a gallimaufry

Oscar and Lucinda, by Peter Carey

Many many many moons ago, Oscar and Lucinda won What Shall Helen Read Next? and indeed I did start reading it but despite enjoying it for some reason put it down and didn’t pick it up again until last week. Fortunately, and this is testament to the strength of Carey’s writing, it was very easy to get back into, and I have just finished it.

And finished it in a rage! Jenny was not wrong to warn me in her comment to that earlier post. Peter Carey, how could you? If you will go and create intriguing, complex characters with whom the reader falls in love, then you had better have a very good reason for degrading and killing them off, and I refuse to believe that this was necessary to your artistic enterprise here. It’s not that I insist upon happy endings, by no means, but the ending felt rushed, scrappy and suddenly cruel in a novel which until now had been generous, and what happened seemed a betrayal.

The novel chronicles the childhoods, eventual meeting (they do not meet until page 231!) and subsequent parting of the two titular characters, one born in rural Devon, the other in rural Australia, in the nineteenth century. Brought together by a passion for gambling, their great endeavour is to create and ship to the outback a glass church (and they turn this plan into a wager as well), an airy dream made solid, impractical but beautiful, a triumph of belief over practicality. The novel draws together the ways in which life is a game of chance; from religion (‘We must gamble every instant of our allotted span. We must stake everything on the unprovable fact of His existence.’) to love, business to conception, glass-blowing to meeting our future spouse. Gambling gives one the feeling, fleeting, of power and control, of harnessing Fortune to one’s own desires. The end of the novel, in which luck runs out in every way, suggests that this is all a gamble we are destined to lose. We may seem to float along the surface but eventually we will sink. (I found that disappointing.)

Yet still I loved this novel, and I loved it for the characters and for Carey’s writing, which is dry and witty and perfect. He has an amazing talent for juxtaposing elements in a description to bring out their oddness, he studs his prose with precise and unexpected metaphors and he has an ear for the droll in how people speak and behave. I could quote endlessly. Here is how Theophilus, Oscar’s father, sees the boy Oscar: ‘His son was long-necked and delicate. He was light, airy, made from the quills of a bird. He was white and frail. [...] The eyes were so clean and unprotected, like freshly peeled fruit.’ And here is Hugh Stratton’s face: ‘[it] showed, on closer examination, all the fine marks of pain and disappointment that buttered rum could not smooth over’. Here is Theophilus himself: ‘He was a sensualist who believed passionately that he would go to heaven, that heaven outshone any conceivable earthly joy, that it stretched, a silver sheet, across the infinite spaces of eternity.’ And here is Elizabeth, Lucinda’s mother, at her husband’s graveside: ‘But it was anger, not grief, that was her dominant emotion. It lay there like a poacher’s trap ready to snare the unwary.’ I will forgive a lot for writing like this.

what shall helen read? May edition

The sun is shining, the birds are singing and my roses are blooming! In the chicken run, peace and joy (mainly) reign. Daisy and Fluffy now positively like Speckle and no longer positively dislike Frosty; nobody has been chased for a while and languid communal dust baths are a frequent occurrence. Excitingly, Speckle and Frosty have started laying eggs. Their eggs are still quite small, here is one beside one of Fluffy’s productions:

Clara, as you see, is very busy. (Actually, if anyone has some advice on what to do with cats who over-groom, please give it! Her poor tummy is getting quite bald.)

Anyway, it’s definitely time for the May edition of What Shall Helen Read?, and this month we’re travelling back to the 1980s. Here are the candidates:

Oscar and Lucinda, by Peter Carey – a young Australian heiress bets an Anglican vicar that he cannot transport a glass church from Sydney to a remote settlement called Bellingen.

Morality Play, by Barry Unsworth – set in the fourteenth century, a group of travelling players stops in a village and stages a play based on a local murder: the killer has already been found but through the play it becomes clear that the facts don’t fit and that someone else is responsible.

Dictionary of the Khazars, by Milorad Pavić – this is difficult to describe but it consists of three cross-referenced mini-encyclopaedias, each based on one of the Abrahamic religions; in the introduction the author explains there is no chronology and that it is like a mirror, you will get from it what you put into it, for ‘you cannot get more out of the truth than you put into it’.

The Shawl, by Cynthia Ozick – this novella describes the march of three characters to a Nazi concentration camp and their internment there.

What should I read? Have you read any of these?

Beside the Ocean of Time, by George Mackay Brown

Shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize, this was the last novel that George Mackay Brown published before his death. However, it is not exactly a novel, and not exactly a collection of interlinked short stories, it is something very slightly different.

There are eight stories, all centring on the imaginary Orkney island of Norday. In the first four stories, a young boy in the 1930s, Thorfinn, dreams of episodes in the island’s past, often inspired by the history lessons of his bête noir, Mr Simon.

Of all the lazy useless boys who ever went to Norday school, the laziest and most useless was Thorfinn Ragnarsson.

Curled up in his father’s fishing boat, Thorfinn dreams of sailing to Byzantium with Vikings; dozing in the smithy, he fancies himself riding to Bannockburn as a squire; perched on the kirkyard wall while a grave is dug, he imagines the biography of the old man who will presently occupy it; on a school trip to a broch or circular fort, he thinks about the people who might have taken refuge there. But the next story, ‘The Muse’, switches focus slightly; although Thorfinn is entranced by the sight of a yellow-haired girl riding a horse at the beginning of the story and is given her horse at the end, this is a tale about the laird in the hall and the minister in the Manse and the yellow-haired girl in Thorfinn’s present, not one of his daydreams.

Its stitching together of Norday’s past and present continues in the story which follows it, ‘The Press Gang and the Seal Dance’, which lays ominous visits by the Ministry of Defence in Thorfinn’s present beside a tale of how the islanders outwitted a press gang in the early nineteenth-century and a selkie tale which perhaps represents Thorfinn’s claim to an imaginative heritage, one that makes him different from the farmers and fisherman around him. ‘Aerodrome’ describes the annihilation of Norday’s culture, history and way of life as it is turned into an RAF airstrip at the outset of the Second World War; it is a distressing chapter to read. Finally, ‘Fisherman and Croftwoman’ charts Thorfinn’s return to the now uninhabited island, his wartime experiences as a POW and his first literary successes, his possible future.

(George Mackay Brown and his father; photograph taken in c. 1926; found here); according to the caption young George’s clothes were made out of postman’s uniforms)

It is in Stalag 29 that Thorfinn writes his first novel, a ‘romance’ or ‘historical thriller’ about ‘the navigation of the Dnieper by Norsemen in the Dark Ages’ – in other words, the first story in Beside the Ocean of Time. His second novel, another ‘historical thriller’, is ‘about the Scottish War of Independence culminating in the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314’ – the second story in the book. But by the time he has returned to Norday after the war:

He is sick to death now of historical thrillers. He is trying to dredge something rich and strange out of the mythical past of the islands – the selkies who shed their coats on the moon-bleached sands and danced; the trows who live under the green knolls and love above all the music of men, so that they cajole young fiddlers to their courts inside the hill and keep them there for fifty winters; but the young crofter with the fiddle, having drunk from their silver cup, thinks he has been among the roots and sources for half an hour, no more. And so there is a great mystery in this connection between music and death and time and the food that the Earth yields for the nourishment of men...

Through this final story, the book transforms: it becomes not only stories about Thorfinn and his physical life, but also stories by Thorfinn and about his imaginative and literary development, and stories about the essence, the soil and the water and the spirit, of the island of Norday. All of these things are woven together so that the individual stories form a greater whole.

At the beginning of ‘The Press Gang and the Seal Dance’ Mackay Brown lays out his philosophy. It is Christian and ostensibly contrasts our search to ‘garnish’ ourselves with worldly possessions to the quest of our ‘real’ selves, ‘a soul that is seeking life-long for the true treasure, the grail’. He imagines a guardian angel beyond a distant star playing a pipe:

The music goes on and on, unheard for the most part. Through this lifetime of vanity we creep, stumble, march, follow plough and scythe, linger, hirple on a stick, until at last the feet are folded and lie still: but seen through the angel’s eye, it is an immortal spirit that dances from birth to death, all the way, from before the beginning till after the end.

Every dance, every lifetime, is unique, and that infinity of dances from every race and from every era, is of incalculable value, and comprehends the great ceremonial dance of mankind. But the music will not be known in all its glory until it is rounded with silence.

And it is this concept of the individual dance as part of the whole, of the harshness of physical existence illuminated by the dance of the soul, that informs the organisation and meaning of the stories in this book.

Thorfinn is deeply saddened by the destruction of Norday: ‘It should not have ended that way,’ says Thorfinn Ragnarsson. ‘I think the saga of the island can never be told now...’ But this book is the saga of the island, he has found a way to tell it after all. Thorfinn Ragnarsson is not George Mackay Brown but there are clearly parallels with his own biography and experiences, and this book seems a deeply personal expression of island life, personal philosophy and literary calling.

(George Mackay Brown writing, from here)

what shall helen read? April edition

A brief moment of sunshine here in Belgium! Everyone got very excited and rushed into their gardens; the air rang with the sound of lawn mowers and children, and in the evening barbeques were lit and cold beers enjoyed.

I planted some pansies from the market and did battle with weeds; I also washed a chicken bottom (Daisy’s, should you be interested). Clara pranced about with a pigeon’s tail-feather in her mouth, the closest she has ever got to actually catching one and you’d have thought she had slain an army of eagles the way she was carrying on, rushing up to people waving the feather at them and squeaking. She has now left the feather ostentatiously in the middle of the lawn and has been walking past it and then acting surprised and catching it again. I have not spotted the denuded pigeon yet.

 

So, back to ‘what shall helen read?’ The idea behind this reading plan is that every month I dig out a pile of books I’ve had for ages and never read, and you all vote on which one I should read. Then I read it and write about it here. I’ve been working in decades, starting with the 2010s (for which I read Hot Milk by Deborah Levy); last time was the 2000s and I read Andrea Levy’s Small Island.

Somewhat to my surprise this project has been encouraging me to read a lot more of my TBR books, not just the winners. I’ve now read two more of the 2010s novels (After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry and Small Change for Stuart by Lissa Evans: I enjoyed both of them) and one of the 2000s (Half in Love by Justin Cartwright, which was so good that I am keen to read The Song Before it is Sung). On the other hand, Olive Kitteridge is on the charity-shop pile: I have read a little and didn’t feel terribly excited by it, and I am sure that I can find another copy fairly easily should I ever change my mind.

We’ll skip over March, which never happened, ahem, and glide on to April and the 1990s. There are no Levys in this pile, which consists of:

• George Mackay Brown, Beside the Ocean of Time. I actually have no idea why I have never read this as it is exactly my cup of tea: ‘Thorfinn, a crofter’s son living on the remote island of Norday, is a dreamy boy [...] Closing his eyes in the 1930s he dreams of crossing the ‘fish-fraught’ ocean with Viking raiders. Falling asleep to the monotonous tones of a history lesson he finds himself running from the press gang into the arms of a beautiful seal-maiden who longs to return to the sea. War and adventure, the struggles of great men and the everyday toil of the fisherfolk, Thorfinn dreams the sweep of Norday’s history, its life and its inevitable death...’
• John Fuller, The Worm and the Star. According to the blurb, this book ‘pioneers a new literary form: the book composed of very short stories’ which ‘rove, with hurtling changes of perspective, over myth, sex, science fiction, the Middle East, boredom, beauty, grossness, global history, childhood, music and death’. Intriguing! But, it seems, not intriguing enough for me to have read it. Yet.
• Dominique Sigaud, Somewhere in a Desert. This takes place at the end of the Gulf War. ‘In prose of extraordinary clarity and power Dominique Sigaud tells [a] soldier’s story and those of the people who have encountered him in his last hours of life and in the days that followed his death. The mystery and horror of war are revealed through the eyes of this Unknown Soldier.’ I bought my copy from Ipswich Library for 30p, I see; its enthusiastic puffs include one by Beryl Bainbridge but my squeamishness has so far held me back from reading it.
• Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres. I don’t suppose this needs an introduction; it’s Smiley’s Pulitzer-winning re-telling of King Lear. I think I bought it (from a remainder bookshop!) because everyone else told me it was brilliant and not because I actually felt a great urge to read it. But perhaps now is the time to get on with it?
• William Trevor, After Rain. William Trevor was a Big Name in the 1990s; like A Thousand Acres, this book was bought because I felt I ‘ought’ to read it. Also the cover is very pretty and I have always been a fool for a pretty cover.

So, which of these should I read? All of them look good and I feel much more enthused about them than about the 2000s contenders I listed last time.

Small Island, by Andrea Levy

This was my February/2000s ‘What Shall Helen Read?’ novel, and it is now April. Oh dear. To re-cap: this challenge began this year; every month I would list the novels from a different decade (working backwards from the present) which pined unread on my shelves and ask you, dear readers, to vote on which I should read and then write about here. January’s selection, from the 2010s, was in fact a library book which I’d added to my list of unread titles as there weren’t that many of them and I wanted to make the competition more exciting. (But here I should add that I have just finished Sarah Perry’s first novel, After Me Comes the Flood, which I enjoyed. This was one of the runners-up in the January challenge.) What with one book that wasn’t even a TBR and one that’s months late, this isn’t proving the most successful challenge ever in the world of book blogging. Never mind. Perhaps I’ll catch myself up.

Back to February’s choice: Small Island. I note that my parents gave me my copy, a hardback, and it’s been waiting for its moment for about fourteen years. And I’m very glad to have finally read it and to have made the acquaintance of Hortense, Gilbert and Queenie (oh and Bernard too I suppose).

‘This is not chips,’ Gilbert Joseph say to me. ‘Your mummy never tell you how to make chips?’

‘My mother,’ I tell him, ‘taught me to be thankful for the food the Lord provide.’

‘But your mummy not here to eat this. [...] How you don’t know what is a chip?’ he ask me. He pick up the potato with his finger to hold it up to show me. Any fool could tell it would burn him. He drop it again and blow on his hand. I tell him the Englishwoman downstairs assure me this is a chip. His eye is wide awake now. ‘You been talking to Queenie?’

It was she that inform m that a chip is a potato cut up small. Reminding me twice that is must be peeled first. So I cut up little Irish potatoes as instructed. I have only the one little ring to cook on but I place the chips of potato in a pan of water so they might boil.

Narrated by four characters, the main action begins in London in 1948 and ranges back in time, over the previous quarter-century, and in place, from Britain to Jamaica to India. Hortense arrives in post-war London to join her husband, Gilbert, who moved there six months before. Hortense is illegitimate and was brought up by her father’s relations, with an uncertain status in their home – not exactly a servant but not one of the family, either. She is a qualified teacher and I have to say my favourite character in the novel – rigid, literal, ‘proper’ (but not above a bit of backstabbing to marry Gilbert), slightly pretentious and extremely innocent. London in 1948 is quite a shock to her; no less Gilbert, who, far from living the dream, is barely making ends meet in a dilapidated rented bed-sit that Hortense ordinarily wouldn’t keep hens in. Gilbert is also a narrator, a Jamaican who enlisted to serve the Mother Country during the war and who returned to England afterwards in the hope of a better future there than he could have found in Jamaica. His landlady is Queenie, daughter of a butcher, and wife of a bank clerk who has never returned from the war. The last narrator is Bernard, her unsatisfactory and repressed husband, sent off to India to fight the Japs near the Burmese border. He offers what I think of as the ‘official white male’ perspective on things in the novel, particularly the innate superiority of the British and the rightness of their views.

Bernard isn’t really able to see the world as it is because of his assumptions. He expresses pride, for instance, that the British Army never maltreats its prisoners, only pages after a Japanese pilot has been summarily executed. Poor Bernard does not even understand himself and his feelings for Maxi; he certainly doesn’t understand Queenie. The other three narrators, being female and/or black, have had to observe things more accurately. If you are not at the top of the pecking order, you need to be alert to possible threats, aware of what it is appropriate for you to say and do and what not, if you are to get by. They too have their prejudices, but they adapt them more readily.

Levy has chosen to write a novel which focuses on the lives of people who have often been missed from what one might call the main historical narrative of this period of history: the working classes and black Jamaicans. The novel’s structure eschews a straightforward linear structure, circling back from 1948 and returning to it again and again, before circling back again, as if to signal that it’s pushing away from convention. Levy’s characters also circle around the Second World War: the men do no actual fighting, those in Jamaica see no bombs fall, even Queenie and Bernard, cowering in their air raid shelter during the Blitz, are portrayed as the passive victims of Great Men’s foreign policies, with no say or enthusiasm in the matter themselves. Yet the consequences of the war, especially on the British empire, will have an enormous impact on all their lives, long after the novel has finished. Meanwhile, they have to make the best of the situations in which they find themselves, situations in which they have very limited agency. As a woman who wants to escape her family’s butchery business, Queenie has few options beyond marriage. (And the way that she marries Bernard in spite of herself is convincingly delineated.) As a lowly aircrafthand (or erk) in the RAF at the end of the war, Bernard has to follow orders whether he likes them or not. As black Jamaicans, Hortense and Bernard face outrageous racism and limits on their employment opportunities in London that they never had in Kingston. England turns out not to be the Mother Country or the Promised Land; it’s poor and many of its inhabitants despise them. Despite this, by the end of the novel is looking brightest for them, for they have energy and ingenuity.

(Street in Brixton, 1952; fuller caption and source here)

Using four narrators is a risky strategy, and I have to say I felt the novel’s energy and my interest flagged rather with Bernard’s sections; it’s difficult to enjoy spending time with a repressed character riddled with racism and sexism, though Levy does her best to elicit empathy for him (and his viewpoint is thematically and structurally important to the novel). However, Levy has a really remarkable ability to write distinctive voices: open the book at random and read a few sentences and you know instantly whose thoughts you are reading. Her characters are nuanced, mixtures of good and bad qualities. And while we only see through the eyes and words of whichever character is narrating at that moment, Levy brilliantly evokes provincial Jamaica, mid-century Kingston and post-war London so that you can almost taste them. If you haven’t read this yet, don’t leave it for fourteen years.

I carried two portions of fish and chips back to the room for Hortense and me. There she was, sitting on the bed. Her face, even after this time, remained set in an ill-tempered frown. ‘See here, Miss Mucky Foot,’ I said. ‘I have fish and chips for you and me.’ Only her big eyes swivelled to my direction while her arms folded tighter across her chest. I got out two plates, which were neatly stacked in the cupboard. Unwrapping and placing the fish and chips on the plate I tell her, ‘You know what the English do?’ Of course she did not reply but I did not expect her to. ‘They eat this food straight from the newspaper. No plate. Nothing.’ I knew this high-class woman would not be able to keep her face solemn in the presence of such barbarity. Scandalised, she could not stop herself staring at me in disbelief. ‘Yes, from the newspaper! So lesson number one, Miss Mucky Foot. This is a chip.’ I offered the chip to her on a fork. She took it from me and popped it greedy into her mouth. ‘And now lesson number two. Are you listening to me carefully.’ I leaned towards her to whisper the secret. She had her big eye on me, mesmerised as a gossip. ‘Not everything,’ I tell her, ‘not everything the English do is good.’

what shall helen read? February edition

Although it’s cold as witch’s spit here today – I type this wearing woolly hat, gloves, blanket, three pairs of socks and an orange cat – the sun is feebly shining, which is heartening after weeks of grey gloom, and so I have managed to take a photograph of February’s contenders for What Shall Helen Read? This time there were plenty to choose from, so I didn't have to resort to cheating.

I zoomed right in on the books so you can’t see the thick dust or mounds of unattractive papers, articles of clothing (we all dress in the sitting room as our bedrooms are too cold) (that makes us sound a tad destitute but I assure you we aren’t), ugly plants (I feel sorry for them so they linger on, half-dead and misshapen) and Lego bricks.

The books are:

• Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
• Only Revolutions, Mark Z. Danielewski
• The Song Before it is Sung, Justin Cartwright
• Half in Love, Justin Cartwright
• Small Island, Andrea Levy
• Fasting, Feasting, Anita Desai
• The Dark Room, Rachel Seiffert

I was surprised that so many of them are hardbacks; some were presents and some the fruits of remaindering. I was also surprised at how unenthusiastic I feel about them, even the Rachel Seiffert and the Andrea Levy. In fact, the only one that drew me in even a little was Only Revolutions. I am tempted to get rid of them all. However, one of them will be read, according to your votes in the comments. And if you can persuade me to keep any of the others, please do!

Hot Milk, by Deborah Levy

So, this is the novel which you, dear readers, voted that I should read...

I had seen some good reviews of Hot Milk, which is the second of Deborah Levy’s novels to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, so I was very pleased when I found a copy in the English-language section of my local library. It did not disappoint.

The book is narrated by twenty-five-year-old Sofia Papastergiadis, former PhD candidate in anthropology, current waitress and coffee-maker in a West London café, who has accompanied her mother Rose to Almería in a last-ditch attempt to find a cure for Rose’s mysterious partial paralysis. Nestled between the barren hills and the poisoned sea is the clinic of Mr Gómez, built of veined white marble and shaped like a breast. As Rose submits to Gómez’s unorthodox treatments, Sofia ministers to her, swims in the sea and embarks on sexual relationships with Juan in the beach injury hut and Ingrid, the German seamstress.

Very subtly, the novel explores femininity. Sofia (‘wisdom’) perceives her world in terms of symbols, symbols that for the most part she chooses not to pin down with a specific, single interpretation but leave open, to accumulate layers of meaning. (And perhaps she is afraid of misreading them, as she misreads the word Ingrid embroiders on her silk top.) An example is the image of Medusa, enmeshed in ideas about female bodies and what they ‘ought’ and ‘ought not’ to do. Stung by ‘medusa’ jellyfish, Sofia identifies herself several times as a monster, despising her body as failing to match contemporary ideals of slenderness. Ingrid also self-identifies as a monster, perhaps because of what she did to her sister, perhaps because of her desire for Sofia. Sofia, however, usually perceives Ingrid as a hero figure, like Perseus rather than Medusa: Ingrid wears silver sandals laced up her calves, she has a bow and arrow to shoot lizards and is interested in decapitation. This is made very explicit near the end of the novel, when she rides a horse at Sofia, ‘in her helmet and boots. High in the dizzying sky an eagle spread its wings and circled the horse’. Rose is also associated with monstrousness, craving amputation like the beheaded Medusa, like the jellyfish ‘in limbo, like something cut loose’. Sofia experiences that desire of her mother’s to cut off her feet as being a desire to cut herself off from Sofia (‘Her legs are my legs. Her pain is my pain’).

In their different ways, Rose and Sofia are trying to reject what one might call the ideals of womanhood. Sofia destroys some images of females; she crushes a doll (already broken) under the wheel of her car and later hurls a vase to the floor. The vase is a ‘fake’, a copy of an Ancient Greek black figure vase, showing seven slave women fetching water. Its destruction inspires Sofia to visit her father in Greece, meeting him for the first time in fourteen years. It may also be part of her attempt to reject her current rôle as handmaiden to her mother. She does, however, purchase an air-freshener from the market in the shape of a woman with ‘massive belly and heavy breasts’, a form closer to her image of herself.

Rose, meanwhile, is withdrawing from the traditional definition of motherhood. Conventional mothers include Alexandra, the very young second wife of Sofia’s father, who devotes her time to breastfeeding her new baby in an atmosphere of stifling solicitousness, and – bathetically – Jodo the cat, who gives birth to kittens in the breast-shaped clinic. Jodo is also described suckling her kittens. Rose does not want to be nurturing and nourishing in this way any longer. Instead, she reverses things. She demands that her daughter tend to her, and bring her endless glasses of water (in place of milk?), water that is never the right water. The novel is set against the Greek government-debt crisis, and Greece seems to figure as a sort of cultural parental figure. What debts do Sofia, her father and Rose owe each other? Can and should they be repaid?

Sofia is content with this but also not content. She wants a bigger life, but her passivity and diffidence paralyse her. At the novel’s opening the screen of her laptop splinters, which she takes as a metaphor for herself: ‘My laptop has all my life in it and knows more about me than anyone else. So what I am saying is that if it is broken, so am I.’ From breakage may come rebirth: Sofia crushes the doll and smashes the vase, she visits her father, she starts laying plans to escape to the US and continue her PhD. The end of the novel, however, makes it seem unlikely  that she will succeed.

(Deborah Levy, 2013, photographed for the Observer)

on being ill and reading plans

It has been a little quiet around here, and I am very sorry that I haven’t been to many people’s blogs yet to wish them a happy new year. I hope that everyone enjoyed the holidays and has had a wonderful start to 2018.

We spent a really lovely Christmas with my parents and also saw one of my brothers and his family. It was great! Then we returned home to Belgium and I was Struck Down with a lurgy, some sort of ’flu I suppose, and it wasn’t that bad but dragged on for two whole weeks. Now I am practically never ill, perhaps one cold a year, and I’d always thought that being ill might be quite a nice break – one could lie about fragrantly reading, drinking cups of tea and having Profound Thoughts – but it turns out most disappointingly that it isn’t like that at all and – horrors! – often I felt too bad to do anything except doze! What an appalling waste of an opportunity!

(Mister Puss doing an impression of me with ’flu)

Still, thanks to copious amounts of Paracetamol and Diana Wynne Jones novels – how lucky that Father Christmas had bought me a great stack! – I am now recovered. But I don’t have anything interesting to write about and I feel as if 2018 is only now beginning (since getting better I’ve been in a frenzy of exam preparation and sleep). Thus it’s only now that I’ve decided to think a bit about Reading Plans. I don’t usually make these for the very simple reason that they quickly start to feel like duties, which skims off the pleasure, and then I fail at them and feel grumpy and miserable. But I am very tempted by Dolce Bellezza’s readalong of Portrait of a Lady in February.

I am also considering another reading plan, and this is related to my Shelving Madness. I used to keep books I hadn’t read on a shelf apart from the rest of my books. But that shelf grew to two shelves. And then a small bookcase. And then a large bookcase. And then started creeping out across the floor of what I laughingly call my study. So in order to hide my shame, I shelved them among the rest of my books (I do reread a lot, so now I just go and look for whatever I feel like reading). And then a year or so ago I went through all my books and reorganised them; the non-fiction by theme (works well!), the fiction, poetry and plays chronologically (FOOL idea! I nearly had a nervous breakdown over it, it took aaaages and I ended up fudging it quite a bit) although I do like the end result), children’s fiction apart – well, basically scattered through the house on any available shelves or flat surfaces.

To the point: I’m going to read one previously unread novel from one decade every month, working backwards. I’ll start with the twenty-teens this month. And to make it a bit more exciting, I’ll ask you to vote on which one I should read (a revival of the short-lived ‘What Shall Helen Read?’). This will continue until we all get bored or forget.

Without further ado, this month’s list – and this is a bit embarrassing since I have very few unread books from this decade. Perhaps this reflects a more disciplined approach to book-buying in my dotage? I’m going to add a book I’ve borrowed from the library. Yes, I know I’m cheating before I’ve even started, but that’s the sort of person I am.

• Muriel Barbery, The Secret Life of Elves
• Lissa Evans, Small Change for Stuart
• Deborah Levy, Hot Milk
• Sarah Perry, After Me Comes the Flood

So, what shall Helen read? Please vote! I’ll make the decision on Sunday evening.

(Clara)

The Witch of Edmonton, by Thomas Dekker, John Ford and William Rowley

I am shocked and embarrassed to see how much time has passed since I last posted here. Ah well, onwards and upwards, etc. etc. Not much has happened here at Gallimaufry Towers, although the sun has come out and spring has sprung, and in fact that’s no small occurrence really after the rainiest winter I can remember.

The cats have spent recent weeks being humiliated by a blackbird, who steals Mister Puss’s food (Mister Puss can only eat outside and only on the ground, not from a bowl) and dances about the garden in front of Clara, adroitly escaping her clumsy attempts at pouncing and then sitting on a chair and jeering at her. Clara has difficulty catching a leaf on the wind, let alone a sentient being with a desire to escape. It was with some surprise therefore that K, on hearing a commotion in the kitchen yesterday, found her with a magpie in her mouth. Somehow she had (a) caught it and (b) hauled it through the cat flap; she is a small cat and the bird was almost as big as her. Sadly for her, both K and the magpie disapproved of this. K opened the door and the magpie flew away, apparently unharmed. Clara didn’t seem overly troubled and went to toast herself before the gas fire for the next five hours.

Anyway, I have been reading and I have read the second of your choices for What Shall Helen Read?, The Witch of Edmonton. I have also spent an insanely long time writing and rewriting this post. This is such an interesting and odd and creepy play, which exposes the darker side of English everyday life, and I keep writing and rewriting and checking and cutting and then writing on... The result is probably very boring, so if you don’t make it to the end: go and see this play if you have the chance. Or read it yourself!

(Title page from the first printed edition of the play, 1658; found here)

The Witch of Edmonton was first performed in December 1621 and was written by (at least) three men: Thomas Dekker, an older playwright with particular interest in social concerns and in the plight of the oppressed; John Ford, whose earliest work this probably is, who became well known for his depiction of complex psychological states in plays like The Broken Heart and ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and William Rowley, a clown and comic writer who, it would seem, wrote the scenes in this play involving the morris dancers. However, the play wasn’t printed until over thirty years later in 1658. Arthur F. Kinney, the editor of the New Mermaids edition, suspects this is because it dramatised a real witchcraft trial from that same year, 1621 (published as ‘The wonderfull discouerie of ELIZABETH SAWYER a Witch, late of Edmonton, her conuiction and condemnation and Death. Together with the relation of the Diuels accesse to her, and their conference together’, by Henry Goodcole), and this made people uncomfortable.

There are two plots, one invented, the other based on Elizabeth Sawyer’s case. In the first, Frank Thorney, a gentleman’s son, is serving in the household of Sir Arthur Clarington – it was common for the children of the gentry to enter into service in the household of someone of higher social status – when he gets the maid Winifred pregnant. He does the right thing by her and marries her, but enjoins her to secrecy because he knows his father won’t be pleased. He persuades Sir Arthur to settle some money on him, and also to write a letter to his pa Old Thorney stating that Frank has most definitely not married Winifred. Not at all. Then he sets off home. Sir Arthur then tries to convince Winifred to sleep with him once more – it seems that the baby may not be Frank’s after all – but Winifred says that she’s a married woman now and is going to behave herself. Meanwhile, in Edmonton, Frank pacifies his father, who is in a fury because he has indeed heard rumours of an unsuitable marriage, and agrees to marry Susan Carter, daughter of a rich yeoman, thus saving the family fortunes. What could possibly go wrong?

Elizabeth Sawyer lives, like the Thorneys and Carters, in Edmonton, but she occupies a very different social stratum: old, poor and unattractive, she is reviled as a witch and blamed for sick cattle, ailing babies and failing crops. She is abused and beaten by Old Banks for no reason other than that he thinks she’s a witch, and it’s made clear that this often happens to her. Alone and cursing, she is visited by Dog, an evil spirit who tempts her to give her soul to the Devil in exchange for revenge upon those who have treated her so cruelly. Since everyone believes she’s a witch anyway, Elizabeth reasons she has nothing to lose: and she’s willing to destroy herself if it brings her vengeance on those she hates. Unfortunately, it seems that the Devil’s powers are circumscribed and Dog can’t just kill Banks and others like him because he is ‘good’. He can, however, infect crops and livestock and drive Anne Ratcliffe, with whom Elizabeth has had a dispute over a pig, to insanity. How can this story not end happily?

(Title page of Henry Goodcole’s account of Elizabeth Sawyer’s trial and execution, found here)

Several things surprised me about this play. I had just assumed that it would be a grand old Jacobean revenge tragedy in the style of Webster, Chapman, Tourneur et al., but while it explores the corruption in society and the abuse of power, its tone is very different to the earlier plays with their clotted and dramatic imagery of decay, death and poison and their dramatic murders and sexual obsessions. Much of its register is quite plain. It is not concerned with the upper echelons of society – the fantastical dukes, kings and ladies – that the earlier plays interrogated, but the families of a gentleman and a yeoman, the middling sorts, people you might know. And the setting is a very recognisably English one, with nary a foreigner, a cardinal or a vial of poison in sight. Just morris dancers.

In this play, however, the powerful abuse the weak at all levels; Sir Arthur appears kindly but is using Frank and Winifred for his own ends and exploiting Winifred sexually; Old Thorney, obsessed with retaining the family fortune, bullies Frank over his marriage to Susan; everyone is horrible to Elizabeth, at the bottom of the social heap, and right up to the end of the play accuses her of crimes she didn’t commit (Old Carter is convinced that she bewitched Frank into murdering Susan presumably because he was always such a nice man). Preserving social status also means that Frank cannot admit to being married to Winifred and Cuddy Banks cannot reasonably expect to become Katherine Carter’s husband. Social status fixes people’s identities, to the advantage of the higher-class characters, especially Sir Arthur, but also Frank, whose behaviour is always given the best construction by the other characters. It works against Elizabeth, who becomes what her community believes she is, a spiteful witch twisted with hatred. The women – Elizabeth, Susan and Katherine – tend to see through appearances more readily than the men and in fact it’s Katherine and Winifred who bring Frank and Sir Arthur to justice.

Another element that I found unusual in this play was that the avenging outsider, usually a male in the other Jacobean tragedies, is an elderly female in The Witch of Edmonton. By selling her soul to the Devil, and unleashing her anger on the community who have cast her out, Elizabeth chooses no longer to remain a victim of her circumstances; this isn’t an endearing solution and she’s an abrasive and bitter character who tests our sympathy. Equally, Frank, her counterpart in the other plot, commits bigamy and murder because of his clandestine marriage; he has an active conscience – does this intensify or mitigate his crimes? – he repents – or says he does – and Arthur Kinney, who is rather more sympathetic to Frank than I am, thinks that his leaving the murder weapon in his pocket signals a subconscious wish to be caught. The character of Dog, who takes Elizabeth’s dark desires and carries them out, and who touches Frank to incite him during the murder scene, further complicates our response to these two characters. How much agency do they really have?

(Jay Simpson as Dog and Eileen Atkins as Elizabeth Sawyer in a 2014 RSC production of The Witch of Edmonton at the Swan, Stratford; found here)

And then there are those morris dancers. Revenge tragedies often have some sort of masque or dance, perhaps performed by lunatics. Morris dancers, according to Arthur Kinney, were associated with misrule and mayhem in the seventeenth century. In The Witch of Edmonton they appear three times, discussing the casting and props for their performance and cracking silly jokes. In themselves, they seem harmless, but they first enter in response to Elizabeth’s curses and demands for a ‘Familiar’, and their presence always presages Dog, the Devil’s spirit. During their second scene, they decide to include a witch in their dance. One of their members, Cuddy Banks, is slightly involved with Dog; Cuddy is innocent but not entirely innocent and he is lucky that Dog considers him not worth the trouble of corrupting. The morris men’s third and final appearance is at Sir Arthur’s house, where they are to perform: Dog bewitches the fiddle so that it will only play in his hands (paws?) and the dance – and what might a morris dance featuring someone dressed as a witch and with music by the Devil be like? – is interrupted by news of Susan’s murder. The dance thus shows a comforting aspect of rural tradition being torn apart by demonic chaos and could, depending on the production and the choices of the director, reflect back Elizabeth’s story in a different register, like a window onto another reality within the play.

The two last scenes of the play are deeply uncomfortable and exemplify its subtlety. First Sir Arthur receives his punishment, a fine, which neither the Justice nor Old Carter considers remotely adequate for his crimes. Elizabeth is brought onstage before her execution, only for Old Carter to blame her for Frank’s murdering Susan. Even at this late stage she is being accused of crimes she did not commit. Elizabeth is one minute furious and wishing death on all of them, the next repenting, the next resigned to her death. The men around her press her to confess again and again; she denies responsibility for Ann Ratcliffe’s death so they accuse her of bewitching Gammer Washbowl’s sow (!); old prejudices are being rehashed. In contrast, Frank, who enters after she has been led off, is surrounded by grieving well-wishers, including Susan’s father, who weeps for him, and the two men he tried to frame for murder, who are also moved by his noble speeches and self-condemnation. (But talk has been shown to be empty in this play.) Winifred considers her original ‘fault’ of extramarital sex to have been wiped out by her subsequent clandestine marriage. Katherine, still in shock at her sister’s murder, no longer wants to be married but it seems that her father, who has learnt nothing, will compel her. We’re denied both a hero and any sense of catharsis, left instead with the feeling that while the community has been purged of its principal wrongdoers, it hasn’t really solved its fundamental problems or achieved true justice. And Dog is free to travel on to London, where he has plans...

Join friends in sorrow; make of all the best.
Harms past may be lamented; not redressed.

 

Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie

This is one of the books that you kindly voted for me to read in the ‘What Shall Helen Read?’ game. I remember buying my copy from a charity shop in Dovercourt, a town I’ve only ever visited once, so I must have had it a good twelve years or so. There’s a photograph on the back jacket flap of Salman Rushdie looking young and handsome, and tucked inside is the strip of paper which was once wrapped around it: ‘Winner of the 1981 £10,000 BOOKER McCONNELL PRIZE for FICTION’. Time to read it!

(Salman Rushdie in 1981; from here)

Midnight’s Children is a big, brash, noisy book. It chronicles three generations of an Indian family, beginning in 1915, with the narrator’s grandparents in Kashmir, and ending in 1978 in Bombay. The narrator, Saleem Sinai, was born on the stroke of midnight 1947, as India achieved independence; like all 1001 Indian children born within that first hour of freedom, he has a special power. These special Children include a boy who can increase and reduce his size at will; twin sisters who are able to make any man who sees them fall passionately in love with them; a girl whose sharp words inflict physical wounds; a child who changes sex whenever immersed in water. Saleem’s ability is to hear people’s thoughts as if he’s listening to a radio; he can rummage around and find memories from quite long ago, if he cares to, and he discovers that he can act as a sort of parliament for the other Children: in his head, they can all come together and talk.

Of course, this gives lots of scope for allegory; and the career of the Children closely follows that of the new nation state. Saleem, whose head is even shaped like India, plays a (often inadvertent) rôle in major political events; in the Children’s parliament, philosophy is discussed while social and religious backgrounds are unimportant. Gradually, however, things fall apart for the Children as well as their country, riven by individualism, fear and guilt.

Despite the allegory and although magical realism is sprinkled throughout the book, Midnight’s Children remains obstinately earthy; even Saleem’s telepathy is inextricably linked to the stream of snot which pours unceasingly from his enormous nose. There’s plenty of dung, urine, verrucas and blood. The city of Bombay in particular is fizzing with life.

Midnight’s Children is very different from all the other Indian novels and novels set in India I’ve read which preceded it: Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster, Paul Scott, Anita Desai. (M.M. Kaye!) (True, that’s not a lot, and not a lot of Indians.) It’s much messier, more insistent on the physical realities of life and more entwined with the mythologies and even superstitions of the nation. Along with the South American magic realist novelists – Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende – it’s influenced a lot of later English-language novels. Omniscient narrator with a knowing tone? Meta-narrative? Multiple generations? Supernatural powers? All there in Midnight’s Children. It’s like the later A Suitable Boy but on coke.

The trouble is that while I can see its strengths, and I admired Rushdie’s prose, I didn’t enjoy it very much after the first 150 pages. I’m still thinking about why that is, but in the main I just became fatigued. This is a book which really batters you, and it batters you for hundreds of pages. I couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for ever more characters and more bodily fluids after a bit, and I found the narrator’s present-day interpolations increasingly annoying. Some of the characters lack a dimension or two; some of the incidents seem to be just there to serve the allegory. There’s a lot of foreshadowing, which also began to irritate me, and as Saleem himself points out, pretty much everyone he meets dies violently. I’m not a fan of Saul Bellow et al., either; this sort of writing is just not to my taste. And actually, it’s an angry novel, filled with frustration and sorrow at how Indian independence had played out by the late 1970s.

From what other people have said, it’s a Marmite sort of book and you either love it or hate it, no half measures. But without doubt it’s an important book in terms of its place in the development of English literature and so worth anyone’s time. I’m glad to have read it!