A Journey to Crete, Constantinople, Naples and Florence - Three Months Abroad by Anna Vivanti

A Journey to Crete, Constantinople, Naples and Florence - Three Months Abroad by Anna Vivanti was published, originally for private circulation, in 1865. Thus we embark on one woman’s perspective of travel in the middle of the nineteenth century. Of course, she travels with her husband, who seems, according to her own estimation, quite an enlightened, liberal male for his time. For instance, he regales against copious silverware ostentatiously displayed on altars in churches that they visit. He opines that the objects might be melted down, sold for profit, which may then, he suggests, be spent on education and healthcare for the ordinary people. One wonder if he still thought the same when he got home?

Indeed, Anna Vivanti herself often seems strangely out of her century. In the Parthenon, she deigns to criticize Lord Elgin for having removed the marble sculptures from the frieze. These still adorn the British Museum and remain bones of contention between the British and Greek governments. There is still much debate around whether Lord Elgin may just have “saved” them for posterity. Anna Vivanti, however, needs no convincing. Taking them away was wrong. Anna Vivanti was not ahead of her time, but she revelled in the concept of authenticity, and the Parthenon without sculptures was surely less than the Parthenon she envisaged. She would surely have frowned upon religious practices that were not Christian, and indeed in Turkey she does just that. But she seems to make an exception for ancient Greek gods, who seemed to form part of her pantheon, a godhead that probably reflects her social class and her obvious respect for a “good” classical education. It was surprising how these self-righteously “civilised” people from the United Kingdom branded as barbaric the practices of ancient warfare, whilst at the same time as turning ever-blinded eyes away from anything perpetrated by ancient Greeks or Romans.

Anna Vivanti shamelessly reeks of middle-class Britain. When culturally challenged, as she finds herself in Constantinople, she recoils in anger and revulsion at anything she cannot understand. It must be said that what revolts her utterly about the Ottomans is their treatment of women. And in her account, she leaves no reader unsure about where she stands on religious practices that she finds unfamiliar.

She is equally judgmental with anyone she encounters who was unlucky enough to have been born with a dark skin. She would clearly like to be on the other side of the street. Italians, it seems, are excepted. In their case, swarthiness is even an advantage, adding to the attractive “foreign” qualities she seems to crave. It is strange, perhaps, for a modern reader to encounter a writer who was so overtly and completely racist. But, as with her opinion on the Elgin marbles, precisely what has changed in the intervening century and half?

Obviously, in 1865, travel is by train, ship, horseback or in a carriage. She does walk here and there, and she is sometimes carried, largely, it has to be noted, because others try to ease her journey. She spends remarkably little time talking about food and is very taken with Dante Alighieri, whose festival she attends in Florence at the end of the book. She left originally from Trieste, still fundamentally Austrian that time, despite sending an “Italian” delegation to the Florence festival.

She finds Crete dusty, Constantinople disgusting, Naples, largely dead, but fascinating, even volcanic, and then drools over Florence. For the modern reader, it might be easy to dismiss her provincialism, her overt Britishness and her racism as manifestations of a more ignorant time. But how many modern travellers could make the same trip nowadays on foot, in carriages along dusty and bumpy roads, or on the back of a donkey? And how many could live from day to day without finding burgers and chips, fried chicken and pizza with cheddar rather than mozzarella?

Mary Swann by Carol Shields

 

I have just completed four years of thinking through a project. There were several false starts, many rejected, some reworked ideas. What I wanted to achieve was tangible, but I could not grasp it. When I thought I had it held, it would melt away or fly out like squeezed soap. Some six months ago things gelled and I began in earnest to write Eileen McHugh, a life remade. It’s the story of a sculptor who left no work, but who, by accident in this case, had become sufficiently recognized for a biographer to reconstruct her life and remake her lost work.

With the book complete and published, I decided it was time to relax and took up Mary Swann by Carol Shields. I found and bought it in a charity shop bag full because I knew the author, not the book. I began to read and the experience was uncanny.

Mary Swann concerns of life and work of a poet from rural Canada. The town of Nadeau was both small and insignificant, until, that is, the world discovered a slim volume of a hundred or so poems by one Mary Swann, insignificant herself, until she was murdered - shot, bludgeoned, dismembered - by her husband in 1965.

Born in 1915, the exact date still debatable, she lived out her anonymous, almost hidden life, even from locals, on the farm. Elsewhere in the world this would be called a peasant holding and her life would be characterized as mired in poverty. Mary Swann had no domestic help, no appliances, none of the trappings of modern life. She never drove a car. Isolated, remote, poor, dilapidated are words that applied equally to the setting of the life and the person who lived it. Nothing much is known of her relationship with her husband, who killed himself after murdering his wife. The erasure was complete, except that they had a daughter who is alive, but is unwilling to discuss family matters.

But Mary Swan wrote. She wrote pithy, crunchy verse that inhabits the world this side of the garden gate but seems to dig deep into the infinite internal space of being. Academics, having discovered her work, likened her to Emily Dickinson. Mr. Crozzi who originally accepted her poems for publication and produced a couple of hundred copies of Swann’s Songs, the perhaps appropriately titled slim volume, was the last person to see her alive, apart from her husband. There are estimated to be about 20 extant copies of the collection. But the content has found its admirers and champions. There are even academics whose reputation is built on the critique of Mary Swann’s verse.

There is to be a symposium on the poet and her work and Carol Shields follows the lives, testimonies and experience of a group of interested parties. There are academic researchers, who cooperate by competing. There is Rose, the Nadeau town librarian, timid, self-effacing and suffering. There is Crozzi, perhaps a little crazy, the publisher and a long-standing journalist in the local press, though himself an immigrant. He is an eccentric, opinionated type who dearly misses his deceased wife. He also likes a drink or two. There are Sarah and Morton, academics with their own lives to live who have championed Mary Swann’s work.  And there are others. Via the experiences of these characters and others, we piece together something of the life and work of Mary Swann, though, like everyone else involved, we never know her and her work remains enigmatic.

What for me was utterly uncanny, was that this was the exact form I had chosen for Eileen McHugh. Exactly what makes an artist? Why do we try to express ourselves in these arcane, often esoteric forms? What is authorship? What constitutes recognition? Who controls that process? How does life influence art, or vice versa? How do we recall our interactions from the past with someone we never thought we would remember? At eighty per cent through Mary Swann, I felt like I was reading a different version of my own book and I concluded I was very glad I had not read Carol Shields’s book before inventing my own.

But eventually, things diverged. Carol Shields’ Mary Swann concludes with the symposium on the poet’s work, a meeting that brings together the characters we have been following and constructed in the form of a screenplay. A particular thread of the plot begins to dominate. Competition surfaces, insults are perceived, and offense is taken. Difficult to explain events coalesce to identify and conclude what really has been going on in the background throughout the book. By the end of this superbly crafted and constructed novel, we are intimately involved in considerable slices of the contemporary characters’ lives.  Mary Swann, however, lingers in a continued, enigmatic anonymity that remains entirely her own, just as, thankfully, does that of my own Eileen McHugh.

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

There is perhaps no other tale in European culture that synthesises history, myth, literature and perhaps religion as famously and as frequently as Homer’s Iliad. So often has this story of Bronze Age conflict been adapted, one might wonder why an accomplished writer, known for her apposite, pungent and penetrating comment on contemporary society and its issues should turn to it for inspiration. It is a question that recurs throughout a reading of The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker.

Surely an intentional pun on the similar film title, the substitution of Girls for Lambs, plus the associated allusion to insane slaughter and violence ought to point a reader toward the eventual direction of the book. The fact that this contemporary reality emerges gently and subtly is further evidence of Pat Barker’s profound writing skill. In a less accomplished writer’s hand, this rather blunt concept might just bludgeon the reader’s experience with polemic in a similar way to Achilles’s sword occasionally dealing with heads. But in Pat Barker’s hands, the idea works supremely and subtly.

The Silence of the Girls begins with a victory for Achilles in which a Trojan adversary is defeated and killed before his city is sacked. Men and boys are slaughtered, as well as most of the women, except for those deemed worthy of abduction as slaves, an office that would demand regular calls to duty. Young women thus become the chattel of victory, the spoils to be despoiled at the hands of the brutes, all to be suffered in the submissive silence of slavery.

Briseis is a king’s daughter who loses most of her family in the city’s sacking and it is through her eyes that the story is seen. She herself becomes a prize. Achilles, the half god, half man superhero, is the obvious claimant, but Briseis ends up in the confused clutches of Agamemnon. Achilles mysteriously withdraws from battle, apparently to sulk, and the Greek cause in the war with Troy suffers severely as a result.

Now thus far this might sound like a conventional rewrite of a well-known and well covered story, but Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls sees events through the eyes of the newly enslaved Briseis and her viewpoint adds much to the familiar territory. It is through her prism that we see an ancient world that is foreign to us but familiar to her. Her observations become interpretations of its customs, beliefs and assumptions. Like Helen, the beauty whose abduction started the conflict, Briseis is young, eligible and marriageable. Unlike Helen, Briseis was already on a losing side and must endure her gender without privilege, though in the bedroom their differences in position might just have been minimal, mere details of posture. While the males enact their increasingly ritualised conflict, Briseis and the other women hold everything together via food, comfort, kindness and tolerance. Their reward is further use, always with the threat of death nearby, if ever the fancy were to wear off.

In the case of Briseis, the fancy of Agamemnon was always in question, like his geography, but Achilles, it seems, regards her as something more than a mere bed-mate, though he seems have difficulty expressing his feelings. A thoroughly modern man, we presume. When Agamemnon gives way and Achilles claims his prize, there develops a bond which might pass for marriage. But somehow, any acknowledgement of a woman’s rights seems to be beyond the imagination of these committed warriors.

And this lack of ability to see self-interest extended by greater tolerance is doubly underlined when, at the end of the conflict, a sacrifice to the gods is needed to ensure a fair wind for the voyage home and this automatically has to entail killing someone who is young, virginal and female. Old habits, no matter how hard-set, simply do not die.

By the end, the significance of the title and Briseis’s relationship with Achilles has thus become clear. Contemporary films and genre fiction still make their point by sensationalising male violence against women, and perhaps relations between the sexes still bear some of the hallmarks that characterised the behaviour of these Bronze Age brutes. The difference, perhaps, is merely one of degree.

The Silence of the Girls is a challenging read, but not because of difficult language or deviousness of plot. Indeed, like much great drama, we know what is going to happen in advance, since the story is so well known. The joy is learning how things happen and how they are interpreted, and thus the difficulty arises because the reader must operate on different levels of awareness throughout. To ignore this contemporary parallel would render The Silence of the Girls just another re-write of an old story, and it is much more than that.

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

Orlando by Virginia Woolf claims it is a biography. A young man, the eponymous Orlando, is in London in the sixteenth century. At the outset, we meet him in an attic, having fun with a severed head and a sword. Virginia Woolf also tells us to expect Orlando at a later date to become a woman. It is destined to be a book of surprises.

He is, of course at court. Where else? He rubs shoulders with Tudor bigwigs, even monarchs. Of course, he is at court. Where else might such a character reside? Bloomsbury, perhaps… A few years later he even looks up at the dome on Saint Paul’s Cathedral, many decades before it was built. Despite its historical settings, Orlando does not much care for accuracy. It is not long before this biography becomes something decidedly less definable, though its author continues to invoke her declared intention of presenting the life of an individual.

Orlando, both the book and the character, is rather hard to define. Though it ostensibly focuses on the life, or perhaps lives of an individual, the book is not a biography, even a fictional one. It's not really a novel either, since it offers neither thread of plot, nor characterization, nor description of relationships. There is a lot of name dropping, and many references to historical figures, but history it definitely is not, the author often preferring to drop personal opinion almost at random alongside a name. Orlando meets and even spends time with several literary figures from the past, notably Pope, who is even quoted from time to time.

The writing is often poetic, but Orlando is not poetry. Neither is it a poetic novel. Some markers are needed, so here are some highlights from the text to illustrate both the inventiveness of Virginia Woolf and also how the text often appears disjointed, like random flashbacks into a dream.

“What’s the good of being a fine young woman in the prime of life”, she asked, “if I have to spend all my mornings watching blue-bottles with an Archduke?”

“Life and a lover” – a line which did not scan and made no sense with what went before – something about the proper way of dipping sheep to avoid the scab. Reading it over she blushed and repeated,

“Life and a lover.”

He started. The horse stopped.

“Madam,” the man cried, leaping to the ground, “you’re hurt!”

“I am dead, sir!” she replied.

A few minutes later they became engaged.

Orlando lives for the better part of 400 years, at least within these pages, and has numerous different lives, both as a man and a woman. He is a man, becomes a woman, marries and has children, and then becomes a man again. He or she is a writer, a poet, a courtier, whatever the page appears to demand for him, or her. Orlando displays a little in the way of character, let alone consistency within these different identities. The character increasingly feels like a vehicle for the personal gripes of its creator. On several occasions, the reader seems to occupy the back seat in a taxi, with the driver repeatedly saying, “And another thing…”, over her or his shoulder.

It may or may not be relevant, but it has to be noted that Virginia Woolf, for all her talent as a writer, for all her skills as a constructor of dream-like word pictures, was mentally unstable, and became more so as she aged. The unfortunate observation about Orlando is that the book appears to be a series of randomly assembled, almost disconnected thoughts, illusions, memories, prejudices, spiteful digs and opinionated rant. Orlando is also no less of an achievement for any of this, however, since it contains some real gems, but also much that is impenetrable and obscure.

What is clear, throughout, is Virginia Woolf’s 1920s version of feminism. It provides a thread that binds together the bones this book, but it is a thread that is far from golden, and the skeleton thus constructed has little recognizable form or shape. Also, in fact, she often seems sanguine, almost defeatist in her analysis, more often than not equating “female” with poverty, ignorance or failure, even when the female characters themselves, as individuals, are nothing less than assertive. It could be, of course, that she is projecting stereotypes associated with the people she describes, but it is hard to be convinced of this, since consistency is not a word that can be used in describing Orlando, which is a unique book, its success a genuine achievement of a vivid and strange imagination.

A review of Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel

In her novel Beyond Black, Hilary Mantel presents a series of characters who ought to be Mr and Mrs, or Uncle and Auntie Normal. They all live near the M25, London’s orbital motorway and inhabit places as interesting as Slough, Maidenhead and Uxbridge. Even distant Essex gets a mention.

But many of these people aren’t normal, or average, or even alive, for that matter. Many of them are in fact the dreaded four-letter d-word, the word that the book’s principal character prefers not to say out loud. Alison is a medium. This m-word applies to her trade, not her stature, which is determinedly out-size. She is a large woman, fat, to be precise, if that is not an f-word. She regularly communicates professionally with the spirit world in front of a live audience. At least some of them seem to be alive.

Alison works with an assistant, Colette, a woman with a history of her own. They even live together, but don’t start thinking there’s any funny business between them. Oh no! This is the M25 we are near, after all.

Alison and Colette have their own lives, and their own pasts. Alison’s seems to be the more lurid. Mother was a professional woman, the kind that admits to the world’s oldest profession, and so can’t be sure who might have been Alison’s father. The mother and all the candidates for the role of father are now ex, deceased, d-word, but of course Alison is a medium – a large medium – so she can effectively meet with them whenever she wants. One of them is called Keef, but he probably spelled it Keith. Colette’s past is much more mundane, but it has had its ups and downs. She has had her share of dealing with men, enough to have them come back to haunt her. She seems to value the stability offered by Alison’s regular work. They even buy a house together, one of those new ones on an estate.

But don’t you think there’s anything going on between them! There are pleasant, even amusing moments in beyond Black. But overall the book is too long and presents little to challenge or inform the reader. These are people we have to take at face value, since their engagement with the world seems to go no deeper than this. And it always seems strange that, given the number of d-word people who clearly don’t exist any more, that a medium quite by chance encounters one of them who knows someone in that night’s audience. The chances of that happening must be very slim indeed, a lot slimmer than Alison, at least.

As Alison and Colette examine their past and current lives, Colette starts to tape their conversations with a view to putting it all down on paper. She might even write a book. But the recordings are regularly interrupted by memories from the spirit world who always want to have their own say. At least the dead are electromagnetic. I mean, it’s all in the past. Can’t they just let go? Thus we examine the two women’s identities. Beyond Black presents a sometimes funny, generally entertaining, if rather long read. But it is a book that challenges little and does not inform. It also only inhabits the surfaces of its characters. But then they do live near the M25.

Snow by Orhan Pamuk

When I read Snow by Orhan Pamuk a second time, I will pay more attention to its central character, nicknamed Ka. He is a poet, a Turkish émigré, fresh from Germany. He’s also a journalist and is travelling to Kars, a town in north-eastern Turkey (can the similarity of name be mere coincidence?) to investigate a series of crimes. It’s the detail of these crimes that give the book its poignancy, tension and fascination. 

Girls have committed suicide. These are crimes. In Islam suicide is a sin, eternally damning. So what drove apparently happy, conventional, balanced young women to take their own lives? On the surface there are some obvious candidates for the answer. Turkey’s secular though military state requires women not to wear a scarf, while their religion demands it. Could it be this political and cultural tension that has provoked these women, out of shame, to end their lives?

My review will not be a plot-spoiler. In the case of Snow, that would also be hard, because it’s the issues and contexts that matter, not the events. Suffice it to say that while in Kars, Ka meets many people who can offer opinion and proffer hypothesis on the town’s recent history. There’s a newspaper owner who, in order to promote circulation, predicts the news. There’s an old-fashioned communist, a one-time agitator, whose current activities appear to be thoroughly questionable. There’s a travelling theatre group who will play great roles in the plot. There’s an underground Islamist on the run. He’s called Blue, surely a reference to themes raised in My Name Is Red. Political associations of colour might be naïve, but might also be a tad revealing. There’s military personnel, policemen, secret agents, an occasional murderer. There’s also snow, and enough of it to cut off the town and prevent outside knowledge of a shooting coup where interests vie for control.

And if this were not enough, there’s a hotel owner with two daughters of stunning beauty. One, İpik, was once the apple of Ka’s desire. His return promises a long-deferred bite of forbidden fruit. But then there’s politics, history, culture, religion, rules, regulations, laws, even personal preferences that can get in the way. Snow is a complex novel whose density needs to be fully entered for a reader to share its preoccupations. It’s an intense experience, a miasma of contradictions, political, cultural, religious, the whole gamut. 

The only problem with Snow, in my opinion, is its central character, Ka. This is why next time I must be more careful to assess his sincerity. Unlike most poets of any worth, he writes from revelation, not from hard work, etching out a word at a time. For me, this does not seem genuine. But then, as the book unfolds, the reader realises that these are merely Orhan Pamuk’s own recollections of Ka, described from afar. Some years later, he has tracked the poet down to his apartment in Germany, soon after he has been murdered by an anonymous assassin. Now I wonder who that might have been? As ever in Orhan Pamuk’s work, Snow is deeply enmeshed within the characteristics and contradictions of Turkish culture and society.

Equally, as we would expect from Orhan Pamuk, it allows the Western reader (politically and culturally Western, not geographically) to appreciate how Western values, so rarely questioned on the inside of the argument, can be perceived as essentially imperial, colonial and perhaps oppressive. If you like your reading to provoke thought, please do read Orhan Pamuk’s Snow.

Ladder Of Years by Anne Tyler

Delia, short for Cordelia, is the central character of Anne Tyler’s Ladder Of Years. As usual for Anne Tyler, Delia is a Baltimore resident, a wife, a mother and probably, at least from the outside, a pillar of strength and dependability in both family and community. The children are growing up. Which children don’t? Bet then it’s how they grow up that matters, isn’t it? 

Sam, the husband, is doing moderately well. Moderate seems to be the word, as far as Sam is concerned. He’s hardly made a success of the business he inherited from Delia’s father, but the family survives to inhabit a middle class, rather liberal niche in the common psyche. As Ladder Of Years opens, the family is holidaying by the sea and Delia is dressed, mentally, for the beach. And then, without warning, even to herself, she takes off. Just like that, whatever “that” might be.

She absconds. Goes missing. Disappears. There’s suspicion of drowning. A report appears in a Baltimore paper. The family fears she has come to harm. But no, she hasn’t. In fact, still dressed for the beach she is heading off to a place she doesn’t know with a stranger. It’s no particular stranger, just a stranger. Quite soon, and with new clothes, a new address and a changed life, Delia takes on a new identity. 

Though Baltimore wife and mother still lives in her head, she’s become a new Delia, single, independent and employed. In this new guise, she inter-reacts with her new community and gradually becomes part of it. Why did she leave the apparent safety, security and responsibility of her family? Not even she can answer. What slowly begins to emerge, however, is that Delia’s choice of opting out becomes increasingly one of opting in. 

By degree the characters in her new life start to become more demanding. Without needing to state everything explicitly, they start to assume Delia’s support and claim reliance upon her. She, of course, responds and finds that she now has two levels of responsibility created out of the demands of her new life and continued contact with her family. Interestingly, Delia, this pillar of support, never feels either at home or secure in either role. 

 And so it is via this scenario of identity change, relationships of dependency, insecure self-image, alongside a fixation of demand that Anne Tyler relates how Delia’s life unfolds. Delia notices a lot about people, but she’s no great analyst. Surely she’s the type to apologise before expressing an opinion, but would harbour unspoken bigotries like the rest of us. At the start of the book she seems confused. By the end, a few more rungs along the ladder of life, she apparently remains so. Perhaps the ladder is horizontal … and with irregular spacing… But then Delia has little time to consider such arcane ideas. After all, there are things to do, people to talk to, arrangements to be made, jobs to be done…

Brick Lane by Monica Ali

A review should always try to address its subject in its own terms. The purpose, after all, is many-sided, to summarise, paraphrase, contextualise, all with the express intention of informing a potentially interested participant of the nature of the experience on offer. Any proffered review that merely says I did or did not like it is thus entirely specious, since it conveys nothing of the work in focus, only the doubly-uninterpretable reaction of a dismembered, effectively anonymous opinion.

So in the case of Brick Lane by Monica Ali a dutiful list of the elements must begin with the setting. For the majority non-Londoners, Brick Lane is a market street in East London. It is just up the road from the eastern fringes of the City of London, the financial centre that boasts gleaming towers and vast wealth. (Or perhaps it once did!)

But over the years Brick Lane has been a magnet for new migrants, communities marginalised by both origin and destination. It has also been a centre for political action of all shades. The current occupants of this social clearing house are Bangladeshis and the street, in particular, has become a centre for Bangladeshi culture and food.

So, at the centre of Monica Ali’s novel is a Bangladeshi woman, Nazneen, who arrives in Britain to meet her husband, Chanu, an apparently slobbering slob, imbued with more social manners than domestic. But arrangement suffices, as Nazneen learns to cope with married life in a foreign place in which she has no ties and little communication. Nazneen’s experience in London’s Brick Lane is juxtaposed via an exchange of letters with the parallel experience of Hasina, her sister in Bangladesh. The two women’s experiences eventually diverge as local pressures demand decision and action. The contrasts, along with the considered tensions between white working class racism and Muslim identity promotion in east London ought to provide a powerful vehicle with which to explore worlds of culture, experience, relationships and ideology.

Brick Lane, unfortunately, falls short of every destination. Unfortunately again, the characters are weak, the artifice feels false, the vibrant location is portrayed as dull and the passions of ideological difference are confused and politically limp or naive. Brick Lane was an ambitious project, but it began confused and lost direction as it progressed. It does have its moments, but its hours are long, and not a little tedious.

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A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

I read A Thousand Splendid Suns having just finished Kite Runner. I would like the opportunity to live life again (who wouldn’t?), if only to have a chance of reversing the order of this experience. I suspect that had I read A Thousand Splendid Suns first then none of the criticisms I raise about the book would even have been imagined, let alone expressed. A Thousand Splendid Suns is a wonderful book, a compelling and gut-wrenching story of two women, Mariam and Laila, who share a husband throughout the years of Afghanistan’s tragedy and turmoil. The fact that Khaled Hosseini can sustain expression, narrative, emotion and interest across two novels with ostensibly similar themes in the same territory is testament both to his supreme skill and the depth of the country’s despond.

Where Kite Runner tells the story of two boyhood friends approaching maturity, separating and reuniting, A Thousand Splendid Suns presents two women who are forced together by arrangement. As in Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini presents ethnic and social class differences as the givens of the story. Similarly, Afghanistan’s turbulent thirty years from the mid-1970s is more than a backdrop: it is the very substance of the idea, eventually revealed as the flesh on the story’s bones, the driving force of circumstance that creates the inevitability of the characters’ fate.

And this is why I wish I could read both books again in the different order, because too often in A Thousand Splendid Suns I felt I had been there before. The backdrop came just too much to the fore, in some parts so much so that I felt Mariam and Laila became puppets of its detail and demands.

That, I suppose, may also be part of the point. Whereas Kite Runner concentrated on male experience, A Thousand Splendid Suns focuses on women and, given what happened in Afghanistan over those decades, it may be that the sense of subservience to the turn of events is the very essence of these women’s experience. Thus, it is almost true to say that they were not, themselves, protagonists. They were done unto.

Mariam and Laila differ in age, ethnicity, birthright and social class. They both, and for different reasons, finish up unhappily married to the same man, Rasheed, older than both combined, brutish, bigoted and sadistic. Rasheed is thus a symbol for the traditional male role without declaring himself as such. In Western terms, we read this “tradition” as misogyny, however, and it is here where I find the book’s weakness. In my opinion – for what it’s worth, and not much at that - A Thousand Splendid Suns would have been an even greater novel had Rasheed been cast as a more liberal figure and had he also suffered as a result of his own conflict with the requirements of changing times. But Khaled Hosseini made A Thousand Splendid Suns from the women’s stories and a more complex role for their husband might have deflected attention from them.

The two women had quite different experiences of youth, and demonstrate quite different capacities to relate to others and even to life, itself. But they have enough in common to need to act together, to need to form a relationship, less than an alliance, more than acquaintance. Pragmatism might have been easier, but the two women develop a real bond, a relationship that shares out the pain, disappointment and unfulfilled dreams of their marital confinement. There is tragedy aplenty and ultimate resolution of a kind.

And then it was the eventual similarity between Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns that prompted me to take my eye off the ball, to lose a little bit of interest in the story at mid-point. But if this is a criticism then it is an extremely minor one. As I suggested at the start, had I read the two books in the opposite sequence, I would probably have levelled my criticism differently. But having also said in a review of Kite Runner that I would not criticise the book for a lack of explicit position on the politics, I feel that in A Thousand Splendid Suns Khaled Hosseini ought to have said more about the status and role of women. Mariam and Laila live a tragedy, but they are also offered as icons for something bigger, which is women’s position in the society at large. In A Thousand Splendid Suns I thus wanted the author to offer explicit comment on the plight of his characters, at least some general comment, even a dose of polemic to merely label absurdity. Alternatively, as I stated earlier, he could have made Rasheed, their aging husband, a little more complex, a tad more endearing in order to offer a source of the social attitudes without the need to justify them.

But these are all minor points. A Thousand Splendid Suns is, in its own right, another supreme achievement by Khaled Hosseini and a further reminder to all of us that ideology imposed blindly can be a blunt and dangerous instrument.

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A Thousand Splendid Suns

A review of A S Byatt’s A Whistling Woman

A S Byatt’s A Whistling Woman is a strange book. At one level it’s a straightforward account of university life, with its politics, affairs and academic pursuit. But then there’s the suspicion that none of this is ever satisfying for those involved. They yearn for something bigger, whilst at the same time trying to deny its significance in their lives. Another strand is the career of Federica, one of the book’s principal characters. Almost by default, she finds herself host of a BBC2-style arts review or in-depth discussion. She is forced via the subject matter of her programmes to re-examine a whole host of assumptions. So while the scientists try to identify a mechanism by which memory is both stimulated and fixed by means of electrical stimulation, Federica, via her television shows, offers apparently ever more arcane subject matter, leaving us confused as to what we think we might believe – or even remember.

And these are just some of the strands of plot and characterisation in A Whistling Woman, certainly one of the more complex novels I have read in many years. I have not read the previous three works in the series. This may have been why I found a number of loose ends that seemed to have strayed and frayed from elsewhere.

And then there’s the alternative university that establishes itself near to the conventional campus of the University of North Yorkshire, whose acronym, obviously, is UNY, implying generality. The alternative people adopt true nineteen sixties postures, preferring question to answer, experience to knowledge, heuristics to instruction. When we recall this hippy, flower power, professedly liberated, free thinking era, it is wise to bear in mind that this is also the generation that elected Ronald Reagan, tolerated support for death squads in central America and fuelled the consumer boom of the later eighties. But at the time, these revolutionaries sought something transcendent in their anti-university and found it in a self-destructing religious sect.

But no matter what people profess, no matter what they research, they still sleep with one another, still get pregnant, still need mutual support. The 1960s complicated all of these things with a superimposed need for personal, transcendental fulfilment and expression, whilst, at the same time, destroying perhaps permanently any possible recourse to established religion. In A Whistling Woman, A S Byatt captures this confusion and dissects it, but she offers us no neat packages of analysis, no simple results by which we might identify its elements.