“If thou wilt marry, marry a fool.” (Hamlet, Act III Sc.1)

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Literary Wives is a quarterly online book club which considers the question: What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife? You can read all about the club and its previous choices on whatmeread’s blog here. When I saw on Naomi’s blog that the December choice would be Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (2020) I thought this would be a great incentive to pick it off the TBR and join in!

Hamnet is historical fiction, taking the death of William Shakespeare’s only son at age 11 as its inspiration. It’s generally thought that this bereavement was the impetus behind Hamlet. But Hamnet Shakespeare had a mother too, and she is the focus of the novel:

“Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother’s: the boy, the empty house, the deserted yard, the unheard cry. […] It will lie at her very core, for the rest of her life.”

The plot moves back and forth between the present illness and then death of Hamnet, and the life of his mother Agnes Hathaway (as named in her father’s will although historical discussions usually refer to her as Anne). She is a misfit in late sixteenth-century Stratford society. She has a dowry, but her behaviour – flying hawks, understanding the healing powers of herbs, taking long walks – is problematic.

“She grows up feeling wrong, out of place, too dark, too tall, too unruly, too opinionated, too silent, too strange. She grows up with the awareness that she is merely tolerated, an irritant, useless, that she does not deserve love, that she will need to change herself substantially, crush herself down if she is to be married.”

She doesn’t have to crush herself down though, because the local Latin tutor finds her fascinating and doesn’t ask her to change.

“He is, he prides himself, adept at dissembling, at reading the thoughts of others, at guessing which way they will jump, what they will do next. Life with a quick-tempered parent will hone these skills at an early age.”

And Agnes marries into this unhappy home without quite knowing what she is getting into. She finds a way for her (never named) husband and her to survive her father-in-law’s temper and raise their three children. Like her husband, she sees and understands more than most people, although her skills come from a different source, an innate and psychic knowledge.

“They are women, mostly, and she seats them by the fire, in the good chair, while she takes their hands and holds them in her own, while she grinds some roots, some plant leaves, a sprinkling of petals. They leave with a cloth parcel or a tiny bottle, stoppered with paper and beeswax, their face is easier, lightened.”

Reading Hamnet was an interesting experience for me. I kept thinking: ‘Is this overwritten? Am I enjoying this or not?’ and for quite a while I wasn’t sure. Ultimately I decided it was overwritten but that I was still enjoying it 😀 I think this was because the overwritten aspects seemed to be an enthusiasm by O’Farrell to immerse the reader in the historical setting, rather than prove how clever she was and delight in her own brilliance. The scenes after Hamnet dies I found truly moving.

Agnes is a wonderful character, strong and fully realised. Anne Hathaway tends to be somewhat disregarded – the wife who stayed at home while her brilliant husband gallivanted around the City writing poems to dark ladies and fair youths. Hamnet makes Agnes a formidable woman while not rewriting history.

I liked the portrayal of Shakespeare too – limited contemporary accounts suggest he was good fun when he did go to the tavern, but these occasions were rare. That he was quiet and gentle, and very frugal, focussed on setting up financial security in Stratford. This is who O’Farrell has portrayed here.

What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?

The marriage in Hamnet is not always happy but it is always grounded in a deep love for one another. It is a marriage between two strongly individual people who endure tragedy and their very different ways of managing it.

Agnes doesn’t lose herself when she becomes wife. She doesn’t lose her identity within that of being Mrs Shakespeare, even though she’s married to a writer whose wider adoration is so extensive it has its own noun. Agnes is definitely not one for Bardolatry, grounded as she is by the demands of domestic family life and her own work.

Agnes marries for love the man of her choosing. Within a society that restricts women’s roles and where her skills in particular could be quite a danger for her, she perseveres along her own path. She shows how wives can be the lynchpin of a family, and the importance of unconditional love.

“What she desires is for him to stay at her side, for his hand to remain in hers. For him to be there, in the house, when she brings this baby into the world. For them to be together. What she desires, though, does not matter. He is going. She is, however secretly, sending him away.”

To end, the RSC is currently staging an adaptation of Hamnet and I enjoyed seeing the posters all over the tube as I sat there reading the book:

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

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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.”

“For me writing is an act of the will.” (Elizabeth Jolley)

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I’ve been meaning to read Elizabeth Jolley for ages so I’m pleased to be finishing AusReading Month 2023 hosted by Brona at This Reading Life with one of her novellas.

Milk and Honey (1984) has quite a Gothic feel to it, so it’s worked out well with Hallowe’en too…

The story is narrated by Jacob, who at the beginning of the novella is an unhappy, unfulfilled door-to-door salesman with an injured hand.

“Sometimes, after my cup of real coffee in the Beach Hotel, I sat outside on the small, sandy cliffs, looking down onto the sea as it came up in long, slow waves to the rocks and sunk sighing back down the beach, and I felt the profound melancholy that all my life has come over me from time to time. It was the melancholy of dark trees standing alone and the quiet sadness of the colours of the land, dark greens and browns and the sand subdued. As I sat, the colours deepened, tawny, dun coloured blending beneath the low grey sky. And from somewhere hidden, the sun lit up the sea.”

We then go back in time to when Jacob was a teenager and sent by his father to live with the Heimbachs so he can be tutored in the cello by Leopold.  The widowed tutor adores Jacob, calling him ‘Prince’, but his sisters Tante Rosa and Aunt Heloise may be more ambivalent. Certainly Jacob’s lauded genius may not be as evident as Leopold proclaims. But Jacob does play with feeling:

“When I played the cello and the cello hesitated, poised on a single note so pure and restrained and lovely, I closed my eyes with an exquisite love of the cello. I was in love with the cello.”

Also in the house are Leopold’s children. His daughter Louise is a romantic interest for Jacob, and there is his son Waldemar who has unspecified disabilities. The household is insular and claustrophobic, but Jacob willingly relinquishes external experiences:

“I had no wish to be free. I preferred not to go to school, and, though the house and garden were open to the street, I never went out into the street. I read and studied and lived in the household which seemed to contain all in the way of books and musical instruments and teachers I could ever need.”

For the reader though, the household is deeply unsettling. We never really know what anyone’s motivations, views or plans are. Jacob is self-focussed and so as a narrator he doesn’t tell us. We piece together certain aspects of the wider life of the household – I guessed an unpleasant twist towards the end – but so much is left unspecified.

Conspiracies abound in this small household. A major decision is taken early in the novel that is traumatising for Jacob but we’re not completely sure why such action is taken. Jacob is having an affair but it seems entirely likely that everyone knows about it. A wedding ceremony is sprung on him, and yet everyone seems to think this is completely acceptable:

“But even after the surprise celebration of our engagement, on the day of my inheritance, the idea of marriage had seemed remote, something vague, talked about in laughter while eating apples and trying on rings made from human hair, something looked forward to from childhood but, like a disease experienced by adults, never reached.”

Milk and Honey is an odd novel and at times I wasn’t sure it was for me. There was so much that was unexplained that it could be entirely discombobulating, and Jacob was so oblivious and callow I wasn’t sure he could carry me through. I’m glad I persevered though, and I would definitely be interested to read more by Jolley. From this, I would say she writes about nature beautifully and is expert in creating an unsettling, memorable atmosphere.

You can read Lisa’s excellent review of Milk and Honey here.

To end, a bit of a departure from my usual 80s cheese – I always find Elgar’s cello concerto in E minor so moving (and this is with the City of Birmingham symphony orchestra, which was Elizabeth Jolley’s place of birth before she emigrated to Australia – see what I did there? 😀 ):

“Borderline, feels like I’m going to lose my mind.” (Madonna)

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Somehow I’ve accumulated several Janette Turner Hospital books in the TBR, without ever managing to get round to reading any of them. So thank goodness for AusReading Month 2023 hosted by Brona at This Reading Life which finally got me to pick one up!

Borderline is JTH’s third novel, published in 1985. The blurb on the back describes it as a metaphysical thriller, but I don’t think that’s a helpful description. There are thriller elements but what JTH is more concerned with is the unreliable narratives we tell ourselves and others; how we can love those who remain so unknown to us; and the unpredictability of all our lives that can change in an instant. These themes don’t lend themselves to definite resolutions, so those seeking a thriller will be disappointed.

However, if you’re happy to go along with an exploration of these ideas that ends without any neat answers, there’s a lot to enjoy in Borderline.

The narrator is Jean-Marc, a man who has always had a slightly Oedipal relationship with his father’s girlfriend, Felicity. Seymour aka Old Volcano, was an artist much older than Felicity, who was nearer in age to her stepson.

“When I was five, my father was already famous and my mother was mostly distraught. Later she escaped. She made a quantum leap into banality. Which is the true secret of happiness – a second marriage, a very ordinary life, other children. Naturally she does not care to see me, a revenant from that earlier bad time, and I do not blame her at all.”

Felicity and Seymour’s relationship inevitably ends, and Felicity becomes a successful art dealer. She is returning from a trip when, at a border crossing between the United States and Canada, she makes the impulsive decision to smuggle Dolores Marquez, a refugee from El Salvador, with the help of a man called Gus.

Gus’ full name is Augustine, he’s a salesman who is routinely unfaithful to his wife. Felicity calls Dolores La Magdalena after a painting. People in this novel have different names, different roles, splintered lives. They disappear and no-one knows where to begin looking for them.

Gus’ daughter Kathleen turns up at Jean-Marc’s house, and their relationship seems to almost transgress boundaries, but not quite. As they try and locate their loved ones, Jean-Marc acknowledges that he is filling in a lot of gaps with very little to go on:

“Her stories bombard me, they seem to have become my own memories, they writhe and change and regroup in the way true memories do. They are like photographs in her grandfather’s dresser, a deluge of the ever-present past.”

The plot of Borderline is enough to pull the reader along, but this is not the novel to read if you want a plot-driven story. Jean-Marc tracks Felicity as best he can, but she remains out of reach. The stories in Borderline are unclear in origin: what Jean-Marc has experienced, what he has been told, what he is making up.

“Her days are baroque, they curl into each other like acanthus leaves, she lives somewhere between now and then. She moves in and out of her life.”

“Still, I have to admit, there has always been a quality of absence about her; which is why her disappearance itself seems insubstantial, merely a figure of speech, or a trick of the light, a momentary thing.”

I would completely understand if someone experienced this novel as a frustrating and disappointing read. However, I felt Borderline was an effective exploration of how human beings try and make sense of themselves, each other and the world when so much remains unknown and chaotic. It has some truly breathtaking passages and JTH is absolutely a writer I’d like to explore further.

To end, let it never be said that I shy away from the obvious in my 80s song choices 😀

“Compared to memory, every possession can only ever seem disappointing” (Giorgio Bassani)

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This is my final post for the 1962 Club, hosted by Simon and Kaggsy, which has been running all week. It’s been a great event as always, and I’m really pleased it prompted me to pick the three I’ve read off the TBR pile at long last!

(Please note, despite the subject matter I’ve made a deliberate choice not to draw contemporary parallels. I think Lisa explained this decision really well in her blog post here.)

I adored Giorgio Bassani’s The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles (1958) when I read it last year, so I had high expectations when I approached The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (transl. Jamie McKendrick, 2007), the third book in his Romanzo di Ferrara cycle. It fully lived up to those expectations.

The unnamed narrator tells us in the Prologue that he is looking back from 1957 to a time before World War II. However the tone is more elegiac than nostalgic, as he also tells us that those he recalls perished in concentration camps.

Before the war the Finzi-Continis were a prosperous family, but the conflict destroyed them and all they owned. The large house is now squatted in, and the titular space:

“All the broad-canopied trees, limes, elms, beeches, poplars, plane trees, horse chestnuts, pines, firs, larches, cedars of Lebanon, cypresses, oaks, holm oaks, and even the palm trees and eucalyptuses planted in their hundreds by Josette Artom during the last two years of the first world war, were cut down for firewood, and for some time the land had returned to the state it was in when Moisè Finzi-Contini acquired it”

So it is with this knowledge that we then meet the younger, somewhat callow narrator, and follow his developing friendship with the younger Finzi-Contini’s, Alberto and Micòl, son and daughter of Professor Ermanno and Signor Olga.

Racial laws are coming into effect in Italy in the late 1930s, and this sees the narrator invited into the walled estate, as Jewish people are banned from places such as the local tennis club.

“They entirely left aside the existence of a far greater intimacy, a secret one, to be valued only by those who shared it, which derived from the fact that our two families, not by choice, but by virtue of a tradition more ancient than any possible memory, belonged to the same religious observance, or more accurately to the same ’School’”

Despite the growing pressures of the outside world, within the Finzi-Continis walls the narrator remembers a time where:

“The weather remained perfect, held in that state of magical suspension, of glassy, luminous, soft immobility which is the special gift of some of our autumns. In the garden it was hot, just slightly less than if it was summer.”

In this enchanted space the narrator falls for Micòl, but their relationship never develops, characterised by misunderstandings and ambiguity that they are too young to resolve. Being too young for what life throws at you is also shown through the political conversations with Giampi Malnate, an older Christian friend of Alberto, as well as an experience of terminal illness.

What I thought was so subtle and clever from Bassani is that nothing overly dramatic happens. Rather, things fade out. The huge events that we know are looming take place outside of the novel, and instead we are shown how we can take for granted the moments that seemingly have no wider ramifications. Except of course, they do. This is a formative time for the narrator.  

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is not a plot-driven novel. It is a beautifully written evocation of a time before unimagined horrors. It is reflective and elegiac in tone without ever letting sentimentality lessen the portrait of a family obliterated by the Holocaust. It’s a truly devastating read.

The novel was adapted into a film in 1970, which won the Best Foreign Language Oscar that year. Has anyone seen it? It looks pretty faithful to the book so I’m interested to watch it:

“Writing’s not always a pleasure to me, but if I’m not writing every other pleasure loses its savour.” (John Braine)

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This is my second contribution to the 1962 Club, hosted by Simon and Kaggsy, which is running all week. Do check out all the wonderful posts!

I picked up Life at the Top by John Braine because it is the sequel to Room at the Top (1957) which I really rated, with its depiction of the postwar north of England and Joe Lampton’s determination to leave his working -class life behind, whilst juggling complex sexual relationships. Life at the Top I didn’t find as compelling, but there was still a lot to enjoy.

Set ten years after Room at the Top, the novel follows Joe as he lives the life he thought he always wanted. Even if you’ve not read the first novel, take a guess as to how that’s working out for him 😀

“The truth was that I actually wanted a drink now, I wanted something to blur things slightly, to put a haze between me and the pink wallpaper and the pink cupboards and the white refrigerator and the electric oven and the mixing machine and the pink wall table and the pink covered stool; it was too bright and shiny and hygienic at eight o’clock on a March morning with Harling Crescent quiet under the weight of Sunday, it reminded me rather too coldly that I was thirty-five and a father of two children and at least ten pounds overweight.”

Joe adores his young daughter Barbara but feels alienated from his son Harry, who has been sent away to a school of his grandfather’s choosing. He and his wife Susan still sexually desire one another, but there seems to be little intimacy. Working at the family firm (Susan’s family), Joe is frustrated:

“I had stopped wanting things. I wanted power, power to put through my own ideas; I wanted to be taken seriously, I wanted to be something more than the boss’s son-in-law.”

He is going to become a local councillor, but that doesn’t suggest fulfilment to him (nor should it, bloomin’ Tory! 😀 )

“The prosperous middle-aged grumblers, the solid sensible citizens; I would sit here or in the committee room listening to them; taking great care not to offend them, and without my realising it, I would become exactly like them. Waiting my turn to grumble, waiting my turn for thrombosis, waiting my turn for death.”

So what does Joe do? Talk honestly with his nearest and dearest? Seek out a life of authenticity? Reflect honestly on the deep-rooted cause of his dissatisfaction and what he can do to make his life more fulfilling? No, of course not. He starts an affair with an attractive young journalist named Norah Hauxley and runs away to London.  The shadow of his former lover (from Room at the Top) still looms large, and I felt Alice was really the only woman Joe had loved:

“She was grown up. I hadn’t met a grown up woman in ten years, and for ten years I hadn’t felt the need to be with one. And Alice, even Alice, had been broken somewhere, she had lost the habit of happiness.”

Joe is not likable. He takes decisions that hurt others. He behaves selfishly. He’s a bit of a misogynist.But still I found myself staying alongside him as narrator, because he’s so honest. He doesn’t ask the reader to like him, because he doesn’t much like himself. I thought Braine did a brilliant job of presenting a man so of his time, and so completely believable.

Life at the Top doesn’t have a huge amount of plot, but I found it a compelling read in its honesty, particularly around flawed human relationships.

“I looked at her in surprise; I had not felt so close to her since we were first married. But I made no move to comfort her.”

Life at the Top is a short read, and I may not have stuck with it had it been longer. But as it was it was well-judged, and there are some developments in Joe’s familial relationships toward the end that I found truly moving. I’m glad the 1962 Club prompted me to finally pick this one up after it had been languishing in the TBR for many a year.

Life at the Top was adapted into a film in 1965, with the magnetic Laurence Harvey, who also starred in Room at the Top. Unfortunately the director changed from the first excellent film, and although I tried to watch the sequel, I found it so heavy-handed and unsubtle compared to the book that I gave up. But it did make me appreciate the book more!

So rather than a trailer for the film, here’s a 1962 song about rain, which the West Yorkshire town of Warley would be no stranger to:

“I regret profoundly that I was not an American and not born in Greenwich Village.” (John Lennon)

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The 1962 Club, hosted by Simon and Kaggsy, starts today and is running all week which I am very excited about 😊 The Club weeks are always great and I’m really looking forward to seeing the posts. This is the first of  what I hope will be three contributions, but as I never blog as much as I mean to, failure is almost inevitable!

The Golden Spur was Dawn Powell’s last novel, and it’s a humorous look at the bohemian arts scene of late 1950s New York, specifically Greenwich Village. This was a world Powell was very much a part of and my edition features an effusive introduction from Gore Vidal who was one of her close friends.

We are introduced to the artists and writers – both up and coming, and those very much faded and failing – their hangers-on and their varied associates through the outsider view of Jonathan Jaimison. He is in his late twenties and recently discovered that his father isn’t the domineering tyrant he grew up with, but someone from this scene, back when his mother was hanging out with Prohibition-era flappers.

So Jonathan leaves his Ohio home and soon makes his way to the titular bar, at the start of his quest to find his biological father:

“Through a gap in the plum velvet cafe curtains he could see the bar … He breathed deep of the heady New York air, that delirious narcotic of ancient sewer dust, gasoline fumes, roasting coffee beans, and the harsh smell of the sea that intoxicates inland nostrils. Then he pushed open the door.”

He’s quickly adopted by Lize and Darcy, two frenemies who sleep with the same male artists, although it’s not entirely clear why, as they seem to have no great fondness for men or for art:

“The girls never asked questions about a man’s private interests or listened when he tried to tell them. For them it was enough that he was a man and that he was there. Who needs a talking man?”

“That his newest canvas was gone should have told her something, but she wasn’t sure which was the new one because all his pictures looked alike to Lize. Great lozenges of red and white (‘I love blood,’ he always said), black and grey squares (‘I love chess,’ he’d say), long green spikes (‘I love asparagus’). All Lize had learned about art from her life with painters was that the big pictures were for museums and the little ones for art.”

As Jonathan makes his way in New York, he moves between two generations: the young artists and the fading interwar generation. There is a nostalgia for the Prohibition period and what New York was then which is beautifully evoked, alongside a recognition that New York is a city that continually makes itself and its inhabitants anew:

“Jonathan recognised New York as home. His whole appearance changed overnight, shoulders broadened, apologetic skulk became swagger; he looked strangers in the eye and found friendship wherever he turned. With the blight of Jaimison heritage removed, his future became marvellously incalculable, the city seemed born fresh for his delight. He took for granted that his mother’s little world, into which he had dropped, was the city’s very heart.”

Although The Golden Spur is described as a comic novel, I didn’t find it laugh-out-loud funny. Rather I’d describe it as affectionately satirical. It ribs the 1950s arts scene and the vacuous people drawn to it, but it never has a bitter or nasty tone:

“Anybody with a tube of paint and a board was an artist. But writers were not writers unless decently unpublished or forever muffled by a Foundation placebo.”

“‘I just want to be overestimated,’ Earl shouted, ‘like everybody else, goddammit.’”

Despite the overarching plot being Jonathan’s search, this really isn’t a plot-driven novel. Rather, the question of his paternity is a device to introduce the various characters and their world. It’s a novel to read for the evocation of the city, of a particular society found within it, and for the characterisation and the wit. In the way that Tales of the City was serialised in the San Franciso Chronicle, I felt The Golden Spur could have worked similarly in The Village Voice. It’s almost a series of sketches, albeit well realised ones.

I can’t say I loved this quite as much as Gore Vidal clearly did, but then he probably recognised a lot of the characters and situations within the novel. I still found a great deal to enjoy, and Powell certainly has a way with words:

“She was making more and more passes at the wrong men, then trying to recoup with stately cultural pronouncements in her refined Carolina accent, which she kept polished up like her grandfather’s shotgun, ready to bring recalcitrant suitors into line.”

To end, I was going to go with the song Little Lize because that’s the only other time I’ve come across the name. I thought it would be easy to get a good quality version as the massively successful Fisherman’s Friends have recorded it. But I couldn’t find a decent one so here they are instead singing about never leaving home. New York isn’t for everyone…

“You’re on earth. There’s no cure for that.” (Samuel Beckett)

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This is my third read for AusReading Month 2023 hosted by Brona at This Reading Life and so far I’ve been very lucky with my choices from the TBR, they’ve all been striking and compelling reads. I’m grateful this month-long event has finally prompted me to get to them.

I was immediately taken with the premise of Claire Thomas’ The Performance when it was published in 2021, as it is set in one of my favourite places to be: the theatre. Also I’m shallow and I really liked the cover too, with flames licking through the seats.

Set during a performance of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days in a Melbourne theatre, the novel follows the thoughts of three women in the audience.

Margot is a professor nearing unwanted retirement:

“Margot refuses to be patronised by sudoku puzzles or the cryptic crossword – lifting a pen towards one of those activities announces you as a gullible geriatric – and she has instead embarked on this careful consideration of her past.”

Ivy is a rich patron of the theatre, who has recently had a child many years after the death of her first, and has been a huge Beckett fan since her student days:

“Ivy pulled down her SB picture after a further year of tertiary education bloated with critical theory, once the idea of idolising a dead white man had become too embarrassing to have on public display.”

And Summer is a young usher who doesn’t know key facts about her past and is trying to manage her anxiety about the future:

“Summer wishes that she were more even-tempered. She wishes she noticed less and worried less and cared less. She knows there are better ways to live a functional life. Well, she hopes that there might be better ways to live a functional life and she just hasn’t worked them out yet.”

Like Winnie on the stage, trapped in earth up to her waist (then up to her neck in the second half), the three women are rendered immobile by the conventions of theatre-going. As they sit in the auditorium, there are bushfires edging ever closer…

“Everyone seems engrossed. The performance is working on them. Perhaps they are immune to what is going on outside this cold bubble of culture. Maybe they already felt safe in their city or their suburbs, buffered from the threat of the distant, unpredictable flames.”

Thomas balances all the elements of the story so well. The three women are all fully realised and believable individuals and the performance they are watching intrudes enough to give a sense of the play without being jarring or gimmicky.

Speaking of which… the interval is written in playscript style which is clearly marked in the book with grey-edged pages, so I knew it was coming and wasn’t convinced. But on reading it in context I thought it was well-justified. It gave a sense of the change of environment and pace for the characters in a clever way, without losing sight of what had gone before or would come after. I can be a bit grumpy about such techniques but really can’t complain here 😀

I thought the themes regarding the roles of women and environmental crisis were so deftly handled too. Happy Days lends itself to these really well and provided a constant background reverberation, alongside the threat of encroaching fires.

Meanwhile, the three women are trying to work out which parts of their many roles feel performative and which feel authentic:

“Summer is not effortlessly cool. She is not effortlessly anything. Performing in the right way each day is exhausting her.”

“Ivy suspects that feeling confused about whether one is being ironic is a key indicator of approaching middle age.”

“So [Margot] imagined being someone without a professorial chair. Someone who had not written several books. Someone who had not won many prestigious awards and grants for her work […] and those erasures were only momentarily tolerable before she felt panicked and bereft.”

As the quote about Ivy shows, there is a dry humour running through The Performance that keeps it engaging. Like Beckett, Thomas uses humour to keep explorations of existential crisis becoming utterly overwhelming for the reader/audience.

This is the first work I’ve read by Melbourne-based Claire Thomas and I’ll definitely seek out more. Apparently she’s currently working on her third novel and I’d be interested to read her first, Fugitive Blue.  

“This is what’s so special about theatre, Ivy thinks. This forced intimacy between strangers. This shared experience of watching or not watching other people performing right now in this delicate moment. Anything could happen beside me or in front of me, but here I am, sitting here, just doing this play.”

To end, a brief interview with Judith Lucy who played Winnie in the Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of Happy Days earlier this year: