I’ve just managed to keep up my 2024 resolution to read a book per month from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence this April! It’s been a bit of a month and May looks equally challenging so I won’t be doing my Novella a Day in May this year, though I will focus on novellas for the month as I had some lined up that I’m really keen to read.
Back to A Dance to the Music of Time! Published between 1951 and 1975, and set from the early 1920s to the early 1970s, the sequence is narrated by Nicholas Jenkins, a man born into privilege and based on Powell himself.
The fourth volume, At Lady Molly’s, was published in 1957 and is set in the 1930s before the start of World War Two. Politics is only mentioned very occasionally though, and the focus remains on the relationships between an insular set of people.
This is the volume where I started to get a sense of the dance. With marriages a strong theme, the characters circle around, encountering one another for periods before spinning off again. Others weave in and out.
Nick is now working as a script writer and his affair has ended. At the start of the novel he is taken by a colleague to a party at Lady Molly Jeavons. Once again he runs into acquaintance/talisman Widmerpool:
“Yet, for some reason, I was quite glad to see him again. His reappearance, especially in that place, helped to prove somehow rather consolingly, that life continued its mysterious, patterned way. Widmerpool was a recurring milestone on the road”
Widmerpool is engaged to Mildred Haycock, who is quite a few years older than him and has a colourfully described past. Later we learn that Widmerpool’s political aspirations are growing, and there is a chilling speech he gives Nick over lunch at his club, in favour of appeasement of Hitler.
Once again I was struck by Powells astute, clear-sighted assessment of people. Surrounded as it is by a satirical comedy of manners, he can really pack a punch when he chooses.
“Sentiment and power, each in their way, supply something to feed the mind, if not the heart. They are therefore elements operated often to excess by persons in temperament unable to love at all, yet at the same time unwilling to be left out of the fun, or to bear the social stigma of living emotionally uninteresting lives.”
There are lighter portraits too of course. My favourite in At Lady Molly’s was retired General Alymer Conyers. In his eighties, he spends his retirement reading Virginia Woolf, practising the cello, and learning about psychoanalysis:
“‘Been reading a lot about it lately,’ said the General. ‘Freud – Jung – haven’t much use for Adler. Something in it, you know. Tells you why you do things. All the same, I didn’t find it much help in understanding Orlando.’
Once more he fell into a state of coma.”
Quiggin and Mona Templar reappear (“She was like a strapping statue of Venus conceived at a period when more than a touch of vulgarity had found its way into classical sculpture.” Ouch.) living in a cottage owned by Erridge, who is now Lord Warminster. The lord of the manor dresses in scrappy clothes, has a big beard and gives a lot of his money away to good causes. I work near Shoreditch so none of this sounds like remotely remarkable manhood to me, but to his 1930s aristocratic family he seems mad. I’ve read somewhere he may have been based on George Orwell!
Nick meets two of Erridge’s sisters when he visits, including Isabel, “a bit of a highbrow when she isn’t going to night clubs”. He falls in love at first sight but their courtship happens entirely away from the eyes of the reader. Powell’s interest isn’t romance, but rather the dynamics of relationships and how these play out in the wider world.
“Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they’ll marry anybody.”
There are so many ways A Dance… is of its time (which I think is exactly as intended) but it also doesn’t age, through Powell’s astute characterisation. I was very struck by this comment early on in At Lady Molly’s:
“One of those men oddly prevalent in Victorian times who sought personal power through buffoonery”
You don’t have to look very far back through our Prime Ministers to find a much more recent example…
I absolutely whizzed through At Lady Molly’s and I’m really looking forward the next volume, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant.
To end, a beautifully simple rendition of a song about Molly:
The 1962 Club, hosted by Simon and Kaggsy, starts today and is running all week which I am very excited about 😊 The Club weeks are always great and I’m really looking forward to seeing the posts. This is the first of what I hope will be three contributions, but as I never blog as much as I mean to, failure is almost inevitable!
The Golden Spur was Dawn Powell’s last novel, and it’s a humorous look at the bohemian arts scene of late 1950s New York, specifically Greenwich Village. This was a world Powell was very much a part of and my edition features an effusive introduction from Gore Vidal who was one of her close friends.
We are introduced to the artists and writers – both up and coming, and those very much faded and failing – their hangers-on and their varied associates through the outsider view of Jonathan Jaimison. He is in his late twenties and recently discovered that his father isn’t the domineering tyrant he grew up with, but someone from this scene, back when his mother was hanging out with Prohibition-era flappers.
So Jonathan leaves his Ohio home and soon makes his way to the titular bar, at the start of his quest to find his biological father:
“Through a gap in the plum velvet cafe curtains he could see the bar … He breathed deep of the heady New York air, that delirious narcotic of ancient sewer dust, gasoline fumes, roasting coffee beans, and the harsh smell of the sea that intoxicates inland nostrils. Then he pushed open the door.”
He’s quickly adopted by Lize and Darcy, two frenemies who sleep with the same male artists, although it’s not entirely clear why, as they seem to have no great fondness for men or for art:
“The girls never asked questions about a man’s private interests or listened when he tried to tell them. For them it was enough that he was a man and that he was there. Who needs a talking man?”
“That his newest canvas was gone should have told her something, but she wasn’t sure which was the new one because all his pictures looked alike to Lize. Great lozenges of red and white (‘I love blood,’ he always said), black and grey squares (‘I love chess,’ he’d say), long green spikes (‘I love asparagus’). All Lize had learned about art from her life with painters was that the big pictures were for museums and the little ones for art.”
As Jonathan makes his way in New York, he moves between two generations: the young artists and the fading interwar generation. There is a nostalgia for the Prohibition period and what New York was then which is beautifully evoked, alongside a recognition that New York is a city that continually makes itself and its inhabitants anew:
“Jonathan recognised New York as home. His whole appearance changed overnight, shoulders broadened, apologetic skulk became swagger; he looked strangers in the eye and found friendship wherever he turned. With the blight of Jaimison heritage removed, his future became marvellously incalculable, the city seemed born fresh for his delight. He took for granted that his mother’s little world, into which he had dropped, was the city’s very heart.”
Although The Golden Spur is described as a comic novel, I didn’t find it laugh-out-loud funny. Rather I’d describe it as affectionately satirical. It ribs the 1950s arts scene and the vacuous people drawn to it, but it never has a bitter or nasty tone:
“Anybody with a tube of paint and a board was an artist. But writers were not writers unless decently unpublished or forever muffled by a Foundation placebo.”
“‘I just want to be overestimated,’ Earl shouted, ‘like everybody else, goddammit.’”
Despite the overarching plot being Jonathan’s search, this really isn’t a plot-driven novel. Rather, the question of his paternity is a device to introduce the various characters and their world. It’s a novel to read for the evocation of the city, of a particular society found within it, and for the characterisation and the wit. In the way that Tales of the City was serialised in the San Franciso Chronicle, I felt The Golden Spur could have worked similarly in The Village Voice. It’s almost a series of sketches, albeit well realised ones.
I can’t say I loved this quite as much as Gore Vidal clearly did, but then he probably recognised a lot of the characters and situations within the novel. I still found a great deal to enjoy, and Powell certainly has a way with words:
“She was making more and more passes at the wrong men, then trying to recoup with stately cultural pronouncements in her refined Carolina accent, which she kept polished up like her grandfather’s shotgun, ready to bring recalcitrant suitors into line.”
To end, I was going to go with the song Little Lize because that’s the only other time I’ve come across the name. I thought it would be easy to get a good quality version as the massively successful Fisherman’s Friends have recorded it. But I couldn’t find a decent one so here they are instead singing about never leaving home. New York isn’t for everyone…
I’m not a fan of Dickens. I don’t like his caricatured villains, I don’t like his insipid virgin heroines, I don’t like his sentimentality. This may explain why it’s taken me thirty years to open the copy of Bleak House given to me as a teenager by my mother, as it’s one of her favourite novels. It begins:
“London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.”
And that’s how long it took me to absolutely love Bleak House. Which just goes to show that as always, my mother knows best 😀 (as do the bloggers who recommended I choose this as my tome reading after a month of novellas – many thanks!)
Bleak House follows the fortunes of three young people caught up in a long-running legal wrangle:
“Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it.”
Esther Summerson, Ada Clare and Richard Carstone find themselves under the guardianship of John Jarndyce, a benevolent older distant relation of the latter two. Ada and Richard fall in love, but it is Esther rather than the young lovers who is the focus, her first-person narration alternating with that of an omniscient narrator.
She is from a mysterious background, not knowing who her parents are and raised by an abusive godmother. “Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers”. Esther is a Victorian heroine though, so rather than becoming defensive or angry, she decides she will:
“strive as I grew up to be industrious, contented, and kind-hearted and to do some good to some one, and win some love to myself if I could. I hope it is not self-indulgent to shed these tears as I think of it. I am very thankful, I am very cheerful, but I cannot quite help their coming to my eyes.”
Although tediously self-deprecating at times, generally I found Esther really likable. Her narrative is can be witty and some of her portraits of others almost sharp, so I did wonder if the reader wasn’t supposed to take her modest protestations entirely at face value, at least not consistently.
The omniscient narrator widens the tale to explain the various legal dealings of Chancery Lane and all its hangers-on, alongside the situation of the Dedlock family:
“there is no end to the Dedlocks, whose family greatness seems to consist in their never having done anything to distinguish themselves for seven hundred years.”
The current incumbent Sir Leicester Dedlock does little to change this history of his family as he “is generally in a complacent state, and rarely bored. When he has nothing else to do, he can always contemplate his own greatness. It is a considerable advantage to a man to have so inexhaustible a subject. After reading his letters, he leans back in his corner of the carriage and generally reviews his importance to society.”
He is devoted to his beautiful, fashionable, remote wife Honoria, who the reader quickly realises has A Big Secret in Her Past. Hmm, based on what we know of the other characters so far, what on earth could it be…?
It’s not hard to guess what it is as the clues are laid on pretty thickly, and I thought the imagery when Esther first sees Lady Dedlock was so striking:
“It was easy to know that the ceremonious, gouty, grey-haired gentleman, the only other occupant of the great pew, was Sir Leicester Dedlock, and that the lady was Lady Dedlock. But why her face should be, in a confused way, like a broken glass to me, in which I saw scraps of old remembrances, and why I should be so fluttered and troubled (for I was still) by having casually met her eyes, I could not think.”
Dickens weaves together the various strands of the story, the main plots and all the subplots with brilliant dexterity. Sometimes with these big Victorian baggy monsters (to steal a phrase from Henry James) the stories can flag a bit, as the authors are trying to keep them going for a number of episodes in the serial. I really didn’t feel this with Bleak House. The story kept driving forward and all the various plots came together so cleverly, contriving to make a well-paced page-turner.
What really struck me about Bleak House though, is that it is a story of great compassion. Of course I knew Dickens had a strong social conscience and his work has a social message to it. But Bleak House demonstrated a degree of understanding and sympathy that I wasn’t expecting. Unmarried mothers, those struggling with addictions, human weakness and vulnerability – none are judged. Those who are judged are the ones who seek to profit from such.
Which brings me on to Mr Tulkinghorn… I said at the beginning I’m not usually keen on Dickens’ villains, finding them too caricatured. The lawyer Tulkinghorn was medacious, conniving, cold as ice, completely believable and completely terrifying. Truly villainous.
Although there are romantic elements to Bleak House, it is not an overly romantic tale. It is a novel much more concerned with the fall-out on the vulnerable members of society from immovable and self-serving institutions. Perhaps the main way in which the novel has dated is an engagement that seemed highly questionable to me, but as it remains chaste and ultimately everyone comes to their senses, it didn’t overly offend my modern sensibilities 😀
If I’ve made Bleak House sound a heavy read though, I’ve done it a disservice. I found it very often funny, whether satirically critiquing the legal system or broader nonsense like Mrs Guppy trying to throw John Jarndyce out of his own home and resisting all attempts to explain the illogicality of such a move. It has its sad moments too, and is genuinely moving in places.
And just in case a Victorian novel may seem to have no relevance to our modern world, I leave you with this exchange between Esther and Miss Flite:
“I said it was not the custom in England to confer titles on men distinguished by peaceful services, however good and great, unless occasionally when they consisted of the accumulation of some very large amount of money.
“Why, good gracious,” said Miss Flite, “how can you say that? Surely you know, my dear, that all the greatest ornaments of England in knowledge, imagination, active humanity, and improvement of every sort are added to its nobility! Look round you, my dear, and consider. YOU must be rambling a little now, I think, if you don’t know that this is the great reason why titles will always last in the land!”
I am afraid she believed what she said, for there were moments when she was very mad indeed.”
This is an excessively long post and I’ve barely scratched the surface of Bleak House. But in summary: funny, sad, socially engaged, well-paced, emotionally affecting, entertaining, original. An absolute masterpiece.
To end, I remember watching the BBC adaptation of Bleak House when it came out and thinking it very well done. Now I’ve read the book I might go for a rewatch, as I don’t remember it that well and it does look entertaining (especially Charles Dance as Tulkinghorn):
Mallika at Literary Potpourri’s wonderful event Reading the Meow has been running all week, do check out all the great posts prompted by our feline friends! Here is my post just in time…
I’m grateful to Reading the Meow for finally getting me to pick up The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (finished in 1940, published in 1966) which is part of my Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century Reading Challenge and has been languishing in my TBR for years. Although not ostensibly a book about cats, one does feature prominently as these various edition covers will attest:
The reason it had lain unread for so long was because I’m (aptly) a big scaredy-cat. I was really intimidated by this classic of twentieth-century fiction and I thought it would be far too complex and clever for me to understand. Which as it turned out, was broadly correct. I’m sure I didn’t pick up all the allusions and references, even with the notes in the back of my edition to help me (Alma Classics, trans. Hugh Aplin 2020 – I definitely recommend this edition and translation). However, I still found it very readable and a lot to enjoy, especially regarding Behemoth, the character that meant I was reading it this week particularly.
The Devil arrives in 1930s Moscow as a Professor Woland, along with his entourage: red headed, bizarrely dressed Korovyev; sinister vampiric Azazello; beautiful Hella; and Behemoth, an enormous cat that walks on his hindlegs, talks, drinks vodka and plays chess.
The proceed to wreak havoc for three days in a series of carnivalesque scenes, using the greed and corruption of people against them. It’s absolute chaos and carnage, but brilliantly Bulgakov shows that the devil doesn’t have to push very hard for all this to occur.
At the start of the novel, Woland predicts the shocking and absurd death of Berlioz, head of Massolit, a literary organisation. Once people hear of his death, this description of a barrage of statements in order to get Berlioz’s apartment is a good example of how Bulgakov balances social realism, satire, the comic and the desperate throughout:
“In them were included entreaties, threats, slanders, denunciations, promises to carry out refurbishment at people’s own expense, references to unbearably crowded conditions and the impossibility of living in the same apartment as villains. Among other things, there was a description, stunning in its artistic power, of the theft of some ravioli, which had been stuffed directly into a jacket pocket, in apartment No.31, two vows to commit suicide and one confession to a secret pregnancy.”
Meanwhile, Margarita, beautiful and unhappily married, is distressed because her lover, The Master, has committed himself to an institution and renounced his writing.
This is interspersed with the story of Pontius Pilate and Yeshua (Jesus), with the two stories echoing one another, and it emerges that this was the novel The Master was writing.
It is through the titular characters that Bulgakov prevents his satire becoming too bitter and alienating. Their devotion to each other and Margarita’s belief in The Master’s work is truly touching.
I don’t really want to say too much more as The Master and Margarita is such a complex, riotous piece of work that I think the more I try and pin it down the more I’ll tie myself in knots! It tackles the biggest of big themes; religion, state oppression, the role of art, love, faith, good and evil, how to live… It is a deeply serious work that isn’t afraid to be comical too.
But as this post is prompted by Behemoth, here is my favourite scene with him, getting ready for Satan’s Grand Ball on Good Friday and trying to distract from the fact that he is losing at chess:
“Standing on his hind legs and covered in dust, the cat was meanwhile bowing in greeting before Margarita. Around the cat’s neck there was now a white dress tie, done up in a bow, and on his chest a ladies mother-of-pearl opera glass on a strap. In addition, the cat’s whiskers were gilt.
‘Now what’s all this?’ exclaimed Woland. ‘Why have you gilded your whiskers? And why the devil do you need a tie if you’ve got no trousers on?’
‘A cat isn’t meant to wear trousers, Messire,’ replied the cat with great dignity. ‘Perhaps you’ll require me to don boots as well? Only in fairy tales is there a puss in boots, Messire. But have you ever seen anyone at a ball without a tie? I don’t intend to find myself in a comical situation and risk being thrown out on my ear! Everyone adorns himself in whatever way he can. Consider what has been said to apply to the opera glasses too, Messire!’
‘But the whiskers?’
‘I don’t understand why,’ retorted the cat drily, ‘When shaving today Azazello and Korovyev could sprinkle themselves with white powder – and in what way it’s better than the gold? I’ve powdered my whiskers, that’s all!’
[…]
‘Oh, the rogue, the rogue,’ said Woland shaking his head, ‘every time he’s in a hopeless position in the game he starts talking to distract you, like the very worst charlatan on the bridge. Sit down immediately and stop this verbal diarrhoea.’
‘I will sit down,’ replied the cat sitting down, ‘but I must object with regards your final point. My speeches are by no means diarrhoea, and you’re so good as to express yourself in the presence of a lady, but a series of soundly packaged syllogisms which would be appreciated on their merits by such connoisseurs as Sextus Empiricus, Martianus Capella even, who knows, Aristotle himself.’
‘The kings in check,’ said Woland.
‘As you will, as you will,’ responded the cat, and began looking at the board through the opera glass.”
I think overall I probably admire The Master and Margarita more than love it, and I enjoyed Bulgakov’s A Country Doctor’s Notebook more. But there is so much in this extraordinary, unique novel that will stay with me, and I’m sure it will reward repeat readings too.
To end, I tried to get my two moggies to pose with the book. With typical cattitude, they flatly refused 😀 So it’s back to 80s pop videos:
This is a contribution to Reading Wales 2022 aka the Dewithon, hosted by the lovely Paula over at Book Jotter. My VMC pile is reaching ridiculous proportions so I googled “Wales Virago” and was delighted to find that there were two authors I could take off the TBR for this year’s Dewithon.
Firstly, I chose Penelope Mortimer, as I’d enjoyed Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting and The Pumpkin Eater a great deal, finding her writing spiky and incisive. Mortimer was born in Rhyl, Flintshire and My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof (1967) was her sixth novel.
Muriel Rowbridge is a journalist on a trip to Canada, the only woman in a group of men, warned by her editor:
“Don’t go wandering off in one of your Virginia Woolf fits.”
She is very much the outsider, wanting to focus on her writing while the rest of her group view it as a bit of a jolly:
“they were pleased with themselves, thawing toward each other, throwing out remarks about wives, children, secretaries, which were immediately understood, as though they were giving a particular handshake or flicking back their lapels for identification.”
This is the working world of the 1960s, which we’re all familiar with from Mad Men at least. Her colleagues think it’s totally acceptable to comment on what she’s wearing and the attractiveness of her legs. Thankfully Muriel doesn’t spend much time with them, or indeed much time working. The trip is a time of reflection and recuperation for her, as she recovers from a mastectomy for breast cancer.
“How to deal with it, except with vague attempts at courage and acceptance, she had no idea.”
Although Penelope Mortimer did have lung cancer later in life, I’m not sure she had personal experience of breast cancer at this point. But I thought this was a sensitive exploration of a woman working out who she is after a life-changing experience. Muriel isn’t remotely self-pitying, but she does need to find self-compassion.
”the anger against herself raged brightly, a clear fire. She had never felt this anger before; she could never remember feeling it before. It was enlivening, making her very defined and sharp, as though she had become a weapon.”
She had left her married lover Ramsey when she was diagnosed, and he is back with his wife Flora, a situation neither Ramsey and Flora are sure they want. This led to some of the pithy observations on relationships between the sexes that I expect from Mortimer:
“Between us, he said, he was being eaten alive. If this was so, I don’t know why we were both starving.”
While in Canada, she meets Robert: “what had been an indeterminate distance between their hands, knees, faces, was now measured exactly: they were accessible to each other.”
While she feels ambivalent about their relationship, the sex does lead her towards a new acceptance of her changed body.
“She leant against the lift wall and slowly remembered the night; then realised that this was the first time she had woken, and dressed, without any sense of mourning.”
Amongst the sexist or paternalistic colleagues; the self-centred married lover; and the surgeon who possibly took an entire breast when a lumpectomy would suffice without considering what it would mean for Muriel, Robert is a reminder of what can be positive in male/female relationships. This doesn’t necessarily mean that its happily ever after either… Mortimer is determinedly realistic.
I didn’t think My Friend Says Its Bullet-Proof was quite as strong as the other two Mortimers I’ve read, but it was an interesting examination of the choices available to women in the late 1960s. It questions how to navigate independence in a world that marginalises and objectifies you both professionally and personally.
Secondly, a new-to-me author despite the vast number of novels she wrote; Rhoda Broughton, who was born in Denbighshire. Belinda (1883) was written roughly in the middle of her career, and my edition tells me she was alongside Mary Braddon as ‘Queen of the Circulating Library’.
Belinda is a satire, but that double-edged royal appellation did make me wonder if it was always read as such. Maybe I’m doing the fare of circulating libraries down, but I would have thought a tale of simpering Victorian virgin lovers was more typical of their stock than a satire of such stories. Regardless, if you read it straightforwardly as a romance because that’s what you were looking for, or as a satire because you were sick of such stories, Belinda would deliver.
The titular heroine is in Germany with her feckless, charming sister Sarah at the start of the novel:
“Away they go to Moritzburg, when the noon sun is warm and high; away they go, handsome, gay, and chaperoneless. There is no reason why their grandmother, who is a perfectly able-bodied old lady, should not escort them; but as she is sixty-five years of age, has no expectation of meeting a lover, and is quite indifferent to spring tints and German Schlosses, she wisely chooses to stay at home.”
Sarah is hugely popular with young men and is on her seventh fiancée. Belinda is unpopular, except with student David Rivers (aptly named, as he’s totally wet). The sisters wonder if Belinda’s nose is behind her lack of societal success:
“It is not case of measurement,’ says Sarah gravely; ‘I have seen noses several hands higher that were not nearly so alarming. It is a case of feeling; somehow yours makes them feel small. Take my word for it,’ with a shrewd look, ‘the one thing that they never can either forgive or forget is to feel small’”
It isn’t Belinda’s nose, unsurprisingly; it’s her fairly dull personality and her social awkwardness, matched only by that of her love interest:
“Is it her fault that all strong emotion with her translates itself into a cold, hard voice, and a chill set face? With other women it translates itself into dimples and pink blushes and lowered eyes. Ah! but do they feel as she does? Sarah, for instance. When do men ever leave Sarah’s company with the down- faced, baffled, white look with which Rivers has more than once quitted hers? Preening themselves rather; with sleeked feathers and cosseted vanity.”
As you can see from the quote above, Broughton uses Belinda to poke fun at romantic mores, the silliness of them and the uselessness of them. She demonstrates how those who cannot master the light-hearted conventions end up tied in knots.
“‘And you were — and you were — one of the heavenly host up there!’ ends the young man, baldly and stammering. But love is no brightener of the wits.
One of the heavenly host?’ repeats she, justly infuriated at this stale comparison. ‘An angel, in short! Must I always be an angel, or a goddess? If anyone knew how sick I am of being a goddess! I declare I should be thankful to be called a Fury or even a Ghoul, for a change!’
So saying, she turns her shoulder peevishly to him; and leaving the garden, begins to walk quickly along the road by the water, as if to make up for her late loitering. He keeps pace with her, dumb in snubbed contrition, stupefied by love and, unhappily for himself, fully conscious of it; burningly aware of the hopeless flatness of his last simile, and rendered by his situation quite incapable of redeeming it by any brighter sally.”
The course of true love inevitably does not run smooth for the young lovers – ‘twas ever thus. However, Belinda’s understandable frustration with Victorian female conventions leads her to make some very questionable choices. For those of you who have read Middlemarch, these questionable choices will be most familiar. I don’t know what Oxford Rector Mark Pattison did to the women writers of late Victorian society but whatever it was, he really, really annoyed them. He provided the model for Casaubon in Middlemarch and here he is rendered as Professor Forth:
“She had known that she did not love him, but she had not known that he wore carpet slippers in the drawing-room.”
Belinda is well-paced and witty, but I think I would have like the satire to be slightly more explicitly evoked. At one point there seemed a never-ending round of cheeks blushing, lips whitening, words stumbling… and a pretty major suspension of my disbelief that Belinda and Rivers could really be in love, given they had barely spoken to each other but only mumbled vaguely while experiencing various body temperature changes.
I would have liked a slightly sharper authorial voice, or more scenes with witty, pragmatic Sarah and the frankly reprehensible grandmother, with whom I could only agree when she observed:
“Belinda is too everything, except amusing.”
I did enjoy Belinda though, and there was broad comedy too, including some nice scenes with pug dogs, and with social bull-in-a-china-shop Miss Watson:
“I shall certainly mention it to his mother. Lady Marion, when next I meet her,’ says Miss Watson resolutely; I do not think it would be acting a friend’s part not to do so. I do not actually know her, but there is a sort of connection between us; I was at school for six months once at Brussels with a cousin of hers, and there is no doubt that there is something uncommonly louche about it.’”
To end, the BAFTAs earlier this month featured a performance from an 85 year-old Welsh singer/legend:
It’s probably a good thing though, as my usual verbose, stream-of-barely-conscious style is likely to have been even worse as I try to work out what on earth I could say about this enormous tome, such a well-known classic novel that despite having not read it before or seen any adaptations, I already knew the plot and lead characters.
So I’ve decided to focus just on one element of the novel: satire. Although published in 1847-8, Thackeray set Vanity Fair earlier, during the Napoleonic Wars, enabling him to point out to society how appalling and self-serving everyone is, without alienating his readers. Clever Thackeray.
Thackeray proclaims that Vanity Fair is “a novel without a hero”, and by the end of the novel, he has so thoroughly painted a picture of a materialist, corrupt, self-serving and shallow society, that heroism seems nigh on impossible. What we do have is the main protagonist of Becky Sharp:
“Miss Rebecca was not, then, in the least kind or placable. All the world used her ill, said this young misanthropist, and we may be pretty certain that persons whom all the world treats ill, deserve entirely the treatment they get. The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.”
But if all this is sounding pretty grim, it really isn’t. I enjoy satire, particularly that of the century preceding Vanity Fair, but it can often leave rather a bitter taste. Thackeray largely avoids this because firstly, he seems to quite enjoy his characters, and secondly, he doesn’t aim for the moralistic teaching of some satirists. He never suggests there is a way for this world to be other than it is. Which is bleak, but also stops the tone being too heavy.
He also doesn’t make the reader feel too implicated. Regency England is even further removed from us than the original readers, and in setting it amongst the upper classes, he skewers a stratum of society very few inhabit.
“The whole baronetage, peerage, commonage of England, did not contain a more cunning, mean, selfish, foolish, disreputable old man. That blood-red hand of Sir Pitt Crawley’s would be in anybody’s pocket except his own; and it is with grief and pain, that, as admirers of the British aristocracy, we find ourselves obliged to admit the existence of so many ill qualities in a person whose name is in Debrett.”
So while amoral Becky climbs from very humble origins, as the daughter of an opera singer and a artist, by any means necessary with no concern for anyone other than herself, we can sit back feeling pretty smug, yes? Well, no. Thackeray positions the reader very cleverly by making Becky the most entertaining and compelling character. I certainly felt the novel was pointing out very clearly what it meant that I would rather hear about Becky and all her conniving, that about simple, kind Amelia (Emmy) or upright Captain Dobbin.
I didn’t like Becky, but I enjoyed her. While she could be spiteful and a bully to Amelia:
Women only know how to wound so. There is a poison on the tips of their little shafts, which stings a thousand times more than a man’s blunter weapon. Our poor Emmy, who had never hated, never sneered all her life, was powerless in the hands of her remorseless little enemy.
She also used all the vanities and weaknesses of not very pleasant people against them, was clever and entertaining, and was out to ensure her position and security in a world where everything was stacked against her. I would far rather hear about Becky than Emmy, who spent her time simpering over her repulsive husband, spoiling her revolting child, and crying whenever she wasn’t otherwise engaged.
“In two days he has adopted a slightly imperious air and patronizing manner. He was born to command, his mother thinks, as his father was before him.”
I’m not sure we’re supposed to think Emmy particularly misguided here. Thackeray is pretty scathing about those in charge. Those with privilege are those who lead, and there is nothing in their personal qualities to suggest this is wise. Sadly this has not dated.
Always to be right, always to trample forward, and never to doubt, are not these the great qualities with which dullness takes the lead in the world?
Thackeray exposes how these weaknesses of the ruling classes are indulged in a way that poorer members of society are not:
When we read that a noble nobleman has left for the Continent, or that another noble nobleman has an execution in his house—and that one or other owes six or seven millions, the defeat seems glorious even, and we respect the victim in the vastness of his ruin. But who pities a poor barber who can’t get his money for powdering the footmen’s heads; or a poor carpenter who has ruined himself by fixing up ornaments and pavilions for my lady’s dejeuner; or the poor devil of a tailor whom the steward patronizes, and who has pledged all he is worth, and more, to get the liveries ready, which my lord has done him the honour to bespeak? When the great house tumbles down, these miserable wretches fall under it unnoticed.”
Certainly along with the bullying, it was the financial exploitation of her staff that made Becky most problematic and unlikeable for me. However, it’s very clear that Becky’s options, and Amelia’s, are limited and I thought Thackeray was surprisingly sympathetic to the position of women in society.
Although frequently compared to War and Peace, the writer Vanity Fair most put me in mind of was Jean Rhys. I think both she and Thackeray agree that morals are a privilege of the comfortably off, and those with choices (mainly men).
“And who knows but Rebecca was right in her speculations—and that it was only a question of money and fortune which made the difference between her and an honest woman? If you take temptations into account, who is to say that he is better than his neighbour? A comfortable career of prosperity, if it does not make people honest, at least keeps them so.”
I really enjoyed the humour and social commentary of Vanity Fair and I’m so glad today’s reviewathon prompted me to finally take it off the shelf. For those of you thinking about giving it a go, I should warn you that there are racist portrayals of some characters and countries primarily at the beginning, but these are thankfully short-lived and Thackeray doesn’t seem to be asserting that whites hold any kind of moral authority.
Frankness and kindness like Amelia’s were likely to touch even such a hardened little reprobate as Becky. She returned Emmy’s caresses and kind speeches with something very like gratitude, and an emotion which, if it was not lasting, for a moment was almost genuine.
I’m not sure who else is taking part but I’ll add links to the other bloggers posting today as I find them 😊
To end, for some reason I’ve been thinking a lot about Stevie Nicks lately. So I’ve decided to shoehorn her into this post by claiming that at the start of Vanity Fair, Becky and Amelia are almost definitely – ahem – on the edge of seventeen… (#sorrynotsorry)
UFO in her Eyes is structured as a series of government files, with memos, notes paperclipped to pages and redacted sentences. This sounds gimmicky and tedious, but actually works effectively and Guo is able to capture a variety of voices within a formalised format.
Kwok Yun is a woman in her thirties who lives in a quiet village of Silver Hill with people much older than her, as the younger generation move to the city. As Chang Lee, the middle-aged Communist village Chief explains:
“Silver Hill is a simple village, with tea and rice fields, the harvests of which are our principal sources of agricultural income […] The village centre is rather small, just one narrow street. But it provides everything you need for life”
All of that is about to change drastically, following one extremely hot day when Yun is cycling through the rice fields. She sees a giant spinning plate in the sky.
“then I realised that the noise was coming from the enormous metal plate. I stared at it, terrified. It was as if I was a tiny insect, exposed on the soil, about to be eaten by a big bird. I kept gazing at that white monster, and suddenly the world in front of me went hazy and I collapsed.”
When she awakes she finds a Westerner injured by a snake bite. She helps him and then he disappears.
As a result of these events two things happen: the Westerner sends the village $2000 as a thank-you, and various government types attend the village to interview the inhabitants and find out what happened.
This proves no easy task. Only Yun saw the UFO and the villagers are grumpy and resolutely unimpressed by metropolitan officials, as Yun’s grandfather Old Kwok demonstrates:
“Did I not tell that to your colleague from Beijing already? The one with the square head who spends his whole time at Niu Ping’s liquor stall drinking Er Guo Tou while you do all the work? Did he not understand what I said or something?”
The money provides an opportunity for change, an opportunity Chief Chang Lee has been waiting for:
“everything is stuck as it was in the sixties. Except its falling apart.”
No-one particularly loves Silver Hill. The older villagers have lived through feudalism, communism, the Great Leap Forward, famine and the Cultural Revolution. They remember a starving man eating his brother’s leg. Even younger people like Yun hold no affection for the place:
“The sun here makes everything decay. It beats down on sticky skin, sweaty legs, burning hair, dead leaves, broken roots, old seeds and slowly they all rot. I hate this place.”
Yet the change isn’t welcomed either. Essentially it is industrialisation, and carp ponds are filled in, tea and rice fields built over. This has tragic consequences that are both immediate for some villagers, and more insidious, like Yun realising the air is getting harder to breathe.
Guo doesn’t suggest that modernisation is evil and old ways better; the famine is still in living memory when the villagers had to eat grass to survive. For Yun, her intelligence is given opportunity to thrive as she becomes educated. But Guo does question the price paid for unplanned progression, and what the desired outcomes are.
“In Silver Hill, we don’t smile much. Smiling is even more difficult than crying. Our faces have been frozen by hardship. You understand what I’m saying? Yun doesn’t smile. She doesn’t talk much either. She just listens to my swearing and cooks my food. What goes on in her broad forehead I don’t know.”
So much of this novella could be clunky: the file format, the treatment of Silver Hill as a microcosm of China. But it’s written with such a light touch and the characters are so idiosyncratic and believable that I found it an entertaining read, dealing with important themes but never preachy.
Xiaolu Guo is a film director as well as a novelist and she adapted this novella to film in 2011. I didn’t realise this and I’d love to see the film – it’s not often a novelist adapts and directs their own work. Here is a short interview with Guo about the film. The clips look beautiful:
The Loved One: An Anglo American Tragedy – Evelyn Waugh (1948) 127 pages
The Loved One was written following Waugh’s experience of visiting Hollywood to discuss an adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. In the novella he satirises Hollywood and how death has become a business. It’s a pretty brutal attack, particularly towards the end.
It begins with a portrait of two ageing Hollywood tycoons, Sir Ambrose Abercrombie:
“He was still on what Lady Abercrombie fatuously called the ‘right’ side of sixty, but having for many years painfully feigned youth, he now aspired to the honours of age. It was his latest quite vain wish that people should say of him: ‘Grand old boy.’”
And Sir Francis Hinsley: “His swimming-pool which had once flashed like an aquarium with the limbs of long-departed beauties was empty now and cracked and overgrown with weed.”
Dennis Barlow, a poet who was fired from a story of Shelley’s life and now works at Happier Hunting Ground pet funeral service, lives with Sir Francis. Dennis enjoys his work:
“there at the quiet limit of the world he experienced a tranquil joy”
But Sir Ambrose feels it reflects badly on the ex-pat community. When Sir Francis kills himself, no-one is particularly upset. Dennis finds discovering the body “rude and momentarily unnerving”, but it brings him into contact with Whispering Glades funeral home and fragrant cosmetician Aimee Thanatogenos.
I thought this was the strongest part of the novel, as Waugh turns his satirical eye to the façade and sentimentality that can accompany the business of death. I particularly liked the question of how Sir Francis should look in his coffin:
“ ‘shall I put him down as serene and philosophical or judicial and determined?’”
Dennis starts courting Aimee, and she find herself torn between him and the inappropriately named Mr Joyboy, the senior mortician who is something of a celebrity in his place of work:
“As he passed among them, like an art master among his students, with a word of correction here or commendation there, sometimes laying his gentle hand on a living shoulder or a dead haunch, he was a figure of romance, a cult shared by all in common, not a prize to be appropriated by any one of them”
How the relationships play out in The Loved One is particularly vicious. Waugh is scathing about the cruel disregard human beings can demonstrate towards one another and what this means for individuals and for society as a whole. The title of this novella is bitterly ironic.
I’ve decided to give into the inevitable and make the theme of this week’s post politics. *sigh* But unfortunately it is what dominates just about everything at the moment. I went to a lecture last week which was supposed to be about The Merchant of Venice, but turned out to be about tolerance, accessibility of the arts and the power of the humanities to understand nuance, subtlety and multiple viewpoints and how this is needed now more than ever. The speaker was genius American academic Stephen Greenblatt who I’ve seen before but he’s never made me blub like a baby (my friend was also a total mess, I’m hoping he’s short-sighted and didn’t notice). The previous week I went to a talk about nineteenth-century European theatre, which included a determined assertion from a British playwright that he too was a European writer (cue cheers from the audience, I’m guessing there weren’t many Brexiteers present). Unfortunately at the moment, all roads seem to lead back to the horror show we’ve found ourselves in. In the words of Cher:
(Note to my brother: Cher is AWESOME. Accept that I am right on this.)
So, two novels about politics. Firstly, Look Who’s Back by Timur Vermes (2012, trans. Jamie Bulloch 2014), a satiricial novel which looks at what would happen if Hitler woke up in 2011 Berlin. Naturally there is fun to be had at his misunderstanding over modern life:
“ ‘But I still don’t recall seeing you anywhere, Have you a card? Any flyers?’
‘Don’t talk to me about the Luftwaffe,’ I said sadly. ‘In the end they were a complete failure.’”
And there is also poking fun at the self-aggrandizing former Fuhrer:
“Now my razor-sharp gaze pierced the darkness between a jar of bulls-eyes and one of sugar drops, where the bright light of the moon soberly illuminated my brainwave like an icy torch.”
But the bulk of Vermes’ satire is reserved for modern society, for this Hitler becomes a star. He appears on an alternative comedy programme and his rants become huge hits on YouTube. People think he is satirising Hitler and yet this means Hitler’s rhetoric is once again endorsed by the masses. Vermes challenges what we laugh at and why, and the unquestioning nature of modern media. As Hitler becomes more popular, it is so easy to see how he, or someone like him, could rise again, and also that some of what happened has never gone away.
“It still remains a mystery to me why that relationship never worked. How many more bombs would we have to drop on their cities before they realised that they were our friend?”
Satire is a demanding form and Vermes is not entirely successful. Look Who’s Back is a bit overlong and flags in places. Considering it’s about a fascist despot it all feels a bit too restrained at times and the plot doesn’t really develop beyond the original premise. But still a worthwhile read, and – in terms of showing how easily an insane media personality can achieve real power *cough* – a little bit terrifying too.
Secondly, The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, which won the Booker in 2004. Set in 1983, 1986 and 1987, Maggie Thatcher’s government is systematically destroying Britain to extent from which it will never fully recover elected by overwhelming majorities and Nick Guest is down from Oxford to stay with his friend Toby’s family, headed by an ambitious Conservative MP, Gerald Fedden.
“Gerald was a knowing, self-confident speaker, trained at the Oxford Union, polished at innumerable board meetings, and his tone combined candour and insincerity to oddly charming effect.”
The ruling class, ladies and gentleman.
Nick is from an ordinary family and grew up in an ordinary town. He has a strong aesthetic sensibility and is carried away by the glamour of the Fedden’s money and power, and ability to surround themselves with beautiful things.
“Nick felt he had been swept to the brink of some new promise, a scented vista of the night, and then held there.”
Nick is also gay, and the story is about his sexual development within a backdrop of thinly disguised homophobia and fear of AIDS, which cut a swathe through the gay community during the decade.
“It wasn’t their fault they didn’t know – Nick couldn’t tell them things, and so everything he said and did took on the nature of a surprise, big or little but somehow never benign, since they were the aftershocks of the original surprise, that he was, as his mother said, a whatsit.”
Despite being a fairly long novel (501 pages in my edition), The Line of Beauty is not overly plot-heavy. Nick stays with the Feddens and struggles for a sense of purpose beyond pursuit of various lovers, Gerald gets elected MP and enjoys his life of extraordinary privilege, and the 80s rumble on with cocaine fuelling a deregulated City. The novel is a mix of pithy attacks on political elites and the shallowness of relentless acquisition, whether of power, money or the next high:
“Gerald had still not received the accolade of a Spitting image puppet in his likeness, but it was one of his main hopes for the new Parliament.”
And a broader, more melancholy consideration of love and loss. The descriptions of the characters who succumb to AIDS are truly moving, and unexpected in this novel populated by self-interested self-promoters.
“He commanded attention now by pity and respect as he once had by beauty and charm.”
Like Look Who’s Back, I felt The Line of Beauty was overlong, and not the strongest Booker winner there’s been, but at the same time the characters were recognisable and fully realised, the 80s were brilliantly evoked in all their horror, and Hollinghurst is capable of writing truly stunning passages:
“He caught the beautiful rawness of those days again, the life of instinct opening in front of him, the pleasure of the streets and London itself unfolding in the autumn chill; everything tingling with newness and risk, glitter and frost and glow of body heat, the shock of finding and holding what he wanted among millions of strangers.”
To end, despite the horrific politics of the time, I’m finding 80s YouTube videos a good respite from all the madness of the world at the moment (as you may have gathered from the one at the start where Cher wears a costume made of black dental floss and sits astride a giant canon – what’s not to love?) Here is another one I employ to great effect, but a word of warning: I am a hardened user of 80s pop-culture. If this is one of your first forays, you might want to ease yourself in by watching Wham!’s Wake Me Up Before You Go Go video first, or else your eyes might start crying deely-boppers and mismatched fluorescent socks, or something. I’m not kidding – there’s a blouson leather dinner jacket at one point…
Do you ever get the feeling you want to kick over the traces and run away? I’m really fed up with my job and while I daydream about jacking it all in through some dramatic gesture before setting off to backpack round the Greek islands, it’s not going to happen. Not if I want a home to return to – the pesky mortgage will insist on being paid.
Fundamentally I’m not an anarchist, however much I might like to think I’m a free-wheeling, free-thinking rebel.
So I’ll just have to compensate by watching Marlon Brando films (any excuse) and reading about anarchy. The novel and play I’ve chosen suggest anarchy may not be the best way to go anyway.
Firstly, The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad (1907). I studied this for ‘A’ level and it’s no exaggeration to say it was the bane of my life. I hated it. I found it so unbearable I never actually finished reading it and wrote my exam essay based on the chapter summary at the back of the edition we used (not an exam technique I recommend, kids). Events conspired against me and about ten years later I had to read it again for a course I was doing. Much to my surprise, I didn’t mind it so much this time and found it quite readable. A lesson there that I should return things I’ve previously written off – at the very least I can confirm my prejudices, which is always fun.
The Secret Agent was inspired by an actual event in 1894, where a French anarchist, Martial Bourdin, accidently blew himself up in Greenwich Park. Conrad sets his story two years later, and the opening of the novels sets everything up expertly:
Mr Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of his brother-in-law. It could be done, because there was very little business at any time, and practically none at all before the evening. Mr Verloc cared but little about his ostensible business. And, moreover, his wife was in charge of his brother-in-law.
The shop was small, and so was the house. It was one of those grimy brick houses which existed in large quantities before the era of reconstruction dawned upon London. The shop was a square box of a place, with the front glazed in small panes. In the daytime the door remained closed; in the evening it stood discreetly but suspiciously ajar.
The window contained photographs of more or less undressed dancing girls; nondescript packages in wrappers like patent medicines; closed yellow paper envelopes, very flimsy, and marked two-and-six in heavy black figures; a few numbers of ancient French comic publications hung across a string as if to dry; a dingy blue china bowl, a casket of black wood, bottles of marking ink, and rubber stamps; a few books, with titles hinting at impropriety; a few apparently old copies of obscure newspapers, badly printed, with titles like The Torch, The Gong—rousing titles. And the two gas jets inside the panes were always turned low, either for economy’s sake or for the sake of the customers.
This basically tells you all you need to know: the grimy sordidness of Verloc’s existence, the fact that he is involved in some sort of subterfuge, and the involvement of his family at the edges, with his wife, Winnie, devoted to her brother Stevie.
Verloc is utterly unlikeable – lazy and self-serving, he is not an anarchist dedicated to a higher cause. His ‘comrades’ are equally despicable and pathetic, except for The Professor, who is altogether more sinister:
“The Professor’s indignation found in itself a final cause that absolved him from the sin of turning to destruction as the agent of his ambition. To destroy public faith in legality was the imperfect formula of his pedantic fanaticism; but the subconscious conviction that the framework of an established social order cannot be effectually shattered except by some form of collective or individual violence was precise and correct. He was a moral agent—that was settled in his mind. By exercising his agency with ruthless defiance he procured for himself the appearances of power and personal prestige. That was undeniable to his vengeful bitterness.”
Conrad is highly sceptical of the motivation of those proclaiming themselves agents of societal change. The group of would-be anarchists plot a violent act, and unfortunately, skirting around them is Verloc’s brother-in-law:
“There was no young man of his age in London more willing and docile than Stephen, she affirmed; none more affectionate and ready to please, and even useful, as long as people did not upset his poor head.”
Stevie is an obvious choice, for those who would not want to risk their own lives in carrying out terrorist acts, to manipulate and control. The Secret Agent is fairly predictable, but the flash-forward/flash-back structure works well at sustaining plot tension, and its utter bleakness, while unrelenting, is effectively ironic in evoking politics where the principle is self-preservation above all else.
The Secret Agent was made into a film in 1996 starring Bob Hoskins as Verloc ,Patricia Arquette as Winnie, and Batman Christian Bale as Stevie:
Secondly, Accidental Death of an Anarchist by Italian theatre legend Dario Fo (1970), which you can read here. Like The Secret Agent, it is based on actual events. Giuseppe Pinelli was an anarchist accused of bombing a bank who fell (?) to his death from a police station window in Milan in 1969. In Fo’s play version, events become farcical, beginning with the Maniac being interrogated at the police station by Inspector Bertozzo. The Maniac denies being a con artist and impersonator, insisting he is mentally ill:
“I have a thing about dreaming up characters and then acting them out. It’s called ‘histrionomania’ – comes from the Latin histriones, meaning ‘actor’. I’m a sort of amateur performance artist. With the difference that I go for ‘Théatre Verité’ – my fellow performers need to be real people, but people who don’t realise that they’re in my plays. Which is just as well, ‘cos I’ve got no money and couldn’t pay them anyway…”
This metatheatrical theme runs throughout the play, with Fo using the dramatic form to demonstrate how public life can often involve playing a role. The Maniac poses as a judge to interrogate the officials on the fourth floor and explore the events that led to the fall of the anarchist:
“MANIAC: We’ll stick with the ‘right at the start’ for the moment… One step at a time. So, at about midnight, the anarchist was ‘seized by a raptus’ – these are still your words – he was seized by a ‘raptus’ and went and threw himself to his death from the window. Now, what is a ‘raptus’? Bandieu says that a ‘raptus’ is a heightened form of suicidal anxiety which can seize even people who are psychologically perfectly normal, if something provokes them to extremes of angst, in other words, to utter desperation. Correct?
SUPERINTENDENT AND SPORTS JACKET: Correct.
MANIAC: So we need to find out who or what it was provoked this anxiety, this desperation. I suspect that the best way would be if we do a reconstruction. Superintendent, the stage is yours.
SUPERINTENDENT: Me?
MANIAC: Yes, go ahead: would you mind re-enacting your famous entrance?
SUPERINTENDENT: I’m sorry, what famous…?
MANIAC: The one that brought about the ‘raptus’.
SUPERINTENDENT: Your honour, there must be a misunderstanding here. It wasn’t me who did the entrance, it was one of my officers…”
As the role playing intensifies, so does the satire:
MANIAC: It’s true, I’m afraid: your careers are in tatters! Blame it on politics, friends! At the start you served a useful function: something had to be done to stop all the strikes… So they decided to start a witch-hunt against the Left. But now things have gone a bit too far… People have got very upset about the death of our defenestrated anarchist… they want someone’s head on the block, and the government’s going to give them – yours!
[…]
SUPERINTENDENT: Your Honour, you’re going to have to advise us. What do we do now?
MANIAC: How should I know?
SPORTS JACKET: Yes – what would you advise?
MANIAC: If I were in your shoes…
SUPERINTENDENT: Yes?
MANIAC: I’d throw myself out of the window!
In the second act a journalist turns up, the physical comedy intensifies and it all degenerates into total…well, you know. Accidental Death of an Anarchist is very silly, but don’t let that fool you. The satire is sharp and the theatricality informed and accomplished. It’s a play with plenty to say and it does it with great energy and verve.
madame bibi lophile recommends 