Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson - 1886

Read in a Penguin Classic edition

It’s about time I explained why I am reading what is essentially a children’s book, albeit a Victorian ‘classic’. A few months ago the Guardian completed a two year exercise to publish a list of the top 100 novels written in English. I’ve written previously about how irritating these lists can be, and this was no exception – it contains some strange choices (‘Emma’ over ‘Pride and Prejudice’?) and some books that stretch the definition of ‘novel’ to breaking point (‘Alice in Wonderland’?) I’ve been working my way around the list in recent months, not because of any completest tendencies, undeniable though they are, but simply as a guide for some interesting novels that I probably should have read. There have been some really interesting discoveries (for me) thus far (‘Money’, ‘Disgrace’), a few re-reads (‘The True History of the Kelly Gang’), and some stinkers. Sadly, this falls in the latter category.

The novel is set in the highlands of Scotland, shortly after the second Jacobite rebellion in 1745. The politics of this revolt are central to the novel, but knowledge of the issues is largely assumed, and not given any context. The principal character and narrator is 17-year-old David Balfour. His parents having recently died, he visits his evil uncle, Ebenezer, who arranges for him to be kidnapped and sold into slavery. The kidnappers are incompetent sailors, because after several days of journeying their boat is still off the islands of Scotland, where it collides with a row boat carrying Alan Breck, a leading Jacobite wanted by the British. Breck is a confused figure – pompous, short-tempered, and murderous, yet perceived by Davy as something of a glamorous, slightly heroic character. Alan is a Jacobite who supports the claim of the House of Stewart to Scotland's throne; David is loyal to King George III, and the tension between them arises from these loyalties. Stevenson uses the Jacobite rebellion as a setting for this novel, but is clearly not that interested in the politics of the situation.  The relationship – a bromance if you like – between Breck and Balfour is at the heart of the novel – they argue, fall out, make up, and repeat, like an old married couple. If you don’t believe in the authenticity of this father/son-like relationship, then the rest of the novel holds few attractions.

The poor sailing continues, and after a short fight and siege over some money Breck is carrying, the ship capsizes. Breck and David are separated. David is stranded on a deserted ‘island’, which he eventually finds out is not an island but a spit of land joined to the mainland at low tide. He sets off to find Breck, but runs into the Red Fox, a real historical figure, who no sooner meets David but is killed by a hidden sniper. David is suspected of involvement in the murder, not unreasonably, and flees, by chance reuniting with Alan as he does so, lurking suspiciously in the woodland. The improbabilities involved here are skirted over.

We arrive at this point fairly briskly, but now the novel descends from here into an extraordinarily extended trudge across the Scottish Highlands. It rains, they walk, it is sunny, they walk, and so it goes on for chapter after chapter, with only the occasionally comically Scottish highlander to break the monotony. John Buchan clearly spent far too long reading this before writing ‘The 39 Steps’ as it contains similar scenes of prolonged walking in the rain – sadly ‘The Deathly Hallows’ has more than a touch of this affliction as well. Eventually they make their way back to the starting point and David’s uncle, who is confronted, confesses, and comes to financial settlement with David.

The parallels between this novel, written in 1886, (and published, like much Victorian fiction, in serial form in a magazine) and the earlier ‘Treasure Island’ (1881) are unavoidable. An impoverished, inexperienced, but self-respecting teenage hero goes to sea. Here he faces a crew of thugs. Supported by a strong role-model, he valiantly wins the day, following a siege scene very reminiscent of that at the island fort. A long voyage of wandering & discovery follows. Stevenson clearly knew a trustworthy model for a boy’s adventure story when he found one.

The novel is written with a large amount of colloquial scots. I am not sure whether the language is authentic, but it descends often into what reads like parody:
“Ye have a fine, hang-dog, rat-and-tatter, clappermaclaw kind of look to ye, as if ye had stolen the coat from a potato-bogle” (190)

Stevenson is a more interesting writer than this – Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a fascinating portrait of the schizophrenic nature of Victorian society – but ultimately this is a tired children’s story no longer read by children.

The True History of the Kelly Gang – Peter Carey – 2000

By coincidence, following on from my previous review of ‘In Cold Blood’, this is another novelisation of factual events. More specifically, this novel is (effectively) a biography of Ned Kelly, the famous Australian outlaw, written in the first person using Kelly’s own distinctive personal style.

Kelly was a first generation Australian, son of transported Irish Catholic parents. Part of a large family, Kelly’s life was troubled from the start, with his father being imprisoned and then dying when he was 12, and subsequently a long series of increasingly serious brushes with the law. If you establish a country peopled by former prisoners it is hardly surprising that there are one or two law and order challenges; add in nationalist resentments from the Irish community in Australia, the enmity between Catholics and Protestants, and the grinding poverty which characterised the settlement at the time (the 1880’s, chiefly) then it is hardly surprising that some people decided to live outside the law.

Carey follows what is known of Kelly’s early life with care. His descent into criminality is shown as being unavoidable – despite Kelly’s efforts to remain honest, his personal code doesn’t allow certain slights to go unrevenged. This is all portrayed from Kelly’s perspective, and the elements of self-justification are not hard to spot.

The main interest in Kelly’s story is how he became transformed from a horse thief to a national hero. There are many components to this transformation, and Carey captures them all. Kelly had a naïve belief in the power of the written word, and some of his attempts to justify his crimes have survived, such as the Jerilderie letter. Google this to see the original text – Carey has captured the spirit of Kelly’s style perfectly. Here’s a transcript of the first page of the Jerilderie letter from the Australian National Archives:

‘I wish to acquaint you with  some of the occurrences of the present past and future, In or about the Spring of 1870 the ground was very soft, a Hawker named Mr Gould got his waggon bogged, between Greta and my mother's place house on the eleven mile creek, the ground was that rotten it would bog a duck in places so Mr Gould had to abandon his waggon for fear of losing his horses in the spewy ground he was stopping at my mother's awaiting finer or dryer weather, Mr McCormack and his Wife, (Hawkers' also) were camped in Greta and the mosquitoes were very bad which they generally are in a wet spring and to help them Mr Johns had a horse called Ruita Cruta, although a gelding was as clever as old Wombat or any other Stallion’

There are in this one page several wonderfully expressive phrases – that first line for example, or “as clever as old Wombat” (note, not an old wombat). All Carey had to do to copy this style was pretty much abandon punctuation, throw in lots of vernacular phrases, and plenty of seemingly irrelevant detail, and the job is done.

The other components of the national hero legend are equally obvious. Kelly had a wonderful turn of phrase – the letter ends 'I am a Widow's Son, outlawed and my orders must be obeyed', and at his death it is claimed he said “Such is Life” – and very much in the Robin Hood tradition Kelly was the little guy fighting against an oppressive regime. The spectacular end to the story, when Kelly and his gang wearing their metal armour fight it out against a small army of armed police, gives the story the climax it deserves, although this ending is slightly thrown away in this novel, an inevitable consequence of the first person narrative. But Kelly emerges a charismatic leader, and it is entirely understandable that his legend is secured almost before his death. His crimes are not ignored, but the police murders/killings are shown in context as self defence.

There is a hunger in society for outlaw heroes. Bonnie and Clyde, immortalised in film but not, so far as I am aware, in a novel, are an example from American society. I wonder who will emerge as the outlaw hero of the early 21^st century – Julian Assange, perhaps (perhaps not) or the more elusive hackers of the Internet movements?

In Cold Blood - Truman Capote - 1966

Read in Abacus edition.

This non-fiction novel (Capote's term for it) describes the murder of the Clutter family, a mid-Western American family, and the subsequent arrest, conviction, and execution of their killers, Hickock and Smith.

It's a banal and senseless murder, and despite the meticulous way it is reconstructed by Capote he never really gets close to explaining why the killing took place. The motive is one sense is quite simple - theft, and an attempt to cover their tracks - no witnesses - but it takes a certain deranged quality to murder four helpless people 'in cold blood', and it is that aspect of the killings that remains elusive. Towards the end of the book Capote hints at the possibility that Smith, the actual killer of all four family members, was triggered to commit the killings by some resemblance between the first of the family to die, the father, Herb, and an authority figure in his (Smith's) past, but the idea is only mentioned in passing and is not followed through.

A non-fiction novel is arguably a contradiction in terms - novels are by their nature works of imagination. Of course many novels take as their starting point something factual, either in the public domain or the author's personal lives, so in one sense Capote simply takes this idea and develops it. But the reader is left uncertain as to what extent the description of events - including detailed conversations, and accounts of the characters' thought processes - are 'as imagined' by Capote, and which are based upon interviews with the participants and other research. The novel is sub-titled 'A true account of a multiple murder and its consequences', and in a short acknowledgements section Capote claims "All the material in this book not derived from my own observation is either taken from official records or is the result of interviews with the persons directly concerned, more often than not numerous interviews conducted over a considerable period of time". But apart from this acknowledgement, Capote erases any trace of himself from this novel - there is never any mention of "when I spoke to him" or "later he told me that...". In reality this invisibility is misleading - his presence would have had some impact, particularly long after the crime when the appeals process was coming to a conclusion. The 'support' of a celebrity writer would have had an impact, and of course people more cynical than me have pointed out that Capote had an interest in the final execution of Smith and Hickock, giving him the ending his novel needed.

My instinct is that wherever possible Capote stuck to the facts, as they could be verified. The killing is banal and there is no attempt to sensationalise it - in some ways quite the opposite, because Hickock's sexual perversions are glossed over, the executions when they finally come, is over in three or four pages, and while the murders are described in detail, this is done with as much sensitivity as possible in the circumstances. Capote tells the story of the killings murders themselves through Smith's confession - had the murders been described by anyone else the terror of the victim's would have been unavoidable, but because he was simply unable to share any real empathy with them it is (slightly) easier to bear.

Without wishing to labour the point, I find the form of this novel uncomfortable. Documentary recreations of crimes, where the known events are supported by evidence of one form or another ('according to a witness statement', 'in evidence, Smith said', the coroner's report said, etc.) allow the reader to judge for themselves the extent to which this the report is accurate. Similarly, imaginative recreations where the author attempts to step into the shoes of the characters and capture what it must have felt like to be present and involved in the crime, are another legitimate form. But this is a halfway house between these two forms, where some of the scenes are fictional (Dewey, the lead investigator, is shown at the end of the novel meeting one of Nancy Clutter's friends at her grave - he subsequently denied that ever happened) and others likely to be based upon conversations and interviews with the participants where their accuracy can never be tested. If the end result gave us an insight into crimes of this kind then the effort could perhaps be justified - but eventually all we learn is the banality of evil.

The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford - 1915

This novel has an utterly misleading title. Ford claimed 'The Good Soldier' was his publisher's idea, as an alternative to 'The Saddest Story', which may not have caught the public mood, but the commercial appeal of a novel published in 1915 about a 'good soldier' must have been hard to resist. Why not go the whole distance and call it "Brits beat the Hun"? It would have had as much relevance.

My main reaction while reading, and on completing, this novel, was one of irritation. The fallible narrator may have been innovative for its time (was it really?) and the fractured timescale may even have seemed daring, but 100 years on these features cannot disguise the novel's many weaknesses. The characters are spoilt, deluded, and ignorant, yet we are invited to admire them despite their manifold flaws. The narrative lacks pace and interest, and the language plods.

To take a step back, this novel tells the "saddest story" of two couples who meet on vacation in Germany. The Dowell's are wealthy Americans on what develops into a long-extended honeymoon - having married without her parent's permission, Florence develops a spontaneous heart condition as soon as she boards her transAtlantic liner, a condition that conveniently means she is unable ot consumate her marriage without the exercise putting her life at risk. Her husband, our narrator, relates this all with a straight face, seemingly unaware that he has been duped. They meet the soldier of the title, Edward Ashburnham, and his wife Leonara. Edward's occupation is incidental of the events of the novel; he seems to have one of those Army positions that involve minimal amounts of soldiering. He is wealthy, but profilgate, a drinker, gambler, and womaniser. His wife detests him, but is forbidden by her Catholic faith from divorcing him, so instead devotes herself to torturing him. Deeply unhappy, Edward and Florence eventually separately kill themselves. The narrator insists to the bitter end that Edward is a good man, but the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming.

This novel is about these two unhappy marriages. At the heart of their unhappiness is, inevitably, sex. Ford is unable to address this issue directly, so he employs a wide range of euphemisms to hint at the issue:
 

“It was the ship’s doctor who discreetly suggested to me that I had better refrain from manifestations of affection. (83)

“I must never enter her room without knocking, or her poor little heart might flutter away to its doom” (84)

“It will give you some idea of the extraordinary naiveté of Edward Ashburnham that, at the time of his marriage and for perhaps a couple of years after, he did not really know how children are produced” (136)

“he passed the night in her bed”. (147)

“From the moment of his unfaithfulness….she never acted the part of wife to Edward.” (163)

“Watching Edward more intently and with more straining of ears that that which a cat bestows upon a bird overhead, she was aware of the progress of his passion….She was aware of it from the way in which his eyes returned to doors and gateways; she knew from his tranquilities when he had received satisfactions.” (163)

I particularly like the last of these - note the plural ‘satisfactions’.  Our narrator seems unperturbed by his wife's machinations to avoid sex with him, hinting that this is because he may discover that she is not a virgin, and later in the novel accepts her infidelity without complaint. He is a deeply unappealing character, and is rewarded at the end of the novel with another 'partner' he is unable to sleep with.

'The Good Soldier is in many ways a transitional novel, bridging the gap between the Victorian novels where sex was never mentioned, and anticipating Lawrence and the other authors who finally shrug off this constraint. He is also a modernist in his style. He adopts a very conversational style, attempting to mimic the way Dowling may have written a personal narrative were he to have existed. He anticipates any criticism of this style by explaining it thus:

"I have, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way, so that it may be difficult for anyone to find their path through what may be sort of a maze. …I console myself with thinking that this is a real story, and that, after all, real stories are probably told best in the way a person would tell hem. They will then seem most real” (167). Apart from being rambling, Ford obviously also though that repetition was key to this conversational style. (If he is right, conversations with him would have been pretty dull!) Time and again Dowling repeats himself without variation, as for example here:

“I should marry Nancy if her reason were ever sufficiently restored to let her appreciate the meaning of the Anglican marriage service. But it is probable that her reason will never be sufficiently restored to let her appreciate the meaning of the Anglican marriage service” (212). The difference between bad writing, and deliberately bad writing to convey character is of course important, but over the course of a whole novel the point is lost. The novel also uses the technique of telling the reader the eventual fate of the characters early on, rather than leading up to this, a technique which strangely seemed quite new when Muriel Spark used it in the "Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" fifty years later, but which here simply seems confused.

One last thought: there's very little humour in this novel, but one line did stand out, when the narrator comments on Edward's soldiering:

"Edward ought, I suppose, to have gone to the Transvaal. It would have done him a great deal of good to get killed”. (156/7)

 

Disgrace - J M Coetzee - 1999

Disgrace follows the downfall and disgrace of David Lurie, a lecturer in Communications at Cape Town University. He is 52 and twice divorced. His job at the university has recently been redefined, prefiguring some of the significant changes in South African society that form the backdrop to and context of this novel. Lurie has a brief affair with one of his students. The descriptions of the sex between them are carefully constructed to make it clear that this is an abusive relationship. They are shown from Lurie's perspective, but even he, delusional about his attractiveness though he is, can still understand that what he does with Melanie, his student, is wrong. He sees her as “A child! No more than a child” (20). All the descriptions of Melanie emphasise her youth and immaturity, and her passivity towards a man old enough to be her grandfather. The descriptions of their sex, even though filtered through Lurie’s distorted perspective,  makes it utterly unambiguous that her consent is either not given, or given under pressure and protest:

“She is too surprised to resist the intruder who thrusts himself upon her… “No, not now!, she says, struggling” (20/21).

Lurie may fool himself that he is being a sexual adventure – “I’m going to invite you to do something reckless” (16) but the reader is left in no doubt that this is a sexual assault:

“She does not resist. All she does is avert herself; avert her lips, avert her eyes. She lets him lay her out on the bed and undress her… little shivers of cold run through her. Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself”. (Interesting use of the phrase “lay her out” as opposed to “lay her” for example, with the suggestion of her being like a corpse, laid out by an undertaker.

As soon as the ‘relationship’ is exposed, an unrepentant Lurie is sacked. He goes to live in the South African countryside with his daughter, Lucy, who runs a small holding a dog kennel with the assistance of Petrus, a worker on her property. Petrus’s status changes during the course of the novel. South African was still in transition at this point, moving slowly away from being the country of apartheid where white people held all the positions of responsibility and own much of the land. This transition is embodied by the changes in the relationship between Lucy and Petrus. He starts the novel as her employee (“I am the gardener and the dog-man” (65) but by the end he is a landowner and has proposed a form of arranged marriage with Lucy, which she seems minded to accept, as a form of protection.

The dark centre of the novel is a disturbing and distressing attack on the Lurie family, where Lucy is raped by 3 black men during a home invasion. Her father is shamed by his inability to protect his daughter, and puzzled by her passive acceptance of what has happened to her. She refuses to report the rape, and appears to accept as inevitable that it will happen again, and that there is nothing she can do about it. Her father urges her to leave the smallholding, but she refuses. Coetzee doesn't offer any simple explanations for this puzzling refusal. Lurie speculates that her response is an example of 'white guilt', where the sins of the apartheid era are expiated by the subsequent suffering of the white community: ‘

"But why did they hate me so? I had never set eyes on them.’

‘It was history speaking through them...A history of wrong. Think of it that way, if it helps. It may have seemed personal, but it wasn’t”.

The reader is invited to draw parallels between Lurie's behaviour towards his students and the mixed race prostitutes he frequents at the start of the novel, and the subsequent rape of his daughter.

I get that. The parallels are pretty unavoidable and frankly heavy-handed. White people in apartheid South Africa (and of course elsewhere) abused black people, and the response of the black men who rape Ellen, while not excused, have to be seen in that historical context. That, anyway, has been the typical reading of the novel in most reviews and analysis. (For example, the London Review of Books review summarises this question thus:’ Lucy decides not to press charges, believing that this rape, in the South African context, is not ‘a public matter’. In the face of irresistible historical change – the collapse of a corrupt order – the claims of the individual are necessarily of secondary importance, even irrelevant. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n20/elizabeth-lowry/like-a-dog)

But I am not buying that, not for one minute. Rape is rape, irrespective of race, and in creating a female character who appears to accept that being raped is the price she has to pay for retaining her home, Coetzee comes perilously close to suggesting that some forms of sexual assault can be understood if not condoned. There is no place for white people in South Africa unless they can come to terms with the retribution that is coming their way, Coetzee seems to imply when he puts these words into Lucy’s mouth:  

“What if rape is ‘the price one has to pay for staying on? Perhaps that is how they look at it; perhaps that is how I should look at it too. They see me as owing something. They see themselves as debt collectors, tax collectors. Why should I be allowed to live here without paying? Perhaps that is what they tell themselves.

This is not a didactic novel, far from it, but I have not found in any reviews any other explanation of Lucy’s response. But she is not a cardboard cut-out, allegorically representing white rule in South Africa; she is a strongly realised character, whose response to her attack is upsettingly realistic in all other respects.

There are two other important themes running through the novel which I ought to mention. Firstly, there is the question of human attitudes towards animals. Lurie volunteers in an animal shelter, in which his main role is in helping euthanize the unwanted dogs and cats brought into the refuge, and then disposing of their bodies. Coetzee suggests that a value of a society can be judged by the way it treats its pets; Lurie redeems himself by treating the dogs kindly, including respecting their bodies when they come to be incinerated. This echoes an earlier comment by Lucy when she foresees herself stripped of any status and value in South African society, “like a dog”. By this point in the novel we have come to treat sceptically anything Lurie says, so when he argues that “as for animals, by all means let us be kind to them. But let us not lose perspective. We are of a different order of creation from animals. Not higher necessarily, just different. So if we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we feel guilty or fear retribution” (74).

This is not just an argument about how people treat animals, of course – the phrase “different order of creation” was used by those who sought to justify slavery and apartheid.  In a final, deeply pessimistic scene, Lurie sacrifices a dog who he had formed an attachment to through an apparent shared enjoyment of music. It is not by accident that the cover illustration of most editions of this novel feature a picture of a dog.

The other less successful theme is Lurie’s plan to write about Byron, more specifically a light opera about Byron’s sexual adventures in Italy. He plans to orchestrate this using the banjo, which is obviously intended as a way of illustrating the absurd gap between his view of the world and reality. It sets up some uncomfortable contrasts between Lurie’s meditations of 19^th century romantic womanising, and his own delusional view of himself.

I can admire the skill involved in constructing ‘Disgrace’. The carefully ambiguous title probably merits a separate blog entry all of its own, given the multiple things that are considered or treated as disgraces in this novel. But the central characters are unlikeable – Lurie in particular is something of a narcissistic monster (his reaction when told his daughter is pregnant is to consider the impact this will have on his sex life: “What pretty girl can he expect to be wooed into bed with a grandfather”) (217) or under-developed. Lucy is real enough, but trapped inside Lurie’s perspective we never get close to understanding what makes her tick.  There’s one ultimate test I always apply when evaluating a novel – would I read something else by this author? And my response here would be as of now, no, although I reserve the right to change my mind!

Kim - Rudyard Kipling - 1901

Many of the classic novels I have been reading in recent weeks have been reasonably familiar to me. often this is through film or television adaptations, or from having read versions or parts of the novel decades ago. 'Kim' is an exception to that general rule - although I had heard of the novel, I had no prior knowledge of the plot or characters. I am sure it has been adapted as a film at some point, but not I suspect with any great success.

Kipling is notorious as a jingoistic supporter of Empire, and as this novel is set in 19th Century India, one would have expected the white men to be the heroes, and the Indian characters to be (negative) stereotypes or caricatures. In the event, nothing could be further from the truth. The novel follows the adventures of a young orphan - Kim - who is born of Irish parents, but who grows up assimilated into Indian culture, and who identifies as an Indian (when he first wears white men's trousers, for example, he finds them uncomfortable and can't understand why anyone would wear them). He is a classic street rat, surviving on his wits. He meets a Tibetan monk on a pilgrimage, and quickly strikes up a friendship which is the heart of the novel. They journey around India in a fairly leisurely fashion. India is shown in all its magnificent complexity, which many different races, religions and castes. The occupying English forces are also not portrayed simplistically as either all good or bad - they include a range of well developed characters, some of whom are benevolent, others less so. But there is not a hint of jingoism anywhere in the novel. Kipling quite obviously had a deep affinity with India, and while his portrait of the country is not rose-tinted, at the same time he demonstrates an understanding of the peoples, traditions and cultures that you would never have anticipated from someone with his reputation as a defender of Empire. Occupation is not a benevolent force for good in India - neither is it the opposite - it simply is part of the experience of the citizens of the country.

In the course of his journeys, Kim's parenthood is revealed, and he is given an 'English' education. Because of his knowledge of India and its culture, as well as a natural quick wit, he is prepared for a career as a spy, a player in the 'Great Game'. We are introduced to some of the other spies, all native Indians risking their lives to ensure intelligence is fed to the occupying English. Towards the end of the novel, as Kim's spiritual journey reaches its anti-climax, this espionage sub-plot also comes to a slightly comic conclusion, as two foreign spies (French and Russian, in an unlikely alliance) are humiliated because of their lack of respect for and knowledge of Indian culture.

Given the period in which it was written, this is a surprisingly enlightened novel. But was it any good? Perhaps there is a reason why the novel is not in the first tier of classics, not part of the cultural zeitgeist. Because the answer is not really. It was a struggle to complete. Much of the action is conveyed through dialogue, and Kipling uses innumerable terms deriving from the Raj which are sometimes translated, but often not (in the particular edition at least (Wordsworth Classics) - I can imagine that there are other versions with more comprehensive footnotes that would have clarified some of these terms). So it was at points not easy to follow the plot. Kim is an endearing character, and his supporting cast are reasonably well developed, but overall I never fully engaged with the novel, and would probably not have finished it were it not for a streak of stubbornness. I can see why, when choosing a Kipling novel to adapt, Disney chose 'The Jungle Book', not 'Kim'!