Serpent In Paradise by Dea Birkett

Towards the end of Serpent In Paradise Dea Birkett offers a personal confession. “We all hold a place in our hearts – a perfect place – which is the shape of an island. It provides refuge and strength; we can always retreat to its perfection. My mistake was to go there.” It may have been another mistake to have written about it. Serpents In Paradise is a perfectly good read. It is well written, if a little clumsy here and there. Personally, I blame the editor. It’s a travel book, relating the history and experience of the author’s quest to Pitcairn island.

At the time of writing, just over two hundred years had elapsed since sine the famous mutineers on The Bounty had stumbled upon a wrongly-mapped island in the south Pacific. Thus they found their own perfect hiding place, so they burned their bridges, in their case a ship. It is largely their descendents who still inhabit Pitcairn and it was in this society that Dea Birkett sought her own personal paradise. Getting to and from Pitcairn is an adventure in itself. It has no regular services and no harbour. A visitor has to make an application to the island’s authorities – basically the entire population – for permission to land. 

And Pitcairn islanders don’t like writers. Dea Birkett’s ruse to gain access was a project on the Island’s postal service, whose stamps and franks are both rare and in high demand from collectors. Then you have to find a freighter, usually out of New Zealand, over three thousand miles distant, that happens to be charting a course near to Pitcairn and is planning to pause there. When this happens, the Island’s entire population turns out. There are supplies to be delivered, fish to sell to the ship, trinkets to sell to the crew. Occasionally, there are people to transfer up or down the rope ladder. The author made it into the pitching longboat below, but initially failed in several other feats during her stay. 

What she did accomplish was the creation of a rather light, impressionistic view of life within a dwindling island community. We are on first name terms form the start, but strangely most of the characters we meet retain an anonymity. As we read on, an explanation emerges. Dea Birkett eventually records how this community usually seems to act as a single entity. They share tasks, forage, fish and cultivate in groups. Decisions emerge out of communally chewing over an issue, apparently without ever confronting it directly. They are driven by their religion, Seventh Day Adventism, to impose restrictions on possibility, but then not everyone takes the rules seriously, hence the local division of inhabitants into “old and young”, effectively traditional and modern. But the tradition came from foreigners in the late nineteenth century, and the modern involves imported beer. And it was into this largely biblically-literal society that Dea Birkett brought her serpent. 

As in the original, it was temptation embodied. Forbidden fruit were tasted. There was a fall from Grace. And yet the author does not tell us whether there were consequences as a result of her island fling. She does, however, continue the quote at the start of this review as follows: “Dreams should be nurtured and elaborated upon; they should never be visited. By going to Pitcairn, I had vanquished the perfect place within myself.” And thus we reach the nub of the problem. With the printed word, the medium is not the message. This always has to be disentangled, revealed and understood. In Serpent In Paradise, we have a perfectly good read, a well-described travel experience, but it may be too focused on a journey within to really take us there. View this book on amazon Serpent in Paradise

Burr by Gore Vidal

The passage of time edits history. The roughness and corners of detail wear away under the constant erosion of recall and interpretation. Eventually, unless events or people are sufficiently insignificant so they can be merely forgotten, the process rounds off what remains to form mere icons, summaries that become anodyne cartoons of once complex events and motives. I can recall the celebrations that surrounded the bi-centennial of the American Revolution. At the time, I thought I knew something about the history. Names such as Washington, Jefferson and Adams became commonplace for a while. 

A couple of years before, Gore Vidal had published his novel Burr, which I had not read. Having just finished it, nearly forty years after it appeared, I now know much more. In the novel Gore Vidal presents a history of the War Of Independence and its aftermath through the eyes of a contemporary, Aaron Burr, who was Vice President to Thomas Jefferson. Burr’s form is a brilliant invention. The treatment enhances the content, allowing Gore Vidal to lay several perspectives before the reader. Aaron Burr lived to a ripe old age. 

We meet him first in the 1830s approaching his final years. He is still very much an active participant in life, however. He still has an eye for the ladies, two very big eyes for money or opportunity, and a very much alive and kicking penchant for political dabbling. His proclivities have left a world-wide trail of successes and failures, personal, political and familial. A gentleman called Schuyler, who considers himself Dutch first, American second, is commissioned to write the old man’s memoirs, after a fashion. He researches, contacts and interviews. There is a motive. The writer’s commission is barbed. What Burr might reveal can be used to lever contemporary political advantage. Schuyler’s task is to prise out the useful from the detail the old man might reveal. And it is from this quest that the book’s eventual surprise materialises. It is, however, quite a long wait. 

Schuyler meets Burr several times and, on each occasion, the old man develops a section of his memoir. The writer records the words and, here and there, interprets. Burr has lived a long and eventful life. His rise to fame was accelerated by participation in the War Of Independence. He became a battlefield commander and earned a reputation for success, not difficult when apparently everyone else involved, in Burr’s estimation at least, lacked commitment, competence or both. This included George Washington, who is revealed as a selfish, bungling incompetent. Burr was also, both by choice and inevitable proximity, a confidante and colleague of Thomas Jefferson, who saw Burr as a competitor. Jefferson’s ideals are portrayed as naiveté and his judgment as eccentric. 

And Burr was always a threat to Jefferson’s personal interest and ambition, and thus had to be controlled, manipulated, excluded, undermined. As ever, for the good of the country, of course… But Burr was a survivor. A tempestuous private life riddled with success, failure, allegation and counter-claim, alongside a roller-coaster political career took the central character close to both power and ruin, ecstasy and despair. It also took him close to death several times. Burr’s enduring claim to fame is the duel he fought against a rival, Alexander Hamilton. Their long-standing rivalry is chartered through the book. Hamilton’s death in the duel surfaces many times in Burr’s narrative before the event itself is presented and, of course, there is more than meets the eye. 

 Gore Vidal states that he chooses to write historical fiction rather than history to reveal the frailties and shortcomings of icons such as Washington and Jefferson. He cites fiction’s ability to ascribe opinion, its opportunity to create illustrative drama via dialogue in meetings that only might have happened. And at this level, Burr is a remarkable success. Events and people that have become statuesque icons are questioned, reassessed and often revealed as quite different from what we have learned to assume. Burr is also a book of forensic detail and, when that detail is reaffixed to the historical figures we thought we already knew, it is surprising to see them anew, revealed as merely human. It is not a book for the uncommitted reader who might be only partially interested in its subject. This, eventually, is its strength. View the book on amazon Burr (Narratives of a Golden Age)

Worst Fears by Fay Weldon

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

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

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

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

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

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake presents the reader with a significant but rewarding challenge. Though as an author she rejects any association with the term “science fiction”, that basically is the genre in which this novel lives. And it really does come to life, though exactly which life-form might be open to debate. Oryx and Crake are nicknames. Both are animal species and both are extinct. Oryx is female and Crake is male. They are both acquaintances of Snowman, who is really Jimmy. We are in a dystopic future – a common enough setting for a sci-fi. 

But where Margaret Atwood’s work transcends such clichés of genre is in the development and description of character. Not only is their situation remarkable, so are their responses to it. What they sense as mundane is quite different from the reader’s. From very early on in the book, we engage primarily with the characters and their responses, but we know immediately that we are in a different world that we see only through their assumptions. This is writing of real skill.

Eventually it is the nature of the dystopia that provides the tension. We are all products of environment and circumstance., but in Oryx and Crake both of these are to some extent the products of the characters’ labour. Though there are no lengthy descriptions to set the scene, it is the events that led up to the world’s parlous state that are central to the story. We are in a future where human society is fragmented and disjointed. What began as the operation of a market has forced a complete separation of social classes. The clean, even sterile, world of the middle class intellectual is a closed world. Filtered, protected, disease-free. Genetic engineering has bred out of existence many of those annoying aspects of humanity. 

That was, of course, before the environment was declared toxic, a fact that is a mere given for the book’s characters. Growing up in such a world presents its own challenges. The usual ones of family break-up, unrealised aspiration, selfishness, self-obsession and power-lust obviously survive. But in a world where anything has a price and everything is sold, at least virtually, how is a growing lad to approach life? Well, no doubt, they’ll make a pill for it. Education is rigidly class-based, of course, so no change there then. And then enter, jointly, a genetic engineer so brilliant that he can transform every aspect of even the already transformed and a willingly sold-on sex slave who has starred in many a virtual experience. Bring the two together and the chemistry surely has to reach instability. Jimmy the Snowman is their admirer, colleague and acquaintance, though never in that order. And, if it can go wrong, it probably will, just like it did in the past. 

 Oryx and Crake is no “Genetic Mutants Rule Manhattan”. It is a much more subtle and engaging idea than that. But perhaps the idiom did take over too much, thus allowing Margaret Atwood to get just a little too much frustration with contemporary life off her chest at one go. When it came, the emergence of a plot and denouement seemed a little contrived. And there were places where things did seem to get bogged down. But Oryx and Crake is also an experimental book. It is written from inside the experience of characters whose values have been sold on as cheaply as life itself. When, eventually, you cut your foot, however, it still hurts, despite what the product claims on the tin. 

So, as ever with Margaret Atwood’s writing, it’s the humanity and character that comes through, making Oryx and Crake a strange but rewarding glimpse of a strangely familiar future. View the book on amazon Oryx and Crake

Another Part Of The Wood by Beryl Bainbridge

Another Part Of The Wood by Beryl Bainbridge first appeared in 1968. It was a significant year. The book’s vintage shows through via passing reference to recognisable ephemera. Characters rejoice in wearing flared trousers, for instance, and remark when P J Proby sings on the car radio. Quaint, wasn’t it? There’s a holiday retreat in the north Wales hills. There are some cabins in the wood. They offer what would sound like very basic accommodation in today’s terms. But back in the 1960s, when foreign package holidays were still not the norm and no more likely encountered than a week in a caravan at Flamborough, the holiday-makers in the book no doubt looked forward to the experience. It was then, as now, a trip back to nature. Beryl Bainbridge’s forté is the presentation and juxtaposition of characters. In many ways, the discovery of their relationships is the plot. So it does not help the prospective reader if I give a detailed description of them in a review. But a cursory glance at them reveals how, after more than forty years, their identities and their concerns have remained remarkably modern. There’s a couple of families. There’s marriage and not marriage. There are children, both vulnerable and exploitative. There are flashbacks to a wartime experience that still makes everyday life hard to bear long before the term “post-combat stress disorder” had passed a campaigner’s lips. There is both pride and fear wrapped together. There are others who can’t cope with who they are. Someone is overweight. How modern can you get? Someone else stammers when over-wrought. There is someone who is easily led, and someone who wants to lead. There are people getting away from it all, and other who actively want to seek out experience. There are those who regard the rural area as a threat because of its lack of urban familiarity, and then there are those for whom it is a liberation. While a family argues over a game of Monopoly, someone almost burns down the real estate. There’s even more going on under the surface. A contemporary reader might find the obvious lack of linear plot somewhat confusing. Reading Beryl Bainbridge is a bit like sitting on the sea. Waves come with regularity. They are all different, but eventually a pattern emerges. And it’s a pattern where all the usual – and remarkable – human traits can be found. The final act may be over-played, but the experience is lasting, just as long as it lasts. It’s a bit like life, actually. View this book on amazon Another Part of the Wood (Penguin Decades)

Julian by Gore Vidal

When you are born into greatness, you may be forgiven for exhibiting a sense of destiny or an assumption of purpose. When you also find yourself marginalised, you may also be praised for a decision to pursue philosophy and learning alongside religious purity. When the celebrity that is your birthright also suggests that others might prefer you dead, you might be excused for wanting to keep your head down. But then you were born into greatness and had no choice in the matter. Your head is permanently above the parapet. 

 Gore Vidal’s masterpiece of historical fiction works on every level. The Roman emperor Julian is his subject. The novel charts Julian’s origins and early years in the eastern part of the late Roman Empire. He thinks of himself as Greek, never really masters Latin and never willingly expresses himself in it. Neither is he one of those new-fangled Galilean types who espouse a new religion with three gods. No, Julian is a traditionalist, though not because of a propensity for conservatism, but more because the tried and tested has worked for centuries, continues to do so and, crucially, reveals itself to him. Like his own pedigree, the old religion has an identity and record all its own and, alongside that, proven power. He takes this stand despite the habit of conversion, manifest in Constantine’s adoption of the new faith, running in the family. Julian’s form - in the sense of literary form – works with remarkable success and consistency. It is presented as his own journal, jottings toward an intended autobiography. 

But these notes have been pored over by two readers, Libanius and Priscus, both of whom the emperor has known since childhood. Since they are both also teachers, philosophers and advisers, their marginal comments are themselves interesting, enlightening and definitely not to be trusted. The book, thus, is a linear progression through a life, something akin to an autobiography in note form. It describes Julian’s early formation and education in detail and his almost Masonic adoption into the old religion. It captures beautifully how pragmatism must rule, despite the necessity of being faithful to ideology. It relates with great skill how greatness can be thrust upon even a willing recipient, be accepted, and yet be no more than a manifestation of cynical pragmatism. So when Julian is summoned to the status of Caesar, we see immediately that power prefers him on the inside projecting minimally outwards, rather than outside and potentially polluting. 

His changed status warrants a posting to Gaul to clear up the mess left by others less competent, a hospital pass if ever there was one. But Julian astounds all. He succeeds. He has the Midas touch. Everything goes his way and his pragmatism marries itself to opportunism to generate a populist mongrel that fights better, schemes more ruthlessly and thus wins. What it never does, however, is forget its origins. Throughout it remains frugal, thrifty and to the point, the greatness thrust upon it is reinvested towards achieving a greater, but ever-receding glory. Gore Vidal’s Julian thus raises its subject to Augustan status and follows the new leader to the east where he engages Persia and dreams of conquering India. Is this Alexander reborn? What the book does not do – thankfully – is offer detailed descriptions of military matters, since Julian himself has already written on these things elsewhere. This neat ploy keeps the focus of the book on the man, not his exploits. Late sections are in note form only, since the emperor was engaged with his day job of attempted world domination. As historical fiction, 

Julian has it all. It recreates a feeling of the places. It relives decisions and options in a thoroughly convincing way. It fleshes out events with credible, fallible people, despite their occasional god status. Above all, it takes you there. View the book on amazon Julian

The Knot Of Vipers by Francois Mauriac

When you reckon your time is up and that you’d like to get a few things straight before you peg out, the temptation to take up a pen and use it as a weapon might become all-consuming. Louis does precisely this, and thus the text of Francois Mauriac’s novel, The Knot Of Vipers, comes alive. Louis is well-heeled. He has made millions from his business interests over the years. But, realising he can’t take any of it with him, he considers how best to dispose of his fortune and, at the same time, analyses various aspects of the relationships that have filled his life. 

He finds all of them wanting in one way or another. He might be accused of a lack of both optimism and charity! So Louis pens a letter, a novel-length letter addressed to his wife. It’s to be his final statement and his way of putting the record straight, perhaps also a means of exacting retribution. He has been married to Isa for many years. Their marriage has been good in the Catholic sense, but their bed has been a cool, reverential place for some time, rather than a seat of reverie. 

The wife is the husband’s prime target. He recalls her lack of conviction, her inability to respond to him. An entire marriage relived becomes a jumble of opinions, recollections, threats and judgments, many of them petty, but all heartfelt. Louis particularly recalls his wife’s description of an episode with another man. He conveniently ignores a fling of his own. There was a much-loved daughter called Marie. But for all kinds of reasons she is not going to inherit. How annoying it is when you want to wield the dagger and find the job already done! 

So who else might Louis drag down with his pen? Well, there’s his son, naturally, and also a natural son. The former is Hubert, and his personal qualities rarely approach the old man’s professed standards. The latter, Robert, remains meek and unassuming. He’ll do all right! At least he won’t be plotting his father’s downfall! And so The Knot Of Vipers tightens itself around its own complications. Even lifetimes of highly profitable devotion produce complicated, internecine rivalries that have to be given space to dissipate. And, in Louis’s family, where even the obvious can be denied to preserve public face, what has not been expressed over the years just creates new layers of complication, layers that crowd out any negotiable space. 

I found on occasions that the scenario gave way under the weight of what had to be described. A private letter to a wife does not need descriptions of mutual acquaintances. The reader might demand this, but shared experience would only need an occasional reference. This, however, is The Knot Of Vipers only weakness. It’s a real tour de force of the concept that families f*** you up, especially Catholic ones, especially uncommunicative ones, especially… And then, of course, the book ends. View the book on amazon The Knot of Vipers (Capuchin Classics)