Courtesy of Project Gutenberg

Edward B Taylor’s Anahuac, Mexico and the Mexicans, proved to be a thoroughly surprising read. Not only was this written in the late 1860s, but it was composed and expressed in apparently modern terms and modern language. Some of the attitudes might be old fashioned, and the concept of the noble savage keeps rearing its head, but the general feeling throughout was that here were travellers who brought minds open enough to be influenced. One wonders if most modern tourists are as flexible. And here was the United States to the north, just emerging from the Civil War, not yet the established world power it would be just a couple of decades later. On reflection, one is reminded of the rise and growth of China since its own, more protracted upheavals of the mid-twentieth century.

A Pushcart At The Curb is a set of poems by John Dos Passos. Its language is unremarkable, hardly poetic in places, but interesting, nevertheless.

Brief Diversions, Tales, Treatises and Epigrams by JB Priestley is what it says on the tin, and often embarrassingly straightforward. 

A History Of England Volume 1 by David Hume is enlightening, literally, from the period of enlightenment. Hume’s prose is wonderfully transparent, the clarity sometimes brilliant.

A revisit to Chekhov via Uncle Vanya recalls that evening in Scarborough that would have been, perhaps, in 1968 or 9, when one, being me, was revising for trial exams on holiday, when a production, no doubt directed by Alan Ayckbourn made such a strong and lasting impression.

Edward Potts Cheyney’s An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England made little of an impression.

Italian Hours by Henry James takes us on pretty well-known Italian sights. But is it possible for this particular author to express himself, albeit with a true talent for sentence construction, and notwithstanding his undeniable grasp of vocabulary, though sometimes rather mis-placed, I might say!, ever, despite his quest to communicate the immediacy of experience, to write a simple sentence?

And then a revisit to The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance by Bernard Berenson. I’ve not read that since I was a student, methinks. It’s still a work of astounding scholarship and perception, despite the fact that now I have seen much of the material he is describing at first hand.

Essays by David Hume range in their subject matter, but not in their quality, which is always superb.

 

Kate Atkinson - Behind The Scenes At The Museum

Kate Atkinson´s read for the first time in the form of Behind The Scenes At The Museum. It’s a magical realist style, quite superbly virtuosic and utterly vivid in everything it tries to do. It’s the story of Ruby, a 1950s girl whom we meet, like Tristram Shandy, before she is born. She seems to have perfect recall for a memory, which later on becomes something of a contradiction, because the plot hinges on a particular empty area of her past, something that she has apparently blocked out completely. Ruby's ability to recall detail of events where she was not even present seems astounding, and makes her inability to remember anything about a twin whom she is, after all, accused of killing is all the more incredible. It was her sister’s fault anyway. Overall the book is beautiful, but just once in a while I wanted it to break free of the confines of the family, just for a while. The garden gate seemed to be open, but we could never quite et through it. This limitation did not detract from what was in itself a beautifully constructed and brilliantly written book,

The Jealous God by John Braine

The Jealous God by John Braine was published in 1964, just a short while after his blockbusting Room At The Top and its sequel, Life At the Top.  Braine was one of the original ‘angry young men’, those upstarts of English life, who had not been nurtured entirely by the conventional establishment, and who at least began their careers by attacking and satirising its safe conventions and patronising assumptions. At least that’s how they began…

By the time we reach the mid-1960s and The Jealous God, however, there are already signs – now overt where previously they had been only implied – of the author’s apparent yearning to ally with convention. His espousal of establishment thinking, however, seems still to be an uneasy relationship, still suffused with doubt and at least some guilt.

The Jealous God, like most of Braine’s work, is set in what was the West Riding of Yorkshire, with its uneasy marriage of coal, wool and engineering, alongside a deeply traditional agricultural sector in which medieval landowners still held their stake. Suffused with notions of class allegiance, the region’s inhabitants brushed shoulders as they walked the same streets, but they voted along social class lines for different political parties, displayed utterly different cultural identities and drank different drinks in different pubs.

Unlike Room At The Top, The Jealous God lives solidly in the lower middle class world of a history teacher in a Catholic Boys’ School. And that also, though not here forming an issue, would have been a Grammar School, so precious few working class lads would have been present in Vincent Dungarvan’s discussion classes, and even fewer of them would have ever have spoken up. It is the Roman Catholic faith of Vincent and his family that takes centre stage in the book’s plot.

Fifty years on a reader might be forgiven for assuming that homosexuality and child abuse might also figure as themes, but they simply do not. Vincent Dungarvan may regularly, albeit subliminally, question his faith, but he is never an abuser of it.

Vincent is a teacher. He’s educated, but perhaps also pedantic and just a little pedestrian. We rarely, in fact, follow him into the classroom and, unlike most teachers, he hardly ever talks about his work in his hours of relaxation. He rarely spends his time marking, it seems. He is already thirty years old and remains an unmarried virgin. His mother, a devout, guilt-besmirched widow, really did hope that he might become a priest, but by innuendo worries that he is continually sinning, either by lack of conscience or embrace of Onan.

Vincent, himself, seems not really to have had a past. His present begins on page one and rather progresses from there. One feels there might be more to tell, but nothing much is shared. He has two brothers, one who drinks rather too much and neglects his child-laden and frustrated wife. The other, more successful but inferior intellectually, seems to be a pillar of familial convention, even down to seventeen inch televisions and house extensions. Vincent also has a grandmother who seems pious, philosophical or pragmatic at whim. Grandparents often are.

John Braine’s book proceeds to examine events that see Vincent in the arms of two different married women, both, for different reasons, remaining unavailable until he can break free of the manacles of his own and his mother’s faith, a seemingly impossible ask. Guilt associates with momentary ecstasy, always mingled with disbelief and self-doubt. He seems willing to be flexible, but reverts to type whenever he starts to bend. Eventually, and unfortunately, he becomes something of a vehicle for the statement of women’s dilemmas, though these were probably not at the forefront of the author’s intentions. Though Vincent appears to want to espouse convention, the circumstances in which he finds himself, alongside his own reactions to them repeatedly place him at odds with the very assumptions he deep down wants to uphold. And so there’s questionable parentage, dilemmas of ideology and bucketsful of guilt to negotiate, especially as he negotiates with his own conscience as to what do about Laura, the apparently unlucky librarian. Laura’s own dilemmas are the more interesting, but we approach them only via Vincent’s interests.

But what is eventually fascinating is how John Braine conveniently offers his characters redemption. Having apparently begun as a free spirit, Vincent eventually finds himself willingly espousing convention, albeit in circumstances he could never have envisaged. As a snapshot of its time, The Jealous God remains a thoroughly engaging book. As a catalogue of how its author migrated from angry young man to conventional conservative, it is both informative and vivid.

 

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…

Grass For My Feet by J. Vijayatunga

Urala is a village near Galle in the south of Sri Lanka. Its existence might be fiction, but equally it might have been, or be reality. Everyday life there, just like anywhere, is a mixture of the expected and unexpected, change and tradition, ritual and experiment, received values and new directions. In fact, Urala is pretty much like anywhere in that folk live their lives, set up homes, get married, have children, perhaps, grow up and die, for sure. So what is special about Urala? Well, on the face of it, nothing. But this village does have the distinction of having its day-to-day life described in some detail by J. Vijayatunga in his book, Grass For My Feet.

This is not a novel. Neither is it a factual account, a social study of a community. And these cannot easily be called short stories. There are no obvious plots. Grass For My Feet is rather a collection of occasional or descriptive pieces, coming near in style to a regular newspaper column, of the “letter from” genre. Sometimes something typical is featured. Sometimes it’s an event, and sometimes the focus is merely inter and intra-family relations. But the reader should not expect drama, or even anything like a linear story to unfold. And perhaps these pieces are best approached one or two per sitting, rather than as a collection to be started and finished.

The tales cover many aspects of village life. There are burglaries, weddings, even a murder, funerals and births. There’s an argument or two. There are inheritances, ceremonies, religious festivals and visits to the doctor, traditional remedies alongside potions from the apothecary. We entertain Bikkhus and then do it again. We visit temples, prepare food for feast days and celebrations, and then we eat it. We describe foods, grow them, praise the family’s cattle, harvest fruits, winnow grain, plant trees, climb them and chop them. And we also walk through the forest, memorably.

This, then, is village life in the middle of the last century, writ as small as it was and as large as it felt. Sri Lanka is Ceylon in much of this text and there are still English colonials in administrative office. There is a reverence for things European (at least white and English) alongside an assumption that anything local is better. But there is also change in the air, despite its progress being almost imperceptible.

The style is unconventional in that Mr Vijayatunga’s paragraphs are often long and meandering, often without focus or point. But again life in Urala is probably like that, and these pieces are offered as impressionistic record of that life and the culture that underpins it. By the end we feel that we have been there, to this village in Sri Lanka, felt its warmth, wandered through its forest, tasted its food and been grateful for our invitation. But we are also conscious that this is a past remembered and, to an extent, an ideal reconstructed. The experience is rich enough to convince us that we can never, as literary tourists, understand the true significance of these recollections for the villagers, themselves. We are outsiders and remain so even at the end of the book. Between the covers of Grass for My Feet, however, we are invited in and allowed to share the life of a village in Ceylon. So, if this is tourism, it is of the richest, most enlightening kind.

The Adventure Of English by Melvyn Bragg

Melvyn Bragg subtitles The Adventure Of English with the intriguing phrase “The Biography of a Language”. He thus implies that the language, specifically English, has a life of its own, setting himself the task of creating both an adventure and a narrative that will convince the reader that the language has both an identity and, to some extent, a personality that identifies an individuality. He succeeds on all counts.

The story starts of course with a birth and then unfolds chronologically throughout the first half of the book, before diverging to examine the different and often parallel geographical manifestations of English in the modern world. These have happened since the dawn of Empire and, as a consequence of their disparate elements and different paths of development, perhaps suggest that English is more of a family than an individual. Amazingly, Melvyn Bragg goes through eleven chapters before considering Shakespeare. The book is thus quite careful in its examination of the origins of the language and its early development.

Later on there are three chapters on the language in the United States, one each on Australia, India and the West Indies. We come across a little, perhaps not enough, Singlish from Singapore, and Africa is largely ignored, except for the influence of African languages on English in the Americas.

Melvyn Bragg also devotes considerable time to the discussion of accent, pronunciation, dialect and correctness. Obviously each of these areas could have been a lifetime’s work, let alone a book in itself, but Melvyn Bragg succeeds at least in defining the territory and correctly identifying the parts played by snobbishness and social class in the application of labels such as coarse, standard or even correct.

A decade and a half ago, I myself managed to astound an American colleague who, having prejudged the length of my “a” asked me to pronounce the word b-a-t-h. He was a New Yorker and was more than surprised when I intoned a sound that rhymed with American math. He had expected, of course, a sound like “barth”. Melvyn Bragg identifies this short “a” with an older version of English, one that predated the strong French influence of the eighteenth century that produced the long “a”, amongst other things, especially amongst the middle classes of southern England. The American settlers, of course, left Britain before this new-fangled foreign influence arrived, so they retained their short “a”, which is of course the correct version. This serves to remind us that whatever we speak in our daily lives and wherever we live, we are perhaps born into a language and the one we adopt as infants becomes part of our very identity.

This is just one example of many of interest that appear in The Adventure Of English. Once assembled, these quirks of history really do allow the language to create its own identity. It is thus portrayed as a living, developing entity, constantly changing its appearance whilst many try to hold it fixed.

The Adventure Of English by Melvyn Bragg is in no way a comprehensive look at the language, its development and its contemporary manifestations. But is does achieve admirably what it intends to do at the start, which is to create an adventure and present an as yet incomplete biography.

Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler

“How pointless real life was! In novels, events led up to something,” thought Ezra, as he scanned his mother’s diary.  “What would you say is your patients’ most common disease?” This was what Ezra later asked of his medic sister, Jenny. “Mother-itis,” Jenny replied. Their mother, Pearl, so central to their lives, yet so difficult a project for any of them, passes away to be eulogised at her funeral in a manner that was “so vague, so general, so universally applicable, that Cody thought of that parlour game where people fill in words at random and then giggle hysterically at the story that results.” Cody was another of Pearl’s three children, the first, in fact, and also the most difficult. It was, of course, the children, those that remained after their mother’s death, that were the consequences of the random gap filling that had not even recognised their mother. And then, at the end of Pearl’s funeral service, the minister announced the closing hymn, chosen by Pearl herself. “We’ll Understand It All By And By.” Perhaps she did. Perhaps.

In its quiet, essentially suburban understatement, Anne Tyler’s tale of family life in Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant is nothing less than a masterpiece. As ever with Anne Tyler, the family lives in Baltimore, is not rich, is not particularly poor and presents little that is even potentially memorable. When Pearl and Beck Tull married, they might have anticipated a shared life of convention, an expectation that might have been on the way to fulfilment when three children arrived and the progress of their father in his sales career seemed assured. But then we all take far too much for granted. Beck Tull disappeared, walked out, apparently to pursue his career via a posting that had to take him away from Baltimore. But soon this was an independent life. The letters home became infrequent, the fifty dollars he apologetically generously enclosed less dependable.

Such events might have proved earth shattering if Pearl Tull had not been such an effective, if reluctant pragmatist. For the good of her family, apparently, she made the best of things, created excuses, refused to accept that this was a separation, and chose not to offer an opinion to her children. Such a change thus becomes a different form of convention. These events are set, of course, in the mid-twentieth century and in the United States, where such occurrences were not unknown.

And so Pearl was left to raise three kids. She took a job behind a store counter and walked to work to save on fares. Cody, the eldest of the three, had always been difficult. Ezra was meeker, milder, perhaps prone to naiveté, a quality he never quite managed to grow out of. Jenny was perhaps the most capable, and talented, certainly the most obviously practical of the three. She was motivated to study, to go to medical school and become a doctor. And that is exactly what she did. Ezra took on a restaurant, the eating house of the title, though we are not to conclude that Jenny’s later eating disorders are a result of the unconventional nature of the family menu. Cody became a time and motion man, but a very successful one. He always did seem to have a desire to tell other what they should be doing.

And thus all three of Pearl´s children grow up. They survive because of, rather than in spite of their mother, but the recipients of the love feel things differently. These people live anticipatory lives, their experience of the present dominated by a view of the future as it ought not to be. These people are never “well”, only “pre-ill”. They are never “happy, only “pre-trauma”. They never enter into “marriage”, only “pre-divorce”. And yet illness and trauma only rarely visit their essentially safe lives, though perhaps inevitably divorce is somewhat more common. As adults, they continually reinterpret their past, without ever really either acknowledging it or knowing it.

What happens to these characters is the important and essential content of the book, so a review of Anne Tyler’s Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant must leave all detail to be discovered by the reader. But eventually what happens is far less important than how it happens. The book’s currency is the complexity of the relationships between and amongst these family members. And these inter-relationships, though often both predictable and dysfunctional as well as avoidable are described by Anne Tyler in truly beautiful, economic prose via the shared events of their fictional but illustrative lives.

But it must be recorded that Ezra inherits a restaurant, and several of the family encounters that form the spine of the story take place over the dinner table. Not every dish served up is to everyone’s individual taste, but when did individual preferences count for anything when the collective of family is so strong? Even when superficially it might appear weak… As time passes, it becomes clear that it might not just be the food that might be described as a “concoction” when these family members get together.

Anne Tyler’s genius lies in her ability to make the mundane captivating. These people could live next door. They are not gentry, not celebrities. They are not really achievers and, at least on the face of things, might not possess any feature that might be described as outstanding. But then that is entirely Anne Tyler’s point. They are ordinary people of their time but, as individuals and then because of that collective we label “family”, they are of course unique, And their lives consist of never-to-be-repeated attempts to solve the challenges their unique circumstances generate. They offer no great surprises, no significant crimes, no earth-shattering traumas, and witness no particular history. But their lives continually change, develop, disintegrate, reform and surprise. In Anne Tyler’s work, life itself is the plot and the family is its landscape.