“Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!” (Dr Peter Venkman, Ghostbusters)

October 13, 2015July 24, 2026 / madamebibilophile / 21 Comments

This week I bought my first Christmas present of the year. I was really pleased with it. Then as I gazed at it I realised the first present I’d bought this year was for my brother & sister-in-law’s cats. From my cats. I’m gifting between cats. That’s who I’ve become.

So I’m sharing my pain as mad cat lady with the interwebs. But I also love dogs, its just I can’t convince one to live with me in my tiny London flat. So in a spirit of inclusivity, and a rejection of the idea that you are either a dog-person or a cat-person, I’m looking at one novel about a feline, and another featuring a sarcastic dog.

Firstly, The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide (trans. Eric Selland). This short novel is a delicate, sensitive study of the unspoken ties that bind. A small stray cat, adopted by the neighbours, arrives in the house of the narrator and his wife. They live a quiet life, he a poet and she a proof-reader, and the cat brings a spirit of unpredictability into their lives:

“Chibi’s dependence would manifest itself in unexpected ways, even while performing acts of incredible athletic skill. Casting aside the Ping-Pong ball, she turned about at an acute angle, yet in the next moment she had placed her tiny paw on the head of a toad concealed in the shade of one of landscape rocks. Then just as suddenly she flew to the other side of the garden, extending one of her front legs to slip into a clump of bushes.”

The novel is a mix of the closely observed and the philosophical/metaphysical:

“When she began to sleep on the sofa – like a talisman curled gently in the shape of a comma and dug from a prehistoric archaeological site – a deep sense of happiness arrived, as if the house itself had dreamed this scene.”

Hiraide captures how animals bring their own energy, changing dynamics in relationships, affecting homes and the people therein. They are catalysts (no pun intended) and their full effects can be both quiet and far-reaching:

“I opened the window and welcomed in the guest, accompanied by the winter sunrise, and the mood inside the house was restored. Chibi was our first New Year’s visitor. They call the visitors who go around to all the houses on New Year’s Day to wish everyone happy new year ‘pilgrims’.”

You don’t have to like cats to enjoy The Guest Cat. Chibi could be any animal or transforming external force; it is her impact rather than her cat-ness that Hiraide is interested in. The Guest Cat’s story is one of love, change, resilience and loss.

“’See, I told you. She’s our girl.’

…or so my wife said, although she knew she wasn’t really ours. Which is why it seemed all the more as if she were a gift from afar – an honoured guest bestowing her presence upon us.”

Here are my two, utterly engaged with the whole idea of buying their cousins a gift, and with being part of a blog post:

It’s quite hard to find a dog in literature which doesn’t end in a way which has me in floods of tears. Thankfully, the full title of the well-known comic novel by Jerome K Jerome is Three Men in a Boat, To Say Nothing of the Dog! It is a blessed relief to tell you that fox terrier Montmorency makes it through in one piece.

“To look at Montmorency you would imagine that he was angel sent upon the earth, for some reason withheld from mankind, in the shape of a small fox terrier. There is a sort of Oh-what-a-wicked-world-this-is-and-how-I-wish-I-could-do-something-to-make-it-better-and-nobler expression about Montmorency that has been known to bring tears into the eyes of pious old ladies and gentlemen.”

J and his friends George and Harris are hypochondriacs who are convinced they all have terrible diseases. In order to recouperate they decide to sail a boat along the Thames to Oxford. J’s dog is not impressed:

“The only one who was not struck with the suggestion was Montmorency. He never did care for the river, did Montmorency.

‘It’s all very well for you fellows,’ he says; ‘you like it, but I don’t. There’s nothing for me to do. Scenery is not my line, and I don’t smoke. If I see a rat, you won’t stop; and if I go to sleep, you get fooling about with the boat, and slop me overboard. If you ask me I call the whole thing bally foolishness.’

We were three to one, however, and the motion was carried.”

Usually I’m not keen on anthropomorphism, but with Montmorency it really works. He acts as a slightly detached commentator on his three bally foolish companions and never loses his dogginess – he remains very much the fox terrier. The four of them head off to the water and as anyone who has read the novel will know, very little happens yet much hilarity ensues. The three men are absolutely useless with any practical considerations, such as putting all their food into one disgusting stew:

“Towards the end, Montmorency, who had evinced great interest in the proceedings throughout, strolled away with an earnest and thoughtful air, reappearing, a few minutes afterwards, with a dead water-rat in his mouth, which he evidently wished to present as his contribution to the dinner; whether in a sarcastic spirit, or with a genuine desire to assist, I cannot say”

I love the idea of a sarcastic dog. Three Men in a Boat was apparently first intended as a travel guide, which seems astonishing for such an unrelentingly funny book. Attempts to act as a guide remain, but the humour always forces its way in:

“From Abingdon to Nuneham Courtenay is a lovely stretch. Nuneham Park is well worth a visit, It can be viewed on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The house contains a fine collection of pictures and curiosities and the grounds are very beautiful. The Pool under Sandford lasher, just behind the lock, is a good place to drown yourself in.”

By some miracle they make it to Oxford, and Montmorency shares my love of the city of dreaming spires:

“We spent two very pleasant days in Oxford. There are plenty of dogs in the town of Oxford. Montmorency had eleven fights on the first day, and fourteen on the second, and evidently thought he had gone to heaven.”

I must admit though, I’ve never fought a dog any time I’ve been to Oxford. It’s also safe to say he would not approve of the theme of this post:

“When Montmorency meets a cat, the whole street knows about it; and there is enough bad language wasted in ten seconds to last an ordinary respectable man all his life, with care.”

To end, a reminder that the dividing line between cat & dog may not be as clear-cut as we think:

“Remember, remember the 5th of November: Gunpowder, Treason and Plot!” (Traditional, British)

November 6, 2014July 24, 2026 / madamebibilophile / 4 Comments

OK, so I’m a day late, but that’s practically on time compared to how late some of my other posts have been. I’ve met my own low standards. 5 November is Guy Fawke’s Night in Britain, where we commemorate the foiling of an attempt to blow up the House of Lords and kill the king in 1605 by, er, setting fires and letting off fireworks. We used to burn effigy of the plotter Guy Fawkes (who was discovered with all the gunpowder) but that and kids asking you for “a penny for the guy” doesn’t seem to happen anymore – which is fine with me, it was a bit gruesome for my delicate sensibilities.

Anyway, the plotters were Catholic and wanted to kill the Protestant James I to put a Catholic monarch on the throne, so I thought this week I’d commemorate the plot through books rather than pyromania and look at work by Catholic writers.

Firstly, Ben Jonson, frenemy of Shakespeare, who actually had dinner with the plotters but somehow managed to duck suspicion and went on to become a writer for the court of James I. Jonson converted to Catholicism in 1598, while imprisoned for killing fellow playwright Gabriel Spencer in a duel (he’d previously been imprisoned for suspected sedition – he had quite the life). Jonson converted back to Anglicism in 1610, but the poem I’m going to look at sees him wrestling with his faith while still a Catholic. Much of Jonson’s writing doesn’t carry well across the ages – he was heavily satirical and our knowledge of early seventeenth century politics and theatre-life has waned somewhat. However, this poem, written when his first son Benjamin died of plague aged just seven, captures such grief and pain as to be recogniseable today:

On My First Son (1603)

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;

My sin was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy.

Seven years tho’ wert lent to me, and I thee pay,

Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.

O, could I lose all father now! For why

Will man lament the state he should envy?

To have so soon ‘scap’d world’s and flesh’s rage,

And if no other misery, yet age?

Rest in soft peace, and, ask’d, say, “Here doth lie

Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.”

For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,

As what he loves may never like too much.

There’s a theory sometimes advanced that parents in this period were so used to losing their children that they met their deaths with equanimity. Jonson’s poem shows how totally misguided this is. He writes in heroic couplets, showing how deeply felt this is for him; the poem is epic in style, if not in length (the short length thereby reflecting his son’s short life). Jonson finds himself tormented in faith rather than soothed by it; he knows he should be glad his son has “scap’d world’s and flesh’s rage” but can’t help feeling he has to pay for the sin of loving his son too much, and grieving the loss; he is left with the questions that form the middle of the poem, rather than answers. The answer Jonson finds for himself means this is a poem that captures two tragedies – the death of the seven year old, and a father so consumed by pain that he wishes he had never known parenthood: “O, could I lose all father now!” determining to close off his feelings in future: “As what he loves may never like too much.” Jonson was egomaniacal about his work, so when he says “Rest in soft peace, and, ask’d, say, “Here doth lie/Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.”” There is no higher acclaim he can give the seven year old. Truly heart-breaking.

Secondly, The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Sparks (1963, Penguin, my edition 2013). Like the titular girls, this novel is one of slender means, only 142 pages in my edition. But although it is a short novel and very funny, it is not fluffy or disposable. It tells the story of a group of women living in the boarding house the May of Teck Club, when “long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor”. Thus, the slender means, but they also have other slender means; the girls are obsessed with calories and being thin enough to attract a husband. I would normally find this sort of behaviour intensely irritating, but it is testament to Spark’s writing that I didn’t – it’s 1945, options are limited for women, and they are using the means at their disposal to improve their lot. They are pragmatic rather than vain and foolish.

“And they realized themselves in varying degrees, few people alive at the time were more delightful, more ingenious, more movingly lovely, and, as it might happen, more savage, than the girls of slender means.”

Selena is beautiful and promiscuous, trying to decide which of her lovers to marry; Joanna has abandoned romantic love for reciting poetry and giving elocution lessons, Jane is overweight (which she hates) and intellectual, and writes to famous authors in an attempt to get autographs for her strange employer. I was quite fond of Dorothy:

“Dorothy could emit, at any hour of the day or night, a waterfall of debutante chatter, which rightly gave the impression that on any occasion between talking, eating and sleeping, she did not think, except in terms of those phrase-ripples of hers: ‘Filthy lunch.’ ‘The most gorgeous wedding.’ ‘He actually raped her, she was amazed.’ ‘Ghastly film.’ ‘I’m desperately well, thanks, how are you?’[…] It was some months before she was to put her head round Jane’s door and announce ‘Filthy luck. I’m preggers. Come to the wedding.’”

As this passage shows, Sparks humour is acute, incisive, and packs a punch. She captures dark circumstances and behaviour with such a light touch that is ultimately a lot more shocking than from within an unrelentingly bleak novel. We know that Nicholas Farringdon, drawn into the May of Teck circle, became a missionary and subsequently died in Haiti, but we don’t know what prompted the conversion. As The Girls of Slender Means builds towards its denouement, Sparks doesn’t spell out the totality of the impact of the events in 1945. The novel is more powerful for this; the women and Nicholas remain partly unknown: to themselves, to each other, and to the reader.

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no point in being a damn fool about it.” (W. C. Fields)

July 19, 2014November 19, 2020 / madamebibilophile / 8 Comments

For those of you that have put up with my posts over the last few months where I’ve banged on and on and on about finals, I promise this is the last time I’ll mention them. I’ve received my results and I feel like this:

Hooray! So I thought this week I’d look at times when authors may have felt a similar way: two debut prize-winning novels.

Firstly, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride (Galley Beggar Press, 2013) which won the Goldsmiths Prize last year, and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Desmond Elliot Prize, both this year. If you have any interest in books, you’d have to have been living under a rock not to have heard of this novel. Aside from all the breathless reviews, I’ve seen buses trundling along with huge posters commanding us to “Read it and be changed” (from Eleanor Catton’s review). Written in about 6 months when the author was 27, she struggled to find a publisher due to its inventive style and uncompromising subject matter. She shoved it in a drawer, but 10 years later sent it to a small independent publisher. Galley Beggar Press published the novel, and plaudits galore followed. I hope this signals a less conservative approach by publishers, but I’m sceptical… Still, at least as far as AGIAHFT goes, they got there in the end (Faber and Faber have partnered with Galley Beggar Press to publish it on a much wider scale).

McBride is a huge fan of Joyce, and the novel is written as a stream of consciousness. However, while many people can find Ulysses intimidating, AGIAHFT is only 200 pages long, and much more approachable. It is, however, a tough read, both in style and content. It details the narrator’s relationship with her brother, who is partly disabled from an operation on his brain as a child.

“I sneak. I snuck. I listened at the door. I heard them. I pondered you should send him to a special school. Those marks aren’t fit for a boy that age. Oh such clucking and glucking. Snob and preen herself. I hear my two are off to the convent. Not a ladder in their tights or a pain in their heart. Such brilliance. Unearthly. I snoot them. Aunt and uncle. Chintz for brains I hiss and think. Listening listening.

Life is hard, and although her brother’s scars are visible to all, the narrator has scars of her own. The stream of consciousness gives her experience an immediacy, unmediated by considered use of language, which places the reader right alongside her, and that is not an easy place to be. She decides to use sex to get her classmates to leave her brother alone; she is raped by an uncle; she has a fractured relationship with her mother; and through it all is her tender but ambivalent relationship with her brother.

We were moving off now. From each other. As cannot be. Helped. I didn’t help it from that time on. You know. All that. When you said sit with me on the school bus. I said no. That inside world had caught alight and what I wanted. To be left alone. To look at it. To swing the torch into every corner of what he’d we’d done….Who are you? You and me were never this. This boy and girl that do not speak. But somehow I’ve left you behind and you’re just looking on.”

AGIAHFT is as unique and extraordinary as all the hype would have you believe.

Secondly, Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre (Faber & Faber, 2003) which won the Booker, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Award for Comic Writing, all in 2003. Let’s get my wholly unoriginal but unavoidable observation out of the way first: this novel really reminded me of The Catcher in the Rye. Vernon Little is a teenager disgusted by the hypocrisy of the society he sees around him “I sense a learning: that much dumber people than you end up in charge”. He is desperately looking for a place to belong, but it’s not the barbeque sauce capital of Texas where he lives. His best friend Jesus has shot dead their classmates and taken his own life. Vernon is left to take the blame, as the society of the small town look for answers without listening to anything Vernon has to say.

His overbearing mother and her friends are all obsessed with diets, “Leona’s an almost pretty blonde with a honeysuckle voice you just know got it’s polish from rubbing on her last husband’s wallet.”; his psychologist is corrupt and abusive “the shrink’s building sits way out of town; a bubble of clinical smells in the dust. A receptionist with spiky teeth and a voicebox made from bees trapped in tracing paper, sits behind a desk”; there’s a manipulative journalist unconcerned with truth, setting himself up as puppet-master. Vernon God Little is scathing in its treatment of contemporary society: its focus on the easily discarded, the scandal-mongering and superficiality of the media, the ineptitude of those in power to exercise it with any integrity. All this is bound up with a great deal of humour and truly inventive use of language. As I hope the quotes so far demonstrate, the images throughout the novel are startling and evocative. Pierre uses the adolescence of his narrator to demonstrate how versatile language can be and how it can be reformed for individual expression. One of my favourite lines was this:

“I get waves of sadness, not for me but for them, all mangled and devastated. I’d give anything for them to be vastated again.”

Funny, sad, original and thought-provoking: the entire novel of Vernon God Little held in a single sentence.

I know I said I wouldn’t mention finals again, but permit me, if you will, just one final milking of it:

Happy weekend everyone!

“They laugh at me because I’m different; I laugh at them because they’re all the same.” (Kurt Cobain)

March 28, 2014August 9, 2026 / madamebibilophile / 11 Comments

Dear reader, it’s been so long. I’ve missed you, but the preparation for finals and my last piece of coursework took over. Now I have finished writing the definitive essay on Cary Grant’s performance of gender ambiguity (OK, I’ve written an essay on Cary Grant’s performance of gender ambiguity) I have a brief respite which I choose to spend blogging. Away we go:

The Bridge concluded almost two months ago and I’m still bereft. In my day off between coursework and revision I’ve been watching BBC4’s replacement foreign-language thriller Salamander, and although excellent, it’s not The Bridge.

I love Saga, I love Martin, I love the way their relationship developed in the second season, I love Saga. I know I’ve said I love Saga twice, but this is because I have a girl-crush, the like of which I haven’t experienced since The Killing’s Sarah Lund.

How I wish I was effortlessly cool and Nordic, with scrappy long hair, Faroe Isle jumpers, leather trousers and emotional reticence. Unfortunately I’m perennially uncool, I’m British, my hair is an inch long, I look terrible in chunky jumpers and leather trousers and I’m emotionally incontinent. Otherwise the similarities between me and these two women are really quite remarkable.

Now, I know the socially inept detective is becoming something of a cliché, but I’m a huge fan of many of them (see here for how I excited I became over Sherlock) and I miss Saga. It was this which prompted me to start reading The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion (Penguin, 2013) the day after The Bridge finished. It’s not a detective novel, but it does have a main protagonist who is highly intelligent, socially awkward, inflexible, unable to read social cues and has a tendency to respond to things that are said literally. Perfect, just what I needed to fill the Saga-shaped hole in my life. Don Tillman is a geneticist who wants to get married. Having tried dating and found that “the probability of success did not justify the effort and negative experiences” (how many single people out there can relate to that statement?)Don devises a questionnaire “a purpose-built, scientifically valid instrument incorporating current best practice to filter out the time wasters, the disorganised, the ice-cream discriminators, the visual-harassment complainers, the crystal gazers, the horoscope readers, the fashion obsessives, the religious fanatics, the vegans, the sports watchers, the creationists, the smokers, the scientifically illiterate, the homeopaths, leaving, ideally, the perfect partner, or, realistically, a manageable shortlist of candidates”. Into Don’s life breezes Rosie, who it’s safe to say, does not fit his criteria for the ideal mate. She is chaotic, confrontational, encourages him to drink, watches sport and is a smoker. They are perfect for one another.

““Where do you hide the corkscrew?” she asked.

“Wine is not scheduled for Tuesdays.”

“Fuck that,” said Rosie.

There was a certain logic underlying Rosie’s response.

[…]I announced the change. “Time has been redefined. Previous rules no longer apply. Alcohol is hereby declared mandatory in the Rosie Time Zone.””

Although Don is unusual, in many ways his situation is ordinary: so many people spend time constructing their ideal mate they forget to think about the relationship they want, missing what’s actually in their lives, and who it’s worth compromising a bit of ourselves for. Simsion looks at this aspect of oh-so-human folly with a comic eye, and there are some hugely funny scenes as Don tries to get to grips with situations where he is hopelessly out of his depth: attending a “formal” function in top hat and tails, practising sex positions with his teaching skeleton and being walked in on by his boss. Because Don is aware of the humour but doesn’t quite get it, the scenes are told in an utterly deadpan style that is hilarious, but you’re never laughing at Don, just the situations he finds himself in. This is because you are completely rooting for the character. Simsion manages quite a feat with Don: a resolutely pragmatic, measured voice that still manages to create a person that you really feel for, and a novel of real warmth and humanity. Simultaneously, Don exposes the fakery that goes along with social skills and fitting in – the office politics, the lies and infidelities – that he is incapable of, making you question what is of real value, rather than what just makes life easier. If you’d told me I’d like a book I would describe as “sweet and romantic” I’d tell you (with a raised eyebrow of scepticism, reader) that it really wasn’t my taste. But, just like Don, I stepped outside my comfort zone, tried something new, and was completely won over.

For my second social outcast I’ve chosen the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (Faber, 2008). Poor Oscar: he’s massively nerdy and all he wants is to love and be loved. “Oscar showed the genius his grandmother insisted was part of the family patrimony. Could write in Elvish, …knew more about the Marvel Universe than Stan Lee, was a role-playing game fanatic….Perhaps if like me he’d been able to hide his otakuness maybe shit would have been easier for him, but he couldn’t. Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light sabre or a Lensman her lens. Couldn’t have passed for Normal if he’d wanted to.” An incurable romantic who dreams of becoming the “Dominican Tolkien”, Oscar’s life will never play out how he wants it to.

He lives with his mother Beli and rebellious sister Lola, and as we learn about all three of them, we learn about the recent history of the Dominican Republic and its impact on a family. The novel makes frequent use of footnotes, which generally I dislike but which worked well here, detailing political history in the distinctly non-academic (though learned) voice of Yuniour, Lola’s boyfriend, serial womaniser and narrator. The family are thought to be under the sway of a fuku “the Curse and Doom of the New World”, and certainly all are subject to violence and hardship, Beli in Dominica and her son and daughter in the United States.

There is a touch of magic realism as the family are also protected by a guardian animal that appears to them in times of extreme distress: “there appeared at her side a creature that would have been an amiable mongoose if not for its golden lion eyes and the absolute black of its pelt. This one was quite large for its species and placed its intelligent little paws on her chest and stared down at her. You have to rise.” The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has plenty to say about the immigrant experience, the price of assimilation and the inability to assimilate to the societies we find ourselves in, and the self-definition we express through the language we use. The novel has references I didn’t get: Spanish phrases and nerd-allusions, but it didn’t matter. The refusal to be sentimental and the triumph of human spirit in the face of violence and tragedy meant this novel really spoke to me even if I didn’t grasp all the intricacies. It was funny and tragic, and truly moving.