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July
2006
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Hot,
hot, hot, just the weather for doing nothing but read in the shade;
global-warming weird and going on and on, just the weather for strolling
out to Jenny’s (still sweltering at eight in the evening!) to discuss
a strange book about a parallel present, or rather near past, Kazuo
Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.
What
on earth was this book about? This is what we discussed as the air
con blew our hair around. Some reviewers seem to have said that
the book builds masterfully to a horrific revelation, but the horrific
‘secret’ is clear from the first page. Kathy H, our thirty-one-year-old
narrator, tells us right away that she has been a ‘carer’ for over
eleven years and that she is about to cease being one, that my
donors have always tended to do much better than expected. Their
recovery times have been impressive, and hardly any of them have
been classified as ‘agitated’, even before the fourth donation.
It’s
quite clear from this - the ‘recovery times’ - that what are being
donated are organs or body parts, (that nasty detail of the ‘fourth
donation’, which must surely mean death), and even if we have only
‘semi-guessed’ Kathy’s fate, as it is suggested by one reviewer
we do, it is soon made perfectly clear that when Kathy ceases to
be a carer she will become a donor too, and that she and her fellows
in their boarding school Hailsham were bred specially for this purpose,
the cloned products of genetic engineering. The fact of cloning
then is not the heart of any revelation, and Ishiguro lacks the
science-fiction writer’s interest in the logical details of the
alternative scenario he creates, leaving unaddressed the issues
of how precisely these donors manage to survive to a ‘fourth donation’,
or who in this parallel nineties Britain benefits. We are treated
instead to the minutiae of boarding-school life and teenagers’ mentality,
and the love triangle between Kathy and her manipulative and controlling
friend Ruth and volatile Tommy. Ishiguro’s interest is elsewhere:
in the human spirit, and how people behave in hopeless situations.
The
clones’ education is a kind of brainwashing, preparing them for
their fate, and they are trained to brainwash each other (taking
this ultimately into the role of carer). So brainwashed do they
become that even once they are allowed out into the world they still
accept their fate, looking in on conventional society like aliens
from afar.
Trevor
said with some glee that he felt that Ishiguro was - as usual, he
thought - having a swipe at the public school system, which he said
brainwashes people to conform in just the same way. Jenny expostulated
that public schools teach people to lead, not submit! But Trevor
said it didn’t spoil his argument, they still submitted to a social
system. Anyway, he said, changing his argument slightly, what about
all those kids down the comprehensive who have no higher aspiration
than stacking shelves - or come to think of it, now that 50% of
the population is meant to go to university, those graduates who
have no higher ambition than that, either?
I
said that my problem with the book was that although I can agree
with this as a political theory - the idea that as a rule people
submit to their fate, often indeed willingly or proudly (in keeping,
as someone said, with both traditional Japanese and Protestant ethics)
- I can't accept that no individual ever tries to rebel, and couldn’t
take it that none of the donors tried to escape, and Hans strongly
agreed. I said in fact it would have made a better book if they
had. John at this point said that his problem with the book had
been its flatness, its sense of a closed fate encapsulated in the
flat mundane prose of Kathy’s voice. Trevor cried that he couldn’t
disagree more, these were the things he thought were entirely great
about the book. Anyway, he said, they do rebel in a way: they have
the dream of ‘deferral’ (of graduation to donorship). Jenny said,
Quite, it’s only deferral, that’s all they can imagine. Yes, said
Hans, but you’d think that once they were together in the outside
world they could have taken that idea further - and why were they
so very immune to the influences of contemporary society and so
outside of it when in fact they were free not to be? Hans didn’t
find it credible that the brainwashing could be that effective,
when it was after all a very mundane, recognisable and social sort
of brainwashing, unlike the kind of brainwashing we encounter in
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. Anne said, Yes, and in Nineteen
Eighty Four Winston does actually rebel. They were clones! said
Trevor. But, we said, it’s never made clear that they were fundamentally
lacking in human emotions as a result, and it’s clear, Anne said,
that Tommy has some of the emotional volatility of the person from
whom he was cloned.
In
other words, although we could see that the book wasn’t meant as
conventional science fiction, none of us but Trevor could help reading
it in that way and being dissatified with the logical holes. And
taking it on the other level, as simply a disquisition on the passivity
and hopelessness of the human spirit, we found it profoundly bleak.
John
said, to be frank he found it pretty boring actually - that flat
prose and all the petty details of teenage relationships. Trevor
objected again that this was the brilliance of the book, portraying
the way that horror lurks under mundane surfaces. And Hans pointed
out the clever technique which Ishiguro uses to keep you hooked
through all the banalities: Kathy's tick of constantly referring
to incidents which she says she'll tell you all about in a while.
And
then it was eleven-fifteen and we went home, and outside it was
as hot as it had been when we came, and the possibility was lingering
in the night air: that the effects of human tinkering with nature
were too real in any case for science fiction.
September 2006
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
Everyone
present loved this 1961 book, recently reprinted by Methuen, the
tale of the Wheelers, a young American couple trying unsuccessfully
to lead intellectually-fulfilled lives and ‘find themselves’ in
a barren, suburban post-war America. Everyone’s breath was taken
away by the acute observation, the concise, satirical prose, and
the sheer humanity… Everyone marvelled that they had never heard
of Richard Yates before, and that nor indeed, apparently, had Clare’s
friend, a university teacher of literature.
The
book was not published in Britain until 1986, and people suggested
that one reason was Yates’s very prescience: the suburbia he describes,
with cocktails before dinner each evening in the little box houses
of a modern housing estate, and neighbours coming round for drinks,
did not come into being in England until the late sixties at the
earliest, and so the world he describes would have been alien to
Britons at the time of the book’s first publication. It is surprising,
though, that even on its 1986 British publication it made no lasting
stir.
John,
introducing the book, pointed out how carefully constructed and
unified the book is, and that although it has a veneer of realism
it operates on a sophisticated symbolic level: the path which Frank
Wheeler is having such trouble building across his lawn at the start
of the novel, which ends up going nowhere, symbolising the characters’
existential floundering, the community play with which the novel
begins symbolising the fact that each character is constantly ‘acting’
a role, unsure of who they really are.
There
were two points of disagreement. Although everyone agreed that the
novel was satirical most disagreed with my claim that it was actually
funny. I read out a section to prove my point, a description of
Shep, the Wheelers’ neighbour, escaping into machismo from the prissiness
with which his mother has tried to smother him, a section which,
to me, ends in a wry comic image: his eighteenth birthday sent
him whooping and hollering into the paratroops. Everyone’s face
remained straight and they all protested that that was sad,
not funny! The situation is sad, I said, but what about the language
(the comic image, the hyperbole in whooping and hollering),
but people protested that the language wasn’t funny, just
clever. Doug alone did agree with me that the descriptions of Frank’s
workplace were comic, and especially the depiction of General Sales
Manager, Bart Pollock, lunching with Frank:
He went on talking as he ate but he was quieter now and more
dignified, using words like "obviously" and "furthermore" instead
of "fart" and "bellybutton". His eyes no longer protruded; he had
left off being the backwoods tycoon and was resuming his more customary
role as balanced, moderate executive.
This to me comes from a wry, satirical authorial eye. Since everyone
had already agreed that the book was satirical, though, I guess
we were talking at cross-purposes: the humour I see in the book
is wry rather than laugh-out-loud and always underpinned with the
sadness of the situation. (Everyone did laugh, however, when I mentioned
the spoonerism of Bart Pollock’s name, and indeed all of the names
are similarly wryly symbolic.)
Our
second point of disagreement was over the depiction of the women
in the book. Everyone agreed that Yates is far more understanding
of women than his contemporary John Updike, and indeed way ahead
of his time in this, but most people felt that the book was nevertheless
more weighted towards the men. Doug and I strongly disagreed. If
more words are devoted to the men, then far more of the satire is
devoted to the men. The sections devoted to the points of view of
the women characters are extremely moving, and in terms of the structure
of the book very important: they come later, undercutting the earlier
reality of the men. It is April Wheeler’s tragedy, seen from her
point of view, which forms the crux and denouement, and thus, it
could be argued, the last word.
Very
rarely do we discuss at such length a book about which basically
we all agree. There was so much to comment on, the book was so rich.
And it sent us off onto an animated discussion of the issues, and
on into politics, until finally someone looked at their watch and
found it was twelve-forty-five – the latest we have ever stayed
for a book group meeting.
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October
2006
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Where
is everybody? Only five of our huge group made it to Mark’s new
house through a damp October evening so oddly warm that Mark’s little
boy was waiting at the door in his bare feet and pyjamas, and it
mattered not a jot that Mark had not yet had the boiler installed.
Introducing
this book which caused a sensation on its 1965 publication, Mark
outlined the circumstances of its writing. A ‘non-fiction novel’,
as Capote called it, it is about the real-life mass murder of a
comfortable ‘middle-class’ Kansas farming family, the Clutters,
the police hunt for their two ex-convict killers, the effects of
the case on the community, and the subsequent court trial and process
of law. Mark described how Capote, an established minor novelist,
was sent as a journalist to cover the case and ended up spending
six years researching it, interviewing hundreds of witnesses, aided
by his childhood friend Harper Lee, amassing hundreds of notebooks
and forming relationships with many of the people involved, not
least one of the young male murderers, Perry Smith.
The
novel famously marries an objective journalistic style with some
novelistic conventions, and Mark thought this brilliantly done.
He particularly admired the objective and non-judgemental stance
of the book, and the fact that nevertheless it was a compulsive
read, a book you couldn’t put down.
Trevor
agreed wholeheartedly, but to their surprise Doug and John and I
said that we had struggled a bit with the book, and did not find
satisfying the attempt to marry the two styles or forms. The police
investigation is dealt with in a journalistic way, and the book
opens with a journalistic account of the history, geography and
economics of Holcomb where the killing takes place. However there
follows the classic novelistic technique of alternating between
two sets of people we know are destined to come together: the Clutter
family going through their last day on earth, and the killers preparing
their raid on the house and making towards them in their Chevrolet.
Yet a journalistic distance nevertheless informs the portrayal of
the killers and their preparations, and we are provided with only
a partial insight into their psychology (more will become clear
later in reported interviews), so that to us this novelistic treatment
- the dramatised imagining of their conversations and journey -
seemed both tricksy and incomplete.
Mark
felt that the non-moralising tone prevented the portrayal of the
events from being prurient, but the rest of us felt that the preparations
for the murder especially did evoke prurience in the reader. Clare
- arrived late from a meeting - commented that what was interesting
about the book was that it buffeted your reactions - from prurience
and out again - in a baffling way which usefully conveyed the sheer
incomprehensibility of the killings, and their essential randomness.
(The Clutters were targeted, but unknown to the killers, who were
simply out to rob a rich household.)
Although
the champions of the book within the group, Trevor and Mark noted
that the psychology of Perry (the murderer with whom Capote developed
the closer relationship during his research) is ultimately given
more thorough and sympathetic treatment than that of the other murderer,
Dick, and they saw this as an oversight on Capote’s part.
Everyone
found somewhat tedious the legal and psychological reports at the
end of the book, and the case histories of the killers’ cellmates
on Death Row extraneous. John commented that these were novelistic
objections, whereas this belonged to the ‘sociological tract’ aspects
of the book. He thought that maybe this is how the book is read
nowadays: as a sociological tract and a record of the times, rather
than as an example of the ‘new literary form’ which Capote felt
he had invented.
All
of us also felt that there was something else missing from the book:
the significant effect, recorded elsewhere, of a novelist/journalist
spending years in a small community raking over such an event, keeping
it alive, developing relationships with the protagonists, including
the killers, and giving them all their fifteen minutes' (or rather,
lasting) fame.
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November
2006
Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr
We
take it in turns to choose books for discussion, and when it’s a
person's turn they offer two and the rest of the group vote for
the one we’ll discuss. Trevor decided on two books the publishers
of which had, in the sixties, been prosecuted for ‘obscenity’: DH
Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Last Exit to Brooklyn
by Hubert Selby Jr. We voted for the latter.
Trevor,
renowned in our group for liking books others find too harsh or
distasteful, said that this book, which was new to him, had really
shocked him. This made us laugh but we all understood why. A depiction
of the lives of fifties New York drag queens, bisexuals, prostitutes
and drug addicts, it confronts unflinchingly the relentless violence
and hopelessness of those lives in a way which I feel is stunning
and unique.
John
said he thought it was a joke that the book had been prosecuted
for being likely to deprave: there was nothing erotic whatever about
the explicit sexual scenes, undercut as they were with violence,
sadness and a dreadful loneliness, and the rest of us agreed, apart
from Jenny who said that as a teenager she had found it titillating.
John said that indeed the book was utterly moral, more moral than
most, in the clear-eyed and empathic way it portrays the unhappiness
of the characters and their terrible spirals of degradation, and
Trevor and I agreed, saying we thought it was a truly great book.
At
this point there was some demurring. Anne and Clare said that they
hadn’t enjoyed the book at all, finding the relentless violence
quite off-putting. Clare said she dealt with people like this in
her work, which was quite enough thank you, she went to books for
light relief from all that, and, frankly, for more enjoyment. How
on earth could you enjoy a book like this? I said, But the book
is so brilliantly written: it is this, precisely, which I enjoyed
- no, actually, found thrilling - the prose. With an amazing
facility, Selby captures the differing linguistic registers of all
of the characters and operates a unique narrative technique of switching
between indirect speech and direct all within one sentence, the
effect of which is to create a fluid movement between more objective
observation of the characters and dynamic dramatic effects which
draw you into their experience:
The cop stepped up to the soldier and told him if he didn’t shut
up right now he’d lock him up, and your friend along with you.
(In an introduction to our Bloomsbury edition, Selby writes
of the care and time he took to develop his narrative techniques,
which, designed to make the language of his characters live, are
often mistaken for simplistic and untutored replication.)
Clare
said, But she didn’t read books in the writerly way I did and that
she hadn’t been able to get through the violence to appreciate the
prose, and Anne nodded. I felt pretty frustrated by this but I was
even more frustrated when Doug, whom I can usually rely on to agree
with me in general, supported them. He said he had been able to
appreciate the quality and cleverness of the prose, but he too could
not cope with the lack of redemption in the book, every character
ending up degraded or even dead, with no hope ever of happiness
for any of them. Jenny said, but this is the truth about many lives,
that there’s no redemption (and indeed, in his introduction, Selby
makes clear the efforts he went to to be true to this fact and not
to impose any writerly desires or choices on the story). Clare reiterated:
she knew it was a truth in life, but she didn’t need to get it from
books, and she wanted books to give her something else in compensation.
I said, But isn’t the compensation, and the redemption, in
the author’s stance of compassion: the way he makes us see that
the characters are indeed longing for exactly that, compassion and
love? There was more arguing: Doug felt that we didn’t understand
enough about what had made the characters what they were for this
to be so, which left me too gob-smacked to argue. In view of this,
I was even more frustrated by the fact that every other person in
the room said they had found the longest section of the book, dealing
with a strike, boring and skippable, and that frankly they didn’t
see why it was in the book at all - since this was the piece which
I felt really did give you social underpinning, and the section
which I thus found perhaps the most compelling (the others cried
out in amazement). And anyway, Doug said, these characters are just
so unremittingly immoral and cruel, and Jenny said, yes, what about
that group of housewives watching a baby on a high window ledge
and hoping it would fall? (Jenny and I did have to admit that this
was the one moment we didn't find psychologically convincing.) Doug
said, We are just presented with the callousness, we’re not given
any sense of its psychological effect on others. I said,
But what about the fact that we see inside the mind of the old woman
those housewives laugh at, and into the minds of women downtrodden
by the men (which in fact makes the book feminist way before its
time), and the others did then say, Oh yes.
Clare
then said that actually she could see now that the book was something
different from what she’d thought: it was observation with compassion.
I cried Yes! But Jenny (who also really liked the book) said: Well,
I don’t think much of that, observation with compassion, that’s
just patronising, isn’t it just observation full stop, and what’s
wrong with that? And we ended up having a long discussion about
what you mean by compassion.
But
then Doug said: as for the language, it had become too commonplace
in American gangster films to appreciate its freshness, and he’d
therefore even been a bit irritated by it at times, and even Trevor
agreed with him, at which point I gave up and poured myself a big
glass of wine.
At
which point also though Clare said suddenly that she was really
glad she had read this book, and that what our discussion this evening
had made her realise was that there are other things to read novels
for besides enjoyment.
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December
2006
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
Doug
had a beautiful huge Christmas tree, tastefully decorated wth red
baubles and tiny white lights, which made everyone exclaim as they
entered, and people brought Christmas food, mince pies and chocolates,
and Jenny had a bag of samosas left over from her other reading
group at Didsbury library which had had a Christmas gathering earlier
in the day. And no one was much inclined to get down to business
and discuss the book.
In
the middle of all the hilarity I asked everyone if they minded my
writing about our meetings on my blog,
and everyone said it was fine. But then Doug said suddenly that
that reminded him: he had a good mind to start a rival web report
because my last one (on
Hugh Selby Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn) was totally biased
(towards my own view of the book) and ended on a yah-boo-sucks note.
(Trevor added that he's always shocked by how different my memories
of the discussion are from his.) Quite right! I retorted, refusing
to be chastened.
Anyway,
this is my memory of our discussion this time:
Anne
had chosen this 1938 novel in which, in a classic case of mistaken
identity, a naive aristocratic nature-features writer, Boot, gets
sent as a war reporter to the fictional African Republic of Ishmaelia,
and in which journalistic contempt for the truth is famously satirised.
Having read other Waugh novels and enjoyed them, she said she had
chosen it as a civilised and urbane antidote to the linguistic grimness
of Selby Jr. However, having expected to enjoy it without reservation,
she now wasn't so sure, finding it on the whole to be in fact more
of a farce than a satire. Everyone readily and strongly agreed,
although most had enjoyed it - though Sarah said she had given up
after the first seventy pages, for the very reason that she hates
farce.
John
pointed out that, while the overriding trope of mistaken identity
and that of the innocent abroad were in the realm of farce, there
was true satire in the treatment of the activities of the journalists
and their newspapers, and most people agreed that the telegrams
passing between them were very funny. Most were agreed too that
the book was in any case very clever, but John and Anne weren't
so sure since it wavered between satire and farce. Trevor said that,
having previously avoided Waugh because of his right-wing reputation,
he had been amazed to find how even-handedly Waugh had poked fun,
representing the aristocratic Boot family as dodderers mainly confined
to their beds. At which point Jenny expressed her oft-stated opinion
that aristocrats are anything but duffers, it just suits them to
have people think they are, and Waugh (who was not in fact aristocratic)
had fallen for that.
John
also noted that Boot is something of a psychological blank, and
he said that while this is part of the satirical or farcical point,
he found that it created a sense of something incomplete. We discussed
this - the fact that in a satire you don't really need psychological
complexity but that somehow here it seemed like a flaw - without
coming to much conclusion as to why this should be. I said it was
particularly noticeable in the 'love' interest (Boot falls innocently
in love with a young German woman who is quite cheerfully taking
him for a ride), and Trevor, who'd had quite a bit to drink by then,
explained to me their relationship. I said I understood what their
relationship was, I was talking about the treatment of it, and he
explained it to me again.
Anne
wondered how much more impact the book might have had in its day,
as we are now so much more used to the idea of not trusting the
press, but Doug said, haven't there always been satirical cartoons?
And
that was about it. A very short discussion (as far as I remember
it), and by the time Mark arrived, late from putting his kids to
bed, we'd long gone onto other topics which we stayed late discussing,
even though Doug had to go to London next day...
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January
2007
The Sea by John Banville
Several
members couldn't make it to this meeting, so it was a small group
which gathered at Jenny's.
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