Mind Blowing Books

Should everyone read Northanger Abbey?

noreply@blogger.com (Adam) — Mon, 20 Jan 2014 07:00:00 +0000

Northanger Abbey is generally considered to be the weakest of Jane Austen’s novels. Well, not the very weakest – she wrote some ‘juvenilia’ which doesn’t bear talking about, and she didn’t finish a few of her later novels, so we can’t really count those. But there are five ‘major novels’, and this isn’t classed as one of them.

Trashing it

So should you read it? The critical summary on the back of the copy I read, absolutely trashed it. It took the tone of ‘it’s not quite as terrible as everyone says. Well... actually it is, but that’s what makes it so charming’. To understand Northanger Abbey’s diminutive literary reputation, the first place to look is the plot. Being a Jane Austen novel – of course – it’s centres around a girl and boy who fall in love...

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”

Catherine Morland, a naive girl of seventeen, tries to escape the boredom of provincial life, and so goes to live in Bath with some friends of the family. There she meets a guy that she thinks is really rather nice (Henry Tilney), becomes firm friends with his sister and another girl, and a beastly man – who she doesn’t like in nearly the same way – starts to follow her around. After a time, she goes to stay with Henry and his sister in their father’s home – Northanger Abbey. Growing ever closer to Henry – after a few hurdles – they declare their love for each other and are soon married.

So what’s wrong with that? Well critics talk about a lack of structure and coherence. In Jane Austen’s other novels, the plot slots together like a jigsaw, and love only forms between two people when they fit. But in Northanger Abbey, everything feels a bit rammed together. For example, the central love story. Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney don’t seem fated to be together at all. Henry is ironic, witty and intelligent, whilst Catherine is naive, honest, and demure – and completely misunderstands everything he says.

Starship enterprise on warp-drive

Indeed, towards the end, Jane Austen seems to have got quite bored of writing the book. She wraps up all the outstanding details of the plot in scarcely a page – giving just a summary rather than a proper ending. The pace of the plot goes from a gentle canter on a well-fed pony to the Starship enterprise on warp-drive, ignominiously dumping the reader at the end of the book.

So should you read?

So should you read Northanger Abbey? Well, it’s important to say that it doesn’t appear to have lots of hidden wisdom (perhaps it’s too well-hidden). In fact, it seems quite difficult to extract any life lessons from Northanger Abbey at all. The characters, by and large, don’t make tough choices, still less do we see them wrestle with any difficult moral conundra. Catherine is so naive that the personal growth she experiences – allowing her to become a slightly wiser person – is not instructive. The reader remains two or three steps ahead of her at all times.

That said, there are lots of reasons why someone might want to read this book. The overall tone is winning. It has a real youthful feel that gets in and drives it, and an air of springtime, gayness and naïveté. It seems to have been written to be enjoyed with a sense of gleeful optimism. That’s really quite wonderful, and a breathe of fresh-air against a literary milieu of cynicism and jaded done-it-alls. Through Jane Austen’s youngest novel, we experience the world with new eyes, and the pleasure of being a child again, discovering love for the first time.

That said, I think Northanger Abbey might struggle to be called a ‘great’ book. It probably wouldn’t be classed in the top one hundred – or even the top five hundred books – of all time. It’s the kind of book that, if you scrupulously read only the books you simply had to have read, you might miss out and not feel too guilty.

To hell with it

But that would be a shame. Frankly, I think we should fight back against this culture of over analyzing the merit of every book – judging them all by a set of predetermined criteria. So what if the author’s hand is ‘visible’? So what if she omnipotently makes things happen without recourse to the proper sense of flow? And so what if Henry and Catherine aren’t perfectly suited (and end up divorced in a few years)? And, hang it all, so what if Austen finishes the novel rather quickly? Books should be more than a sum of their details, and Northanger Abbey should be judged by how it makes you feel. And that feeling is, quite simply, happiness.

So should you read it? I say yes, and the reason is simple. Because if you don’t – you’d be missing out.

The wisest book of all time? Pilgrim's Progress

noreply@blogger.com (Adam) — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 07:00:00 +0000

'I’m busy, why should I read a blog post about an old book?' you might ask.

Well, Pilgrim’s Way is a classic – no question. One of those ‘must-reads’. The second best book of all time, in fact, according to the Guardian. What if it’s chock full of wisdom and deep insights into life? And what if this post sucks out all that valuable gold-dust – buried deeply inside – and lays it all out nice and snappy to be consumed in four, life-changing minutes?

Here’s a quick run-down of the plot

Christian feels a burden on his back, and, after reading an ancient book, he knows in his heart that he must set off on a journey. His wife and children will not come with him, so he leaves them and goes alone. Soon he meets a friendly man called Evangelical who gives him detailed instructions to get rid of his burden. His pilgrimage starts at a gate. He passes through and straight away is challenged by a hill called Difficult, which he struggles up, and meets a companion called Faithful. After finding the Interpreter who is able to shed a little bit of light on the path, he has many adventures. Christian does battle with a fiendish monster in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, is locked in a castle by a Giant Despair. Eventually he gets to the end of his journey, and finds a river that he must plunge into, trusting himself to the lord.

Later on, Christian’s wife seeing her error in not going with Christian decides to set out in his footsteps. She goes and is protected by one Great Heart as she travels and becomes wiser and more mature. Eventually the day comes for her to be appointed by God, and there the book ends.

Why is it mind-blowing?

Well it is chock full of hidden wisdom. Here are the three key insights:

1) Clever people will disagree with you
Pilgrim’s Progress makes plain that doing anything worthwhile is a difficult journey. And, as Christian finds, life is full of people trying to throw you off your course. Those people will have whole systems of logic in their heads to support their view. As well as whole networks and hierarchies of people who agree with them. In fact, what they say might even make sense – for them. But in order to get what you want, you have to go through these obstacles. The way to do that is not by convincing them, or by compromising on your destination, it’s by sticking to your way: the straight and narrow.

2) People don’t want you to change
Christian’s wife and children cannot see any rationale for his leaving – they think it’s all in his head, and so they stay behind as he sets off. That’s true of life too. The people around you probably don’t want you to go on the journey. They don’t want you to change or leave because they like you as you are. That means if you want to do something different, not only will they not want to come, but they will resent you for leaving. They might even laugh at you, or look down at you for it. But – and this is important – when you succeed people will follow you, just like Christian’s wife eventually does. People like well-worn paths. They might not help you blaze one, but they’re sure to follow once you do.

3) Being a hero is a choice
Ultimately, Pilgrim’s Progress is a chronicle of every hero's journey. A lone man, setting out by himself is tested and pushed to his limits, but he stays true to his mission and, with help, manages to succeed in his goal. Later people follow him. But unlike, say, Odysseus – who was a hero in stature – Christian is a hero because of the choices he makes. He isn’t especially strong, or clever, or bold. He’s just a man who chooses to take a journey to seek what he thinks is right. Being a hero isn’t about who you are, it’s about the choices you make, and the journeys you take. Being a hero is a choice.

Silas Marner (George Eliot)

noreply@blogger.com (Adam) — Wed, 13 Nov 2013 07:00:00 +0000

Silas Marner – a young man, shy and early-wronged – lives an inward life. He works, and weaves, and becomes fixated by the gold he receives in payment. He collects it, piles it it up, and takes it out just to stare at its shimmer. One day, this precious bounty is stolen and, now forced to lead a life free of luster, his world falls apart. Meanwhile a rich aristocrat in his village has secretly married a peasant girl, who has born him a child. But the women dies, and the body and child are found by Silas half-frozen on the side of a road. The aristocrat, unwilling to compromise his reputation, says nothing. Silas takes the child, and finds awakened within himself a deep-rooted compassion, only dormant it seems, not dead, during his period of reclusivity. Silas nurses this young girl, keeps her safe, and – finding her full of living gold – she becomes his redemption. Slowly and surely Silas’ human side is drawn out, but this fragile recovery is threatened by forces far outside of his control....

Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us: there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.”

George Eliot is my favourite writer. Since Middlemarch, Mill on the Floss and Adam Bede are all amongst the best things I’ve ever read, I was likely to come to the conclusion I did: Silas Marner is bloody fantastic.

Spring Water

Most fiction that you read is like wine – rich, delicious, flavourful. George Eliot’s is like water – pure, clean, and essential. She writes about life almost style-lessly; her fiction is a snapshot of real life. But it’s better than that. Her books have the most wonderful – almost mathematical – coherence. The plot seems to be driven entirely by the characters, and these characters are driven by their thoughts, and these thoughts are influenced almost entirely by other events and characters within the world of the novel. It’s a great big sea of causation. I think George Elliot gets too little credit for the simple intellectual difficulty of what’s she achieves. She manages to solve the nth-level, simultaneous equation of causation within the novel, and turns it into a coherent – and riveting – story.

Silas Marner is slightly different – it’s a little parable, a short novel that packs a big punch. It feels almost concentrated. This novella is as stylistically sparse as other of Eliot’s novels – there is no rhetorical flourish, improbable circumstances or unexplained moves. it is as inner-driven as the others. Real characters make real decisions in a world that seems real, yet, somehow, the resulting story is as concentrated as a myth, an allegory, an essential component of human life.

That’s amazing! George Eliot has developed a foundational, archetypal expression of human existence, just by describing a situation that you feel could really happen. Hamlet needs huge drama, huge sweeping emotions - great speeches, betrayal, death. George Eliot simply takes a seemingly random snapshot of life and comes out with a similarly profound result.

Eye of the Tiger

I think there’s hidden wisdom in there too - and it’s pretty coherent. By hoarding gold, Silas Marner is fostering love for something internal – his work, his wealth. Don’t we all hoard things, inside of us? The novel is saying that losing that thing you love – that you feel you rely on – will hurt you badly, but it won’t destroy you, and, perhaps, is is the loss that will make your redemption possible. And, ultimately, that redemption will be found both in giving love to somebody, and allowing yourself to need help. It is found in a focus, not inward on your own pain, but on the world around you.

Silas Marner is a triple distilled story, as pure as mountain melt-water. This is myth making at it’s most sublime. Eliot’s story is full of wisdom, but stylistically clean - it seems to just be a slice of life, imbued with qualities that make it more than real life, more than fiction. It is almost something magical, with a simple trope: the path to saviour is love.

Three Men in a Boat

noreply@blogger.com (Adam) — Wed, 06 Nov 2013 07:00:00 +0000

"I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.”

The Guardian describes Three Men in a Boat as one of the funniest English books ever written. Which is an interesting description for a book that – as evidenced by its title – aspires to nothing more than the gentlest of humour. The plot ingeniously keeps to the same pace as the proverbial boat, a leisurely drift down the Thames. And like that eponymous boat, you could never say it was making slow progress, but only because it decidedly isn’t trying to get anywhere. So put your feet up on the prow, pour yourself a porter or three, and watch the sunlight dance lazily on the riverbank.

The actual plot goes likes this: three lazy hypochondriacs decide to take a trip down the Thames to get a change of air, thinking it will be good for their various catalogue of imaginary ailments. They set-out, and basically nothing really happens to them. This is fiction at its least embellished. Highlights of the book include a struggle to put up a tent, someone falling into the water, and – I’m scraping the hull here – a man drinking lemonade. There was nothing in this book that could be described as a plot, and you’d have to push the boat out for ‘caper’.

“You can never rouse Harris. There is no poetry about Harris- no wild yearning for the unattainable. Harris never "weeps, he knows not why." If Harris's eyes fill with tears, you can bet it is because Harris has been eating raw onions, or has put too much Worcester over his chop.”

On smiling

Yet, even with so much action packed in, this book doesn’t lose touch with its humourous soul. It’s fantastic. It certainly floated my... water-vehicle, and – for a book billed as humorous – it certainly is funny. Sort of. It’s just hard to describe exactly how. It isn’t rolling on the floor funny, or laugh out loud funny, or even ‘hey guess what I just read’ funny. It is the kind of wonderful book that will make you... smile. And not one of those big toothy grins, or wide beamers. It’s more one of those little half-cocked, one-sided knowing smiles that drifts from ‘oh stop it... you’re incorrigible’, to ‘ah, isn’t it nice to be alive’.

It is nice to be be alive, especially when reading this book. Even more wonderfully, I think, I learned precisely nothing from reading it. Not only did I not gain any new knowledge or wisdom, I had the strange feeling that I had actually lost some whilst reading it. Not the important stuff, you understand, but I decidedly felt that some of the less useful neurons swirling around the recesses of my mind had jumped ship. Probably a few phone numbers, some school history, and the price of cheese puffs at Waitrose.

Wot I thunk

This is Jerome K Jerome’s magnum opus. A book that stunningly manages to recreate the experience of sitting in a boat for days on end. The murky water of the Thames, and amber nectar of a warm beer will be evocated for you so strongly that you’ll feel like putting the book down and swigging the imaginary ale until intoxicated. But in doing so, you’ll just be drinking the book in - and hey, rather that than Thames water.

Slaughterhouse Five

noreply@blogger.com (Adam) — Wed, 30 Oct 2013 07:00:00 +0000

I picked up Slaughterhouse 5 and skimmed the synopsis on the back. It told me that the book was about the Dresden bombings in World War II. Sure, I thought, I could read something like that. So I was somewhat surprised when, not long after I had started reading, the protagonist had already travelled back in time to another planet where green aliens – that look like toilet plungers – are telling him that, in the perfect book, ‘there is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects’. To me, that sounds more like the end of the universe than a good read. But Vonnegut ensures that Slaughterhouse 5 meets the standards set by his fictional aliens. And, you know what, it’s great...

Billy has become unhinged in time, finding himself travelling back and forward into various moments of his unfortunate life. As a young, gawky teenager he is sent to fight the Germans in the Second World War. Completely unprepared and unwilling to fight, he promptly gets captured by the Nazis and, as a prisoner of war, is imprisoned in a slaughterhouse in Dresden. Soon after Billy arrives, the city gets destroyed by the Allies in the horrific and now infamous bombing of 1945. He finds it a scarring experience. Later in life, and now back in America, Billy is a successful, married Optician, but unfortunately finds himself the sole survivor of a catastrophic plane crash. To add to the bad luck, he later gets abducted by aliens - the Tralfamadorians - and taken light years away to their planet in the sky. There he lives in a glass hemisphere, and is forced to make love to fellow abductee, and naked movie star, Montana Wildhack.

Time travelling, Aliens and WAR

Vonnegut tells the reader in the first chapter that he has wanted to write a book about the Dresden bombings all his life. In the next breath, though, he claims that there is ‘nothing intelligent to say about a massacre’. He then spends the rest of the book studiously writing around the Dresden bombings. It’s barely mentioned. In fact, the reader is made of aware of the event, and its impact on the world, not by an emotional tear-jerking description, but through the effect it has on just one person’s life – a survivor. Even then, we’re not privy to this survivor’s emotional world. We don’t see him haunted by what he has seen, or crying his guts out to his friends. Instead, we see its effect in the very structure of novel: he simply can’t get away from it. Billy is pulled back and forward through time, always returning to the most banal and brutal moment of his life: the destruction of Dresden.

The time travelling worked for me. Symbolically it packs a punch, and it allows for a plot structure that is nice and fluid. I didn’t quite understand the purpose of the aliens in the same way. What for art thou, little green Tralfamadorians? The aliens do allow an interesting outside perspective on, not just the war, but all other human endeavours. They presented a fatalistic view-point, exposing just how inevitable and meaningless it all is. And the planet, light years away, seems to be representative of Vonnegut's own substantial travellings into the world of science-fiction. Overall, I found it interesting that Billy struggles to get any temporal space from Dresden, but, somehow in distance, he manages to get thousands of light-years away. Billy is slipping around in time, but the aliens tell him that there is no time. Symbolic, cryptic, and green, the Tralfamadorians are a mystery.

Douglas Adams – of all people – provides a good answer to it. In replying to a reader's question about what really happened in one of his books, he replied: ‘The book is a work of fiction. It’s a sequence of words arranged to unfold a story in a reader’s mind... There is no objective real world I am describing, or which I can enter... It doesn’t exist.’ So, with that in mind, perhaps there’s no point studiously trying to understand why the aliens were there at all. Perhaps they just were. Perhaps everything just is. If that sounds a bit like nihilistic fatalism, perhaps it merely echoes the Tralfamadorians' sense of meaning-free timelessness...

The End, My friend

Slaughterhouse 5 isn’t very emotionally engaging. The description of the bombing takes up less than half a page, and there’s no account of any of the characters having a strong reaction to what they’ve seen. I enjoyed the book, and I found the narrative structure novel and fresh. But for a book about war, it didn’t come up and punch me in the guts. Maybe that’s the whole damn point. The meta-lesson is that however big the punch was, it would never be big enough. And, if you weren’t there, you probably don’t really care about it. Perhaps Vonnegut's right, you can’t write anything intelligent about a bombing like Dresden. After all what can you really say, other than that massacres are very horrible and senseless? And we all know that anyway. So it is.

Laura (Vera Caspary)

noreply@blogger.com (Adam) — Wed, 09 Oct 2013 06:00:00 +0000

“In my case, self-absorption is completely justified. I have never discovered any other subject quite so worthy of my attention.”

Laura was written by Vera Caspary, who was also my Dad’s Grandfather’s wife. The story is less well known as a book, and more as a film by Otto Preminger, which was one of the first ever film noir. Actually, perhaps it isn’t well known at all these days, which is why I did a double take when I saw it stocked in Foyles in central London. Within minutes I was at the till, and I had finished reading it within hours and metres from that moment.

I don’t want to give too much of the plot away because it’s a first rate twister, but here’s a little flavour. A glamorous girl is found dead in her apartment, and it sure looks like murder. Mark, a hardboiled cliche of a detective, is called to the scene. He gives it a cynical once over. There ain’t much promising there, and he doubts the leads will amount to a hill of beans. The dead dame’s friend starts sniffing round the place too. He’s a fat thespish author who makes a living writing books about God knows what. Mark takes him to dinner to pump him for information, but doesn’t like the glint in his eye. The things he’ll do for for this damned job, he thinks but for some reason can’t get his mind off the dead girl. She sure was pretty. Sophisticated too from the look of her apartment. Mike begins to feel a strange connection with this once-elegant broad. He shakes his head vigorously, weird stuff like this just doesn’t happen to him. ‘Keep you eyes on the job Mike’ he tells himself. But then things take a turn for the down-right mysterious – and fast – when a girl knocks on the door of the apartment. It’s the last person Mike ever expected to see, and suddenly the case blows wide open. Mike looks at his watch with a sigh, ‘this’ll take some time’, he thinks dolefully ‘and just when the overtime sheet’s been suspended too.’

Hidden Wisdom

Is there any hidden wisdom in there? Not really. Some books are written to be thought about. Or to be written about. Others want to teach you about life, or else make some dull and obvious philosophical point. But some books are completely and unashamedly written to be read. Laura is one of those kind of books, and it’s glorious. I lost four hours to it. The time just went. I was sitting on a bench on the South Bank looking at little pleasure boats and the sunlight gleaming off the Thames. I opened Laura, and four hours later, I looked up. The book was finished, and I was bathed in a milky twilight. The time vanished as comprehensively as if I had been watching a film, or dreaming. I opened the book, got in, had a roller coaster of a ride, got off and took the tube home. And that’s exactly the kind of engagement the book wants: Laura is a good time girl.

Vertigo

Laura struck me as very similar to Hitchcock’s Vertigo - in both there is a similar theme of lust and obsession, and a detective-type character falls for a girl who he thought was dead. The intended victim and the murderer are very similar in both stories. The plots are different, but the structure of both films is nearly the same. They could almost double up for each other in an elaborate murder plot...

The Last Word

Since it was written by a relative, I felt almost a connection with Laura’s eponymous heroine from the beyond the page. It was like she was reaching out to me, and I couldn’t help thinking that Laura was not some dead-press character, but a real living person. Later I discovered that it was only her look-alike that was fictional, and that, in a staggering twist of metafiction, the real Laura was alive and living in Islington, safe from the ravaging occupational dangers of life in a detective story. Safe, but for how long?

Jane Eyre

noreply@blogger.com (Adam) — Wed, 02 Oct 2013 06:00:00 +0000

"What’s your name?"

"Eyre.

Jane Eyre"

And with that, I expected Ms. Eyre to tuck her beretta back inside her gown, before ordering a martini with very specific serving instructions. Because with a bit of training, I think Jane Eyre would make a good 007. She’s clearly got the courage for it, but I’m unclear whether she would find the idea of being a superspy morally repugnant. Of course, scared as I’m to receive even imagined vituperations from Jane Eyre’s eponymous heroine, I’ll refrain from any more action-hero comparisons, for now...

Not having read Jane Eyre felt like a big hole in my life. The kind of all-consuming black hole that leads one to break down weeping in the supermarket before panic buying shredded wheat. I’ve previously read two pieces of fan fiction – the Wide Sargasso Sea (eurgh), and the Eyre Affair (awesome fun) – so I was long overdue to snuggle down on the sofa with Jane Eyre, a bottle of scotch, and some evening primrose oil to calm me down if it all got too much.

Jane Eyre tells the tale of a plain girl, brought up short on love, but long on pluck. After being sent to a tough school - somewhere between Twist and Copperfield in severity - she goes to work as a Governess in a large, and largely abandoned home. One day, the master returns; a severe, crotchety, particular gentleman named Mr. Rochester. He is quickly drawn to Jane, and singles her out as someone he is comfortable talking to. A hop, skip and a tumble later sees Jane and Rochester in love, and, what is more, betrothed to be married. Of course, circumstance gifts them testing times, and the path of their loves runs not smooth. So, can these luck-crossed lovers make it across the desert of despair? Will they endure the outrageous fortunes that hope slings them? The answer is, emphatically, YES, and as Jane so winningly tells us, ‘Reader, I married him’.

Wonderfulness baked in

Buried in this book is a great big dollop of optimism. It’s been alleged that in double blind trials, Jane Eyre fairs somewhere between lithium and barbiturates at helping to cure depression. Unfortunately, no one bothered to try and get legal clearance since, now out of copyright, there’s just no money to be made in its marketisation. Damn you drug companies, you profit seeking fiends!

Anyway, although Jane Eyre has an almost savage facade, much like its main character, the book is 100% heart. Jane isn’t just a woman, she is also a plain, slight Governess, and back then, all of those attributes were seen to diminish her value. Obviously they don’t, and Jane knows it; commanding equality and respect wherever she finds herself. I worried for a while that Rochester seemed to see Jane a bit like a pet or plaything, something to be bossed around. He married ‘below his station’, seemingly purposefully, because he prefered his wife to have ‘pliability’. But in the end, Jane thoroughly owns him - taking care of him, baiting him and in nearly all senses ‘wearing the trousers’.

For me, Jane Eyre was like finding an old World War 1 unexploded bomb under my house. I felt I was looking at something that was once explosive but no longer. I imagine that when it was written, the straight-talking, equality-claiming Jane Eyre was a molotov-cocktail into an age of stuffy, cigar-filled gentleman’s clubs. But these days, it’s a bit toothless. I mean, the idea of Governess marrying a richer man isn’t exactly fall-off-your-chair shocking. So I appreciated the novel’s once-revolutionary nature, and thoroughly enjoyed the story, but I think this fighting book has been transformed by time into a simple society romance. And that’s good and bad. Bad, because the book is less impactful than once it was, but good because society has moulded round it and overall become a much more equal and much fairer place.

Tristram Shandy

noreply@blogger.com (Adam) — Wed, 25 Sep 2013 06:00:00 +0000

For some reason, I didn’t get on with this book. But, unlike with other novels that I’ve read this year, I don’t have any desire to criticise it. Sometimes books annoy me or I think I can see flaws in them, but I didn’t see many flaws in Tristram Shandy. In a way, I wondered whether it was just a bit cleverer than me. Perhaps Tristram Shandy is like the cool kid on the playground and had better things to do than explain why it was so awesome to a loser like me. But whatever the reason, we just weren’t friends.

How I read

I think partly, it comes down to how I read books. My mind tends to focus in on what it thinks is ‘important’. I’ll follow one narrative thread, and make sure I know what’s going on. That means that books with a split narrative can be frustrating to me because my mind wants to zoom in on one set of events.

I also often think about other things whilst I’m reading. My mind will briefly flutter to work, the news or economics (weird, right?). I think it’s a bad habit and I’m trying to improve my focus, but right now it’s the way I read. The question I subconsciously ask when my mind crashes back into the book world is, ‘did I miss anything important?’ If the story is where I expect, I read on. If not, I’ll skim backwards to find out what I missed.

All of this completely conflicts with reading Tristram Shandy. Because it isn’t a split narrative, it’s an exploded one. So I found I would read down the page, think about something else for a second, come back, and ask the question ‘did I miss anything important?’, and the answer would invariably be ‘I don’t know what the hell is going on’. The narrative was always in an utterly different place.

And it conflicted in another sense too. The whole of Tristram Shandy is one big joke. There are scores of pages on how the narrator's father believes bigger noses are a sign of higher intelligence. This goes on and on and on, culminating in a thirty page ‘extract’ from a fictional philosopher telling a story that illustrates this point. So when my mind asked ‘did I miss anything important’, the question always seemed a bit irrelevant - nothing in Tristram Shandy is ‘important’ at all...

Going deeper

I read for lots of reasons, but the main one is to learn things about life, to become wise, to gain knowledge of what makes us human. I think Tristram Shandy offers a more... aesthetic experience. It’s designed to be funny, humorous, and clever. It’s a book to be enjoyed in the moment, rather than giving you anything you can really take away. It’s not deep, it’s not emotional, instead it’s clever, humorous, a hoot.

And I have to confess, I found it quite hard work. I felt like I was expending a lot of energy in forcing my mind to plough through hundreds of pages of light jokes that I didn’t find funny. There was also a lot in there that I just didn’t understand, and I think I missed a lot of the cleverness. There were many references, for example, to things that I had never heard of. Overall, this has been the book that I’ve least enjoyed this year. I hated Wide Sargasso Sea, but it was more of a problem with what it stood for than any lack of reading enjoyment. Tristram Shandy, on the other hand, was a real struggle for me.

The End

Tristram Shandy has been described by the Guardian as the seventh best novel of all time, and was originally thought of as ‘too popular’ to really be a literary success. I loved the concept. It’s a raucous send-up of the idea of a novel, a seminal textbook of metafiction, and imbued with a riotous disregard for form. Frankly though, a lot of the time I felt lost and confused. I blame myself entirely, and I’ll file this under ‘one to read again’.

Frankenstein!

noreply@blogger.com (Adam) — Wed, 18 Sep 2013 06:00:00 +0000

Frankenstein is my second Gothic Horror this year - and I absolutely loved it! Mary Shelley was only 18 when she wrote this novel, but she had astonishing skill and wisdom for one so young.

Dr. Victor Frankenstein spends his nights in the laboratory putting together human parts in a bid to create life. One night, he succeeds and sees a set of ghoulishly-pale eyes open from the newly-formed being lying on his table. The creature escapes, and Dr. Frankenstein is horror-struck at the crime against nature he has surely committed. This feeling increases when he finds his brother has been brutally murdered. In his heart, he fears that the perpetrator is the monster he so foolishly brought into life. Eventually, this being confronts him, and tells Frankenstein that he has spent his short, miserable existence yearning – like all of us – to be loved. Victor filled with dread, denies the creature the friendship he so craves, and the monster, in a fit of hell-bent fury, promises to to wreak a terrible revenge – to smite and destroy everything that Dr. Frankenstein holds dear.

Frankenstein is very different from the popular idea of the halloween monster, daubed in yellow with a bolt sticking out of his neck. The monster is different – and more human – than his namesake today, but the most surprising element of the novel to me was a long section that was strongly reminiscent of Arabian Nights...

On responsibility

Frankenstein has a lot of wisdom in it, for example on morality. Frankenstein’s monster essentially feels that he would be nice if someone showed him love. He then goes on to murder a series of people when he finds that love and compassion is not forthcoming. Of course, this isn’t exactly a good temperament. I think most people would judge that you cannot be described as a good person, if your good actions are conditional on receiving some benefit for yourself. However, the question it raises is, is it possible to do good in the world – to be a good person – if you never receive anything but hatred and disgust in return? If, like Frankenstein’s monster, nothing you can do will stop people hating and fearing you, then your incentive to do good, is practically zero.

Looking at this another way, would we want to say that there should be nothing that can drive you to commit as deeply an immoral act as murder? Even if you have been given no incentive to act well, and, like the monster been given no moral education? Consider this, everything in the monster’s genetic makeup was given to him by his creator, Dr. Frankenstein. And the Dr. gave the creature no moral education, leaving his temperament to be sculpted by the ravages of a wild and feral environment. So who is to blame for the monster’s murders?

It’s tricky to answer that question. If you say the monster, then I think that’s the same as saying people with serious mental illnesses should be held fully responsible for any crimes they commit. If you say Dr. Frankenstein, then you’re also saying that the parents of serial killers should sometimes be incarcerated rather than the killer themselves.

I think the answer to this question is that these two people – Dr. Frankenstein, and his monster – are simply at different points of the causal chain which led to the monster’s crimes. In general, causal chains for any action, but crimes especially, are very long and complicated, and ‘responsibility’ is always just an arbitrary line we chose to draw somewhere on that chain. We always want to be able to point the finger at someone. It’s comforting to have someone to blame, but in reality the causes that lead to any action are both unknowable and unquantifiable. I think the implications of that are astounding. If we can’t identifying who is ‘truly responsible’, then there can be no role for punishment in society. By this I mean we should aim to rehabilitate offenders, and confine people who pose an immediate danger, but not punish them. Put simply, how could we even begin to determine who to punish if the idea of responsibility is grey and murky?

On appearance

The thing I found most striking about Frankenstein is that the monster was shunned by humankind largely because of its appearance. True, it turned out to have a rather evil temperament, but the reader is lead to believe that this could have been avoided if the monster was treated with some humanity. The truth is that appearance still has a stranglehold on our society: it is still completely acceptable to judge people’s value by the way they look. We all do it all the time, but it seeps into the background of our lives and we scarcely notice it.

The last word

Mary Shelley, somehow, came up with an idea for a horror-story that is so strong it almost guaranteed a fantastic book. The implications of someone creating intelligent (yet hideous) life are just incredibly interesting, and from many different angles - moral, psychological, legal etc. Just like Frankenstein’s monster, I think Shelley’s idea developed a life of it’s own, flying out of her head and demanding to be turned into a book. Because whilst the horror story is fun, the idea, the concept, of Frankenstein probes and prods the human condition in completely new and unusual ways. There is a lot of wisdom in there.

Heroes and Villains (Angela Carter)

noreply@blogger.com (Adam) — Wed, 28 Aug 2013 06:00:00 +0000

This for me was a holiday read, and perhaps I didn’t read Angela Carter’s very best work. I’ll say right at the outset, I’m a bit mystified as to what she was trying to do.

In a dystopian future, a young girl called Marianne is brought up in a village shut off from the world. Dissatisfied with the clinical and routine-driven nature of her life, she runs away with a barbarian who lives in the wild outlands. Half-prisoner, she stays captive in his village, where she experiences a kind of sexual awakening with her barbarian king. Eventually she becomes his bride. They live a disgusting life, surrounding by filth, savages and garbage. But Marianne finds that although, in a rebellious bid for freedom, she has broken away from her rigid upbringing, the constructs inside her mind keep them both more imprisoned than any fence ever could.

Reading the plot summary on the back of the book, I thought the book would be some kind of erotic adventure story. I think the synopsis oversells – or at least mis-sells – the novel. There isn’t really any plot. A girl runs away from home, a few random things happen – there’s some sex, some fighting, some cryptic dialogue – and that’s it. There’s no narrative structure, or resolution, and the action all takes place in the language of smoke-filled symbolism. So this isn’t one of those plot books, this is one of those say-something-about-the-world books. And that’s fine. The trouble is, I call bullshit...

Bullshit

Richard Boston writing for the New York Times called Heroes and Villains ‘a fable that discusses the roles of reason and imagination in a civilized society.’ The novel definitely does do that, but what’s important isn’t ‘discussion’, it’s what a novel actually has to say, you know, about real life. My feeling about fiction in general is that too many novels use cryptic and symbolic language to make points that are either simple, obvious or even untrue. Further, that unclear or imprecise writing is actually a technique that is used quite cynically to mask meaning that, if it was spelled-out clearly, no one would be interested in or would be obviously wrong. It’s a shame because the best writers use symbolism not to mask their meaning, but to shed light on difficult subjects, or create complicated, intellectually satisfying mosaics of multiple meanings - Moby Dick, or Ulysses spring to mind as almost symphonic in this regard.

I think I’ve got a good bullshit detector, and – I’m sorry – but I picked up a lot of it in Heroes and Villains. Check out this quote:

“What do you see when you see me?' She asked him, burying her own face in his bosom.

'Do you want the truth?'

She nodded.

'The firing squad.'

'That's not the whole truth. Try again.'

'Insatiability,' he said with some bitterness.

'That's oblique but altogether too simple. Once more,' she insisted. 'One more time.'

He was silent for several minutes.

'The map of a country in which I only exist by virtue of the extravagance of my metaphors.'

'Now you're being too sophisticated. And, besides, what metaphors do we have in common?”

I think that’s completely meaningless. I can acknowledge that the writer might have some ideas about her characters that would make that passage make sense. I can ever construct some in my head. Here’s my try: Why does he see the firing squad? Perhaps because her culture is doomed. And insatiable? As it happens, Marianne isn’t particularly insatiable, but it could mean that her culture is. And 'The map of a country in which I only exist by virtue of the extravagance of my metaphors.' Eek. I don’t understand that at all. Perhaps it’s not about the meaning, but about how the words make you feel...

There are several possible half-meanings in that paragraph, but it’s just not clear enough to understand precisely. And any meaning I can extract from it doesn’t really add much value to my life. For example, our civilisation is insatiable and over-reaching itself, and we need to create the idea of savages to in some way define us (I actually don’t think either of those things are true).

The Last Word

So my view is that Heroes and Villains fails. Just like a pun is only funny if it has two distinct levels of meaning, I think symbolism in a book is only clever if the surface level – the plot, the characters etc – makes sense and is engaging. And secondly, hidden meaning is only worthwhile if the meaning you have to work hard to find is profound, or, at the very least, interesting. To me, Heroes and Villains is a masterwork of style over substance - of nice-sounding sentences over ideas, character and plot. I’ll close with this quote. I like how it sounds a lot - but I also think it illustrates well this books deeply vacuous heart:

“Darkness was made explicit in the altered contours of his face. He was like a work of art, as if created, not begotten, a fantastic dandy of the void whose true nature had been entirely subsumed to the alien and terrible beauty of a rhetorical gesture.”

The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco)

noreply@blogger.com (Adam) — Wed, 21 Aug 2013 06:00:00 +0000

Umberto Eco clearly wanted to write a book about 13th century theology. Luckily that’s not what he wrote, or not just what he wrote. I imagine the conversation with his publisher went something like this:

Eco: I’ve got a great new book concept! The idea is that the hero – instead of being a person – is, instead, medieval papal theology!!

Publisher: Who in God’s name is going to read that?’.

Eco: [looks at his feet, taken a back. Suddenly, an idea flashes into his head.]: Well, there’s murders in it too. A few monks get killed off in an abbey, and then another monk basically Sherlock Holmes – investigates.

Publisher [gives a slow approving nod] Oh yeah, that could work.

And you know what, a phrase swims into my mind after reading it: unbelievable tekkers. Because The Name of the Rose manages to pull off two pretty ace tricks that are rarely found in one book-shaped package – it’s great fun, and it’s rather interesting too.

A few of my friends told me that they didn’t manage to ‘slog’ their way through this book; they intimated that it was dull and literary in a bad kind of way. This doesn’t resonate with me. I found it nothing but unadulterated fun. That said, there are long sections which involve only monks quibbling about arcane theological points. I found those sections fascinating, and Eco – like the best writers – is able to make you interested in something that bored you beforehand. But sometimes these papal asides happen at quite pacey moments in the plot, and I must admit even I had a few moments of ‘Cooomme Onn, just get back to the plot’. But it’s important to remember at these junctures that theology is the real hero, and the plot a mere exciting distraction.

The Name of the Rose is well-written and slick, but that doesn’t detract from the books most important and wonderful characteristic: the whole thing is great big dollop of silly. Somehow though, the author manages to convince the reader that it’s a serious work. And it is, in one sense. But it’s also pure silliness, and pure fun. There are mysteries and sleuthing, and shenanigans and secret night-time missions. The book has everything you would expect from a Sherlock Holmes story story set in a monastery, but somehow Mr. Eco imbues it all with a deep gravitas. It’s almost akin to the magician who pronounces to the audience solemnly ‘Ladies and Gentleman, this trick involves real danger, please stay silent at all times’. And the novel’s denouement – don’t worry, I won’t spoil it – is the silliest of the lot, it had me laughing out loud.

Bullshit

Of course, books always get me thinking about life too. I read this book mostly in the wilds of rural Canada – snow-capped mountains to the left of me, and a giant blue lake to the right. What struck me most – in that carefree place – was that in the 13th century people burnt each other at the stake over spurious theological questions. For example, was Christ poor? The bible doesn’t describe him as owning any possessions, and, since Christians seek to emulate Christ, perhaps the church itself shouldn’t own any possessions. Only one problem – the Catholic Church at the time was incredibly rich and powerful, so accepting the doctrine of Christ’s poverty would entail abandoning it’s eminent position.

So – just like Carrie Bradshaw – that got me to thinking. The history of humans, more or less, is intertwined with the history of bullshit. Ever since we evolved from being a mere squelch of symbiotic slime stagnating on a rock-face, people have been believing in utterly ridiculous things. And partly that’s great, because life is ridiculous and a lot of ‘out-there’ beliefs have changed the world. But there’s also been a lot of genuinely ludicrous beliefs too. Like burning witches, feeding people mercury to cure them, or ten foot lizards. Two hundred years ago people even thought leeches could cure diseases (oh wait...). We all have the propensity to believe in absolutely ridiculous ideas.

But, what’s interesting to me is that this, humans always seem to behave like humans. Whatever wacky beliefs people have, it doesn’t really affect how they behave at all! The reason the Catholic church burnt heretics was simply because they were protecting their power. The theological differences were merely the surface level excuse. And I think that’s often true. All over the world people believe radically different, contradictory things, but mostly they still act with the same motivations as everyone body else.. Some people are nice, some are nasty, but however lofty their beliefs, their motivations are often all too human.

The last word

On reading The Name of the Rose, be prepared. The book will reach into your mind and thoroughly hook you into the plot. It will then drag you through pages and pages of ancient theology. What I’m trying to say is that I came for the medieval detective, murder-solving monk, but I left with the papal politics and the fractious bickering of defunct Christian sects. And for that I have to say, Umberto Eco, well played sir.

Some other interesting reviews

Irrelevant Scribble
meetmetitanium
Eye on Everything
Splendid Labyrinth s
Distracting from the Now

The Prodigy (Hermann Hesse)

noreply@blogger.com (Adam) — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 06:00:00 +0000

I love Hermann Hesse. He’s written some amazing books. The Glass Bead Game, Sidhartha and Steppenwolf are all among my favourites. So it was with joy and anticipation that I picked up The Prodigy (also called Beneath the Wheel).

The Prodigy is one of Hesse’s early efforts, and it’s a bit different. I think as a finished novel, it’s actually quite weak, but it is an interesting read because you can see the seeds of Hesse’s mental development, and in the second half particularly some of the writing is quite wonderful. Hermann Hesse is famous for crisp writing; his novels are almost fabalistic in their abstraction from every day life. His writing is alway simple, alway concise, and the novel-world tends to be a minimal, essential construction of reality. The Prodigy, well... it isn’t like that. The world is recognisably just the past. And although it never really approaches ‘grittiness’, it puts a dulling filter on life – things seem drab, dreary and imbued with a kind of stale, sepia-tone melancholy. The plot is very simple. A gifted boy called Hans works hard and gets into a demanding school. He struggles to keep pace with the academic and abstruse work he is given. Over time his spirit is broken by this string of zestless esoterica, and his once-eager mind starves on a diet that is so unconnected to the rawness and vitality of real life. It’s a powerful message; an ‘indictment of a conventional education’ according to the blurb on the back of the copy I read. Yet I couldn’t help but feel that Hesse created a caricature version of the real world, and exaggerates how beastly it all is. I agree that learning Latin and Greek in order to pour over the texts of Homer line by line sounds epically dull, especially on a hot summers day. Whilst real education isn’t anything like that today, perhaps it was back when Hesse was writing. But even so, is it so terrible? Sure, I think children could benefit more from learning other things, but Hans has specifically chosen to learn this kind of content. He felt pressured, but actually this is mild ‘pressure’ compared to the rest of the stuff ‘real’ life throws at you. All in all, Hesse’s critique feels a bit wet. Children should learn things that make them connected rather than disconnected with the natural world. However, wanting something and then not getting it, or wanting something then realising it’s the wrong thing, are pretty fundamental parts of life. On education The ending annoyed me too. Hans’ death was narratively inevitable as the only way to effectively represent how utterly the school system had failed him. I accept that the novel isn’t literally trying to say that people are at risk of death from a bad education – because in by far the majority of cases they’re not – but perhaps they are at risk of their spirit ‘dying’, or some other metaphorical expression of death. The annoying part is that Hesse completely fails to talk about what schools give their pupils. In general, I think learning is inherently good and enriching. Even if the kid Hans wasn’t cut out for a conventional education, he still learnt skills and knowledge which would have had a beneficial effect on the texture and quality of his experience for the rest of his life. It’s a sacrifice, and, yes, he probably wanted to be outside snogging girls and jumping through mud. But education is supposed to be an investment. You sacrifice a worse time now, in order to have a set of better quality experiences for the rest of your life. On love Hesse comes alive when he starts describing Hans falling in love. It’s lovely writing. The description of Hans’ heart opening is a beautiful thing. I felt my confidence slightly betrayed though. The kid goes to school and has – all told – a terrible time. When he comes into the real world, he immediately finds some of the pleasures that there exist, including the sweetness of first love. It doesn’t last, of course. But I really thought the book was intending to show how real life is a far better teacher than a school. The book would then have been twice as long, and ten times as good. Instead, the child loses his love, gets drunk and then quickly dies. “When a tree is polled, it will sprout new shoots nearer its roots. A soul that is ruined in the bud will frequently return to the springtime of its beginnings and its promise-filled childhood, as though it could discover new hopes there and retie the broken threads of life. The shoots grow rapidly and eagerly, but it is only a sham life that will never be a genuine tree.” Should you read this? Should you read this? I haven’t read everything else by Hesse, but I have read a fair bit. So I think I could take an odds-on gamble that this is below his average output in terms of quality. That being the case, you’re better off picking a random other Hesse and seeing what happens. I guess that seems like I’m answering ‘No’ to the question – and perhaps I am – but only because I’m concerned about best using your time, not because it isn’t a good read. I enjoyed it.

The Good Soldier (Ford Madox Ford)

noreply@blogger.com (Adam) — Wed, 31 Jul 2013 06:00:00 +0000

This might be the saddest story ever!

Our man marries the girl he loves - Florence. She then tells him just after the wedding that she has a heart disease. So he looks after her for years. He cares for her, nurses her, and accepts that they cannot make love because of her condition. The couple meet and make friends with a charming British husband and wife, Edward and Leanora. They have a nice time until one night, our man finds Florence... dead. He sees a bottle of heart medication next to her body, and assumes her heart has killed her. He mourns bitterly.

To his horror, he later finds out that his wife has committed suicide. Further she had been having an affair for ten years with Edward, the British husband, and she killed herself because she realised that Edward had started to love someone else: a young pretty girl called Nancy. Even worse, our man finds out that his wife Florence’s heart problem turns out to be a lie that she told to trap him (what a hussy!)

To make things even sadder, Nancy moves away, and Edward the British Husband slits his own throat in depression. Nancy goes crazy, and our man - who has begun to love her - spends the rest of his days looking after her. But she can’t say a word.

Gripping stuff.

The Good Soldier is a brilliant story. It is also very told in a very clever way. The writer Ford M. Ford builds up the story in layers. Just like toffee ripple ice-cream. The whole thing is like a friend telling you a story next to a hot fire. He’s got a big glass of wine in his hand, and misses bits out, goes back over things, and generally just pulls you into his tale. Like a friend, he forgets things, misses things out, and accidentally tells untruths whilst spilling his wine and commenting on how big and white the moon is. I felt like a friend was crying on my shoulder in a bar. And I wanted to buy him another drink.

What it teaches you about life

Whenever I read a good book, I always want to try and pull out lessons from it. What is it going to teach me about life?

The Good Soldier has lots of lessons.

Number 1. - Bad things happen.

Without getting all Buddhist; suffering is part of life. It is completely unavoidable, even if you’re basically a good person. So how you deal with it is incredibly important. Our man handles it in completely the wrong way.

When he realises his wife has messed him around, he blames himself. And then he repeats his mistakes, but taking care of another invalid who doesn’t love him - Nancy.

The obvious lesson is to learn from your mistakes. But it’s a hard lesson to learn. Beating yourself up for things that have gone wrong - whatever they are - is pointless. But it’s easier than doing things differently. The easy route, is not always the best one. Sometimes, you just have take responsibility and change the thing that you did wrong.

Number 2. - Being a good person, doesn’t mean you do good things.

Edward is a charming British philanderer. He is a really good person. He saves people from drowning. He risks his own life to help others. And he is always friendly. Through and through, he’s a thoroughly decent chap. The best of British.

But he cheats on his wife relentlessly. Perhaps he just loves the world too much.

Psychologists call it the halo effect. If you see one good trait, you will assume someone has others too. We think someone who is warm and friendly, will likely be a better friend.

It’s worth remembering though that good character traits are completely uncorrelated. Someone might seem like a nice guy, but it doesn’t tell you anything about how they’re going to behave.

In fact, no one is a good person. Or a bad person. If we’re going to judge, we should judge actions, not people. And that includes when we judge ourselves.

The last word

Woah. The Good Soldier is sad. Like seriously go-home-and-cry-under-your-duvet-sad. But you know what, at the end, it made me feel pretty good about life. Pretty good about people too. There are lots of bad things in this book, but there is no whining or moaning. Just a man telling a good story. And I like that. It’s a great attitude. If life goes well - great! If life screws you over, then at least you get to tell a good story.

The Odyssey

noreply@blogger.com (Adam) — Wed, 17 Jul 2013 06:00:00 +0000

Homer’s Odyssey only needs one word to describe it: epic. Seriously, this thing is absolutely awesomely, brilliantly epic.

Everyone knows the plot of this book. It was written two and half THOUSAND years ago, and it is ingrained into the fabric our society. References to it are everywhere. The Odyssey is the fountain of all literature, but it's also responsible for huge swathes of the material that our lives are made of. The Odyssey has influenced the stories we tell ourselves, our ideas about who are, and the narratives that shape our lives.

But in case you don't know it, the plot goes as follows. The patient Odysseus, after fighting honourably in the Trojan war, sets out on his journey home. A few things get in the way. When the story opens he is imprisoned by a nymph called Calypso who cruelly forces him to make love to her, beautiful Goddess that she is, for seven long years. With a prodding from another god, he takes leave of this divine temptress, escapes and starts his journey home. As before, things are not smooth and he encounters innumerable setbacks. These are caused by – Yes – another God, Poseidon the earthquake maker, a fearsome foe who seems to have taken against him. En route, a one eyed giant imprisons him a cave, syrens try to tempt him to wreck his ship on the rocks, and he has to make a quick little detour to the land of the dead. Finally he arrives home. Joy! But – oh no! – he finds his house over-run by suitors competing to marry his wife. The forgiving and merciful Odysseus thinks this a bit of a faux pas, so he and his son brutally slaughter them all, leaving just a pile of gory corpses on the floor. His wife, seeing the results of this murderous frenzy, runs to Odysseus, her love renewed, and they cosy up in bed together happy to have some snuggle time at last.

My thoughts

Everything about this book is astonishing. The world it describes is vivid – full of palaces, feasts, gold, gifts, sacking of cities, and men that look like Gods. And it’s full of Gods too from Athene of the flashing eyes, to Poseidon the bringer of earthquakes, and Hermes the giant killer. It’s mythology, obviously - but everything about it is unreal. The world it’s describing never exists. Ancient Greece, while incredibly advanced, was still very primitive. And the time it’s written in doesn’t exist either. Because Homer’s poem was told orally over a span of 500 years, the time periods are all squished together into one timeless epic.

Before I embarked on the journey to read the Odyssey, I thought it would be a difficult read. In my head I pictured long genealogies, perhaps lengthy battle descriptions, and dull sub stories. That couldn't be further from the truth! It turned out to be one of the more enjoyable books I’ve read this year. This book is pure myth, and it’s great fun. I was completely absorbed by the world that it creates, and I was astonished at just how modern it is to.

I found the relationship with the Gods in Homer fascinating. Their impact on human life is so limited. The most common power they exert is to ‘send a following breeze’ behind a ship. That's not really that impressive. Sometimes they will 'close someone’s eyes in sleep'. Thanks, but that kind of happens on it’s own. Even the mighty Poseidon - the earthquake maker - just whips up a few storms. The God’s also physically talk to people, but often take the forms of other people they know when they do this. I love that. For the Greeks, God’s weren’t someone with ‘divine’ powers - they couldn’t ‘answer your prayers’, or do ‘magic’, they simply were the thing that created all the awe-inspiring stuff around us. And that is a kind of magic if you think about it.

It’s also interesting because even though The Odyssey is a myth - and in the world of the myth the Gods are unambiguously real - but everything the Gods do can be explainable without them. Breezes are often following, people often go to sleep and sometimes there are storms. The limits of their power are never explicitly outlined. Athene could presumably just magic Odysseus home.

Somehow the Odyssey feels real. I unquestioningly believe in it, even though I know it is all made up. It feels deeper than made up - like it’s an archetype surging through my mind, or part of the software that my brain runs on.

Should everyone read it?

You know what, everyone has already read it. It's written into our dreams, into our stories, into the very world we have built around us. This epic poem has been squeezed like a lemon, until every last drop of influence has poured out into society. Read it or not, it's already in your head.

But should everyone read the actual thing? Yes, probably - it's great fun!

Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift)

noreply@blogger.com (Adam) — Wed, 10 Jul 2013 06:00:00 +0000

This is one of the best things I have ever read. It is almost a cliche now to describe Gulliver’s Travels as a biting satire, but it is utterly true - and a wonderful one to boot. In a shortened, picture form, Gulliver’s Travels is one of the world’s most popular children’s book so the plot feels familiar and almost nostalgic. Along with rice cakes and marmite sandwiches, reading it took me back to my childhood. Suddenly I was eight again and running around the playground.

The story goes a bit like this. Gulliver leaves his wife and child to go travelling, and from then on has a set of the weirdest, most fantastical adventures ever set to paper. Shortly after leaving, Gulliver shipwrecks and stumbles upon Lilliput, the renowned land of little people that can walk around on his hand. After the ensuing adventures and a journey home, Gulliver embarks on a further bold voyage, but this time his ship flounders on Brobdingnag, a nation of giants where suddenly it is Gulliver who finds himself a little person. Next, after leaving, he finds all sorts of odd peoples – a floating island in the sky, magicians who can conjure the dead – and finally a land of wise and logical horses, the perspicacious Houyhnhnms. Alongside these omnibenevolent nags, he makes a discovery that turns his blood a-chill. Here, he encounters the infamous ‘Yahoos’. A savage, untameable, splenic animal that seems to bear more than a passing resemblance – in looks and habits – to the species of which Gulliver is a committed member: the unhumble human...

It's wonderful

There is just something so special about this book. It might not be the most significant aspect, perhaps, but I even loved the 16th century-style writing style. For example, every proper noun is capitalised, and letters starting with ‘h’ are always preceded with ‘an’: I saw with mine Eyes, an Hundred Savages advancing upon my poar Self. This must have been standard at the time, but it now lends the books a delightful realism. I’m sure it gets edited out of a lot of modern editions, but I think that’s a mistake.

Gulliver’s personality binds the whole thing together like an egg in cake batter. His most striking characteristic is an ostentatious gallantry. Beached on Lilliput, and captured by the little people, he quickly pays tribute and accepts the rule of the tiny Lilliputian king, even though he is no bigger than his face; soon describing him as ‘my gracious majesty’. Ultimately, Gulliver feels entitled – being a British citizen of Her Majesty the Queen – to be treated civilly and with decorum. He expects to be welcomed into the court of every king, and for his needs to be met – food, wine and a new ‘suit of cloaths’ wherever on the globe he finds himself. This entitlement can lead him to be dreadfully naive, at times unaware of clear and present danger.

What makes us human?

Yet what makes the book interesting is how Gulliver sees the world. It is a fascinating sum of contradictions. Gulliver is overtly proud of his country, and acts as an ambassador wherever he goes. But he also embarks on new life-styles with gusto. In three of the places he visits, he settles, stays for years, learns the language and embraces their lifestyle - even though it’s almost the opposite of his own. However, Gulliver thinks of his own society as far more sophisticated and on a ‘higher level’ than any of the civilisations he visits. In fact, nothing gets him questioning his homeland, until he meets the Yahoos....

The Yahoos are a breed of savage humans. Gulliver is repulsed by them because he sees the character of the despicable Yahoo’s mirrored in humans, and the character of the horses as far superior. So, he never quite manages to critique British society and it’s institutions – something that is changeable – but just the human character – which isn’t (especially not en masse).

I think that’s quite significant, and clearly a Swiftian commentary on something. I see it as saying a range of things from a kind of Thatcherite proclamation that society doesn’t exist, to the idea that culture is just the emergent phenomena that arises out of the character’s of the people that live there. I think that’s dead wrong - and actually so would most sociologists today. Institutions are incredibly important, but Gulliver is only concerned with character. I can’t quite tell which side of the fence Swift himself sat on – but since his most vicious critique is on personality traits, I’ll put flag down and say that he got this one wrong. He savagely critiqued humans character - and finds fault with the echos of our animal urges in the way we live, but he didn’t stop to mention how amazing it is that we’ve developed institutions that work well despite all our Yahoo-like greed.

Life Lessons

I think I missed a lot of the satire in the book – especially since I’m not au fait with the subtleties of George I’s court – but I think I got the main point, and it’s exceptionally clever. By creating and describing so many fantastical species – little men, big men, magicians, talking horses – the book is essentially an exercise in frame setting. It is priming us, by poking fun at imaginary beings, to be able to picture ourselves objectively. Gulliver rocks up at Lilliput and finds a bunch of weird little people, but what if he rocked up in Britain, what strange species would he find there? Humans.

Swift want us to take a long look at what we really are. For him it’s obvious. We’re just savages, monkeys, a slave to our urges. And we've painstakingly built a society that pretends we’re not. That’s problematic, because it means we’re literally unaware of how stupid some of our actions are. Once you start looking as Jonathan Swift wanted us to look, everything becomes ridiculous. From living in houses that are so far superfluous to our needs, to border conflicts, to political slanging matches. This is all comes from animalistic, primal urges – which are just stupid. And yet we pretend that there’s a good intelligent reason for everything, that things are the way they are for a reason. As a culture, we do not live rationally. Our selfish, grubbing instincts are built into the very fabric of our society. But, as I mentioned earlier, that’s only half the story. Actually, society is brilliant, amazing, incredible - and it’s a testament to human ingenuity that we’ve managed to design ourselves a system that succeeds not despite, but because of, the character of the human race.

And yet, we can do more. We can continue to strive towards building a better world. To be better, to live better together, and to help those that get left behind. It's not all doom and gloom, but there's no time for complacency either. Let's get cracking...

Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)

noreply@blogger.com (Adam) — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 06:00:00 +0000

Things Fall Apart is a great book. It centres around the mighty Okonkwo. Living in a tribal village in Africa, he made his fame from a young age as a wrestler and a warrior. We see Okonkwo building his wealth through hard grit and taking part in village life in the tradition of the tribe. The village is steeped in ritual, and everything has a way. During a wrestling match which his son is taking part in, Okonkwo accidentally kills a tribesman when his gun misfires. He suffers the punishment he must, and is exiled from his village for seven long years. The time away is hard, and he misses his friends and tribe. Eventually the time passes, and he prepares to reenter the village. But when he does, he finds the tribe completely changed. Now there are missionaries trying to convert the villages to Christianity. Okonkwo finds it all strange and struggles to adapt to this alien presence that is slowly infiltrating his tribe.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

My thoughts

I enjoyed Things Fall Apart very much. Whilst I found some of the descriptions of African tribal rituals a little hard to get my head around, the whole thing was vivid and powerful.

I really enjoy books that take me into a world that I don’t know and teach me all about it. They let me live someone else’s life. But for that to happen, trust is important. Although stories are obviously made up, I have to believe they could happen. And I did believe in Things Fall Apart. I trusted that the descriptions of tribal life, and the emotions felt by the characters, weren’t just flights of fancy, but instead described what living in that world was really like.

The characters are great too. Okonkwo is a fearless warrior, a tiger, and a man. But is he a real man? He has many manly characteristics. He is strong – physically and mentally. He won’t admit weakness, and has few words to say. He is often short tempered, sometimes brutally so, with his family. And he would die for his people, and his village. Okonkwo is an untamed warrior, a fighter, full of self-motivation, and ambition. He thirsts for success and victory. Is he a real man? Okonkwo certainly ticks some of the boxes, but not all of the ones we would expect from a modern man. He isn’t subtle, shrewd or patient. Okonkwo is a man of the past. And, for better or worse, the world is always rushing onwards towards the future. Not only does his village life fall apart as it begins to embrace Christianity. But even the idea of manhood that Okonkwo embodies is becoming outdated. And in the end, he falls apart.

Perhaps in another world, Okonkwo could have been a hero. Things Fall Apart follows a similar structure to some of the classics. Okonkwo could have been an Odysseus or Beowulf. How would any of those greek heros, from Hercules, Achilles, even the tragic Oedipus fair today? They would be living in a world that rejects the very notion of their kind of man – and their kind of hero. In a different time, the godlike Okonkwo could have set the world aflame, as he shot across the sky in spectacular glory!

The final point

Things Fall Apart, but new things are built in the rubble. The process of creative destruction is brutal, and people, villages, identities and whole cultures lie in its colossal wake – a watery grave of things that the world rushed by, impatient to get to the next thing. Our atoms are built from stardust, and our culture is too. It is worth remembering that every single thing in our world – everything that we know and love – we have because other things have died to make room for them. But it’s also worth looking back from time to time and mourning everything we’ve lost.

Jude the Obscure (Thomas Hardy)

noreply@blogger.com (Adam) — Wed, 26 Jun 2013 06:00:00 +0000

Thomas Hardy must have been a little bit of sadist. He spent his life writing books that are fun and easy to read, full of characters that you can’t help caring about. And then he utterly destroys their lives, brutally and completely. Typically they suffer a bellyful of misery and then die. Usually they aren’t even immoral, but good, innocent people who are trying their hardest to get by, until the world destroys them. Jude the Obscure is no exception.

Jude Fawley has big dreams. From a young age, he has looked over at the neighbouring city – Christminster – and fallen in love with its lofty steeples enveloped in mist. Although born in meager circumstances, he dreams of moving there and becoming a scholar in one of its majestic Churches. In this vein, he takes a job as a stonemason, and studies the classics with every free moment he gets. Unfortunately, being a little naive, he falls into the clutches of Arabella – a devious and comely minx – who tricks him into getting married. It’s short-lived though, and they soon separate; prompting Jude to finally move to his beloved Christminster. Unfortunately, in a bitter blow, the city rejects him, and he takes solace at first in booze and then in his cousin Sue. Sue is a breath of fresh air – pretty, moral, intelligent, free-thinking but frigid and slightly eccentric. Soon Jude is fast in love with her, but she is pushed around on every passing zephyr of her moral whim, and that leads her to act rather erratically. At one moment pursuing her heart – and her love for Jude – and the next punishing herself for her own licentiousness. I won’t ruin the ending, but, since it’s a Thomas Hardy, you can be sure that Arabella pops back into the picture, and all the characters’ lives goes to hell in a miserable handbasket.

“You have never loved me as I love you – never – never! Yours is not a passionate heart – your heart does not burn in a flame! You are, upon the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite – not a woman!”

My thoughts

Thomas Hardy has shown with this book that he is a fantastic writer. I often find that he writes books that wantonly tug on your heartstrings. His plots can seem quite crudely put together to try and make you cry. However, I found the first three quarters of Jude superbly subtle. The books gives a delicate treatment of the mental structures that people and communities make for themselves – and the damage they can do. Ultimately though, it seems Hardy can’t help himself, and the story descends into the usual quagmire of heartache. It’s a shame, because the suffering seems quite forced. The last chunk relied on an improbable run of bad luck, and a set of seemingly unrealistic actions by a main character, who suddenly acts capricious and cruel. I believed it all, apart from the doom.

Reading Jude in the 21st century is quite a bizarre experience. The whole of the impetus for the plot – and people’s actions – is something that has so little relevance today. The driving force is the absolute rigidity of the institution of marriage. Marriage was quite different in Hardy’s time: the man was expected to be completely dominant with the women as his property. Not only that, but the precepts of marriage – no divorce allowed, no sex outside marriage – (which a lot of people still believe in today) were so fixed that to break these covenants wasn’t just wrong, it was deeply evil. And evil to the point that communities would happily shun someone who broke them, driving them out of a job and a town. I was awestruck by just how much power there can be in a dead piece of paper.

So people in Hardy’s time let their mental beliefs about marriage have very large and often negative effects on their lives. People boxed themselves up in a set of very restrictive rules to live by. I think by describing this, Hardy gives a very salient demonstration of just how powerful the internal worlds we create for ourselves can be. Make no mistake, in the lives we live today we all have beliefs that are boxing us up; we just don’t know what they are yet.

I liked it

Jude the Obscure is a vivid hymn to internal struggle, to making the most out of the world, and simply trying your hardest to get by. But it’s more than that. It’s a subversive call to take arms against beliefs – and people – that disempower you. It’s a chronicle of the consequences of living a life based on what other people say. Ultimately, this is Hardy shaking the world by the shoulders and crying ‘for God’s sake, think for yourself’. And that’s deeply relevant today. Of course, the story is depressing. But then life is sometimes...

Candide, or Optimism (Voltaire)

noreply@blogger.com (Adam) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 06:00:00 +0000

Oh what a wonderful book! The best possible book in the best possible world!

The story revolves around the unfortunate exploits of a young, thoroughly decent chap called Candide. He lives an idyllic life in a German castle belonging to the Baron Thunder-ten-Tronckh. Candide is much influenced by the teachings of a philosopher, the inimitable Pangloss, who tells him that everything in the world is perfect and happens for a reason. Unfortunately, after kissing the baron’s daughter in a fit of amorousness, Candide is booted out of the castle by the baron, and thereafter falls victim to a terribly calamitous and unfortunate series of events. He is forced into the army, whipped, lashed, beaten, and enslaved. He suffers an earthquake, a ravaging storm, and scores of malicious thugs. He sees his hero Pangloss reduced to a syphilitic invalid, and his love, the Baron’s daughter, raped and disemboweled. He travels the world, but everywhere rejects him until, finally in a turn of fate, he discovers the hidden city of El Dorado; a place that abounds in great riches and where everything really is for the best. But he foolishly decides to leave, and then promptly loses all his riches to a thief. These legion of horrors test Candide’s innate optimism, but whilst he sometimes questions himself, he never abandons his core belief - the Panglossian mantra that everything is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds.

My thoughts

I absolutely loved this book. Perhaps my mental image of 18th century people is unjustly primitive, but I also found it astonishing how open Candide is about sexuality, violence, and, well, the real world. The Victorian’s generated a fair bit of good literature, and I think that skews my impressions of the past. I tend to think of everything before the last century as repressed and puritanical. But it just isn’t so - the Victorian’s, in that regard, were an odd bunch, and many of the books of the past freely discuss ‘the facts of life’. Candide also surprised me with its working knowledge of the globe. For a book written in the 18th century, the narrative trots around the world as much as any James Bond film - even heading to South American countries like Peru. I don’t know why that should surprise me; the Spaniards discovered/invaded/pillaged South America 250 years before, but, in my experience, simply not very much 18th century European literature references Peru, why is that?

Candide reminded me a little of Don Quixote (which I also loved. As a quick aside - I feel that reading 50 of the best books without including Don Quixote to be a little remiss. It’s long been one of my favourites). The main characters in both books are optimists who befall terrible calamities. Don Quixote and Candide both, to a certain extent, live in a world in their head. And the tone of both books is similarly sarcastic and magnificent. Of course, there are many differences too.

Candide is such a joy, and yet there is so much deep thinking in it. The book, as its subtitle suggests, is written on the theme of Optimism. Pangloss is a die-hard optimist with the slogan ‘everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’. In the beginning he clearly has this philosophy simply because everything in his world, in the castle of the Baron Thunder-ten-Tronckh, is pretty perfect, so he extrapolates that everything must be. But then, things turn sour when leaves the castle, contracts syphilis, and gets hanged. Now things aren’t actually ‘best’ for him - in fact, they’re pretty terrible - so his optimism changes to accommodate his original axiomatic belief. Now, either things happen ‘for a reason’ - suffering is necessary to get you to the best place, OR it simply must be worse in all other possible worlds. I think Voltaire is trying to show that everything is not for the best. Because although optimism seems like a positive world-view, it’s actually quite pernicious. It means suffering must be ‘necessary’ or a ‘punishment’ or have some deeper purpose. When it doesn’t. Suffering is simply an unpleasant, ignoble, banality that we have to put up with, sometimes without any reason or cause. And that’s the human condition, it’s what makes us human.

The last word

The most important thing to note about Candide is that it is an absolute delight! The writing style is that of an adventure story, and the pace is incredibly fast moving. It’s a romp around the far-flung places of the globe, and its tone is sarcastic and full of fun. It is just an utterly great read. I think it’s a lot deeper than that too, but it is worth pointing out since the perception of classics is often of dusty, stuffy, tortuous tomes. Candide isn’t - it’s an adventure, a bawdy, funny, fast-moving, global, rip-roaring, dramatic roller-coaster of a book.

Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys)

noreply@blogger.com (Adam) — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 06:00:00 +0000

I hated this book. Which is a shame, because I actually quite enjoyed reading it; I found it thought provoking and evocative. The hatred was insidious, creeping up on me after I had put the book down...

Wide Sargasso Sea tells the story of Antoinette, a girl brought up in colonial Jamaica in the 19^th century. Her family used to own a plantation, but falls into poverty after the death of her drunk, lazy father. They are despised by the Jamaican’s living around them. One day, hostile neighbors storm Antoinette’s house, setting fire to it, and killing her brother. After spending the rest of her childhood in a nunnery, Antoinette marries a man, Mr. Rochester, in an arranged marriage. At first they seem intoxicated with each other, but he hears rumours that Antoinette’s mother was crazy, and fears madness is in her blood too. He becomes distant, capricious and cruel, and this precipitates the very thing he fears; Antoinette’s slide into madness.

This book was written as a prequel to Jayne Eyre. I think that’s a good idea, and the execution is quite clever – but since I haven’t read Jayne Eyre, I can only really judge Wide Sargasso Sea on its own.

“I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.”

Why I hated this book

So why did I hate Wide Sargasso Sea? I think there were four key reasons.

Firstly, I hated how complicated it made life seem. Wide Sargasso Sea suffers from the ‘literary delusion’. Moments in our lives are – fundamentally – fleeting and ephemeral. They are gone in a breath. Literature, on the other hand, writes about a world whose essence is the opposite; sentences in books are permanent and re-readable. I think this creates an inherent tendency for fiction to overstate the complexity, meaning and importance of every day life. A real person might have complicated motives, but they are mostly instinctive, half-formed and transitory. In literature, too often, motives are fully formed, intricate and imbued with a wider symbolic meaning. Wide Sargasso Sea falls dangerously far down this hole. Everything is just so, clinically complicated. I felt like I was wading through treacle.

“I watched her die many times. In my way, not in hers. In sunlight, in shadow, by moonlight, by candlelight. In the long afternoons when the house was empty. Only the sun was there to keep us company. We shut him out. And why not? Very soon she was as eager for what's called loving as I was - more lost and drowned afterwards.”

Secondly, I hated its attitude towards mental health. In Wide Sargasso Sea, mental illness is described in an incredibly imprecise, wishy-washy manner. This book was written in the sixties, and I think its attitude has dated badly. It reminds me of a world of lobotomies, and ‘raving loonies’. The book describes Antoinette acting a bit oddly, but to me seems to lack a real curiosity about anything real that’s going on in her head. What kind of mental illness is she suffering from? What logic is she using to justify her behaviour? How is she trying to cope with it? I understand it is supposed to be symbolic, but it just seems like a shoehorned, generic plot device to bring the drama to a crescendo. Even as symbolism, does it make any sense? A country might be dealing with a conflicting sense of identity, but where does madness come into it?

Thirdly, I hated its attitude towards men. The main male character, Mr. Rochester, acts emotionless, cold and almost pathologically towards Antoinette. Even in the beginning of their relationship, for example, he is described as being overcome with desire for her and fulfilling it ‘without even a caress’. As their relationship progresses, he calls her by the wrong name, stops speaking to her, and eventually sleeps with another girl within Antoinette’s earshot. Since Mr. Rochester narrates large swathes of the book, there is a great opportunity to understand the motivations behind that kind of vindictive behavior and to get inside the male psyche. Except its squandered. Mr. Rochester simply describes himself acting like a bastard without any explanation. To me that expresses an astonishing lack of curiosity as to the motivations of the main character in the book.

Fourthly, I hated its attitude towards women. The plot in summary: a women with a troubled background grows up and marries a man who falls out of love with her because he thinks she’s mad. This causes her to turn mad. Is this great feminism? That could almost be saying ‘women are what men make them’. I don’t think that’s the message the author intended. But Antoinette Crosby is portrayed as a strong, independent women, who has managed to survive an exceptionally tough upbringing. And yet she goes mad because her husband falls out of love with her.

In Fewer Words

The following metaphor might seem below the belt – but I’ll let it stand. Wide Sargasso Sea is written in hazy language. Lots of the action happens in the gaps between sentences. The characters are driven into bizarre actions and illogical feelings for unclear reasons. When you sing in the shower, it sounds great partly because the water obscures your voice and lets your brain imagine it is hearing something operatic. Perhaps Wide Sargasso Sea is great in exactly the same way.

The short stories of Chekov

noreply@blogger.com (Adam) — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 06:00:00 +0000

I read a selection of Chekov’s short stories mostly because it was the last thing on a list of top writer’s favourite books that I had yet to read. Chekov, contrary to popular conception, was a plump, ruddy fellow who enjoyed a good time and a hearty laugh. I always thought him a sickly pale scholar, but not a bit of it.

Chekov is considered one of the world’s best short story writers. His style is utterly compact. The reader travels a long way in a few sentences, and a lot of the action is left ‘off camera’. All of his stories seem to zoom in on something very specific. He writes two different kinds of stories: little comedies that are often a raucous, acerbic criticism of high society, designed to show how ridiculous it all is. And his later ones, which are much more ‘serious’ and tend to have strong morality at their core.

The comedies were my favorite. One of them tells the story of an army corporal who accidently sneezes on a superior. He tries to say sorry, and the superior, with embarrassment, declares there is no need for apologies. The corporal thinks that he is being brushed off because his apology isn’t accepted, so he tries again, and again until he drives the senior official to irritation. Of course, the corporal confuses this for annoyance at the original sneeze, and going home, lays on his bed in complete resignation – and dies.

Another that I enjoyed tells the story of a man being driven home in a carriage on a deserted road. He talks himself into a paranoia that the driver is going to rob him, so he starts trying to make himself seem like a formidable foe. He describes how he has two guns with him and would shoot the driver without a second thought. The driver promptly deserts his carriage and runs off thinking he is being robbed.

My thoughts

Some of Chekov’s stories have the kind of zinging pithiness of Zen Master tales. I didn’t always get the morality or purpose at their core, but I think sometimes that’s the point, to let us glimpse the meaningless of it all. I remember reading a beginner’s philosophy guide when I was a teenager, and it said that ‘meaning is in the mind, not in the world’. And that my blew my mind - things could mean anything then. Chekov did something similar for me.

I really liked Chekov’s stories, but I don’t think that they are up there with the greats of world literature. His stories are very concise little vignettes capturing a piece of information, emotion, or a comedic moment perfectly. But I didn’t find much else other than humor or poignancy. For example, I didn’t see much symbolism, plot, characters, deeper meaning, or fundamental truths about humankind. Perhaps I missed it. His stories are certainly allegorical – and the later ones are deeply moral. However, I found that the truths buried in Chekov’s stories, were actually more easily discovered in the world.

Chekov had great skill at writing; the succinctness of his sentences is fantastic. I can see why other writers would regard him as one of their favourite authors – his work is like a text-book for writers. And I could perhaps let him contend for the title of greatest short-story writer ever. But maybe I just don’t think short stories can ever be very good. You put a lot of work in to understand a new fictional world, but the pay off is never really worth it. I love the idea of short stories, but try as hard as I do – I just don’t love them, the poor little things.

Hamlet

noreply@blogger.com (Adam) — Wed, 29 May 2013 06:00:00 +0000

This play is - of course - brilliant, archetypal, riveting and confounding all at once. On finishing it, I just wanted to read it again in order to pick up on all the things that I had missed. And then, no doubt, again. In fact, I got the feeling that life wouldn’t be too bad if I just listened to a recording of Hamlet on repeat endlessly, forever.

After one parse, there is just so, so much that I missed. But I think I got a lot too. I read an Open University text with a page of explanatory notes on the left of each page of play - that helped.

Hamlet is a play worth thinking about. Unlike with lots of fiction, asking yourself why the characters act the way they do, trying to go beyond the words into the psychology of the characters is very fruitful. There is always a good reason for everything.

The mentality of Hamlet losing his nerve as he yearns to murder the usurping king seem so... human. Whilst reading - and afterwards - I found myself slotting parts of my life in the Shakespearean mold; the narrative helping me to understand the world around me. Much of life is described in this play.

And of course, it’s a tragedy. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that everyone ends up dying in a heap on the floor. The drama builds and builds, and the tension ratchets up until the final explosive scene. I found the play quite claustrophobic. The plot revolves around a tight band of courtiers and kings who become cloistered, feeding off each others contrivances, grievances and dark impulses. There is no light from the outside world to disinfect this rank pit of emotions. Their lives become mentally unhealthy, a steaming cesspool of bubbling murkiness and frustrated desire, that eventually overflows into spectacular and chaotic doom.

My thoughts

I recommend reading Hamlet. I have seen the play on stage twice, watched the film and listened to a radio production. But reading enabled a completely different - and richer - experience. Watching Hamlet as a play allows you to pick up on the context. You can see what’s going on by the expressions and intonation of the actors. It makes the play seem alive.

However, Shakespeare is very densely packed with information. For example take this phrase:

“The dram of evil doth all the noble substance of a doubt to his own scandal”,

If I heard an actor say that, I might understand the emotion behind the speech, but I wouldn't have time to decode the metaphor. To me, it means ‘a little evil in someone makes us doubt all their good qualities - which is to our detriment’.

I think that’s quite profound. If someone is generally nice, and they act nastily one day we might say ‘now I’ve seen what they’re really like’. Too often people are willing to let a small amount of bad behaviour colour an overwhelmingly positive experience of someone. I find Shakespeare full of this kind of deep insight about life, and it’s easy to miss when simply watching a play.

I bravely attempt a criticism

I can’t really critique Shakespeare (I think it’s a reasonable assumption that the play is operating on a deeper level that I am), but if someone forced me to, I could perhaps come up with one thing. I was slightly disappointed with a plot device in the last act. Hamlet is dueling Laertes with swords. Laertes, taking part in a plot developed with the king, has poisoned his sword in order to try and kill Hamlet. Half way through the duel they - somehow! - switch swords, with Hamlet now holding the poisoned one. Hamlet promptly stabs Laertes with the poison tip who (spoiler alert) dies.

Wait a second - during a duel they somehow manage to swap swords?! This seems such a random, unbelievable course of events, almost as if it were just a device to make sure that both characters die. There was an asterisk in the text that I read saying ‘this might seem crude, but actually during live action this could happen very easily in a scuffle’. I’m not too convinced. Quite a crucial outcome of the play hangs on Hamlet and Laertes accidentally switching swords whilst fencing.

The last word

Should everyone read this? God, yes.

Germinal (Émile Zola)

noreply@blogger.com (Adam) — Wed, 22 May 2013 06:00:00 +0000

I asked a French friend about Germinal, by Emile Zola, and he said that since this book is on the French syllabus, it is often thought about with a groan. That’s a shame, because I loved all the books I read in school. For some people, I can imagine that remembering a novel they were forced to read, takes them back to those dusty, classrooms full of youthful boredom. For me, reading always had the opposite effect; novels I read in school let my imagination soar and transported me to distant worlds far away from the a lecturing, hectoring Mrs Gibbs. I thought Germinal was amazing. This book not only paints a vivid, and necessary, picture of poverty, but also provides some interesting challenges to the economic system we live in.

Germinal tells the story of a miner’s strike in 18th century France. Etienne is a poor but bright drifting worker. Impoverished and hungry, he comes across a mining village and falls into a job hewing coal. It’s backbreaking work. The villagers slog underground all day in the dark and the damp, but are barely paid enough to survive. Etienne becomes deeply radicalized by the suffering he sees around him; the capitalist system that allows this to continue must be immoral and corrupt. At the same time, the coalmine bosses are trying to reduce the workers’ pay yet further. The villagers are scared that they simply will not be able to live under these harsh new terms. Etienne, with his staunch political views, is well placed to lead the coalminers into a standoff - a strike. This strike becomes bloody and brutal as the workers starve, and the company’s profits dry up. Anger bubbles and festers, and the standoff becomes a war. This is no longer about simply trying to win a bread-line wage. They want to send the whole system to hell. And at the root of it all is a crazy dream – that all men are equal under the sun.

My thoughts

This book is the perfect antidote to Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. In Atlas Shrugged, unfettered capitalism leads to advancement and beatification of the human race. In Germinal it leads to effective slavery, conflict and suffering. I don’t think Ayn Rand’s was blind to the ‘Germinal’ critique, she just didn’t care. I think she would say that if a man let himself live a miserable existence - in a coalmine or anywhere else - then he was a fool. But the two books are perfect to read together. At times, they almost seem to be in dialogue with each other putting forward arguments and counter-arguments. For example, Atlas Shrugged posits that since it is the capitalist that takes the risk that creates wealth, they deserve the rewards. But Germinal neatly undercuts this by comparing these wealthy bourgeois throwing around a little of their money, whilst the workers stake their lives on the company.

Socialism

Germinal isn’t exactly an advocate for socialism. In fact, the socialist beliefs and believers are exposed throughout as somewhat naïve and all too human. However, it certainly is a shrill voice highlighting rottenness at the core of the capitalist system.

And I think it’s very effective. The descriptions of poverty in the book are vivid and crushing. It’s always worth remembering that we belong to an economic system that can treat people very cruelly. And also that it is in our nature to accept and live with it, rather than to challenge it. The kind of suffering that Germinal describes is still endemic in the world today, and I feel far too – dangerously too – complacent about it. Reading this novel flared up something inside of me, and I found it quite deeply radicalizing. Whatever the cause, and whatever the reason, and however impossible it is to stop – I think it must be a universal declaration that this kind of suffering is wrong.

It is true though, that for those in the West, Germinal’s central point has become less relevant. The story describes how workers might get trapped in horrible working conditions with a wage that is not enough to survive. Today, the legacy of the Union movement has ensured a certain standard of work safety, and we have a minimum wage, both of which largely prevents the kind of situation that Germinal describes.

Perhaps then, Germinal can be seen today as a good argument against socialism. A problem – poor working conditions and lower wagers - had a good solution within the current system. Beyond this, Germinal describes the wider rumblings of socialism - calls to destroy the bosses, uniting all the workers of the world, totalitarianism. But none of this is effectual in the book, and none of it has been effective in real life.

I’d like to make one final moderating point. It’s easy to write a story that focuses on a salient example of human suffering, but it is harder to focus on the things that are not as visible. I’d suggest some things to keep in mind whilst reading. 1) If these miners weren’t employed in a coalmine, they might have been in worse work or unemployed, or dead from starvation. 2) The coal they were producing was powering the industrial revolution. This means a) it was directly improving thousands of peoples lives, powering hospitals, schools and saving lives b) it was a temporary phase the West needed to go through to develop. Billions of people are better off now – and that couldn’t have happened if men didn’t go down coalmines. 3) Worker’s conditions did improve, and worker’s did take a greater share of the profits 4) For most of history nasty jobs were normal, and it is only the capitalist system that has ever liberated people from it.

One more thing

Germinal is a really exciting book that will pull you into a dark and unfamiliar world. Some of the scenes underground, trapped in bowels of this living mine are scarier and more claustrophic than any horror film I’ve seen. But more than that, Germinal is a question, a challenge, and a call to arms to stand-up for the disenfranchised of the world.

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

noreply@blogger.com (Adam) — Wed, 15 May 2013 06:00:00 +0000

Robert Louis Stevenson claimed that he got most of the inspiration for his writing from lucid dreams. Jekyll and Hyde came to him in a nightmare - his wife concerned at his fitful sleeping cries, woke him. Disappointed he replied ‘'Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.'

The book opens with Mr. Utterson, a prosecutor, who is friends with a friendly and scholarly man, Dr Jekyll. He has been hearing from various sources about the dastardly exploits around London of one Mr. Hyde. Hyde, gossip tells, had recently wantonly trampled over a girl in the street. Mr. Utterson is concerned as he knows that Jekyll has some kind of relationship with this fiendish Hyde. In fact, Jekyll has given Hyde unrestricted access to his house to come and goes as he pleases. Fearing his friend is under some dark influence, Utterson makes some enquiries. These become even more urgent when Mr. Hyde is believed to have brutally murdered an MP. Finally, Utterson discovers the truth in a letter from Jekyll. It explains that, with the aid of a ghoulish medical concoction, he has managed to split his personality into a good part and an evil part. However, now having run out of potion, he must remain permanently as the infamous and degenerate Hyde.

My thoughts

This story is phenomenally well known. So much so that the main characters ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ are commonly used to describe anyone whose personality is somewhat changeable. Our cultural knowledge of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is so strong that actually reading the thing feels like going back to your house and finding everything in a slightly different place. There is much less exciting dual personality, good vs. evil, action than you would expect from a book that typifies the genre. Even the title, ‘Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ feels weird and wrong.

Jekyll and Hyde is thought-provoking though. To an extent, living in society necessitates suppressing our basest urges. You could think of it like a clown’s balloon. As we squeeze one part of our personality into an acceptable shape, all that energy just pops up somewhere else. I think it’s also quite familiar to feel a distinct shift between modes. We talk of ‘bottling things up’ and then letting them go, or ‘blowing up’. And we notice this in our friends too. Part of the reason I think Jekyll and Hyde is so well known, is it speaks to the truth of this. People often do seem to have different sides to their personality, and this novella is the archetypal narrative of this.

Stories help us understand the world around us. They give us a structure to events. From religious stories to fairy tales and fables each contains pinches of reality, triple distilled down to its very essence. Jekyll and Hyde, then, describes something quite fundamental in the human experience. I think it was the first story to capture our changeable nature in a way that resonates with the world we live in.

Welcome to the dark side

Whilst Jekyll and Hyde is an exemplar story, I think its morality is quite subversive - and very different - to that of our times. I see it as a deeply and fundamentally a Christian narrative - which is odd because Louis Stevenson rejected Christianity. To me the basic moral takeaway is: don’t dabble with your dark-side, because it will consume you. The plot condensed into one sentence would be: Jekyll releases some of his inner base urges, finds he can’t control them and get stuck as his shadow self.

Some say that, actually, Dr. Jekyll went too far in suppressing his animalistic urges - when he released the valve it came out like an explosion. But I don’t think that really makes sense. Mr. Hyde is far darker than Dr. Jekyll is good. Jekyll is, if anything, a normal member of society, not some bastion of saintliness. He isn’t helping old ladies cross the street or donating his money to orphan children. In fact he dabbles in a dark laboratory dissecting animals, and says that although he tries hard to be pure he continually experiences dark urges. Hyde, on the other hand, is a murderous thug, almost sub-human in his capacity for evil and lack of regard for social norms.

So to me, the story wants to tell us that in every human there is a bottomless pit of evil which can’t be allowed out without devastating consequences. That sounds very evangelical. Taking one more small step of conjecture, it almost seems that Louis Stevenson took on board all of the teachings of Christianity about the nature of humanity, and rejected just the spirituality. By doing so, perhaps he felt forced into taking the pessimistic view that there was then nothing we could do to control the animal inside all of us. Stevenson even appears to have lived a little of the libertine lifestyle too.

By my reading, Jekyll and Hyde isn’t really an exploration of good and evil, it is really just a study of the evil - the animal - inside of us.

The last word

Jekyll and Hyde is a short little book - worth a read if you've got an hour to kill. What more could you ask for? It’s a little gripping Victorian horror that explores the consequences of living a double life, but more importantly it’s a good look at the philosophy of what it is to be human.

Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë)

noreply@blogger.com (Adam) — Wed, 08 May 2013 06:00:00 +0000

"The action takes place in Hell, but the places, I don’t know why, have English names” Jorge Luis Borges

I didn’t know much about Wuthering Heights before I started reading it, but I had a vague hunch that it was some kind of society romance. I've since talked to some of my friends about it, and they all think the same thing. I had also lumped it into one of a huge pile of books in the category ‘maybe I’ll get round to it one day’. I don't know how Wuthering Heights got this kind of dull reputation, but it is utterly misplaced. This novel is full of savage, Gothic horror that is cunningly disguised amongst the routines of provincial banality.

The novel starts with Heathcliff, a boy found on the moors and taken in by a father of a young family. Heathcliffe grows up, favoured by the father but despised by the rest of the family except the daughter, Catherine. The two of them have a deep affinity and go for madcap rambles on the windswept and rainy moors. Catherine marries a bland boy, Edgar, and later dies. But Heathcliff's love lives on, deep as an ocean, bending him into a cruel and brutal revenge of Catherine's husbands family and everyone he knows.

“Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I can not live without my life! I can not live without my soul!”

My thoughts

This novel really is savage. In the first chapter the narrator visits Heathcliff, the novel’s main character. As he walks into the house, dogs attack him and push him to the ground. They ferociously nash at his face and arms. Heathcliff, seeing this, looks on and laughs at the blood streaming from his visitors face. This is shocking stuff. Here I was, starting a Victorian ‘romance’ novel where passions are normally kept hidden and under the table, and, in the first chapter, there is explicit and feral violence. Very quickly, this engendered in me an intense feeling of claustrophobia and unease. I wanted to get out of this devilish house where such human shadows lurk, casually hinting at the darkness inside us all.

Reading Wuthering Heights was quite an uncomfortable experience - Emily Bronte is describing emotions powerful enough to break a human. But I loved the parts where Catherine runs away to the moor. It seemed to me to be representative of the wildness in us all. Stories really give us a narrative structure to understand our own lives - almost like lenses with different tints and perspectives, they hone the glasses through which we see the world. Catherine breaking free, and running away to the wild moorland of moss and brackish pools of water feels to me deeply symbolic. Twisted, troubled child she is, but who wouldn’t follow her onto the freedom of the moor?

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Italo Calvino)

noreply@blogger.com (Adam) — Wed, 01 May 2013 06:00:00 +0000

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller is one of the more imaginative books I have read. Like a car full of clowns, it’s packed full of wackiness just bursting to get out and make you smile.

This book’s hero is you, the reader. The first chapter describes your attempts to get comfortable and concentrate on this new book you’ve just bought. And then, in the second chapter, the novel begins. It seems like an engaging story, perhaps a thriller, a spy story with hints of espionage. You’re hooked. But then - the third chapter explains - there is a printing error and the part of the book you’ve read is just repeated over and over again. Oh no! You go to the bookshop to try and purchase an error-free version. You end up picking up a pretty girl and a new copy which, in the fourth chapter, you begin to read. But it soon becomes clear that this is not the same story at all... You read on anyway. It is about two people who are about to completely switch lives. How intriguing. And there’s a girl involved. She causes the two main characters to get into a dramatic fight. You’re hooked! But the reading experience is frustrated, and - again - it is possible to get no further than the end of the first chapter.

In fact, every even chapter of Winter’s Night is the first chapter of a new novel. And every odd chapter covers the main story-arc that explains why you are starting all these damn books. This story-arc takes you - the hero - on a wild caper around the world, there’s international book smuggling, rouge-translators, censorious dictators and even space for a little bit of a love.

My thoughts

Winter’s Night brought to my mind At Swim Two Birds, Tristram Shandy, Paul Auster, Nabokov, Borges, and the Eyre Affair. I would file this under inter-textual meta-fiction, and I have a bit of a soft-spot for the genre.

That said, I found reading this novel slightly numbing. Every time I got to a new opening chapter, I would sigh, look up and want to put the book down. That’s because it takes a bit of effort to start reading a new book; you have to learn about a new world and a whole new set of characters. And it would be easy to resent that effort, if there wasn’t a return on your investment. And there just isn’t in this book. Ultimately, since the opening chapters don’t ever go anywhere, it felt slightly pointless reading them. I knew that I was going to be left hanging and disappointed, so I didn’t emotionally invest in any of the characters.

That meant that I found ‘a book of first chapters’ a bit of a gimmick. It’s a really neat idea, but it actually got in the way of telling a good story. Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more if Calvino had in some way wrapped up the myriad of stories he started. But I understand that would have defeated the purpose.

I felt the same way about the main character. When I first opened the book, and saw that it was all about ‘you, the reader’, I got a real rush of delight. ‘That’s me!’ I thought. But that feeling wore off pretty quickly. Obviously I wasn’t doing any of the things that the book described, so ‘You’ stopped being ‘me’ and simply became just the name of the book’s main character. Again, it felt slightly gimmicky because, although it’s a brilliant idea, keeping it up for the whole book seemed redundant - and even detrimental - to my enjoyment.

One more thing, the story arc didn’t stick as close as I would have liked to coherence. Great novels can have whacky things happen, and great writing can be written hazily and ambiguously as though looking through a smoke-filled room. But I think Winter’s Night tries to do both of those things in the same novel, and I’m not sure they go. To me, it started to feel like absolutely anything could happen, but it just didn’t matter because none of it was real.

I did like this book. I really did. There was a breathtaking amount of originality in there. And Calvino is clearly a phenomenal writer. Perhaps my reservations just come down to my philosophy of reading. I like books that contain truths about human nature, that deepen my understanding or sharpen my emotions. Calvino offers a more aesthetic enjoyment - reading as pleasure for it’s own sake, not to get anywhere (even to the end of the book) but simply to enjoy the cleverness, and quality of the writing. It’s the kind of pleasure you get from dipping your toes in a cool mountain stream, feeling the water flow gently over them.

If you like this book, I think you will very much like two novels by Flann O’Brien - At Swim Two Birds, and The Third Policeman. To my eyes they were similar - exceedingly well written, and lots of fun - but even more imaginative, inventive(!) and crazy than If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller.

In fewer words

This book is a little bit bonkers, and it’s bursting at the seams with the sizzling crackle of a technicolour imagination. This book isn’t just in 3D - it’s in 7D! Yeah, that doesn’t make any sense. Neither does the book. But it will overwhelm your senses, and come at you from every direction. And the hero of it all, is you.