→ July 16, 2009
→ By

Living & Party Going.

Henry Green’s Loving appears to only be in print in the U.S. in a volume containing two of his other novels, Living and Party Going, and since I enjoyed the first novel I decided to try the other two. (Incidentally, these latter two novels don’t appear to be copyrighted in the U.S., at least not according to the cover page that indicates that Loving is copyrighted in this country.)

Living was Green’s first novel, and was the worst of the three in this volume by a fair margin. The story is, as is typical for Green, thin, revolving around workers in a Birmingham foundry that is poorly managed by its declining owner and that faces upheaval when he dies. The prose, however, is excruciating, because Green chose to omit most definite and indefinite articles, so even strong phrasings become painful to read:

Were tins of pineapple in that shop window and she wondered and languor fell on her like in a mist as when the warm air comes down in cold earth; in images she saw in her heart sun countries, sun, and the infinite ease of warmth.

The closest thing to a central storyline is the secret romance between Lily and Bert, a factory worker who sees no future for himself in Birmingham and decides to elope with Lily and move to Canada. The unraveling of that romance is one of the most absurd ends to a plot that I have ever seen, rivaling Tony Last’s fate in A Handful of Dust.

Party Going, on the other hand, is more conventionally written and, while not classically plotted, at least follows a more defined pattern by showing us a specific block of time for a specific set of characters. Those characters, a group of friends plotting a getaway to the south of France, end up stuck in a railway station and then in its associated hotel when the trains are all delayed indefinitely by fog. Their reactions to various inconveniences (mostly minor) and to the sudden, unexplained illness of the aunt of one member of the party make up the bulk of the action of the novel, although there’s a bit more drama when the crazy girlfriend of one of the characters shows up unannounced as if she was supposed to be on the trip all along.

As bad as Green’s prose was in Living from a readability standpoint, the prose in Party Going is the novel’s greatest strength:

Memory is a winding lane and as she went up it, waving them to follow, the first bend in it hid her from them and she was left to pick her flowers alone. Memory is a winding lane with high banks on which flowers grow and here she wandered in a nostalgic summer evening in deep soundlessness.

Even when he lapses into the modernist style of Woolf or James, he can still craft an image compelling enough to pull the reader through the awkward syntax:

Night was coming up and it came out of the sea. Over harbours, up the river, by factories, bringing lights in windows and lamps on the streets until it met this fog where it lay and poured more darkness in.
Fog burdened with night began to roll into this station striking cold through thin leather up into their feet where in thousands they stood and waited. Coils of it reached down like women’s long hair reached down and caught their throats and veiled here and there what they could see, like lovers’ glances.

Party Going also offers more small humor along the lines of Loving, including some witty dialogue between the characters and other lines demonstrating their lack of self-awareness when trying to treat station workers like servants, while Living was nearly devoid of humor save that of the old-guard managers at the foundry who attempt to stymie the young boss trying to coax changes in the plant’s operations. Green also shifts back and forth deftly between the primary focus on the fatuous upper-class twits at the novel’s center and their beleaguered servants who, by the way, have to wait out the fog in the station while their masters relax in comfort in the hotel.

EDIT: Almost forgot – one thing I did wonder about Party Going, which Green wrote in the late 1930s, was whether the fog represented Nazi Germany, creeping up on an England too wrapped up in itself to notice the impending danger. The fog lifts at the novel’s end, which probably disproves the theory, although I could craft an argument that Green was commenting on the English aristocracy’s reliance on luck, fate, God, or simply on other parties to get it out of trouble.

Next up: The Grapes of Wrath. No, I’ve never read it before.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ July 8, 2009
→ By

Loving.

Henry Green was an unusual man who wrote unusual books, nearly all with one-word titles ending in “-ing.” One of his best-regarded novels, Loving, made the Modern Library 100 (#89) and the TIME 100. It has little plot and can be hard to follow, but the depiction of class differences in World War II Ireland (featuring an English family trying to escape the war and their English and Irish servants) is clever, incisive, and sometimes quite funny. The scattered, snobbish matriarch refers to all butlers as “Raunce,” regardless of their actual names; constantly loses items; and is completely oblivious to the fact that her daughter-in-law is shagging another man under the same roof. The butler who ascends to the title when the previous one dies is a money-grubbing, status-conscious, fatuous man, and is the closest thing the book has to a protagonist. One of the female servants is in love with Raunce; the other seems to have no idea with whom she’s in love, but wants to be in love with someone.

The plot is paper thin; it would be more accurate to say it comprises several subplots, including a lost or stolen sapphire ring, the romance between Raunce and Edith, and stories like the daughter-in-law’s affair that are almost background noise behind the nonstop dialogue among the servants. Green’s writing style is peculiar, with abrupt transitions from subject to subject and speaker to speaker and a cavalier attitude towards punctuation:

‘Now me lad she wants that glove and don’t forget.’
‘What glove?’
‘The old gardening glove Edith went birds’-nesting with,’ Raunce replied. ‘Holy Moses look at the clock,’ he went on, ‘ten to three and me not on me bed. Come on look slippy.’ He whipped out the decanter while Bert provided those tumblers that had not yet been dried. ‘God rest his soul,’ Raunce added in a different tone of voice then carried on,
‘Wet glasses? Where was you brought up?’

And the setting and subtle humor are reminiscent of Waugh and Wodehouse, two of my favorite authors, although I found Green’s prose a bit offputting until I got used to it.

Next in my queue is Green’s first novel, Living. For more on Green, this review of a biography of Green offers quite a bit of detail on his life and writing career.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , ,
→ April 13, 2009
→ By

The Thirty-Nine Steps.

I’m in the midst of the wakes/funeral after a death in my wife’s family, so my moderation of comments and responses to them may be sporadic and arbitrary for the next few days.

The blog post on Borchering and Washington is up on the draft blog. I think video of Washington will be up tomorrow.

John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps is on the Guardian 100 and served as the inspiration for the excellent early Hitchcock film of the same name, although Hitchcock, as was his wont, rewrote a good chunk of the plot, including the meaning of the title phrase, so if you’ve seen the film much of the book will still be new to you. It’s a straight-up spy story with an emphasis on action: The protagonist finds himself privy to an international plot and by the start of the second chapter is on the lam from both the authorities and the nefarious plotters seeking to destabilize Europe and spark a world war.

The book runs a brief 106 pages and the narrator is in almost constant motion; when he’s not on the move, he’s hiding or planning his next move or both. The double pursuit ups the stakes and almost guarantees that he’ll be in danger, but also increases the need for him to engage in some serious social engineering to find food and shelter as he dances around Scotland trying to evade his pursuers.

I’m not sure how it landed on a list of the greatest novels of all time – it’s good, but it’s just a spy/adventure novel and doesn’t even have the distinction of being the first work in that genre (Erskine Childers’ lone novel, The Riddle of the Sands, holds that honor). It’s a good airplane read or just the solution for a dreary day, as an unnamed man quoted in the book’s introduction put it: “It was one of those days when the only thing to do was read John Buchan.”

Next up: Nonfiction – William Easterley’s The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ March 8, 2009
→ By

A Simple Story.

This has nothing to do with the book, but this Guardian review of six new flavors of Walker’s potato chips is pretty funny.

Anyway, the title of Elizabeth Inchbald’s 1790 novel A Simple Story is, one assumes intentionally, ironic, as the story is not simple, and isn’t even a story; it is, in fact, two stories in four volumes, the first two of which constituted a first draft of the novel that was never published. The first part is a somewhat classic if oddly set romance of the period, mixing serious material with witty banter, but the second part is a dramatic statement on social mores of the day, especially those that pertained to women’s roles and treatment.

The two halves of the novel do read like separate books, joined only by the common male lead, Mr. Dorriforth. The first half tells of the frustrated romance between Dorriforth and his ward, the orphaned Miss Milner, an intelligent, witty girl whose lack of any real education leaves her somewhat ill-prepared for the world of manners and rules into which she is thrust. The dialogue in this first half (Miss Milner: “As my guardian, I certainly did obey him; and I could obey him as a husband; but as a lover I will not.”) is clever and unusually quick for a novel of that time, but I didn’t find the story that compelling; if Inchbald had published those two volumes alone as a novel, the title might have fit better but the book would have been unlikely to meet with commercial success.

The second half is set sixteen years after their ill-fated marriage; the now Lady Elmwood and her daughter, Matilda, have been cast out of the manor, and Lord Elmwood (Dorriforth) refuses to so much as see his daughter because of his ire at his wife. The barely-contained – and sometimes uncontained – rage of Dorriforth burns the pages, while Inchbald tells a second story of male/female relations in late 18th-century England, casting the male as the villain without making him evil or one-dimensional. The subservient positions in which women are placed and the roles their upbringings played in placing them there are openly questioned, themes that have lost most of their relevance but were probably topical at the time the book was published.

Inchbald is perhaps better known today for writing the play, Lovers’ Vows, performed by Fanny Price and her wacko relations in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, which makes A Simple Story interesting for its likely influence on Austen and perhaps the Brontë sisters. The witty dialogue between Miss Milner and Dorriforth in the first part is reminiscent of Austen’s wittier works like Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, while Lord Elmwood seems a clear prototype for the dark, brooding male protagonists in Jane Eyre and (more strongly) in Wuthering Heights. On the other hand, if you’ve read Austen and either Brontë and didn’t care for them, I can’t see you enjoying A Simple Story either.

Next up: Henry Miller’s, um, profane Tropic of Cancer.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ February 18, 2009
→ By

Eyeless in Gaza.

I’ve been sitting on a writeup of Eyeless in Gaza for a week-plus because I’m not sure how to sum it up. It’s a strange book with one clever literary device but an odious protagonist and a philosophical vein that, frankly, bored me.

I’ve read two other Huxley books – the dystopian classic Brave New World and the social satire Antic Hay – but Eyeless bears no resemblance to either work. The protagonist, Anthony Beavis – no, no sign of Butthead, sorry – is a morally rudderless libertine who lost his mother at an early age and was raised by an emotionally distant father who rebounded into a second marriage. He goes to college where he befriends a shy, religious boy named Brian, only to betray him a few years later by seducing his intended. Some years later, Anthony has an existential crisis while trying to write a “sociological” book that is more of a philosophy of life.

The clever device was the weaving of multiple timelines together without destroying the feel of the narrative. You know from early in the book, for example, that Brian is dead, because it’s revealed in the latest timeline, but because Huxley has chopped up his story into four or five timelines and cycles among them as they converge towards the book’s end, the how and why comes out in stages. It’s not the only book to use this method of telling a story, but the separation among storylines is more severe than in any other book I can remember, I don’t believe I’ve read an earlier book that used this device.

Beavis, however, is indeed a butthead. His betrayal of Brian is really just the icing on the cake, although it certainly colors one’s opinion of him to know that he betrayed his best friend and in possibly the only genuinely good person in the book. Everyone else is rotten and/or broken, and when one character threw another overboard or under the bus, I just greeted it with a shrug.

Eyeless in Gaza is part of the Bloomsbury 100, but that seems like a questionable call given the more enduring influence and popularity of Brave New World; in fact, Eyeless seems to be out of print in the U.S.

—

I’m scheduled to be on the FAN 590 in Toronto on Wednesday at 6:05 pm, and we appear to be on for a 1 pm Klawchat on Thursday.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ December 29, 2008
→ By

Summer Lightning.

“Have you ever tasted a mint julep, Beach?”
“Not to my recollection, sir.”
“Oh, you’d remember all right if you had. Insidious things. They creep up to you like a baby sister and slide their little hands into yours and the next thing you know the Judge is telling you to pay the clerk of the court fifty dollars.”

I’ve waxed poetic about the joys of P.G. Wodehouse before, but I think I’m due to push those of you who haven’t dipped into one of the greatest comic writers in the history of the printed word to do so. I’ve actually started to change my opinion on Wodehouse; after years of seeing the Jeeves/Wooster series as his masterworks, I’m coming around to the Blandings Castle series as the funnier books.

Summer Lightning is the third novel in the Blandings series (although there are some short stories set in between the second book, Leave it to Psmith, and this one), although they don’t really have to be read in sequence. It might be the funniest one of the six I’ve read, because it includes all of the key characters – the Efficient Baxter, Lady Constance, Galahad Threepwood, and, of course, the Empress of Blandings – and provides enough other plot strands to move the story beyond the typical Wodehouse framework of two couples whose engagements are blocked by the poor financial prospects of the would-be groom and an eventual misunderstanding that causes one party to break it off.

The Jeeves/Wooster novels and stories are brilliant, but the Blandings Castle series’ ensemble cast gives more opportunities for humor and also avoids overtaxing characters that might seem a little thinly drawn if given too much stage time. In addition, the presence of a true villain in Lady Constance Keeble, who disapproves of every match, despises her brother Galahad and looks down on her other brother Lord Emsworth, gives the Blandings novels more narrative greed than the typical Jeeves story, where the biggest question is usually how Jeeves intends to extract Wooster from impending nuptials, although Roderick Spode and the pilfered cow creamer do stand as counterexamples.

Next up: As many of you have begged me to do, I’ve started Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ December 7, 2008
→ By

The Way of All Flesh.

Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh was #12 on the Modern Library 100 (a cheat, since it was written before 1900 but published posthumously) and made the Bloomsbury 100. I don’t usually give up on books, but I’m setting this one aside, at least for now, after making it through less than 15% of the book.

I’ve got two major problems with the novel. One is the sentences, which are positively Proustian (despite coming years before Proustian sentences existed) and meander between dependent and independent clauses that made me dizzy and, worse, disinterested. But the bigger problem for me was Butler’s creation of a central character for whom he has nothing but a deep, pathological loathing. George Pontifex is a weak, insipid man, barely capable of an independent thought, much less an independent decision, and Butler obviously hates him. George’s father, Theobald, is apparently a stand-in for Butler’s own father, so while I guess it’s OK to work out your daddy issues in novel form, the combination of the two characters makes the book start out at the top of a downward spiral, and 40-odd pages in I was still descending. I guess I should never say never – I did return to Tess of the D’Urbervilles 15 years after putting it down after half a chapter – but it ain’t likely.

Instead I’ll start Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool on the flight to Vegas.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ December 5, 2008
→ By

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

If books were players, I’d probably grade them out on just three tools, plot, prose, and characters (“personalities” if you want to keep on the alliterative tip). The plot must be credible, tight, and interesting, providing the “narrative greed” to which I often refer, that desire to know what happens next (or last) that keeps you moving through the novel. The prose can’t get in the way, at the least; the dialogue must be believable, the sentence structures can’t impede your comprehension of the topic, and if there’s room for clever turns of phrase or literary devices like metaphors, so much the better. There should be at least one character with whom the reader can connect; whether or not that’s the protagonist isn’t a big issue, but I need some sort of empathetic connection with one of the major characters for the book to hold my interest. For example, if the main character is an asshole, he’d better be a funny one, or I’m checking out before Chapter 3.

I rarely run across books that would earn scores of 80 across the board. The Master and Margarita is an obvious one. The Harry Potter books are probably 80s in plot and characters, although even I (a defender of Rowling’s prose) would have a hard time pushing that score above 60. To Kill a Mockingbird is a three-80s book, as are Emma and Tender is the Night (Fitzgerald’s writing might be the definition of 80 prose). At risk of standing accused of slapping high grades on a book too quickly – the literary equivalent of one-looking a player – I’ll add Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: A Novel to the list.

In the book, author Susanna Clarke has given us two compelling characters, the magicians of the book’s title, the conservative, brilliant, condescendingly paternalistic Mr. Norrell, and the exuberant, handsome, and wild Jonathan Strange, who becomes Mr. Norrell’s tutor and later his rival. Both are richly drawn, with complex personal philosophies of magic and magical ethics, and, in Strange’s case, a marriage to help flesh out his character even further. Clarke is deft at imbuing even her secondary characters with deep colors and rounded edges to make them more real, yet never floods the book with so many personages that the core story gets lost in descriptive language.

The prose is very Victorian-Brit lit, with shades of Austen (remarked upon by most reviewers of the book, it seems) but also the gothic novelists of the time, such as Radcliffe and Brontë. Although the book has its share of laugh-out-loud moments, Clarke’s prose is suffused with dry wit throughout, and she melds it with strong descriptive prose, including countless brilliant images to evoke scenes in the reader’s mind:

She did not rise at their entrance, nor make any sign that she had noticed them at all. But perhaps she did not hear them. For though the room was silent, the silence of half a hundred cats is a peculiar thing, like fifty individual silences all piled one on top of another.

If any of Jonathan Strange‘s grades was to fall below 80, it would be the book’s plot, and perhaps that is the inevitable consequence of the book’s length (1003 pages in mass-market paperback) and lengthy gestation period (Clarke wrote it over a period of ten years). The story does meander, and many digressions appear to be just that – digressions into character histories or side stories that don’t necessarily advance the plot. Clarke did employ a clever solution, using extensive footnotes to sequester some of her stories from the history of English magic from the body text, helping to speed the plough, and to be fair many seeming digressions end up tying into the main plot once the book heads into its final inning. Clarke’s use of the hoary “prophecy” plot device did exceed expectations both because of how she resolved it and the way she unfolded it in stages, almost giving us a coarse outline for the second half of the novel. If the plot doesn’t get the highest possible score, it couldn’t get lower than a 70; I flew through what is probably the second-longest novel I’ve ever read, and that doesn’t happen if the plot isn’t fantastic.
I wonder how the book will be perceived by the academic community in time – as simply a well-written work of popular fiction, capitalizing on the recent mania for all things magical as long as it’s not too far into fantasy-nerd territory; or as a thoughtful, clever story of two finely-developed characters, meditating on the natures of friendship and on morality, with a fair quantity of nature-based symbolism for deconstructionist-leaning graduate students to analyze to the nth degree for college theses and dissertations with ultimate audiences numbering in the low single digits. I’d like to think that it’s the latter, but there’s a sort of Nichols’ Law at work in literary academe, where the more popular and accessible a contemporary work is, the less it is esteemed by denizens of the ivory tower.

Next up: Back to the TIME 100 with Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird (Kosinski, Jerzy).

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ October 19, 2008
→ By

Decline and Fall.

I read lots of novels, mostly ones that are considered by someone to have great literary merit. I find that I enjoy a significant number of these novels, and have discovered many that ended up on the Klaw 100 because I stepped out of my comfort zone and read a book I didn’t expect to like, or had never heard of, or thought too long. But there is no doubt that I’d be perfectly happy spending all of my time reading books like Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. Of course, the problem is that even the entire catalogues of Waugh and Wodehouse and Fforde and Amis wouldn’t get me past a year, so I’ve got to spread them out a bit – usually saving them for bad travel days where I need the distraction.

Decline and Fall is a nonsense novel along the lines of Scoop, with a faint underpinning of seriousness, as opposed to a more overtly serious work like Brideshead Revisited. The story follows Paul Pennyfeather, the bland quasi-hero who serves more as a prop than as a character, serving both as a window on to the lives of the slightly insane people around him and as the unwitting victim to the schemes of those characters. He’s sent down from university after a fraternity prank, derailing his hopes of a career in the ministry, leading him to a teaching job at a small and poorly-run public school in Wales (which is depicted as the backwater of England), where everyone he meets is a little bit dotty. Waugh savages everyone along the way – academics, hypocritical clerics, upper-class snobs, etc. – scoring points both with sarcastic putdowns and comical situations (not least of which are the pair of nine-lived con artists who keep reappearing in Paul’s life). The satire is a little dated, of course, but the dry wit is still fresh.

The serious underpinning is a sort of latent nihilism and futile search for meaning (one character says he walked away from a career in the ministry not because he couldn’t believe in God, but because “he couldn’t understand why God had made the world at all”) and, along the way, a dissatisfaction with the answers one finds. Waugh was a misanthrope’s misanthrope, and it’s not clear what he hated more: the world around him, or himself. Pennyfeather accepts the seeming randomness in his life, although much of what appears to be “random” is actually due to the machinations and screw-ups of the people around him; one might argue he should choose better company, but either way, his reluctant acceptance of whatever comes his way, without ire or desire for revenge, is one way to cope.

For a little more on Decline and Fall, The Guardian’s books blog has a note from March of this year bemoaning the lack of appreciation of the novel today, 80 years after its publication.

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→ September 22, 2008
→ By

North and South.

I always keep my conscience as tight shut up as a jack-in-a-box, for when it jumps into existence it surprises me by its size.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South is a somewhat forgotten (at least in the U.S.) classic of 19th century Brit Lit which I discovered by way of the Bloomsbury 100. It’s a sort of Pride and Prejudice meets Germinal, combining a romance between two people who can’t admit their feelings for each other with a commentary on Britain’s “social problem” during its Industrial Revolution in the early to mid-1800s.

North and South‘s heroine is Margaret Hale, who opens the book by rejecting a marriage proposal from Henry Lennox, the old-fashioned and paternalistic lawyer whose brother has just married Margaret’s cousin, Edith. Margaret’s father then announces that he has become a Dissenter and is leaving his post as minister in the southern hamlet of Helstone, instead moving the family north to the industrial town of Milton (a thinly-disguised version of Manchester) where he’ll become a tutor to a local industrialist named Mr. Thornton. Thornton and Margaret take an instant dislike to each other, sparring over the rights and responsibilities of labor and management in a mirror of the contemporary debates over workers’ rights in England at the time. And, of course, they fall in love.

What works about the novel is that while the romance is the foundation of the story, it spends most of the book in the background as Gaskell uses Margaret and Thornton as launching points for subplots around the labor-management strife in Milton. Margaret’s chance encounter with Bessy Higgins, who is terminally ill from working in a textile mill during her childhood, and her father creates a direct window into the life of workers in England’s factories during the 1800s. Gaskell relies a little heavily on coincidence to make sure that the lives of Margaret, Thornton, the Higginses, Margaret’s godfather Mr. Bell, and even Henry Lennox all intersect, although this was very common even in the best literature of the period, and it’s a justifiable maneuver to ensure that both the social commentary and the romance come to a conclusion in the book’s 500-ish pages.

What worked less for me was the romance itself, which felt a little too derivative of Pride and Prejudice and finds a resolution that is driven in large part by money, rather than by emotions or the development of the main characters. In Austen’s masterpiece, Elizabeth Bennet comes around as she learns more of Mr. Darcy’s character and has to admit to herself that she did him an injustice in their earlier meetings. Here, Gaskell imbues Margaret Hale with similar strength of spirit, but denies her the chance for a completely self-sufficient redemption.

Next up: I like big books and I cannot lie – John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, a parody of the picaresque novel, in all its 750 pages of glory.

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