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January
2013
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
I wasn't at the meeting when the group discussed Oranges Are
Not the Only Fruit, the well-known and acclaimed autobiographical
first novel by Jeanette Winterson, in which a protagonist with the
same name as the author is brought up to be a preacher by an adoptive
and fanatically evangelical Christian mother who burns her books,
but, discovering her lesbian sexuality, finally rebels and escapes
to university.
What follows is the report of the discussion written by John:
Jenny chose this book. Or rather she suggested two other books and
was met by a number of people very obviously not keen to choose
either of them. She then mentioned she’d seen a programme
with Jeanette Winterson talking about her memoir, recently published,
which she found interesting. There was then the suggestion that
we read Oranges and general agreement.
Jenny, whose initials, like JW’s, are JW, said she felt very
close to the book, being adopted herself in rather similar circumstances
– she was adopted into a “working class” home
and became a university lecturer. Jenny said her mother was not
like JW's – but that she was nonetheless a mother with a mission.
Jenny said she had enjoyed the book, and that it is very funny.
She (hailing from Stoke), Mark (Moston), John (Skem and New Mills)
and Trevor (Bolton) all agreed about the interesting and vivid picture
of life in Northern towns it presented. There was general agreement
that the women were particularly well portrayed. Trevor said he
could exactly imagine the café – and at this moment
Mark phoned to apologise for being late for the meeting. He was,
he said, in the chippy with his kids and would be along soon (typical
northern life!).
Jenny said she liked the book because it is short and sharp with
no long words. I pointed out “marmalade” and “Factory
Bottoms”, but she still insisted there are not many long words.
Ann also admired what she called the matter-of-fact tone, “No
violins”, no in-depth analysis of personality. Clare said
the characters are great, and Ann added, Particularly the women,
in general strong women, in an environment where the men are absent
or weak. Ann and Clare agreed the mother was mad, gloriously mad.
Two particular incidents were mentioned: the father’s carefully
wrapped birthday present to his wife, a catapult, I think to get
rid of squirrels or some such, and another incident, typical perhaps
of northern life, or perhaps of the non-rich everywhere: the pressing
of a glass against a thin partition wall to hear what’s going
on next door. Surprisingly, this was not the mother’s glass
for her false teeth, but a wine glass! This led to a discussion
of the mother’s background. She is not typical of the working
classes in small northern towns, but has at least one wine glass,
knows some French and has had a French lover, a relationship that
seems ended for her with some regret. She is also a fan of the Brontes.
However she tells JW her own versions: Jane Eyre ends early, with
Jane marrying the preacher man, St John!
The mother’s husband is introduced early, but takes very little
part in the book. JW refers to him early on not as her father, but
as “her mother’s husband”. He oozes supressed
aggression. The first paragraph of the book was discussed, in which
the mother wrestles with God. This is highly significant in terms
of what we are told about the father. A man who says nothing and
has such a wife, and spends much time watching wrestling must surely
be someone who is suppressing aggression? The mother says nothing
to him, and very little about him, one of her main statements being
“He’s not one to push himself”.
Jenny said she wondered if she hadn’t previously read the
book after all as she had thought, because she couldn’t find
it in her house and wondered if she knew the story well because
she knew it from the television series. It was agreed that the TV
adaptation presented a more dramatic storyline. Ann wondered if
the book is a memoir rather than a novel. Most agreed and it was
stated that there is no central drama, but an attrition of information.
The book drifted rather than focusing on the story. It was agreed
there are non-memoir elements, that is the Arthur and the Knights
stuff and the cod philosophy. It was felt that these last were “showing
off”, though they had not particularly bothered any one –
most people had skirted over them.
The symbolism of the title was discussed, and the large number of
references to oranges in the text. The title [EB: a favourite saying
of the mother's] suggests that there are alternatives, and ironically
the mother did not believe in alternatives but in good/evil, friend/enemy
dichotomies. Two possibilities for the meaning of the title were
discussed: that there is the religious view of life and the non-religious,
and that there is not just one type of sex. The mother is well aware
of lesbianism, having stopped the young JW going to a particular
newsagent's shop, run by two women she “suspected”.
The link between oranges and Nell Gwyn was mentioned, and after
the group meeting a Google search of “Jeannette Winterson”
and “lesbian” brought up something like a million references.
However “Nell Gwyn and lesbianism” brought up more.
I mentioned that in spite of any faults the book is a great achievement
for an author who was so young when she wrote it, having been able
to absorb much painful material.
It was agreed that JW was given a remarkable degree of self-confidence
by being moulded by her mother – Ann mentioned the Jesuits,
give me a child until he is 7... The groups’ attitude was
that JW was both to be admired and pitied. Her famous entry for
book of the year for a newspaper was mentioned, and the fact that
most people put forward their friends, whereas she put forward only
herself.
It was said that she seems in a way like Mrs Thatcher, but more
vulnerable than was usually evident. Various members of the group
seemed to think she’d had a hard time about 15 years ago,
and had tried suicide.
This was one of the more popular books recently discussed by the
group.
It was generally agreed that the last paragraph of the book is brilliant.
“This is Kindly Light calling, come in Manchester, this is
Kindly Light.”
The group went on to discuss its own possible claim to fame. Nicholas
Royle’s recent novel, First Novel, set in our area and referring
to real-life characters, mentions a reading group. There is the
implication that this is a mainstream group, with possible negative
connotations. I read out some passages from the book, which had
been sent to one group member, directing them at Mark. It gradually
dawned on him that he and his wife bore some remarkable similarities
to a couple in the book, the wife having 'meringue-like breasts',
which seemed to be intended as a compliment. Clare suggested that
the group should choose to read and discuss the book. This was met
with howls of horror and laughter. One member of the group is Elizabeth
Baines whose blog this is. She wasn’t present however. She
appears named in this book, with some physical description and apparent
life details – and to no precise purpose it seems. All the
group were shocked by this. They asked me, as a friend of hers,
what she thought.* I said I didn’t really know. Three group
members were enraged on her behalf.
[ End of report]
* Elizabeth
Baines: You can read what I did think about it towards the end of
a post on my Fictionbitch blog. Click here
for the post.
February
2013
A Jew Must Die by Jacques Chessex
Once
again other commitments have kept me from writing up the report,
and once again, I'm afraid, I have to rack my brains to remember
the discussion.
The
book was John's suggestion, a very short novella - perhaps really
more of a long short story - set in April 1942 in the author's home
town, the Swiss cattle-market town of Payerne, and recounting a
true incident in which, as a 'birthday present' to Hitler, a group
of Nazi locals (known to Chessex who in school sat next to the children
of their leader, the thuggish Ischi) lure a Jewish cattle merchant
into a stable and kill him with an iron bar.
My
first memory is of John opening the discussion by saying that, short
as the book was, it was certainly value for money, a statement with
which I fully agreed, sensing others agreeing around me. He then
went on to say what made it so: the spare prose, the calm, indeed
stark way in which the author recounts the horrifying events, including
the detailed process of the murder of Arthur Bloch which throws
into ironic relief the town's previously homely tradition of butchery,
a sobriety of narration which, as Jenny would say later, made the
events somehow even more horrifying; the way the beauty of the surrounding
countryside is contrasted with the moral ugliness at the heart of
the town, and the way, especially, that the book anatomises the
evil of idealism: the fact that the perpetrators saw their crime
as an act of glory and wanted to be found out - Ischi walking towards
the arresting policemen as if towards triumph and believing that
once the Nazis took over Switzerland their action would make them
heroes.
My next and main memory is of being most surprised, even shocked,
to discover that Mark didn't think much of the book at all, and
that to some extent he was backed up by Doug. Mark said it had left
him absolutely cold, and he couldn't understand why it has had such
a great critical reception. One thing he strongly felt was that
it was banal and unoriginal. The book makes vividly clear that the
main 'justification' for the murder - apart from the perpetrators'
personal desire for political advancement - is the historic European
resentment of the success of Jews in the professions and in business
(Arthur Bloch being a supreme bourgeois example), now given impetus
by Hitler's anti-Jewish campaign taking place beyond the Swiss mountains.
Mark said, but we know that this is why there was general resentment
of Jews, and he compared the book to the film Conspiracy in which
the Nazi party plot their extermination campaign without ever referring
to the imagined Jewish Conspiracy to dominate, but simply taking
it for granted, which Mark found much more chilling. I was too stunned
to gather my thoughts and say what I have thought since: that throughout
history anti-Semitic propaganda set out precisely to deny the Jews
any right to bourgeois or professional success by presenting them
as dirty and subhuman, and inevitably (surely) in the process erasing
or at least diminishing in the general (non-Jewish) mind concepts
of the Jew as bourgeois and professional. In addition, it seems
to me that the shock I often still hear expressed about the middle-class
and professional status of so many of those sent to the death camps
implies that not everyone has an understanding that the notion of
a Jewish Conspiracy fuelled European anti-Semitism and Hitler's
Final Solution. Indeed, Trevor proved this by wondering suddenly
during the discussion why, out of all the racism there is and has
been in the world, Jews should have been so subject to such a sustained
concerted campaign, and had to be reminded by Mark of the historical
roots, the occupation of money handling falling to Jews in a time
when such an activity was forbidden to Christians.
The book's revisiting of this historic and wartime prejudice is
therefore to me salutary:
A Jew has a bank account and a big belly - nothing surprising
in that... The Jew grown fat from robbing us with his banks, pawnbroking
and dealing in the cattle and horses he sells to our army. Our
army!
and I find moving the contrasting depiction of Arthur Bloch as a
typical yet exemplary and very human Swiss cattle trader:
With the point of his stick he presses on the flank of one of
the animals from Villaz-Saint-Pierre, reaches out a hand, moves
back to feel its haunch and gently strokes its neck... Arthur Bloch
is deliberate, never peremptory or imperious. Unruffled and perspicacious,
he displays the same wise caution as the local farmers. Rubbing
shoulders with them, despite his difference he has long felt at
one with them, that they esteem and respect him.
All I could think to say to Mark at the time was that just because
we know things doesn't mean that they can't be anatomised
in novels, but Mark retorted that in any case, and above all, the
book didn't move him. Here Doug came in and said that for most of
the book he found the same. I now remembered, and John reminded
me, that while I was reading the book I had also commented that
it wasn't moving - until, that is, I got to the end, to a years-later
chance encounter between the author and the unrepentant pastor whose
Nazi agitation was central to the plot, which I found devastating,
and finally to Arthur Bloch's funeral: by then I was in floods of
tears. Doug conceded that he too found the end moving, but he said
it was hard to see why, with which I couldn't help but agree, as
the prose at the end is rather declamatory.
There is probably a clue in the manipulation of viewpoint in the
novel, which John commented on, saying he thought it brilliantly
done. While adopting to begin with an omniscient third person and
looking down on the town from an omniscient visual perspective,
the book segues subtly into the viewpoint of the Nazi thugs, as
in the first quotation above. Finally, we get the angry, grieving
years-later viewpoint of the author confronted by the pastor's continuing
hatred, and looking back on the whole affair. It is the contrast
between the earlier cool anatomisation of the situation and the
author's final outpouring that is so devastating. As John pointed
out, far from being unoriginal, the book is special in being written
by someone who was at the time embedded in anti-Semitic Swiss society.
At one point Jenny commented that the book is about shame.
In response to Mark's objection, Ann also pointed out that the book
is about far more than the single incident of the Nazi murder of
one man by a handful of thugs in a single rural Swiss town, but
(I think she said) wider issues of racism and prejudice and the
way that the poison of seemingly distant events can filter into
the smallest communities and make all of us culpable.
People commented on the title of the translation, A Jew Must
Die. Jenny said she had been reading the book on the bus and
it had suddenly occurred to her how it might look, and had felt
the need to cover it up. It was generally agreed that the original
French title Un Juif pour l'example (A Jew as an Example)
was a more apt title for the book, although I can't help thinking
that the English title is a clever way of endorsing the book's message
of our culpability.
[EDITED
IN: Ann has reminded me that one comment we made at the end of the
evening was that the shortest book we have ever discussed had given
rise to one of our longest discussions.]
March
2013
Saturday by Ian McEwan.
Warning:
plot spoiler.
Mark suggested this book which he said he really admired, considering
it a truly great book: a novel set, like James Joyce's Ulysses
and Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, in the course of a single
day, the day here being the momentous one of Saturday February 15th,
2003, when hundreds of thousands of protestors converged on London
to demonstrate against the Iraq invasion. It concerns minutely the
experiences and thoughts of neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, from the
moment he wakes before dawn in his beautiful and beautifully appointed
several-storey town house on Fitzroy Square - when he sees from
the tall window a plane on fire and hurtling down towards Heathrow
- to the moment he falls asleep at the end of the day. In between,
he watches the news for information about the plane he saw (by lunchtime
it turns out it was a cargo plane that landed safely and its fire
was put out; it was after all no terrorist event), and makes his
way through the rituals of his own private day (comfortable chat
in the kitchen with his amenable blues-guitarist son Theo, lovemaking
with his beautiful lawyer wife Rosalind before setting off into
demonstration-clogged London in his top-of-the-range Mercedes for
a squash game nearby, shopping for, and later cooking, a fish stew
for an evening family get-together, a routine visit to his mother
suffering from dementia in a nursing home, and a visit to a rehearsal
of Theo's band), rituals punctuated and threatened, along with the
whole of Perowne's extremely comfortable life, by two dramatic events
concerning a thug, Baxter, and his henchmen, and indirectly caused
in the first place by the peace march. All of these events are filtered
through Perowne's highly introspective and visually observant consciousness,
his thoughts about the state of the world and his appreciation of
his own material comfort and relish for the modern technology that
facilitates it.
Mark began his introduction by reiterating his admiration for the
book. He said it was full of wonderful set pieces: the lengthy descriptions
of brain surgery, and most especially the 16-page description of
the squash game. The writing was superb, the sentences brilliant.
Mark said he found stunning the brilliant and accurate way the squash
game was conjured up, and thought it just an amazing feat of writing.
He thought the book was exceptional in capturing the atmosphere
and preoccupations of our times. Finally, though, he said that he
did have to concede that the denouement is ridiculous, in which
Baxter - having invaded Perowne's home, threatened the family with
a knife, forced Perowne's daughter Daisy to strip and demanded that
she read a poem from her own newly-published book of poems - is
put off his guard by being overcome by the poem she does actually
recite, Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach.
There was now a huge chorus of derisive agreement about this last,
and expressions of strong dislike for the book. Everyone else had
found it tedious, the squash game in particular, which some said
they had skipped; many had found the descriptions of brain surgery
ridiculously preening and self-congratulatory as well as tedious,
Ann saying she had skipped all but the first (Mark said that McEwan
had done two years' research so of course he had to use it! and
was met with howls of protest that Of course he didn't!), and someone,
I think Jenny, roundly said that the book was smug.
John expressed a certain doubt about this last: was the book really
smug, or was the author McEwan, a famously controlled writer, perfectly
aware of Perowne's potential smugness and distanced from it? McEwan
has insisted that, in spite of the novel being set in a house identical
to his own Fitzroy Square townhouse, he isn't to be confused with
Perowne and his views, as some critics have assumed. John noted
that at times McEwan points to Perowne's potential failings: the
fact, for instance, that he can't relate to literature in spite
of his rising-star poet daughter and his very famous poet father-in-law
John Grammaticus, and the fact that his son Theo needs to point
out to his ridiculously un-streetwise and possibly patronising father
that he may have made a mistake in humiliating Baxter (in his first,
morning encounter with him). While Perowne presents his daughter
with arguments for the invasion of Iraq, his daughter's opposing
view is also carefully presented, and elsewhere, towards the end
of the novel, Perowne expresses doubt about the pro-war position
he has espoused in the argument. But John said he simply couldn't
decide while reading precisely what was the attitude of the author
to the character. I said, In fact, Perowne expresses a fair amount
of doubt about his own actions and perceptions, he's constantly
turning them over and questioning them, but I too felt there was
a certain air of smugness, a self-congratulatory satisfaction about
that very self-questioning characteristic.
I thought that the clue lay in the fact that I found the viewpoint
of the novel hard to grasp. In a long 2009
interview with Daniel Zalewski for The New Yorker which I have
read since (culled over months of meetings with McEwan and running
to 14 pages), McEwan talks of using a 'free indirect style' to stay
close to the thoughts of a character but also to be able to comment
on that character. He is referring in the interview to his novel
Solar (then in progress) but I presume the comment also
relates to Saturday. Although I had agreed with Mark that
the novel was good on the level of the sentence - the sentences
sound beautiful, elegant, and their meanings ring with clarity -
I don't think McEwan employs this mode as cleverly as his reputation
as a master manipulator of prose would indicate. Perowne, the only
character whose perspective is presented throughout, is established
early on as introspective, a 'habitual observer of his own moods',
and the use of the intimate third person leads us into his introspections.
Very early on, he thinks back over the previous day and the surgical
procedures he performed. But as I read I found myself instantly
wondering, What neurosurgeon describes to himself the procedures
he conducted in quite this wide-eyed, detailed and instructive way?
The overall perspective, however, seems very intimately Perowne's:
going over one patient's medical history, he remembers, 'The
tumour was remote from the frontal lobes. It was deep in the cerebellar
vermis' which seems to me accurate doctor-speak. But then the
next sentence follows thus: 'She'd already suffered early-morning
headaches, blind spots and ataxia - unsteadiness,' and one
is tempted to ask: what neurosurgeon needs to explain to himself
what ataxia is? In other words, rather than the free-flowing effect
of a double viewpoint (of both author and character) for which McEwan
is aiming, we get one (unconvincing) viewpoint disrupted by a clumsy
authorial intervention, a direct address to the reader. Throughout
I often found myself wondering, Whose viewpoint is this supposed
to be? Whose musings, at any moment, are these really,
Perowne's or the author's? I also found a clumsy clash of fiction
and fact, and a consequent disruption of suspension of disbelief,
in the way that John Grammaticus, a fictional character, is meant
to have publicly competed with our real-life well-known poets for
their prizes and professorships. This section, in which real-life
poets such as Heaney are name-checked, and which seemed while I
was reading it to be Perowne's introspective memories of Grammaticus'
career, ends with a statement that none of the names mean anything
to Perowne - which of course makes it unlikely that he would remember
them in such detail, and once again there's a skewing of perspective,
and a suggestion that we had not been quite as intimate with Perownes'
consciousness as had seemed. And what about this use of the protagonist's
surname, Perowne? Who ever thinks of himself by his surname? (Or
indeed thinks of his father-in-law by his surname, as Perowne does?)
It's a distancing which signals the viewpoint of the author rather
than the character. But then what novelist getting inside the mind
of a character thinks of that character by his surname? Perhaps
McEwan moves in a different world from mine where people do still
think of themselves and their close friends and colleagues by their
surnames, but to me it struck a psychologically false and possibly
pretentious note.
Now other group members exclaimed that they found smugness in the
fact that everything about Perowne is so perfect: his house, his
car, his perfect marriage - his wife so beautiful and dynamic that
he has never once had a moment's thought of being unfaithful and
with whom he still has such an active love life that they make love
twice in the day - the second time after Baxter's traumatic intrusion!
- his so, so talented children and of course his famous father-in-law.
People said they couldn't stand any of the characters, John (to
cries of agreement) said that in any case the women were just fragrant
objects - Rosalind, Perowne's wife, is freqently referred to as
'childlike' - and Trevor said he couldn't stand the unrealistically
benign Theo. I said that Theo was a character I liked (I didn't
find him unrealistic, but then I know some really nice young men!),
but I did find that the novel carried a certain self-congratulatory
note about the fact of his benignity. People found a lot of things
- beside the risible denouement - highly unbelievable. Why, John
said, would you bother to get out your car just to go a few streets
in London to play a squash game (it's a crunch in the car that begins
the trouble with Baxter)? Ann, who had actually been on the demonstration,
said, And especially on that day: all the roads were closed and
no one would have tried to drive! And what about Perowne managing
to play a really hard game of squash after the thumping and immensely
bruised chest he's received from Baxter? And as for the fact that
in the end, after throwing Baxter down a concrete stair, from which
Baxter incurs a broken skull, Perowne (full of wine!) would have
either wanted to or been allowed to operate on the man who had just
broken into his house, threatened his daughter with rape and held
a knife to his wife's throat...!
Mark said, Come on, you're all being far too pedantic - it's fiction!
And Trevor joined in and said Yes, you can do anything in fiction!
Ann said, Yes, you can as long as you make it believable, but none
of the rest of us had found these things believable. I said, it's
particularly problematic because of all the very minute realistic
details: it's a novel that seems dedicated to realism, so you need
to have psychological realism too. Mark said, But these aren't mistakes,
McEwan knows what he's doing, he's very controlled. Doug and I replied,
Yes, he's very controlled, but that's the problem: everything is
manipulated (for the sake of both ideas and plot), over-controlled;
it's not organic and it doesn't work. I said that I had felt that
the hold-up scene was particularly manipulated: the dialogue seemed
ridiculously, even embarrassingly unrealistic and I could feel McEwan
straining to decide who would do or say what next in this scene
that he had decided (intellectually) to set up. As a result, I found
obscene the moment when Baxter makes Daisy take off her clothes,
manipulated as I felt this moment was by the author. Doug referred
back to the stair-throwing scene, and the unrealistic fact - in
view of recent real-life events - that there was no question of
Perowne and Theo being in any trouble with the police for their
actions in so seriously injuring their intruder: the hat-tipping
air of 'Don't worry, guv, there'll be no problem' which, in spite
Perowne's self-questioning, adds to the general air of unquestioned
privilege hanging over the novel. I also noted that while Baxter
is actually tumbling down the stairs Perowne takes the leisure not
only to compare the man's bad fortune with his own privileged life,
but to actually itemise his own blessings: 'the work, money,
status, the home, above all, the family - the handsome healthy son
with the strong guitarist's hands come to rescue him, the beautiful
poet for a daughter, unattainable even in her nakedness, the famous
father-in-law, the gifted, loving wife'. Early on in the novel
McEwan tries to prepare for this by saying that 'a second is
a long time in introspection' and in the New Yorker article
Martin Amis is quoted as commenting on McEwan's brilliance in slowing
the action down in moments of crisis and noticing things that others
wouldn't. This is a classic technique, but it needs to be the author's
viewpoint slowing things down. This is one passage that strongly
primes us to believe we are firmly in the mind of Perowne - as Baxter
first tumbles away 'Henry thinks he sees in the wide brown eyes
a sorrowful accusation' - and as Doug and I said, it's psychologically
unconvincing that the character would be so introspective
in a moment of such crisis.
John and I were also made uncomfortable by the fact that, although
Perowne struggles with his own prejudice against the thuggish Baxter
and displays a certain sympathy with him for the fact that he's
suffering from Huntington's disease, the prose refers to Baxter
twice, without any apparent authorial irony, as 'simian' and once
as 'monkeyish'. One of the biggest flaws, people noted, was the
fact that Perowne could be so very introspective and yet care so
little for and have so little understanding of literature - and
someone noted that, since Daisy had spent her childhood learning
poetry by heart, including the Arnold poem, it was unlikely that
Perowne should fail to recognise it, and indeed not even have heard
of Arnold - unless, that is, he had been a pretty distant and/or
absent dad, which would rather give the lie to his supposed loving
relationship with her, and maybe explain its air of somewhat sentimental
artificiality. Someone now said that it was pretty unlikely anyway
that a surgeon should be so introspective, that in fact they tend
as a profession towards the opposite, and indeed although some of
us in the room had known many doctors we had never yet come across
an introspective one, leave alone one of such depth of introspection,
which leads one to suspect the conflation of author and character
that McEwan so strongly denies. Even Mark agreed with this, and
by the end of the discussion, although he still thought the book
good, I think he had shifted a little in his view.
Jenny said, to general agreement, that the one bit of the novel
she liked was Perowne's afternoon visit to his mother in the nursing
home, in particular her dementia-induced speech with its fragmentation
and blurring of past and present. Her speech contrasts sharply with
the dogged realism of the rest of the prose, and in fact has the
unexpected poetic associations and perceptual disruptions which
are very often the chief pleasures of fiction.
Clare, who had been unable to attend the meeting, and was later
told that many of the group had hated the book, responded that she
certainly hadn't hated it, but 'on the whole enjoyed reading it
and wanted to finish it'. She said though that she had liked others
of McEwan's novels better and thought this one was uneven. She hadn't
really had time to formulate her thoughts, but off the top of her
head she said she thought that in many places McEwan was working
very hard to fill in enough detail to conform to the structure he’d
given himself, ie all action in a single day, and that the detail
was at times tediously obsessive, for example in the squash game.
EDITED
IN: John has wondered since the meeting if the book is intended
as more concretely symbolic than it has been taken. I remember now
that he did start to try to say this in the meeting, but it's interesting
that no one seemed to get what he was saying or took it up. Baxter,
John suggests, stands for Iraq, which/who must be taken in line
however much immediate damage this causes, but must be healed up
afterwards by the agent doing so. Perowne stands for the liberal,
cushioned West which is forced into an act of aggression for the
sake of a greater safety. In this scenario, John suggests, the squash
game between medical colleagues, conducted under the banner of friendship
but expressing some real antagonism and aggression, is symbolic
of the pre-war position-jostling between Bush and Blair. This interpretation
also gives a symbolic meaning to the fact that the crunch in the
car is caused indirectly by the peace march and its traffic-flow
alterations: a symbol of the notion that peace moves would only
facilitate the violence in Iraq. Contrasted with this is the plane
Perowne sees on fire from his window: a counterpointing symbol of
the notion that those arguing for the war are overestimating the
terrorist threat to the West.
This does seem like the kind of thing the highly intellectual McEwan
would do, but as John says, It's not very good if it isn't clear
(or people find scenes too tedious to bother to read), and the whole
message is undermined if on the human/character level the novel
isn't psychologically convincing.
April
2013
Under the Frog by Tibor Fischer
Trevor
suggested this book, the satirical depiction of life in Hungary
towards the end of the war and under Soviet rule up to the 1956
revolution, seen through the exploits of the randy, skiving, joking
and scamming members of a basketball team. Its title is a reference
to the Hungarian phrase for a dire situation, 'Under a frog's arse
down a coal mine'.
He had chosen it because he had read it when it was first published
in 1992 and loved it. What he particularly liked was the language.
Although the book was written in English, and although Tibor Fischer
(the son of Hungarian parents) was indeed born and brought up in
England, there was a certain feel of translation about it in the
sometimes comical use of obscure and formal Latinate words alongside
the demotic. One chapter begins formally, in reference to the anything
but formal basketball team: They estivated [ie, spent the
summer] outside Tatabanya. Other group members joined in
exclaiming about this, some saying they'd had to look up some of
the words in the dictionary, others saying they couldn't be bothered.
Most people in the group felt that the book was most likely based
on the experiences of Fischer's own father as told to him (indeed
the central character, through whose eyes most of the events are
seen, is called Gyuri Fischer), and that therefore the book is echoing
Fischer's father's voice. What Trevor liked about the effect, I
think, was that it lent the book an air of the characters being
foreigners in their own country under Soviet rule, as well as straitened
yet simultaneously inventive and intellectual in their articulation
of their situation - which I too very much liked. However, having
enthused about the book for five minutes, Trevor then said that
he hadn't actually liked the book quite so much this time round,
although he wasn't sure why, perhaps because when the book was first
published its subject was more current than it is now.
It was very quickly clear though that the book was generally popular
in the group for its satire and its depiction of humour as the only
means of survival under a repressive regime. The only person not
to have liked it at all was John, who found the tone too flippant
and couldn't as a consequence read beyond 50 pages. Others were
staggered by this, but I said that I too had had moments of not
being sure that the humour always hit the right note. Last year
John and I were conducted around the former Stasi prison in Berlin
by a previous inmate who was intensely and fiercely passionate about
the repressive regime he'd lived under, and although he often used
irony - the classic tool of the oppressed - it was a grim and savage
humour, in comparison with which the tone of this book did indeed
seem potentially flippant. It's possible of course that differing
national characteristics may lead to different ways of dealing emotionally
with similar situations (and a native Hungarian has told me that
this is her very favourite book). However, my feeling while reading
was that the lightness of the humour was the effect of the author
having been cushioned from experiencing first-hand the political
circumstances depicted, and that thus it did not always truly portray
the atmosphere and mood.
There was general strong disagreement with this. Most people felt
entirely convinced by the tone and loved the humour. Mark said he
laughed out loud, and Doug said he did too. I was going to ask Mark
how he could laugh out loud at the following scene taking place
in 1944 when the Russians take over the city from the Germans and
Russian soldiers invade the Fischers' house:
Depending on how drunk they were, they either removed the women
to some separate room or they did it on the spot. They were fair.
They didn't just rape the young and attractive women but distributed
the violations equally. It was a day when Gyuri was glad he didn't
have a vagina.
Before I could mention it, Mark referred to the very same scene
as the only one he could imagine being wrong in tone, but he didn't
actually think it was. I said I thought it was. I think that out
of context it's possible to read most of the passage as savage irony,
but in the context of the tone of the whole book, it didn't seem
to me so; in fact it seemed more of a narrative ironic posturing.
In any case, that final sentence does seem to descend into flippancy,
especially as one of the raped women is a young girl with whom the
fourteen-year-old Gyuri is supposed to be in love. Mark said, But
it's all flippant (which he didn't see as a fault but as
a satirical mode). I didn't have an answer to that at the time,
but thought later that that was precisely the trouble: incidents
such as the one above are treated no differently from the schoolroom
shenanigans when Gyuri and his schoolmates play up the unwitting
chemistry teacher. However, when I said this to John, even he wasn't
sure that that was a fault: isn't the point, he said, that all repressive
systems - from repressive schools up to dictatorships - share similar
characteristics? I said, But isn't there a difference of degree
(requiring differences in degree or tone of humour)?, but John said
he wasn't sure: once again, couldn't that be the point, that they're
not that different, that the one is often the seed of the other?
This does seem a persuasive argument, but I'm still not convinced.
In fact, I hadn't finished reading the book by the time of the meeting.
I commented that another thing I found a little unsatisfying was
the fact that it seemed to be simply a series of episodes, rather
a purposeful narrative arc. Everyone agreed that this was so, and
Trevor now said that was perhaps one reason he liked the book less
this time, but it wasn't a problem for those others who relished
the humour. The others told me that the book does take more shape,
and very much changes tone, towards the end (with which, having
now read the whole, I agree).
Mark said, But didn't we find it laugh-out-loud funny? still amazed
that anyone couldn't. Clare and I said, No, at most it made us smile
wryly. Mark said, But what about the camel jokes (which one of the
characters makes)? John and I said that no, we didn't find them
funny (John had read that far). What is funny, and more interesting,
as Ann pointed out, is that it is the priest who makes these jokes,
some of which are obscene (as psychological strategy for surviving
a repressive regime).
As I hadn't then read the ending, I may be mistaken about others'
comments on it, but I think Clare asked, almost as an afterthought,
if there was a suggestion that one of the characters - a surprising
one - turned out to be an informer. Some people nodded, but tentatively,
seeming unsure, and it didn't seem to have occurred to others. I
went away and read it with this in mind, and found that this was
indeed so, and that it is in fact not only planted but we are possibly
meant to assume, or at least suspect, it of this particular character
from early on, and that this is one of the major jokes of the book
- which in turn makes it less episodic and more holistic than we
had all thought. But I and John, at least, had forgotten that the
book begins with the very question: who on the basketball team is
an informer? and an assumption that there is one. Something had
primed all of us I think not to absorb its significance, and I would
say that that is possibly too much levity of tone.
May
2013
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Ann
suggested this 1958 novel because her interest had been aroused
by Chinua Achebe's recent death, and she remembered that it had
once been suggested previously but, in our system of voting between
two suggested books, had been passed over for another.
The book charts the destruction of a traditional native West African
community via the tale of Okonkwo, a great wrestler and warrior,
who, through a combination of circumstance and his own proud, hot-headed
and uncompromising personality, moves towards tragedy.
Ann said that she was very aware of the status of this book in postcolonial
studies, and its political importance in depicting from the inside
a society destroyed by Christian missionaries and colonial government.
She said she had certainly found the portrayal of the pre-colonisation
community interesting, and there was unanimous agreement from the
rest of the group. However, Ann said she wasn't so sure about it
as a novel. For the first three-quarters of the book that appeared
to be all it was, a simple depiction of the society and the history
of Onkonkwo's life, and it's only towards the end that it takes
on more novelistic form. John and I agreed with this: it's not actually
clear for a long time that Onkonkwo is moving towards tragedy, so
there's no sense of forward motion apart from the episodic events
of a life in progression. There's also a lot of repetition - not
only are there recurring descriptions of the rituals of daily living,
but events already related are referred to again as if they had
not been so - although Ann wondered if that was a deliberate borrowing
of traditional oral story-telling mode. She said that it was only
when she got to the very end that she understood the true project
of the book. It ends with the colonial District Commissioner considering
including a chapter about Onkonkwo in the book he is intending to
write, or:
'Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph at any
rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in
cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book,
after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes
of the Lower Niger.'
It is at this point that it becomes clear that the book is specifically
an answer to such colonial versions, and a redress of the editing
of reality implied in that 'cutting out of details' and the unreasonable
reduction to a so-called 'reasonable' paragraph. In political terms,
this does justify the book's prolonged, sometimes anthropological
but nevertheless intimate anatomisation of the life of Onkonkwo's
clan. As Jenny pointed out, any society seems strange if viewed
from the outside in anthropological terms (she referred to experiments
that have subjected our own society to this treatment with telling
results), and she thought that this was an implication of the book.
Trevor pointed out that, although there was warring between the
tribes, the number of people killed each time was a handful, as
opposed to the masses killed by the colonising forces, making an
irony of that 'Pacification'. This point is graphically illustrated
in the novel by the wholesale colonial massacre of a village in
revenge for the villagers' killing, out of fear, of a lone white
man, an apparition they had never before encountered, arriving on
a frightening 'mechanical horse' (a bicycle). Onkonkwo is indeed
particularly warlike, which has made him a hero in his clan, but
he is untypical, and, crucially to the plot, village elders counsel
him to greater restraint. John pointed out the irony at the end
of the novel whereby the District Commissioner is intrigued by the
custom which prevents members of the tribe cutting down a man who
has hanged himself, yet has his own reasons for not doing so, rooted
in a just as much of a constructed convention: it would be 'undignified'
and would 'give the natives a poor opinion of him'. Trevor would
also later note that up to the point in the novel at which the missionaries
arrive, the events could have taken place at any time in the preceding
hundreds of years. The sense of stasis in the first three-quarters
of the novel can thus be seen as a formal reflection of that historical
fact, the long prior and undisturbed existence of the society before
colonisation. Ann also noted that, as a formal illustration of colonisation,
at the end of the novel the point of view and language change to
that of the District Commissioner.
People noted here that, although clearly meant as a redress, the
book is subtle in its assessment of both indigenous and missionary
societies, making clear that it is the flaws or vulnerabilities
in the culture of the indigenous tribes (most clearly personified
in Onkonkwo) that caused certain of its members - the outcasts,
those bereaved by traditional decree - to be open to the Christian
message of the missionaries, with a consequent 'falling apart' of
their society. And the dilution of the culture is presented as ambiguous:
the elders and the first missionaries talk amicably to each other,
teaching each other about their respective religions. By contrast,
as John said, unlike them and unlike Onkonkwo's father whom he despises,
Onkonkwo is no talker:
'He had a slight stammer and whenever he was angry and could
not get his words out quickly enough, he would use his fists'
and it is this particular flaw of Onkonkwo's that leads most directly
to his own downfall.
Ann pointed out that in fact, Achebe - as the grandson of a man
of Onkonkwo's generation, and the son of a man who (like Onkonwo's
own son Nwoye) had been converted by the missionaries - had been
brought up in the Western tradition of the narrative arc, and she
said she had read commentaries comparing this book to Greek tragedy.
Once you get to the end of the novel it is indeed clear that, like
a Greek tragedy, it pivots on the tragic flaw of one man (Onkonkwo),
which leads him to defy the gods. However, the incidents which lead
to his tragedy, and to the preceding defection of his son to the
missionaries, are less pointed than is usual in the traditional
Western narrative arc, with consequently less indication (before
the end) that they are indeed steps towards tragedy.
As a result, Ann said, if she hadn't been reading the book for the
book group, she probably wouldn't have carried on reading, and I
thought that if I hadn't known the political importance of the book,
I probably wouldn't have, either. However, Jenny and Trevor said
that they liked the book unreservedly, and although Jenny hadn't
even registered the (in Western narrative terms) crucial point that
Onkonkwo defies the god, because of the political importance of
the book's revelations she thought it very important indeed. Later,
Mark, who hadn't made the meeting, emailed to say that he had loved
the book, and took it for granted that our discussion had been entirely
consensual.
June
2013
The End of Alice by A M Homes
I bought
this book in the late nineties when it was first in paperback, but
had somehow never got around to opening it, and when, due to the
absence of others from the group, I was unexpectedly required to
make a suggestion for the next meeting, I grabbed it off the shelf,
aware not only that A M Homes was currently shortlisted for the
Women's Prize for Fiction, but that like Emily Prager's Roger
Fishbite (published around the same time and which we have
previously discussed), this
book was something of an answer to Nabokov's Lolita (which
we have also discussed) and
might make an interesting comparison.
The difference turned out to be stark. Unlike Emily Prager who seeks
in Roger Fishbite to redress the balance by taking the
viewpoint of the 'nymphet', Homes follows Nabokov in taking the
viewpoint of the incarcerated male murderer-paedophile. Here, however,
he has murdered not his rival for the young girl's attention (as
in Nabokov) but the young girl herself (and possibly others), and
this novel graphically exposes the mentality and fantasies of the
paedophile as horrific and entirely lacking in moral centre, in
a way that provokes revulsion in the reader (which led to attempts,
some successful, to ban it) and makes the book a very unpleasant
read.
As a result, I felt the need to begin my introduction with an apology:
truly, if I had known the book's tenor beforehand I would have hesitated
to impose it quite so unthinkingly on the group, but as I said to
them I do think the book's unpleasantness, and its effect of horror
in the reader - real horror, rather than the delicious chill of
so-called 'horror' fiction - are entirely deliberate and strongly
politically motivated. On finishing the book I felt that by comparison
Lolita, with its fine writing and its redeeming or at least
excusing insistence on the romantic yearning of Humbert Humbert
for lost youth, wrongly ennobled the paedophilic impulse, and that
this was the moral point that Homes was consciously making. There
is nothing here of Humbert's occasional timidity and crippling shame:
here there is simply a warped mind assured of its own rightness:
indeed, narrator Chappy calls his preoccupation an 'art', an art
in which he is instructing a correspondent, an unnamed nineteen-year-old
girl apparently intent on seducing a twelve-year-old boy. The sexual
attraction to childish bodies and the revulsion towards maturing
physicality is seen here conversely and more starkly as a matter
of power - Chappy simply wants power, and a violent power, over
the unformed female body - and, via some moments recalling Hannibal
Lecter, as a matter of cannibalistic greed. For much of the book,
Chappy peddles the line that children are complicit in paedophilia
(and thus bear some of the responsibility) - I have long suspected
that youth knows more than the sugar-glazed gap between mind and
body it allows to articulate - but finally admits that this
is a dishonesty:
Although undoubtedly I've not said it before, I do firmly believe
it is up to an adult to ignore the attempted flirtations of the
young... it doesn't necessarily mean that she really wants it or
even knows what it is. She is in fact compelled by the culture.
But the point is, he won't respect this, he doesn't care, he still
goes ahead and seduces the child, and his moral corruption is entire.
Everyone in the group agreed with me that, contrary to the claims
of its detractors, the book did thus have a deeply moral core, but
felt that the fact that it was so very unpleasant was problematic.
As Ann said, the true test of a book is whether you can actually
read it, and she had been so drearily revolted that she gave up
halfway through; Doug and John both said that if they hadn't been
reading it for the group they would definitely have given up too,
and I suspected that maybe I would have been the same. In fact,
Ann said, Lolita is horrifying and yet because
it's so beautifully written (and avoids the graphic) it carries
you right on into the horrifying situation it depicts, and Doug
strongly agreed. (Jenny said that it made her wonder about the mentality
of writers who can sit down with such horrible material and then
get up and do normal things like make cups of tea and go about their
daily lives and then get up next morning and start typing away again....!)
A somewhat critical attitude to the book and its author now emerged.
Someone said that the pompous style was awful. I pointed out that
it was the voice of the paedophile narrator, not that of the author.
Homes writes elsewhere with very different voices, and Chappy's
narration contrasts strongly with the teen-speak of his correspondent's
letters; in fact, at the start of the novel he reports that his
correspondent comments on his 'peculiar' style - '...did you go
to school in England?' - which identifies it as an aspect of his
institutionalised decadence. I said I thought it was intended as
a direct parody of Humbert Humbert's high literary style (there's
an implied linking, I think, between such establishment-approved
literary control and the establishment-excused desire for paedophilic
sexual control). However, being such admirers of the narrative stye
of Lolita, the others in the group weren't impressed by
the stratagem, and Mark said that in any case he had read an interview
with Homes in which she expressed surprise that people had seen
so many parallels with Lolita in the book. I in turn expressed surprise
at that, since there are several (to me) clear Nabokov references,
such as a tennis game as seduction (as in Lolita) and the
motif of dried butterflies.
There is a horrifying prison rape scene which someone now said they
found gratuitous. I said, But doesn't the narrator (Chappy) comment
precisely on its gratuitous nature: ...I wouldn't have even
mentioned [it] except that I knew you were waiting for it, wanting
it, had been wanting it all along. He then goes on to tackle
the reader further, suggesting that however disturbing she or he
has found the whole narration, he/she has been sexually titillated
by it. In this way the book goes one step further and implicates
the reader (and thus the whole of society) in the moral degeneracy
of paedophilia. People cried that the book was just too successfully
horrifying to be titillating, though, with which I had to agree.
I said that one aspect of the book I hadn't got to grips with was
the nineteen-year-old female correspondent's seduction of the twelve-year-old
boy. It didn't for me have the ring of truth that (horrifically)
Chappy's paedophilic activities had, and I wondered if this was
because we are not actually meant to take it on trust. As we have
seen above, Chappy is an unreliable narrator, happy to spin himself
false justifications. He rarely quotes directly from her letters,
filling in the story of her seduction in his own far more literary
style and eventually justifying it thus:
Pretentious though it may be, I remain convinced that my interpretation,
my translation, is a more accurate reflection of her state of mind,
far exceeding that which she is able to argue independently.
When he does finally quote her at length it becomes clear that her
motives for writing to him - which he has represented as simply
those of a shared obsession - are quite different: it is him, Chappy,
she is obsessed with, because of the fear that dominated her childhood
and that of all the girls in her neighbourhood after his murder
of the girl-child Alice (and by extension that of all girls because
of all the girl-child murders), and her sexual dalliance with the
twelve-year-old has been adolescent experimentation rather than
the sinister adult-child power game that Chappy has portrayed. An
earlier clue perhaps is the fact that Chappy presents three different
(alternative) sexual scenarios when relating the girl's first arrival
at the boy's house. In other words, he has been injecting his own
paedophilic fantasies into her situation, using her as titillation,
and, rather than confronting the damage he has done to her life
(and to that of all girls), he has desecrated her further.
Doug said though that he just couldn't understand why he should
be attracted to her in this way, and want to correspond with her,
since she was far too old for the narrator's paedophilic inclination.
Doug wasn't convinced by the suggestion that she was the 'best'
the incarcerated Chappy could get, and was anyway primarily a vehicle
for a renewal of his fantasies and a parallel revisiting of the
seduction and murder of Alice which (horrifically) he doesn't regret.
Mark now referred back to the horrifyingly graphic nature of the
book. He pointed to the filmmaker Michael Haneke's concern with
the desensitisation to violence in our culture, and his attempts
to counter this by making films that bring back the true horror
of violence. He said he thought that this book's project was the
same with regard to paedophilia. Jenny agreed. What this book is
about, she said, is that paedophilia is everywhere in our culture,
and that actually it's really horrible - a summing-up with which
I thoroughly agreed.
Someone asked, 'But is it really everywhere, this kind
of really horrible thing?' Sometimes, while discussing this issue
in the group (so many novels seem to touch on it), we women have
laughed about the harmless flashers we encountered in our childhood.
But this book reminded me of a darker side that it is sometimes
more comfortable to forget: of the neighbouring child of my own
age, five, who was abducted and then abandoned at the side of the
road, after which she was quite mute; of my ten-year-old childhood
friend who was raped and murdered (which tainted the whole of the
rest of my childhood with grief and dismay and fear and lost innocence);
of the time that my twelve-year-old sister was dragged into a lonely
public toilet and only escaped by stabbing her assailant with her
umbrella. Most of all, the horrors of this book, and Chappy's warped
mentality, ring so true for me because they are the horrors which,
aged six, eight, eleven, I sensed in the expressions of those men
- and yes, it kept happening - who sidled up to me with clear intent
on the prom and outside the school gates and in the lanes, sending
me running pell-mell...
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