Where my heart used to beat, by Sebastian Faulks, 2015

It wasn’t until I noticed this novel lurking in the Times’s ‘ten best-sellers in paperback’ list last week that I remembered I had read it. Such is the depth of impression it made, and I had to quickly remind myself what it was about – I had a vague memory of the war being involved – by reading some online reviews. They were not overly kind – the New York Times called it “biscuit bland” (a wonderful phrase which I will surely steal); the Washington Post an “an unmeshed assemblage of case histories”; the Irish Times a rather tedious piece of retro-sexism; the Guardian “dithery” (although the quote from this review which the publisher chooses to focus on is “combining as it does the cultural narrative of a complex century forsaken by God and certainty, a serious investigation into the vulnerability of the human mind and an old-fashioned – in the best sense – story of love and war, this is an ambitious, demanding and profoundly melancholy book”. I think “dithery” is more concise!)

Briefly, Robert Hendricks, doctor who specialises in psychiatry, aged 60ish, lives alone and clearly has had problems forming long term relationships. Out of the blue he is contacted by a stranger who knew his father in the First World War and is looking for a literary executor. Intrigued Robert travels to a small mysterious island, and begins a series of reminiscences which slowly unfold the story of his life. The text is unnecessarily complex, with tales within tales. The mysterious island turns out not to be mysterious at all, just small (large enough to have a town, and a mayor, but not large enough to appear on maps). Hendricks is an unengaging character, in his mid-sixties and seemingly irresistible to women. What is it about novels by men of a certain age where women keep throwing themselves at the central male character, stripping off at the drop of a hat and offering him no-strings sex – even the prostitute he engages in the first chapter can’t resist him, and despite his reluctance she is “intent on a repeat”. Such a nuisance when there are some more war diaries to be read.

The reviewers are universally agreed that this novel really takes flight when the inevitable sections on the second world war arrive. I can’t disagree – the portrait of the attempted break out at Anzio is well-written, but there is nothing particularly new here, and the scenes of squalor and fear fit uneasily in the romantic and literary mystery that comprises the rest of the novel, a mystery that I found dull, clumsily plotted and episodic.

“Throughout my life,” Hendricks tells us at one point, “I had thought that if I could get through this section of it, then the pattern of a destiny would reveal itself.” I know how he feels. Was this quote an example of Faulks going all-post-modern on us, anticipating the inevitable criticism of this meandering novel, or just a happy coincidence?

Just as a post-script, I did find one point of interest in the novel. It is set in the early 1980’s.Hendricks is 60ish, which means he was old enough to have fought in the second world war. It was only at that moment that I belatedly realised out that the older adults around me when I was growing up in the 70’s were of the right age to have fought in that war – and that now so many of them are gone. It is an arresting thought that 1980 was nearer in time to the end of the second world war than it is to today. Faulks chose this point in time carefully, and well.

 

 

Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis, 1922

‘Babbitt’, Sinclair Lewis’s satirical portrait of 1920’s America, was written only three years into the prohibition era, and published three years before that other, very different portrait of the USA of the time, ‘The Great Gatsby’. The term ‘babbitt’ was used in the US for some time (I am not sure if it is still current) to signify a person, especially a business or professional man, who “conforms unthinkingly to prevailing middle-class standards and norms”. The name itself is a cleverly constructed combination of ‘babble’, the meaningless babyish talk that Babbitt typically uses when in discussion with his friends, and ‘rabbit’, a small and vulnerable creature, the opposite of the alpha-male that he believes himself to be.

‘Babbitt’ tells the story of two years in the life of estate agent George Babbitt. The novel opens in 1920 when George is 46. He is an unthinking lower middle class businessman, married with three children, staunchly conservative in his views, and profoundly hypocritical in his behaviour. In conventional terms not much happens – he has doubts about some of his convictions, as his children grow up and begin to drift away from him, but after a brief flirtation with a more decadent and liberal group of friends he rapidly scuttles back to his safety zone, unharmed and none the wiser. His story is told by a third person narrator who largely reflects Babbitt’s thoughts and feelings, although the narrative voice occasionally steps apart from Babbitt to give the reader an alternative perspective. This different point of view is usually not really needed, because the narrator does such a good job of pointing out the contradictions inherent in Babbitt’s prejudices.

“All of them agreed that the working-classes must be kept in their place; and all of them perceived that American Democracy did not imply any equality of wealth, but did demand a wholesome sameness of thought, dress, painting, morals, and vocabulary.”

Hypocrites they may be, but some of Babbitt’s associates realise and accept that their respectable façade is dishonest. Early in the novel Jake Offutt, a politician and Henry T. Thompson, Babbitt’s father-in-law confer:

“Wonder how long we can keep it up, Hank? We’re safe as long as the good little boys like George Babbitt and all the nice respectable labor-leaders think you and me are rugged patriots. There’s swell pickings for an honest politician here Hank: a whole city working to provide cigars and fried chicken and dry martinis for us, and rallying to our banner with indignation, oh, fierce indignation, whenever some squealer like this fellow Seneca Doane comes along. Honest, Hank, a smart codger like me ought to be ashamed of himself if he didn’t milk cattle like them, when they come around mooing for it!”

As a satire on American post-war life, its small-mindedness and emptiness, its lack of genuine spirituality, its hypocrisy and prejudice, ‘Babbitt’ is effective, but perhaps a little heavy-handed. With some important exceptions, the principal characters of the novel, Babbitt’s friends and business acquaintances, are all varying reflections of Babbitt himself –stupid and prejudiced, despite considering themselves cultured and modern: There is a deeply unpleasant and sinister tone to some of their comments, such as this discussion in chapter 10:

“We ought to get together and show the black man, yes, and the yellow man, his place. Now I haven’t got one particle of race prejudice, I’m the first to be glad when a n***** succeeds, so long as he stays where he belongs and doesn’t try to usurp the rightful authority of the white man….And another thing we got to do is keep these damn foreigners out of the country. These Dagoes and Hunkies have got to learn that this is a white man’s country”

So perhaps some things haven’t changed that much?

Personally, while I enjoyed the mild sarcasm that Lewis deploys, I found the portrait of a classic mid-life crisis more interesting. When his friend Paul Riesling shoots his wife, this precipitates a moment where Babbitt comes to question the value and purpose of his life. He is unable to pinpoint the source of his dissatisfaction. There is a suggestion in the novel that Babbitt’s dissatisfaction with life derives from his unrecognised doubts about his sexuality. The first hints of this come when he is thinking about the film stars he has seen in his teenage daughter’s magazines, describing them as

‘blankly beautiful, suspiciously beautiful young men”.

We are told that he married without being in love with his wife, and that his sex life is very limited:

“She made him what is known as a Good Wife. She was loyal, industrious, and at rare times merry. She passed from a feeble disgust at their closer relations into what promised to be ardent affection, but it drooped into a bored routine.” (Chapter 6)

(By closer relations I don’t think Lewis means aunts and uncles). ‘Feeble disgust’ is a sad comment on their marital sex-life, and the choice of the verb “drooped” can’t be an accident! Later in their marriage, after his wife returns from an extended break with her sister out of State, Babbitt shrinks from the prospect of having reunion sex. Lewis coyly puts it thus:

“All the while he was dreading the moment when he would be alone with his wife, and she would patiently expect him to be ardent”. (Chapter 25)

Lack of interest in sex with his wife might be a symptom of Babbitt’s developing mid life crisis, but equally Lewis hints at a more specific cause:

“What did he want? Wealth? Social position? Travel? Servants? Yes, but only incidentally…But he did know that he wanted the presence of Paul Riesling, and from that he stumbled into the admission that he wanted the fairy girl in the flesh. If there had been a woman whom he loved he would have fled to her.” (Chapter 23)

In the US at this time the term fairy was used to describe a gay man. [1] Is this Babbitt’s unconscious speaking to him through his dreams, telling him to pursue his true nature? There is another hint of this in his earliest description of the fairy girl “She was so slim, so white, so eager! She cried that he was gay and valiant”. Indeed.

Wondering with this was a genuinely original insight, or whether this was a conventional modern reading of the novel, I asked Google. There is a paper from Richard Schwartz of the Department of English, Florida International University here which argues persuasively that ‘Babbitt’ is a portrait of latent homosexuality. I am not going to repeat the comprehensive arguments and evidence that Schwartz has put together, but if you are reluctant to click through to his paper consider these points that he has assembled:

“Babbitt “was an older brother to Paul Riesling, swift to defend him, admiring him with a proud and credulous love passing the love of women.” In Paul’s presence Babbitt “was awkward, he desired to be quiet and firm and deft.” At their club they eat apart from his regular group of dining companions, even though “At the Zenith Athletic Club, privacy was very bad form. But he wanted Paul to himself.” ”

There’s lots more. Incidentally, the phrase ‘love passing the love of women’ echoes that emphatic Victoria phrase, the “love that dare not speak its name” and is a quote from 2 Samuel 1.26 David’s Song for Saul and Jonathan in the New American Standard Bible.

When you read the novel from this perspective, Babbitt’s behaviour and his unresolved agonies about his life begin to make a lot more sense.

Sinclair Lewis was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1930, and ‘Babbitt’ was cited by the committee as being one of his main achievements. Time hasn’t been kind to this novel – there are better, funnier portraits of the period and type.

[1] <1895 “the peculiar society of inverts. Coffee-clatches, where the members dress themselves with aprons etc., and knit, gossip and crotchet; balls, where men adopt the ladies’ evening dress, are well known in Europe. ‘The Fairies’ of New York are said to be a similar secret organization. The avocation which inverts follow are frequently feminine in their nature. They are fond of the actor’s life, and particularly that of the comedian requiring the dressing in female attire, and the singing in imitation of a female voice, in which they often excel.”—‘American Journal of Psychology,’ VII. page 216

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, 1939

‘The Grapes of Wrath’ opens with a portrait of the devastation caused by the dust bowl in 1930’s Oklahoma:

“Every moving thing lifted the dust into the air…A walking man lifted a thin layer as high as his waist. An automobile boiled a cloud behind it.”

Tom Joad has just been released on parole, after having served four years for manslaughter, killing a man with a shovel during a fight in which he had been stabbed. Tom finds his family home abandoned, and his extended family about to move to California, a journey estimated at around 2000 miles, including up and over the Rockies. He and a lapsed itinerant preacher join them, and thus begins the odyssey which is ‘The Grapes of Wrath’.

The novel draws much of its imagery and language from the bible, not least when the Joad family set off for the promised land joining a mass migration which followed in the footsteps of the original European settlers. In his documentary on the novel, Melvyn Bragg points out that the family of 12 on the Joad’s truck are

“as the 12 tribes of Israel seeking liberation. The truck itself is an ark; there is even a man named Noah on board.”

(The pedant in me wants to point out there were only eight people on the ark, and a heck of a lot of animals, but that might be counter-productive).

The Dust Bowl was caused by agricultural practices not suited to the Mid West environment, but Steinbeck treats it as a natural occurrence, a biblical plague. His condemnation of the banks that buy up the small share-cropper farms and evict the families is heartfelt, although his approach to farming technology – that tractors and combines are somehow alien machines that disconnect man from the soil and are inherently bad – is sentimental and unconvincing. However, the strength and impact of the prose is such that at the time the reader is carried along with the Joad’s distress at their (effective) eviction, and doesn’t challenge their view that they are doing the right thing.

“Funny thing how it is. If a man owns a little property, that property is him, it’s part of him, and it’s like him. If he owns property only so he can walk on it and handle it and be sad when it isn’t doing well, and feel fine when the rain falls on it, that property is him, and some way he’s bigger because he owns it. Even if he isn’t successful he’s big with his property. That is so.”

The rhythms and cadences of the language have the feeling of a revivalist sermon, all the more so when the speaker is Casy, the lapsed preacher who travels with the family. The ending phrase used here – “that is so” – has the impact of an “amen” or “this is the word of the Lord”. Steinbeck uses incomplete phrases to layer his descriptive passages:

“the main immigrant road … the path of people in flight, refugees from dust and the shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership”.

However, the Joad’s don’t feel sorry for themselves – they genuinely believe they are going to the land of milk and honey, and get quite angry when people they meet on route try to point out that not everything in California is as blessed as they expect it to be. The great continental migration from east to west is a fundamental defining part of the American narrative, which probably is one of the central reasons for this novel’s massive popularity in the US. The Joad’s journey echoes that great migration – although again the pedant in me can’t avoid noticing that in some ways it is much easier, as they have a truck to carry them, and gas stations along the way!

The journey is difficult and dangerous, but not completely a negative experience. Their lorry lasts the entire journey, including the crossing of the desert and the mountains; they meet kindness and friendship from other travellers, and they are very lucky to find a place a government camp, where Tom finds work on his first day. Later they get work picking cotton and a box-car to live in. However, the older family members find the journey very difficult, others bail out early, and soon the family has to face the hostile realities of life in California – there is very little work, and the settlers are resented bitterly by the locals, who feel threatened by the ‘Okies’.

This is an overtly political novel – driven by anger Steinbeck rages against the system that drives down wages, pits people against one another, and finds it more economical to leave fields bare than to feed people, crops to rot or be destroyed rather than harvest them and sell them at a loss:

“Here is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

Steinbeck outlines a clear political solution to the problem in the model, self-organising, self-policing community of Weedpatch, the government camp where the family settle for a while. Weedpatch is effectively a model Soviet commune, run by the people for the people, with leaders elected weekly and assets shared. Steinbeck’s novel is both a protest about the treatment of working people, and a warning about the inevitable results of that treatment.

And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history. The land fell into fewer hands, the number of the dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression. The money was spent for arms, for gas to protect the great holdings, and spies were sent to catch the murmuring of revolt so that it might be stamped out. The changing economy was ignored, plans for the change ignored; and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on.”

Tom, the novel’s central figure, slips away into the night at the end of the novel, a wanted man on the run. He is determined to take on the union organisation work of the murdered Casy. We are not told of his ultimate fate, but he leaves with these haunting words:

“I’ll be ever’where – wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’ – I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build, why, I’ll be there.”

It would have been so nice to have been able to read ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ as a portrait of a time long past, in the way we now read Kingsley’s ‘The Water Babies’ or much Dickens’s social realism. But sadly one can’t – the problems of social deprivation and migrant labour are as acute today as they were in the 1930s. Hyperbole? Perhaps, although the statistics for the number of people dying in the attempt to cross from Mexico to the USA are still horrifying. But this is nothing compared the numbers of people trying to escape from poverty and conflict in North Africa and the Middle East, who die in their thousands in the attempt, and who are feared, stigmatised and abused in exactly the same way that Steinbeck’s characters are treated.

“In the West there was panic when migrants multiplied on the highways. Men of property were terrified for their property. Men who had never been hungry saw the eyes of the hungry. Men who had never wanted anything very much saw the flare of want in the eyes of the migrants. And the men of the towns and of the soft suburban country gathered to defend themselves; and the reassured themselves that they were good and the invaders bad, as a man must do before he fights, They said “These goddamned Okies are dirty and ignorant. They’re degenerate, sexual maniacs. The goddamned Okies are thieves. They’ll steal anything”.”

I know I’ve quoted a length from this novel. But I am not going to apologise for that – there is a poetry to Steinbeck’s prose, an almost hypnotic lushness, and it is really hard to find shorter sections that convey this adequately.

I am enough of a traditionalist to want to know what happened to the Joad’s, if they ever found the modestly comfortable life they were looking for, whether Al got the job in a garage he was so obviously suited for. But I can appreciate that Steinbeck wanted to leave some uncertainty about their future in a world where the future of America itself was becoming increasingly hard to predict.

Zuleika Dobson, by Max Beerbohm, 1911

I finished this novel in something of a bad mood. It is a very bad book, and I resented the effort required to find any redeeming features. The fact that I found some in many ways made my mood worse! As I reflected on the text, I slowly came to accept that perhaps it wasn’t as bad as I originally thought. Don’t you hate it when that happens?

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, 1850

Subtitled “The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account)”

Originally published in nineteen monthly instalments, ‘David Copperfield’ takes the form of a personal narrative, with this evocative introduction:

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.”

The largely autobiographical plot follows the young David as he is orphaned, sent to school, and slowly makes his way in the world, eventually becoming a prosperous author.  

Emma, by Jane Austen, 1815

Of all the authors I have written about over the last three years, Jane Austen is arguably the one who generates the fiercest loyalties and the most ardent passions. This can’t all simply be down to Colin Firth’s impromptu dip in the television adaptation of ‘Pride and Prejudice’, surely? While her novels are admittedly eminently suitable for television serialisation, they are so much more than that – for me they stand out as some of the greatest works of the nineteenth century, and I am going to use this review of ‘Emma’ to try to explain why.

Austen is an unparalleled miniaturist – the scope of her novels is usually very tightly confined in

time and place, yet within these constraints the portrait of utterly convincing characters is what makes the novels so successful. Her characters find such a strong place in people’s affections. They are believable and recognisable, none more so than those in ‘Emma’.

‘Emma’ tells the story of a year or so in the life of Emma Woodhouse, a prosperous young women living with her father in Surrey. Her social circle is small, and she is clearly bored, her former governess Miss Taylor having just married a neighbour, Mr Weston, leaving her with time on her hands. She fills this time with matchmaking, first trying to match her friend Harriet Smith to Mr Elton, the local vicar. This and all subsequent efforts are disastrous, although ultimately have do long term damage. Into this settled and neatly circumscribed world come two new characters – Frank Churchill, Mr Weston’s son from his first much earlier marriage, and Jane Fairfax, the orphan niece of, Miss Bates, one of Emma’s neighbours. Their impact on the world of Highbury is to precipitate and resolve a number of romantic storylines. The plotting is as adept as a murder mystery, and it all plays against the comic backdrop of misunderstanding and romance.

On one level, the novel can be enjoyed simply as a light hearted romance, with a happy ending and marriages, the social order preserved with everyone marrying at the right level of social status. The status quo prevails and is passed down to the next generation. A political reading of ‘Emma’ is appealing, but has been done very well elsewhere, so in the interests of trying to find something new to say I am not going to rehash that interpretation here.

Another way of looking at ‘Emma’ is to consider Austen’s extraordinarily sophisticated control and use of point of view narration. The narrator views the events of the novel largely from Emma’s perspective – we see what she sees, and have access to her internal monologue, her thoughts and feelings. But this is not a first person narration – the point of view is one step distant from Emma herself, and allows the reader just enough separation from her perspective to spot when she is being self deluding or simply wrong. I have read that Austen was the first novelist to use this technique (which I am going to take on trust) – certainly she uses it masterfully, the subtlety of which only really emerges with a re-reading (which this was) when the reader knows the denouement and the varies twists in the plot, and can spot when Emma is being mistaken. There are no moments when the reader is hit over the head with “plot device happening here”warning signals – apart from, arguably, the “blunder” scene, when a secret romance is nearly revealed. The one point towards the end of the novel where the narrator strays from Emma’s perspective, when we are shown Mr Knightley’s thoughts, stand out starkly and prompt the reader to consider his ideas and comments all the more carefully, such a contrast as they are from Emma’s speculations and fancies, which by now the reader has come to mistrust.

Emma’s capacity for self-deception is extensive and shown most clearly in her response to the thought of Mr Knightley marrying Harriet Smith:

“She could see nothing but evil in it. It would be a great disappointment to Mr. John Knightley; consequently to Isabella. A real injury to the children—a most mortifying change, and material loss to them all;—a very great deduction from her father’s daily comfort—and, as to herself, she could not at all endure the idea of Jane Fairfax at Donwell Abbey. A Mrs. Knightley for them all to give way to!—No—Mr. Knightley must never marry. Little Henry must remain the heir of Donwell.”

The extent of her genuine concern for little Henry’s interests are shown at the end of the novel, when they occur to her as an afterthought which is quickly discarded.

The character portraits in ‘Emma’ are astonishingly acute, not least in the portrayal of two contrasting chatterboxes, Mrs Elton, the new wife of the vicar, and the adorable Miss Bates, Jane Fairfax’s aunt (“Unluckily, I had mentioned it before I was aware”). It is interesting to contrast these portraits, which Austen achieves using similar techniques. First, the narrator gives us this monologue as Mrs Elton picks strawberries at Mr Knightley’s party:

“The best fruit in England—everybody’s favourite—always wholesome. These the finest beds and finest sorts.—Delightful to gather for one’s self—the only way of really enjoying them. Morning decidedly the best time—never tired—every sort good—hautboy infinitely superior—no comparison—the others hardly eatable—hautboys very scarce—Chili preferred—white wood finest flavour of all—price of strawberries in London—abundance about Bristol—Maple Grove—cultivation—beds when to be renewed—gardeners thinking exactly different—no general rule—gardeners never to be put out of their way—delicious fruit—only too rich to be eaten much of—inferior to cherries—currants more refreshing—only objection to gathering strawberries the stooping—glaring sun—tired to death—could bear it no longer—must go and sit in the shade.”

Note the progress from never tired to tired to death! Later, as Miss Bates arrives for the ball at the Crown Inn, her comments are similarly fractured, but there is not an ounce of malice or self aggrandizement in them:

“Thank you, my mother is remarkably well. Gone to Mr. Woodhouse’s. I made her take her shawl—for the evenings are not warm—her large new shawl— Mrs. Dixon’s wedding-present.—So kind of her to think of my mother! Bought at Weymouth, you know—Mr. Dixon’s choice. There were three others, Jane says, which they hesitated about some time. Colonel Campbell rather preferred an olive. My dear Jane, are you sure you did not wet your feet?—It was but a drop or two, but I am so afraid:—but Mr. Frank Churchill was so extremely—and there was a mat to step upon—I shall never forget his extreme politeness.”

This is stream of consciousness writing in its most sophisticated and economical, 100 years before Joyce and Woolf, and while mainly about the characterisation manages to progress the plot as well.

There are several characters in the novel who do not step fully into the light until late in the day. Mr Knightley, Emma’s brother in law (her older sister has married his younger brother, apparently some years earlier – the have five children) and neighbour is referred to as present in several scenes, but has very few lines to himself and remains enigmatic for much of the novel. (I confess, when I first read ‘Emma’ several years ago I did not understand the convention of naming the eldest son Mr Knightley and the younger son Mr John Knightley, which caused considerable confusion) until Emma’s schemes force him to intervene. Jane Fairfax is if anything even more undefined, having very lines of dialogue, and only being shown through Emma’s distorted perspective. Both characters emerge as central to the novel’s conclusion.

I can’t end without mentioning the comic masterpiece that is Mr Woodhouse, hypochondriac (and yes, I accept that getting a chill was something much more serious in this period than it is today) and control freak par excellence. Emma surely derives her capacity for self delusion – the world is as I wish it to be – from her father.

As a romance ‘Emma’ must take second place in Austen’s works behind ‘Pride and Prejudice’, but as a comic novel, and as a masterpiece of controlled story-telling, I think it comes out just ahead. Happily, we do not have to choose between the two!

Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott, 1868 & 1869

The Guardian top 100 novels in English has led me to some strange reading experiences, but there are few novels I would have been less likely to read than this, Alcott’s semi-autobiographical tale of growing up in a strangely unreal nineteenth century America.

‘Little Women’ was originally published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869. Alcott wrote the books rapidly over several months at the request of her publisher, and follows the lives of four sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March— from childhood to womanhood. The novel is extraordinarily saccharine – the girls/women rarely err, and if they do so it is only for the mother – ‘Marmee’ – to intervene with a moralising lecture on the Christian thing to do, which immediately puts things to right – for example.

“My child, the troubles and temptations of your life are beginning, and may be many; but you can overcome and outlive them all if you learn to feel the strength and tenderness of your Heavenly Father as you do that of your earthly one. The more you love and trust Him, the nearer you will feel to Him, and the less you will depend on human power and wisdom. His love and care never tire or change, can never be taken from you, but may become the source of lifelong peace, happiness, and strength. Believe this heartily, and go to God with all your little cares, and hopes, and sins, and sorrows, as freely and confidingly as you come to your mother.”

There is a really vast amount of this improving stuff.

The first half of the novel, published as a separate book but now considered the first half of the wider work, is set during the American Civil War. The family’s father is away serving in the Union army as a chaplain, and even though he re-joins the family at the end of the first novel, he remains a vaguely defined character with barely half a dozen lines of his own across the whole novel. The absent father is of course one of the most dominant tropes in children’s stories, but this lack of definition pervades the whole novel – the setting is Concord, Massachusetts, but the town and environment is so weakly explored that it could really be anywhere. The war is distant and has no impact on the lives of the characters other than the men who slip away to fight and reappear in passing a few chapters later – their stories are not allowed to intrude. While the March family is portrayed as poor, the golden rule of Victorian literature – that no family is too poor not to have servants – still applies, and the family are also able to patronise with charitable endeavours the local dirt-poor German and Irish immigrants of the town.

As what is effectively an updated version of ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ (there are lots of references to Bunyan throughout ‘Little Women’) this novel formed the template for generations of children’s, and specifically girls stories. To give her credit, Alcott does have the guts to kill of one of her main characters, but the dying is done so gracefully and with such patience that it seems more like a blessing than a tragedy.

What possible reason could any 21^st century reader have for revisiting this novel? Are there any redeeming features or points of interest? Frankly, I struggled to find any. Some critics have claimed it as a feminist tract – the March family are mostly strong independent women, but they all find fulfilment in marriage (apart from the sister that dies, of course). The gender constraints they face are accepted as a fact of life, and even the feisty Jo, the character closest to Alcott, who herself did not marry, succumbs to a proposal from a father figure in the end.

But I will just have to accept that I am not and never was the target audience for this novel, and that my inability to appreciate it should take nothing away from those who enjoy it as younger readers, and continue to return to it for its comforting familiarity.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, 1902

Read in a 1980’s Penguin edition with an introduction by Paul O’Prey

When I read a book that intend to blog about, I usually try to keep a pencil to hand to underline passages that I think might be of interest, relevant to the review, or otherwise worth making a note of. With Heart of Darkness I found myself underlining sections every other page – this is such a dense, intense novel, that wherever you look there is something that needs to be looked at more closely.

Like a number of classic novels (I am thinking of Frankenstein, or Wuthering Heights) Heart of Darkness has a framing device which at first seems irrelevant, a delay before the true narrative begins. But the opening of HoD sets the scene for the whole novel, and provides a striking contrast between the setting – the Thames – and the other river that dominates Marlow’s take, the Congo. The anonymous narrator imagines the Thames 1900 years earlier, when Romans did to Europe what Europe then did to Africa. So this, in an interesting contrast to Scoop, is a novel about imperialism. Arguably it is the novel about imperialism. Conrad, having seen some of the nature of African development at first hand, has no illusions about what it constitutes:

“It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind – as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or a slightly flatter nose than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea – something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to…” (31-32)

Throughout the novel Conrad plays with the theme of light and darkness: 
“It (Africa) had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery – a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness.” (33) This is an interesting inversion of the common notion of the time that exploration of Africa by Europeans was bringing light to the Dark Continent; instead Marlow argues that in exploring Africa Europeans were darkening it.

The plot is extremely well known, so I will keep this brief. Marlow, an old sailor, tells some colleagues a tale of his last trip to Africa, captaining a steamer up the Congo to escort some traders collecting a shipment of ivory. He hears tales of one of the upriver agents, Kurtz, and at the end of his journey meets him. He falls under Kurtz’s spell, although why it is hard to understand.  He speaks frequently of Kurtz’s extraordinary eloquence, but very little of this is directly reported. Kurtz’s charismatic personality is also emphasised by Marlow, and by Kurtz’s fiance who is introduced in the closing episode, but the reader is given nothing to make their own judgment upon. Kurtz appears to have “gone native” – but the extent of this is very hard to judge given Marlow’s highly fragmented narrative, a fragmentation that continues throughout the novel, so much so that by the closing chapters the time scheme lurches dramatically, and incidents that would normally have been focused upon, such as Kurtz’s death, are mentioned only in passing.

Is this novel racist? I asked the same question at the end of my review of Scoop, and dodged answering. The n-word is used throughout the novel, and African people are treated as little more than animals. Marlow appears to endorse Kurtz’s recommendation “Exterminate all the brutes” – but elsewhere the portrayal of the cost of imperialism is damning:

Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out of, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment and despair. …This was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die. They were dying slowly – it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now, – nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confused in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed  on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest. These moribund shapes were free as air – and nearly as thin. (44)

The references to legality and freedom point out the contrast between the state of these workers, worked to breaking point and beyond and then abandoned, and their forebears, who would have been enslaved. There is little difference between the free men broken and left to die, and their predecessors. Wage slavery is still slavery.

I think if you can work your way past the use of the n-word, which Conrad uses without spite or malice, in as far as one can, then this is not otherwise a racist novel, but more a novel of racist times, which are shown unblinkingly as such.