books

“She got her looks from her father. He’s a plastic surgeon.” (Groucho Marx)

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For the second week running Groucho provides the title of my post – I try not to quote the same person so close together, but it was really hard to find a quote about fathers that had the right air of flippancy that I try to cultivate for this blog. 16 June was Father’s Day in many countries and so both of the books I’ve chosen are around this theme.  However, my search for quotes about fathers showed me it’s a potentially tricky subject for people, so neither of the novels are precisely about fathers, more about the role of fathers and the impact that has.  Also, my own father has always proclaimed that Father’s Day is a commercial scam and instructed his offspring not to engage with it, which means I feel a bit disloyal even mentioning it.  So the theme of this post is Father’s Day, sort of…

Firstly, The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright (2011, Vintage).  Enright has a sparse writing style that I love, and I highly rate her 2007 novel The Gathering, which won the Man Booker Prize.  The Forgotten Waltz explores many of the same themes – families, what damage they do, the lies and intricacies that can make up adult lives.  If that sounds really depressing, well, it’s not exactly a heart-warming read, but it’s not downbeat, just very real.  I chose it for Father’s Day because the narrator identifies her lover’s role as a father as the motivating force in their lives from the opening paragraph:

“If it hadn’t been for the child then none of this might have happened, but the fact that a child was involved made everything that much harder to forgive.  Not that there is anything to forgive of course, but the fact that a child was mixed up in it all made us feel that there was no going back; that it mattered.  The fact that a child was affected meant we had to face ourselves properly, we had to follow through.”

The thing that happens is an extra-marital affair, and the child is Evie, who witnesses the narrator, Gina, kissing her father.  You’ll note Gina believes there was “nothing to forgive”, which is somewhat questionable – when deceit is involved, people get hurt in the fallout.  But I think this one of the strengths of the novel, that there are not easy characters (like the intermittently self-deluding Gina) or situations, no “goodies” or “baddies”.  It’s all shades of grey (by which I mean morally complex, not badly written BDSM tales).

The reality of the situation is also reflected in the structure of the narrative, which although essentially linear, jumps back and forth, as people do when they’re telling you their story.  It accurately reflects the complexities of our lives, the way we restructure our narratives as we try and make sense of things; things that can appear different to us on different days: “This is the real way it happens, isn’t it? I mean in the real world there is no one moment when a relationship changes, no clear cause and effect.” There’s no huge driving plot here, in that sense it is a very simple tale, but Enright’s great skill is to capture small moments and attempt to define their importance:

“When the last small guest was gone and the rubbish bag full of packaging and uneaten lasagne the thought of him – the fact of him – happened in my chest, like a distant disaster.  Something was snapped or broken. And I did not know how bad the damage was.”

The Forgotten Waltz is an acutely insightful novel, that at the same time steps back from offering the answers – honest and thought-provoking.

Secondly, Pop by Kitty Aldridge (2001, Vintage). Pop was Kitty Aldridge’s first novel (she’s an actress who has been friends with fellow thesp-turned-author Esther Freud since their days at drama school, literary fact-fans) and looking on amazon people seem to object to the abundance of imagery in the novel, which I think is understandable in your first attempt.  I like an abundance of imagery so it didn’t bother me at all, and I found the story of Maggie, parentless at thirteen, going to live with her trivia-loving granddad in the Midlands in 1975, a touching and compelling read.   The opening paragraph introduces us to Maggie’s new parental figure:

“She is looking up at a tall man in shambolic clothes.  He is racing-dog thin with a long mischievous face, whiplashed with creases. The railway-station wind lifts his remaining hair.  It is hard to say how old he is; old, seventy perhaps.  But he moves with the quick fluidity of a youth and hangs a lean on one hip like a gunslinger. When he is not squinting he has the openly amazed expression of a child.  His eyes are a shocking shade of blue; they steal almost all the available light.  Maggie follows, up into his eyes like the light.”

The book follows Pop and Maggie as they grow used to each other.  The plot is slight – Pop wants to win the local pub quiz:

“Pop had stayed up half the night with his facts.  He knew every West Indian cricket team for the past five years.  “I’ll wipe the floor with you in a sporting category any day Malcolm Denton!” he hollered as he shaved at dawn.  The statement sprang through the open window and bounced off car roofs into the trees.  The birds stopped singing momentarily, considering the claim.  The three of them trooped in the man-dog-child formation along Tower Road past the Pint Pot and on past Iris’s house.  Iris was Pop’s exquisite, unattainable love and he was going to win her at any cost.  He told himself the gallon of beer and five pounds meant nothing; winning, that was what counted.”

Gradually, the two of them, a cantankerous old man still having nightmares about the war, and a teenage girl who worries her hands are too big & the rest of her too bony, form an unlikely alliance, and a bonded family.  This is what makes Pop a great Father’s Day read:

“Pop wondered about her.  About how it would turn out.  About what he’d said to the woman carrying a file with their names on.  The stuff about family, about blood ties, all that thicker-than-water speech.  The prohibitive wave of his hand to knock the alternatives into a cocked hat.  The rise of blood in his temples as he moved himself to trembling, and the final whispered declaration of love for her, that he didn’t feel then but was saddled with now […] And he felt for her now alright. He laid his chin in the cradle of his free hand and closed his eyes. Buggered it again, you fool.”

Here are the books with a picture of Lenin.  I realise I need to explain this, dear reader.  They are with Lenin because my very own pater is the spitting image of the Bolshevik leader.  So much so that when I showed him (my Dad, I don’t talk to the ghost of Lenin) the image on my phone that flashes up when he calls me, he asked “When was that taken?  I look good.” And I had to break it to him that it was in fact Vladimir Ilych, not himself. Happy Father’s Day, and up the revolution!

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“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” (Groucho Marx)

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Unlike Groucho Marx, I quite like television.  I say this in the full acknowledgement that at least 99% of it is shocking in its lack of aspiration towards anything other than cheaply-made sensationalist drivel.  And (unsurprisingly) it will never be as rewarding to me as reading is.  But some of the programmes of recent years have just been astonishing.  I’m careful how I use TV, which essentially means I never channel surf to sit mindlessly in front of  America’s Next Top Gypsy Teenage Mom Hoarder Bounty Hunter Bride’s Got Talent or whatever else the channels are filling their many hours with repeats of.  I choose what I’m going to watch, and then my addictive personality traits emerge as I stack up hour upon hour to watch in a big binge.

This is why I’ve only just started on Mad Men Season 6. But aside from my unhealthy habits, there was another reason why I stacked up the episodes.  Fear.  I was so worried it wouldn’t live up to itself.  Surely, I thought, they’re due to screw it up?  They’ll take this piece of TV perfection and turn it into yet another series that lost its way and sends fans apoplectic with grief at the betrayal?  I needn’t have worried.  A few minutes in to the first episode, there was a moment so completely perfect I nearly wept with relief at the beauty of it all. (For those of you who haven’t sold your soul to Rupert Murdoch in the name of timely programming, and therefore haven’t seen season 6 yet, don’t worry, this isn’t a spoiler). Here it is, the moment: Don Draper is on the beach in Hawaii reading Dante’s Inferno.  That’s it. Damn, Matthew Weiner is a bona fide genius.  Everything you need to know about a character distilled into one perfect moment.  Don Draper, living the life everyone wants: gorgeous and successful, beautiful loving wife sipping cocktails next to him, relaxing on a beach in luxury, reading about the nine circles of Hell.  I could’ve kissed the screen.  If I wasn’t such an appalling housekeeper & so my TV covered in dust, I would have.

And then this got me thinking about other moments in TV where books are used as a visual clue to as to the reader’s personality.  There’s the time in The Wire where McNulty (police officer) goes to Stringer Bell’s (drug lord’s)apartment, picks up a copy of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and is so wrong-footed by it he wonders aloud “Who the fuck was I chasing?” But often it’s unspoken, and funny: Marcus, the scarily shark-eyed ten- year- old in Spy, reading The Slap (Christos Tsiolkas) or Machiavelli’s The Prince; Gromit’s many punning titles of great novels (my favourite: Crime and Punishment by Fido Dogstoyevsky).  It’s a great opportunity to flesh out a character (even a plasticine dog) without using any dialogue, in a matter of seconds.  A wordless conversation between the programme makers and the viewer.  So in celebration of such moments, here are two TV characters and the books I’d like to see them read (and proof, if proof were needed, that Matthew Weiner is not lying awake at night worrying that I’m about to emerge as a rival TV-producer-of-substantial-genius)…

Firstly, in celebration of the series return via Netflix, Gob from Arrested Development, for whom I recommend The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan (1989, my copy 1996, Minerva).  The uninitiated can view some of Gob’s moments here:

Gob is a lunatic, obsessed with stage magic but woefully inept at its execution, a wannabe alpha male who will never lead the pack, despised by his mother and barely tolerated by the rest of his family.  And he travels everywhere by Segway.  I decided on The Joy Luck Club because I feel Gob could benefit from some positive female energy in his life, and this tale of two generations of mothers and daughters will immerse him in oestrogen-fuelled drama.  It will also show him the power of unconditional love of parents for their children, something entirely lacking in his own life.  The club of the title is a group of Chinese immigrant women who are living in San Francisco, and who get together to play mah jong.  At the start of the novel one of the women, Suyuan, has died, and her daughter, Jing-Mei/June has been asked to take her place.  The novel is divided into four sections as the three remaining mothers and each of the four daughters tells their story.  The tales explore the experience of the women back in China, and their daughters’ experiences as the first generation growing up in San Francisco.  The communication difficulties across the generations are contextualised within an Asian-American experience, but are really universal:

“For all these years I kept my mouth closed so selfish desires would not fall out.  And because I remained quiet for so long now my daughter does not hear me.  She sits by her fancy swimming pool and hears only her Sony Walkman, her cordless phone, her big, important husband asking her why they have charcoal and no lighter fluid….I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.” (Ying-Ying St.Clair)

“During our brief tour of the house, she’s already found the flaws.  She says the slant of the floor makes her feel as if she is “running down”.  She thinks the guest room where she will be staying – which is really a former hayloft shaped by a sloped roof – has “two lopsides”.  She sees spiders in high corners and even fleas  jumping up in the air – pah! pah! pah! – like little spatters of hot oil.  My mother knows, underneath all the fancy details that cost so much, this house is still a barn.  She can see all this.  And it annoys me that all she sees are the bad parts.  But then I look around and everything she said is true.” (Lena St.Clair)

The novel has been accused by some of dealing in racial stereotypes, but I think what limits this is Tan’s ability to create seven strong, original, fully drawn female characters and explore their idiosyncratic relationships.  The voices of the members of The Joy Club Club are memorable and distinctive.

Secondly, Annie from Community, for whom I recommend Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski (1982, my copy 2000, Canongate). The uninitiated can view some of Annie’s moments here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUKDfOWGVQY

Oh, Annie, with your relentlessly perky expression and upbeat attitude, your array of tastefully coloured angora jumpers and perfectly organised stationery.  Every now and again the strain shows and the façade crumbles, and Bukowski will teach you that that is where the interesting stuff happens.  Come join us on the darkside, Annie, you know you want to…… Ham on Rye is Bukowski’s most autobiographical novel, and follows his alter-ego Henry Chinaski through an abusive childhood and into an early adulthood where his main source of support and meaning is found in a bottle.   After his first experience with alcohol, drinking his friend’s father’s wine, Henry sits on a bench and reflects:

“I thought, well, now I have found something.  I have found something that is going to help me, for a long time to come.  The park grass looked greener, the park benches looked better and the flowers were trying harder.”

The only other positive experience Henry has in a childhood filled with violence and deprivation is when a teacher praises his creativity and reads aloud an essay he has written:

“Everybody was listening.  My words filled the room, from blackboard to blackboard, they hit the ceiling and bounced off, they covered Mrs Fretag’s shoes and piled up on the floor… I drank in my words like a thirsty man.  I even began to believe some of them[…]So that’s what they wanted: lies. Beautiful lies. That’s what they needed. People were fools.”

Bukowski is a legend of the beat generation and his reputation for hard-living precedes him.  In some ways this is unfortunate, as it suggests a reputation built on image rather than skill.  But he’s a really beautiful writer who Capote could never accuse of typing, not writing.  For all you fellow bibliophiles out there, here is what happens when Henry discovers the joys of the library:

“It was a joy. Words weren’t dull, words were things that could make your mind hum.  If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.”

Gorgeous.  Moments like that shine out like beacons amongst the violence and bleakness of Henry’s existence; Ham on Rye is a fantastic reminder of why we read.

Here are Gob and Annie with their books:

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“Why do people say “grow some balls”? Balls are weak and sensitive. If you wanna be tough, grow a vagina. Those things can take a pounding.” (Sheng Wang, probably)

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I didn’t plan for the theme for this week’s post to be feminism, but then my weekend consisted of thinking of little else, so I decided feminism it had to be. So, what happened this weekend?  I watched Caitlin Moran being interviewed by India Knight as part of this year’s Hay sessions, Beyonce’s Chime for Change concert was televised, I read an interview with Joss Whedon talking about Buffy as a role model and why he didn’t want her turned into a doll, there was an article about feminist activism in the digital age. Then I switched on Radio 4 for Book Club and the author was discussing his creation of strong female characters (more of that later).  Once I’d decided on the theme for this post, I wondered if this meant branching out from discussing fiction, as I gazed at my bookshelves trying to decide between Germaine Greer, Susie Orbach, Caitlin Moran, Naomi Wolf, Natasha Walter…  but then I realised I was being incredibly short-sighted.  I wanted this blog to be about fiction and there was no reason to change (but I still wanted to name-check a few authors, please check them out if you haven’t already).  Feminism is about the world we live in, and fiction writing and reading is part of that – for some of us, a huge part… So, fiction it is. I’ve chosen one classic of feminist literature and one less obvious choice.  Also, one by a female author and one by a male, because I don’t think feminism is about the exclusion of men (that’s just made me think of another recommendation, Feminist Ryan Gosling by Danielle Henderson, a great gift for the feminist Gosling fan in your life, of which surely there are many). Let’s smash the patriarchy!

Firstly, The Women’s Room by Marilyn French (1977, my copy Warner Books 1993). Written during the 1970s feminist movement, this was French’s first novel and has become one of feminism’s classic texts.  It’s a huge tome – just shy of 700 pages in my copy, but it has a very readable style and isn’t an arduous “but-I-know-this-is-good-for-me” experience. The central protagonist is Mira, a baby-boomer who grows up to live the domestic idyll, married to a doctor (called Norm, geddit?) and with 2 children who she raises in middle-class suburbia. Her friends are all like her, and discontent and extra-marital affairs abound as they come to terms with the limitations of the lives they’ve wandered into.  After the breakdown of her marriage, Mira attends Harvard and plans to become a teacher.  Here she has her consciousness awakened by Val, a feminist.  It is this character that voices the more extreme views within the book, the most famous probably being “all men are rapists”.  Eek.  Don’t let that put you off though, as the novel generally has a less extreme approach to issues, and as an insight into militant 1970s feminism the character of Val is worth sticking with.  There is a lot of angry polemic, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and here there is enough narrative drive to make you feel you’re not being battered over the head with it.  Mira is a character you root for, and she’s not a victim:

“Ever since the divorce, she had grown more and more bitter at that injustice, at the injustice of the way the world treats women, at Norm’s injustice to her.  And all she was doing was getting more bitter, destroying her own life, what was left of it.  There is no justice . there was no way to make up for the past. There was nothing that could make up for the past.  She sat stunned for a while, freed of a burden, feeling her mouth soften, her brow unline. […] There was no justice, there was only life. And life she had.”

In some ways The Women’s Room has dated. Things are different to how they were in 1977.  In other ways it hasn’t dated at all and the things that its angry about are still a source of inequality today; as a novel that looks at how “women’s work” is undervalued, it is entirely current as long as gender pay gaps persist, which they do. The Women’s Room is an approachable way to start to look at feminist issues through narrative.

Secondly, Quarantine by Jim Crace (1997, Penguin).  This may not seem an obvious choice, but it was the novel discussed on Radio 4’s Book Club this week, where Crace identified himself as a feminist:

“I guess it’s a question of being a right-on bloke, that’s lived in through the seventies and eighties […] what I do want to do with the women in my books though, is not have Hollywood type heroines, in which good looks are the gateway to being virtuous and having good luck, and having good fortune, and having long marriages and lots of handsome children. That seems to me to be a very pessimistic view of the world, that only very good-looking women are going to do well in the world. So what I want to do in all of my books, is to present women who are admirable for other reasons. They are strong women, and I like that, and in a way if you’re spending as many hours alone in your house as I do, then you might as well have the company of women that you’ve created who you like.”

So, who are the women of Quarantine?  They are Miri and Marta, living in Judea around 2000 years ago.  Miri is married to Musa, a truly evil man to the point of possibly being the embodiment of Satan.  He is a trader, one who exploits and commodifies all: “He looked each of them in the face as if they were for sale.  He could tell at once what they were worth.”  Miri doesn’t even pretend to like him. Marta enters the desert to fast for fertility:

“Husbands were amusing, too.  At least, they were amusing when they were out of sight.  Their vanities and tempers could be joked about among women friends at the ovens or the well.  Grumbling and laughing at their curdy husbands made the bread rise and the yoghurt set.  But Marta could not find the comedy in Thaniel.  He’d made her and his first wife barren, she was sure, with his dry heart and sparking tongue.  They were like millstones without oil.  But – Marta was an optimist – she still believed everything would be a joy if she could have his child.”

Set 2000 years apart, The Women’s Room and Quarantine both highlight the marriage laws remaining resolutely on the man’s side.  Quarantine however, is resolutely on the women’s side, as they fight to find their way in a society that is not built for them. The women are the strongest characters in the novel, and this may be somewhat surprising when you consider there is another man in the desert too, a young Galilean:

“He was open mouthed.  He looped his tongue from side to side, circling his lips, tasting the atmosphere for smells.  In fact his sense of smell had been so bludgeoned by the heat and by his thirst that he could not detect the sulphur even. He was parched and faint.  His lips were cracked…he was a traveller called Jesus, from the cooler, farming valleys in the north…”

The word quarantine comes from the Italian quarantena, meaning 40 days, and so the title takes on a layered meaning.  The characters are in quarantine from the rest of society for various reasons, including Jesus spending forty days in the desert as part of his spiritual journey. Quarantine is a haunting, beautifully written novel about characters on the outskirts, who are given a space of their own within this story.

Here are the novels, hanging out with Germaine Greer:

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“There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.” (P.G. Wodehouse)

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Usually I try and pick books that explore a similar theme in different ways, but this week the choices aren’t linked thematically in any way except how they came into my life.  Both were given to me as gifts recently and I enjoyed them both, but couldn’t think what else to pair them with for a post.  Then I realised that for me they were sort of tied together, and this was a good enough (flimsy, lazy, what you will) reason for them to occupy the same post.  It’s unusual for friends to by me books – I think one sight of my overflowing bookshelves sends them scurrying to the nearest smellies store for presents, in the mistaken belief that any book they buy me I will have already read/somehow owned for years even if it’s just released/view with barely disguised contempt.  I’ve recently put the kibosh on toiletries by developing mad allergies, cause unknown, that make me look like Father Bigley (as my ever-sympathetic brother pointed out, for all you Father Ted fans out there) so this may explain the sudden enthusiasm for printed matter amongst my cohorts.  Either that, or I’ve finally taken control of my body odour, negating the need for bags of stuff from L’Occitane. Whatever the reason, two of my friends did sterling work with these recent offerings.

Firstly, At Freddies by Penelope Fitzgerald(1982, my copy 2003, Flamingo), given to me by my lovely friend C, who is an academic mega-brain, filled with boundless enthusiasm for literature, and despite these gifts and being quite beautiful as well, carries it all with such an unassuming genuine pleasantness as to make her completely likeable.  She can now add gift-giving to her long list of talents.  C chose this for me because firstly, she’d read and enjoyed it, and secondly because it concerns the theatre, which is one of my great loves.  But although it does have a dry, knowing humour about the theatre, At Freddies is much more about being a child in an adults world, about school and those teachers whose main qualification is their force of personality, and about trying to find your place in the world, which is after all, a stage (at least according to one highly regarded writer).  Freddie runs a dilapidated stage school for children in 1960s Covent Garden.  There is no money but somehow she keeps it all hanging together by being someone who everyone knows, and who no-one can refuse.

“Insane directors, perverted columnists cold as a fish, bankrupt promoters, players incapable from drink, have all forgiven each other and been forgiven, and will be, until the last theatre goes dark, because they loved  the profession.  And of Freddie – making a large assumption – they said: her heart is in it.”

There is a lot of humour in this book, the precocious kids who are manipulative and knowing, but still just children, are hilarious.

“You saved me Miss Wentworth…I’d be out of work, I’d never get work again, if you hadn’t spoken to Mr Lightfoot…I owe everything to you…”

Freddie paid no attention whatsoever.

….Mattie, with an expression of deep malignance, departed.

“He’s acting,” said Miss Blewett.

“Worse than that,” said Freddie.  “He’s acting being a child actor.”

Apparently Penelope Fitzgerald did teach at a theatrical school for a time, and some of her portrayals of theatrical professionals are drily presented, such as the director who wants to “underline Shakespeare’s concepts in the way he’d do it himself if he were here” – apparently this means having young boys played by very old men, and everyone on stage except the person going mad acting a breakdown while the character experiencing it remains stock still.  Not sure that’s quite what Shakespeare had in mind…  All this mayhem revolves around Freddie who remains resolute but ultimately enigmatic.  No-one quite knows her background, motivation or purpose, except to keep going.  When one of the teachers finds her collapsed, he reflects “No, she won’t die…She won’t change her habits so easily.” At Freddie’s is a short novel (230 pages my edition), highly readable and very enjoyable, but also unnerving and thought-provoking, as much about what isn’t said as what is.  I highly recommend it.

Secondly, The London Train by Tessa Hadley (2011, Vintage) given to me by my also very lovely friend K, who is as creative as she is kind as she is gorgeous.  I’ve got to stop hanging round with such thoroughly brilliant women, it only highlights my own shortcomings (except when it comes to choosing friends, which I am inordinately talented at). K chose this for me because again, she’d read and enjoyed it, and secondly, because it was set partly in London, another of my great loves.  See what thoughtful friends I have? The London Train is a book of two halves.  In the first half, Paul is looking for his missing daughter, Pia, who he finds living in north London with her slightly controlling boyfriend and his sister.  In the second half, Cora is travelling in the opposite direction, back to Wales, to escape a failing marriage.  I enjoyed Tessa Hadley’s first novel, Accidents in the Home, a great deal but I hadn’t kept up with her writing since, and The London Train made me regret this, as she writes with such sparse beauty:

“He wished he could remember better those passages in The Aeneid where Anchises in the Underworld explains to his son how the dead are gradually cleansed in the afterlife of all the thick filth and encrusting shadows that have accumulated through their mortal involvement, their living; when after aeons they are restored to pure spirit, they long, they eagerly aspire, to return to life and the world and begin again.  Paul thought that there was no contemporary language adequate to describe the blow of his mother’s vanishing. A past in which a language of such dignity as Virgil’s was possible seemed to him itself sometimes only a dream.”

Hadley is also brilliant at capturing small moments, both between people and within individuals:

“Her speech wasn’t slurred, but aggressive, some layer of concealment had been stripped from between them. Where their feet bruised it, the grass sent up its yearning green smell, tugging at his emotions.”

“In the library Cora sometimes felt as if she had fallen to the bottom of a deep well.  It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling.  She hadn’t known there could be a job like this, pressing so weightlessly on the inner self, allowing so much space for daydreaming.”

This great skill, at pinpointing the significance of moments that are barely tangible, make Hadley’s writing both incisive and sympathetic.  The London Train is about the journeys we take both physically and psychologically, and how we construct notions of home, sometimes in the entirely wrong places.  I’ll be seeking out the novels by Hadley that I haven’t read as a matter of urgency.

Here are the books alongside the cards which accompanied them – thanks again, C&K!

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“Heterosexuality is not normal, it’s just common.” (Dorothy Parker)

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I’m hopelessly late with this post, which was prompted by 17 May being the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia. At first when I was looking at what was going on this past week for a theme for this post, I was resistant to choose this, as it seemed I would be attaching the potentially reductive label of “gay writing” to literature.  I’m not sure about this label for the same reason I’m unsure of the label “women’s writing” – while not necessarily inaccurate, it seems to suggest its somehow not “proper” writing, that it can only appeal to ready-designated group and have no meaning outside of that. Well, to quote Maya Angelou, we are all more alike than we are unalike, and so great writing is great writing. Who a writer chooses to sleep with is their own business, and if this informs their writing I don’t see why it should be picked out as “gay writing” unless we have the label “straight writing” which, of course, we don’t. And I guess that’s my main objection.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with literature being labelled as gay, except that because the sexuality is marked out when straight isn’t, it seems to be suggesting a deviation from some sort of norm.  And as Dorothy Parker pointed out….. So why did I decide to go ahead with it?  Because we still need an  International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia, because the city I live in has seen a rise in homophobic attacks over recent years, because this sickening hate crime still exists, and so I wanted to recognise 17 May as an important day.  I hope one day it is no longer needed.  And now I’ll climb down off my soapbox to talk about books, no more ranting, I promise…

Firstly, Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters (who doesn’t mind being labelled a lesbian writer, so maybe I should stop being quite so precious about it) (1998, Virago).  This was Sarah Waters’ first novel and was widely well received; she has gone on to forge a successful literary career with four further novels.  I enjoy her work greatly, because she writes evocatively of the past (in TtV its Victorian London) and is a beautiful writer who also has a great command of plot.  The plot of TtV sees Nan King fall in love with a male impersonator, Kitty, and she leaves her home and family to work with Kitty in the theatres and music halls.  They begin a relationship, but when this disintegrates Nan leaves her and works in London, selling her body as a boy, becoming a rich woman’s plaything, and getting caught up in politics through her friendship with a neighbour.

“The Palace was a small and, I suspect, a rather shabby theatre; but when I see it in my memories I see it still with my oyster-girl’s eyes – I see the mirror-glass which lined the walls, and the  crimson plush upon the seats, the plaster cupids, painted gold, which swooped above the curtain. Like our oyster-house, it had its own particular scent – the scent, I know now, of music halls everywhere – the scent of wood and grease-paint and spilling beer, of gas and of tobacco and of hair-oil, all combined.”

Waters often describes settings through smells, and it is a technique that works well, creating a vivid earthiness that engages with Victorian literary tradition but pushes far beyond it, giving a voice to those largely unheard in the literature of the time:

““You say I know nothing about you; but I have watched you upon the streets, remember.  How coolly you pose and wander and flirt!  Did you think you could play at Ganymede , for ever? Did you think, if you wore a silken cock, it meant you never had a cunt at the seam of your drawers?….You’re like me: you have shown it, you are showing it now! It is your own sex for which you really hunger!””

“Tipping the velvet” is Victorian slang for cunnilingus, something I don’t remember occurring in Dickens…

Secondly, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891, my copy 1994). I won’t go into this in great detail, because I think it’s one of those novels that everyone knows even if they haven’t read it.  A beautiful boy named Dorian Gray has his portrait painted, capturing his first flush of youth.  Under the influence of the hedonist Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian offers up his soul to stay beautiful forever.  He gets his wish, and the portrait ages in his place, growing more hideous with each passing year as a reflection of Dorian’s corrupted soul.  This was Oscar Wilde’s only novel and was hugely controversial at the time, but as my plot summary has hopefully captured, it’s actually a highly moral work.  It’s also gorgeously written, with Wilde bringing his aesthetic sensibilities to his prose, and full of typically Wildean aphorisms to raise a smile amongst the dark subject matter:

“You have a wonderfully beautiful face, Mr. Gray. Don’t frown. You have. And beauty is a form of genius -is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it….. People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial. That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial as thought is. To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.”

TPoDG is a great read, with something for everyone: wit, morality, amorality, the Gothic, adventure, and almost pastoral in places with its detailed descriptions of nature.  It also, like Dorian, hasn’t aged one jot.  In this age of celebrity obsession focussed so much on appearances, the enormity of the cosmetics industry, of plastic surgery and of so much style over so little substance, TPoDG has as much to say about our society today as it did about late Victorian society.  We all have to face our portraits at some time…

Here are the novels wearing a rainbow, symbol of LGBT Pride (and surrounded by cat hair, sorry about that):

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“Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary.” (Oscar Wilde)

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This week I struggled to find a theme to write about, as absolutely nothing remotely noteworthy happened.  I went to work, I saw friends, I cooked, I shopped (as little as possible, I hate shopping in all forms), I read, I watched DVDs (I’m catching up on Breaking Bad)…you get the utterly banal picture.  So I was completely at a loss until an epiphany – that’s probably overstating it, a realisation – earlier today: in my problem lay my solution.  There’s probably a tenet of some philosophy that tells you that very thing, but I took my time getting there. The theme of this week’s post is novels that take a look at the resolutely everyday, the ordinary events in ordinary lives.

Firstly, The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields (1993, 4th Estate). This novel tells the story of Daisy Goodwill, from birth to death, her life lead along entirely ordinary lines.  The Stone Diaries was showered with awards, and certainly Shields is an author gifted in finding the poetic in the everyday.  Take for example this description of eating to assuage a stomach ache (Daisy’s mother failing to recognise birth contractions):

“Frequently she sprinkles sugar on top of the buttered bread.  The surface winks with brilliance, its crystals working between her teeth, giving her strength.  She imagines the soft dough entering the bin of her stomach, lining that bitter bloated vessel with a cottony warmth that absorbs and neutralises the poisons of her own body.”

This first chapter is narrated in the first person, with Daisy telling the part of her life from before she could speak.  The rest of the novel though, is a mixed narration, including third person, letters, newspaper cuttings. This has the effect of demonstrating the difficulty of biography – how it is a patchwork of sources and viewpoints, and that there can never be a definitive telling of a life.  This distance is reflected in the character of Daisy herself, a woman who never quite becomes the protagonist of her own life.  She never quite engages with the events or people that surround her.  The closest she comes to being fully present is in her garden:

“It is, you might almost say, her dearest child, the most beautiful of her offspring…she understands, perhaps, a quarter of its green secrets, no more.  It in turn perceives nothing of her, not her history, her name, her longings, nothing – which is why she is able to love it as purely as she does, why she has opened her arms to it, taking it as it comes, every leaf, every stem, every root and sign.”

So Daisy is not necessarily the most likeable character, but this is turn adds to the verisimilitude of the story – she is just as flawed and problematic as everyone else, ordinary and yet entirely unique.

Secondly, Mr Phillips by John Lanchester (2000, Faber & Faber), and from a book that encompasses an entire lifespan to one than concerns just a single day. However, this is not an ordinary day in the life the eponymous protagonist (hero is a bit much, Mr Phillips is far from a heroic character).  Mr Phillips has lost his job, but he gets up and leaves for work as he has done for decades.  His wife and family, and his neighbours, do not know he has been made redundant. He spends the day aimlessly wandering around London.  Through the events he experiences and his thoughts and fantasies, Lanchester creates a fully drawn and minutely observed character.  Mr Phillips may not be employed as an accountant any longer, but it is an intrinsic part of his nature.  He cannot enjoy a walk in Battersea Park without drawing up what he sees in double entry style.  For example, the lovely peace pagoda in the park is reduced to “Asset: Golden Buddha, Liability: Upkeep of Buddha, gilt paint, etc.”  It reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic, a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.  But this cost/benefit analysis does make for some funny passages such as his colleagues discussing the chances of being dead before the next Lottery draw, and therefore when you should buy your ticket to maximise your chances of winning the Lottery and minimising your chances of being dead. “It had lingered in the mind.  Mr Phillips wonders what his relative chances of being dead before this week’s Lottery draw are at this precise moment.  In all probability they have never been better. Or worse, depending on your point of view.”

Poor Mr Phillips, so bound by the quantifiable realities of life.  Watching someone bungee jump he reflects how adrenalin sports hold no appeal: “You would have to see gravity as a joke or as a benign force or at the very least something you could trifle with …whereas all that Mr Phillips  has to do is look downwards, at his sagged and weighted flesh, to feel differently.” Mr Phillips also thinks about sex a lot, but calculates that “even allowing for films, Mr Phillips is still left with an average daily probability of 96.7 per cent against having sex.” It is this dour acceptance of all odds, weighing up of everything, that makes Mr Phillips so ordinary.  He will never truly experience the extraordinary because he’d never embrace the unknown.  Or will he?  On this day unlike any other, Mr Phillips is forced out of the ordinary.

I was tempted to present the books this week on my toilet, as I thought what is more ordinary than that?  You’ll be relieved to know I decided not to do this, and opted for my ordinary, everyday dining table instead:

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“I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.” (Jerome K. Jerome)

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This weekend is the May Day Bank Holiday in UK.  For those of you who don’t have this celebratory tradition, it’s very simple.  A young woman is dressed in diaphanous clothing and flowers and carried through the village.  Traditionally she would have been a virgin.  Yes, in Britain we like celebrate the purity of young girls by parading them as some sort of Springtime woodland sex fairy.  Then we get children to dance with ribbons around a giant phallic symbol – nothing inappropriate there.  Then grown men strap bells to their ankles and don knickerbockers to dance with each other (women are banned from this so inherently masculine of pursuits) and whack each other with well, that would be phallic symbols again.  It’s not as weird as it sounds.  I did the mammoth cock ribbon dance (not its technical name) as a six year old and it didn’t do me any lasting damage – my therapist promises me it’s all reversible.  The traumas of May Day aside, 1st May is also International Workers Day, and so I’ve chosen a play that picks up on themes of May Day, and a novel about workers politics.

Firstly, a disclaimer. Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth is set on St George’s Day (23 April), not May Day.  But hey, what’s a week? I decided to go ahead with it anyway as it lends itself to May Day – ideas of ritual, tradition, Springtime and revelry run throughout.  Seeing Jerusalem was one of the most extraordinary experiences I’ve ever had in the theatre;  Mark Rylance in the lead role of Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron put in a performance that was literally breathtaking – and that’s not a misuse of the word literally, at one point I realised I’d forgotten to breathe. I loved it so much that when a friend offered me the chance to interview Mark Rylance I turned it down – I couldn’t bear the thought that I might not like him off-stage and that I’d lose that performance. Even if you didn’t catch Jerusalem, which ran 3 times in London and also on Broadway, I still recommend the playtext.  Jez Butterworth is a highly rated playwright and his original voice and great skill mean it is an enjoyable read.

Rooster Byron lives in a mobile home in a wood.  The local council plan to evict him.  The local teenagers love him (and sort of despise him), as he supplies them with drugs and alcohol.  A local girl (dressed as a fairy) has disappeared and her psychotic step-father believes Rooster is involved, and plans to do him serious damage. Amongst these various pressures, Rooster remains resolutely upbeat and self-aggrandizing, with tall tales such as this one of his conception, whereby his philandering father is shot by his wife:

JOHNNY….The bullet passes clean through his scrotum…where it hits the number 87 tram to Andover. The bullet passes through two inches of rusty metal, clean through an elderly lady’s packed lunch and lodges in my sweet mother’s sixteen year old womb. Eight months, three weeks, six days later. Out pops him. Smiling. With a bullet clenched between his teeth.

GINGER. First of all. Babies don’t have teeth.

JOHNNY. All Byron boys are born with teeth. Thirty two chompers.  And hair on thems chest,…

Hopefully it’s apparent that Jerusalem is very funny.  Traditions surround the characters, such as the local Flintock Fair taking place, but are made resolutely current, such as when a Morris dancer arrives, talking about how his participation is due to a “Swindon-level decision”, and needing drugs to get him through it – hardly a bucolic idyll.  This take on England’s green and pleasant land lends the play a slightly surreal air, as Rooster’s outsider status gives him an askance view of the traditions, both wholly entangled (he was once the main attraction of Flintock Fair, performing daredevil stunts) and yet undermining them also.  The surreal quality exists in fairly straightforward exchanges:

JOHNNY. …Two weeks back, your brother Daffy comes round here, tries to buy three grams of whizz with a tortoise.

LEE. That weren’t his tortoise. That’s my sister’s tortoise.

JOHNNY. Well, now it’s my fucking tortoise. Little bugger pisses everywhere. It pisses pints.  It’s like the TARDIS.

LEE. He’s right. That tortoise pisses like a shirehorse.

But as well as humour, the surreal quality is unnerving, and you feel anything could happen.  When Byron claims he met a ninety foot giant “just off the A14 outside Upavon. About half a mile from the Little Chef. I’d been up for three days and nights playing canasta with these old ladies in a retirement home outside Wootton Bassett.” you don’t entirely disbelieve him.  What is real, what is fable, merge until you are not sure whether you watching a man in a mobile home in a wood in the West Country or a mythic being inextricably bound to the legends of the land. Maybe both. I can’t recommend Jerusalem highly enough.

Secondly, and I’ll make this brief, as my love for Jerusalem means I’ve wittered on too much already, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell.   Published in 1914, 3 years after the death of its author from tuberculosis, TRTP is a classic of socialist literature.  Frank Owen, described on the back cover of my copy of the novel as a “journeyman-prophet”, joins a group of workers who are renovating a house known as The Cave.  He encourages them to consider their role within a capitalist system and how they engage in their own economic suppression.  It’s a long novel, and highly polemical, but it’s also very readable and engaging.  In one of the most famous sequences in the book, Owen uses a loaf of bread to explain his reasoning. The bread is raw materials, cutlery is machinery, the cut pieces of bread the goods made.

‘You say that you are all in need of employment, and as I am the kind-hearted capitalist class I am going to invest all my money in various industries, so as to give you Plenty of Work. I shall pay each of you one pound per week, and a week’s work is -you must each produce three of these square blocks…..

‘These blocks represent the necessaries of life. You can’t live without some of these things, but as they belong to me, you will have to buy them from me: my price for these blocks is–one pound each.’

As the working classes were in need of the necessaries of life and as they could not eat, drink or wear the useless money, they were compelled to agree to the kind Capitalist’s terms. They each bought back and at once consumed one-third of the produce of their labour. The capitalist class also devoured two of the square blocks, and so the net result of the week’s work was that the kind capitalist had consumed two pounds worth of the things produced by the labour of the others, and reckoning the squares at their market value of one pound each, he had more than doubled his capital,…as for the working classes,… they were again in precisely the same condition as when they started work-they had nothing.”

This occurs in a chapter called ‘The Reign of Terror. The Great Money Trick’. As you may have guessed, TRTP is quite a bleak novel. Nothing changes and the workers are so indoctrinated in the system that Owen fails to raise their consciousness, turning his attention instead to George Barrington, a middle-class socialist who plans to overturn the system through elected representatives in the House of Commons (argue amongst yourselves as to how that’s working out). The Philanthropists of the title are the workers, doing so much for so little their labour must surely be an act of philanthropy towards their capitalist employers. This bitter irony captures the attitude of the novel towards the complicity of all society in a capitalist system, but although it is an angry book, TRTP doesn’t lose sight of its story amongst the politics.

Here are the books garlanded in May Day fashion:

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“If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.” (Frank Zappa)

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This week I went to visit friends in Oxford, an incredibly beautiful city: the dreaming spires, the May morning choirs, the seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness… er, where was I?  Oxford has a mythology about it as Britain’s oldest university which inspires both fear and rapture, but I don’t think that’s necessarily limited to Oxford or Cambridge.  Going to university can be an exhilarating, terrifying, wonderful time no matter where you are.  And it can also be a massive let-down, when actually nothing major happens and it’s just another step of many on your path. So this week I thought I’d look at two novels that try and capture this time, one set in Oxford, and one at the fictional Drama Arts school in London. Both novels consider the gap between our aspirations and dreams, what we wish were true, and the reality we have to navigate around these hopes.

Firstly The Lessons by Naomi Alderman (Penguin, 2010).  Alderman studied at Oxford herself, and so there is a sense of authenticity in her descriptions of Oxford both in terms of the geographical surroundings but also in the psychology of the university: “This is Oxford: it need not be all or nothing, but it lends itself to that way of thinking.”  The lack of romanticism means there is a limit to which The Lessons adds to the mythology of the place which was somewhat refreshing.  However, there is more than a whiff of Brideshead in the tale: a naïve young man arrives at Oxford, is befriended by a rich man from a Catholic family, who introduces him to his glamorous circle, but all is not as it seems…sound familiar? But The Lessons still manages to tell its own tale.  The main protagonist, James Stieff, is miserable at Oxford until the pretty and talented Jess introduces him to Mark, an erratic and charismatic student whose enormous wealth means he owns a crumbling Georgian mansion where he and the rest of the group (bookish Franny, glamorous Emmanuella, and Simon who I felt was quite undeveloped, preventing me from reducing him to a single adjective easily), all live.  During their time at Oxford they bond over student parties and intrigues, but after university they drift apart as so easily happens.  However, James and Mark are bonded by an event at university which means they are not so easily split:

“I thought he needed to be saved and that it was for me to do.  In that moment I was lost.”

Mark is mentally unstable and although previous mental illness is alluded to it’s never properly explained.  When James reflects, fairly early on:

“For this is the heart of the matter: disasters occur where accidents meet character.”

It is a foreshadowing of where the tale will take us.  The character of Mark is both compelling and flawed, and this fatal combination is ultimately destructive to all who get too close.

The Lessons in many ways is a straightforward book with a simple plot and the resolution is low-key.  However, to an extent I thought this was its strength: few of us live life on a determinedly grand scale and the events and realisations we experience can seem outwardly small, however great the significance to us as individuals. Although James believes:

“It is ridiculous to think we can learn anything from so arbitrary experience as life.  It forms no kind of curriculum and its gifts and punishments are bestowed too arbitrarily to constitute a mark scheme.”

He does in fact learn lessons, but they’re just not as clearly delineated as when they are bestowed from within an academic structure:

“No wonder we spend our adult lives feeling we’re simply pretending to know what we’re doing.  After sixteen years spent doing exams , where the lessons we’ve received perfectly fit the challenges we’re faced with, our preparations for the unpredictable events of normal life will always seem shoddy and haphazard.”

I thought Disobedience, Naomi Alderman’s first novel was far stronger than The Lessons, (especially in terms of characterisation, only Mark and James were fully drawn), but this novel still had something to say about how we come to terms with what we learn, inside and outside the classroom, and how we carry that into our lives with meaning.

Secondly, Lucky Break by Esther Freud (Bloomsbury, 2011).  Before she turned to writing, Freud trained at Drama Centre London, and although the Drama Arts of Lucky Break is fictional, it certainly seems authentically drawn (the temptation to wonder if any characters in the novel are based on specific actors is hard to resist).  A group of students start at Drama Arts, a training school with the ethos of: “Break them down to build them up.”  They all embrace the opportunity to be broken, despite Nell worrying that being overweight will mean she always plays maids and wenches, Charlie being a stunning beauty who is utterly selfish, and Dan becoming something of a teacher’s pet.

“There would be actors, acting, and then them, inhabiting their actual characters, an entire psychological life, both physical and mental, all mapped out.”

However, once in the world of jobbing actors rather than in the classroom, they find their idealism quickly fades.  Nell’s friend Sita constantly plays girls despairing at an arranged marriage, as the industry is unable to cast an Asian woman as anything else, there are limited roles for women, and only 8% employment.  The casting couch remains and any signs of physical imperfection result in a career crisis.

Freud’s fluid writing and subtle characterisation creates flawed, believable characters in a highly readable style that whips the reader along.  Although acting is a profession surrounded by glamour that most of us will never experience, Lucky Break shows the reality of the industry and all its inherent frustrations, while at the same time making it understandable as to why people persevere against the odds.  The allure of that lucky break exists not only for actors, and can be a driving force, even when it seems entirely ethereal and beyond reach. Lucky Break is ultimately more optimistic than The Lessons about holding onto idealism once you leave the sheltering confines of further education and head out into the world, but both show the value of realising that the lessons, and therefore learning, never quite end.

Here are the books donning (get it? donning.  Oh wow, I apologise.  That was truly bad.) a mortar board.  I know it just looks like a big black square but I promise it is a mortar board, I just couldn’t get it to balance properly (as with the books, so it is with my head. Is the impossibility of wearing academic dress part of the elitism? In which case I’m screwed.)

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“Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them.” (Dr. Seuss)

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The theme for the post this week was prompted by spending time with friends’ children.  Although I don’t have kids myself, I enjoy their company and the fact that most of my friends have now reproduced works superbly in my favour:  I can spend time with them, then trot off to [insert any number of frivolous time-wasting activities here]. So, my lack of maternal instinct aside, one of the brilliant things about kids is when they start to discover language and approach it with such fresh eyes and ears, making you reconsider the words you use to explain and understand the world.  This got me thinking about novels written from the point of view of children.  It’s a hugely tricky premise to pull off effectively, but done well it can help the author voice something essential about our experiences in the world, that we perhaps lose sight of as we grow into adults.  To Kill a Mockingbird is a perfect example of this – an incredibly well-written, powerful and incisive novel that so many people adore and find profound meaning in.  I decided not to discuss To Kill a Mockingbird as I found it too daunting a task (for the reasons just given), so instead I’ve chosen two fairly recent novels that both employ a child narrator (a five year old boy and an nine year old boy respectively) to explore tragic circumstances through voices that are not typically heard in literature.

Firstly Room by Emma Donoghue.  A few years ago I was doing an evening class with a journalist who was given a proof copy of this novel to read, and she absolutely raved about it.  I was reluctant to read it at the time as I knew it was inspired by the Josef Fritzl case, and I wasn’t sure of the role in literature in fictionalising such recent events.  My only defence is that I’m an idiot, as Room is a wonderful novel which treats its subject matter with great sensitivity.  It tells the story of Jack who has lived all his five years with Ma in Room, an 11×11 foot space.  Within this limited environment, Jack creates richness and stimulus for himself, personifying the objects that surround him to create his friends:

“I count one hundred cereal and waterfall the milk that’s nearly the same white as the bowls, no splashing, we thank Baby Jesus.  I choose Meltedy Spoon with the white all blobby on his handle when he leaned on the pan of boiling pasta by accident.  Ma doesn’t like Meltedy Spoon but he’s my favourite because he’s not the same.  I stroke Table’s scratches to make them better”

Jack is happy in his world (aside from when their captor, “Old Nick” visits), but how much he is shielded from its sinister side becomes apparent when he describes among the games he and Ma play one called Scream, where it’s clear they spend a portion of each day yelling for help.  They have a TV, and for me this really brought home the shock of what they were enduring: the mention of celebrities like Rihanna, Lady Gaga, and Kanye West grounded it very much in the here and now and narrowed the distance between their extreme experience and the contemporary reader.

Jack is remarkably accomplished verbally and numerically for a five year old, and while the cynical side of me thinks this is convenient for Donoghue as she can make a five year old say much more than they would otherwise, I actually think it works.  Ma is college educated and in trying to provide games to keep Jack occupied, she inevitably ends up accelerating his learning in some areas that children with more balanced experiences wouldn’t undertake.  At one point he even paraphrases 1 Corinthians 13:11: “When I was a kid I thought like a little kid, but now I’m five I know everything”.

Jack’s voice is so distinctive and unique, I found myself being completely drawn into his world.  The story is never depressing because although Ma has been through the most horrific ordeal, her love for Jack ensures that while he is scared and often overwhelmed, he is never without an ally.  At one point, considering whether she sees her captor and rapist in Jack, she says: “He reminds me of nothing but himself”.  This is Donoghue’s great achievement as an author; she has created a protagonist who is wholly unique.

Secondly, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer.  To start I just want to get my one negative point out the way: I found the voice of the narrator, Oskar, entirely unconvincing as a nine year old, even a precocious, highly intelligent, autistic nine year old.  Having said that, Oskar is an engaging, likeable and sympathetic character who easily carries you along on his journey around New York and towards an understanding of what life means following the death of his father.  After his father dies in the events of 9/11, Oskar finds a key labelled “Black” in a vase in his father’s closet.  Oskar decides to unravel the mystery by visiting every New Yorker with the surname Black in New York.  For part of the way he is accompanied by his elderly neighbour, Mr Black (you can probably guess how they meet).  The narrative is interspersed with stories from his grandparents, who witnessed the Dresden bombings, broadening the narrative to consider human trauma across the generations of a family.

The book is inventive in its structure both in narrative terms and physically – there are blank pages, those with only a few words, words crossed out, photographs.  This alongside Oskar’s unique understanding of the world, even in small domestic matters (“I woke up once in the middle of the night and Buckminster’s paws were on my eyelids.  He must have been feeling my nightmares.”) makes for a reading experience unlike any other.  There are ways in which I felt the book wasn’t entirely successful, and certainly not on par with Everything is Illuminated, Safran Foer’s previous novel which I think is one of the best pieces of literature of recent years.  However, I don’t want to dwell on the shortcomings in particular, because I felt the novel succeeded in capturing the most important thing, the grief of a child for his father.

“I loved having a dad who was smarter than the New York Times, and I loved how my cheek could feel the hairs on his chest through his T-shirt, and how he always smelled like shaving, even at the end of the day.  Being with him made my brain quiet.  I didn’t have to invent a thing.”

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is as inventive as its main protagonist, and I found it a highly readable and moving novel from an author who strives to create truly original pieces of writing.

Here are the books with a remnant of my own childhood, Ted (unlike Oskar, I clearly wasn’t an inventive child, at least when it came to naming my toys):

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“Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.” (Alan Bennett)

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Before I start this post proper, I just wanted to mention the sad news that Iain Banks announced this week that he has terminal cancer.  In almost 30 years Iain Banks has produced an impressive volume of work, including science fiction under the name Iain M. Banks, and aged only 59, it was reasonable to assume he would continue to do so for a great many years. Instead, he has confirmed that his latest novel, The Quarry, will be his last. I discuss my favourite of his novels, The Crow Road, in my post of 25 February.  I really don’t know what else to say about this that won’t sound trite or clichéd, but I would urge you once more to check out the work of this highly readable writer whose talent will be sorely missed by his many fans worldwide.

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The prompt for this post came from a friend who emailed this week asking me for recommendations of classics to read.  She had just bought a Kindle and discovered the joy of copyright-free books being free to download.  (All hail Project Gutenberg).  So I thought lots of people could be in a similar position, and it would make a good post… how wrong I was.  It wasn’t long into my deliberations (which I’d love to claim involves a complicated algorithm I’ve compiled to ensure the most riveting blog possible, but the reality is me staring mindlessly at my bookshelves and shaking my head whilst eating too much chocolate) that I ran into the truth of Alan Bennett’s definition.  For so many of the books charged as classics I found myself asking – who needs me to recommend them?  Everyone’s heard of them, knows what they’re about, has an idea of whether it’s something they’re interested in.  OK, I don’t pick the world’s most obscure books the rest of the time, but classics don’t exactly need the PR.  Then I decided to just chill out and pick a book each from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries that are classics but maybe not the most well-known ones.  You’ll be relieved to know I scrapped that idea as I realised this would mean the post would go on forever, and like so many Modernists before me, I decided to abandon all thoughts of the nineteenth century. So here are two books, both of which you’ve probably heard of, one from the century that saw the birth of the novel, one from the twentieth century (unfortunately only the first one is free to download on Project Gutenberg).  If you haven’t read them, I hope this post is helpful in adding to the belief that you have!

Firstly, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, by Henry Fielding (1749, my copy Penguin 1999).  Written at the time when the novel as a form was just beginning, you can sense Fielding having a great time playing around with the lack of established rules – there a lots of direct addresses to the readers, often at tangents to the plot, including précis to each chapter such as “Chapter XII: containing what the Reader, may, perhaps, expect to find in it” and “Chapter I: containing little or nothing”. The book is a huge one: 346,747 words, according to Wikipedia, so I won’t attempt anything other than the very basic outline of the plot: Tom Jones is found abandoned in Squire Allworthy’s bed as a baby.  The Squire raises him as a son, and Tom falls in love with his neighbour, the beautiful and virtuous (of course) Sophia.  He has a nemesis, Bilfil (nephew to Squire Allworthy), whose machinations lead to Tom being banished from the house.  He takes to the road, and Sophia, who loves him, runs away to find him.  Adventures, trials and tribulations abound…

The Victorians reacted against the libertinism of the eighteenth century, but I think this liberal morality means the novels of the time are great fun.  Tom Jones is picaresque, and as such Tom doesn’t always behave well, but it’s always believable and funny, and what makes it so endearing is that he really tries to be the hero of this novel. For example, when he hears the screams of a woman in a wood, he runs to her rescue.  Except he half slides down a hill in a not-very-heroic manner, beats the man attacking her, and then rather than cover over the exposed woman, enjoys gazing at her breasts. The lady recovers sufficiently to flirt with him, and declines his offer of a coat:

“Thus our Heroe and the redeemed Lady walked in the same Manner as Orpheus and Eurydice marched heretofore.  But tho’ I cannot believe that Jones was designedly tempted by his Fair One to look behind him, yet as she frequently wanted his Assistance to help her over Stiles, and had besides many Trips and other Accidents, he was often obliged to turn about.”

Needless to say, this being the eighteenth century, they end up acting on their inclinations…

Tom Jones is a classic that perhaps isn’t as well read as some of the novels that followed, their way opened by Fielding’s inventive work.  I think that’s a shame.  It’s funny, it has plenty to say, and although it’s satirical it’s not overly moral, so if you’ve been put off the classics by the heavily moral tone of the Victorians (or Fielding’s contemporary, Samuel Richardson) then Fielding could be the author for you.  And although Tom Jones is long, it’s not nearly as long & impenetrable as other eighteenth century classics like Tristram Shandy and Clarissa. As a free download, you won’t even have to wrestle with an unwieldy paper tome, so there’s no reason to be anything other than content: “a blessing greater than riches; and he to whom that is given need ask no more.”

My second choice, Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, runs to a modest 222 pages in my edition (Penguin, 1938; my copy much later but no date given) so if you can’t face the girth of Tom Jones, maybe this will appeal more. Scoop is Waugh’s satire on the newspaper business, and the integrity (or lack thereof) of an industry looking for a story at any cost is thoroughly lampooned.

William Boot writes countryside columns for the Daily Beast.  The newspaper’s owner, Lord Copper, mistakes him for the novelist John Boot, who wants to leave the country, and so sends him to be a war correspondent in Ishmaelia, a (fictional) country on the verge of civil war.  The whole experience is disastrous for Boot, but he does manage a scoop, and so is proclaimed a wild success.  The novel is full of Waugh’s witty turns of phrase (Boot is served at one point by a page “with a face of ageless evil”)and eccentric characters, who ask questions like: “Why should I go to Viola Chasm’s Distressed Area; did she come to my Model Madhouse?” If you enjoyed Vile Bodies, this style will be familiar to you, but here the humour is employed to expose the faults inherent in the Press rather than the Bright Young Things of the interwar years. Waugh is scathing about the process of news journalism as a whole: “News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read.  And its only news until he’s read it.  After that it’s dead.” The facts of the war are unimportant to the journalists, as Boot is instructed at one point: “From your point of view it will be quite simple.  Lord Copper only wants Patriot victories and both sides call themselves patriots, and of course both sides will claim all the victories.”

I don’t know a lot about journalism today but I suspect Scoop hasn’t dated too badly, and therefore the satire stands up as well today as it ever did.  One thing which doesn’t stand up & which I found shocking is the horrifically racist language used through the book.  It’s not in abundance, but there’s enough of it there for me to feel the need to warn you.  Ishmaelia is set in Africa, and the language used by the white journalists to describe the country’s inhabitants is derogatory and hugely offensive – it is probably also, I fear, an accurate portrayal of attitudes at the time.  I would still recommend Scoop as a novel, but I wish I’d known about this facet of the story before I went in, as I would have felt better prepared to manage it.

Here are the books presented in classical style, on a bookshelf!

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