Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte, 1847

I think a case can be made for ‘Jane Eyre’ as the definitive nineteenth century novel. It has it all:

Romance – the scene in chapter 22 when Rochester teasingly proposes to Jane, and she slowly comes to realise he is serious, is as touching and effective as anything in Austen, and the final reconciliation in Ferndean House between Jane and the blinded Rochester would bring a tear to the eye of the hardest heart (but perhaps not St John Rivers);

Drama – spooky scenes in the middle of the night, the “I object” scene at the wedding, parties, house fires, tragic deaths and maiming, ‘Jane Eyre’ has pretty much got it all – although the only issue I have with the novel the extent to which it occasionally teeters into melodrama….

The supernatural – Jasper Fforde in the brilliant ‘The Eyre Affair’ has great fun with the ‘cosmic telephone’ that Rochester uses to communicate with Jane, but the novel just about gets away with this piece of nonsense without seeming too absurd;

Gothic elements – the spooky house, the mad woman in the attic, possession and long lost relatives appearing at inopportune moments;

Social commentary – education, the slave trade (tangentially), the condition of the poor; the emancipation of women;

Pathetic fallacy – after Rochester’s proposal the storm blows fiercely, the trees “writhed and groaned”, and thunder and lightening provide an ominous backdrop to the engagement;

A heroine to admire, with courage, principles, and determination, and a hero with a square jaw, deep-running passions, and a vulnerable side.

The novel is written in autobiographical form, and follows the eponymous heroine in five distinct phases of her life. An orphan, she is brought up by her abusive aunt, Mrs Reed. At the age of ten she is sent to a horrific boarding school, Lowood Grange, where she is lucky to survive. At eighteen she leaves Lowood to work at Thornfield Hall as a governess for Adele, the ward of the mysterious Mr Rochester. Running away from Thornfield to escape Rochester, who wants to marry her, but unfortunately already has a wife, albeit one who is mad and ineffectually imprisoned in his attic, Jane escapes to another secure refuge, Moor House, where she is taken in by St John Rivers and his sisters. Finally, Jane is reunited with the widowed but maimed Rochester at his back-up house, Ferndean, and “reader, I married him”.

At the heart of the novel is the relationship between the not-yet twenty governess Jane, and the almost twice her age Mr Rochester. They first meet in Chapter 12, when he falls from his horse. Despite struggling to help himself, he eventually has to rely on Jane for support: “I must beg of you to come here.” I came. “Excuse me,” he continued: “necessity compels me to make you useful.” He laid a heavy hand on my shoulder, and leaning on me with some stress, limped to his horse. Having once caught the bridle, he mastered it directly and sprang to his saddle; grimacing grimly as he made the effort, for it wrenched his sprain.” This incident, and in particular Rochester’s temporary disability, and his dependence on Jane, is not important for the plot, but it foreshadows the events later in the novel, first when Jane rescues him from his burning bed, and later when he is seriously injured, and depends on Jane more comprehensively.

Jane enjoys being helpful in this way, although it helps her calmness at their first meeting that Rochester is not particularly good looking:

“I traced the general points of middle height and considerable breadth of chest. He had a dark face, with stern features and a heavy brow; his eyes and gathered eyebrows looked ireful and thwarted just now; he was past youth, but had not reached middle-age; perhaps he might be thirty-five. I felt no fear of him, and but little shyness. Had he been a handsome, heroic-looking young gentleman, I should not have dared to stand thus questioning him against his will, and offering my services unasked”.

Their first conversation at Thornfield Hall is a little more relaxed, and although it largely takes the form of a cross-examination, it eventually warms to something closer to flirtation:

‘“Adele showed me some sketches this morning, which she said were yours. I don’t know whether they were entirely of your doing; probably a master aided you?” “No, indeed!” I interjected.

“Ah! that pricks pride. Well, fetch me your portfolio, if you can vouch for its contents being original; but don’t pass your word unless you are certain: I can recognise patchwork.”

“Then I will say nothing, and you shall judge for yourself, sir.”…..

He deliberately scrutinised each sketch and painting. Three he laid aside; the others, when he had examined them, he swept from him. “Take them off to the other table, Mrs. Fairfax,” said he, and look at them with Adele;–you” (glancing at me) “resume your seat, and answer my questions. I perceive those pictures were done by one hand: was that hand yours?”

“Yes.”. “And when did you find time to do them? They have taken much time, and some thought.”

“I did them in the last two vacations I spent at Lowood, when I had no other occupation.”

“Where did you get your copies?”  “Out of my head.”

“That head I see now on your shoulders?”  “Yes, sir.”

“Has it other furniture of the same kind within?”  “I should think it may have: I should hope–better.”

From this point conversations between Jane and Mr Rochester habitually adopt this teasing tone. Rochester clearly enjoys being stood up to by Jane, in contrast with the simpering women he is apparently used to. He constantly refers to Jane as something otherworldly – elf, fairy, sprite, and asks her for a spell to make him “a handsome man”. This playfulness continues to the end of the novel:

“Am I hideous, Jane?”

“Very, sir: you always were, you know”

Jane’s gradual awareness of her feelings for Rochester, and her delight at coming to understand that her love is reciprocated, is done with a wonderful tenderness and lightness of touch.

This wouldn’t be an honest review if I did not mention the few reservations I have about the novel. At times it can be over-written, and some of the foreshadowing – constant references to fire, furnaces, burning etc for example – is heavy-handed. Mr Rochester’s behaviour, in retrospect, is absurd – he freely tells Jane about Adele’s illegitimacy and his affair with her mother, but hides the existence of his wife even when the evidence becomes overwhelming. The excuse offered for this – that knowledge of a madwoman in the house might deter prospective governesses from applying to look after Adele – doesn’t stand much scrutiny, when the resolution, to send her away to school, is readily at hand. The novel carries this all off with style – the romance at the heart of the novel is really all that matters, and that is done superbly.

‘Jane Eyre’ is much-loved, and understandably so. It is in the select group of novels one closes at the end with a satisfying sigh and is put somewhere safe in confident expectation of taking up again sometime soon.

The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing, 1962

The Golden Notebook is a complex narrative. The writer, Anna Wulf, uses four notebooks to record different aspects of her life, and at the end of the novel attempts to unite them in a fifth, gold-coloured, notebook. The novel waves together several parallel narratives, and at times it can be hard to work out whether we are reading Anna’s personal account of her life, or her fictionalised version. In addition to the ‘realistic’ narrative of Anna’s life – Free Women— the four notebooks – black for her adventures in Africa before World War 2,  red for her time as a on/off member of the British Communist Party, yellow for a fictionalised account of her relationships, which sometimes run ahead of the real life telling of her story, and at others behind, and blue for her personal journal of memories and dreams.

The non-linear narrative Lessing uses was ground breaking for its time – there is little in the way of conventional story telling. When the novel was first published the focus in many critical responses was on Lessing’s frankness in sexual matters, and what were seen at the time as her feminist characters. 50 years and more on, the presentation of sexual relationships in the novel seems dated – perhaps inevitably. As a feminist character Anna in particular is utterly defined by her relationships with men – and while she is sexually liberated, her emphasis on being sexually available to men who pay her very little regard shows her vulnerability. In the final section of the novel, the apparently unifying golden notebook, where the tale of her relationship with Saul Green is fictionalised, virtually every encounter with Green, however strained or disagreeable, almost always ends with the throwaway line “and then we made love”.

In a Guardian piece written to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the novel’s publication, Margaret Drabble put this point more clearly:

“As a feminist and a free woman, living a life of what was then striking promiscuity, her protagonist Anna Wulf displays some curiously traditional female behaviour, which is even more puzzling on rereading. On one page she can declare, shockingly but truthfully, that “every woman believes in her heart that if a man does not satisfy her she has a right to go to another. That is her first and strongest thought, regardless of how she might soften it later out of pity or expediency.” But this same woman (albeit writing in a different notebook, about a later period in her life) is discovered preparing a meal for the man she loves and knows she is about to lose. Much care is lavished on this memorable set piece describing a breaded veal escalope with mushroom in sour cream, a dish that the defaulting man never turns up to eat. Throughout the novel it is the women who do all the cooking and make all the cups of tea, even for men to whom they owe less than nothing. …. And yet it seemed liberating at the time.”

The novel has a number of other dominant themes: the Cold War and the decline of the British Communist Party, the end of Empire, and not least the personal breakdown of the central character. Often the novel seemed increasingly self-referential – so for example the novel’s opening lines are “The two women were alone in the London flat”; much later, to help relieve her writer’s block, Anna is given an opening line for her novel, which of course is “The two women…” etc. Novels which have as their central character novelists are always going to go down this road.

To be frank I found ‘The Golden Notebook’ very hard work. It is very long, very repetitive (to read about a dull relationship is one thing – to read about it twice, once in the central character’s diarised version, and then again in her fictionalised, slightly changed but essentially the same, version – is quite another. I doubt I would have troubled to finish were it not for a reluctance to admit doing so in this blog, which I think says it all. Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2007, 45 years after ‘The Golden Notebook’ was published – 45 years in which Lessing published a great deal, but was never to repeat the critical or commercial success of her earlier work. It looks a little like a lifetime achievement award, which is understandable, but doesn’t make this novel any easier to read.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, 1719

Robinson Crusoe – or, as its amazing sub-title would have it ‘The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates’ is quite an extraordinary book. Published in 1719 at the very dawn of the novel, it was widely taken as a true story. It was wildly popular, running through four editions in its first year of publication, and according to Wikipedia, by the end of the 19th century no book in the history of Western literature had more editions, spin-offs and translations (even into languages such as Inuktitut, Coptic and Maltese), with more than 700 such alternative versions.

When you read a classic like this you hope you are going to discover something beyond the popular culture version you have absorbed since your childhood. Some of the novels I have read recently were slightly disappointing in that regard – ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland‘ for example was everything I had been led to expect. ‘Dracula‘ and ‘Frankenstein‘ were probably the most remote or adrift from their origins. ‘Robinson Crusoe’ was in many ways very familiar, but there were some things I hadn’t expected to find. For example I had no idea that Defoe wrote a sequel, ‘The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe’ which I must look out/download. Because I really enjoyed this novel.

Taking the novel as an adventure story for a minute and ignoring its importance as a cultural artefact, this was fun. After running away to sea, being enslaved and then escaping, Crusoe finally makes his way to Brazil, where he settles down and becomes prosperous. Greed tempts him into a voyage, where he is shipwrecked on the aforementioned deserted island. What isn’t well known is that his voyage was to purchase slaves to work on his plantation. The attitude to slavery is interestingly frank – slavery isn’t particularly nice for the slaves, Crusoe recognises – he knows even the cannibals he meets on ‘his’ island are still people – but then Christmas isn’t nice for turkeys. It’s just a fact of the world he lives in, and the thought of doing something about it doesn’t cross his mind, in the same way as we see suffering and misery in our own world and shrug and walk on by.  

‘Crusoe‘ can really only be read as a story of imperialism or colonialism. He goes about mastering his environment with a dogged determination, farming, building and learning skills such as pottery and basket weaving. The animals on the island are culled in a casual a way that helps the reader understand how 17th and 18th century sailors destroyed native populations of animals such as the dodo so wantonly. He slowly comes to a religious settlement with his situation, accepting that while God may have shipwrecked him alone on the island for decades, he also provided him with an Eden-like environment in which surviving is not a struggle.

“These reflections made me very sensible of the goodness of Providence to me, and very thankful for my present condition, with all its hardships and misfortunes ; and this part also I cannot but recommend to the reflection of those who are apt, in their misery, to say, Is any affliction like mine? Let them consider how much worse the cases of some people are, and their case might have been, if Providence had thought fit.”

Provisioned from the wreck of his ship with virtually every tool, seed, animal and material he could possibly need, he is able to construct a home, a farmstead, and a fortification against dangerous creatures (of which there are none) and savages, which only appear towards the end of the novel. This is inspired by the famous and mysterious ‘footprint on the sand’ scene, mysterious because Defoe stresses several times that there is only the one footprint. Where it comes from is never resolved, but leads Crusoe to discover the cannibals that periodically visit the other side of his island for their celebration feasts. He interrupts one such party to rescue his man Friday, who becomes a faithful friend. He teaches Friday all about Christianity. This generates one wonderful scene where Friday innocently asks Crusoe some difficult theological questions (specifically, If God is all powerful, why is his struggle with the Devil so protracted?) which lead to a bit of a tumbleweed moment – Crusoe has to evade the question by pretending not to hear it!

Having been quite slow paced while Crusoe explores his world and steadily turns it into a little England, the narrative accelerates when the cannibals arrive, swiftly followed by an English ship captured by mutineers and recaptured by Crusoe, on which he returns to England to reclaim his birthright and possessions. There is time for one last chase through the woods pursued by packs of wolves, before Defoe decides to let Crusoe rest and take a breather.

The impact of Defoe on the English novel was huge. Poe obviously borrows heavily from him in ‘The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket’, as do the later Victorian adventure novelists such as Verne and Wells. You can even see traces of Crusoe in ‘Coral Island‘, and its counterpart ‘Lord of the Flies‘. This is the earliest novel I have reviewed to date, and its surprising modernity – there was no difficulty in language or style – is a tribute to Defoe’s innovation.

Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte, 1847

‘Wuthering Heights’ has over 22,000 reviews on Goodreads alone; one has to wonder what else I could possibly add to that overwhelming weight of opinion and consideration?

The dark and gothic tale is constructed with a complex variety of framing structures – at one point the narrative is told by Mr Lockwood, the tenant of Thrushcross Grange, recounting the story told him by Nelly Dean, the housekeeper of the Grange and the Heights, who in turn recounts details of a message from Isabella Heathcliff (nee Linton). People drop dead with alarming frequency, and nurture dark passions to the grave and beyond. The novel opens in 1801 with Lockwood’s neighbourly visit to the Heights, and the story is then told in a series of flashbacks/reprises. This means we have a clear picture of how things are going to end – until the final closing chapters, at least.

Underworld, by Don Delillo, 1997

Some novels are easy reads – the pages roll past in a blur, the events have a pace and unity that keep you turning the page, but the reader sometimes feel a bit of a passenger, riding the tide of the novel without having to do any work. Chapters are as short as the reader’s attention span, and when the novel is put down at night it can be picked up again at any time without the need to remind oneself where one left off. ‘Underworld’ is the precise opposite of that kind of novel. It is complex, dense, extremely long (832 pages), and peopled with a large cast of characters. The narrative voice is evasive, jumping from character to character, and often it is not until well into a paragraph that there is any clue as to who the “I” is – and the very next paragraph it could change once again. The language Delillo uses is fractured and often very poetic; his characters usually speak in incomplete sentences, and there is often no indication who is speaking. The time structure of the novel is equally fragmented, and the jumps in time are mirrored by jumps around the globe. This all adds up to a challenging novel, from many different aspects – but the question is, was it worth it?

Sybil, by Benjamin Disraeli, 1845

“Would he have made the cut if he had not become prime minister?”

asks Robert McCrum in his Guardian article explaining why he chose ‘Sybil’ for his “top 100 novels written in English” list. He goes on:

”his literary contemporaries such as Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and even Anthony Trollope are much greater novelists. Disraeli’s plots are far-fetched, and his characters balsa-wood. At the same time, he has flashes of brilliance that equal these greats at their best.”

This is where McCrum and I part company. I found no flashes of brilliance in ‘Sybil’ (and I did look carefully) and I don’t think anyone else would either. McCrum provides no quotes to support his contention, and if you look at this selection in Wikiquote I don’t think you will find anything there which justifies this description either. The weight of evidence to demonstrate the opposite, the wooden, flat, simply bad nature of Disraeli’s prose is overwhelming. I obviously can’t flood this review out with bad prose, but here are a couple of examples, from the 400 pages of possibilities:  

Supplementary: Hadrian 7th – F Rolfe – 1904 (Part 2)

Fans of obscure words might be interested in this.

In my review of F Rolfe’s Hadrian 7^th (1904) I mentioned Rolfe’s predilection for using arcane language. I made a note of just a small selection as examples – see if you recognise any:

• koprolalian
• cardinalitial
• matutinal
• acolyth
• prooimion
• Sbdiaconate
• yearnest
• exoletes
• dicaculous
• dilacerated
• pachydermatosity
• juvence
• exsequies
• intagliate
• curule
• rascalt
• fulguration

How did you do? Obviously this exercise is made more difficult by the absence of context, and in any novel about the papacy you would expect a few obscure terms about the Roman Catholic liturgy and rituals. But Rolfe goes completely overboard, rooting out obscure 16^th century terms, often adapting them into a form not normally found (so koprolalian would normally be rendered with a c not a k, meaning the obsessive use of scatological language). Others he more simply invents from their Latin and Greek roots – prooimion for example, with which he opens his novel.

The message is clear – Rolfe is more intelligent than the reader, whom he holds in contempt. If my earlier review hadn’t made the point clearly enough, unless you love weird obscure words – DON’T READ IT!! I do so you don’t have to.

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, 1925

 

‘Mrs Dalloway’ is Woolf’s modernist masterpiece. Sadly, anything I have to say about it, as is so often the case when reviewing classics, is not now going to be original. If you want to know what happens in the novel Wikipedia is a click away, and the novel’s themes, language, characterisation and structures have been analysed to death over the years. Yet the purpose of this blog is not to break new ground in the field of literary analysis, (or even avoid tired clichés such as “break new ground”), but to record my honest impression of the novel, and leave me sufficient reminders that I did actually read it, once a few years have passed.

‘Mrs Dalloway’ follows Clarissa, the eponymous central character in a single summer’s day as she prepares for a party at her house in Westminster. It is set shortly after the end of the First World War, and the echoes of the war in people’s lives reverberate in the same way that Big Ben echoes throughout the course of the day/novel. ‘Mrs Dalloway’ is daring in its form – it draws a portrait rather than tells a story, and takes point of view narration to places it had not gone before. I have avoided using the term “stream of consciousness” thus far, but no further – but in fact that doesn’t tell the whole story, because as well as showing us the thoughts of her characters in a free form manner, the novel swoops freely from one mind to another as characters pass in the street. Woolf also uses another technique to unsettle the reader, leaving the object of sentences to the last possible moment in many of her sentences. This requires the reader to restart many sentences, once they have ascertained who is thinking or speaking.

The novel is daring in other ways. It introduces homosexual relationships in a coded way – but fairly explicitly nonetheless. It is clear that Clarissa had feelings for a female childhood friend, and fears that her daughter has come under the spell of a very serious lesbian acquaintance. Clarissa’s parallel character, Septimus Warren, avoids sex with his wife, which he finds disgusting, and is unable to come to terms with the loss of his close army friend, Evans.

I’ve described ‘Mrs Dalloway’ earlier as a masterpiece, and I wanted to try to illustrate this, not just with a short summary but a closer look at the novel’s opening paragraph. Here it is:

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning — fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”— was that it? —“I prefer men to cauliflowers”— was that it?

So why is this such exceptional writing? I wanted to pick out a few features. First of all the reader is only given clues as to who the characters are – we can guess that Lucy is a domestic servant – because Mrs Dalloway is doing a chore for her because she is so busy – and that Mr Rumplemayer is a tradesman, because his men are coming to remove the doors from their hinges. But this is very little to go on – and we have no clue (at this point) as to where Boulton is (a childhood country home, we can infer, but not where) or who Peter Walsh is – a family friend or member, past lover. The fact that he is given a full name, unlike Lucy or Mr Rumplemayer, tells us something about his relationship with Clarissa, but so far we know very little about her – she is prosperous enough to own a house where the doors need to be removed to accommodate a party, and has domestic staff, but that is just about it. This is clearly going to be a novel where the reader has to do a lot of work to understand what is going on, who is speaking, what their relationships are to one another, and so on.

This opening paragraph introduces us to Clarissa’s internal monologue, and several of her ways of thinking. This isn’t simply a replay of her thoughts – there is still a narrator here (not the direct reporting of thought as speech, “yes, I said yes, I will yes” but “it had always seemed to her” (rather than “it had always seemed to me”). The narrator is not a translator, simply leaving the reader small clues to follow. Her memories are very visual and sensual – she remembers the squeaking hinges on the French windows – but what starts as a very happy childhood memory – “what a lark, what a plunge” gradually becomes more serious. Look at the adjectives – “fresh” “calm” “stiller”, “chill”, “sharp” and “solemn” – all leading to the feeling “that something awful was about to happen”. She cannot avoid the darkness of her thoughts for long, and even something as pleasant as a summer’s morning leads her inexorably to a darker place. The reader is here introduced to the dark element Clarissa’s character which she will struggle unsuccessfully throughout the novel to escape from.

Clarissa also thinks in metaphor – the morning is fresh “as if issued to children on a beach” and the air is “like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave”. Another theme which is introduced here is the fallibility of memory “Was that it?” is repeated as a refrain.

Just one final thought on sentence structure. Stream of consciousness writing is sometimes thought of as inevitably leading to long cumbersome sentences. You can find these here if you look for them, of course, but there are also incomplete and fractured much shorter sentences – “For Lucy had her work cut out for her” – which accurately reflects the way thoughts will come to us, sometimes in long streams, and at others in short staccato bursts.

I hope I have written enough here to whet your appetite for some Woolf. I know she is not to everyone’s taste – but there are depths here that you could take many readings to explore, extraordinarily thoughtful and sensitive writing that are a pleasure to revisit.

Hadrian the Seventh, by F Rolfe, 1904

When undertaking to read my way through (and then blog about) the Guardian 100 best novels in English, I hoped to find some hidden gems, some novels which I had not come across previously, which would then lead me on to discover more works by the author. Sadly that hasn’t happened thus far. But equally there haven’t been any complete stinkers, novels I simply wish I hadn’t bothered to pick up in the first place. Until now. ‘Hadrian VII’ finds whole new ways of being bad, and the fact it found a publisher in the first place, let alone somehow found a place in the Guardian’s list, is a cause for astonishment.

The novel is a thinly disguised and infantile personal fantasy. The protagonist, William George Rose, applied to join the priesthood as a young man, and was rejected. No clear explanation is offered for his rejection, but there are sufficient hints relating to his personal life to suggest that inappropriate sexual conduct was suspected. He then spends twenty years in splendid, bitter isolation, nursing his wounds. Although he is the first person narrator, and as such profoundly blind to his own faults, it is clear that some people simply can’t stand him. I normally take great pains to distinguish between the narrator and the author, but given the autobiographical nature of the novel’s setting I am not sure that is possible here. In fact as a reader I felt largely superfluous to the exercise – Rolfe is exorcising his demons, settling scores with anyone who crossed him in his life, and imagining his glorious career in the Church, and I was not needed in that process. The novel is for him, not me. The telling of a story, development of character or any of the other traditional things one looks for in a novel are largely ignored. I get the impression Rolfe would actually have been quite happy if this novel had not been read – it would have just confirmed his persecution complex.

Out of the blue Rose is approached by penitent representatives of the Roman Catholic Church which has collectively come to its senses. He is offered the priesthood, and a few pages of ecclesiastical nonsense later sees him catapulted him into the papacy, becoming Pope Hadrian 7th. There he reforms the church, meddles with international politics, and bests all his remaining enemies, only to succumb to an assassin’s bullet at the novel’s close.

The novel is badly written, with Rolfe/Corvo’s tendency to use obscure religious words (acolyth, matutinal, among many others) and deliberately misspell others (e.g. chymist) particularly irritating. The central character is unlikeable – hugely egocentric, arrogant, and he most unlikely priest or pope you will ever find – he practices astrology and admits to detesting his fellow man. The minor characters are ill-defined, and one who eventually kills Rose for no apparent reason, Jerry Sant, adopts a range of accents throughout the novel. Rose interferes in European politics, encouraging Germany to annex Austria and invade France and Russia. While this latter point might look prescient, speculation of this kind was commonplace at the time, and doesn’t suggest any particular insight by Rolfe. Even Robert McCrum, in choosing the book for his “top 100” list, accepted that this “eccentric and weirdly obsessive” novel is “contrived”, and can only offer as an explanation for his choice that it is “entertaining” and that it sheds light on the author. The latter point is certainly the case – but hardly a recommendation. As for entertaining – I’m afraid not. Arcane catholic dogma, speculative European statecraft, and unfunny, spiteful ‘comic’ portraits of working class characters provide little interest.

It is rare that a novel is bad in unique and interesting ways – if they are that bad they usually fail to find a publisher. That Hadrian 7^th remains in print suggests there is something here I am missing. I am quite prepared to accept that the failing is mine, but the author writes so poorly and takes everything so seriously and so tediously that I found locating any wit, erudition or interest not worth the effort. Don’t read it.

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, 1934

‘Tropic of Cancer’ was banned in the UK and the USA for almost 30 years. Re-reading it after several decades, I am not surprised – it contains what were for the times explicit descriptions of sexual activity that you cannot find in any other conventional text of the time. Miller’s own description of the novel explained:

“This is not a book in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of art”

George Orwell was an early defender of Miller, and in his 1940 essay ‘Inside the Whale’ wrote –

“I earnestly counsel anyone who has not done so to read …Tropic of Cancer. With a little ingenuity, or by paying a little over the published price, you can get hold of it, and even if parts of it disgust you, it will stick in your memory.”

He went on to say

“It is also an ‘important’ book, in a sense different from the sense in which that word is generally used. As a rule novels are spoken of as ‘important’ when they are either a ‘terrible indictment’ of something or other or when they introduce some technical innovation. Neither of these applies to Tropic of Cancer. Its importance is merely symptomatic. Here in my opinion is the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past. Even if that is objected to as an overstatement, it will probably be admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single glance; and after all, he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive acceptor of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses. Symptomatically, that is more significant than the mere fact that five thousand novels are published in England every year and four thousand nine hundred of them are tripe. It is a demonstration of the impossibility of any major literature until the world has shaken itself into its new shape.”

“Whitman among the corpses” – what a phrase! It’s impossible (for me) not to read those words and recognise Orwell’s extraordinary powerful way with words. It was on the basis of this recommendation that I originally read ‘Tropic of Cancer’. My recollection is that I found it much more erotic than on re-reading, so much so that I began to wonder whether the Grove Press (no, me neither) edition I was using was bowdlerised – but apparently not. Memory can play tricks of course, which I suppose is one reason why I am re-reading many of these novels in the first place.

Briefly, ‘Tropic’ is a portrait of the life of an American expatriate down and out in Paris in the 1930s. The character is virtually penniless (or francless) and has a series of adventures, sexual and otherwise, while writing a novel. At times there is a semblance of a narrative, particularly in the novel’s closing scenes when the narrator teaches at a school in Dijon, and subsequently helps a friend escape from a relationship and return to America. It is written in a free form, stream of consciousness style, and Miller holds nothing back – it is scatological and sexually explicit. At times the narrative breaks down almost completely, and the text becomes simply layers of phrases:

“Tania is a fever, too – bright neckties on the Boulevard Montparnasse, dark bathrooms, Porto Sec, Abdullah cigarettes, the adagio sonata Pathetique, aural amplifiers, anecdotal séances, burnt sienna breasts, heavy garters, what time is it, golden pheasants stuffed with chestnuts, taffeta fingers, vaporish twilights turning to ilex, acromelagy, cancer, and delirium…” (page 5)

The first person narrator holds women in contempt – he describes them all routinely using the c-word, and there isn’t a single female character in the novel that isn’t either a prostitute or a sexual victim of one kind or another. Women exist only as objects. He describes female genitals as “that dark, unstitched wound, that sink of abominations” (251) and as an “ugly gash, the wound that never heals” and “this great yawning gulf of nothingness which the creative spirits and mothers of the race carry between their legs” (253). Later in a scene towards the end of the novel, the narrator visits a friend, who has been sleeping with a young woman:

“He came to the door stark naked. It was his night off and there was a c*** in the bed as usual. “Don’t mind her” he says, “she’s asleep. If you need a lay you can take her on. She’s not bad”. He pulls the covers back to show me what she looks like.” (291).

Freud would have a field day with this language and imagery – what psychological or sexual trauma led to Miller’s narrator feeling this way towards women?

Tempted as I am to dismiss this as misogynistic soft porn and move on, I can’t. For one thing, Miller can write;

“I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.”

He is also articulates the millennial nihilism that afflicted many in Europe as war threatened:

“For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grace, it needs to be blown to smithereens”

At times the tone is unsettlingly uneven – Miller moves from light comedy, such as the scene where a bidet is used inappropriately, to surrealist, fantastical descriptions, which are the parts of the novel I found the most challenging:

“Standing in the courtyard with a glass eye; only half the world is intelligible. The stones are wet and mossy and in the crevices are black toads. A big door bars the entrance to the cellar; the steps are slippery and soiled with bat dung. The door bulges and sags, the hinges are falling off, but there is an enamelled sign on it, in perfect condition, which says: “Be sure to close the door.” Why close the door? I can’t make it out. I look again at the sign but it is removed; in its place there is a pane of colored glass. I take out my artificial eye, spit on it and polish it with my handkerchief. A woman is sitting on a dais above an immense carven desk; she has a snake around her neck” (and so on – this goes on for a long time!)

Eighty years ago ‘Tropic of Cancer’ was banned because of its portrayal of sex – it is a sign of how we have moved on as a society that what is shocking about the novel today is its sexism, not its sex.