Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson - 1886

Stevenson's 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" is an under-appreciated masterpiece. It's a breathlessly fast paced story where the protagonist, Dr Jekyll, is dead (sorry, spoilers) halfway through the very short novel, and yet Stevenson manages to sustain the excitement until the big 'reveal' at the end. We now know of course that Dr Jekyll is Mr Hyde, but it is still possible to imagine the excitement readers must have experienced on first finding this out, perhaps having worked it out for themselves a few pages earlier.

The novel uses a traditional framing device and a combination of diaries and other documents to provide some distance from the main action. Gabriel Utterson, a lawyer, is told by his cousin about an encounter some months ago, when he witnesses a sinister figure named Edward Hyde and a young girl accidentally bump into one another. Hyde trampled on the girl causing her some undefined harm. In a form of mob justice, Hyde was forced to pay £100 to avoid any scandal. He paid this on the spot fine with a cheque drawn on the account of Dr. Henry Jekyll, an old friend of Utterson. This tale reinforces Utterson's fear that Jekyll is being blackmailed by Hyde - he has recently drawn his will to make Hyde the sole beneficiary in case of his death or disappearance. Jekyll assures Utterson that there is nothing to worry about. Is there a suggestion that the reason Jekyl tolerates and funds Hyde is due to an 'unnatural' sexual relationship between the pair? This would explain the need to pay off witnesses to avoid a scandal, and also fits with the unspecified sins or vices that Jekyll admits to later in the novel when explaining his experiments.

Later, Hyde is implicated when a servant sees him beat a man to death with a heavy cane. Police find half of the cane, which is revealed to be one which Utterson himself gave to Jekyll. There is no trace of Hyde, and for a while Jekyll reverts to his former friendly manner. This cannot last, and soon Jekyll starts refusing to see any visitors. Then a mutual acquaintance of Jekyll and Utterson, Dr Lanyon, dies suddenly of shock. Before his death, Lanyon gives Utterson a letter, with instructions that he should only open it after Jekyll's death or his disappearance. It soon seems as if that time has come, because in the next chapter Jekyll's butler, Poole, visits Utterson and explains that Jekyll has locked himself away in his laboratory for several weeks. They break into the laboratory to find the body of Hyde wearing Jekyll's clothes and apparently dead from suicide.

They also find a letter from Jekyll to Utterson promising to explain the entire mystery. The suicide note and accompanying documents reveal that Lanyon's death resulted from the shock of seeing Hyde drinking a serum and, as a result of doing so, turning into Dr. Jekyll. The second letter explains that Jekyll, having previously indulged unstated vices found a way to transform himself and thereby indulge his vices without fear of detection. Unable to control the transformations he resolved to cease becoming Hyde, but it is too late - he is ever more helpless and trapped as the transformations increase in frequency and necessitate ever larger doses of the draught to reverse them. Eventually, one of the chemicals from which he had prepared the draught ran low. His ability to change back from Hyde into Jekyll slowly vanished in consequence. He finally realises that he will soon become Hyde permanently.

I class Jekyll and Hyde, along with Dracula and Frankenstein, as the one of the three great horror novels of the 19th century. I appreciate that places me in the mainstream of critical reaction, but for some reason while the latter two works have been recognised as great works of fiction in their own rights, divorced from the industry of 'inspired by' films, television adaptation and novels they have generated, Jekyll and Hyde remains largely unread. Which is a pity, because it is genuinely scary. Hyde is a monster largely because he is so un-monstrous. The potion which Dr Jekyll discovers allows him to physically separate the good and evil parts of himself, but the Mr Hyde which emerges feels at first to be something quite positive. Outwardly he appears to be a normal man, although anyone seeing him is struck by his profoundly evil character:

“The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but innocent freedom of the soul."

But this younger, lighter, happier personailty comes with a catch:

"I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine.” 

What I find fascinating about this novel is the way Stevenson brings together in one short story many of the prevailing big themes of the day: that science can unlock dangerous secrets, that people have dual or multiple personalities, and that some of our instincts are animalistic:

Jekyll experiments with splitting himself because he wants to find a way to indulge his appetite for vice with impunity. He releases a beast he cannot control:

"I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin.” 

These vices are not specified, but sexually transmitted diseases, and their debilitating effect on men's health, were a particular dread of the time. More specifically, the novel lends itself very conveniently to an allegorical reading of the need for homosexual men to live double lives. The Guardian noted in a review of a stage production a few years ago that:

"Even though Stevenson may not have intended leaving them, there are suggestive markers throughout the text: the suspected blackmail of Jekyll by his "young man", his "favourite"; the "very pretty manner of politeness of Sir Danvers Carew" when approached in the street - terms that may have denoted forbidden liaisons to a Victorian readership. The hidden door by which he enters Jekyll's house is the "back way", even "the back passage". It happens that the year of composition, 1885, was the year in which an amendment to an act of parliament made homosexual acts between men a criminal offence."

Victorian society was still coming to terms with Darwin's revolutionary idea that men had evolved from animals, and that it was from these origins that some of our animalist instincts could be traced. At the same time ideas around the subconscious were becoming more current, although yet to be formulated clearly by Freud in the twentieth century. Stevenson's formulation of these ideas in 'Dr Jekyll' is arguably one of the earliest description of the divided consciousness:
 

"It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both; and from an early date, even before the course of my scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most naked possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements. If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil."

This is a fascinating, chilling and hugely influential book, horror for grown-ups, Stevenson's best writing for adults.

The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow

To be honest, everyone comes across a book from time to time that they struggle to complete, indeed to get started with. The plot never really seems to start, the characters are undefined and un-engaging, and keeping track of who is who and what has happened doesn't really seem worth the effort. But one persists, out of stubbornness more than any expectation that all of a sudden the novel will transform into something more compelling. For me this is a relatively rare occurrence, but Bellow's 'The Adventures of Augie March' was unfortunately one such book.

The novel follows the first few decades of the life of the eponymous hero growing up in Chicago in the 1920's and 30's. The title deliberately echoes the Mark Twain Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn novels of 80 years or so earlier. While Twain's narratives were, superficially at least, quite innocent, Augie March is brought up in a very different world. 

So why was this book such a challenge, to the extent that I actually felt a sense of relief when I finished? I identified a number of reasons. Firstly, Bellow's sentence construction is often awkward, almost as if English were not his first language. To offer just two simple examples:


"By dumb concentration and notice-wooing struggle. The only way I could conceive, in my blood-loaded, picturesque amorousness". (138) 


"Thus Mrs Renling in her strenuous wand hacked-up way, and the whiteness that came from her compression into her intense purposes.(151)"

The intention, presumably, is to convey the fragmented nature of Augie's internal narration. This works effectively at first, but after a while becomes wearing. 

Secondly, the novel has no real plot. We follow Augie as he wanders aimlessly from job to job and relationship to relationship. Each situation involves the introduction of a large cast of characters - even on the penultimate page, more than 500 in, Bellow is still introducing new characters. Events are structured chronologically, but the episodic nature of the narrative means it doesn't flow - I did this, then I did this, then I did something else. 

Thirdly, Augie is not an engaging character. He is devoid of any insight into his own motivation - he just wanders through life. His personal attachments to other people are superficial - even his family members are discarded when he loses interest in them. His mother is left in a home for the blind, and he rarely visits her, and his disabled brother is dumped in an institution and he only visits him once in a period of several years. His love life is complicated and unconvincing. 

If this was just a series of scenes of urban life in pre-war Chicago, the novel would have had a degree of integrity. But at one point Bellow seems to bore of this theme, and he takes Augie to Mexico to train an eagle to capture lizards. Yes, apparently the best way to catch lizards isn't to trap theme, but to train an eagle to catch them. As a plot device this would be out of place in a Marx brothers film, but it gets worse, because out in Mexico Augie meets Leon Trotsky, on the run from Stalin's secret police. Despite the major world events that occur over the span of the novel, from the end of Prohibition and the Great Depression, Augie barely notices them. Even though he has met Trotsky, his later assassination and death don't merit a mention. The Second World War only intrudes as an interruption to Augie's plans to finally settle down and marry.

So to summarise: no plot, boring characters, clumsy writing - yet Bellow won the Nobel prize for literature! I'm quite happy to admit I must be missing something. I'm going to guess it's one or more of the following:

1. 'The Adventures' conforms strictly to the traditions of the picaresque novel, defined in the Encyclopaedia Britannica as:

"a first-person narrative, relating the adventures of a rogue or low-born adventurer as he drifts from place to place and from one social milieu to another in his effort to survive. In its episodic structure the picaresque novel resembles the long, rambling romances of medieval chivalry, to which it provided the first realistic counterpart. Unlike the idealistic knight-errant hero, however, the picaro is a cynical and amoral rascal who, if given half a chance, would rather live by his wits than by honourable work. The picaro wanders about and has adventures among people from all social classes and professions, often just barely escaping punishment for his own lying, cheating, and stealing. He is a caste-less outsider who feels inwardly unrestrained by prevailing social codes and mores, and he conforms outwardly to them only when it serves his own ends. The picaro’s narrative becomes in effect an ironic or satirical survey of the hypocrisies and corruptions of society, while also offering the reader a rich mine of observations concerning people in low or humble walks of life."

See what I mean?  Augie is an Everyman through whose eyes the reader can see his world, but his passage through it leaves few traces. So is 'the Adventures' a modern day American version of the classic picaresque novels such as 'Don Quixote'? I think that is a sustainable interpretation, but I am not convinced. 

2. 'The Adventures' also contains numerous classical references. These left me wondering if there were possibly parallels between Augie's adventures and those of the classical characters he refers to, as happens in 'Ulysses'. In the end I just didn't care enough to try and find out. 

3. The range and scope of the novel made me wonder whether this was Bellow's application for the 'Great American Novel' competition. This scepticism wasn't helped by the quote from Martin Amis on the back cover claiming "'The Adventures of Augie March' is the Great American Novel. Search no more." There are some explicit references to other candidates in that competition, now closed of course. Does this description of Augie's brother Simon's spending habits ring any bells?:

'From the barbershop we'd go to Field's to by him a dozen or so shirts, imported Italian underclothes or slacks or shoes, all things of which he already had a surplus; he showed me drawers, closets, shelves full, and still kept buying' (224)

I noted down several quotes from this novel during the week or so that it took to complete, but the one I should have listened to was Bellow's advice, in Augie's voice: 

"I never blamed myself for throwing aside such things as didn't let themselves be read with fervor, for they left nothing with me anyhow" (206)

This novel didn't let itself be read with fervour, and even though I didn't throw it aside, no-one could surely have blamed me if I had. 

Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth - 1969

Portnoy's complaint is both a noun and a verb - the book is another first person narrative describing the author's childhood and later life, an autobiography with only the flimsiest attempt at disguise as a novel. Alexander Portnoy complains to his psychiatrist - at quite some length - about his domineering mother, his father crippled by chronic constipation, and the impact this has on his later ability to develop serious relationships with women. This is both his lament and his condition.

Of his mother he writes memorably:

"She was so deeply embedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise. As soon as the last bell sounded I would rush off for home, wondering as I ran if I could possibly make it to our apartment before she succeeded in transforming herself. Invariably she was already in the kitchen by the time I arrived, and setting out the milk and cookies. Instead of causing me to give up my delusions, however, the feat merely intensified my respect for her powers"

As a young boy his relationship with his mother is simply dysfunctional, but when he hits puberty it becomes positively Oedipal. The chapter on the masturbation frenzy he embarks on at this point is a famously sustained portrayal of adolescence, and is quite filthy in some respects. It is hardly surprising given Portnoy's frankness about every aspects of his sexual life and fantasies that the book caused a considerable controversy on publication. Even today it has the power to shock.

As with most first person narratives, the reader is automatically sympathetic to the narrator - we see the world through their eyes, hear their explanations for their conduct, get their side of the story. With such monstrously controlling parents it is hardly surprising that Portnoy rebels, pursuing relationships with non-Jewish girls. He is unarguably a misogynist. He gives his girlfriends unpleasant, objectifying nicknames - the Pumpkin, the Pilgrim, the Monkey - and abandons the latter when she is feeling suicidal. He feels guilty about this, but not guilty enough to do anything about it. Of course he blames his mother for his inability to form grown up relationships with perfectly pleasant young women, (he cites one reason why he leaves 'The Monkey' as her calligraphy!) but his inability to accept any personal responsibility for this begins to chafe after a while - "a Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant" - and you want to tell him to stop whining and grow up.

The novel takes a darker turn in the final chapters when Portnoy goes to Israel. He has a casual sexual encounter with a female soldier, but is impotent. Later in the final pages he meets up with a hitchhiker, and tries to rape her. It is quite satisfying to see her kick his ass. His misogyny seems unrestrained when the travels to Israel, possibly because of his distance from his mother.

In the end, Portnoy is his own, most astute critic. He pleads:

"Spring me from this role I play of the smothered son in the Jewish joke! Because it's beginning to pall a little at thirty-three!”

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath - 1963

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York".

Is there a better opening line to a novel? It wasn't until towards the end of this book, when the narrator, Esther Greenwood, has electro-convulsive therapy as part of her treatment for severe depression, and submits to it "like a person coolly resigned to execution" (203) that I was able to join the dots - she sees what happens to her as similar to what happened to the Rosenbergs. Note also that "they electrocuted the Rosenbergs" not "the Rosenbergs were electrocuted" - suggesting the existence of a shadowy and malevolent but wholly real external force that can take people's lives. Not only does Esther not know what she is doing in New York, but as the novel develops it becomes apparent that her confusion is much deeper rooted.

Rarely has an opening sentence more brilliantly foreshadowed the events of the novel, while at the same time setting the tone and fixing the events in time and place.

Sadly it is now not possible, if it ever was, to separate any reading of 'The Bell Jar' from one's knowledge of Plath's own life (and death). She committed suicide a few weeks after 'The Bell Jar' was published under a pseudonym. The novel is largely autobiographical, and horribly foreshadows, even predicts, her final days. I don't know whether this extraordinary book is an extended suicide note, or a cry for help - but I do know that I can't remember reading a sadder novel. The ending, where Esther's ECT seems to have been successful, and she finally starts to recover from her illness, is a false dawn all the sadder in the context of Plath's death.

The novel opens with Esther enjoying something of an adventure, on a work-placement with a magazine in New York. She is academically successful, has enjoyed lots of advantages in life, and seems to have the world at her feet. She has not yet mastered the art of developing relationships with men, but is starting to experiment with her new found freedom. There are some aspects of life she finds hard - men consistently try to bully her, particularly when it comes to sex, and while she stands up for herself this is not an aspect of her life she is comfortable with. She doesn't bond easily with the other women in her lodgings, and in the background is the loss of her German father when she was nine (Plath lost her German father when she was eight).

At first she appears to be in control, and the depression that comes to dominate her life is not immediately apparent. However, subconsciously, the signs are already there. Death, murder, suicide, and objects associated with death, constantly crowd her thoughts:

A lumpy bed is "shrouded by a thin white spread" (86); a silver lighter is "in the shape of a bullet." (103), as is Doctor Gordon's pencil "like a slim, silver bullet" (129); a mattress falls across Esther "like a tombstone" (119); a bath tub is "coffin-shaped" (18) and a telephone sits "dumb as a death's head" (17).

The language of death pops uninvited, and unnoticed, into Esther's mind all the time, even when there is no apparent connection with the subject. Death is everywhere:

"My penalty was the long, dead walk from the frosted glass doors of the Amazon" (95)

"Pretend you are drowning'." (103)

"I felt like a hole in the ground" (15)

"At my feet, the city doused its lights in sleep, its buildings blackened, as if for a funeral."(106)

"Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one's ashes, the grey scraps were ferried off" (107)

"A summer calm laid its soothing hand over everything, like death" (109)

"I cracked open a peanut from the ten cent bag I had bought to feed the pigeons, and ate it. It tasted dead, like a bit of old tree bark". (131)

(On her mother's snoring) "The piggish noise irritated me, and for a while it seemed to me that the only way to stop it would be to take the column of skin and sinew from which it rose and twist it to silence between my hands" (119)

Finally, these thoughts cannot be resisted, and the crisis point is reached.

"The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower" (92)

From this point Esther plans to kill herself, and these thoughts dominate her waking hours. She plans her suicide carefully, and her inverted thinking is reflected in the language she uses to discuss these plans:

(Of the Japanese) "They disembowelled themselves when anything went wrong" (132)

"The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of storeys, you might still be alive when you hit the bottom. I thought seven storeys must be a safe distance". (131)

Note the use of the word safe, meaning here to end in certain death, the complete opposite of its usual meaning.

Esther's suicide attempts lead to her being sectioned. She dreads the ECT, even though finally it appears to have helped, if only temporarily. She describes her feelings during psychiatric analysis:

"I had imagined a kind, ugly, intuitive man looking up and saying "Ah!" in an encouraging way, and then I would find words to tell him how I was scared, as if I were being stuffed farther and farther into a black, airless sack with no way out. Then he would lean back in his chair and match the tips of his fingers together in a little steeple and tell me why I couldn't sleep, and why I couldn't read and why I couldn't eat and why everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end." (123/4)

So the father figure she is hoping for fails to appear. Equally, the young men in her life are not substitute fathers, failing to care for her.

This isn't just a book about mental illness and suicide. It's about growing up, about the way men behave towards women, it is about literature, and reading, and writing, and so much more. It is deeply sad, and provides an insight into the thoughts of a suicidal depressive who ultimately can't understand her own illness, just wants it to end. In many ways it is a very difficult, challenging novel, and anyone in a similar position to Plath would fit little comfort in it. My edition carries a quotation from Joyce Carol Oates "A near perfect work of art", and just this once I agree.

At Swim-Two-Birds - Flann O'Brien - 1939

'At Swim-Two-Birds' is quite unlike any other novel I have ever read. On the whole that is a good thing, but it also means that it can be a challenging, almost impossible read. Let's start with a plot summary, which I have borrowed from Wikipedia:

At Swim-Two-Birds presents itself as a first-person story by an unnamed Irish student of literature. The student sets three apparently quite separate stories in motion. The first concerns the Pooka MacPhellimey, "a member of the devil class". The second is about a young man named John Furriskey, who turns out to be a fictional character created by another of the student's creations, Dermot Trellis, a cynical writer of Westerns. The third consists of the student's adaptations of Irish legends, mostly concerning Finn Mac Cool and Mad King Sweeney.

In the autobiographical frame story, the student recounts details of his life. He lives with his uncle, who works as a clerk in the Guinness Brewery in Dublin. The uncle is a complacent and self-consciously respectable bachelor who suspects that the student does very little studying. This seems to be the case, as by his own account the student spends more time drinking stout with his college friends, lying in bed and working on his book, than he does going to class.

The stories that the student is writing become intertwined with each other. John Furriskey befriends two of Trellis's other characters, Lamont and Shanahan. They become resentful of Trellis's control over their destinies, and manage to drug him so that he will spend more time asleep, giving them the freedom to lead quiet domestic lives rather than be ruled by the lurid plots of his novels. Meanwhile, Trellis creates Sheila Lamont (Antony Lamont's sister) in order that Furriskey might seduce and betray her, but "blinded by her beauty" Trellis assaults her himself. Sheila gives birth to a child named Orlick, who is born as a polite and articulate young man with a gift for writing fiction. The entire group of Trellis's characters, by now including Finn, Sweeney, the urbane Pooka and an invisible and quarrelsome Good Fairy , convenes in Trellis's Red Swan Hotel where they devise a way to overthrow their author. Encouraged by the others, Orlick starts writing a novel about his father in which Trellis is tried by his own creations, found guilty and viciously tortured. Just as Orlick's novel is about to climax with Trellis' death, the college student passes his exams and At Swim-Two-Birds ends.

The reason why I have exceptionally quoted this plot summary at such length is to give you some idea of the labyrinthine complexity of the plot. I struggled with following the action of the narrative until I came across this summary (after extensive research, of course) and used it as a crib sheet to help me follow things. I have no idea what this says about me as a reader, but I recommend it as an approach for anyone else who struggles as I did. Of course the other point that jumps off the page from this precis is the bizarre, post-modernist nature of the text. Characters writing their own endings and launching attacks on their authors is something no-one (that I know of) had done before O'Brien, certainly not in novel format, and it still remains outside the normal realms of fiction, belonging more to comedy or comic books.

The third reason why the novel presents challenges to the reader brought up on traditional narrative is the innovative use of found texts. I've not been able to establish precisely which parts of the novel were copied from other texts in 'At Swim-Two-Birds', other than the letter from a tipster recommending a sure fire winner, but I suspect the section providing random 'useful' facts during Trellis's trial, the summary of the events of the poem 'The Shipwreck' (pages 201-211) and the long list of 'flowers and plants rarely mentioned in ordinary conversation' on page 192 are examples. The latter two instances are dropped into the text almost entirely at random with little or no contextual reason for their use. The use of complex Irish names and place names added yet another layer of difficulty for this reader, and if you think I am exaggerating the point, try this:

"Sweet to me your voice, said Caolcrodha Mac Morna, brother to sweet-worded sweet-toothed Goll from Sliabh Riabhach and Brosnacha Bladhma, relate then the attributes that are to Finn's people."

Most of the humour in the novel derives from O'Brien's surreal approach to his subject matter, such as it is. The closest thing I can compare it to is listening to a drunk telling you a long and unstructured story, where no-one behaves rationally, and where he keeps forgetting what he was telling you. Occasionally glimmers of sense can be perceived, but this never lasts long and we are soon back in old Ireland, with the Pooka speculating on whether his wife is a kangaroo, or whether the invisible fairy in his pocket is planning to set it on fire.

This certainly all adds up to an unusual, even unique novel.

The Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger - 1951

Three things I didn't notice about 'Catcher in the Rye' when I first read it as a teenager:

a) Holden Caulfield, the novel's 16 year old narrator, is seriously rich. He attends a private boarding school in New Jersey, from which he has just been expelled. His family live in an apartment building close to Central Park which is large enough (the apartment, not the park) for them to have a live-in house-maid. During the 48 hours or so of the novel's span he spends money like water, on hotels, cabs everywhere, drinks, and a prostitute. How could I have missed this first time round, seeing him as a fairly normal, typicla teenager. I think the simple reason is that we see the events of the novel through Holden's eyes, and he is not aware of how privileged and prosperous he is - for him, it is normal to be able to afford all these things.

b) Holden hates pretty much everything. Actors. Hotels. Phonys. People who repeat themselves. Inexpensive looking suitcases. People who repeat themselves.

"I hate living in New York and all. Taxicabs, and Madison Avenue buses, with the drivers and all always yelling at you to get out at the rear door, and being introduced to phony guys that call the Lunts angels, and going up and down in elevators when you just want to go outside, and guys fitting your pants all the time at Brooks, and people always...." (page 141)

Holden's anger is random - he snarls at anything that crosses his path, but at exactly the same time tries to befriend anyone he can.

c) Holden is quite obviously clinically depressed. He is unable to sleep, he cries for no particular reason, he is unable to concentrate, and he is full of inarticulate rage against the world. Holden may have become, as described by Wikipedia, as "an icon for teenage rebellion and angst", but that's really a case of projection - Holden doesn't really rebel against anything; he is just extraordinarily lonely and upset. He desperately tries to make connections with anyone who will talk to him, from taxi drivers to Salvation Army nuns, (not that the Salvation Army has nuns) and ten year-olds in the park.

By the end of the novel, Holden is hospitalised. He talks in the introduction about becoming "run-down" and coming "here" without saying explicitly where here is. However, on the final page, he mentions "how I got sick" and "this one psychoanalyst guy they have here".

So, we have someone who is prosperous and in a loving family, with no material wants. He hates virtually everything he comes across, however trivial or inoffensive they might be. He is depressed. How can that be a simply case of teenage angst, something he will grow out of? For me, rereading 'Catcher' it is quite obvious that Holden has not recovered from the death of his brother a few years earlier. It is reasonable to assume that showing grief would have been frowned upon by his Waspish family. There's no reference to any counselling or other support - instead he is simply sent away to boarding school, separating him from his remaining siblings. He still mourns for his brother, thinks about him a lot, and refers to him in the present tense in his internal monologue, but doesn't speak about him to anyone, not even his little sister Phoebe.

'Catcher' is a novel much loved by teenage readers. Holden seems to speak to them in a way like few other characters in literature. He was, arguably, the first authentic teenager in literature. Coming back to the novel several decades later the authenticity of that voice is lost. In trying to establish whether this reaction was simply personal to me, or something wider, I scrolled through some Amazon (UK) reviews of the novel. One comment from a perceptive reviewer jumped out at me:

"Reading it - and To Kill A Mockingbird, which is the only book that regularly beats it in polls - has been a formative influence for generations of American adolescents, to the point at which nostalgia for that time of life may impose a filter between the older reader and any objective assessment. Even so, it's striking how many find that it can't be reread later in life with the same admiration."

That struck a chord - the novel is often read at a point in the life of readers when they can identify with Holden, not because of his wealth, his illness, or his loss, but because he is a teenager angry with the world. As a more mature reader we see the novel's faults, the absence of any plot and the various implausibilities in terms of Holden's age, an immature 16 who still gets served in bars and clubs.  We also see Holden as the distressed young man he is rather than a voice of rebellion. It is, of course, one of the strengths of the novel that is can appeal to different types of readers in very different ways.

Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson - 1980

Among the various reasons for keeping this blog, the one I keep coming back to is to help me remember. I doubt if it is just me who forgets the detail of a novel, then the main events and protagonists, and finally come to doubt whether I have even read it at all. Which is why it is important that I write carefully about Marilynne Robinson's 'Housekeeping', because otherwise there is not a chance in hell of me remembering it in a few months time.

The novel is narrated by Ruthie, and tells of the events of her childhood. Orphaned by the suicide of her mother she is brought up with her sister Lucille by their grandmother, then two elderly great-aunts, and finally by her aunt Sylvie. It is never stated directly, but it is fairly evident that Sylvie is mentally disturbed - she neglects the children, fills the house with rubbish and cats, and can often be found staring out into space. Housekeeping, the semi-ironic title, is not something that occurs to her, and even in the broader sense she struggles to keep a house for the girls, the younger of whom escapes to live with a teacher as soon as she is able. Finally, after Ruthie's neglect becomes inescapable, and it appears likely she is going to be taken into care. To avoid this she and Sylvie run away, and at the novel's close we are told they continue to live the rootless life of transients.

'Housekeeping' is one of those novels where the sense of place is vital. The isolated American town of Fingerbone (admittedly a fine name for a town) is settled next to a large lake, crossed by a railway bridge. From said bridge and into said lake a train crashed, carrying with it Ruthie's grandfather, setting in chain the events that lead to this story, and providing a backdrop for the narrative itself. Think 'Twin Peaks' without the murder or (some of) the craziness. It always seems to be bitterly cold down in Fingerbone, and the chill and damp coming off the lake exudes from the pages.

Robinson left it almost another twenty-five years after publishing 'Housekeeping' to publish another novel, but it cannot have been because of the reception of this her first, prize-winning attempt. In his Guardian review Robert McCrum goes to far to say, surely in an act of wild over-exaggeration, that Robinson introduces a "new, timeless, and utterly distinctive voice into the magical polyphony of the American novel". While she can certainly craft an image - for example  "watching gulls fly like sparks up the face of clouds that dragged rain the lenght of the lake" this restraint and economy is often absent. At times the writing is extraordinarily over-written, as here:

“To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing–-the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.”

Does it really? Or is this the triumph of style over substance, attractive to literature prize-juries but simply not that interesting?

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain - 1884/5

Mark Twain's 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' follows chronologically the earlier 'Tom Sawyer', but has a much darker, more adult tone. Huck is the novel's first person narrator, and has a primitive, naive view of the world which contrasts with that of the reader, and provides much of the humour and insight of the novel. Huck is dirt poor, uneducated, and more than a little feral. His mother is long dead, and his father is an abusive alcoholic who treats Huck like a slave. To escape his father's abuse he runs away - he fakes his own death, steals a boat, and sails off down the Mississippi, looking for somewhere to hide. The parallels between Huck and Jim, the escaped slave he meets and befriends, are done with a light touch - Huck has almost no self pity, and doesn't equate his position with that of Jim. It is not so much that he believes himself superior to Jim, but that his awareness of Jim's role as a slave, as property, with no rights whatsoever, is rarely challenged.

Jim and Huck sail down river, having various adventures. They meet a family engaged in a bitter feud with some neighbours (to be precise Huck meets the family, Jim remains hidden through these chapters) just at the point where the feud erupts into deadly violence. They meet two con-artists and become embroiled in some of their scams. Eventually Jim is captured and imprisoned, and in some of the final chapters of the novel which even its most ardent supporters recognise are misconceived, Tom Sawyer is reintroduced and the children's book, Just-William style of the earlier novel is reimposed, before a resolution in which Jim is freed.

'Huck Finn' is lauded as a masterpiece of American primitive literature. Twain certainly captures the scenes of living on the river vividly. But the whole impact of the otherwise complex and subtle novel was spoiled for me by the constant and repetitive use of the n-word. The word is used casually and in most cases without vicious intent, and no doubt was historically accurate. Although the novel was published in the UK in 1884, and the US the following year, the setting of the novel is some 20 or so years earlier, when slavery in the South (having been abolished across Northern states as early as 1804) was still in force. Abolition and the free state are mentioned as background, but the attempt to take Jim to freedom is abandoned easily. Huck's presentation of slavery is very matter of fact - he reports Jim's distress that his wife and children have been sold to another owner - but there is little or no empathy, nor indeed recognition of their shared misfortune. All the black people in the novel are portrayed as caricatures - they speak an exaggerated form of English, rendered phonetically thus:

"But it's awluz jis' so; people dat's sot, stays sot; dey won't look into noth'n'en fine it out f'r deyselves, en when you fine it out en tell um 'bout it, dey doan' b'lieve you.”

They are all also hugely superstitious, frightened of ghosts and witches, and are extremely easy to tease or fool, with a child-like innocence or naivety. Huck and Tom have no hesitation in exploiting this gullibility for their own amusement.

As Huck gets to know Jim, his admirable qualities emerge. He is kind, faithful, and patient. He sacrifices his freedom for Tom's welfare, and suffers uncomplainingly the many injustices placed upon him. Twain's portrait is generally sympathetic, despite his use of many of the 'Uncle Tom' cliches of the time. But this emphatically isn't an anti-slavery novel - that battle had been won years earlier after the Civil War. Equally it doesn't present the case for civil rights for emancipated slaves or opposition to racism - its setting means that is simply not an issue. So at best the presentation of the issue of slavery in 'Huck Finn' is ambiguous.

Ultimately it is the use of the n-word that defaced this book for me. Finn is a charming and thoughful narrator, and his insights into his world are at times witty and interesting. But imagine (say) 'Pride and Prejudice' with a foul swear word used casually by the characters every other page or so. The values of the novel would remain, its wit and intelligence, the clever characterisation, and so on, but it would be really hard to prevent the use of the distressing language from spoiling one's appreciation of these aspects of the novel, wouldn't it? I am not suggesting bowdlerising this novel, although such things have been done, but I doubt it would prevent readers from enjoying it if alternative language was used.

The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Graeme - 1908

It is an incredibly long time since I last read 'The Wind in the Willows', and I returned to it with some nervousness - would it have retained its wit and charm? Unsurprisingly, it is one of those novels which contains depths unnoticed in earlier reads. It is simply wonderful, and if you have a couple of hours spare there are few ways of spending them that would be more rewarding than on the riverbank with Ratty, Mole, Toad, and Badger.

In an interesting article in the Guardian books column back in 2009, 'Wild Waters are upon us', Rosemary Hill observed that 'The Wind in the Willows' was written within a few years of Beatrix Potter's 'The Tale of Peter Rabbit', E.Nesbit's 'The Railway Children', and J.M.Barrie's 'Peter Pan'. Together she argues, very persuasively, that these children's stories came to define the Edwardian Era, "as an idyllic last summer bathed in golden sunshine", in contrast to the developments in the real world, "a decade of social discontent and growing international tension, when the cracks in the British Empire began to show". This novel captures brilliant a world of largely suburban contentment - the animals co-exist quite comfortably with the human world, all except perhaps Mr Toad, and their occupations - mainly messing about on boats - are those of middle class people with time on their hands. If 'Willows' creates a lost Edwardian idyll, rather then portraying it, the novel is however quite clear that this world is under threat, from development, urbanisation, and not least the dreaded car. The car must have been a rare and slightly frightening sight in 1908, but the way Graeme captures the petrol-head obsession of Toad still has close parallels to the car worship of today.



Graeme's wonderful conceit in 'Willows' was to anthropomorphise his characters, but in a very fluid way. At times they are real animals, and in the edition I read on the kindle the illustrations show them as lifelike, to scale creatures. At other times they are human scale. They have human character traits, but also at other times behave like the animals they are, subject to instincts and urges which nevertheless find an echo in the reader. The cast of characters is hugely strong and well defined; we all know a Ratty, Mole, or Badger, let alone a Toad. The supporting cast of characters is equally well sketched in, so we feel great affection for Otter, for example, or his son, Portly. The Chief Weasel only gets a few lines but that was enough for A.A. Milne to give him a much larger part in the stage version, 'Toad of Toad Hall'. The narrative is also told with a striking economy - there are only two pages between Toad's escape from his friends at Toad Hall, and the magistrate passing sentence, "twelve months for the theft..., three years for the furious driving, which is lenient, and fifteen years for the cheek".


Part of my nervousness about returning to 'Willows' lay in the way the Wild Wood and its inhabitants are handled. It is 'other' - and can be read as anything alien to the comfortable life of Ratty and company, even if it is home to Badger. At one point the narrator describes it as "low and threatening, like a black reef in some still southern sea". The alliteration is marvellous, but the point is made - the wild-wooders are like foreigners, tribal natives, dark and threatening. It is like the areas on maps marked 'here be dragons'.  The insurrection of the wild-wooders, numerous and disrespectful to their betters, and at times actually threatening, seemed to me to be a perfect model for the class struggles of the period. The working class are organising and asking why they have to live lives of poverty and drudge, while the middle classes mess around in boats, doing very little. Their revolution, when it comes, is quickly squashed, and it is made clear they have learnt their place, tugging on their forelocks when the squires of the manor pass by. This of course was wishful thinking - the class problems of 20th century Britain were not as easily resolved as a clip around the ear. However I think the handling of this paradigm does throw a light on the complacent attitude of many to the rise of the organised working class in the early years of the 20th century.

I was equally nervous about the "Piper at the Gates of Dawn' chapter, that strange, surreal story where Ratty and Mole go searching for Otter's lost son, Portly, and meet him safe in the arms of Pan. Yes, Pan. Mole sees "the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humorously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arms that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward". Pan saves Portly and returns him to his friends, then wipes their memories, Men in Black fashion. It's still a really strange, slightly homo-erotic chapter. I can only assume Graeme was trying to introduce the idea that the animals have their own spirituality, their own God, but this must have opened up some really difficult lines of thought for God-fearing Edwardians only just coming to terms with Darwinism and their links with the animal kingdom.

The thing that struck me for the first time on this reading was in relation to the treatment of Toad by his friends when they decide they cannot stand by and see him wreck his life by his addiction to fast cars. The way this is described is almost identical to a modern intervention into the life of a drug addict. His friends sit him down and clearly explain the problem. They describe the waste of money on his addiction, the "regrettable incidents with the police", and the "weeks in hospital, being ordered about by female nurses". When he rejects their help they restrain him, keep him under close watch - "he must never be left an instant unguarded. We shall have to take it in turns to be with him, till the poison has worked itself out of his system". (page 61). Toad has "violent paroxysms" makes "uncouth and ghastly noises", and lies "prostrate amidst the ruins of chairs" - is not this a wonderfully accurate description of someone going 'cold turkey'.

Finally, to end on a joke, which made me laugh out loud. Toad is in the most liberal dungeon in the country, chatting to the kindly daughter of the warder. She is trying to explain her escape plan, and says:

"I have an aunt who is a washerwoman",

to which Toad graciously and affably replies

"There, there, ...never mind; think no more about it. I have several aunts who ought to be washerwomen".

Could Bertie Wooster have said it better?

An Artist of the Floating World - Kazuo Ishiguro - 1986

This novel addresses what most be one of the most difficult issues a country has to ever face - how to come to terms with overwhelming military defeat. For Japan, that defeat was all the more painful because its involvement in World War 2 was completely avoidable; and the end of the war, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was so shocking and final. Ishiguro's approach to this subject is to walk slowly round it, quietly approaching and then stepping quickly away as soon as the subject becomes too raw.

I am being oblique myself, so let's explain. The narrator is a painter, Masuji Ono. He has lost a son and a wife in the war, but his two daughters survived. One is married, one going through the complex engagement process used by some Japanese families at the time (and for all I know is still in use). The time structure used in the novel is complex; although each section is dated, giving the reader a misleading reassurance as to the date of the events of that part of the novel, Ono's account wanders across time, gradually revealing details of his career as a painter. Discouraged by his father from becoming a painter, he runs away from home, and becomes an artist of the floating world - a particular genre of art in Japanese culture. Very slowly Ono reveals his involvement in the rise of Japanese nationalism, and his subsequent disgrace and the rejection of his values by the new, post-war generation. This reveal takes the whole of the story arc, and even then one is left with the distinct impression that we have only been shown a small part of the story.

Ono is a reflective character - he is certainly a deeply flawed narrator, as one would expect, but he is not delusional - he knows that his involvement in Japanese nationalism, painting pictures encouraging the expansion of the empire, was wrong, although the extent of that recognition is unclear: at one point he admits "There is certainly a satisfaction and dignity to be gained in coming to terms with the mistakes one has made in the course of one’s life", although this is more of a tactical admission than a confession. Ono's grandson plays an important part in the narrative - he is a really brattish, unpleasant little eight year old, who is encouraged (by his grandfather) to believe that his gender gives him authority over his mother.

There is a profoundly hesitant, tentative feel to the novel. Ono tiptoes around his story, rarely revealing much, and constantly admitting that his recollection may be flawed, The reader is given enough information to piece together the outlines of his story, but only through hints and only rarely through actual events - at one point we are shown him visiting the house of one of his students, who he has reported for anti-nationalist feeling, and it is clear that the authorities reaction has been extreme - we found out earlier that the student was imprisoned for a long time, and apparently tortured. Ono doesn't understand, or refuses to understand, his responsibility for this situation.

Ishiguro is clearly a writer of some considerable skill - the novel is quite deliberately like a delicate Japanese watercolour, done with great finesse. But the characters - other than Ono himself - are only tentatively drawn - we only see them through Ono's eyes, and he doesn't trouble to sketch them in any detail. The language is equally delicate and riven with hesitation, again quite deliberately, giving a very authentic flavour to the narrative, but leaving the reader a little bit detached and remote - the speeches are overly polite, and you need to listen carefully to the subtext to understand what the speakers are really saying, even if the narrator usually misses the point.

Japan clearly went through a huge, if self-imposed trauma before, during and after the Second World War. The price paid was enormous, and understanding how that come to happen is important. Ishiguro gives us one witnesses flawed account, but it is very much that of someone who had only a small, marginal involvement in the tragedy, and I am not sure that it tells enough of the story to be of any value. The book ends without any big reveal, and so does this review.

The End of the Affair - Graham Greene - 1951

I am ashamed to admit that this is the first Greene novel I have read; I fear it may be the last, at least for now. 'The End of the Affair' tells the story of an adulterous affair between Maurice Bendrix, an author on the cusp of, if not fame, popularity, and the wife of a neighbour and friend, Sarah Miles. Bendrix's narrates the story in flashback, returning to the present often and thereby constructing a complex time scheme that only coheres at the end of the novel. The affair lasts for four years, the first four years of the Second World War. The war is largely background noise to the events of the novel, although it does intrude at one point when a V2 bomb, strangely called here a 'robot' lands very close to Bendrix's house, knocking him out. Thinking him dead, Sarah prays for him to be saved, promising god that if he does survive she will reward him (that is, god) by leaving Bendrix and being faithful to her husband.

Bendrix survives, in fact is largely unhurt, and true to her perverse bargain with god, Sarah leaves him. Leaves is a misleading term, in that she has never actually left her husband, who working late at the Ministry and already living a sexless life, doesn't notice the affair. She finds the separation painful, so perversely pursues other affairs - the deal with god was very specific apparently - but eventually relents and decides to resume the relationship. The reader is invited to see the hand of god in the various bits of fairly clumsy sit-com style incidents that prevent this resolution being carried out, and Sarah finally succumbs to the irresistible charms of the Catholic Church, before catching a cold and dying. Colds are pretty ferociously dangerous in romantic novels; in fact it would be nice some time soon to read a novel where the resolution is not provided by someone conveniently dying, even if the death as here is signposted a long way in advance, and comes as nothing of a surprise. Cuckolder and cuckolded commiserate one another after Sarah's death, and eventually become an odd couple of their own, pottering down to the pub each night to drown their sorrows.

Much of the novel is dominated by a discussion of religion, and more specifically Catholicism. God intervenes in the life of the characters, and while they resist fiercely, they eventually accept his gifts. Even though Bendrix ends the novel by rejecting the roman god, he does so more through stubbornness and anger than any lack of belief. Frankly, this is largely tedious, unconvincing preaching - of course god can appear in the lives of characters if the author simply invents "coincidences" to persuade them of his existence. Rosencrantz and Guildernstern in Stoppard's play about their deaths show infinitely more faith in the power of coincidence, denying the existence of an external power, even when that power is the author himself. All it takes here, by comparison, are some simple coincidences before Bendrix begins to start doubting his agnosticism, ending with a suggestion reminiscent of the conversion at the end of "Brideshead" that he too has accepted the inevitable (even if this suggestion comes at the very beginning of the novel: "If I had believed then in a God".)

In an insightful introduction in this Vintage edition, Monica Ali surgically pinpoints many of the faults in the novel - the poor characterisation in particular, and the failure of the religious conversion scenes. I agree, but I think she is too kind on Greene. We are invited to see Bendrix as a tragic anti-hero - he is the victim of his own sad story - but if you remove his point of view from the events of the novel and look a little more objectively, he is really a nasty piece of work. He cuckolds Miles, simply at first to get some material for his novel. He has sex with Sarah in her own house while Miles is upstairs, and later has sex with her in a ditch, overlooked by a farmer on a tractor who passes "at the moment of crisis". Nothing gets in the way of his determination to sleep with Sarah - at one point he even is grateful for the war for the opportunities it provides: "War had helped us in a good many ways" (page 45). He is casually arrogant about his writing and his attractiveness to women, and treats his lover appallingly, employing a private detective, the gormless hat-tipping Parkis, to steal her diary.

Greene's reputation as one of England's foremost post-war novelists cannot be evaluated on the strength of a single novel, but this is not a strong exhibit for the defence. 'The End of the Affair' is a confidence, well constructed novel full of strong descriptions and turns of phrase, but I suspect it won't linger long in the memory. It has not aged well - I appreciate that 1951 was a long time ago, but there is a bit of a dated, Edwardian feel to this tale - the characters still have maids to answer the door. Perhaps I need to take a look at 'Brighton Rock' or 'Our Man in Havana' after a suitable period of reflection?

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont - Elizabeth Taylor - 1971

I confess I had never heard of Elizabeth Taylor before her appearance in the Guardian best 100 novels in English list. One of the hope-for benefits of working through this list was the discovery of some hidden gems, a writer whose back catalogue would open up to exploration. Having now read the clumsily titled and thinly written ‘Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont’ I know why she is so unknown – her inclusion on this list is puzzling, when you consider the authors such as Tolkien and Rowling who missed the cut. There’s nothing wrong with ‘Mrs Palfrey’ as a novel, and if you try hard you can find some features of interest – but little that will occupy you for long.

Laura Palfrey who in Taylor’s somewhat spiteful description ““would have made a distinguished-looking man and, sometimes, wearing evening dress, looked like some famous general in drag”, is recently widowed. She arrives at the Claremont hotel in London, one rainy Sunday in January. The novel immediately strikes a false note – the taxi driver is unfamiliar with the hotel. Taylor is telling the reader that the hotel is obscure and forgotten, like Mrs Palfrey herself, but she surely under-estimates London cabbies? After years as a colonial ex-patriot wife she faces the fact of her isolation, and the inevitability of decline and death.

There is a strangely dated air to both the Claremont and the novel itself. Although published in 1971 the setting is firmly in the sixties, with references to the Beatles and hair-length being a cause for disproportionate anger in the elderly. At one point, a young man refers to his girlfriend as a “bird”. (Quite genuinely, for a split second I took this as a reference to him having bought himself a parrot or canary, so dated is this slang). In fact, although the setting is the 60’s this novel could easily have been published several decades earlier with only minor edits. Mrs Palfrey’s back story is strangely blank – while we know her husband was in a colonial role in Burma, that would have ended in the late 1940’s; we aren’t told when or how he died, where Mrs Palfrey lived after that, or much about her strange decision to move away from her daughter in Scotland to the most expensive city in the country, rather than the more sedate and welcoming south coast, for example.

The Claremont becomes in the words of the Guardian’s reviewer “a genteel antechamber to oblivion”. Mrs Palfrey and her fellow long term inhabitants are waiting for death, bored silly, whiling their time away with banal occupations – patience, short walks, crosswords – waiting for the next meal or the next infrequent visitor. This is more a retirement home than a hotel. Even great writers struggle to generate interest from a story of bored people with nothing to do, and while Taylor captures the sense of ennui well, it’s not enough to keep the reader engaged.

As a substitute for incident or plot, Taylor introduces Ludovic (Ludo) Myers a struggling writer. Ludo rescues Mrs Palfrey after a geriatric fall, and becomes, through a series of misunderstandings, her substitute grandson. Ludo has fallen straight out of the pages of ‘New Grub Street’ – he is trying to write a novel, keeps warm by working during the day in Harrods Banking Hall, (not the British Library, just for variety), subsists on tinned goods, and only puts his fire on a single bar when he is feeling extravagant. His friendship with Mrs Palfrey is the only thing that enlivens her days, but there is little of substance to it and it quickly fades.

Taylor is felt by some to be an undiscovered genius, a novelist spoken of in the same breath as Jane Austen. The comedy in the novel is ineffably slight – if you find old people being pompous and falling over funny then this is for you, but I found the novel’s ending, when Mrs Palfrey has another fall, and dies alone, unremembered, something of a release.

George Gissing – New Grub Street – 1891

Gissing isn’t really read very much today. His novels – or at least some of them – are still in print, but I doubt if he makes his way onto many syllabuses or reading lists. Certainly I would not be reading him now if ‘New Grub Street’ hadn’t appeared on the Guardian’s best 100 list. Does that really matter? There is a relentless Darwinism at work in determining what books are read and which are forgotten, and if Gissing is steadily dropping out of sight it is probably for a good reason.

‘New Grub Street’ tells at considerable length the story of a small group of lower middle class but educated people trying to make a living from professional writing. Some write novels, others articles for publication, reviews, and short stories. All are utterly obsessed with their financial situation.

“Poverty is the root of all social ills; its existence accounts even for ills that arise from wealth. The poor man is a man labouring in fetters. I declare there is no word in our language which sounds so hideous to me as “Poverty”” (page 33)

George Orwell, in an article about Gissing which ironically was probably written simply to keep the writer’s income flowing, claimed that we had “very few better novelists”, although he does go on to say that “His prose, indeed, is often disgusting”. Disgusting is a bit strong, but clumsy, undoubtedly. Take this sentence for example:

“Fixed in his antipathy to the young man, he would not allow himself to admit any but a base motive on Milvain’s side, if, indeed, Marian and Jasper were more to each other than slight acquaintances; and he persuaded himself that anxiety for the girl’s welfare was at least as strong a motive with him as mere prejudice against the ally of Fadge, and, it might be, the reviewer of ‘English prose’.”

But it’s not all stodge – some of the descriptive writing, of which there is admittedly little, is very well put, as in here when he describes one of his younger female characters:

“So exquisitely fresh in her twenty years that seemed to bid defiance to all the years to come”. (70)

There is a relentless focus in ‘New Grub Street’ on money – who has how much, what interest can be expected from savings, how much an article of novel might bring in, and so on, at extraordinary length. Rarely a chapter goes by when money, and its absence, is not the focus of the narrative. Even when ostensibly the story moves on to a discussion about relationships, these are determined solely in respect of the relative wealth of the participants. Creative endeavour can only be measured by the income it generates. Despite the grinding poverty that most of the characters suffer, the distinction between this group of people, who earn their living, such as it is, by writing, and the social group immediately below them who work for a living, is preserved at all cost. One character, Edwin Reardon, is actually left by his wife because he proposed to take a clerical post, rather than continuing to try to earn a living by writing novels.

New Grub Street is a depressing place to be. One writer dies of a consumptive-like illness which is not specified by is clearly derived from years of poverty; another commits suicide when the failure of his magnum opus becomes apparent, a third marries purely for money and social advancement, abandoning a young woman as soon as her inheritance falls through. It’s not just the world of writing that Gissing is condemning, but the society in general - Reardon, the one person who throws it all in and gets a proper job suffers just as badly as the rest.

A novel about writing is bound to break the narrative fourth wall from time to time. It is obvious at points that Gissing is writing from personal experience about trying to earn his living. The scenes where Reardon suffers horribly from writer’s block also have a poignancy suggesting Gissing had probably suffered similarly, as well as having felt the pain of having to write for payment by the page. But overall it is hard to feel too much sympathy for most of his cast of characters, and I feel no compulsion to seek out any of Gissing’s other novels for now. Just to end with one of my favourite quotes from an Amazon reviewer of ‘New Grub Street’. Missing the point with uncommon accuracy – “It's not funny at all”

 

 

1984 - George Orwell - 1949

When I re-read a novel (as here) for the umpteenth time, I always look carefully for things I have forgotten or overlooked the last time. It's surprising what you miss - I wrote about this here a while back. The first thing that struck me about '1984' is what a brilliant opening it has. Not just the extraordinary first line - "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen" - but the opening chapter. Orwell packs so much into these few pages it positively fizzes - Big Brother, the anti-sex league, the two minute hate, the Ministry of Truth, doublethink and newspeak. It's such a detailed and comprehensive evocative of the new world we are plunged into that it is shocking.

Orwell was the first writer who spoke to me personally through his works, and I absorbed all his novels, even those he wrote simply for financial reasons, and would have been happy to have seen pulped, as well as his journalism, letters, and anything else available. So making a dispassionate judgment about 1984 is impossible, and I am not even going to try. Orwell's fierce intellect shines from every line - this has to be the most quotable novel ever written, particularly when you think that it was not written as a series of epigrams (unlike, say 'Dorian Gray') but as a dystopian horror story. The concepts that Orwell develops in this novel have become part of our popular and political culture - 'Big Brother' for example, as a short-hand phrase to describe the over-intrusion of the state into our private lives, (as well of course as a reality TV gameshow). 1984 is a passionate warning cry against the evils of totalitarianism. 

But, and there is always a but, post-war ration starved Britain had already rejected the hopelessness of '1984'. In electing a Labour Government with a mandate for radical change, they had decided that they didn't have to settle for the permanent rule of the party, and that things didn't always have to be dreary and hard. The proles had rejected the lie of the ruling class that things can never get any better. Orwell seems to have completely missed that sense of optimism. Winston Smith believes that if there is hope, it is with the proles, the working class. But the proles of 1984 are so easily distracted by pulp fiction, machine produced porn, and a fake lottery that there is never any prospect of them organising and gaining a class consciousness which would allow them to "rise from slumber, in unquenchable number". By 1949 the Attlee Government was clearly struggling - was that really the time to warn of the risks of a Soviet takeover of Western Europe?

I can't find the faintest trace of hope in 1984. Some readers claim the post-script essay on the introduction and development of Newspeak suggests IngSoc did not last, but that seems clutching at straws. By the end of the main novel, Winston is broken, looking forward to the bullet in the back of his head as a mercy. There is no suggestion that the future holds anything but the stamping of a boot on a face, forever.

Eton-educated George, or should that be Eric, was always a stranger in the slightly smelly, uncomfortable world of the working class. His sense of alienation from the working class - even, one could argue, his submerged class hatred - is vivid in 1984. They are an utterly alien species, with goldfish like memories, no class consciousness, and representing nothing of value. Winston is amazed at their stoicism, as well as their ability to reproduce so prolifically - Orwell shares similar sentiments in, for example, 'The Road to Wigan Pier'. If the proles are the only hope, then there is no hope. I appreciate I am criticising '1984' for not being a socialist manifesto, when of course it was never intended as such. But it handed a potent weapon to the critics of socialism, and all Orwell's subsequent comments about the intention of his writing had little impact on the perception that he was a trenchant critic of English Socialism. Which is a pity, because there are few writers in the twentieth century who wrote as interestingly or as well as Orwell on social issues.

The History of Mr Polly - H G Wells - 1910

Most Victorian novels were about prosperous people. Yes, they sometimes had money worries, but they weren't urban working class. Dickens changed all that, and people from all parts of the class spectrum became suitable subjects. However, the petit bourgouise, the shop keeping class, technically bosses in that they were self employed, but dirt poor nonetheless, were largely ignored. That changed with the Grossmiths' 'Diary of a Nobody' in 1892, and 'The History of Mr Polly' is an early entry in this 'little man and his troubles' or 'white collar' genre.

'Mr Polly' opens with him sitting on a stile, grumbling. He hates his life. He doesn't love or particularly even like his wife, he finds his job as a shopkeeper dull and unfulfilling, and he mourns the absence of any romance or culture in his life. He also suffers horribly from chronic indigestion, representative of his dissatisfaction with life. The first half of the novel is a flash-back from this point, chronicling how he has always felt this way, more or less, and how he reaches this nadir. He settles on suicide as the only logical escape, and having made that decision implements his plan quite calmly. Inevitably he botches the job, and in the process burns half his street down. Ironically this provides him, in the form of insurance money, an escape route, and he runs away. The final section of the novel sees him settled as a handyman at a country pub, living a bucolic but largely culture-free lifestyle that seems to suit him. This life is threatened by uncle Jim, the nephew of the landlady, a thug who menaces her for money. Polly discovers the hero inside himself, stands up to Uncle Jim, and in comic bumbling fashion defeats him.

Polly is quite an engaging anti-hero. He reminded me of Anthony Burgess's Enderby, one of my comic legends. He has a kind heart, and does his best to avoid causing harm. he takes the hardships in life as they come, and looks for pleasure in small things. He has a way of mangling the language which is intended as humorous, and which just about manages to raise a smile. Despite his ineptitude in most things, somehow he manages to come out on top. Some of the set-piece scenes in the novel, such as his father's funeral, where remote relatives descend on the wake and have a great day insulting one another, are enjoyable. If one looks hard for more serious themes, such as any traces of Wells' Fabianism, they can be found, but the novel is not openly political. The main 'message' of Mr Polly's history is that one should be true to oneself:

"when a man has once broken through the paper walls of everyday circumstance, those unsubstantial walls that hold so many of us securely prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a discovery. If the world does not please you, you can change it. Determine to alter it at any price, and you can change it altogether. You may change it to something sinister and angry, to something appalling, but it may be you will change it to something brighter, something more agreeable, and at the worst something much more interesting. There is only one sort of man who is absolutely to blame for his own misery, and that is the man who finds life dull and dreary"

Mr Polly didn't have such a terrible life. While slowly going bust in his shop, he didn't suffer the privations many people experienced, and enjoyed many of the comforts of his Edwardian idyll - an idyll that was to be lost forever just a few years after this novel was published.