Month: November 2023

“To die will be an awfully big adventure.” (Peter Pan)

/ madamebibilophile / 28 Comments

Happy Birthday Beryl Bainbridge, who would have been 91 today! I thought I wouldn’t manage a post for Reading Beryl Week hosted by Annabookbel as I had a couple of false starts. I love Beryl but the two I had in the TBR didn’t work for me – probably the wrong time (I seem to be catching #AllTheWinterViruses).

Then I thought I’d let fate decide (admittedly I knew the odds were stacked in my favour, but I just like to pretend to myself that I’m not always going to buy a book 😀 ) and I went to the consistently wonderful charity bookshop across the road from me… of course they had plenty on their shelves, including one I keep meaning to read, An Awfully Big Adventure (1989).

I could just squeeze it in because Beryl generally wrote very short novels; this one comes in at 197 pages. So I’m counting it towards Novellas in November too, hosted by Cathy at 746 Books and BookishBeck.

Set just after the war, young Stella is encouraged to pursue dramatic interests by her Uncle Vernon, who feels she needs an outlet for all her feelings:

“Emotions weren’t like washing. There was no call to peg them out for all the world to see.”

But despite Stella’s emotional reactivity, she is also strangely detached. Uncle Vernon and Aunt Lily raised her, but she is not intimate with them. She never talks to them about what is happening for her or how she feels.

This theme of the distances between people continues when Stella joins an acting troupe at the local theatre, helping backstage and playing small parts. There are complex histories, resentments and intrigues between the players, which Stella only partly grasps.

“Bunny agreed with Meredith that there was nothing wrong with Dawn Allenby apart from her love of beauty, an affliction she was ill-equipped to fight. He put it in a nutshell when he said she was the sort of girl who, if there had been a meadow handy, would have been out there in a flash picking cowslips.”

Stella is naïve and self-focussed, which means the reader sees much more than she does. She can make sharp observations but lacks the sophistication to fully comprehend their meaning. She falls for Meredith, the nicotine-stained, spiky director:

“She suspected it was education and breeding that enabled him to keep his face and his feelings separate.”

But she is so wrapped up in her own feelings she barely registers how little she knows of him, or his lack of any interest in her:

“Endeavouring to be what she imagined was his ideal, she altered her demeanour several times a day.”

The reader knows Stella will never, ever be Meredith’s ideal. But Stella remains wilfully ignorant and intent on very shaky self-reinvention. I would say this seems to be a recurrent theme in Bainbridge – the psychological warfare people can wage on one another, though self-involved disregard of others, rather than outright mendacity.

Also typical of Bainbridge is the witty, pithy turn of phrase and humour threaded throughout the darkness.

“She plumped out my vowels. I tend to have flat ones. It’s to do with catarrh as much as region.”

Apparently An Awfully Big Adventure was partly biographical with Bainbridge drawing on her time working at the Liverpool Playhouse. It certainly felt very authentic, with lots of detail about the daily drudge of postwar life, such as when Stella wants a bath:

“It meant paraffin had to be fetched from Cairo Joe’s chandlers shop next door to the Greek Orthodox Church, and then the stove lugged two flights of up the stairs and the blanket nailed to the window with tacks. In the alleyway beyond the back wall stood a row of disused stables and a bombed house with the wallpaper hanging in shreds from the chimney breast, and sometimes women, no better than they ought to be, lured men into the ruined shadows.”

An Awfully Big Adventure is ultimately very dark. Stella’s seduction by seasoned actor PL O’Hara is treated by Stella with the same detachment with which she views nearly all her relationships. But the consequences will be tragic, and again, the reader is left to realise far more than Stella.

For newcomers to Bainbridge, this would be a good place to start. It covers many of the themes she returns to and is so tonally distinctive, in the way her novels are. For those who are already fans, she is at the height of her powers here. An Awfully Big Adventure was one of the five books that gained her a Booker nomination, which she never won.

“In the end everyone expected a return on love, demanded a rebate of gratitude or respect. It was no different from collecting the deposit on lemonade bottles.”

To end, An Awfully Big Adventure was adapted to film in 1995. I have a vague memory of seeing it in the cinema at the time. This trailer has reminded me how perfectly cast it was, and how much I miss Alan Rickman’s performances:

“My library was dukedom large enough.” (Prospero, The Tempest)

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For a few years now, despite my best intentions, I have entirely failed to take part in Margaret Atwood Reading Month (MARM) hosted by Buried in Print.  This year I was determined to do better and I’m delighted it meant that I finally plucked Hag-Seed (2016) from the TBR.

Hag-Seed is Margaret Atwood’s retelling of The Tempest as part of the Hogarth Shakespeare Project. It’s my favourite of Shakespeare’s plays and I can be a bit precious about such endeavours, but I thought if anyone is up to the task it would be Margaret Atwood. The Tempest is such a complex play, and really quite horrible in many ways, but with fairies and magic occurring too. It’s quite a balancing act.

I realise this is probably the least controversial position I could take, but here it is: Margaret Atwood is absolutely and completely brilliant at what she does. From the start of Hag-Seed I was drawn in because she knows how to tell a compelling story, and write it with such skill. In Hag-Seed, she never loses sight of her source and there are enough references to keep Shakespeare nerds like me happy; but at the same time you could read it not knowing The Tempest at all and the novel would stand entirely on its own.

Felix Phillips is the artistic director of the Makeshiweg Theatre festival. He runs it with the help of Tony:

“Finding the money had been Tony’s thing. A lesser thing: the money was only a means to an end, the end being transcendence: that had been understood by both of them. Felix the cloud-riding enchanter, Tony the earth-based factotum and gold-grubber. It had seemed an appropriate division of functions, considering their respective talents. As Tony himself would put it, each of them should do what he was good at.

Idiot, Felix berates himself.”

Felix is alone in the world, his wife having died in childbirth and his beloved daughter Miranda following her aged three. When Tony conspires to oust Felix, no-one stands in his way, least of all the Minister of Heritage, Sal O’Nally:

“The Sound of Music, said Sal. Cats. Crazy for You. Tap dancing. Things the ordinary person could understand. But the ordinary person could understand Felix’s approach perfectly well! What was so difficult about Macbeth done with chainsaws? Topical. Direct.”

Atwood has a lot of fun with references to Felix’s outlandish productions, both those past and The Tempest he was planning to stage before Tony’s takeover. As someone who has sat through many … interesting … theatrical choices over the years I really enjoyed these brief asides.

Felix disappears to a rurally isolated shack to lick his wounds and prepare his revenge, with only the ghost of his daughter for company:

“She never asked him how they came to be there together, living in the shanty, apart from everyone else. He never told her. It would have been a shock to her, to learn that she did not exist. Or not in the usual way.”

His ‘most auspicious star’ arrives in the shape of Estelle – lover of sparkly earrings and someone who wields enough power to help Felix direct his fate. She gets him a job under the pseudonym of Mr Duke, putting on productions with a cast from Fletcher County Correctional Institute, using actors with stage names like 8Handz, WonderBoy, and Shiv. After a few years, Felix is ready to enact his revenge.

“We’re doing The Tempest, he said.

‘Oh,’ said Estelle, dismayed. He knew what she was thinking: way too gay.”

Like Prospero in The Tempest, Felix remains a problematic protagonist. He drives the action by using people, consumed by his own vision of revenge. The prisoners are not fully realised characters and I think this is deliberate. Although Hag-Seed is narrated in the third person, it’s all from Felix’s point of view and for him the prisoners are, in the main, a means to an end.

One aspect Atwood didn’t explore is the role of Caliban and post-colonial readings of The Tempest. Caliban can really dominate productions alongside Prospero, but in Hag-Seed his character – or equivalent  character – is not a focus. Ideas often explored in productions now around colonisation and slavery were not present. There is some racism from Felix in his casting notes, but the fact that the prisoners are a much more diverse group than the theatre world and politicians is pretty much left alone. Perhaps she felt there wasn’t space, and for the sake of a tight narrative she had to pick a focus.

Atwood brilliantly builds towards Felix’s vengeful denouement and I found it tense and perfectly executed. The ending of the novel follows that of the play by containing almost as many questions as it resolves, yet it was ultimately satisfying.  

“Fear can be very motivating. Sea-changing, you might say.”

Hag-Seed isn’t just a clever reworking of scenes and structure though, or word play and puns, as enjoyable as those are. I thought it captured the deep-rooted sadness in the play and the themes around the emptiness of revenge, the loneliness of humans, and the endurance of grief. It demonstrated how  people can imprison themselves, and was truly moving to the final line.

There’s an interesting article by Margaret Atwood on writing Hag-Seed here.

“It’s the words that should concern you, he thinks at them. That’s the real danger. Words don’t show up on scanners.”

To end, Prospero’s Act IV speech that I never make it through dry-eyed:

“Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.” (Georges Simenon)

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November is the month of many reading events, and I definitely won’t manage them all, but I’m starting with Novellas in November, hosted by Cathy at 746 Books and BookishBeck.

I’m taking this as a good opportunity to carry on with my much-neglected Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century reading challenge, reading Pietr the Latvian by Georges Simenon (1930, transl. David Bellos 2013) which is No.84 in the list.

This was Maigret’s first outing and Simenon clearly had a very thorough understanding of his policeman from the start. Like many Maigret stories it is novella length, coming in at 162 pages in my English translation.

“Not that he looked like a cartoon policeman. He didn’t have a moustache and he didn’t wear heavy boots. His clothes were well cut and made of fairly light worsted. He shaved every day and looked after his hands.

But his frame was proletarian. He was a big, bony man. Iron muscle shaped his jacket sleeves and quickly wore through knew trousers. He had a way of imposing himself just by standing there. His assertive presence had often irked many of his own colleagues.”

In this first story, Maigret is in pursuit of a thief and conman, Pietr the Latvian, who may not even be from Latvia. (I was anticipating some xenophobia, which there wasn’t in the novel, but be warned there is Antisemitism at points.)

There is intelligence that Pietr has travelled to Paris from the Netherlands and Maigret is tasked with apprehending him. At the Gare du Nord he thinks he spots Pietr, but is then called to a train to identify the body of a man who also matches the description.

Following the first man takes Maigret into the world of well-heeled Parisian hotels:

“Maigret persisted in being a big black unmoving stain amidst the gilding, the chandeliers, the comings and goings of silk evening gowns, fur coats and perfumed, sparkling silhouettes.”

Things become more complex as Maigret follows various leads around the first man. His unshowy, procedural approach is evident from the start as he doggedly pursues evidence throughout Paris and to Fécamp at the coast. The conman knows Maigret is closing in and the danger grows.

I’ve not read all the Maigrets as there are at least eleventy million of them, but I would say from my limited knowledge that this isn’t the strongest. For such a short novel, it is repetitive at times and I wonder if this is because it was published firstly as a serial. In that format the repetitions would work well, but in the novel they weakened the story and it could have done with an edit with the new format in mind.

However, there is still so much to enjoy. The evocation of Paris, the character of Maigret and the novella length make this a quick, entertaining read. Simenon’s affection for his creation is evident and this makes his Detective Chief Inspector so appealing.

“The Latvian was on a tightrope and still putting on a show of balance. In response to Maigret’s pipe he lit a cigar.”