How to Build a Girl - Caitlin Moran

“How to Build a Girl” is, as the title suggests, a semi-autobiographical account of a girl’s teenage years of self discovery or invention. The close similarity of the title to Moran’s earlier, non-fictional book, “How to be a Woman” has led some readers to see this book as a sequel of sorts, which is entirely natural. But that expectation leads to disappointment, because “Girl” is in many ways simply a novelisation of “Woman”. It’s entertaining, undoubtedly, but ploughs the same narrow furrow that Moran has made her own. (by way of example, her column in yesterday’s Times (29/5/15) is on “the things people from a large family know that other people don’t”, such as how to make meals go further.)

In the introduction to “How to Build a Girl” Moran claims that the novel is fictional, however close the apparent parallels with her life may appear. This leaves the reader guessing – did this or that lurid incident in the novel really happen, or is it invention? Are these just a series of pub tales woven into a “kind-of” novel, half-truths with just the names changed? I think I can mostly spot where she moves into invention quite easily – the tone changes, becoming less sincere and believable. To be fair I don’t think I am the target audience for this novel – which is a pity, because I usually love Moran’s work. She is at her best when she writes about social issues – her articles on the bedroom tax for example are outstanding – and while there is some social commentary here (we get it, growing up on benefit in 1990’s Wolverhampton was grim) it usually takes second place to the shall we say “bawdier” content.

The narrator of “Girl” self consciously reinvents herself as “Dolly Wilde” and becomes a music critic for a popular music magazine, not a million miles away from the trajectory of Moran’s own early career. This is the so-called “girl building” which the novel purports to be about. This struck me as contrived – do we really all so self-consciously adopt a persona with costume, mannerisms and language to suit? Her brother Krissi by comparison is a well realised character who seems to know himself and has no need to develop an external shell, and makes the point that the narrator’s advice is not an instruction manual. Normally that would be blindingly obvious, but the parallels between this novel and Moran’s earlier work could easily lead people to miss the irony. Self invention is perhaps not the best way to build a girl, even if she gets there in the end. Incidentally, the fact that Caitlin, sorry Johanna, doesn’t notice that Krissi is gay (despite it being waved in her face), is one of the nicer, subtler touches in the novel.

In the acknowledgements at the end of this novel, Moran gives the usual thanks, and writes about how difficult the novel was to produce. This is surprising – it gives the appearance of being effortless, and not particularly substantial, but when she describes telling her agent “I can’t write this book..I’ve made a terrible error” ten times, I believe her. Making something new out of “another book full of wanking and shagging” (her emphasis) was swimming too close to the shore. She is a better writer than this, and just needs to find a new topic. Fiction sells, but is it where she is at her best?

P.S. Johanna’s career as a music critic is based upon her being horribly abusive towards all the bands she reviews, and late in the book she has an epiphany of sorts when she realises that this is not the writer she wants to be. Being critical of bands you like is dishonest and unworthy. It did make me wonder whether my reviews on this blog where at times unnecessarily critical, and whether I should focus more on the positive aspects of the books I read. So if nothing else it was a useful corrective to that tendency, even if I have not been as negative as Dolly Wilde.

 

 

Will Self - The Book of Dave

"The Book of Dave" has been on my "should get round to reading at some point" list for some time now, having read the blurb and been curious about where the author would take the idea. Having said that, the scenario of this novel is startlingly unoriginal. The world has suffered a catastrophe, and the small number of survivors have reverted to barbarism. They base their rituals on a surviving text, the Book of Dave, the demented ramblings of a London cabbie, who in the novel’s most contrived scene decides to have his ravings printed on  metals plates to ensure their survival. Of course he did. (“Red Dwarf” did this much better, the cat civilisation basing all their beliefs on Dave Lister’s half remembered daydreams.) Self created a language for the survivors, Mokni, which is relatively easy to follow if you speak estuary English, and take the time to sound out the words. The lexicon at the back of this Penguin edition is also helpful, if you know it is there! I was going to write about how cleverly Self allows the reader to decode the specialist terms he uses - moto, opare, moped, etc - but I stumbled across these translations about 400 pages in, by which time I suspect many readers will have abandoned ship (or pedalo). Most of this new language derives from Dave’s experienced of driving a cab, so people are fares, the sun is a foglamp, full beam or otherwise, and so on.

 

The narrative structure is equally unoriginal - alternate chapters switching from Dave in the present to the distant future, allowing Self to draw the lines between the two so that they are pretty hard to miss. The Mokni (i.e. Mockney, or mock Cockney) that most people speak - Arpee (RP = received pronunciation) is reserved for formal occasions - is no different from the transcriptions of the speech of some characters speaking under stress towards the end of the novel. In the future genetically engineered cattle, motos, have basic consciousness, and are able to speak, always with a pronounced lisp, and have the functional intelligence of a toddler. This portrayal is quite chilling - the beasts are loving, and loved by the people of the island of Ham, (= Hampstead) but used as food when necessary. Their slaughter is disturbing, as they go to their deaths uncomplainingly, aware of the pain being inflicted. In case we haven’t drawn the parallel Self points it out for us towards the end of the novel, when describing Dave’s thoughts about his son:

“The child hadn't been apart of him at all - he was from another species, half human, half something else. He had been engineered only to be loved and then sacrificed, his corpse rendered down for whatever psychic balm it might provide.” (419).

 

The story is a fairly limited interest - Dave’s marriage breaks up, he breaks down, discovers his relationship with his son is not what he thought it was. In the future, similar things happen in a more colourful setting. It doesn’t all end happily ever after. There is a strong suggestion, never properly followed through, that the scenes of Ham in the future are all part of Dave’s disturbed imagination, explaining many of the more obvious parallels between the story lines. Most characters share names between the two tales, and even the motos are named after the pigs on the farm Dave lives next to at the end of the novel. (462).

So to summarise - unoriginal scenario, hard to follow dialogue, a deeply unappealing central character who is only partly redeemed at the end of the novel, clumsy satire, storylines that go nowhere, slowly, - is there anything that redeems this novel and justified the time invested in reading nearly 500 pages? Surprisingly, yes. Self can really craft a sentence. His use of metaphor is quite stunning - they seem to pour out of him, several to a sentence, in a volume and force I can’t remember coming across before, and making his contemporaries look quite flat and stale by comparison. Choosing examples to quote is hard, but here are a few. First, fields being ploughed,(actually harrowed, but meh)

 

“…it was properly autumn. The harrows came chattering across the great field, tearing up the earth with their steely argument. “ (421) Fields being ploughed/harrowed have been described many times in the past, but has anyone ever used such an accurate metaphor?

 

Later there is this description of a walk through London: 

“ Straightening up, swivelling - the London diorama pivoted about him: the toothpick steeples and cruet cupolas of the remaining Wren churches, the steel braces and concrete Karnak of Broadgate and the Barbican, the Astroturf lawns and inflated, latex walls of the Tower, the brass doorknob of the Monument".  (453) 

 

This is poetry, not prose - slightly out of control poetry perhaps, but poetry just the same. London miniaturised, landmarks becoming household objects such as toothpicks, cruets, and doorknobs.

 

Finally, one last example, an image that for me jumped off the page, because of the echoes of the opening chapter of "The Big Sleep" (read it). Self refers to a stained glass window with “the battleship-grey legs of a medieval knight, imprisoned in a glass slide”. 

 

As always, a simple test needs to be applied - would I read more by this author?  Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

Hitler, A Study in Tyranny - Alan Bullock

This is probably the definitive Hitler biography, against which all others are judged. It was originally published in 1952, seven short years after the end of the Second World War, and despite some subsequent updating; it inevitably shows its age. Since 1952 we have learnt a lot more about the history of the Third Reich, and indeed Hitler’s personal history – for example in this edition the fate of Martin Bormann is unknown, the number of deaths in the Holocaust is given at 4.2 million, and the whereabouts of Hitler’s remains was undetermined. So was this worth perserving with through 800 odd pages, when there are more up to date biographies available?

The point is of course moot, because I did (persevere, that is) but the question goes to the merits or otherwise of this text, despite its limitations. I learnt some (a few) things I did not know about the history of the Third Reich, but was left noticing some significant gaps – things I knew about the period which were not included, for no obvious good reason. Let’s start with the former. Of the 5 million Russians taken prisoner of war by the Germans, over 2 million died in captivity, from hunger and cold, often as a deliberate policy by the Germans. (More detail on this on page 696 of the book). That slaughter is never mentioned in programmes about the Second World War in my experience. The relationship with Mussolini was not something I knew much about, nor the very different relationship with Franco, alive and in power when this book came out of course.

But equally there are those omissions. The Holocaust is covered, of course, but in a very detached way. Tracing the origins of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, and the way it took hold across Germany, deserved more focus than is given here. Equally, I know that Hitler began experimenting with euthanasia of the sick and disabled long before the outbreak of war – this was nothing to do with lebensraum, or indeed anti-Semitism, but about racial purity, which Bullock never really focusses on. The slaughter of trade unionists, gays, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gypsies, and so on, also doesn’t get mentioned, let alone explored. Hitler’s control of Germany once elected Chancellor is worthy of closer examination. His recognition that power rested in institutions and organisations through the country which needs to be smashed, closed down, or assimilated was surely the key to his success in turning a minority Cabinet – his first Cabinet in January 1933 had only 3 Nazi members, including himself – into one in which national plebiscites showed hysterical levels of support over 99%.

There are some eternal questions about Hitler which challenge any biographer or historian of the period. Why did Germany elect such a man? Why did no-one properly understand the risk he faced and do something about it? How did he turn a tiny party of workers (the German Workers Party, which became the National Socialist Party in the early 1920’s) into a continent-dominating machine, able to command devastating levels of support? It can’t just be about charisma and luck, surely? How could the extermination camp guards kiss their children goodnight? Why was his personal life such a blank canvas, and was he religious in any way? We get a little closer to the answers here, by following the story from rural Austria to the Chancellery and beyond, but many of the mysteries and myths remain. I suspect much of the “traditional” features of the Hitler story can be traced to this book. There are things everyone is taught about Hitler, and other things that are simply ignored. I suppose what I am saying is that there was a familiarity about this book. Each phase of Hitler’s life came on schedule, with few surprises or revelations. Is this book the source of the orthodox account of Hitler’s life? I suspect so.

Just one other point: there is a slight tendency in this book, subtle but noticeable, to praise Hitler just a little too much. Positive comments are almost always followed up with condemnation, but his “achievements” are given more than sufficient attention. For example, on page 724 (yes I did get that far) Bullock writes very positively about Hitler’s prescience about the Cold War: “No-one, looking back at German anti-Bolshevik propaganda from the era of the Cold War, can fail to be struck by the aptness of much of the argument”. I accept that a biography that simply portrayed Hitler as a monster would be over-simplifying things, but the tone here is, at times, just a little too positive for my liking. Here’s another example: Bullock writes at length and at several points about Hitler’s ability to “read the mind” of his audiences (for example, page 722, “Hitler’s gifts as an orator had always depended on his flair for sensing what was in the minds of his audience.” Now presumably this is metaphorical rather than literal, but what is the metaphor for? How was Hitler able to tune into what his audience wanted, and give it to them? You could probably work this out through some close textual analysis, whereby he tries out themes and then either drops them or develops them depending on the audience’s response, but that is not attempted here. Instead Hitler is just credited with a supernatural ability to read collective minds. I'm not saying Bullock was a supporter of Hitler in any shape or form, simply that attitudes towards him (Adolf, not Alan) have hardened in later generations.

I really ought to read a modern Hitler biography for contrast, and probably will in time, but for now I need something lighter!

The Professor - Charlotte Bronte (2)

Written in 1846, although not published during her lifetime, The Professor is a largely autobiographical account of Charlotte's two years teaching in Belgium. Her attempt to narrate the story through a male character is at best a mixed success. There is, as with Villette, a degree of wish fulfillment, as the romance is successfully concluded with marriage, a child, and a comfortable country cottage. Reader, I married him. If this was all The Professor had to offer then its obscurity would be understandable, however well drawn the romance is. However, there are other elements that draw the attention.

One of the minor characters is Mr Hunsden (if he is given a first name, I missed it), an acquaintance and latterly friend of Mr Crimsworth, the eponymous professor. Despite being relatively prosperous, Hunsden is undoubtedly a radical. He describes England in terms which would surely have been shocking to Victorian England in its Imperious pomp

“A little, corrupt, venal, lord-and-king-cursed nation, full of mucky pride… and helpless pauperism; rotten with abuses, worm-eaten with prejudices. ….Come to England and see ….examine the footprints of our august aristocracy; see how they walk in blood, crushing hearts as they go. Just put your head in at English cottage doors; get a glimpse of famine crouched torpid in black hearthstones, of Disease lying bare on beds without coverlets, of Infamy wantoning viciously with Ignorance, though indeed Luxury is her favourite paramour, and princely halls are dearer to her than thatched hovels”. 175

This is purple but very effective prose which Dickens and other observers of Victorian England's darker side would hesitate to use. The speech is dismissed by Frances Henri, the Swiss teacher and fiance of the Professor to whom it is addressed, and the theme is largely dropped.

In contrast the novel also has a vigorous anti-Catholic element. Frances is the spokesperson for this point of view:

“I know nothing of the arcana of the Roman Catholic religion, and I am not a bigot in matters of theology, but I suspect the root of all this precocious impurity, so obvious, so general in Popish countries, is to be found in the discipline, if not the docutrines, of the Church of Rome. …These girls belonged to what are called the respectable ranks of society. They had all been carefully brought up, yet was the mass of the mentally depraved." (page 71)

“ I long to live once more among Protestants. They are more honest than Catholics. A Romish school is a building with porous walls, a hollow floor, a false ceiling. Every room in this house Monsieur has eye holes and ear holes, and what the house is the inhabitants are - very treacherous.” (page 106/7)

It is easy to forget in liberal, 21st century Britain how virulent anti-Catholicism was in this country for centuries - only 60 years earlier London had been torn apart by the Gordon riots (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Riots) - Frances's anti-Catholicism can presumably be read as a simple reflection of Charlotte's own feelings.

Finally, there is room in the novel for Charlotte's defence of her occupation as a novelist. She clearly felt the prejudice against women writers deeply, as she puts these words in the mouths of another female character:
 

“It appears to me that ambition, literary ambition especially, is not a feeling to be cherished in the mind of a woman. Would not Mlle Henri be much safer and happier if taught to believe that in the quiet discharge of scial duties consists her real vocation, than if stimulated to aspire after applause and publicity? She may never marry, scanty as are her resources, obscure as are her connections, uncertain as is her health (for I think her consumptive).” (page 111) How many times must she have heard these sentiments, or suspected them. The final parenthesis - "for I think her consumptive" is sadly chilling.

The Professor - Charlotte Bronte - inadvertent smuttiness?

Here's a fun game for anyone finding 19th century romatic literature just a little too slow - "spot the subconscious sexual metaphor".

These novels invariably put young men and women in the prime of their lives in close proximity, and despite every attempt to restrain their sexual impulses, it just can't help bursting through. Usually nature is the chosen vessel in which to convey their instincts, with tree buds bursting into blossom, waterfalls spouting, and so on, but I don't think one needs to be too smutty minded to see this effect happening elsewhere. "The Professor" provides some excellent examples. The scenario is this: William Crimsworth is teaching English to Belgian schoolgirls in Brussels. There he meets a young womanF rances Henri - we are told she is 19 - , and eventually after some complications falls for her charms. He visits her archetypal 'umble abode, and she lights a fire to warm the place. He is worried she is using up her limited supplies of firewood and coal, and wishes he could be in a position to help her:

"I am glad it is not yet winter, thought I, but in two months more come the winds and rains of November. Would to God that before then I could earn the right and the power to shovel coals into that grate ad libitum” (page 132). At his pleasure indeed.

Later he desbribes the moment he declares his affection for her, and instead of this being a stumbling, formal declaration in the manner of Mr Darcy and his peers, he grabs her and sits her on his knee:

“The frost of the master’s manner might melt; I felt the thaw coming fast, whether I would or not. ….There are impulses we can control, but there are others which control us, because they attain us with a tiger leap, and are our masters ere we have seen them”. (page 165).

 

The use of the term "our masters" is particularly significant here as Crimsworth is always described as Frances's master, even after they are married. This is an arguably less-Freudian use of language - instead of the sexual metaphors jumping unbidden into the author's head, this second example seems more deliberate. For a Victorian female novelist to write this frankly about sexual desire - a tiger leap - and to acknowledge the sexual frisson between husband and wife is unusual, if not unique. The initial submissiveness of their relationship matures into a flirtation which is preserved by Frances's enjoyment of chastistement. William says at one point “I fear the choice of chastisement must have been injudicious, for instead of correcting the fault, it seemed to encourage its renewal”. (188)