-obsessed, selfish, perhaps. They are people who have lives outside the family, but people who seem pre-occupied with the familiar and seem rarely to confront ideas or experience outside its apparently defining, but only sometimes reassuring confines.

And perhaps that’s the point. It is an American dream, a libertarian ideal under a microscope. It is analysed, picked apart, sometimes reconstructed. The characters are affected by political, social, economic and cultural change. Their lives are materially transformed by the same forces that lay waste and occasionally reinvent their home town, Baltimore. But they, themselves, are mere recipients of these effects, appearing to play no part in their instigation or, it seems, their analysis. They live their lives. They are pushed around by experience, jostled by life, reflect little, internalise everything, only occasionally recognising life’s potential to reform. Time thus moves on. Inevitability looms unexpectedly.

It is not a criticism of Anne Tyler, her novel or its characters to proffer the opinion that everything seems to happen in an intellectual wasteland. People go to college, do law degrees, become involved with good causes, procreate, but moments of reflection seem to be confined to what breed of dog might not provoke allergy. Perhaps that’s the point. Such things are the stuff of life. Time goes on.

View this book on amazon The Amateur Marriage

The South by Colm Toibin

The South by Colm Toibin is an intense, though fitful chronicle of a woman’s life, a life as yet incomplete. It presents a patchwork of detail amidst vast tracts of unknown, like a painting that has a suggestion of complete outline interspersed with patches of intricate detail. Thus, eventually, we know some amazing things about Katherine Proctor and we have shared much of her life. She remains, paradoxically, largely anonymous, however, as she probably does to herself.

The title carries an agenda for Katherine Proctor’s life, since aspects of the word provide setting and context for phases in her life. We meet her having just left her husband and her ten-year-old son. She was unhappily married to Tom. Richard was her spitting image. We never really get to know why she left, why she so definitively broke with a past that appeared both secure and fulfilled. A part of her motives may have sprung from her status as a Protestant in Enniscorthy, a small town near the sea in the south of Ireland, in the south-east. She thus inherited a status that bore its own history, a history of which she was aware, but minus its detail. But it could only have been part of an explanation, because it was her husband and her life, her private concerns, that she fled.

In the 1950s, she went south to Spain, settling in Barcelona. There she met Miguel, a man with his own history. He had fought with the anarchists in the Civil War. He still had friends, colleagues from the fight. Katherine falls for him. They move to a stone house in the Pyrenees. He paints. She paints. She bears him a child. Katherine meets Michael Graves, an Irishman, doubly coincidentally also from her home town. He is working in Barcelona. He seems to be an ailing, gently cynical character, who is clearly besotted with her. When things with Miguel turn unexpectedly sour, he offers solace and comfort.

This time, however, Katherine had nothing to do with the split, a separation that also took away her young daughter. She painted more, hibernated. And then there grew an urge to trace the son she had left behind many years before. He was still in their family house, the one she had deserted, where he lived with his wife and daughter. There are tensions. They are solved. Michael Graves is also back in Ireland. Katherine rediscovers the south, her homeland, through painting it. Though penniless, she gets by, sometimes appearing to live off her own resources of passion and commitment. Though perhaps not conscious of it herself, she is always striving for a fulfilment she believes she never attains. In fact, she has it all along. Though a victim of circumstance, she is ready to grasp any opportunity and live it. 

“Only a protestant would go into sea so cold,” Michael says to her. She gets wet. He doesn’t. And in the end, though we still hardly know her, we like Katherine proctor, and we respect her. The South alternates its narrative between first and third person in a subtle way tat allows the reader to sculpt its main character. She becomes wholly tangible, but rarely are we told anything about her. She lives. We meet her, and we react. Colm Toibin’s achievement in this, his first novel, is considerable.

View this book on amazon The South

The End Of The Affair by Graham Greene

Anyone who has lived in London could place the Common that forms a geographical centrepiece in The End Of The Affair by Graham Greene. It doesn’t really matter if it’s the particular place one thinks it is, because it’s what happens in the houses at or near its periphery that is central to the book. And the relationships between man and woman, between classes, between interests could be anywhere.

Maurice Bendrix is a resident of the suburban, unfashionable, southern extremity of the open space. He has rented rooms in which he labours over his writing. He is a novelist with several books and some critical acclaim to his name. He is a passionate man, a sceptic, perhaps in every sense, and he is nothing less than scheming in the way that he manipulates friends, acquaintances and probably anyone in order to conduct his research, and perhaps to secure his other interests as well.

It was during one such foray into the mind of a fictional civil servant he was trying to invent that he began to see Sarah Miles. She was the wife of a real civil servant and the affair was constructed to enter her husband’s mind, though it took a more conventional initial route. Sarah and Henry, her ministry mandarin husband, live in a large freehold on the fashionable north side of the Common.

One feels that, left entirely to his own devices, Maurice would not have a great deal in common with the lifestyle of the Miles household. But when he meets Sarah, he finds a passionate woman whose devotion to the institution of her marriage is not matched by the satisfaction she derives from it. Sarah’s frustrations are great, her needs are obvious, and the affair with Maurice ignites. Their passionate, highly physical affair lasts some years. One day in 1944, however, a robot bomb lands outside Maurice’s house and he is injured in the blast. Initially Sarah thinks he is dead. Then, somehow, their relationship ends, maybe because she seems almost disappointed that he has survived.

They see nothing of one another for two years. Maurice, of course, assumes she has moved on to richer pastures, to another more novel lover, who can satisfy her demands in new, less committed ways. He hires a private detective to check on her. He talks to her husband and others with whom she has been acquainted. What he discovers is a surprising change of direction in her life and her priorities, a change that neither he nor Sarah’s husband can either explain or accept.

Ultimately The End Of The Affair is about the space between people. Relationships are always limited, no matter how intimately they are shared. The Common, the geographical space between Maurice and Sarah, becomes a symbol of the no man’s land that must be crossed when people interact. We enter into this territory when it is our intention to go part-way to meet the psyche of another, but perhaps we never really leave home. The territory can only be entered, but probably not crossed, when there is mutuality, at least a partially shared desire to meet in the unsafe space. But it remains a position that can be retracted, a space that can be abandoned at will.

But what emerges in The End Of the Affair is that this space is specific to particular relationships. Scratch the surface of a different association of that same person, and it will reveal a different territory, perhaps not even sharing recognisable landmarks with the first. Perhaps, therefore, we project onto others what we want them to be. Perhaps relationships are never really shared, and remain at best pragmatic and, more likely, ultimately selfish. In the end, The End Of The Affair suggests that they are not, but it is only a suggestion.

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The Heather Blazing by Colm Toibin

The Heather Blazing by Colm Toibin is a deeply emotional, deeply moving book. It’s the story of Eamon Redmond, a complex man, grown on tender roots, influential friends, a keen intellect and a tangible distance between himself and those whom he loves. The book is set in three parts, each of which dips in and out of time. 

We are with Eamon as a child in the small Wexford seaside villages he forever regards as home. Coastal erosion changes them over time and provides, in itself, a metaphor of aging, both of the individual and the community. Eamon’s schoolteacher father is a significant figure, both locally as a renowned teacher, and nationally as a result of what he accomplished in his youth in the furtherance of Irish independence and political development. Eamon’s mother died when he was young, an act for which, perhaps, he could never forgive her. 

We also see Eamon as an adolescent, hormones abuzz, becoming aware of adulthood, a physical, intellectual and, for him, a political transformation. But it is also a time when his father’s illness complicates his life. Throughout, we are never sure whether Eamon’s perception of such difficulty remains primarily selfish, driven by self-interest. If we are honest, none of us knows how that equation works out. 

We are with Eamon when he meets Carmel, his future and only wife. They share a political commitment and a life together. And they have two children. Naimh becomes pregnant at a crucial time. Donal is successful in his own way, but perhaps inherited his father’s distance in relationships. And then there’s another time and another Eamon, the professional, the legal Eamon. At first he practices law, but later, at a relatively early age, he accepts a politically-driven appointment to the judiciary. He has powerful sponsors, but also toys a little with the idea that he is being kicked upstairs. The moment, however, is his, no matter how dubious the source of the patronage. 

And then there are the cases that he has to judge, cases that impact in their own way upon the substance of his own life, his own family, whatever that might be, however the entity might be defined. It remains a substance that is perceived mainly by others, it seems, as he enacts his training and judges other people’s experience according to rules he has dutifully learned so that he might apply them dispassionately. 

So Colm Toibin mixes these time frames and circumstances in each of the book’s three sections. We are also presented with some intellectual arguments arising from the substance of the judge’s daily routine, issues with which he must grapple in his assessment of competing interests. Eventually he must address the dichotomy of terrorism versus political action, a definition that, years ago, might have left his own father on this side or that, if ever he had been identified. Eamon’s friends, in hindsight, might not have been the most worthy or honest sponsors, and so, again only with hindsight, we might question his judgment. But the pursuance of interests, like life, itself, is a process, and a process that The Heather Blazing describes in its richness and illusory permanence. 

As the Wexford coast erodes, Eamon ages, changes, succeeds, fails, loves and loves again, all in his own way. He engages us, and yet we, like the trusting, thoughtful Carmel, his wife, we never really know him, and we never really understand why we feel that way. If only he knew himself. A quite beautiful book. Life goes on. 

Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai

In her novel, Fasting, Feasting, Anita Desai eventually accomplishes what many writers attempt and then fail to achieve. She uses light touch, simple language, uncomplicated structure, but at the same time addresses some very big issues and makes a point.

Uma and Arun are children of Mamapapa, the apparently indivisible common identity that parents present. These parents, however, are not at all alike. Mama is protective, perhaps selfish, and not a little indolent. Papa is a parsimonious control freak who locks away the telephone because someone might use it. But they are at least together. Their relationship has survived, despite the long wait for a son, and their disappointment at his disability.

Uma and Arun also have a sister, Aruna. She is bright and pretty, but in her own way she is also disabled, because she is a woman. Arun’s disability is visible, but Aruna’s exists because of the her society’s preconceptions about women.

Uma is not pretty, nor is she academic. She wears thick glasses and has fits. And so in the middle class society the family inhabits, Uma can pursue only two possible roles. Either she can be married off, or she can become a labourer, a near slave for the family. The former, of course, is the same as the latter. Only the location is different. For Uma marriage doesn’t happen. It does, but it fails before it starts, since the groom was already married and merely wanted to collect another dowry. The arranged marriages of both Uma’s sister and her cousin also fail. Initially well starred, both end tragically.

The first part of Fasting, Feasting suggests a domestic drama, a faintly comic family trying to cope with their own cultural minority status within India’s vastness. It takes awhile for the tragic elements of the story to surface. But when they do, they also disappoint, because only the two disabled characters, Uma and Arun, eventually display any honesty or compassion, everyone else being merely selfish, even those who kill themselves to end the pain. For women, it seems, even achievement is nothing but an asset to assist their trade. When offered a place at Oxford, a girl’s duty precludes acceptance and necessity frames the letter as evidence of her greater eligibility. So what seemed to be a pleasant family tale of the idiosyncrasies of culture becomes a tragedy, and a tragedy for all women. Ugly, unmemorable Uma is the only apparent survivor, and that only because she is not even a competitor. She exists on the scraps of life she is allowed.

But what of Arun, the disabled boy? Well he is quite a bright lad. He goes to university in the USA, and to an institution with status in Massachusetts. But what is he to do in the holidays when the college is closed? We can’t afford to bring his all the way home, concludes parsimonious Papa.

So Arun lodges with the Pattons, an all-American nuclear family, an American Dream of sorts, mum, dad, two kids, one of each. But Dad is a laconic type. A beer from the fridge keeps him quiet. The son has all kinds of ambitions, and yet none that are realistic. Mom is an emotional wreck. She years for something in her confusion, but has not idea what it might be. And her daughter is bulimic. Happy families.

So through Arun’s eyes, and to some extent as a result of his culturally challenging presence, Anita Desai presents a picture of middle class American life that is utterly dysfunctional. But it is again the women who are most deeply affected. Mom does all the shopping and cooking to feed the unappreciative men and the daughter who cannot eat. She fantasises about Arun’s cultural authenticity, sees in him qualities for which she yearns. The daughter is a complete head case. She is fat wanting to be thin, eating to fast, stuffing sweets until she vomits, perhaps a slave to a male-generated concept of female perfection. And Arun witnesses all of this. Eventually, in his deformity, he is the only presence that is not self-obsessed.

The title is important. Fasting, Feasting presents apparent opposites, two contrasting, if imbalanced scenarios, India and the USA. It offers two deformed observers, Uma and Arun. It unpicks two contrasting cultures and finds that women are slaves in both. The opposites are thus ultimately similar, hardly opposed.

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Fasting, Feasting

Masterpiece: On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

The fly cover of On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan describes the book as “a short novel of remarkable depth by a writer at the height of his powers”. On Chesil Beach was recently short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, but lost out to Anne Enright’s The Gathering. I have read both books and, for me at least, what is so amazing is the mere fact that two such utterly different concepts could have been considered for the same prize. It is reassuringly astounding that the “genre” of literary fiction can be home to every style, every emotion, every approach, every outcome, everything imaginable and much that is real. 

Those who write book blurbs are often prone to hyperbole. The greatest, the best, the most, the biggest, the most superlative are terms of mundane commonplace. The term “best selling” is usually an empty platitude. “Real” often signifies “very”, but without the latter’s imagined meaning. 

So what can we make of “a short novel of remarkable depth by a writer at the height of his powers”? In the case of On Chesil Beach this blurb is an understatement, but it is essentially accurate and justified. If I were to write a blurb for this Ian McEwan novel, I would use a single word: masterpiece. I will offer only the merest summary of the plot to provide context, because the book effectively deals with just one event, a newlywed couple’s wedding night. What happens to them is the book’s crucial point, so to reveal it would render the reading less rewarding. 

Suffice it to say that Edward and Florence are newlyweds and they are in a Dorset hotel for their honeymoon. This is the early 1960s, an era when sexuality was not discussed or even approached in the manner of even half a decade later. Edward and Florence are products of their age and of their upbringing. Ian McEwan tells us much of these aspects of their characters in asides and cameos throughout the narrative. 

When I reviewed the same writer’s Saturday, I described the book as time turned inside out. In that book, across the span of a single day, an entire family is presented through its past, its aspirations, its identities. On Chesil Beach accomplishes a similar feat across a smaller canvas, but in a much more concentrated form, replete with comment, detail, analysis and observation. Florence is solidly middle class, Edward less so. She is a violinist from a musical family. He likes Chuck Berry. They are deeply in love and they marry, but they remain children of their age, and there is the rationale for the book, an examination of their private ideas on how to cope with adulthood, alongside an account of the practicalities. 

On Chesil Beach has limited objectives, lives mainly in the events of a single evening, but, like Saturday, turn its time inside out, so we have beautifully detailed pictures of both of the nuptials’ families. Coping, or not, is what characterised the age. On Chesil Beach is a masterpiece, beautifully conceived and executed. Do read it. 

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Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons is a giant of a book, a giant because of the way in which it gently wraps you into its characters’ world and allows you to feel their lives being lived. It’s a giant of a book in a very small world, a world inhabited by Maggie and her husband, Ira, and, it seems, by precious little else. They are long married, happy, perhaps without really knowing it, and replete with generally unacknowledged failure.

Breathing Lessons starts with Maggie picking up the family car after its repair job and spruce up. She immediately runs into a truck and doesn’t stop. She and Ira then head off on a long drive to a funeral of a long lost friend. Memories revisit high school and adolescence as the widow attempts to recreate her wedding service to bid farewell to her husband. The songs her friends originally sang turn out to be highly inappropriate, depending on your point of view, and some don’t want to try to recreate their youth and so become dignified spoilsports. Some old scores are retallied, none settled, of course.

Then Ira and Maggie set off home and decide to call in on their son’s estranged wife and their granddaughter, a girl of seven, it turns out, they haven’t seen since she was an infant. On the way there is a strange encounter with a fellow traveller. Maggie invents a story, for some reason, which he believes. She pursues the scam, is as duplicitous as hell and carries the whole thing off as if it had been gospel from the start. A strange episode.

Maggie is surprised that she does not recognise her granddaughter. Perhaps Anne Tyler is suggesting that the only really important things for Maggie are those she keeps within the confines of her head. Fiona, the estranged daughter-in-law, seems surprisingly accommodating, even more so when details emerge of how poorly treated she has been by Maggie and her son, Jesse. Maggie and Ira clearly weren’t too good at being parents, or grandparents, either.

Maggie convinces herself that she can get the separated couple back together and cajoles her daughter-in-law and granddaughter to motor back to Baltimore with them. She phones her son and arranges for him to call round later that day, after the travellers have reached the family home. It seems that everyone except Maggie is both indifferent and sceptical, but, for some reason, everyone goes along with her suggestions. And, of course, it all goes nowhere. None of these folk, by the way, could be described as intellectual. Not one of them seems to have read a book or, indeed, ever suffered the trauma of a moment of self-reflection since birth. All anyone ever does is react, and then usually wrongly.

Maggie is the book’s central and essential character. Ira, her husband, for the most part busies himself driving, playing solitaire or teaching Frisbee. But basically he seems to hover around the edge of Maggie’s universe, occasionally putting his foot in it by pointing out the odd reality here and there, realities that Maggie expends massive resources trying to ignore or deny. She makes mistakes. She crashes the car every time she drives (two out of two in the book). She constantly imagines herself as God’s gift, a sort of Mrs Fix-It for everyone else’s problems. But she is singularly unable to organise her own existence. She is overweight and yet overeats. She is full of self-justification, almost invariably based on obviously false premises. And she seems to have developed absolutely no powers of self-analysis or reflection, even when reality occasionally forces its way into her existence to contradict her assumptions and undermine her intentions.

I have to admit that I tried to start the book at least three times without success. For me, Maggie’s character was just not quite credible and, if it were credible, I could find no reason why I would want to read about such a person. I persevered this time, however, and the result was a rewarding insight into an uncultured and eventually valueless approach to life that, I suspect, Anne Tyler suspects may be widespread, though I feel that she would not be as judgmental about it as myself.

In the end, all of the characters in Breathing Lessons are failures, who consistently render their own lives a chaotic mess, both inside and outside their heads. They are surrounded by their own mistakes and missed opportunities. These are people who really work at their incompetence and succeed brilliantly. I can’t help feeling that at least one of them, in the normal run of things, would display an intellect superior to a demented parrot and a facility for self-reflection greater than a sooty fireback. But no one ever does. Perhaps that’s the point.