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.

The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain

The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain is a deceptively complex book. The deception is borne of its author's skill to render complexity in a subtle, sensitive and simple way. Simplicity comes from the focus on a small group of families who interact in many of the ways acquaintances do. This is small town Switzerland, where perhaps very little of the unexpected ever arises. Complexity arises, however, from the ubiquity of sexual relations, passing lives, an approaching world war, with its persecution of Jews and a need to adopt neutrality.

The neutrality arises from the book's setting, which is Switzerland. But even in a land of clockwork, nothing is straightforward or predictable. Even time is not linear. When we start, we encounter Gustav and Anton, two young friends forging a relationship together. Their families are also close. They go on holiday together. The boys form a bond.

Then some years earlier, we encounter Gustav's mother, Emilie, as a teenager, still a maiden as Rose Tremain describes her, at a festival in her home town of Matzingen. It's an ordinary place, between the Jura and the Alps, not mountainous, not clockwork-pretty, just local. Both local and personal considerations fill the consciousness of Emilie, who instinctively knows the time is right. Erich was in the police and she was much arrested. A marriage ensues, and there are children. But there is little that is conventional about the eventual birth of Emilie’s son, the Gustav of the book's title. Rose Tremain would surely point out that in life little is ever predictable.

The Gustav Sonata is a book whose plot consists of the substance of people's lives. Any review that describes their relationships is pure spoiler. Even a list of elements might come too close to detail best left to the reading. But suffice it to say that there are multiple elements of interrelation between the families we meet in the book. Erich has a superior in the police. The boss has a wife. The Second World War turns everything upside down. Jews need to escape from neighboring countries. Emilie and Erich's close friends are Jewish. They have a son called Anton. Anton and Gustav are friends.

There is insubordination, sexual dalliance, splits and reformations.  There is time spent back at home with mother. Disgrace appears in its ugliest form, and destruction ensues. Ambition drives achievement, but careers never quite materialize.

The Gustav Sonata is a beautiful book because its characters come to life. Their experiences are particular, but always credible. They almost tell one another what they want, but gaps will inevitably widen, and misunderstandings, deceptions and outright lies breed in the void.

What is so refreshing about this book is that none of these people ever achieve greatness, and none of them fall to complete destitution. Events remain local, personal or familial. And precisely because of that, everything remains credible. The effects are magnified by their closeness to home.

Throughout Rose Tremain's always surprising but always simple and free-flowing prose provides the perfect vehicle to communicate these complex relationships in their simplest, yet most vivid form.

The Noise Of Time by Julian Barnes

The Noise Of Time by Julian Barnes is a novel. Its subject is real. The person lived a famous life. This, however, is neither memoir nor biography. It is not a critique. Neither does it claim to be fact, though the factual record and history form the spine of the work. In some ways, Julian Barnes is revisiting the territory of Flaubert's Parrot, but in a more intense, completely personal way, without the potential distraction of a fictional author as a go-between.

The Noise Of Time deals with the life and work of a composer. Novels about music tend to miss their intended mark. Carpenter's The Lost Steps and McEwan's Amsterdam might quality as exceptions. But here, Julian Barnes approaches from an original angle. The music is there, but its existence is assumed, its generation simply a part of its creator's life. The author does not need to describe every meal that sustains the life of one who needs to eat, and so Julian Barnes can safely by-pass the process by which a compulsive composer creates. In The Noise Of Time it is the art's context, political, social and historical, that drives the plot and thus constructs the character of the undoubtedly real composer.

The composer is Dmitri Shostakovich, prodigy, genius, icon of the state, embodiment in sound of the revolution. Or was he?  Obviously not. Why obviously?  The world is aware of his achievements - fifteen each of symphony and string quartet, two concertos each for piano, cello and violin, chamber and choral music, ballet scores and a couple of operas, including that particular opera, that infamous opera.

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is perhaps our starting point, because it, along with the Fourth Symphony marked the start of the composer's brush with state power that was Stalin's State, the Power. This music, to bureaucrat and dictator alike, represented formalism, the tendency of the artist to inhabit the self rather than society, and write for an elite rather than a public. We are all guilty.

To illustrate an artist's life in conflict with authoritarian expectation, Julian Barnes adopts a particular and unexpected style. It is a choice that is very hard to bring off, but Julian Barnes does it with apparent ease. Via a third person narrative, more suited to linear narrative or formal record rather than episodic reflection, we enter the passing thoughts that flit through the composer's mind as he faces the immediate dangers that confront him. Initially this grates. It seems to fall between first person narrative reliving experience and a detached historical record. But then, quickly, a reader realizes that any artist inevitably becomes alienated from published work, because it becomes the property of those who claim it for their own experience. It is the artist, often the composer, who becomes an internal third person, someone who already exists for posterity, rather than the present. The work is already complete, but posterity has yet to be created, and in whose image will that be?

The novel runs across three large chapters, entitled On the landing, On the plane and In the car. These apparently momentary encounters with Dmitri Shostakovich occur at significant points of his brushes with authority and power. These are moments when he must reflect on what it means to be an artist, a servant of the state, a husband, father, Russian, a hero of the people and a coward, all alongside the pressure of staying alive. Occasionally, apparently, he composes and plays music.

Because of Julian Barnes's stylistic choice of third person narrative married to an implied record of the character's own thought, the text can inhabit the external world of historical fact and Shostakovich's internal doubts simultaneously. The reader, like the artist, can cope with a third person who behaves like a first. And so, when the text also includes elements of dialogue to describe the composer's intermittent brushes with Power, we feel we are there alongside the artist fearing for his life, choosing his words as carefully as he has chosen his notes both to project  himself and to protect himself.

Thus, via a short but intense novel, Julian Barnes presents a rounded portrait of the artist, a flavour of his times and its history and an appreciation of the composer's achievement. There are even musical techniques built into the fabric of the piece. Leitmotifs, apparently minor details or asides, reappear. Oranges and pigs, a Mercedes for Prokofiev, an imagined Red Beethoven are some of the germs that reappear throughout the text, just like D-S-C-H permeates the composer's output, perhaps as a means of communicating when he was writing for himself, and not following dictates.

The Noise Of Time is the kind of book that passes quickly, but whose impression and influence will be long-lasting. Just like its subject.

Schubert and his work – Herbert Francis Peyser

Schubert and his work – Herbert Francis Peyser turns out to be a short and simple account of Schubert’s life. Given when the book was written, there is no surprise that the concept of venereal disease did not raise its head in the entire piece. It was alluded to, but there was not even a nudge or a wink in the text. The final diagnosis became typhus. Some interesting points:

·         father- parsimonious, poor, haughty

·         father taught son

·         child handed over to a local teacher who drank too much

·         father chucked him out for a while

·         conscription was avoided by studying

·         often careless with his work (though not deliberately)

·         hint of homosexuality

·         “You squander your thoughts without developing them”

·         Would not eat for several days at the end

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.