a good passionate fit of crying.

Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë

This is a tricky review to write. Partly because I don’t tend to enjoy writing negative reviews (I wrote a whole post on the topic, including why I think they’re useful, here). Mostly though because Wuthering Heights is widely agreed to be a stone-cold classic and is a book that a great many people absolutely love. I wanted to love it too. Unfortunately, I didn’t even think it worth finishing.

As an aside, when I first saw that cover I thought it shameful that Wuthering Heights was being sold by reference to Twilight. Having now read a fair chunk of the book though, I can sort of see the link.

Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr. Heathcliff’s dwelling. ‘Wuthering’ being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed: one may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun. Happily, the architect had foresight to build it strong: the narrow windows are deeply set in the wall, and the corners defended with large jutting stones.

As the above quote suggests, we’re in gothic novel territory here. Remote, brooding locations. Stormy metaphoric weather. Strange households with dark secrets best not spoken of. To be fair, these are a few of my favourite things so I’ve no issue with any of that. I’d even go so far as to say that the opening sets up expectations nicely, making it clear that what’s to come isn’t going to be a matter of strict realism but rather a work of mood and emotion.

Where the book soon runs into difficulty however is a flabbiness of structure. It opens with a framing device, the remarkably irritating initial narrator coming to his new landlord’s home and discovering a household afflicted by the remnants of past misery and bitterness. Edith Wharton, nearly 70 years later, used much the same device (quite possibly influenced by Brontë) in her Ethan Frome, but Wharton is a much better writer. Her narrator doesn’t take over the tale, she gets to the actual story much more swiftly and her prose is vastly more elegant.

Wuthering Heights then cuts back to the childhood of the central characters (one could argue who those are to a degree, but however you cut it they include Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw). Heathcliff is a foundling, adopted by Catherine’s father and raised with her, not quite one of the family but not a servant either. He cuts across barriers of class, money, race and propriety. In a sense he’s almost more plot device than character, an interloper from beyond the social world the novel otherwise portrays, and thus a living challenge to that world’s order.

He is a dark-skinned gipsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman: that is, as much a gentleman as many a country squire: rather slovenly, perhaps, yet not looking amiss with his negligence, because he has an erect and handsome figure; and rather morose.

Catherine, though as wild as Heathcliff by nature as a child, grows up to assume the place expected for her by society. She becomes a lady, gently spoken, refined and beautiful. In her heart she loves Heathcliff, but when the time comes for marriage she chooses a gently born neighbour as Heathcliff has no fortune and thus could not maintain her position.

I won’t say what happens, since there may be those reading this who don’t actually know the story, but it’s all very passionate and dramatic. How could it not be, when we have conflicts of nature and society, of expectation and desire? The problem though is the characters and the contrived nature of the plot.

A degree of contrivance is inevitable in a gothic novel. Here though it’s simply heavy handed. At one critical passage Heathcliff overhears Catherine talking about how she feels about him. He manages to hear the bit about why she doesn’t want to marry him (he’s broke), but not the lengthy exposition of how much she loves him. He then charges off in a fury and naturally never thinks to ask for clarification. It’s a device still used in literature and film today, the part heard conversation leading to misunderstanding and breakup, but it’s a terrible device and the perfect example of how characters here act as puppets to the plot rather than from any organic sense of character.

Wuthering Heights is a novel of grand passions. The difficulty is that the characters are vehicles, not people. It’s easy to write that two characters love each other. I can do it now: Bill and Hannah love each other. It doesn’t make it mean anything though. Bill and Hannah are in love because I’ve said they are, but I’ve established nothing about them that makes that love meaningful.

Reading Ethan Frome, I could see why Ethan felt trapped, why his cousin Mattie was so important to him. The characters felt real, their emotions grew out of their natures and their situations in ways that were organic and true. Ethan Frome isn’t really any less contrived than Wuthering Heights, but it feels like a story that could be told in no other way and so has the quality of Greek tragedy.

In Wuthering Heights characters act as the plot demands. Of course that’s also true of Ethan Frome, and most every other plot-heavy novel ever written, but in Wuthering Heights you can see the puppeteer’s hands moving the strings. I had no sense that Heathcliff and Catherine’s situation arose out of anything other than their being written to be in that situation. I had no sense that they had lives beyond the novel (which of course no character in any novel does, but then novels are beautiful lies which in most cases at least seek to make us forget we’re being lied to while we read them).

Perhaps I was just the wrong age for this book. Were I first encountering it as an adolescent I can see that I might relate to characters motivated by sweeps of emotion which overcome their reason. I might find Heathcliff romantic (with a lower case r, he’s obviously Romantic with an upper case R), and Catherine’s dilemma interesting. I’m not adolescent though, and I couldn’t believe in them or their problems.

I’ll end on a minor positive note. The following passage reminded me irresistibly of Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree. The two books have nothing in common, and the Hardy while I think more successful is much less ambitious than Wuthering Heights, but the Hardy is easy to love and anything that reminds me of it is welcome.

our pleasure was increased by the arrival of the Gimmerton band, mustering fifteen strong: a trumpet, a trombone, clarionets, bassoons, French horns, and a bass viol, besides singers. They go the rounds of all the respectable houses, and receive contributions every Christmas, and we esteemed it a first-rate treat to hear them.

There it is then, Wuthering Heights. I genuinely wanted to like it, and having compared it here so much to Ethan Frome which uses very similar devices I’m slightly frustrated that all I seem to say in the end is that I didn’t like it because I didn’t think it was very good. Unfortunately, that’s where I come out, I just didn’t think it was very well written. If you read this and you disagree, think I’ve utterly missed the point, whatever, please feel free to tell me where I went wrong in the comments.

She walked on in television serials very occasionally, either as a barmaid or a lady agitator.

The Bottle Factory Outing, by Beryl Bainbridge

Beryl Bainbridge is one of those writers who seem to slip out of fashion, never quite given the recognition they deserve. She was nominated five times for the Booker, never winning (except for a rather bizarre consolation prize for which nobody else was nominated). Since her death she’s remained in print, but I see relatively little discussion of her online.

Today her books are firmly marketed as women’s fiction, a category largely made up by marketers which helps shift units but at the same time pigeonholes a wide range of female authors by implying their books are essentially entertainment. There’s nothing wrong with entertainment, and there’s no dichotomy between being serious and being entertaining (several of the books I’ll soon be writing up are both). Still, if a book comes with pretty pastel covers, or faux-vintage photos of vaguely 1940s/50s-ish people against a black and white background, it’s sending a message about the contents. Much the same as if a book comes with big bold letters and a picture of a gun, helicopter or other piece of high-tech hardware.

Why do I care about all this? Well, partly because I’m a Guardian reader of course and it’s the sort of thing we care about, but mostly because while it does undoubtedly help sell books it also blocks certain books off from certain readers. So, if anyone reading this has been put off Beryl Bainbridge by the covers (the one below features two women nothing like those in the novel, and is utterly misleading), the blurbs, the impression given by all that of her work, here’s the important bit: she can write.

The Bottle Factory Outing opens with Brenda and Freda, two flatmates who decided too hastily to live together and have long since found out they have little in common. Brenda is a mouse of a woman, constantly cowed and put upon (“As a child she had been taught it was rude to say no, unless she didn’t mean it.”) . Freda is near her opposite, voluptuous and full of rather theatrical life.

They had gone once to a bureau on the High Street and said they were looking for temporary work in an office. They lied about their speed and things, but the woman behind the desk wasn’t encouraging. Secretly Freda thought it was because Brenda looked such a fright – she had toothache that morning and her jaw was swollen. Brenda thought it was because Freda wore her purple cloak and kept flipping ash on the carpet.

They share a North London bedsit and work together in a bottle factory, bottling Italian wine. Rossi, a manager, gropes Freda every day (“He had a funny way of pinching her all over, as if she was a mattress whose stuffing needed distributing more evenly.”), she doesn’t like it but she doesn’t like to say no either and she can’t get Brenda to pay enough attention to help her out. Brenda anyway is too preoccupied with the handsome Vittorio, who she is determined to have a grand romance with.

Does it sound prosaic? Initially it is. It’s also though beautifully observed and painfully funny. Here’s an example of Brenda and Freda’s domestic arrangements:

Brenda had fashioned a bolster to put down the middle of the bed and a row of books to ensure that they lay less intimately at night. Freda complained that the books were uncomfortable – but then she had never been married.

Bainbridge crafts each sentence perfectly. She has an extraordinary talent for small and cutting observations. Both Brenda and Freda are brilliantly captured. I believed in them and to an extent sympathised, which given they’re comic characters and arguably stereotypes is no small achievement. Bainbridge also has a knack for language that illuminates the everyday, but from unexpected angles (such as at one point where she describes a “block of flats, moored in concrete like an ocean liner.”, an image I adored).

Freda has organised an outing for the bottle factory employees. A van is booked, picnic lunches packed and the absent factory owner has contributed two barrels of wine for the day. Everyone is looking forward to it, everyone except Brenda who’d rather not go but doesn’t want to put anyone out.

At this point in the novel I was expecting a light observational comedy. I’d already noticed a black vein to the humour, but it was nothing compared to what followed. Obviously I won’t spoil what happens for those who may read it, but it’s fair to say that by about the half-way/two-thirds mark I was wondering what Bainbridge was trying to achieve. The essentially realist opening turned increasingly surreal as the day of the outing unfolded; the plot became less likely, the tone more vicious.

Stick with it though and Bainbridge does have a plan. Looking back the cruelty, uncertainty and bleak irony were always there, right from the beginning. Here’s the novel’s opening:

The hearse stood outside the block of flats, waiting for the old lady. Freda was crying. There were some children and a dog running in and out of the line of bare black trees planted in the pavement.

‘I don’t know why you’re crying,’ said Brenda. ‘You didn’t know her.’

It’s a collision of romance and brutal reality, as is the whole novel. Freda is self-indulgently moved by the death of an old woman she didn’t know “‘I like funerals – all those flowers – a full life coming to a close …’”. Brenda notes that the dead woman’s life didn’t look that full, seeing as she only left behind a cat and had no mourners. Brenda’s life is rather miserable, and while perhaps Freda’s is too Freda certainly doesn’t see it that way. Brenda is escaping a past, Freda is looking forward to a future even if it is one that’s largely founded on self-delusion. Of the two, if I had to choose, I’d rather be Freda.

In case there’s any lingering doubt I thought this was superb. It’s funny, disturbing and exceptionally well written. It won’t be my last Bainbridge. Thanks are therefore due to Guy Savage of His Futile Preoccupations, who turned me on to Bainbridge in the first place. Were I to compare her to any other author it would be JG Farrell, who can also make the reader laugh while showing them terrible things (I reviewed his Troubles here,  if you like one its worth trying the other).

For some other reviews of The Bottle Factory, I’d recommend this rather excellent review by Savidge Reads, this from the bibliolathas blog (particularly good for quotes) and this review by Gaskella which seems to have inspired a lot of different people to read the book.

‘So just you take care, what you think is the heart might well be another organ.’

Oranges are not the Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson

LIKE MOST PEOPLE I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle; it didn’t matter what. She was in the white corner and that was that.

That’s the opening paragraph to Oranges, and it’s one of the best opening paragraphs I’ve read in a long while. I knew as soon as I read it that I’d like this book; that I was in safe hands.

For some reason I’ve long had the impression that I wouldn’t like Winterson’s work. She’s one of those writers who has a long shadow beyond their fiction, with a public persona that can seem arrogant and offputting (Hensher and McCarthy also spring to mind on that front). I was wrong though, because I absolutely loved this book and I’ve already bought her second novel. Winterson can write, and what’s more she has that unusual knack of writing serious fiction which is also extremely funny.

Oranges is about a girl named Jeanette Winterson, growing up in Northern England as part of a small evangelical Christian church in which her mother is one of the most important local figures. That’s also the early story of Jeanette Winterson, the writer. Does that make it autobiography? No, it just means that like many writers Winterson drew on her own life. It’s a story, and in that sense whether it happened like this or not (or not at all) doesn’t affect its truth. As Winterson observes: “People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe. This is very curious.”

Jeanette’s mother divides the world into friends and enemies, and there aren’t many on the friends list. Chief of the enemies of course is the devil, but it also includes the next door neighbours, the godless generally, most of the world in fact. Her life revolves around her church, which gives her a permanent cause to fight for and an endless supply of foes to fight against.

The Missionary Report was a great trial to me because our mid-day meal depended upon it. If it went well, no deaths and lots of converts, my mother cooked a joint. If the Godless had proved not only stubborn, but murderous, my mother spent the rest of the morning listening to the Jim Reeves Devotional Selection, and we had to have boiled eggs and toast soldiers. Her husband was an easy-going man, but I knew it depressed him. He would have cooked it himself but for my mother’s complete conviction that she was the only person in our house who would tell a saucepan from a piano. She was wrong, as far as we were concerned, but right as far as she was concerned, and really, that’s what mattered.

Jeanette of course is among the friends, a virgin birth (well, adopted, which is almost the same thing). As a child she grows up steeped in bible stories, myth and history commingled and inseparable. She views the world through the lens of religion:

Our house was almost at the top of a long, stretchy street. A flagged street with a cobbly road. When you climb to the top of the hill and look down you can see everything, just like Jesus on the pinnacle except it’s not very tempting.

It all works very well indeed, until the local council notices that Jeanette isn’t at school and requires her mother to make her attend (no home schooling in those days, thankfully). It’s the first exposure Jeanette has to worldviews beyond her mother’s.

‘And why, and this is perhaps more serious, do you terrorize, yes, terrorize, the other children?’ ‘I don’t,’ I protested. ‘Then can you tell me why I had Mrs Spencer and Mrs Sparrow here this morning telling me how their children have nightmares?’ ‘I have nightmares too.’ ‘That’s not the point. You have been talking about Hell to young minds.’ It was true. I couldn’t deny it. I had told all the others about the horrors of the demon and the fate of the damned. I had illustrated it by almost strangling Susan Hunt, but that was an accident, and I gave her all my cough sweets afterwards. ‘I’m very sorry,’ I said, ‘I thought it was interesting.’ Mrs Vole and Miss shook their heads. ‘You’d better go,’ said Mrs Vole. ‘I shall be writing to your mother.’

Still, despite all these contradictions in her life (and whose life doesn’t have contradictions, however old they may be?) young Jeanette manages to balance her world at home with the wider world. To her church she’s a shining example, a young missionary with great promise. That’s what she wants, to grow up and one day take the Good Word out to the benighted peoples of the Earth. Unfortunately, not all contradictions can be reconciled. Jeanette falls in love, which might be manageable except that the person she falls in love with is another girl.

Oranges is sometimes described as a lesbian novel. Winterson doesn’t agree with that description, and she’s right not to. The key relationship here is not between Jeanette and the women she sleeps with as she grows into adulthood, it’s between Jeanette and her mother. This isn’t a coming out novel, it’s a novel about the gulf between parent and child as we come to realise that our parents may not, after all, be right about everything and definitely may not be right about us. (Well, that’s one of the things it’s about – no truly good novel is about just one thing.)

The problem Jeanette the character faces here isn’t an unusual one. She wants to be the child her mother wants, but who she is isn’t compatible with that. Here it’s because she loves the wrong people, but it could be too a child that realises they can’t face working in the family business; they want to marry outside their community or faith; they don’t want to be a doctor or concert pianist or whatever; there are so many ways parents can expect more from their children than just their happiness.

In part I actually found this quite a painful novel to read. It brought back a great many memories of my own childhood and adolescence; of trying to be someone I wasn’t and could never be. I was shy back then, terrible at sport and with no interest in it unlike my father’s side of the family who were (are) confident and naturally athletic. I was bookish, as were two of my grandparents but nobody else and the things that interested me were often so far from the interests of my family that we could barely talk to each other. I was transitional, born to a working class family but wanting more. None of this is unusual. As Winterson says: “Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception.”

Winterson of course, the real Winterson, left home and went to Oxford and from there became a writer. Winterson in the fiction leaves town too, escaping but at times returning, as most of us do. Few of us, however much we may wish to escape from home, truly leave it behind forever. Few of us truly wish to, because however much we may fight with our parents, our family, we love them and they us and that remains true even as we may deplore each others lives.

There is much pain here. Some people think you can have your cake and eat it. The cake goes mouldy and they choke on what’s left. Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.

I talked above about the key relationship here being between Jeanette and her mother, and it’s that tension between expectation and love that it captures so well. To Jeanette’s mother Jeanette is unnatural, one of the Godless, damned for passions against God. Jeanette however comes to accept her nature, to be happy with who and what she is. Logically that must be a divide that cannot be bridged. How do you reconcile two such different perspectives?

Well, you don’t I suppose. Still, only in the saddest cases do parents and children remain permanently estranged. We make allowances, permit exceptions to our most vital beliefs, because the alternative would be to deny love. My maternal grandmother was a devout Catholic, in her later years she took to referring to the family as heathens for our lack of faith, but she wouldn’t have dreamt of rejecting us over so small a thing as god or the fate of our immortal souls.

I should add that Oranges is not as straightforward a novel as the (marvellous) tv adaptation of it would suggest. While most of the novel is told fairly straight, it dips from time to time into fable, stories which reflect the wider story but which introduce an element of myth into the mundane. It works, because it fits. Winterson, the real Winterson, is telling a story and there are more ways of telling a story than just saying what happened.

Oranges is a superbly written novel. I was never a lesbian growing up among Pentacostalists in the North of England but I found it resonant and unsettling for all that – it isn’t remotely limited to its own particularities. Winterson is adept at arresting turns of phrase, women with “shoulders bared and white like hard-boiled eggs”, “ripe plums of indignation”, but she’s not one of those writers who place one beautifully crafted sentence after another ending with a result that while beautiful is somehow sterile and cold. All that and she’s funny too. Frankly, I wish I’d started reading her sooner.

‘Your Loyalty is to me!’

The White Goddess: An Encounter, by Simon Gough

The line between fiction and memoir can be a tricky one. Memories are unreliable, perspectives inevitably partial. We create narratives of our past, assign meanings and interpretations, but the truth of it all is open to challenge and our truth may not be that of others who were there. Rashomon remains one of my favourite films.

The White Goddess: An Encounter is a novel by Simon Gough about, in part, his relationship with his great-uncle Robert Graves. It is, Gough says in a foreword, true in the sense that it captures the truth of what happened between them, possibly untrue in terms of precise chronology or incident. It is history then that has been turned into myth, and that’s something that I think Graves would have approved of.

 

In 1989 Simon Gough is a dealer in second hand and antique books. He’s been given five years to live, and he’s been invited back to Deya, in Majorca. Simon hasn’t been to Deya for nearly thirty years, not since, well, to say not since what would be giving far too much away for those who don’t already know Graves’ story.

The book cuts back swiftly to Simon’s first visit to Deya, in 1953 at the age of ten. He’s a lonely boy, from an English public school which treats him brutally. He is a nervous and rather formal child. His mother, an actress, is in Deya and he is flying to meet her there for an extended holiday. As the plane descends he starts to feel ill from the changing pressure. The stewardess checks that he’s ok:

‘Is your mother meeting you?’
The question came as such a shock that I almost forgot the pain. Of course she would! Unless she had asthma or bronchitis or something, I’d see her in a few minutes – oh, God, please make the pain go away so that she needn’t know. She’d make a fuss, get tired, cross-

I quoted that becauseI liked how much implicit context it carries. Immediately it’s obvious that Simon’s relationship with his mother is a difficult one. Simon is constantly afraid of her moods, of upsetting her or triggering her anger. It’s not that his mother’s abusive, but she is raising Simon on her own and she is deeply temperamental. He is a lightning rod for her fears and anxieties.

Deya though holds more than Simon’s mother and a bit of relaxation. It holds his great-uncle (grand-uncle, as Graves instructs Simon, “Great is for steamships and railway lines, don’t you think? Grand is for fathers and uncles, and Russian dukes, of course!”). Simon’s existence until now has been grey and painful, but Graves is a vast charismatic explosion of a man filled with life and passion and sheer vital force. He dazzles.

The White Goddess is a slow burner of a book. The first 100 pages or so didn’t particularly grab me (it’s over 600 in total). It’s not really until after around page 140 or so it really kicks into gear (Part 1 ends on page 140). Gough spends a huge amount of time painstakingly setting up his characters, his locations, ensuring that the reader can see Deya as he saw it, that they know Graves and his family and his various hangers on.

That early part of the book is made more difficult by a couple of annoying stylistic tics that Gough has as a writer. He vastly overuses italics in quoted speech. This quietens down later on but in the first 100 pages or so there’s scarcely a sentence without some italics in it telling the reader where to place the emphasis. Gough wants you to know how these people spoke, this is an act of memory after all, but I found it bludgeoning.

Similarly annoying is how characters rarely in fact do speak. Instead they grin, they gasp, they explain. Grin is actually a particular favourite. Characters grin, grinned, are grinning. Gough is planning a sequel, which I plan to read, but his editors should strike that word whenever he uses it going forward.

With all those problems why would I read the sequel? Because once the book gets going it turn’s out there’s a point to all that scene-setting. Part 1 is critical because when Simon returns in Part 2, in 1960 aged 17, you feel why this place is so important to him. You understand why Graves is so important. Sometimes a book needs a little patience, a small act of faith on the part of the reader, and this is one of those times.

Gough’s portrait of Deya makes it an attractive place, a place a ten year old might find magical. Is a ten year old’s view reliable though? Are all these people, these artists and writers and actors who hang around Graves, are they all as remarkable as they seem? As the time comes to depart back in 1953, Simon begs his mother to let them stay, to send him to school locally, to never go home again:

She took another gulp at her drink, put it down on the mantelpiece, and began to pace up and down. ‘I couldn’t bear to live here, anyway,’ she went on, in her ‘trying to be reasonable’ voice. ‘The heat, the lotus-eaters, the drunks and layabouts… the thought of becoming like them-’

‘But Uncle Robert isn’t-’

‘I don’t mean Uncle Robert – he’s remarkable, although how he can work in this climate defeats me – and surrounded by all these so-called writers and artists who never sell a word or a picture and live off private incomes and drink themselves into a stupor every night.

In that one little exchange everything we’ve seen of Deya is transformed. Again, that wouldn’t work without the slow buildup.

The heart of the novel comes when Simon returns, in order to attend university in Madrid. That’s when he meets Graves’ muse, Margot Callas. Margot is young (though older than Simon), beautiful, effortlessly herself. To Graves she is an incarnation of the Goddess, a mythic intrusion into reality which fuels his poetry, and he sees himself first and foremost as a poet. Graves cannot write poetry without a muse, for him poetry is both divine gift and act of worship. If Margot were to leave she would not just be taking herself away, she would be taking his art, and destroying her own purpose. Simon, of course, immediately falls in love with Margot, but then who doesn’t?

A core theme of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time was the creation of personal myth, a myth of self that could guide one’s own life and that somehow through one’s own belief in it could become true. Graves lives steeped in myth, he wrote a book titled The White Goddess which delved deeply into the relationship between supposed-ancient Celtic belief and poetry. He sees himself as a mythic figure, the Poet with capital P inspired by the Goddess with capital G.

Graves’ force of personality is so strong that his myth sweeps up those around him, particularly the young and impressionable, like Simon. He talks of how at Deya there are no secrets, but that is just another part of his myth. Graves has no secrets, everyone else does being merely mortal. Graves is a classicist, and so his myth is classical drawing more on the traditions of Greek tragedy than the Christian arc of fall and redemption. It is the Poet’s destiny to have the Goddess withdraw her favour, to be usurped by the False Poet.

This is a haunted novel. Haunted primarily by Graves of course, who by 1989 is dead and yet still a lowering presence. Not just by Graves though. In 1953 Simon is part of a play put on for his birthday in a grotto in Deya. When practising there he feels presences, spirits, what Graves believes are ghosts of people yet to be. Myth lends meaning to landscape, not perhaps in a way that is true but in a way that is nonetheless meaningful. Were there ghosts in Deya? I don’t believe in ghosts, so I don’t believe so. Does myth have power though? Undoubtedly.

Gough is often at his best when capturing how fragments of places survive, in our memories and imaginations but also in occasional remnant pockets which preserve what was before. When Simon returns in 1960 what was once rocks and scrub is showing signs of nascent development. Just a few houses and a restaurant so far, but the signs are there of what will follow. By 1989 Majorca will be transformed. What was though remains, sleeping until we awake it by our acts of recognition.

His absence was almost as tangible as his presence, seeming to conjure him. In the sudden air of suspense I found myself holding my breath, expecting him at any moment to come crashing through the double doors, eyes staring, words half-formed, muttering to himself as he strode to his desk and grabbed his relief-nib pen, dipped it in the ink well and started to write while still in the act of sitting down-

This is, ultimately, a compassionate novel. Simon’s mother may seem the villain to him at ten, but later their relationship improves and he understands her better. Graves is impossible, his attitude to Margot possessive and suffocating (and denying her her own agency in favour of her significance within his myth), but he is also funny and brilliant and it is easy to see why he was loved. Margot is perhaps selfish, but what woman can live up to being a goddess? And of course there is Simon himself, miserable at ten and conflicted at 17, pulled between Graves and Margot neither of whom should ever have asked as much of him as they did.

The White Goddess is also a peculiarly unfashionable sort of novel. It is written as if from an earlier age, as if Maugham were still a leading writer and Greene cutting edge. It is an old man’s novel, which sounds dismissive but isn’t. It is concerned with telling what happened, long ago, truthfully if not always with precise accuracy. It is concerned with being fair, which must be difficult when one of those the author most needs to be fair to is his earlier self. It is emotional, but not sentimental, and it is kind which is no small thing.

Often I read reviews on blogs of books that form part of a series, and the blogger praises the book but when asked if they will read the sequel is uncertain. If the book is so good why wouldn’t you? The White Goddess is flawed. Gough has some stylistic habits that he should break, that do get in the way, but his story is a fascinating one and over the course of his narrative he does bring back places and people long past and brings us into their w0rld.

All these words and I’ve not spoken of Gough’s evocation of Franco’s Madrid, of his sympathetic portrait of Graves’ wife, Beryl, or his wild cousin Juan. This is a rich book that ultimately merits its length, provided you’re able to take that leap of faith with the first 100 pages or so.

I received my copy of The White Goddess as a free review copy from the publisher.

‘Tis my belief she’s a very good woman at bottom.” “She’s terrible deep, then.”

Under the Greenwood Tree, by Thomas Hardy

Romcoms get a bad press. They’re often seen as nothing but megaplex filler, Saturday night entertainments for the undemanding. Mostly of course that’s true.

As with anything though there are exceptions. Steve Martin’s LA Story is for me a thoroughly likeable film that’s easily borne several viewings, even though I hate every English character in it (including the female romantic lead). It’s a romcom, but it’s a good romcom. They do exist.

Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree isn’t of course a romcom (it predates cinema for one thing). Except, well, it sort of is. Boy meets girl. The path of true love proves bumpy. Will the boy and girl end up together in the final reel/chapter? All this against a backdrop of the impact of social change in mid-19th Century Britain as seen through the declining fortunes of a traditional church choir, facing replacement by new technology in the form of the church organ.

Hardy is a writer with a formidable reputation, perhaps for many readers too formidable as his classic status can be offputting. Some years ago my wife persuaded me to read The Mayor of Casterbridge which she was convinced I would love, and as so often she was right. The Mayor of Casterbridge is, quite simply, brilliant and utterly deserving of the word classic (and, as is true of so many classics, it’s actually not a difficult book to read at all).

More recently Emma of Book Around the Corner and Guy of His Futile Preoccupations have both been singing Hardy’s praises, and their reviews made me want to give him another try. Where better than at the beginning, with Under the Greenwood Tree, his first Wessex novel?

And, even though I didn’t read this edition but because it’s the best cover for it I’ve seen, here’s how the Oxford World Classics version looks:

The clue to Under the Greenwood Tree lies in its subtitle, “A Rural Painting of the Dutch School”. To draw analogies from another media again this is a pastoral, a romanticised and somewhat nostalgic depiction of an imagined country life.

It’s easy when reading a nineteenth century novel today to think of it as being contemporary fiction of its time, but Under the Greenwood Tree isn’t. It was written in 1872, but is set in (as best I can tell) the 1840s and it deals with the passing of country traditions that at the time of writing must already have been lost for a generation. It’s not therefore, strictly speaking, a realist novel. What it is though is a delight.

The village of Mellstock, in Hardy’s fictional county of Wessex, has a new vicar and that means change. The old vicar, much loved by all, was a respectful man who didn’t bother you if you didn’t attend church and who would never have dreamt of visiting his parishioners as they went about their business. He kept to himself, and kept church for Sundays.

The new fellow, by contrast, is always calling on people to see how they are and making an effort to get to know his flock. That’s strange enough, but much worse is that he plans to abolish the ancient Mellstock Quire (choir) – a collection of locals who sit in the upper gallery in church and play music for the congregation, as well as going round at Christmas time to everyone’s homes and playing carols whether those inside want to hear them or not.

The quire by the way play string instruments, as god surely intended:

“I can well bring back to my mind,” said Mr. Penny, “what I said to poor Joseph Ryme (who took the treble part in Chalk-Newton Church for two-and- forty year) when they thought of having clar’nets there. ‘Joseph,’ I said, says I, ‘depend upon’t, if so be you have them tooting clar’nets you’ll spoil the whole set-out. Clar’nets were not made for the service of the Lard; you can see it by looking at ‘em,’ I said. And what came o’t? Why, souls, the parson set up a barrel-organ on his own account within two years o’ the time I spoke, and the old quire went to nothing.” “As far as look is concerned,” said the tranter, “I don’t for my part see that a fiddle is much nearer heaven than a clar’net. ‘Tis further off. There’s always a rakish, scampish twist about a fiddle’s looks that seems to say the Wicked One had a hand in making o’en; while angels be supposed to play clar’nets in heaven, or som’at like ‘em, if ye may believe picters.” “Robert Penny, you was in the right,” broke in the eldest Dewy. “They should ha’ stuck to strings. Your brass-man is a rafting dog–well and good; your reed-man is a dab at stirring ye–well and good; your drum-man is a rare bowel-shaker–good again. But I don’t care who hears me say it, nothing will spak to your heart wi’ the sweetness o’ the man of strings!” “Strings for ever!” said little Jimmy. “Strings alone would have held their ground against all the new comers in creation.” (“True, true!” said Bowman.) “But clarinets was death.” (“Death they was!” said Mr. Penny.) “And harmonions,” William continued in a louder voice, and getting excited by these signs of approval, “harmonions and barrel-organs” (“Ah!” and groans from Spinks) “be miserable–what shall I call ‘em?–miserable–” “Sinners,” suggested Jimmy, who made large strides like the men, and did not lag behind like the other little boys. “Miserable dumbledores!” “Right, William, and so they be–miserable dumbledores!” said the choir with unanimity.

At the same time, the village has a new schoolmistress, Miss Fancy Day, daughter to a wealthy local farmer. As the quire perform their annual Christmas carrolling one of its youngest members, Dick Dewy, sees her and falls immediately in love. She’s pretty, spirited, has some measure of refinement and is every inch the desirable catch. So desirable in fact that Dick isn’t the only one with an eye on her. There’s another farmer who has considerably more money and position than Dick, and who is therefore a better match, and that new vicar is in need of a wife too. Can Dick win Miss Day’s heart, and if so can he keep it? It doesn’t help that Miss Day turns out to be something of a flirt…

The romance is at the forefront of the novel, but the looming obsolescence of the choir is never far away either. Miss Day you see will be the new organist. The vicar and Miss Day are modern, forward looking, bringing new ideas and new fashions (some shocking – a hat in church!) to Mellstock. Against that what chance have a group of old men with their fading traditions and battered instruments?

Looking at what I’ve written what strikes me is how dark this novel could have been. It isn’t at all. The quire make their case for survival, but they understand that times change and they’re not resentful men. Dick has rivals better placed than him to win Miss Day, but he’s a sound lad and not daunted. Miss Day hasn’t perhaps the most constant of hearts, and is perhaps overprone to vanity, but there’s no real harm in her. This is an extraordinarily affectionate work in which there is drama, yes, but a very gentle drama. Things may change, are changing, but Mellstock will remain.

Part of what makes Under the Greenwood Tree such a joy is Hardy’s slyly humorous prose. Dick is a young man “consisting chiefly of a human skeleton and a smock-frock, who was very awkward in his movements, apparently on account of having grown so very fast that before he had had time to get used to his height he was higher.” After he falls in love with Miss Day:

It followed that, as the spring advanced, Dick walked abroad much more frequently than had hitherto been usual with him, and was continually finding that his nearest way to or from home lay by the road which skirted the garden of the school.

There’s some lovely character humour within the quire, as well as comic interplay between wives and husbands. I loved too a throwaway line when a man is late for his wedding due to some honey bees suddenly swarming – “Marrying a woman is a thing you can do at any moment; but a swarm o’ bees won’t come for the asking.” Everything is a chance for comedy, from the quire’s debate with the vicar as they argue for more time to a country dance where Dick desperately tries to get as many dances with Fancy as propriety permits (and certainly more than his main rival).

Finally, it almost goes without saying that Hardy is a master at portraying nature itself. The novel follows the seasons, from Winter through to Winter and on to Spring again (and if you’re reading this because you’ve been set this book at school and found this blog looking for something to crib off, do look at how Hardy uses seasonal and weather imagery to underline the progress of the plot and character emotions, easy marks). Here’s one final quote:

The last day of the story is dated just subsequent to that point in the development of the seasons when country people go to bed among nearly naked trees, are lulled to sleep by a fall of rain, and awake next morning among green ones; when the landscape appears embarrassed with the sudden weight and brilliancy of its leaves;

Isn’t that lovely? The whole book’s lovely, though with sufficient notes of melancholic ambiguity to prevent it becoming oversweet. If you find yourself, as I did when I picked this up, in need of a book that’s well written but in which nothing bad can truly happen (and however robust we may be, we all at times need a little escape) this couldn’t be a better choice. My wife (naturally), Emma, and Guy were all right. Hardy deserves reading.

Update: Emma of bookaroundthecorner posted a review of this the same day I did (unfortunately I accidentally deleted her pingback). Her review is, as ever, excellent and well worth reading - particularly for how it brings out the novel’s musical themes. Emma’s review is here.

some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty

The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes

I grew up, like many people, believing memory to be a sort of hologram stored in the brain. An accurate image of what was once perceived, once felt. Of course that’s not true. Memory is a reconstruction, and frequently a faulty one. As a factoid I think that’s fairly widely known now, but knowing that and feeling the truth of it are of course two very different things. We may know that our memories are not necessarily reliable, but they often seem so very definite.  Besides, without our memories who exactly are we?

That’s a question beyond the scope of this blog (though if I had to answer I’d say we’re a constellation of cognitive processes with an illusion of continuity, and that the very concept of self is deeply problematic). It’s at the heart though of Julian Barnes’ coolly distant Booker winning novel The Sense of an Ending.

The book opens with a short list of memories. not all of which the as yet unnamed narrator actually saw. Immediately we’re on warning, if one of these memories is imagined rather than real, can any of them be trusted? As the narrator says, “what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.”

From there the novel develops in two reasonably distinct halves. The first is the narrator’s (who we eventually learn is named Tony) memories of his final years at school and his early years at university. The key here is that as a reader we’re not experiencing Tony’s early life directly, we’re experiencing what he remembers it as being like which may not be the same thing at all. This is underlined, time and again, with barely a page passing without Tony/Barnes reminding the reader that none of this can necessarily be trusted (“Later that day – or perhaps another day –”, “Was this their exact exchange? Almost certainly not. Still, it is my best memory of their exchange.”).

A new boy, Adrian, joins the school and becomes a key member of Tony’s small clique of friends. They consider themselves philosophers, intellectual rebels, they look to great art and literature for inspiration and they are convinced as was I and as no doubt were many reading this that they have insights that the old and adult world never knew or has long since forgotten. They look down on those around them with all the haughty certainty of adolescence, and they look forward to lives which whatever they may be will not be like their parents, or so at least they hope.

This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents – were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen. Like what? The things Literature was all about: love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God. And barn owls. Of course, there were other sorts of literature – theoretical, self-referential, lachrymosely autobiographical – but they were just dry wanks. Real literature was about psychological, emotional and social truth as demonstrated by the actions and reflections of its protagonists; the novel was about character developed over time.

After school they separate, as school friends tend to do, and Tony goes to university where he meets his first girlfriend, Veronica. It’s the 1960s, but one of the charms of the novel is how it brings out that for most people the 1960s is not the 1960s as we now picture it (just as having grown up in the 1980s I can testify it wasn’t for me much like the 1980s I now see on tv). If the sexual revolution is happening, it’s not happening anywhere near Tony. If people are turning on, tuning in and dropping out they’re not inviting him to do it with them. 1960s England for most is not that different to 1950s England. Our collective memories turn out to be not that reliable either.

The second half of the novel is years later, in the present. Tony is in his 60s now. He’s retired, divorced though still on good terms with his ex-wife, he has a daughter and while they’re not as close as he’d like they get along. He has a grandson he dotes on. His life is calm, comfortable, untroubled and deeply ordinary. That’s how he likes it. His teenage yearnings for more were a product of being a teenager, nothing deeper (“I would never do those things adolescence had dreamt about. Instead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life.”).

Tony’s existence is placid, and then he gets an unexpected bequest from Veronica’s mother who’s recently died and who he’s not heard from since an unsuccessful visit to meet Veronica’s parents decades previously. That leads him to contact Veronica, and to proof that how he remembers those years (and in particular how he remembers what lead up to a particular terrible incident) may not be quite how they actually happened.

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves.

I won’t talk more about the plot. What happened is interesting, but it’s not the point. The point is memory, age and the myth of self (Anthony Powell would have liked this book). Back in their schooldays Adrian challenged a history master with the idea that all one can say of history is that “something happened”. Later Adrian quotes what appears to be a French historian named Patrick Lagrange who said that “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation” (what appears because as best I can tell Patrick Lagrange is himself fictional, whether Adrian made him up or Tony misremembers is unknowable).

As a teenager Tony looked forward to an uncertain future. Now he looks back to an uncertain past. He has his account of what happened, but of what use is that? After all, “historians need to treat a participant’s own explanation of events with a certain scepticism.” Tony sets off on a dogged quest to understand what really happened all those years ago. As a narrator though he’s hopelessly compromised. If he can’t trust his own memories, and so we as readers can’t trust his descriptions of the past, how can we trust his perceptions of events now or the conclusions he draws? The whole book becomes slippery, with all that can be relied upon being Tony’s own emotional response. Everything else is, at best, approximate.

To the extent The Sense of an Ending has a weakness it lies in its tone. At the start I called this a coolly distant novel, and that’s in large part because Tony is a rather detached figure (detached from his own life in fact). As Tony is the narrator the book’s nature must follow his, and the result is a book that can at times be hard to love. When Josipovici criticised Barnes, and other contemporary English writers, it was exactly this sort of bloodless text he was arguing against.

Against that is one simple fact. Barnes can write. The book is filled with sentences that are absolute delights, frequently very funny and sometimes cruelly telling. I loved this as a summary of a certain kind of life: “We bought a small house with a large mortgage; I commuted up to London every day.” And similarly this as a description of a certain kind of English town: “one of those suburbs which had stopped concreting over nature at the very last minute, and ever since smugly claimed rural status.” As a final brief example, I thought this line unbearably sad: “I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded – and how pitiful that was.”

At the end The Sense of an Ending becomes a sort of detective story, but one in which the solution doesn’t really matter and anyway can never be certain. Tony tries to understand what really happened in his past, how his personal account differs from the truth, and the extent to which he was responsible for what happened.  Those are all the wrong questions though. All of them amount to an attempt to fix that which is by its nature fluid, and to ascribe responsibility.

Tony’s investigation therefore becomes a more personal search. His choices are largely behind him. His life is now set in the path it will likely stay in until he dies. He thought he knew what the future held, but it wasn’t as he dreamed. He thought he knew what the past held, but it wasn’t as he remembered. The only certainty left is death, and that before it something happened.

The Sense of an Ending has naturally been the subject of a great many reviews. Some I’d point you to are (in no particular order) by Will of Just William’s Luck, here, Kevin of KevinfromCanada here, John Self of theasylum here, Kerry of Hungry Like the Woolf here, Tom of Tomcat in the Red Room here (and if you don’t know Tom’s blog you should, it’s definitely worth checking out), and just today as I wrote this at whisperinggums here. If I’ve missed your review (and I’m sure I’ve missed some blogs I follow, I’m very late to this book), please let me know in the comments.

a random collection of desperate acts

Troubles, by J.G. Farrell

Troubles is perhaps the bleakest comic novel I’ve read. It opens with the narrator, unidentified, talking about the Majestic hotel which once stood on a peninsula in rural Ireland. Today, whenever that is, it’s a burnt out ruin littered with unusual numbers of small animal bones and great quantities of cast-iron bathtubs, bed-frames and lavatory bowls all showing how grand the hotel must once have been.

The unknown narrator comments that the Majestic had been in decline for some time before its end. A man named Edward Spencer had taken ownership of the hotel and managed it with the aid of a threadbare staff who catered to the limited needs of his guests and family. Those guests were a dwindling number of elderly ladies who had visited for years. Many of them had no other home. The Majestic then was a decaying hulk with only a few rooms of weak life left within it.

Troubles is the story of how a man known as the Major came to the Majestic, and what happened to him there. It’s also the story of how the British Empire lost Ireland and how ultimately it lost its empire.

This is a longer quote than I’d usually wish to include, but it gives an excellent feel for the style of language used and the sly humour that permeates the novel:

In the summer of 1919, not long before the great Victory Parade marched up Whitehall, the Major left hospital and went to Ireland to claim his bride, Angela Spencer. At least he fancied that the claiming of her as a bride might come into it. But nothing definite had been settled.

Home on leave in 1916 the Major had met Angela in Brighton where she had been staying with relations. He now only retained a dim recollection of that time, dazed as he was by the incessant, titanic thunder of artillery that cushioned it thickly, before and after. They had been somewhat hysterical – Angela perhaps feeling amid all the patriotism that she too should have something personal to lose, the Major that he should have at least one reason for surviving. He remembered declaring that he would come back to her, but not very much else. Indeed, the only other thing he recalled quite distinctly was saying goodbye to her at an afternoon thé dansant in a Brighton Hotel. They had kissed behind a screen of leaves and, reaching out to steady himself, he had put his hand down firmly on a cactus, which had rendered many of his parting words insincere. The strain had been so great that he had been glad to get away from her. Perhaps, however, this suppressed agony had given the wrong impression of his feelings.

Although he was sure he had never actually proposed to Angela during the few days of their acquaintance, it was beyond doubt that they were engaged: a certainty fostered by the fact that from the very beginning she had signed her letters ‘Your loving fiancée, Angela’. This had surprised him at first. But, with the odour of death drifting from the dug-out in which he scratched out his replies by the light of a candle, it would have been trivial and discourteous beyond words to split hairs about such purely social distinctions.

That quote comes from very early on and it created certain expectations for me. I had a sense of where the book was going. Yes, I wondered who the mysterious narrator was and what part they’d have to play, but I expected a certain kind of story. A story about an Englishman encountering a ramshackle and eccentric Irish family. Anyone reading this probably already knows the broad outline of that story as its usually told. I just thought that here it would be well written.

Troubles is well written. It’s not though simply a novel about an Englishman encountering a ramshackle and eccentric Irish family. That does happen, but this is no tale of Irish whimsy.

The Major is taken to the Majestic by Angela’s brother, and then left in the hotel’s echoing lobby. Nobody greets him. Nobody takes his bag. Eventually he finds his way to the Palm Court where Angela, her father and some friends of the family are taking tea.

The Palm Court proved to be a vast, shadowy cavern in which dusty white chairs stood in silent, empty groups, just visible here and there amid the gloomy foliage. For the palms had completely run riot, shooting out of their wooden tubs (some of which had cracked open to trickle little cones of black soil on to the tiled floor) towards the distant murky skylight, hammering and interweaving themselves against the greenish glass that sullenly glowed overhead. Here and there between the tables beds of oozing mould supported banana and rubber plants, hairy ferns, elephant grass and creepers that dangled from above like emerald intestines. In places there was a hollow ring to the tiles – there must be some underground irrigation system, the Major reasoned, to provide water for all this vegetation. But now, here he was.

When I talked about my expectations for the novel what I was really talking about was my expectations for its plot, and by plot I mean a sequence of events with narrative coherence and logic. A story with a beginning, middle and end.

Troubles has a beginning (the arrival of the major) and it has an end (the opening page tells the reader that the Majestic burnt down). A lot happens between those two points in time so it has a middle. Does it have a plot though? Is there narrative coherence and logic? Or is it rather a sequence of meaningless events conveniently bracketed by moments that have no ultimately greater significance than any others?

That’s one sense in which this is not a straightforward novel (though it’s not a difficult one either), and one I’ll return to. The other is that of course all this acts as metaphor. For the Majestic read British rule in Ireland, or even the British Empire itself. For Edward, his family, friends and guests read the English in Ireland, ruling over a local populace they neither understand nor respect.

As the book progresses the lines between masters and servants become blurred. The local villagers grow hostile. The Majestic sales on – a bubble of decaying order ruled by assumptions of status that the world increasingly no longer recognises.

I’ll put my cards on the table. Troubles is brilliant. In 2010 it won the “Lost Booker” prize (a retrospective prize for the year 1970 designed to cover books which lost eligibility due to a change in the prize’s rules around that time). I haven’t read every book that was eligible for the Lost Booker, but given the extraordinary quality of Troubles I’m not at all surprised that it won.

The Major gets drawn deeper and deeper into the life of the Majestic but seeing its decline does not mean he can stop it. The hotel’s structure crumbles while it becomes overrun with feral creatures: tribes of cats; soldiers serving in the black-and-tans; a pair of pretty and wilful twins who couldn’t care less for propriety as long as there are dances and new dresses to be had (Resolute Reader in his review sees them as a harbinger of the 1920s and I think he’s absolutely right).

The old order, both in the Majestic and in Ireland, is being swept away. It’s disappearing not gently, but in violence and brutality. The young are indifferent to its passing and the old barely notice it. In between are those like the Major who are old enough to be part of how things were but young enough that they still have to live in the world as it now is.

As well as all this Farrell has a marvellous turn of phrase. The Major attends family dinners where “… silence collected between the tables in layers like drifts of a snow.” Later the Major sadly observes a “… bath of peeling gilt and black marble in which, no doubt, many a bride of the last century had washed away her illusions of love.”

I wrote recently about how the comic novel fails to get the literary respect it deserves (I was inspired by a post to that effect at Tomcat in the Red Room’s blog). Troubles is the best example I could imagine of how a comic novel can also be a piece of genuinely exciting literature. It’s superbly written and operates on a number of levels but at the same time it’s extremely funny.

Farrell never loses sight of the human among the unravelling of Empire. He describes how the old ladies gain new energy putting up Christmas decorations and mounting little expeditions into the nearby village, fleeting moments of purpose. He brings out the Major’s bitterness brought back from the Great War and tamped down just out of sight. There is warmth here in the writing so that even in the face of the despair and tragedy that pervades the novel it’s possible to laugh while seeing quite plainly that really there’s nothing to laugh about.

I said I’d return to the question of whether Troubles has a plot, or just things that happen. It’s not actually the easiest question to answer. Ultimately though Troubles is subversive in part because it uses traditional narrative techniques but undermines them from within. The novel is a form of history. Like history it has a narrative, it has major characters and minor ones, it has a direction.

In truth though all that is a lie. History has only the narrative we give it. Historical periods start and end where we choose them to do so. Which individuals stand out is dependent not just on who did what but on what records remain and on the agendas of the historians researching them. The only direction history truly has is forward and that is mere fact – it isn’t a direction with purpose. History is written with narrative coherence and logic, but that’s just because that’s the only way we can understand it.

Troubles then as a historical novel reflects how history is created. Things happen, and from them a beginning is chosen and an ending. Certain characters are emphasised, certain parts of what occurs are given prominence while others remain in the backdrop. In the end though it’s all what Edward in an appeal to faith desperately wants it not to be. A random collection of desperate acts.

The Resolute Reader review I referred to is here. John Self reviewed Troubles here and wasn’t nearly as taken by it. Obviously I disagree with his view but a John Self review is never to be sniffed at. Sam Jordison of the Guardian also wrote about it here.

… the once and future king

The Death of King Arthur, by Peter Ackroyd (based on La Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory)

In the old wild days of the world there was a king of England known as Uther Pendragon; he was a dragon in wrath as well as in power. There were various regions in his kingdom, many of them warring one against another, and so it came about that one day he summoned a mighty duke to his court at Winchester. This nobleman was of Cornwall, and he was called Duke of Tintagel; he reigned over a western tribe from the fastness of his castle on the rocks, where he looked down upon the violent sea. Uther Pendragon asked the duke to bring with him to court his wife, Igraine, who had the reputation of being a great beauty, and it was said that she could read the secrets of any man’s heart on the instant she looked at him.

So starts Peter Ackroyd’s version of Sir Thomas Malory’s La Morte d’Arthur. Within a page or so the king has lusted for Igraine, she has seen that lust within him and the Duke and Igraine have fled back to Tintagel. When Uther learns of their departuure he is furious. “And, as the people of England know well enough, the wrath of the king is death.”

The story of the birth, reign and death of Arthur is of course a cornerstone of British myth. Most people know at least parts of it, and many of the central characters are still household names – King Arthur, Guinevere, Merlin, Lancelot. It’s an incredibly enduring tale but in the original text (and yes, I know there are problems with calling Malory’s work an original text) it’s hard to read.

La Morte d’Arthur is around 900 pages long. It’s written in poetic and now rather archaic language. It’s often very repetitive and its assumed audience bears no resemblance to anyone who might read it today. None of that stops some people from still reading it, but it’s likely that a great many are put off.

Enter Peter Ackroyd. This is in part a translation of the Malory, in part a retelling of it. It’s not wholly faithful (particularly in the detail) to the earlier work, but it is largely so. That means it’s not a novel in any meaningful sense. It’s a sequence of tales rich with sex and death and the occasional bit of magic – all those things that a fifteenth century courtly audience held so dear.

So Ulfius rode out, whispering the name of ‘Merlin’ under his breath many times; he knew that the magician was aware of the secret life of all things, and would know that his name was being murmured in the wind. The birds, or the singing grasses, would tell him. As Ulfius rode on he suddenly encountered a beggar standing in the high road; the beggar wore a hood, and his back was turned to the knight. He seemed to be peering at something lying on the ground. ‘Move,’ Ulfius told him. ‘Get out of my way.’ ‘Do you begrudge a poor man the space of a dusty road?’ the beggar replied. ‘Move on, or I will cut you with my sword. It is not right for a knight to argue with one such as you.’ ‘Even if I know for whom you seek? Even if I know that your name is Ulfius?’ ‘Who are you?’ ‘I am the one you wish for. I am Merlin.’ He put out his hands, palms outward, and his beggar’s clothes were transformed into robes of white satin. ‘I am the man of magic.’

Most translations seek to preserve something of the style of the original. Here my impression is that Ackroyd is more concerned with the substance – the content of the tales. Malory’s language is rich and sonorous. Ackroyd’s version is is often flatter and Adam Thorpe in the Guardian found it “deadpan” and lacking in the grace and subtlety of the original. I’ve quoted extensively here because the extent to which anyone will enjoy this book will largely depend on how they engage with Ackroyd’s prose.

I’ve not read the original in depth, but on its own terms I found Ackroyd’s version to have the feel of a Norse saga, or a Beowulf or Song of Roland. The language has a formal, often ritual, quality to it which for me matched the material. Malory is notoriously repetitive. Ackroyd avoids that but still includes some repetition where it aids that sense of a ritualised text - for example lengthy battles always seem to last for two hours which is clearly a figurative rather than literal period of time.

So they rode until they came to a fair lake with placid waters. ‘Look,’ Merlin said. ‘There is your sword.’ And, at that moment, from the surface of the water there emerged an arm clothed in white that in its hand held a shining sword. The air was filled with sweet sounds, and the light from the sword suffused the whole lake. Then Arthur saw a lady sailing towards him in a dark boat; she was wearing a black cape, and her hair was covered with a hood. ‘This is the Lady of the Lake,’ Merlin told him. ‘She lives in a great palace within a cavern. Speak graciously to her, and she will give you the sword.’

There’s little by way of characterisation. Personalities are broadbrush and often defined by a handful of traits. Sir Palomides is a skilled and powerful Saracen knight who is in love with Isolde, but she loves Tristram and so Sir Palomides is his enemy. That’s about it for Sir Palomides. Uther is a great warlord but lustful and prone to rage. That’s about it for him.

Much of what happens bears no relation to any wider narrative. Knights meet other knights waiting at crossroads or are waylaid in mysterious castles but many of these vignettes are self-contained. Where there is a larger story it’s one any reader will already know: the sword and the stone; the grail quest; the death of Arthur.

These may seem like fundamental flaws, but as noted above this isn’t a novel and it doesn’t aim for story or character. This is myth. The characters are widely drawn because they are epic. Their actions sometimes make little sense because their motives are not ours but are the motives of heroic figures driven by heroic passions.

So Griflet took up his shield and spear, and galloped into the wood. When he came up to the spring he saw a richly painted pavilion; beside it was a horse, well saddled and bridled, and on a tree was hanging a shield decorated with all manner of devices. Griflet struck the shield with his spear, and knocked it to the ground. The king came out at once from the pavilion. ‘Fair knight,’ he said, ‘why did you strike down my shield?’ ‘I wish to joust with you.’ ‘You had better not do that,’ the king replied. ‘You are still young. Your might will be no match for mine.’ ‘No matter. I wish to joust with you.’ ‘Since you are so sure of yourself, I have no alternative but to fight. From where do you come?’ ‘From the court of King Arthur.’ So the two warriors fought against each other. Their battle was hard and fierce; King Pellinor broke the shield of Griflet and, smashing the spear, laid Griflet low upon the ground with a wide wound in his side.

Here men fight because fighting is what knights do. It is honourable, and pride is the essence of knighthood and so insults must be met with blows. At least twice men suffering from grievous wounds make passionate love to their ladies and leave the beds they lie in slick with blood. These are not reasonable people because we are not in the world of reason.

Magic of course plays a part. Merlin’s gifts lie largely in glamour (illusions essentially) and prophecy. As so often in folklore he knows the future but cannot change it. He knows that he will be buried alive, but not when or why.

It so happened that Merlin also fell madly in love with a young woman, once a companion of the Lady of the Lake; her name was Nineve. He would never let her rest, but followed her everywhere; she flattered him, and pretended to welcome his favours, until she had learned all she needed from him. Still he was besotted by her, and could not be brought from her side. Merlin also told Arthur many secrets. He said that he himself would not live for much longer, and that he would be buried alive in the earth. He informed the king of many ills that would beset him, too, and warned him to keep safe his sword and scabbard. ‘Yet this also is true,’ he told him. ‘Your sword and scabbard will be stolen from you by a woman whom you trust most in the world. She wishes to take Excalibur from you. Then you will miss me, sir. Then you would rather have my wisdom than all of your wealth.’ ‘To be buried alive is a terrible thing,’ the king replied. ‘But if you see your fate so clearly, why can you not avert it by the force of your magic?’ ‘It cannot be. This is my destiny. But I do not know the day when it will come.’

It’s his obsession with Nineve that proves his undoing. The only real surprise for me in the book was that Nineve is not a villain (as I had remembered her) and Merlin is arguably a bit of a stalker. Passion before reason once again of course.

Here gifts are made of goblets that spill their contents if drunk by a woman who does not truly love her husband. Out of a hundred women at Camelot only four can pass that test. Guinevere is not among that four. Perhaps she of all people should have refused to drink, but a key theme here is how even the great are subject to the whims of chance and fate.

Arthur’s end is long foretold by Merlin, but he cannot avoid it. Lancelot is Arthur’s friend and greatest knight, but they come to war. Merlin is the greatest wizard in the land, but he is outwitted through his passion for his own student. Sir Balin of the Two Swords is warned of what will bring him to ruin, but that does not prevent it ocurring.

Tragedy runs through these stories and as I alluded to above it’s hard not to remember what kind of audience they would once have had. There are no peasants here, no common folk. Those who matter are titled or outside the class system by virtue of religious rank or magic. Marriages are political and love is a disruptive force that destroys households and alliances. Even Lancelot  is undone by desire – his skill at arms cannot win a contest against himself.

Malory/Ackroyd portrays an escapist world of fantasy and adventure, but one rooted in a grimmer reality. Knights quest for adventure, but many are brutally killed and the virtuous do not always prosper. God is said to reward a just cause over an unjust one, but when Lancelot challenges men over Guinevere’s honour they know that they will lose to him even though she is an adultress. Faith may teach that God grants victory only to the righteous, but experience shows it goes to the strong.

The Death of King Arthur is a romance in the classic sense. With existence so fleeting and so fragile all that remains is passion. Malory and his readers all knew that chivalry was at best an aspirational fiction. An interesting foreword notes Malory’s many arrests and his distinctly questionable career. By Malory’s time knights were political rather than martial creatures. Like the Hagakure in Japan these are stories of a time past that likely never existed, but which still reflects glory on a more prosaic present.

All my life I’ve seen complaints about sex and violence in entertainment. As a child people complained about it on TV, and now they complain about it in songs and video games. Malory/Ackroyd gives us heroism, adventure, courtly love, the holy grail itself, but in the end this too is a tale of sex and violence. King or commoner we’re all at the mercy of chance, we all face either early death or the eventual decline of our powers and we all have to live as best we can in the meantime. The tale of Arthur and his knights has power in part because despite being so specific and remote to our world it is in fact universal. The king is, after all, the land.

Nicholas Lezard of the Guardian also reviewed this here. His take is more positive than that of Adam Thorpe and makes an interesting comparison.

Most of the subjects which I find important are not spoken of

Corker’s Freedom, by John Berger

A man (and it’s usually a man) lives a life of quiet desperation among the English lower-middle classes. He dreams of something better, but when he tries to realise his dreams he finds the stultifying weight of society harder to shake off than he had imagined. Worse yet, perhaps he finds himself not quite up to the challenge.

How many novels does that describe? Quiet suburban desperation is well-explored territory for the literary novel. There were a spate of them in the 1960s though the trend goes back much further. Even today they haven’t gone away. I doubt they ever will.

William Corker is a middle-aged (on the cusp of just plain old) man who runs a small employment agency in Clapham. It’s taken him years to build up the business and it gives him a comfortable living with regular foreign holidays (no common thing in 1960 when this is set). Here’s the opening paragraph:

(William Tracey Corker, bachelor, aged 63, has this morning, April 4th 1960, walked out on Irene, his invalid sister, in whose house he has lived for the last twelve years. He has no intention of returning. Alec Gooch, Mr Corker’s junior and only clerk, will be 18 in two months’ time. Last night he went to bed with a girl for the first time in his life. The girl, with whom he is in love, works in a florist’s shop and is called Jackie.)

It reads to me like directions in a screenplay. The stage is set. The day is a momentous one, far from ordinary. Both men’s lives have transformed within the past 24 hours. Even so, there’s little sign of it as the day begins. The first section of the novel deals with their morning in the office: clients phone up asking for people to be placed with them; potential employees come in for interviews hoping to be given work; Corker and Alec chat a bit.

Alec is trying to make sense of the world. He has categories that he tries to fit all his experiences into. One is “office day“. Another, a new one, is “having Jackie“. He’s starting to realise that the world may be much larger than he imagined and that there may be a great deal that he can’t neatly file.

Corker’s internal reverie is quite different. He thinks about his life, about himself and his own innate uniqueness (there are no other William Tracey Corker’s in the world), about women and age and all manner of things. The difference between the mundanity of his job and his flights of thought is jarring and true.

If I had to trace a graph of my interest in this novel it would start high (a Berger!); as the novel progressed it would dip slowly down falling eventually quite low (again with the mental filing Alec? How many clients do these people see in a morning?); having hit a dangerous low point by the half-way mark it would start to make a wavering recovery as after lunch Corker and Alec start clearing the upstairs rooms so that Corker can move into them (Corker’s interior world so unexpectedly rich); it would rise further as the day ends and the story moves to a church hall that evening where Corker is giving one of his regular talks and slideshows on the subject of his most recent foreign holiday to Vienna; and it would stay high from there.

Berger here contrasts Corker’s outer and inner world, and Alec’s too but Alec’s is far narrower. He has not travelled as Corker has. He has not lived years in frustration with a woman to whom he is related but for whom he feels little affection. Alec sees life opening up before him and Jackie showing him worlds he never dreamt of but that were always present. Corker sees his world closing down and wants to seize some of it while he still can.

In an extraordinary sequence (and not the only extraordinary sequence) Corker gets Alec to help him move some furniture. The narrative subdivides. There is what Corker says. There is what he knows but does not say. There is what he fantasises. Here Corker has just cut his finger and is waiting for Alec to return:

(The following concerns Mr Corker whilst he waits upstairs in the front room after Alec has gone down for the second time to find the First-Aid Box. Mr Corker has slipped off the armchair into the seat so that his legs now dangle over the arm and his head rests on the other arm. He cannot sit in the chair in a normal position because the front of the chair is still wedged against the sideboard. His eyes are shut.)

Corker thinks: Something I said made him cross. He was quite rude about what I was telling him about the Blighty ones. It’s always the same thing – if you give an inch, he takes a mile.
Corker knows: I have been telling him lies, ever since lunch I have been telling lies. This lying is not altogether deliberate on my part. My memories are lies, yety the are, when all has been said and done, my memories. So I do not know how I can talk about the past and not lie. It is true that I want to impress Alec and so sometimes I embellish even the lies that are my memories. For instance: many men shot their hands off in the war. I saw one man who had shot his hand off. I told Alec I had seen many so that he should not believe I was making a fuss about my finger. I know that I want to impress Alec particularly today.
Corker thinks: He’s taking advantage of me.
Corker makes believe: He will walk out on me today of all days. He is down by the front door now. He is leaving me in the lurch.
Corker thinks: Funny how I can’t help being fond of him too. And that’s the trouble I daresay – I’ve spoilt him. A nice mess I’d be in if he did leave me in the lurch now.
A voice screams: Abandoned again! Again!
Corker makes believe: Sir Lancelot for his sins is put to shame and lies defeated in the wood. On the ground he groans but no man pays him heed. He heard their voices. ‘Tis the end of Lancelot, they said.
Corker thinks: I can hear them saying it – He’s gone to pieces, aged you know, ever since he left his sister…

It’s a long quote I know, but I wanted to get across the unsparing honesty of it and the contrast between thoughts, fears and fantasies. In this incident the internal monologues, dialogues really, extend for a few pages. Later at the church hall there is a much longer section exploring thought, knowledge, fantasy, what is actually said and what is projected on the screen all alongside the internal thoughts and reactions of the audience. It’s a world in a drop of water.

In Wind, Sand and Stars Antoine de Saint-Exupery thinks about how each person carries a world inside their head. He talks about the miracle of consciousness and of how it can lie sleeping and how it can be woken. Corker’s freedom is partly the freedom of his own self-awareness (though Corker’s freedom can be interpreted in a number of ways some more pressing than that).

When we deal with each other in life we deal only with one small aspect. As I ask a post office clerk to issue me with some form for all I know within their head I’ve (barely) interrupted their seduction of a movie star; their successful battle against star-pirates; their recreation of a day out last year with their children; their dream of leaving home and job and everything and painting in the South Seas.

My notional postal clerk may say to me “We don’t stock that here”. At the same time they may be thinking “why should I help you, are you aware I exist?”. They could even be dreaming “this man asking for a form will have a heart attack, after I resuscitate him everyone will burst out in applause. It was nothing I’ll tell the ambulance crew as they thank me, anyone would have done the same.”

This is why I love Berger. Few novelists make me think as much as he does.

At the village hall Corker gives his talk and the contrast between what he says (bogged down in tedious detail and irrelevancy) and what he wants to say (about how to live) is painful. As the evening draws on his desire to break the barrier between what he says and what he thinks grows ever stronger. His life is ordinary and yet has potential for glory within it, even if it would be glorious only to him, even if it would be absurd to everyone else. The same could be said for a great many people.

This is a book about the gap between surface and content. When Alec meets Jackie in the shop where she works she must maintain a pretence that he is just a customer. Nothing can hint at what happened between them the night before; of how he left that morning after a few hours sleep having eaten eggs she cooked for him. The world is expectation and compliance while out of sight there is passion and desire and beauty.

Corker’s freedom is freedom from his sister. It is freedom to think and to dream. It is freedom to live as he chooses. To live as a Viennese would even if not in Vienna. More than all of that though Corker’s freedom is something much more prosaic. Corker’s freedom is money.

Corker’s business is successful. He has his own premises with rooms above them. He can afford to go on holidays. He can afford to leave his sister. He can afford dreams because he may be able to afford to fulfil them. The difference between Corker and his audience at the church hall is not that he has dreams and they do not; it is that he can afford dreams and they cannot. Alec is the only exception, and his dreams are mostly of Jackie’s thighs.

There are times this is an extremely funny novel. Overall though it is suffused with melancholy and yearning. It’s daring in terms of structure and form and it’s provocative too. It’s not an unqualified success. I did get dangerously close to boredom, even irritation, during the first two-fifths or so, but I’m glad I read it and I’m glad too that Verso reissued it.

While writing this I found that Tom had covered it over at A Common Reader, here. Tom’s take is as ever well worth reading. I also came across a review in the New Statesman, here. Like Tom I received my copy of this book as a review freebie from Verso. Books like this are exactly why publishers like Verso are important.

Corker’s Freedom

Everything must leave some kind of mark.

Remainder, by Tom McCarthy

Tom McCarthy couldn’t get Remainder published in the UK at first. He eventually sold it to a French house who marketed it through art galleries rather than bookstores. It proved a critical hit and so was then picked up for a more traditional UK release.

I wrote recently in the context of Elif Batuman’s article about how I feel there’s a degree of conservatism to contemporary publishing (of course there is; they’re businesses). Remainder’s difficulties are as good an example of that as any. I don’t wholly blame those publishers for rejecting it though. It’s a disturbing and unsympathetic work richer in ideas than emotion. To be blunt it’s deeply uncommercial.

In the afterword to his Gentlemen of the Road Michael Chabon argued that much contemporary literary fiction fell into a genre of late 20th Century naturalism (and that it was essentially genre writing). I have mixed views on that argument. On the one hand it’s easy to see what he’s talking about. On the other while never as popular authors such as Alasdair Gray, Will Self, Haruki Murakami and here Tom McCarthy show that the literary novel and naturalism are not the same thing.

So what is Remainder? Plotwise it’s fairly simple. The narrator has suffered a terrible accident. Something fell out of the sky and left him in a coma from which he’s only recently recovered. He has had months of reconstructive surgery and physical therapy. Due to brain damage he’s had to relearn how to control his own body; how to make the simplest movements of lifting a carrot to his mouth or walking.

He doesn’t remember the accident itself. In a way that’s a good thing though as the £8.5 million settlement he receives requires as one of its terms that he never discusses it. He can’t discuss it: both legally and practically.

Initially this premise felt a little unlikely to me, but acceptably so. Books often ask us to take something of an initial leap of faith with respect to their premises. Anyone who reads science fiction in particular is used to being asked to give the author at least one or two impossible things before breakfast without quibbling too much. What I had yet to realise was that likelihood wasn’t the point.

Remainder quickly gets into yet stranger territory. The narrator’s settlement is celebrated by his best friend and a woman he knows and was previously hoping to be romantically involved with. He no longer has any interest in either of them though. In fact he finds them vaguely irritating. It’s soon clear that he’s no longer really the same person as he was before.

He’s troubled too by feelings of inauthenticity. Having learned how to do everything nothing feels fluid. He is conscious of everything he does. He reflects that in films people just do things and those things happen; without mess or self-consciousness. When Robert de Niro opens a fridge the fridge just opens. In life when he opens a fridge the fridge sticks or some part of him thinks “here I am, opening a fridge” (that’s not a direct quote).

That struck a chord with me. I live myself in a constant state of self-awareness. Sometimes I go to gigs to see a band I love and while I’m jumping up and down I can’t help observing myself jumping up and down being a person at a gig enjoying a band they love. I’m not really there in the moment; I’m there observing myself being in the moment. There’s a remove.

The narrator complains to his friend that the accident has left him inauthentic; more artificial than everyone else. Unusual. His friend replies that on the contrary everyone is inauthentic. The narrator isn’t unusual, he’s “more usual than everyone else”.

Soon afterwards a chance vision of a crack in a bathroom wall at a party sparks a memory of a time when he wasn’t separate from the world. It was a time when he lived in an apartment and moved through it unconsciously and smoothly. The fridge door didn’t stick. Is it a real memory? Possibly not because he can’t think of a time in his life when he’d have lived in a place like that he remembers, but real or not he decides to recreate it. After all, he has £8.5 million. He can afford to have the whole building recreated together with the view from his apartment window and re-enactors to play the parts of the others he remembers living there.

Other re-enactments follow. He takes quotidian events and sees meaning in them and has them re-enacted in painstaking detail in full-scale replicas of the places where these scenes happened. He employs a large and full time staff and a logistical specialist named Naz to ensure that his re-enactments are precisely realised. He moves into his recreated might-be-memory and has his hired neighbours recreate the fragments of life he remembers from his time there.

The scale of all this is incredible. The whole exercise is incredible. McCarthy approaches it though in a very naturalistic way. The problems of sourcing the buildings, finding the actors, recreating the remembered surfaces, all these are described and the sheer amount of work required for each re-enactment is clearly detailed. Much of the book is the nuts and bolts of these pointless reconstructions of trivia.

There’s a fascination to all this and because McCarthy is a good writer it doesn’t bore. Alongside all this though are more disquieting elements. The narrator feels a sense of euphoria connected with these events as if through them he’s becoming more real. He becomes obsessed with repetition, patterns, systems, communications, and grids. He shows no empathy. He is a monomaniac obsessed with breaking through the shell of awareness that surrounds us all so that experience and action are no longer separate but one.

The narrator becomes obsessed too with the recalcitrance of matter. He wants to be effortlessly in the moment, but the universe makes that hard to achieve. Stuff makes that hard to achieve. He wants to transend the physical but the physical is while the transcendent may well not be. “…physics wouldn’t let him carry out the plan: it tripped him up.”

He’s also not trustworthy. He narrates how when in his coma he dreamt of being a commentator at a racetrack. Now he is awake, but is he? Everything suggests he is (it’s possible to interpret the whole book as a dream or as him being dead and in purgatory, but it’s a tedious interpretation) but he is the only source of everything that is described and at one dizzying juncture he admits that a conversation he just described didn’t actually happen. I was so taken aback by that admission I read it twice. I re-enacted it. I felt a sense of vertigo and uncertainty – what the narrator feels through much the book (or claims to feel).

Later he’s dogged by a smell of cordite. Nobody else can smell it except for one man, but later still nobody else seems to be able to see that man and this unseen person becomes a meta-narrator commenting to the narrator on the narrator’s own actions. Does the man exist? The narrator can see and hear him and early on it seems at least one other person can, but we can’t trust the narrator and by this point in the book he’s clearly mad anyway.

Some books are comforting. Brooklyn was for example. Brooklyn for me was a hugely enjoyable read that I relaxed into. It was beautifully written with a clear and engaging story (if not much plot). This isn’t that kind of book.

Remainder is a novel of ideas. It was clear to me quite quickly that to have any chance of understanding some of what it might be about I had to pay attention much more to themes than to events. I’ve talked about some of those themes here: repetition; the barrier of consciousness from direct experience; the intransigency of matter. Another theme is that of cutting away to the truth of a thing.

Recently I went to an exhibition in London titled Modern British Sculpture. By chance I got talking to one of the curators of the exhibition; himself also a sculptor. I mentioned that I was reading Remainder and it turned out he’d read it too. That’s not as odd as it might be because sculpture too is a theme here. More precisely the cutting away of stuff until what remains is revealed. Michelangelo spoke of the statue being inside the block of marble already. His job was just to cut away the excess material until the statue revealed itself.

The narrator re-enacts experiences but then cuts away at them looking to reveal the remainder that they already contain: the core of the experience or perhaps the act of experiencing. The moment is locked within the stuff, but if the stuff can be bypassed or made to disappear the remainder can be brought into view.

It’s not all flawless. Oddly the book worked least well for me when most realistic. McCarthy/the narrator’s description of Brixton as a place filled with young men dealing drugs to each other didn’t mesh with my own experience of living there and the description of Soho as filled with spray tanned gays doesn’t much match my experience of there either (I spend a lot of time in Soho, spray tans aren’t unusually noticeable). Both are cliches of those places rather than their realities. They’re re-enactments of them which don’t persuade.

Similarly, part of the re-enactment of the building and old apartment includes the view from it of a sloping tiled roof on which cats would lie in the sun. This part doesn’t work out so well as the cats placed on the roof keep falling off it and dying. For me that rang false because cats in fact very rarely fall off sloping surfaces unless they can’t stay on to begin with and anyway cats aren’t killed by long falls – they’re killed by short ones (I grew up with cats, and in fact had one accidentally fall fifty feet from a tower block window onto concrete. It made a full recovery which I later learned was what I should have expected).

None of that matters. The point of the cat exchange is the narrator’s lack of empathy as this shows:

“What do you want to do?” asked Naz. “Get more,” I said. “How many more?” “At a loss rate of three every two days, I’d say quite an amount. A rolling supply. Just keep putting them up there.” “Doesn’t it upset you?” Naz asked two days later as we stood together in my kitchen looking down into the courtyard at one of his men sliding a squashed cat into a bin bag. “No,” I said. “We can’t expect everything to work perfectly straight away. It’s a learning process.”

It’s ironic though that in this least natural of novels the only parts I balked at were those parts most rooted in reality. I noticed once or twice that many of the characters talked in ways that seemed to me more what I’d expect of a modernist novelist than what the characters were supposed to be, but given the general tone of the novel that wasn’t a problem at all.

Other than those rather pedantic caveats it’s also fair to say that the book lost some of its force in the final third and for me went into more conventionally unconventional territory (increased use of violent imagery and images of death which just aren’t as interesting as what’s gone before). The actual ending is very good, as good as it could be really, and there’s still new material of interest but it wasn’t as strong overall as the earlier two-thirds.

I said up above that Remainder is disturbing and unsympathetic. It is. It’s a novel that made me work and I’m sure there’s a vast amount in there in terms of symbolism and references that I missed. It’s dense.

It’s also though extremely good. It’s well written. It’s fascinating. It didn’t just let me sit back and watch but instead required me to think about what I was reading. It’s also quietly funny as it contrasts the peculiar obsessions of its narrator with the reactions of those around him. I’ve not quoted a huge amount in this post so I’ll end with one that I rather liked. The narrator becomes obsessed with cofee store loyalty cards which promise a potentially endless loop of coffee purchases punctuated by free coffees and new cards. Here he realises he’s near the end of a card:

I’d forgotten about the loyalty-card business. Now I’d been reminded I was really excited by it. I was so close! I gulped my cappuccino down, then strode back to the counter with the card. “Another cappuccino,” I told the girl. “Heyy!” she answered. “Short cap coming up. You have a…” “Of course!” I said. “I was just here!” “Oh yes!” she said. “Sorry! I’m a zombie! Here, let me…” She stamped the tenth cup on my card, then said: “So: you can choose a free drink.” “Cool,” I said. “I’ll have another cappuccino.” “On top of your cap, I mean.” “I know,” I said. “I’ll have another one as well.” She shrugged, turned round and made me a new one. She pulled out a new card, stamped the first cup on it and handed it to me with my two coffees. “Back to the beginning,” I said. “Through the zero.” “Sorry?” she asked. “New card: good,” I told her. “Yes,” she said. She looked kind of depressed.

The ideas make this a rewarding read. The wit helps make it a fun one too. It’s never easy but it is remarkably original and it’s no surprise that two books later McCarthy was shortlisted for the Booker (giving hope to rejected authors everywhere).

I was persuaded to read Tom McCarthy by Will over at Just William’s Luck. His review of McCarthy’s second novel, Men in Space, is here. While writing this I also found this interesting article about McCarthy which sheds some light on him and on his thoughts about contemporary UK publishing.

Remainder