Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, 1977

‘Song of Solomon’, makes an interesting companion text to Morrison’s later novel, ‘Beloved’ which I reviewed earlier this month. Both novels take as their subject matter the question of African American identity and experience, but while ‘Beloved’ looks unflinchingly at arguably the most difficult period of this experience, the nineteenth century, ‘Song of Solomon’ takes as its setting a later, less traumatic time span, approximately 1930-1963. The novel opens with the death of an insurance agent, Robert Smith, who believes he can fly. From this opening scene Morrison introduces her cast, the Dead family, who witness Smith’s death, along with the rest of the community of Not Doctor Street, The family derives their name from the period immediately after the end of slavery, when all former slaves had to register with the Freedmen’s Bureau, and when the answer to a question about the character’s father (who was deceased) was mistakenly entered as his name. Other unusual names are a motif throughout the novel, either as nicknames – Milkman, Guitar, Sweet – or as family names chosen at random from the bible – First Corinthians, Pilate, and Magdalene called Lena

At first the novel is a wide-ranging saga following the interwoven relationships of the Dead family across several generations. The structure is complex, with revelations about the family’s past being revealed slowly in flashback. However the novel changes pace at roughly half way, (the original New York Times review called it an “abrupt shift”) and in this latter section the narrative becomes more akin to a thriller or a detective story. Here the search for buried gold, a midnight hunt, a secret society and above all an emerging mystery surrounding the origins of the Dead family are breathlessly presented. Eventually the novel’s protagonist, Milkman, so-called because his mother breastfed him into early childhood, learns his great-grandfather Solomon was said to have escaped slavery by flying back to Africa, bringing the theme of flight full circle. Finally, another leap into flight leaves the novel to end on an ambiguous note. Morrison uses this theme –flight – as both a symbol of empowerment and escape, and of self delusion and suicide.

Morrison took a risk in making Milkman her central character – he is not very sympathetic, particularly in his relationships with women, not least his cousin Hagar, who eventually dies of (to all intents and purposes) a broken heart. He is heavily influenced by his parents, but takes most of his advantages and friendships for granted. One of the best scenes is where his sister, after decades of silence, finally lays into him:

“Where do you get the right to decide our lives? I’ll tell you where. From that little hog’s gut that hangs between your legs. Well, let me tell you something… you will need more than that. I don’t know where you will get it or who will give it to you, but mark my words, you will need more than that…. You are a sad, pitiful, stupid, selfish, hateful man. I hope your little hog’s gut stands you in good stead, and you take good care of it, because you don’t have anything else.”

I can admire Morrison’s obvious skill in this novel. She combines a compelling storyline with wonderfully crafted imagery and insights into complexities of the African American experience in twentieth century America. The skill in construction of the novel is obvious in little scenes like the following, where Milkman and Guitar spot a peacock white incongruously in the street:

“How come it can’t fly no better than a chicken?’ Milkman asked.

Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can’t nobody fly with all that [stuff]. Wanna fly, you got to give up the [stuff] that weighs you down.’

In just a few lines the themes of flight, commercialism and the pursuit of wealth are neatly tied up in a brief sketch. Morrison’s penetrating insight is also shown in the portrayal of relationships between men and women, for example when Milkman describes a conquest as a “third beer”.

“She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it’s there, because it can’t hurt, and because what difference does it make.”

So why the hesitation? The simple truth is that I admired and enjoyed this novel, but wasn’t blown away by it. It lacks some of the power of ‘Beloved’, and while many of the characters are memorable, not least Milkman’s aunt Pilate, yet Milkman himself is not the character the reader wants to follow. The change of tone is at the time welcome – who doesn’t enjoy the occasional midnight chase or escape from sudden death – but the uneasy shift in tone left me wanting to know more about some of the threads left dangling. Lastly, I’ve written elsewhere at my frustration with authors using the device of killing off a key character simply to provide a convenient resolution (rather than as the fulfilment of an inevitable fate)– I was surprised to see an author of Morrison’s calibre relying on this approach as well.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, 1960

The subset of people who have read ‘Go Set a Watchman’ but have not read’To Kill a Mockingbird’ must be pretty small, and until this week included me, embarrassed although I am to admit it. Yes, until this week I had not read this the ultimate American classic. I had seen the film, of course, and the stage play, but somehow never got round to the novel, until now. 

I can completely understand why the novel holds its place in the affections of American readers. It captures a lost America, and shows that while its passing is on the whole a good thing, particularly in terms of civil rights, something has been lost as well.

I wanted to address the question as to whether ‘Go Set a Watchman’ has in any way had a negative effect on the reputation of ‘TKAM’. I think this debate is based on a false premise, namely that ‘GSAW’ is a sequel to ‘TKAM’. Certainly it was published later than the original novel, and is set around 20 years later. In the later novel, Atticus is no longer seen through the innocent eyes of a young daughter’s hero-worshipping eyes, but from those of a mature, travelled woman. Of course he is no longer on a pedestal, and a lifetime of living in the deep South has taken its toll on his tolerances. Civil rights had not stood still in that time either, and what was once a liberal position had become reactionary, simply by staying still as the world moved on.

But. I think that it is important to remember that ‘GSAW’ is, in terms of composition, the earlier novel. It is in fact the first draft of ‘TKAM’. Looked at that way, Atticus doesn’t become more reactionary, but more liberal and tolerant as he developed as a character in Lee’s imagination. We also owe thanks to Lee’s editor for this metamorphosis.

There is a charming innocence to ‘TKAM’, achieved in large part through Scout’s narration. She is disarmingly honest, kind, and in the main unspoiled by the prejudices and racism around her. It has still taken its toll, of course – she uses the n-word and other insulting racial epithets freely, and would prefer Atticus to have refused to defend Tom Robinson. Tom’s tragic, off stage death doesn’t seem to trouble her, although neither does Bob Ewell’s at the end of the novel. Lee never seems entirely sure whether the trial at the heart of the novel is her focus, or the story of the agoraphobe Boo Radley which is more prominent at the novel’s opening and close. She manages to weave the two stories together at the death but it is not so much as climax as an end.

I suspect the other primary reason for the novel’s enduring importance is that it contains so many platitudes. Children believe that all the problems of the world can be solved if only people were nice to one another, and that is the principal sentiment of the novel. I started to keep a track of the platitudes, but gave up after a while:

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”

“real courage is, instead of … a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.

I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.”

“Atticus, he was real nice.””Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.”

“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)… There are just some kind of men who – who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”

People are nice, once you get to know them. Never give up. Folks are all the same under their skin. This homespun philosophy gets a bit overly saccharine after a while. TKAM is a plea for tolerance, not only for the rights of black people to a fair hearing under the country’s justice system, but also for the traditions of the South. Many white people in the South had felt under attack since before the end of slavery, and Lee also offers these people a voice, less explicitly here than in ‘GSAW’, but unmistakeably nonetheless. Lee explained this is a rare commentary on her own novel once, saying:

“Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that To Kill a Mockingbird spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners.” 

The heritage of all Southerners? Or all white Southerners? The idea that the Southern code of honor and conduct that led to mass lynchings, the KKK, and segregation was worth preserving despite everything is a challenge to the interpretation that this novel is a straightforward advocate for the civil rights cause. There is a risk that we sentimentalise the novel, and see it as a simple anti-racism tract, when the portrayal of the South is more nuanced than that.

I’d love to know if you agree?

The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope, 1875

One of the reasons for keeping this blog is to tackle novels that I would otherwise not even consider attempting. Trollope definitely falls into that category – not only have I never read any of his work before, but I had no intention of doing so. Trollope treated writing as a job, studiously putting in his three hours a day, and eventually produced 47 novels. I find this volume of output oppressive – you could read Trollope for a decade and still be reading.

However, in recent years Trollope has enjoyed a renaissance, with the two hundredth anniversary of his birth last year not doubt being a factor. He is also, inevitably, a favourite of the Sunday afternoon television adaptation. His inoffensiveness and blandness, large casts and sedate plotlines suit this genre perfectly.

There is a Trollope Society (John Major is one of its Vice Presidents; the President himself is the Bishop of London) which has very smart website. In introducing its subject the site adopts a slightly defensive tone:

“Trollope wrote forty-seven novels – three times as many as Dickens – and many have long preferred Trollope for his subtle delineation of human character and middle class”

So Trollope is a better writer than Dickens because he wrote more? Not the strongest of arguments – an appreciation of quantity over quality would venerate Catherine Cookson over Jane Austen. I could also argue that “subtle delineation” is a tautology – delineation is by definition an act of precision. In any event, Dickens doesn’t need defending by me, but the test is in fact a simple one – can you recall any character from Trollope?

Which brings me to the over 900 pages of the Victorian soap opera that is ‘The Way We Live Now’. The plot is relatively simple for such a long novel – a series of characters attempt to arrange mutually satisfactory marriages, and after a long series of frustrations and rejections, finally most of them are successful. The central character, Auguste Melmotte, a financier, embezzles money, apparently, and when exposed commits suicide. His death precipitates a slightly frenzied tying up of plot lines as Trollope realises that with Melmotte gone, much of the interest of the novel has also expired. The large supporting cast are reasonably well delineated, to be fair, although many of the rich young men who gather at the BearGarden, an early incarnation of the Drones Club, are interchangeable, and the young women seem happy enough to swap one suitor for another as their financial positions change.

As a commentary on the way Victorian society encouraged dishonesty, in romance, finance, and public affairs, the satire is wooden and uninteresting – bad people do bad things, are exposed, and disposed of. Poor people are virtuous and stupid, and only happy when they learn to accept their place in life. It’s hardly surprising given the 100 chapters Trollope had to fill that he finds it necessary to repeat himself endlessly, recycling situations, recapping each time a storyline is revisited, and showing events from different points of view. To cap matters off, there is some deeply unpleasant anti-semitism in the closing chapters of the novel – it could be argued these attitudes are shown in order to expose them, but the only rebuttal offered is that times have changed, and what was once unacceptable is now less abhorrent.

Trollope is comfort food for those who like to think they have an appreciation of literature, but who actually enjoy having their prejudices confirmed. It really isn’t worth your time.

P.S. In an interesting article in the New Yorker last year, entitled “Trollope Trending – Why he’s still the novelist of the way we live now”, Adam Gopnik claimed that “The Way We Live Now” is the Trollope novel for people who don’t like Trollope novels.” Gopnik had a couple of other insights worth mentioning. He describes Trollope as

“not a sentence-by-sentence writer, or even a scene-by-scene writer; really, he is a character-by-character writer.”

He also claimed that

“Amateur readers have taken up Trollope as a cause and a favourite in a way that they have taken up perhaps no other nineteenth-century English novelist except Jane Austen.”

I have no idea if the concept of an amateur reader is intended as a joke – it must be, surely?

The Rainbow by D H Lawrence, 1915

‘The Rainbow’ is an extraordinarily dense, complex novel. It follows three generations of the Brangwen family in rural Nottinghamshire, and contains some remarkable writing. Originally published in 1915 it is incredibly modernist in tone. But it also has, for me, some serious stylistic weaknesses. Of course this will be heresy for any Lawrence adherents, and I recognise it is a matter of personal taste.

The novel spans a period from the mid-nineteenth century to just after the Boer War at the end of the century. It portrays the relationships of the family set against the background of the industrial revolution. Tom Brangwen, one of several brothers, falls in love with a Polish widow, Lydia. The conflict in Poland from which Lydia is a refugee is mentioned only in passing, and with the later reference to the Boer war is one of the few real world events that intrudes into the lives of the characters. Lydia’s daughter by her first husband, Anna, forms the focus of the second third of the novel. She marries Will Brangwen, a cousin by marriage, and goes on to have a very large family. The last section of the novel follows Will and Anna’s daughter, Ursula, and her relationships with a female teacher (in what today would be an illegal relationship, because Ursula was still a pupil at the time), and then a Polish soldier.

The novel is infused with Christian sentiment and symbolism, and this is expressed most clearly in the novel’s closing lines, from which it also draws its title:

“She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.”

This is a version of Blake’s new Jerusalem, in England’s increasingly dark and unpleasant land, scarred by the impacts of industrialisation.

The portrayal of sex is probably the aspect of his writing for which Lawrence is most well-known. Here he attempts to address the challenge of how to write about sex without using explicit language. Euphemisms are deployed extensively – I particularly liked the phrase “underneath yearnings” (106) and “they loved each other to transport again, passionately and fully” (112). Imagery, particularly of flowers, animals and different forms of heat, flames, and burning is also used throughout the novel to portray sex and sexuality.

“Suddenly, with an incredibly quick, delicate movement, he put his arms around her and drew her to him. It was quick, cleanly done, like a bird that swoops and sinks closer, closer. He was kissing her throat. She turned and looked at him. Her eyes were dark and flowing with fire. His eyes were hard and bright with a fierce purpose and gladness, like a hawk’s. She felt him flying into the dark spaces of her flames, like a brand, like a gleaming hawk”. (Notice the change of tense there by the way – from “he put” to “he was”.)

“Feeling herself lying open, like a flower unsheathed in the sun, insistent and potent with demand…The warmth flowed through her, she felt herself opening, unfolding, asking, as a flower opens in full request under the sun.…When she opened and turned to him…she was as new as a flower that unsheathes itself and stands always ready, waiting, receptive.”  (34)

Later, when Ursula is considering having sex with Skrebensky, Lawrence’s use of the flower as a metaphor for female sexuality becomes more explicit –

“Here she would open her female flower like a flame, in this dimness that was more passionate than light”.

Male sexuality is more directly treated, although again symbolism often takes the place of direct description:

“She went down with him into the warmish cellar, where already in the darkness the little yellow knobs of rhubarb were coming. He held the lantern down to the dark earth. She saw the tiny knob-end of the rhubarb thrusting upwards upon the thick red stem, thrusting itself like a knob of flame through the soft soil.”

Lawrence’s attempts to write about female sexuality are certainly bold. His portrayal of a lesbian relationship in particular would undoubtedly have been shocking to a contemporary audience. Despite his efforts (to write about sex without using explicit language) ‘The Rainbow’ was on publication judged obscene, and banned. It is still to this day shocking that copies of the novel were burned by the authorities in 1915 in scenes that pre-figured the Nazi book burnings of the 1930’s. It is likely that the anti-war sentiments expressed in the novel by Ursula were a contributory factor in the decision to ban the book – airing anti-war arguments in 1915 was a brave move by any standards.

Flowers and flower imagery dominate throughout the novel – daffodils, primroses, snowdrops, bluebells, harebells, jasmine, yellow crocuses, peaflowers, geraniums, Christmas roses, and on and on in profusion. When he gets it right there is a luxuriance to Lawrence’s writing that is almost intoxicating:

“The dim blue-and-gold of a hot, sweet autumn saw the close of the corn harvest. To Ursula it was as if the world had opened its softest pure flower, its chicory flower, its meadow saffron. The sky was blue, and sweet, the yellow leaves down the lane seemed like free, wandering flowers as they chittered round the feet, making a keen, poignant, almost unbearable music to her heart. And the scents of autumn were like a summer madness to her. She fled away from the little, purple-red button chrysanthemums like a frightened dryad, the bright yellow little chrysanthemums smelled so strong, her feet seemed to dither in a drunken dance.” (208)

So what are the negatives? Firstly, there is Lawrence’s propensity for hyperbole. For my taste, ‘The Rainbow’ is massively over-written. Characters hate one another with a passionate intensity, then moments later love one another with an eternal unfulfilled longing. Everything is expressed in sudden absolutes that change just as easily.

“A shiver, a sickness of new birth passed over her, the flame leaped up him, under his skin. She wanted it, this new life from him, with him, yet she must defend herself against it, for it was a destruction” (23)

After a while this gets tiring and tedious. Or as Lawrence would say, his heart achingly rejected it with a passionate urgency that seemed to overwhelm his soul – he hated it and loved it and hated it. And so on.

Secondly, not since the ‘Deathly Hallows’ have I read a book more desperately in need of a good editor. Lawrence uses repetition relentlessly, like a sledge hammer. Nothing is said well enough that it cannot benefit from a second or third repetition. Examples are spread across every page, but for instance see this from pages 180/181:

“In spite of herself the tears surged higher, in spite of her they surged higher. In spite of her, her face broke. …she did not forget, she did not forget, she never forgot”.

As I have written elsewhere, each instance of repetition can in isolation be justified – here the character is repeating these phrases to herself to try to persuade herself not to cry, and once having cried, to remember the wrong done to her. But the cumulative impact of this repetition is oppressive.

Lawrence is an important writer, and his inclusion on the Guardian’s 100 best novels list is certainly justified. But I wish he had had a good editor.

Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway, 1926

The name of this novel has a complex history – at one stage it was going to be called, among other things, ‘The Lost Generation’ – and this alternative title, together with the epigraph from Ecclesiastes, beginning “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh” provide some useful guides to interpreting this novel. 

Set in the 1920’s in Paris and Spain, the events of the novel are shown from the viewpoint of the central character, Jake Barnes. Barnes recounts what happens in the moment, but he never explains – only context and snatches of conversation provide clues to the characters’ backstories. We can gather, for example, that Barnes was a combatant in the First World War, and that during that conflict he received a wound, physical or psychological, which made him impotent. Barnes is besotted with Lady Brett Ashley, a young woman who is part of the hard-drinking crowd who haunt the bars and clubs of Paris. No-one seems to work – Barnes is ostensibly a reporter for an American paper, but we hardly ever see him do any reporting, and he takes several weeks off without repercussions.

It is reasonable to infer that Barnes’ impotence, combined with his lust for Brett, would torture him, but only glimpses of this are offered to the reader. He compensates for his feelings by assisting Brett in conducting her affairs – for a woman of the 1920’s she is very liberated, and quite guilt free and open about her relationships. In a rare moment of introspection Barnes chastises himself, saying

“Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right.”

The second section of the novel moves to Spain, and a fishing expedition is followed by the fiesta of the title in Pamplona, including the bull run and some of the scenes of bull-fighting for which Hemingway is probably best known. With Barnes’s connivance, Brett seduces the 19 year-old matador, and in a jealous rage one of her recent former lovers beats him (and Barnes) up. The novel ends shortly after the fiesta, with Barnes and Brett spending time together in Madrid, and wondering how their relationship might have developed had he not been afflicted:

“Oh Jake,” Brett said, “We could have had such a damned good time together.”
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me. Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

(The mounted policeman’s raised baton proving a somewhat unnecessary piece of symbolism there I think. )

As an evocation of the fascination of bull-fighting, the scenes towards the end of this novel are unparalleled. If one is already disgusted by bull-fighting there will be nothing here to change ones mind. The portrayal of the hedonism of  Barnes and his group of friends, representatives of a lost generation, reminded me of an expatriate version of ‘Vile Bodies’. Another text worth comparing this novel to is of course Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’. which in a different setting has similar themes. The reader is invited to see this group of characters as resilient survivors of the fracturing of society which is slowly healing, as the sun also rises. 

But. There are some issues with the novel that I wanted to explore. The first is the use of repetition. At times it is quite oppressive. I know drunk people – and many of the characters are pretty much permanently drunk – repeat themselves a lot. But it’s not much fun to read. Here’s a random example:

“Brett put her hand on my arm. 

“Don’t get drunk, Jake’ she said. ‘You don’t have to’. 

‘How do you know?’

‘Don’t’, she said. ‘You’ll be all right’. 

‘I’m not getting drunk’  I said. ‘I’m just drinking a little wine. I like to drink wine’. 

‘Don’t get drunk’, she said. ‘Jake, don’t get drunk’. 

In context, each repetition is justified and legitimate – here the effect is to emphasise both the drunkenness of the pair, and the lack of real communication between them. But the cumulative effect is somewhat wearing.

Secondly there is Hemingway’s famously sparse style. In Hemingway the quick brown fox never jumps over the lazy dog – the fox jumps over the dog. In theory this should make the novel very simple to read – but avoiding over elaborate description is one thing, and stripping the prose to its bare bones whereby one thing happens, then another thing happens, and so on, combining to deadening effect, is another. As a result although it is only just over 200 pages long this novel took me several days to complete.

Third, Barnes’s group of expatriate friends are an unpleasant bunch. They are openly anti-semitic, and the novel contains several derogatory references to homosexuality. These of course were much more acceptable attitudes than they are today, but the casual use of the n-word in a text only 90 years old isn’t reflected in the novels of many of Hemingway’s contemporaries.

Finally, the elephant in the room (metaphor deliberately mis-chosen) is the topic – bull-fighting. Hemingway glamorises the killing of animals for sport, and while this once may have seemed acceptable, today it leaves a bad taste.

As a postscript, and to be completely honest something of a boast, I spotted a fleeting reference to Marlowe’s ‘The Jew of Malta’ here. On page 66 of the Vintage edition, (which by the way contains an extraordinarily self-indulgent introduction by Colm Toibin which is all about Colm Toibin, and barely mentions the novel it is introducing), Barnes mentions a friend who is a taxidermist. Bill, another friend, replies

“That was in another country…and besides all the animals were dead”. The full quote from Marlowe is:

“Thou hast committed fornication: but that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.”

This so far as I can tell isolated example of wit from Bill is of course a reference to Brett.

Amongst Women by John McGahern, 1991

Michael Moran, the patriarch at the heart of this novel, is a depressing misanthropic monster. He abuses his children, terrorises his wife, and attempts (ultimately unsuccessfully) to control every aspect of their lives, all the while ensuring that his interests and comforts are catered for:

“Anything easy and pleasant aroused deep suspicion and people enjoying themselves were usually less inclined to pay attention to others” (61) (others here being Moran himself.)

When Moran dies at the end of the novel his family finally experience a sense of relief from his omnipresent oppression. This relief is possibly a false dawn, as his influence continues to linger:

“as they left him under the yew, it was as if each of them in their different ways had become Daddy.”

The novel is set in rural Ireland in the 1950’s or 60’s. The exact date is not specified, but can be inferred from the changes in society affecting Ireland, as well as the ages of the characters in relation to some of the historic events mentioned, specifically  the Irish war of independence. The Moran family in addition to Michael, the father, includes his three daughters, two sons, and their stepmother. We are never told about their mother, who is never referred to or hinted at. Given the veneration by Irish Catholics for the role of mothers in the family, this is surprising.

The novel opens with Moran being cared for by his daughters, who have put their busy lives in Dublin and London on hold. To cheer him up, a thankless task if ever there was one, they decide to recreate ‘Monaghan Day’, a family celebration when Moran’s friend McQuaid used to visit and they would reminisce about the war. Without McQuaid to participate there seems little point in this, and it is really just an excuse for the narrator to tell us in flashback some of Moran’s back story. We are told that he fought as an officer in the Irish Republican Army, and in the Irish Civil War that followed (we are not told on which side Moran fought in the Civil War, but can infer that he was a loyalist). Moran is bitter about the direction Ireland has taken post-independence, and petulantly refuses his soldier’s pension. The main narrative focus of the novel is the teenage years and early twenties of the children, as they grow up and leave home. Moran’s violent outbursts towards his family and his control freakery, often exercised through obsessive repetitions of prayers, gradually drive them all away, although they all, except Luke the eldest, regularly return thereafter to the family home. They are pathetically grateful for any acts or signs of tenderness from their father.

This is all well done – the portrait of an abusive, dysfunctional Irish family is convincing. But is it enjoyable? Hardly. It tells us little we do not already know about this society, which even when this novel was written was fading into the past. It was a time of widespread and institutionalised physical and sexual abuse, unpredictable violence, and the tyranny of men over women. McGahern seems ambivalent about this period, and about his central character, perhaps from a sense of nostalgia about his own past. While well written the novel contains too much repetition for my taste – endless scenes of family prayers and haymaking – and much of the heavy-handed symbolism was sign-posted clumsily. It came as more of a relief than anything else when Moran was finally laid to rest.

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner, 1926

Virago Modern Classics have done the reader no favours in managing expectations by publishing this in a twee edition illustrated with a strangely distorted ginger cat, and a quote from John Updike, author of yesterday’s reviewed novel, describing this as “witty, eerie, tender”. (How many times have you said to yourself, “You know what I need to read right now is a funny but scary but romantic novel”?)

The eponymous Lolly, a childish transliteration of Laura, is a prosperous young woman. The first third of the novel follows her very conventional background and birth, and in a fractured time scheme that must have felt very modern in the 1920’s takes the reader up to Lolly’s 47th year. Her family have long since attempted to marry her off – one suitor is dismissed with a joke about werewolves. The company of men -as potential husbands anyway – leaves her cold. She prefers wandering the more obscure parts of London looking for herbs to turn into medicines. One day she has an epiphany, and decides to break free from the patriarchal forces that have been suffocating her, and go and live alone in a small village in the middle of nowhere. Here she begins to breathe at last, but her peace is short-lived, because a visit from her nephew Titus quickly comes to feel like an invasion.

And this is where the novel takes an unexpected turn. Having been quite naturalistic for three quarters of the story, Townsend Warner introduces the occult. More specifically Lolly becomes a witch, and shortly thereafter meets Satan. This development isn’t quite as sudden as I have suggested – looking back over the text there are clues that the village of Great Mop is not the rural backwater it seems on the surface – but it is a strange turn of events nonetheless. Satan is a genial chap, whose idea of supreme evil extends as far as stinging Titus with wasps, and making his milk go off. Titus flees Great Mop, happily engaged as it happens, and the novel ends with Lolly looking forward to a long career of witchcraft, presumably fairly relaxed about the eternal damnation that will follow shortly thereafter.

The allegorical intent of the novel is not hard to decode. As is often the case, sex is at the root of it all. ‘Lolly Willowes’ is at once a manifesto for the liberation of women from patriarchy, with witchcraft being the symbolic representation of the rejection of control of women by men, but also a more subtle plea for the right of women to control their own sexuality. Lolly begins to discover her long dormant feelings when she moves to the countryside and starts to commune with nature:

“In February came a spell of fine weather. She spent whole days sitting in the woods, where the wood-pigeons moaned for pleasure on the boughs. Sometimes two cock birds would tumble together in mid air, shrieking and buffeting with their wings, and then would fly back to the quivering boughs and nurse the air into peace again. All around her the sap was rising up. She laid her cheek against a tree and shut her eyes to listen. She expected to hear the tree drumming like a telegraph pole. (page 110/111)

Admittedly there are phallic symbols aplenty here, but look at the verbs – moaning, tumbling, shrieking, buffeting, quivering, rising, drumming – this is an extraordinarily physical experience for someone just sitting still.

The novel’s climax is a witches’ Sabbath, which threatens to end in a Bacchanalian orgy – “They whirled faster and faster, fused together like two suns that whirl and blaze in a single destruction … contact made her tingle from head to foot…like a torch she was handed on from one to another…partners came and went, figures and conformations were in a continual flux…sometimes the dancers were coupled” (159/160). This scene is followed by a more reflective conversation between Lolly and a very gentlemanly Satan, dressed as a gamekeeper, her very own Mellors. Lolly explains her conversion to witchcraft in a quite sad, melancholy speech, only some of which I can offer here:

“One doesn’t become a witch to run around being harmful, or to run around being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It’s to escape all that – to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to by others….That’s why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life’s a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure… When I think of witches I seem to see all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded. I see them, wives and sisters of respectable men…there they are, child-rearing, house-keeping, hanging washed dishclothes on currant bushes, and for diversion each others silly conversation, and listening to men talking together in the way that men talk and women listen”.

There definitely is a poignancy and tenderness to this unexpected ending to what starts as such a conventional novel. Once I had taken time to comes to terms with the subversion of my expectations about the direction and tone of the novel, I liked it!

Rabbit Redux – John Updike – 1971

The Penguin Modern Classics editions of Updike’s Rabbit quartet (Run, Redux, Rich, and at Rest) contain an afterword by the author which in some ways makes the reviewer redundant, offering insight into the composition of the novels to which few could hope to achieve. Of course, I am going to have a try.

Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom is a middle aged, blue-collar American. His wife is sleeping with a work colleague, and soon leaves Rabbit and his teenage son Nelson. Harry is in a dead end job as a print-setter, which even in 1969, the novel’s setting, was clearly becoming obsolete. The reproductions of Harry’s set type which appear in the novel are cruelly riddled with errors, suggesting he isn’t even any good at his job. While the narrative point of view is largely Harry’s/Rabbit’s, we do not gain much insight into his feelings. He seems to take his wife’s betrayal in his stride, although it obviously hits him harder than he realises, as is shown later in the novel when his behaviour begins to get more erratic. Invited out by a work colleague, a black man who Harry would normally not associate, Harry picks up Jill, a wealthy 18 year old young woman fleeing suburban Connecticut. Although more like his lost daughter than a replacement wife, she moves in with him and Nelson. Later her  ‘friend’ Skeeter, a radical Vietnam veteran follows her and also moves in, causing scandal in the neighbourhood.  While Harry and Nelson are out visiting friends the house suffers an arson attack, and Jill is killed. Finally, in the aptly named Safe Haven motel, Harry reconciles with his wife, after a fashion, and they fall asleep together.

The period setting of the novel provides an important backdrop to its events. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin land on the moon – Harry watches the landing on a fuzzy black and white television in his mother’s bedroom. Race riots break out across America, and the war in Vietnam continues to divide the country. Harry is defiantly conservative in the face of several protest voices, not least Skeeter, who challenges him on issues of race and the war.

It has to be said that Harry is not a pleasant character. He is unashamedly racist, sexually exploits the clearly vulnerable Jill, who is half his age,  and takes pleasure from hurting her during sex. He beats his wife when he finds out she has been unfaithful, and is a poor father. He has many other faults which I am not going to spell out here – suffice to say he is a hard hero to like.

It’s equally hard to avoid the simple reading of this novel that has Harry as an extended metaphor for America. Updike specifically invites this comparison in his afterword – “The character of Harry Angstrom was, for me, a way in – a ticket to the America all around me.” Skeeter’s “invasion” of Harry’s home, hard to understand otherwise, is representative of the rise of black power in America, the intrusion of what Harry/Updike sees as an alien race. His values – paternity, patriotism, fidelity – are under attack from all around. In other words this is a deeply conservative novel in which Harry struggles to at first resist, then come to terms with the changes sweeping America in the late 60’s. He is a victim throughout the novel, weakly accepting what happens to him, not challenging his wife’s lover when he confronts him, taking redundancy without complaint, even spinelessly accepting Skeeter’s moving into his house and sleeping with Jill – he doesn’t like it, but he can do nothing about it. He has a sharp tongue towards his family and friends, but is a profoundly weak man. The reader feels sorry for Harry, perhaps, but that’s the extent of it.

Reading the second novel in a quartet is not the best way to approach a writer’s output (I started the Harry Potter series by reading The Goblet of Fire, stupidly) but I am torn on whether I want to read more about Rabbit. What might bring me back, one day, is Updike’s undoubted way with a sentence:

“How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation”.

The Heat of the Day –Elizabeth Bowen – 1948

Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘The Heat of the Day’ has strong echoes of Graham Greene’s ‘The End of the Affair’. It is set in London during the second world war, where the threat of sudden death from the Blitz leads to people to live their lives with a sense of urgency. Bowen’s evocation of life in London during this period is one of the strongest features of this otherwise flawed novel:

“The night behind and the night to come met across every noon in an arch of strain”. (10)

“Now down a shaft of anticipating silence the bomb swung whistling”. (114)

“Overhead, an enemy plane had been dragging, drumming slowly round in the pool of night, drawing up bursts of gunfire–nosing, pausing, turning, fascinated to the point for its intent. The barrage banged, coughed, retched; in here the lights in the mirrors rocked. Now down a shaft of anticipating silence the bomb swung whistling. With the shock of detonation, still to be heard, four walls of in here yawped in then bellied out; bottles danced on glass; a distortion ran through the view. The detonation dulled off into the cataracting roar of a split building: direct hit, somewhere else.”

Bowen’s language, and in particular her sentence construction, is interesting. At first you wonder whether English is her first language, given how unnatural some sentences sound:

“The restaurant at which they met most often was this morning, he was sorry to tell her, closed.”(115)

Would not that sentence have flowed more naturally with the words “was” and “closed” together, for example

“The restaurant at which they met most often was closed this morning, he was sorry to tell her” or

“The restaurant at which they met most often, he was sorry to tell her, was closed.” Or even

“He was sorry to tell her that the restaurant at which they met most often was closed”

But it is a fair assumption that writers do things like this for a reason. In this case I am sure that the impact this slightly awkward sentence construction had on me, which was to read the sentence twice or more, was deliberate. This technique is intended to keep the reader focussed, preventing them from reading passively. I have a vivid memory of Kingsley Amis doing this in a novel of his which I haven’t read for a long time, but must revisit, ‘The Green Man’. Anthony Burgess does the same thing in one of his Enderby novels when he brilliantly constructs a sentence in which the word “onions” is repeated four times, but which remains syntactically correct. Coming back to ‘The Heat of the Day’ for a moment, Bowen also conveys the hesitancy of her character with this technique.

Probably the weakest, least interesting aspect of the novel is the contrived, unconvincing, plot. Stella Rodney, a middle-aged woman who works for the government, is propositioned by Harrison, a shadowy figure who seems to be in love with her. Harrison tells Stella that her boyfriend/lover, Robert Kelway is spying for Germans. He promises not to report Robert if she becomes his lover. This sordid proposition forms the core of the narrative – Stella cannot decide whether to take Harrison seriously or not, so extraordinary is his proposal. While she thinks it over, we are told in flashback of the first time she met Harrison, at the funeral of a relative who has left his substantial property in Ireland to her son, Roderick, who is now in the Army. Eventually, after a trip to the estate in Ireland, Stella asks Robert about Harrison’s accusations – he of course denies the accusation, and then proposes to her. However, we later find out that the accusation is true – Robert is a German spy, even though he was wounded at Dunkirk. He confesses all to Stella, and in an attempt to escape from her flat falls from the roof and is killed – the novel deliberately leaves it ambiguous as to whether this is an accident or suicide. The novel then quickly draws to a close with an overview of the next few years of the war and a fast forward summary of the lives of the main characters. The subplot involving a working class girl, Louie, is horribly patronizing – I was not sure if Louie was intended as comic relief in contrast to the well bred Mrs Rodney, but the tone of these scenes was unconvincing.

Bowen is a good stylist (for example, this sentence jumped out at me ““Vegetables of the politer kind packed the curves of crescent and the points of stars” (125)), although occasionally her writing is overblown. But the plot is weak – the reasons for Kelway spying for the Germans are unconvincing, and his behaviour when he is exposed – going to his family home for a long and pointless (and possibly intended as comic?) discussion about its sale is bizarre. The elusive Harrison is equally unconvincing. His interest in a relationship with Stella, for which he is prepared to turn a blind eye to Robert’s spying, surely another form of treason, is pursued in a very lacklustre way – having raised the question with her he then leaves her alone for several weeks to mull it over. Bowen seems to recognise this weakness when she writes:

“By the rules of fiction, with which life to be credible must comply, he was as a character “impossible” – each time they met, for instance, he showed no shred or trace of having been continuous since they last met.”

The Vintage classic edition I read this in quotes the Los Angeles Times as describing this novel as “intelligent noir” and that it “fills the reader’s heart with dread”. I thought it was entirely lacking in suspense or menace, but the fact that this is the best quote they could find about the novel probably tells its own story.

Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift, 1726

I’ve written at length in this recent series of posts about the gap between the perception of novels in popular culture, and the books themselves. ‘Gulliver’s Travels‘ has probably suffered the most in this regard, or had the longest journey, in that the coruscating satire has been recast over the years as a children’s book. It is utterly futile to think of this transformation as being either a good or bad thing – it is just what has happened, and there is clearly a children’s book within the pages of this novel. But if it is seen as simply that, then what a shame.

‘Gulliver’s Travels‘ should be a set text for every GCSE student. It should be read by politics, history and literature undergraduates as well. It is a breathtakingly brave polemic. I last read the novel a few years ago, but rereading in recent days I was struck by the vigour of the satire, the ferocity of Swift’s anger. He tears his targets apart in a way that even today is rarely seen, when we think of ourselves as being much more open and challenging, but still pull our punches and avoid saying the unsay-able, steering away from taboo subjects in a way Swift fearlessly refuses to do.

No-one escapes his attention and criticism. The king of Brobdignag, the land of the giants, having heard Gulliver’s naively damning description of his home,says

“I cannot but conclude that the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.” 

I don’t think anyone has ever captured the futility of political discourse more effectively than the paragraph describing the disputes between the Big- and Little-Endians.

“It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty’s grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. The people so highly resented this law, that our histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account; wherein one emperor lost his life, and another his crown. These civil commotions were constantly fomented by the monarchs of Blefuscu; and when they were quelled, the exiles always fled for refuge to that empire. It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end. Many hundred large volumes have been published upon this controversy: but the books of the Big-endians have been long forbidden”

That’s pretty much it, one short paragraph on the topic, but in these lines how much of human folly is portrayed? Political and religious disputes are exposed as the nonsense they are. Gulliver’s Travels is sometimes described as a narrow political satire in which direct parallels between contemporary events and characters and those in the novel are found. This I think places unnecessary constraints on the text – there is a universality to this portrayal of human folly.

If the satire in Lilliput and Brodbignag is relatively benign, the ferocity steps up a notch when Gulliver returns to sea once more (these are a series of separate voyages, between each of which Gulliver returns to England and visits his family, and is then tempted back to sea) and he meets the peoples of Laputa. I have used the phrase “fizzing with ideas” in previous blog entries about some other writers, but never has it been more appropriate – the ideas fly past with extraordinary speed, breathlessly, with little time to consider the wonderful invention and humour before the next is upon us. It’s not all relentless mocking of the absurdities of modern life – the chapters on the immortal men and women are quite haunting, and to this day have given me a different way of thinking about death. Yes, it’s that profound. In a ‘children’s book’.

It is really not until the extraordinary final chapters describing Gulliver’s time in the land of the Houyhnhnms where the  intensity of the satire reaches its full pitch. Ruled by a race of intelligent horses which possess all the virtues man lacks, these chapters principally consist of Gulliver describing England (and Europe) to his master. Simply through this description, and the horse’s occasional observation, the whole of society is damned. Take this description of the law for example:

“Judges… are picked out from the most dexterous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office.”

Or international relations:

is a very kingly, honourable, and frequent practice, when one prince desires the assistance of another, to secure him against an invasion, that the assistant, when he has driven out the invader, should seize on the dominions himself, and kill, imprison, or banish, the prince he came to relieve.

Or finally, and possibly most damningly of all, for a country still priding itself on the expansion of its empire, we have this description of colonialism:

a crew of pirates are driven by a storm they know not whither; at length a boy discovers land from the topmast; they go on shore to rob and plunder, they see a harmless people, are entertained with kindness; they give the country a new name; they take formal possession of it for their king; they set up a rotten plank, or a stone, for a memorial; they murder two or three dozen of the natives, bring away a couple more, by force, for a sample; return home, and get their pardon. Here commences a new dominion acquired with a title by divine right. Ships are sent with the first opportunity; the natives driven out or destroyed; their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free license given to all acts of inhumanity and lust, the earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants: and this execrable crew of butchers, employed in so pious an expedition, is a modern colony, sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous people!”

Again this is just one paragraph, but is there anywhere a better indictment of imperialism?

It’s hardly surprising that this novel was published anonymously at first. If a modern version was published today the author would be vilified and almost certainly prosecuted. But the concept of a modern version of the text is probably nonsense – the universality of Swift’s themes means that this novel is quite timeless.

Just by way of a postscript, we think of 17th and 18th century novels as quite prudish, but that is completely wrong. ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ is surprisingly scatological. Gulliver is one of the few figures in fiction who needs to go to the toilet – in almost all books (and films) this simple universal need is politely ignored. This isn’t just for comic effect, as when he puts out the fire in Lilliput, funny though that is, but also as a part of making Gulliver a believable human character.

Finally, I bring you another delight from Amazon’s one star review selection, commenting on how easily Gulliver seems to recover from the various shipwrecks he endures: “It all seems too good to be true”.