Why did I write Eileen McHugh, a life remade?

I wanted to explore several strands, the first and most important being the interrelationship between popular and populist, understanding the latter term in its colloquial sense of wanting to achieve popularity, possibly at all costs. I have long found it intriguing why pop music, for instance, is assumed to refer to ‘popular’ music when something over ninety per cent of releases never achieve popularity on any measure. Probably more than ninety per cent of pop is also not from Tajikistan, but we do not call it Tajik music. Thus labelling things by what they are not could be an infinite process! If pop means populist, however, then it makes sense, because this art form seeks, by whatever means, to achieve public notice, sales, profit and the rest, with the stress on the words ‘aspires to achieve’, hence the failure of ninety per cent of the genre. This often leads to an artist compromising an idea to render it saleable. But if an artist does not do that, the work remains unknown, anonymous, unexperienced. How much should an artist in whatever form seek to live within the confines of recognisable genre? And is that possible without compromising what the artist wants to communicate? How far can one go along this road before reproducing cliché?

Eileen McHugh is an artist. She is a sculptor. She seeks no avenues of compromise in her work. Her career was short and unnoticed. Paradoxically, one of her works has achieved viral status on the internet via a photograph posted in the name of Mary Reynolds, who now wants to create a biography of the artist and a discussion of her work so that she can create a museum to display it. She has contacted Eileen’s mother and has the artist’s sketchbooks and notes.

Eileen wanted to tell stories in her work, stories that arose out of the detritus of people’s lives, their bits and pieces of discarded trash. Her work at one stage is described as ‘off the wall’ as well as on it. The form of the book, however, repeatedly illustrates how lives themselves mirror this state. The lives of people who knew the artist become like new works created by Eileen, assemblages of life’s discarded bits and pieces.

Another strand was the obsession that drives artistic expression, if the motivations of populism and profit do not apply. Why exactly did Schubert write over six hundred songs when he never heard a single one of them performed before a paying audience? What motivated the composer Mieczeslaw Wenberg to ‘write for the shelf’? What drove a deaf Beethoven to communicate via sound?

And why is it that we often feel challenged by art? Is it because we have no idea what we like, and prefer to live in the security of liking what we know? Is it because we only trust things with which we have an assumed commercial relationship, so therefore we trust the transactions being offered?

Paradoxically, by the end of Eileen McHugh, the artist herself is perhaps the person we know the least, despite having been the subject of the whole book! If we do not see people as assemblages of their petty likes and dislikes, any of which might change on whim, what is left? Perhaps it remains as anonymous and unknown as ignored work. Our real contribution to humanity, however, artistically or otherwise, is eventually revealed as that which we give to others. Even tragedy can have a positive outcome.

The Wall of the Plague by Andre Brink

At the heart of the book is an obvious but tenuous parallel. Andrea Malgas is an attractive – even stunning – coloured woman from South Africa. She has lived in Europe for several years and has become involved with a film-maker who is researching the plague in Europe, southern France in particular. She has had a number of relationships, the first with a white Englishman beginning in South Africa and thus breaking the law. Association took her to Paris. Paul is the current incumbent and he is the film-maker. Andrea gets a job she does not want, to accompany an ANC exile on a tour of southern France. The initial revulsion turns to attraction and Andrea becomes rather homesick. The obvious parallel that does not work arises out of the juxtaposition of being black or coloured in South Africa and being an outcast in the era of the plague, an illness that makes some victims turn black.

At the heart of the story, always, is Andrea. She seems strangely unable to direct her own life, despite coming over as a thoroughly focused person. It is almost as if by taking control of situations she becomes a victim of them. Mandla (not Mandela!) is revolting to her as far as first impressions go. A few chapters later she is in bed with him, unable to resist a raw physicality that elsewhere she often decries. She is a complex type with a complex past that has consciously and unconsciously always sought to challenge. She similarly seems to reject South Africa and its unacceptable social system and racist laws, but equally can not get the place out of her system.

Eventually the attempt to marry the parallels simply falls apart, and we are left with a psychological analysis of Andrea’s approach to life. It’s an interesting read, but never really captivates. TimeOut on the front cover reviews it as “a very good book”. Let’s leave it at that.

Imaginings of Sand by André Brink - masterpiece

Imaginings of Sand by André Brink is, simply put, a masterpiece. Not only does it bring convincing characters to life, flesh out the history of a people, portray the fortunes of a family coping with imposed and unwanted change, it also addresses one of the main political events of the late twentieth century. And André Brink´s novel does all this without the slightest recourse to polemic or posturing. Its themes and statements emerge from the shared lives of its characters. This is subtle authorship at its most accomplished. How many novels might aspire even to one of these achievements?

We are, as in many works by André Brink, not only in South Africa, but also within the Afrikaner community.  We see things through the eyes of Kristien, who is clearly named after her grandmother, the dying Ouma, who is called Kistina. The difference between the names is both slight and significant. They may be separated by time and by political difference, but by the time history has had a chance to view them both, they may be much more similar than first sight might suggest. They are undoubtedly cast in different landscapes, not only in time, but also in terms of the landmarks that might endow their individual sense of permanence. Not only do their values seem different, surely they conflict, given their different politics and ages. Mid-thirties Kristien, of course, has been politically active, while her grandmother has lived on an Afrikaner farm all her life.

Imaginings of Sand begins with Kristien being summoned back to South Africa, because her grandmother is dying. In London, Kristien has had ties with the African National Congress and has campaigned against Apartheid. Her family, with roots stretching back to the original Voortrekkers are, on the face of things, conventional Afrikaner farmers, complete with black servants and employees alongside attitudes that accept without question the supremacy of the Dutch Reform Church, allied to supreme white skin and thus Apartheid.

The message to Kristien in London arrives as South Africa faces change, just before its first multi-radial elections. Apartheid is already a thing of the past, but not yet officially. Political transition is feared by the Afrikaners and there has been much talk of feared violence, even of bloodbath. Kristien´s family house has been attacked and set on fire. Ouma was very old and perhaps frailer than she liked to admit, but now trauma has taken her close to death. Her doctors expect it to be just a few days hence. Her granddaughter insists she should die at home. She has the place cleaned up and made habitable enough for herself and her grandmother, plus, of course, the servant family.

Once home, Ouma Kristina begins to tell her granddaughter the family history and her own life story. How much of it is truth neither Kristien nor we will ever know. Whatever racial or cultural purity the family in theory might claim, Ouma´s history of their ancestry identifies the inevitable complexity. But a thread that runs throughout is the central vulnerability of women. Sweet children, then playthings and finally enforced child-bearers seems to be the repeated and indeed only pattern. Any deviation assumes a break from both culture and identity, but it is a break that anyone from an Afrikaner community finds almost impossible to accomplish. Publicly condemned for any expression of independence, women are equally damned for any sign of disloyalty to community or family or husband, no matter how inconsiderate, lascivious or even violent he may be. For the first time, Kristien comes to terms with the life her own mother led before she died all too young.

History seems to have repeated itself a number of times. Anna, Kristien´s sister, seems to be respectably but unhappily married to Casper, who is both Boer and boor. When he is not chasing a woman´s tail, he is busy organising what can only be described as a vigilante force to anticipate problems of majority rule. They seem determined to get their retaliation in first.

And so the tale of family and national history unfolds. The politics of state, community, family and sex develop and intertwine. Race, gender and class play their roles as well. But yet this novel never descends into polemic. It is never less than credible, never less than real. Its style, indeed, in often an African variety of magical realism that both amplifies and enlivens the already fantastical stories of Ouma Kristina. The plot always surprises, even to the very end, but none of these events, however, bizarre, is anything less than credible, From the start, it is a masterpiece.

Family Album by Penelope Lively.

One comment that is often made about many writers - usually women - is that all too often the material does not venture beyond the garden gate. Domesticity rules, reigns and all too often stifles. Except, of course, when it falls into the grasp of a truly expert writer, when these self-imposed limits open up a veritable universe of experience.

In Family Album, Penelope Lively often gets far beyond the garden gate, but strangely, she convinces us that in the minds of her characters, that limit is a permanent horizon, the crossing of which will never be possible. The garden gate in question gives us open access to Allersmead, a sprawling three story Victorian middle class dwelling, perfect for a large family with live-in staff. And, on opening the front door to be greeted by the ubiquitous smell of fine family cooking, it is this arrangement that we encounter. Charles, aloof, bookish, perhaps a snob and utterly dedicated to the pursuit of pseudo-academic, self-defined literary explorations in his study, is married to Alison, the wife and mother. They have uncountable children -  is it five, is it six? - and also host a Scandinavian maid-cum-nanny-cum-home-help-cum-whatever-else, as we will learn.

Allersmead, the Victorian pile, is witness to the myriad of events, games, meals, relationships, disputes, treaties, failures, successes and accommodations that family life inevitably entails. Penelope Lively seems not to claim that these people are anything special, though they clearly are. By virtue of their individuality and personality, they are unique, both as individuals and as a family. They are nothing special. But then everything about them is special. Just how does Charles manage to keep writing books that sell? What is he actually doing behind that closed sturdy door? And what do the children get up to when they disappear to play in the cellar? And from where does Alison draw her inspiration for all those delectable table treats? It is, perhaps, a mystery.

Do not expect a plot. There is none. But who needs a plot when lives are drawn as perfectly as this? The lives themselves, the family life indeed as a character in its own right become the plot. We are drawn in as a guest and observer, possibly even participant. And it is the accuracy, poignancy and precision of observation and expression at which we marvel. This is writing of the utmost beauty and skill. Every word seems crafted to supply a detail that would be lacking in a thousand pictures. Genius at work.

At least that's how Charles might see it. Ingrid, the Scandinavian maid, moves out for a while and family hiatus ensues. She returns and lives are picked up where they were left off. Except that perhaps some family members have picked up more than they knew. Lives diverge. Children grow up  and start to assert their individuality, their personal priorities. Where will it lead than? And will it be where they wanted to go. Only time will tell.

Family Album is one of the most beautiful, most moving books it is possible to imagine. Be drawn along with these lives, and there will be no consequences, for there perhaps never are. We become what we are, we aspire to what we imagine, and we achieve precisely what we achieve. Our goal is to be human, though not all of us achieves that particular end. We err. We lie, perhaps. We deceive, do we? In Penelope Lively's Family Album we will find all the snapshots, all the pictures that tell the story, but it's the words that count, so few, saying so much, each one worth a thousand pictures.

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan is a subtle, moving book about espionage. There is a touch of oxymoron about that, somewhere. No-one is killed. There are no guns. No-one is shot, poisoned, dismembered or tortured, at least not physically, within these pages. There’s plenty of anguish, however, but this is usually personal and more often than not self-inflicted. Sweet Tooth demonstrates that drama, excitement and suspense can be generated by a plot that puts people and their relationships at the fore. After all, intelligence is born of people’s thoughts, and is rarely generated by bullets or car chases.

Sirena Frome (rhymes with plume) has been brought up with her sister by a Church of England Bishop as father, married to a rather frumpish wife. The background is dismissed quickly, but returns occasionally. Ian McEwan via Sirena tells us that it’s not important. What is significant is Sirena’s love of reading and associated ability to absorb texts at speed and, alongside that, her seemingly innate facility for mathematics. She just can’t see the problems that others refuse. She ought to have studied English, but pragmatism choses the mathematics option and Cambridge embraces her, though not happily. She is no ordinary mathematician, as her university is soon to find out.

It must also be noted that Sirena Frome (rhymes with plume) was also a child of the sixties and has developed a liberal approach to and a distinct taste for sex. She is blonde, young and desirable, certainly not dumb. Wherever she goes, it seems not to take long before sensuality bubbles to a boiling surface.

And thus Sirena leads her author, Ian McEwan, into several relationships of varying frequency, quality and intensity. There’s a bloke who realises, through her, that he prefers other blokes. There’s an affair with an older man, a Cambridge tutor with a complex marriage and, as it turns out, other complexities as well. There is a colleague in her first job, facilitated by her complex older man, who gets nowhere with Sirena and leaves for pastures elsewhere. And there is Tom Hanley, a writer who develops a style that really hits the spot.

Sirena’s relatively brief fling with the older Cambridge tutor leads to a recommendation that she should apply for a job with the Civil Service. And this is not to be any old filing clerk position, but something with one of those secret outfits, MI5, no less. The talk and gossip about the office and the papers concentrates on some weighty issues of the day – miners’ strike, three-day weeks, Provisional IRA activities in Northern Ireland. As a woman, Sirena Frome believes she is probably at a disadvantage when the tasks are given out, with the big boys allowed to cherry-pick. They just don’t take women seriously, it seems, and the jobs they get are jokes.

And Sirena does get a job – cleaning. It leads elsewhere and soon she finds herself at the forefront of intelligence work, reading. Questions arise by chance and, of course, in a world where no-one trusts anyone, there are never any answers, only suggested half-truths. Some of the pieces, however, start to fit, and the picture becomes familiar. A colleague tries it on, but it doesn’t work out. He retreats, but skeletons are left in cupboards where we thought there was no furniture.

Sirena’s reading is focussed, its aim to decipher, perhaps lead opinion. In the end, isn’t intelligence about just that, what we think, what we assume? And who decides that? How is it that one career flourishes, leads to stardom and award, while others, apparently equally talented, wither and die, or at worst, stumble along in anonymity? Is this an area where intelligence services can usefully contribute? Is this a sensible question, given what we already know? And just which writers and works have benefitted in the past from virtual state sponsorship? Some will be revealed, suggested, at least.

This is where Tom Hanley appears. Academic, unlikely and unknown, he has produced some interesting work. It’s not especially noteworthy, we might fell, but there is potential. Exactly where might that potential lead? And who might take up the cause to offer support, guidance, influence? And precisely what role might Sirena play?

And it is here that Sweet Tooth displays its remarkable subtlety. It examines the concepts of fame, appreciation, critical acclaim and success, and even the nature of creativity, itself, in surprising ways, never via the head-on anguish we have come to expect. When writers write, who is it that is in control of the process? If art is the imitation of life, what forces shape the reality we experience? When we say we believe something, or adopt an opinion, just how much of it is generated on our behalf so that we might adopt it as a package? And can values be promoted? Of course they can, but by whom, and for what reasons? And who picks up the pieces should the whole thing backfire?

Sweet Tooth continues its way, relating a plot that involves treachery, deceit, double-dealing and a shifting of alliances that might constitute betrayal. At the heart of everything is sex, personal relationships and self-interest, however. The story lives through a passionate relationship between the clandestine Sirena and her writer. Though she desires permanence, Sirena can never reveal exactly who she is to her lover. Can he be open with her?

The novel thus presents a story related from a distant future, a reminiscence of what might have been. Throughout, Ian McEwan’s prose is nothing less than a joy, delicately transparent and arrestingly vivid at the same time. But, by the end, we are not even sure whose book has been written, or even who the real writer might have been. Until, that is, we immediately start it all over again. And then…

History, Myth. Fact, Fiction – Several Points Of View: A Review Of Innocent Traitor by Alison Weir

Reviews often begin by warning of spoilers. Neither excuse nor warning here for saying that Alison Weir’s book, Innocent Traitor, recounts the public and political life of Lady Jane Grey. She was sixteen years old and married by agreement when, in 1554, she was beheaded upon the order of Queen Mary of England, after being convicted of treason. Mary, you see, was a Roman Catholic and Lady Jane Grey was a Protestant. The young lady had been elevated to the throne by interested parties and had herself been Queen of England for just nine days after the death of the juvenile, and himself manipulated, Edward The Sixth. Jane Grey’s elevation to the throne had been nothing more than a blatant plot to hold on to power by a group led by the dead King’s Proetctor, if that be the word to use. The plot, which had not involved Lady Jane herself, was a ploy to maintain the Protestant identity of the English crown. Mary, Henry The Eighth’s daughter by Spanish Catholic Katherine of Aragon perhaps had the greater claim to the throne. She was the old king’s daughter, but she had been born of an annulled marriage to a queen who had also formerly been married to Henry’s brother, a fact that in some eyes rendered the marriage to Henry illegal from the start. Opinion was determined by which side of the religious divide was asked. But, as ever, pragmatism surfaced and interests ruled. But no-one can hold on to usurped power without support. And when what you have ebbs away, you get it in the neck. Here endeth the spoilers.

Innocent Traitor is an historical novel. It sticks to the facts, embroidering them only when records are scant. This is not Hollywood, and so reality cannot be edited. And we all know the facts, so it is neither cliché nor spoiler to re-state that “she dies in the end”. What is crucial to Alison Weir’s scheme, however, is how things happen, how motives and allegiances shift and coalesce to create what eventually feels like an inevitable fate for Lady Jane, who became the only remaining and unwilling pawn in a vast power play. And, in describing these events, motives, allegiances and deceits, Alison Weir creates a rich tapestry of fact, embroidered with minimal invention, depicting how fate unfolds to take the life of Lady Jane. If you did not already understand the history, then by the end of Innocent Traitor, you will. If you did already have a grasp on events, then by the end of the book you will see them clearer.

The story is told through the eyes and thoughts of several characters. Lady Jane Grey herself is to the fore, but her scheming and unloving parents, Frances Brandon and Henry Grey make crucial contributions. We also meet several queens, Jane Seymour, Katherine Howard, Katherine Parr and Mary. We meet Elizabeth almost in passing, but her tricks spice the tale throughout. The book appears to concentrate on the women, which is interesting in itself, but then males appear, such as the inevitable John Dudley and the flighty Henry Fitzalan. All of these characters – and more! – relate their tales in the first person and the present tense.

Now here is the great shortcoming of Innocent Traitor, since each of these people ought to have a different perspective, a different point of view and might even use different types of language. They would certainly have brought different assumptions into focus, given their disparate backgrounds. Innocent Traitor, however, requires them to deliver facts to the reader, and they all do this efficiently, and in rather similar style. And yet we, the readers, are taken into the first person, present tense thoughts of a woman in childbirth, a person being executed, a maid dressing her mistress, and then, almost in the next breath, we are plotting potential treason, intrigue, or merely justifying religious difference. As such, these characters rather lose their identities and emerge as mere vehicles for delivering the plot of historical events.

But despite the required and rather lengthy suspension of disbelief that is required by the novel’s form, the complexity and jaw-sagging duplicity, recalcitrance and utter selfishness of these people make Innocent Traitor an absolutely riveting read. By the end, one wonders why it is that that these people, and probably others like them, who populated the centres of power throughout history are not today described simply as the two-faced, lying murderers they were.

And by the end we are also left with a certain emptiness of the stomach when we realise that all this scheming was all prompted by these people’s adherence or not to merely different versions of obvious myth. If we have to suspend belief to accommodate unlikely points of view, then we might also want to admit defeat in order to appreciate the fact that these people, and many thousands of others, were persecuted, executed or merely fell in war as a result of an argument about a largely mythical man who defied gravity and rose bodily into the skies, and an institution that maintains bread changes into flesh and wine into blood – and does it daily!

Innocent Traitor, despite faults generated by its form, is a highly successful book. It captures the motives very accurately and leads the reader into complete sympathy with the plight of Lady Jane Grey who, at just sixteen years of age when the axe severed her neck, just wanted to be left alone with her books. These, it seems, were the wrong books.

A Few Chapters on The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen by Laurence Sterne

Chapter One – The Plot

Well, gentlefolk, at least that’s out of the way!

Chapter Two – The Characters

Young Tristram Shandy, so unfortunately misnamed, is so young he’s still in the womb. He doesn’t even condescend to appear until volume three! This means he writes a bagful of pages before he even has access to paper, pen and inkhorn. But there is his good father and perhaps better mother, who at the outset suffer the ignominy of being depicted clock-winding.  There’s Uncle Toby, who has a passion for fortifications. In fact, verily indeed, whatever compass point provides the direction for whatever conversation, up will pop Uncle Toby and let off about mullions, parapets and ´scarpments. And don’t expect any assistance with vocabulary! Toby’s servant Trim and a forgetful maid called Susannah complete the cast. But there are others everywhere walking in and out of the tale, a farce acted through the momentary opening of doors, a trip to France and an occasional visit to the parlour for a pipe or a snifter.

Chapter Three – The Style

There will be no chapter three. The greatest of all philosophers, the very Slawkenbergius, assures us that the inclusion of third chapters inevitably lowers to tone of a tome, so these notes will have no chapter three, just to repeat what was said earlier. Thus, as a result of this pontification that we may not cross, this particular chapter three does not exist and is hereby deferred until chapter LXVIII of volume six.

Chapter Four – Noses

We all have one, we are told. Restating this perhaps more precisely, so that the good Doctor Hume might not be tempted to issue his objections, we all have the potential to possess one. But nose possessors beware! Be they long and judgmentally wagging, heavy and lewd or retroussé and apologetic, no nose is safe when the infant must be drawn forth into the world with newfangled assistance such as metal forceps.  Imagine the relative frailty of the protrusion compared to the grip of metal tongs! And if the child be a male, let that be the end of it! Or perhaps the end off it…

Chapter Five – The Moral

Morals were always questionable. And since there is nothing left to say on the matter, let’s let chapter five be the same as chapter four. Except let us also include reference to nonsense, absurdity, Monty Python, Cervantes, Rabelais and perhaps anyone else who cares to call in. Including the young Tristram Shandy, gentlemen, the poor unfortunate lad whose memoir this reported ‘novel’ claims to be. Hilarity also must look in to confirm the status of masterpiece, a status obviously to be achieved the moment the redoubtable author, one Laurence Sterne, placed his pen upon paper in Shandy’s name. And let it also be said, that, despite its two and a half centuries of age, the memoir may sound surprisingly modern, if the word Pythonesque be validly employed. Not all readers might be of the opinion, but in the end, what does it matter?

Chapter Six – The End and The Plot Again

So that’s it! The end. Please have a look at my website.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

If Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell had been a piece of music, rather than a novel, it would probably have taken the form of a gigantic Bartok arch. Its apparently simple, but rather disconcertingly foreign-sounding start would develop into something that sounded quite new, but also strangely familiar. It would reach a central climax at its keystone, but a climax that would not satisfy in the conventional way that music often does, by achieving a stable tonic tutti in a home key, expressed via harmonies that reassure, confirm and reinforce. No, this climax would be violent, but also strange and disconcerting, offering as much question as confirmation. And then it would retrace its steps, but revealing them transformed by the very process of revisiting them. It would progress through its stages of development until it returned to its opening theme, mildly but intellectually transformed.

And it would be here that we would realise that all the material the piece had presented was in fact derived from the same basic idea, transformed via style, tempo and time to appear different, despite its progress through different episodes, which only now appear to be linked. At the end of the process, we are sure where we have been taken, but not at all sure where we have arrived. It might look and sound like the beginning, but we now see it anew, transformed, perhaps even distorted, even a little devalued, a reality newly interpreted.

But Cloud Atlas is a book, a literary, not a musical journey. The territory visited in the atlas, however, is like any inhabited by any artist, that of the human intellect and psyche. Like Julian Barnes’s A History Of The World in 10½ Chapters, it appears to meander from story to story, from setting to setting, with only barely random links. We begin on a nineteenth century Pacific voyage of assumed cultural superiority, graduate to a nineteen-thirties cooperation between a famous, syphilis-ridden composer and a young, naïve and bisexual amanuensis and then suffer a brush with corporate vengeance as a journalist seeks to expose safety risks with an atomic energy installation. A British vanity publisher, vainer than most of his clients, suffers success with a gangster memoir and walks straight into demands for a greater slice of what he assumes is his own action. Many decades later we encounter a dystopia, where a humanoid bred purely for service graduates threateningly to a more enlightened state. Into a further indeterminate future, we find a complete disjunction between rich and educated versus peasant and poor, groups who do not even share the same environment. And thus we reach the keystone in the arch, when the characters of a dystopic future cooperate to complete a mission that appears to be in both their interests. They share a design, a motivation, perhaps even values.

Then in turn we revisit each scenario we encountered on our way up. Each still occupies its own place in space, time and perception, a state in which they know their past but must speculate on their future. Even if we go backwards, time still progresses. By the time we have descended the other half of the arch, we are back where we began in the nineteenth century Pacific. But strangely, it seems that this earliest of the characters in time knows everything about all the others and can describe their lives.

But as we work through these apparently different stories, we begin to perceive a thread. There are obvious links. In some shape or form, each new scenario demonstrates an awareness of what preceded it. But these obvious links are not the real thematic threads. We are interested in each story because we meet characters pursuing both cooperation and competition. We find people driven by belief, internally driven by motives they themselves cannot control. But it is this drive that forces them to act, and it is their actions that provoke responses, cooperative or competitive, in others, differences usually driven by perceived interest.  And perhaps inevitably they all judge. They all seek personal advantage, but sometimes this is pursued via shared or group identity, alliances that both define and protect. We compete as individuals, but we also live by cooperation, applying judgment via assumption, presumption and prejudice, alongside what we excuse as intellect.

Thus Cloud Atlas examines the human condition. As an atlas it fixes certain aspects of humanity as constants, the ever-present belief, motivation and the need to act, to cooperate and compete. But the cloud is the nebulous form these constants may take in different time and place. We are driven by common traits towards unpredictable outcomes, the consequences of which our own future must accommodate and share. In Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell perhaps there is permanence along the way, but each scenario finds characters apparently forced by mere circumstance to act, to respond, to initiate, but only ever with partial sight of possible outcome. As the arch reveals its completion, we are back where we began, but we are richer for the experience, transformed by the journey. We might know where we are, but how do we respond? There, perhaps, is the permanent question.

The Story Of An African Farm by Olive Schreiner

Reading takes you there, sometimes even to places where you, the reader, may not want to go. Someone else, someone we have never met, did this, thought that, recorded it and related it. The reader, never unsuspecting, willingly takes the author’s hand to be led partially blind along others’ pathways, into foreign lands, or distant times in unfamiliar landscapes. If the experience proves rich, a reader has seen life, culture and time through another’s eyes and is richer for it.

And sometimes the experience is utterly surprising, especially when the landscape and culture in question is one whose recent press, and therefore the reader’s assumptions, are not wholly positive.  It is then that the readers own assumptions may be questioned, even by apparently uncontroversial subjects. And it in this respect that the reading of The Story Of An African Farm by Olive Schreiner is thoroughly recommended.

It’s a novel published in 1883, focusing on the rites of passage from childhood to adulthood, from naïve encounter with nature to married expectancy of two orphaned girls, Em and Lyndall, growing up in a mixed, though predominantly Boer, determinedly white household. Now white South African culture of the nineteenth century has rarely commanded a sympathetic English language press. The twentieth century’s policy of separate development, Apartheid, they called it, can be traced to the assumptions and notions of separateness that we learn to take for granted in the pages of Olive Schreiner’s novel.

There is no attempt to explain or justify such ideas in the book. It is no bigot’s apology for failing. What it does do, however, is portray life for this family, and especially the two young girls within it. We grow with them through childhood to the goal of becoming women in a small farm in the dry karoo scrublands of South Africa.  Daily life, with its wholly obligatory chores, is almost dispassionately described. These people were farmers, but in fact peasants in modern parlance, since they approached the activity not as a business, but as a means of achieving sustenance.  They observed that cattle did not breed with ostriches and that different species inhabited their own cycles and niches of life. It’s what God decreed and, though there was always space for doubt and question, these were activities that could not publicly be expressed or acknowledged, since the bedrock of community might be undermined.

There was a perceived and assumed order to things, an order that had to be obeyed, the price for non-observance being non-survival. Outsiders, like guests at any formalised gathering where regular participants implicitly know the rules, were always seen as potential threats. And, when your nearest neighbour might be many miles away, separateness was part of the assumed and inhabited landscape.  And so we see the concept applied even to the different people with whom these white farmers had to cultivate daily contact, contact without which none of them would have survived.

What happens to the two girls, Em and Lyndall, in their African farm is the very substance of the book, content that only should be revealed via the reading of the tale. Suffice it to say that this novel about lives lived within a system of apparently rigid rules eventually relates events that have all the characters questioning the very basis of the assumptions they live by. Life was hard, and often cruel. But that was the life they lived and, given their location in place and time, it was perhaps the only life that was possible. The Story Of An African Farm by Olive Schreiner is a book that certainly takes the reader into its own world. It presents a life and landscape that is both unfamiliar and little understood. By the end, we may be no more in sympathy with its reality, but we certainly do know more about it.

A Change Of Climate by Hilary Mantel

In A Change Of Climate Hilary Mantel presents what is essentially a family saga, but in settings that add extra dimensions to the expected dilemmas. The family in question is the Eldreds. Ralph and Anna have shared an unusual if not an altogether unconventional married life. They have spent time in Africa as missionaries. They have devoted their time to helping others less advantaged than themselves. Ralph runs a charitable trust in Norfolk in the east of England. But they have also found the time and energy to raise children of their own and experience the day-to-day pressures of any family’s life. But there has been more, more that has not been voiced.

Volunteer missionary work took them to South Africa, to a township called Elim near Johannesburg. It was during the era of toughening Apartheid, a time when new powers threatened whole communities with eviction and resettlement to “tribal homelands”. Ralph and Anna begin to identify with their community and deal with certain people who held particular opinions about the way South African society was being organised. Their activities catch the eye of the local police and, as a consequence of their contact, Ralph and Anna are arrested and imprisoned.

For them there is a way out of jail, and it is a way that is not available, of course, to the others who had been associated with them in Elim, those who have to continue living with the injustice that seems to affect the lives of the Eldreds. Hilary Mantel’s novel, however, doggedly follows the Eldreds to Botswana, where the family apparently gives up thinking about those they have left behind. Known then as Bechuanaland, Botswana provides the family with an opportunity, but they are offered a posting that the previous incumbents did not appear to like. By this time Anna has been through a pregnancy and has been blessed with twins. It seems, however, that the mission’s previous occupants were correct about the undesirability of the posting. Problems ensue for the Eldreds. What happens to the couple in the latter days of their stay in southern Africa is crucial to the plot of the A Change Of Climate. But there are two or three aspects to these events, not just one relating to a child. Perhaps sometimes overlooked is the fate of the others involved with the tragic events at the end of the family’s time in Botswana, a fate that returns to haunt via an almost passing mention towards the end of the book. Guilt, it seems, has many manifestations, mostly ignored.

Back in Britain, the Eldreds devote themselves to assisting those less fortunate than themselves. Thus Melanie appears on the scene. She is young, self-abusing, antisocial and in need. But then all these characters find themselves in need - in need of comfort, reassurance, something that might salve the conscience, replace the loss, turn time around and allow a different path to be taken. Devoted to alleviating the suffering of others, neither Ralph nor Anna can cope with their own traumas. These have to be lived with and relived every day, the guilt they engender colouring most of their lives. Ways out of the impasse of coping are always at hand, however. When Ralph and Anna’s son takes up with the daughter of a local single mum who ekes out a living from standing markets and trading junk, an opportunity burns suddenly bright and new suffering and guilt is wrought in the furnace.

In the end, no matter what life throws at us, we all depend on one another and need the succour of others to survive. This remains the case, even when our ideals lead us blandly towards avoidable tragedy and our ensuing suffering impinges on the lives of others.

Hilary Mantel’s novel invites us to empathise with the suffering and guilt of Ralph and Anna Eldred. But what the book fails to examine in depth is their motives. Given the consequence of some of their actions, whether intended or not, these could surely have come under greater scrutiny.

Blackberry Wine by Joanne Harris

In Blackberry Wine Joanne Harris presents a novel about Jay, who is a writer. Some years ago Jay created a character in Three Summers With Jackapple Joe, the novel that made his name. But since then, Jay’s products have been mediocre and his career has stalled. We meet him looking at his life, especially his relationship with Kerry, whose own media career seems to go from strength to strength. There is tolerance in the air, but resentment and envy are not far from the surface.

Jay reminisces about Joe, the ex-miner in Yorkshire who became something of a local hero for the young writer. Back in the 1970s, when Jay Mackintosh was an impressionable lad growing up in Yorkshire, Joe seemed so sophisticated, a much travelled man of the world whose collection of exotics from all over the planet facilitated the concoction of strange brews from the fruit of his plants. Blackberry Wine is actually written from the point of view of one of Joe’s bottles of home brew that survived for decades after its initial fizz. The device is interesting at the start and end of the book, but for the most part it is best ignored. It remains a good idea, but does not quite come off.

Chapters describing Jay’s present in London and then France and his past as a child and adolescent in Yorkshire are interleaved. Joe’s magic seemed to work those years ago when talismans cast spells that protected Jay from local bullies. They also seem to work when, disaffected with city life and frustrated by his continued lack of achievement, Jay disappears to a rural French farmhouse. There, lubricated by some of the home brew preserves, Jay finds himself haunted by old Joe and, once again transformed, as if by magic, newly able to write.

Jay finds that there is more than meets the eye in his little French town. The small community is riven by family feud and accusation, alongside general disagreement about how the area should develop in the future. Should it retain its rural roots or appeal to the holiday trade? Perhaps displaying latent Romanticism, Jay finds himself securely on one side of the discussion. He negotiates his way through new relationships, some mixed with a little local politics. Meanwhile his muse, Joe’s old wine and its associated ghost, encourage him to write a new and successful book.

Jay’s neighbour in France is Marise. She has a daughter, Rosa, who apparently is deaf after an illness contracted when an infant. For some unknown reason, Marise is determined to buy the very farmhouse that Jay himself has bought. The competition from over the fence intrigues Jay. He is at a loss to explain how passionately Marise appears to want his property.

Joanne Harris’s characters are thoroughly credible. Their weaknesses are truly human and their reserve makes their shortcomings understandable. But overall Blackberry Wine fails to convince. Not only is the setting in which Jay finds himself too soon accommodated by both himself and the locals, but the book simply has too many themes. Jay’s relations with the locals could have been the single focus of the book, but we also have his childhood, his inspiration, his relationships with two different women, his coming of age. As a result, none of the themes is thoroughly examined. This gives the book a lightness that aids a skimming read, but which simultaneously undermines any real engagement with the character. Some of the book’s themes, indeed, become submerged and apparently forgotten, only to spring up again without warning. The novel remains, however, a rewarding read and an interesting take on what really has the power to motivate people to achieve. There might be an added dimension of autobiography, but that would be another story.

One Hundred Best Books by John Cowper Powys

In his One Hundred Best Books, John Cowper Powys confidently selects a reading list for all humanity. Written in 1916 by a man already in his forties, it offers a selection that can be labelled as distinctly pre-war, pre-First World War, that is. Given that the author was the product of an English public school - that means private, by the way, if you are not English - and then Cambridge University, one would expect the list to be dominated by the classics, ancient and modern. And, indeed it is, but there are numerous surprises.

One Hundred Best Books is a short text and offers only a potted critique of the works chosen. More often than not, John Cowper Powys chooses an author rather than a work. So, for example, Sir Walter Scott manages to have three books listed, and Dostoyevsky four, while Chares Dickens manages just one. So, in fact this list is not one hundred best books, more like a hundred favourite authors. The critiques, therefore, more often than not relate to the author’s perception of the writer’s overall oeuvre, rather than to a specific work.

This list might be almost a hundred years old, but it remains an enlightening and enjoyable tour of the literary perception and, to a certain extent, the bigotries of the time. Selections are often more revealing in what they omit rather than what they include and One Hundred Best Books by John Cowper Powys is no exception. Indeed, towards the end, the text appears to descend into mere advertisement, but this part can be safely skimmed or ignored.

A statistic that reveals much of its time is the stark reality that only two of the hundred writers listed are women. A third woman, who chose to write under a male non de plume, George Eliot, is omitted altogether, which, given that she had died over thirty years before this list was published, is a surprise. Though the list covers ancient classics and includes works from Russia, France, Italy, Germany and the United States, there is no place for the naturalism of Emile Zola.

But neither is the list merely a safety first trip through big names. A number of the French and Italians listed would not be immediately recognised by a contemporary reader. And some names, such as Gilbert Cannan, Vincent O’Sullivan and Oliver Onions have apparently almost disappeared.

John Cowper Powys is not afraid, however, to describe those he has chosen in colourful terms, sometimes revealing much about prevalent ideas of the day. How many people, in the twenty-first century, would advise the following: “a few lines taken at random and learned by heart would act as a talisman in all hours to drive away the insolent pressure of the vulgar and common crowd,” especially when referring to The Odes of Horace? And today would the phrase “the greatest intellect in literature” be attached easily to Rabelais?

On Nietzsche, we are advised that “To appreciate his noble and tragic distinction with the due pinch of Attic salt it is necessary to be possessed of more imagination than most persons are able to summon up.” Theodore Dreiser is lavished with praise: “There is something epic—something enormous and amorphous—like the body of an elemental giant—about each of these books…  All is simple, direct, hard and healthy—a very epitome and incarnation of the life-force, as it manifests itself in America.” What literature of the Unites States in the early twenty-first century, I wonder, aspires to simplicity coupled with directness, hardness and health? If it exists, I bet it’s not fiction.

Thackeray has one work included. One wonders whether John Cowper Powys really wanted it. “Without philosophy, without faith, without moral courage, the uneasy slave of conventional morality, and with a hopeless vein of sheer worldly philistinism in his book, Thackeray is yet able, by a certain unconquerable insight into the motives and impulses of mediocre people, and by a certain weight and mass of creative force, to give a convincing reality to his pictures of life, which is almost devastating in its sneering and sentimental accuracy.”

Charles Dickens is nowadays credited with being a great social realist. Powys includes only Great Expectations and seems to regard Dickens as something less than real. “His world may be a world of goblins and fairies, but there cross it sometimes figures of an arresting appeal and human voices of divine imagination.” And who, today, would say this about a writer? “Mr. Shaw has found his role and his occupation very happily cut out for him in the unfailing stupidity, not untouched by a sense of humor, of our Anglo-Saxon democracy in England and America.”

One Hundred Best Books by John Cowper Powys is a quick and easy read. It is always useful to remind ourselves that perhaps the way we think about the world changes our psyche as much as changes in fashion alter our appearance. 

The Girl At The Lion D’Or by Sebastian Faulks

The Girl At The Lion D’Or, a novel by Sebastian Faulks, presents a love story which is both engaging and poignant. But because of the book’s setting in 1930s France, there is also much historical and political colour that significantly broadens the novel’s scope. Anne is a poor, but attractive girl. Her family life was disrupted by the First World War. In this she is not alone. But, as the narrative progresses, we learn that her story is rather more complex than the common, but still tragic one, of family members killed in action.

In Anne’s case there was also something to hide. Thus she was orphaned, and perhaps never really had a home she could call her own. 

At the start of The Girl At The Lion D’Or, Anne is about to make a change in her life – and not for the first time – by leaving Paris to find a job elsewhere. That elsewhere is Janvilliers, a provincial town, where she is reluctantly accepted as a waitress in the small hotel of the book’s title. Anne is a beautiful woman, perhaps more arresting even than that, and it is not long before some of the restaurant’s clientele are taking note of her charms.

One such client is a middle class businessman called Hartmann. He is married and lives in a large, rangy mansion whose rooms perhaps have their own stories to tell. There develops a liaison that forms the novel’s primary plot. Along the way we learn much about Anne’s background and the Hartmann’s modus vivendi. There are other characters, of course, and these are convincingly portrayed to create a picture of French inter-war provincial life. There’s the owner of the hotel, for instance, who seems reluctant to leave his flat. There’s the domineering – perhaps threatening – manageress who aspires to higher moral ground. There’s a builder who builds none too well and there are others whose attentions, lecherous and otherwise, are arrested by Anne’s beauty.

But also this is France just prior to the outbreak of World War two. There are rumblings about Jews, about ultra-nationalism, about political leaders in disarray who sway this way and that. There are many stories of loss still vivid from the previous war, stories whose pain has not yet dissipated and whose memory will soon be obliterated by new conflict. Sebastain Faulks’s novel is not a spectacular read. It does not try to be so. It is, however, a sensitive, informed and often beautiful portrayal of love set against a backdrop full of quite real humanity.

Fools Of Fortune by William Trevor

Generally, genre thrillers are books without thrills. Someone gets killed. Turn the page and it happens again to someone else. There’s a chase, a near miss; da capo al fine; repeat. There are never consequences. Characters seem to exist – they never come to life – in an eternal present devoid of either thought or reflection. Plot is a series of events, while characters are mere fashionably dressed acts. William Trevor’s beautiful novel, Fools Of Fortune is, in many ways, a whodunit – or better who done what – thriller. But it transcends genre because it is the consequences of the actions and their motives that feature large, that provide plot and ultimately a credible, if tragic humanity.

Fools Of Fortune is a novel that presents tragedy not merely as a vehicle for portraying raw emotion, but rather as a means of illustrating the depth of ensuing consequence, both historical and personal. In conflict it is easy to list events, quote numbers, suggest outcome, but it is rare to have a feel of how momentous events can have life-long consequences for those involved, consequences that even protagonists cannot envisage, consequences that can affect the lives of those not even involved.

William Trevor’s book is set in Ireland. Its story spans decades, but the crucial elements of the plot are placed in the second decade of the twentieth century. They do involve the First World War, but really as a sideshow to the issue of Home Rule for Ireland. The Quinton family are Protestants living in an old house called Kinleagh in County Cork. Willie Quinton is a child, initially home schooled by a priest called Kilgarriff, who has a highly personal view of the world. We see many of the events through Willie’s child eyes, including a surreptitious meeting between Willie’s father and a famous man who visits on a motorbike. The family owns a flour mill. They are quite well off, a fact that is clearly appreciated by some and resented by others. Crucially, it is this availability of finance that leads to a downfall, events that lead to deaths, destruction and calls for revenge. Willie’s life is transformed for ever.

Over the water, the Woodcombes of Woodcombe Park, Dorset, have a daughter called Marianne. The Woodcombes and the Quintons are related. Marianne is Willie’s cousin. On a visit to Kinleagh she falls in love with Willie. She is a small, delicate girl. She has experience of a Swiss finishing school, a stay that brings exposure to practices that are not wholly educational. Marianne returns to Kinleagh to find Willie. She has important news, but finds that devastation has hit the Quinton household, a culmination of events beyond the control of any individual. No-one wants to talk about what might have happened, and no-one admits to the whereabouts of Willie. Marianne stays to wait for his return. It proves to be a long wait.

There is vengeance in the air, and unforeseen consequences for a child who apparently played no part in any of the events. She was blameless, a mere recipient of the consequences of others’ actions, of others’ grief. William Trevor tells the tale of Fools Of Fortune as serial memoirs of those involved, primarily Willie and Marianne. Some of the school experiences that form a significant part of the story are comic, and offer some relief to the pressure of unfolding tragedy. But central to the book’s non-linear discovery of motive and consequence is the fact that events can dictate the content of lives, and sometimes individuals appear as no more than powerless pawns in games dictated by others. We are all participants, but not always on our own terms.

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.

Maudiegirl and the Von Bloss Kitchen - a cookbook fiction

Maudiegirl Esther Kimball’s first husband, Campbell, died on the voyage to Ceylon. Her second, Kimball, succumbed to malaria. She then married Cecilprins and became his tower of strength. This is how Carl Muller describes - for want of a better word – the heroine of Maudiegirl And The Von Bloss Kitchen. The book continues the story the author began in the award-winning The Jam Fruit Tree, a tale of Burgher life in Sri Lanka.

If “heroine” was a slightly inappropriate description of Maudiegirl, then “story” is certainly not a description of this book’s plot. Simply put, the book presents a picture of life within the Burgher community, an island within an island. It illustrates, but does not lead. Read it for an experience, not a journey. 

Nominally Dutch, but Sinhalese-speaking, Asian born but with European aspirations, the Burghers are a wholly integrated race apart. The names survive – Van Der Poorten, Caspars etc – but the identity is merely confused. Whose isn’t? 

Most of this Burgher family’s life revolves around food and sex, not always in that order. Sustenance and procreation occupy most of the time, with recreation – usually in the form of sex – taking up the rest. Maudiegirl is the pillar of the household, probably of the community. She brings people together, solves problems, disposes wisdom and occasional rebuke via her cooking. She has a recipe for every occasion. Her meals can cure ills, solve problems, offer advice, and her cooking skills are recognised throughout the Von Bloss family, even the community.

The cooking’s unfamiliar and complex mix of influences, European, Asian, Dutch, English, Sri Lankan, Indian and American, reflect the community in which they live and its place in the world. A woman who can’t conceive eat too much fish. Need something stronger. Stewed eel works wonders. Only wonder what. Dunnyboy expose himself in public. Big thing. Worries sisters. Eat pork pie. Daughter need baby. Need hammering. Make plum pudding (dried fruit only, butter a pan, boil or steam for four hours). Problem solved. 

Carl Muller’s style is pithy, occasionally playful, often funny, always earthy, sometimes vaguely embarrassing. He sails metaphorically close to winds and occasionally obfuscates via the inclusion of unexplained, un-translated Sinhalese words and phrases. He makes no excuse for this, and invites the interested reader to find a Sinhalese speaker to help translate this world language and explain, and thereby intensify the experience and promote communication between races and cultures. So there! Maudiegirl And The Von Bloss Kitchen, this part novel, part cookbook, thus records the day-to-day, reflects life and opens a window onto a perhaps unique culture that is in no way special.

There is no plot, no obvious sequence of events, only everyday life as it predictably and unpredictably unfolds. It is also a superb cookbook, recording the recipes of an expert cook. And refreshingly, whatever she cooks and in whatever style, no-one ever seems to dislike anything, pick at their food, question its authenticity, count its calories or even mention omega-3. It’s the food of a living culture.

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.

The Dead Heart by Douglas Kennedy

We first meet Nick Hawthorne in a Darwin bar. As a stripper offers contorted perspectives on what Australia has to offer, our hero from Maine meets a fellow countryman from Detroit intent on doing to Asia what America does to most places. (Personal opinions, eh?) Nick has some of those. He has a personal approach to life, but feels he gets little out of it, despite having achieved the status of being the first person principal character of Douglas Kennedy’s novel The Dead Heart.

Nick is a journalist who has only ever had bit jobs. They interested him bit, earned him a bit, stimulated somewhat less. Then he found a map of Australia and became so obsessed with the continent’s emptiness that he sold up and left the US to discover the unknown, to visit the unvisited. He is less than impressed with Darwin. It’s not a good start. But a VW camper van bought from a Jesus freak promises a great escape along the road to Broome. Not round the corner…

A hitcher called Angie provides welcome diversion from the repetition of the road. She seems easy-going, not to mention easy, and a little threatening. She is travelling for the first time, but exudes confidence. Nick, however, retains control. Or so he thinks… Until he finds himself in Wollanup. It’s a town whose recent tragic history has removed it from the map. Nick has arrived at nowhere, the dead heart of a land. 

He is now unknown, has sex and beer on tap and an awful diet. A horror story haunted by powdered eggs… Until Krystal starts to cook… His mechanical skills come into play. The rebuilt camper van is destroyed again. Its renewed mobility is a threat. Events happen, like they do… Douglas Kennedy’s The Dead Heart evolves into a kind of fast-moving, page-turning thriller. But there are characters here. Something – not sure what! – seems almost credible. Nick is not the most likeable person, but this rather self-centred, thirty-odd, overweight hedonist does realise that there might be more to life than unlimited sex and beer on tap. He wants both, but clearly somewhere other than Wollanup.

What happens in The Dead Heart is crucial. It’s a plot-led work, but it is also engaging and well written. Its racy style fits the characters´ obvious preoccupations and helps to create a vivid portrait of lives that know only the here and now. The Dead Heart is a book to be read in a single sitting. The process will leave readers wondering how they might have reacted in such circumstances. And what about Australia as depicted? Is this a stereotype? You bet…