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January
2006
A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
Another
large meeting to discuss this book of Mark’s choosing. Published
in 1929 but set in the late-Victorian period, the novel concerns
the ‘adventures’ of a group of children from two colonial families
sent to school in England from Jamaica, and captured by pirates
en route.
The book was a sensation in its day and is known as the classic
which challenged the sentimental Victorian popular image of childhood
as innocent, and paved the way for the later Lord of the Flies.
However, our group encountered certain problems as to how to read
it in the present day and age.
Anne
said that she had found the novel unpleasant, but thought that she
might have been intended to find it unpleasant, though wasn’t sure
of this. Some people, notably Mark, Jenny and new member Hans, found
the prose dated and formal for a novel written in the late twenties,
although Hans said that he soon adapted and got drawn into the story.
Jenny strongly objected to the narrative mode of ‘telling rather
than showing,’ and Trevor agreed, saying that he found the author
opinionated.
We never really got to grips with this last point in the meeting,
but as John said afterwards, the author Richard Hughes, a young
man of twenty-six when he wrote the novel in the late twenties,
is not the same as the narrator, whom we learn has not visited
the island since 1860. The narrator is therefore identified
as Victorian, which inevitably informs the voice he/she is given
by the author. However, John also said that he nevertheless had
a problem with this narrator, who is never further identified and
whose attitude to the events of the novel often seems ambivalent.
This ambivalence may well be a calculated stratagem, an antidote
to Victorian certainties about the nature of children, but it did
lead at times to our difficulties in interpreting the author’s own
attitude.
Several
people noted the parallels between this story and Peter Pan,
and we felt that this book was a deliberate pastiche and critique
of that tale in which childhood is an idyllic state out of which
it would be better not to grow, and in which, although the children
adventure away from their parents, they are ultimately cocooned
in a sentimental mother-love. Here, on the contrary, the children
are said to love their cat more than their mother, suffer little
on separation from their parents, and, once let loose on board ship,
exhibit a complex and animal amorality which involves a certain
amount of matter-of-fact cruelty. In addition, the main protagonist,
eleven-year-old Emily, experiences a certain existential awareness
which implies a Freudian concept of the complexity of childhood
psychology. These moments in Emily’s psychology are presented as
moments of change and there is explicit reference to the stages
through which children pass as they grow into adulthood, countering
the simplistic Victorian child/adult dichotomy. The pirates themselves
are indeed at moments presented as childlike, and, in what seems
an important and symbolic statement on the part of the author, are
unarmed. On many occasions the children and pirates seem deliberately
aligned in their amoral and child-adult complexity.
However,
from our present-day vantage point we found the novel unsatisfying
and the psychology of the children still too simplistic. While I
could appreciate the depiction of the children as a refutation of
Victorian concepts, I found their lack of trauma on being separated
from their parents unrealistic in the light of our subsequent ideas
of nurture and parental deprivation, and the novel on this level
collusive with Victorian/Edwardian children’s stories of untroubled
adventure. There was some discussion about this. Some people pointed
out that the children already led somewhat ‘hippyish’ lives independent
of their parents in Jamaica, and Trevor said that they were thus
absorbed in themselves and took their parents for granted. Mark
thought that it could be explained by Richard Hughes’s own Edwardian-style
childhood in which middle-class boys were routinely separated from
their parents by being sent to boarding school. I said that none
of these things could explain the children’s lack of a sense of
loss: anyone who is taken for granted is by definition depended
upon, and just because separation was the middle-class Edwardian
norm did not mean that there was not a sense of loss, inevitably
repressed, and that what this book seems to lack from our vantage
point, in spite of its Freudian concept of child complexity, is
the Freudian idea of emotional repression.
John had wondered to me beforehand if perhaps the fact that none
of the children ever comments on the sudden unexpected disappearance
of the elder child John (who happens to die on a visit on shore),
is perhaps meant by Hughes to be an instance of repression – the
narrator does indeed make the point that none of them mentions it.
If this is the case, however, the issue of repression doesn’t seem
properly addressed, and Jenny in particular found repugnant the
way John’s death was skipped over. It is true that one might read
the ending, in which Emily condemns the pirates to death for a crime
she herself committed but then blanks off and puts it all behind
her, as a deliberate portrayal of repression, but once again it
is impossible to draw definite conclusions. The narrator declines
even to speculate: What was in her mind now? I can no longer
read Emily’s deeper thoughts, or handle their cords. While this
allows Emily the independence and complexity which Victorian images
of childhood would have denied her, it leaves us in the dark as
to how conscious she is of the consequences of her actions – and
left our group largely unsatisfied.
Neither
could we work out the author’s precise stance on the sexual abuse
by the pirate cook of the eldest child, Creole Margaret. There was
disagreement among us about how likely it is in reality that all
of the other children would be as innocent of what is happening
to her as they seem to be in the book. Would they really have been
so innocent, as indeed Victorian sentimentality would have held?
Or is this another instance of repression, and if so is it that
of the children or the author: is the author slyly assuming that
the children are repressing their own awareness, or is he, in view
of the moral climate in which he was writing, simply unable to deal
with the issue? In any case, in our present paedophilia-conscious
era, the way it was glossed over – and spliced with portrayals of
the pirates as humanely quaint – made for us a less than comfortable
read. Anne pointed out too that making the abused child Creole made
the abuse ‘safe’ in a somewhat racist way.
We felt it was also unclear how
aware Emily is of the sexual nature of the captain’s approach towards
herself, when she repels him by so symbolically biting his finger,
or how sexual the author intends to imply her own behaviour is when
she subsequently woos him back to be her friend. Ultimately we felt
it was another instance of authorial ambivalence, that Hughes himself
had been unable to address this issue. Someone suggested that indeed
the character John had been dispensed with by the author precisely,
however subconsciously, in order not to have to deal with the abuse
of boys, of which as an ex-boarding-school boy he would have been
all too aware.
Classic
as it is, we found copies of this book hard to obtain. Sarah hadn’t
succeeded in getting one, so hadn’t read it, and said that she didn’t
think she would now: we hadn’t exactly sold it to her. Doug, however,
was one person in the group who had entered entirely into the spirit
of the book and had enjoyed it unreservedly.
February
2006
Kiss of the Spiderwoman by Manuel Puig
Three
new members and a very lively, noisy meeting with lots to distract
us: some very tasty titbits provided by Jenny, an unusually large
amount of wine and, since two of our new members had just moved
into the area, the subject of house removal - all a far cry from
the grim Argentine prison-cell setting of this novel of Trevor’s
choosing. Nevertheless, in spite of the distractions, we managed
to conduct a disciplined discussion.
In
this novel, in the night-time darkness of the cell, Molina, imprisoned
for a homosexual offence against a minor, relates to his political-dissident
cellmate Valentin the spell-binding stories of lush and supernatural
films in all of which, someone pointed out, people and things are
often not quite what they seem. As the stories unravel, Valentin
too becomes bewitched by them and his rational cynical guard comes
down, and the two men begin to affect each other profoundly, drawing
each other like ‘spiderwomen’ into their worlds.
Trevor
said that when he read the book years ago he thought it was brilliant,
but this time, reading it in a rush while suffering from flu, he
had found it somewhat hard going, and wasn’t now at all sure that
it was any good after all.
A main sticking point, he said, was the footnotes which interrupt
the story at seemingly random points and provide a lengthy and dry
account of the history of theories of homosexuality. Everyone agreed,
and no one felt sure of their function or usefulness. New member
Clare who is a counsellor and psychotherapist was particularly irritated
by the material as over-familiar, although Anne suggested that maybe
it was there to educate a homophobic 1970s Argentine audience. Even
so, we were still puzzled about the way the footnotes appear, splicing
up the story as they do – most often mid-dialogue – and seeming
to run counter to it in mode. We all however agreed that there is
a strong air of authority about the writing of this novel, and felt
that nothing in it is done without calculated intention.
We
turned our attention to the mode of the story itself. Much of it
is played out through dialogue alone. We all agreed that this is
brilliantly done, that although there is thus never any narrative
intervention or description we gained a vivid picture of the cell
and sense of the two characters. Clare presumed that Puig’s use
of this mode must simply be due to his training as a filmmaker,
but Trevor had a different theory:
As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that the prison authorities
are spying on Valentin, and later we are treated to transcripts
of surveillance reports. Trevor wondered if in fact the dialogue
we read is a transcript of a surveillance tape, and we all entertained
this idea until I pointed out that the dialogue sometimes bleeds
into first Molina’s and later Valentin’s inner thoughts in a way
which suggests otherwise. Alternatively, and more simply although
politically, it is a way of promoting the novel’s theme of the power
of fantasy in the face of oppression and political over-rationality,
allowing the characters and their impulses and the dream-like recounted
film fantasies to float free of narrative restrictions or contingency.
Clare then suggested that the footnotes are above all a formal narrative
device illustrating the uselessness of theory in the face of the
human need for sensual fantasy and the comfort of relationships
– for it is indeed very hard to attend to them while one is involved
in the story of the novel.
All
in all, we were very impressed by this book and its devastating
end, and new member Fran said she was very glad of the chance to
read it, which otherwise she wouldn’t have done. At which point,
the meeting disintegrated into separate and noisy discussions on
other topics, and we fell on the food, and to our shame all of the
wine got drunk.
March
2006
Snow by Orhan Pamuk
Anne
chose this book in which an exiled and creatively blocked poet,
Ka - whose name in fact means Snow - returns to Turkey for the death
of his mother and then travels in a snowstorm to the depressed Anatolian
town of Kars, ostensibly to report on local elections and a rash
of suicides amongst Muslim girls forbidden by the secular state
to wear headscarves, but also in subconscious and amorous pursuit
of his old university friend, the divorced and beautiful Ipek. As
Ka reaches Kars, the snow cuts the town off from the rest of the
world, and in this snowbound dreamscape Ka begins to write poetry
again and is drawn against his will into a military coup in which
secularists and Islamists are ostensibly pitted against each other,
but in which, as always, no one’s colours are ever clear. The story
is narrated years later after Ka’s assassination by his friend,
a narrator with the same name as the author, Orhan.
Essential
reading for our times is the quote from Margaret Atwood on the
cover of our edition, and in the same review she praises Pamuk for
his considerable more long-term achievement of ‘writing his country
into being’ for Westerners. I’m afraid that on the evidence of this
book few in our group could feel so positive, in spite of our appreciation
that simply writing this book was an act of bravery, with its critical
look at every position, both secular and Islamist - a point carried
by Ka's assassination backshadowing the story.
Since
Anne spent her own childhood in Turkey, it was the setting and subject
matter which had inevitably drawn her to the book, and she said
that in the event that was all she could read the book for, since
as a novel she found it somewhat deadly, not so much a novel as
events arranged for the author to attack and sometimes satirise
his many targets, and the characters mere ciphers in this purpose.
Worst of all, she found the translation very bad, and this made
her quite angry - one obvious mistake being the constant reference
to the trees in the town as oleanders, when oleanders could never
grow in the chill climate of Anatolia.
Others
of us had guessed that the translation was less than perfect,
since there were odd careless repetitions within sentences. I said
that the trouble is, if the translation is lacking you can’t really
judge the book. While mystery and the muddiness of people’s motivations
is clearly a preoccupation of the book, there were often moments
when even the narrator's stance towards the characters and situations
seemed contradictory and puzzling, and in a way which gave me the
sense that it was unintentional. However, it was impossible to tell
if this was a function of the translation or of the novel itself
or my own lack of cultural understanding (though I would expect
a novel to remedy this last). I said that I was immensely interested
in the subject matter of this book – the clash between Westernisation
and Islamism – (and we all agreed with Margaret Atwood’s implication
that it was the pressing subject of our time), but because I could
not get to grips with the psychology of the characters this book
did not illuminate the subject for me, or indeed move me anything
like as much as a short news film from Iraq which I had seen on
TV that evening. A main point of the novel is that the motivations
and psychology of the suicide girls remain a mystery to everyone
including the Islamists to whom suicide is a sin, but there seemed
other, less intentional psychological mysteries: for instance, everyone
in our group found Ka’s attitude to Ipek unconvincing and hard to
fathom.
One
problem may have been the matter of our attention. We were never
drawn in to the book and had to work to apply ourselves to it, and
most of us found we could read it only in short bouts. We all got
pretty sick of the descriptions of the snow, and most people found
impenetrable and affected Ka’s theory of poetry (he envisages his
poems as existing on the two axes of a magnified snowflake, representing
logic and imagination). Clare, indeed, failed to finish the book,
as did Doug who left it on a plane and then could not dredge up
the interest to get another copy.
However,
in spite of all this, the book has left me with a lasting sense
of the desolate, aching spirit of a place once at the heart of empire
but now abandoned, and of the hope and despair of its alienated
protagonist Ka and the bitter-sweet euphoria of his creativity.
Thus for me Pamuk has indeed conjured into being what Atwood calls
the divided, hopeful, desolate, mystifying Turkish soul.
April
2006
The Human Stain by Philip Roth
One
thing you can say about the members of our group: they’re not swayed
by received opinion. I met Madeleine for lunch and, since she had
missed the last few meetings, told her about the meeting fixed to
discuss this book, and she replied sardonically: ‘Well, I’m not
exactly keen on Philip Roth!’ It was no surprise, therefore, that
she failed to turn up once again.
Doug,
who chose this book, thinks that Roth is often as brilliant as the
critics say, but that often too there is simultaneously something
annoying or unsatisfying about his books. This was precisely how
most of the group felt about this particular novel.
In
The Human Stain Coleman Silk is a seventy-one-year-old Jewish
Classics professor who, as the novel opens, has resigned in anger
two years before, after having been accused of making a racist comment
about a black student, a crisis which he believes killed his wife.
Now, against the background of the impeachment of an American president
brought down by his own all-too-human 'stain', Silk has begun a
‘secret’ affair with Faunia Farley, an emotionally damaged and apparently
illiterate thirty-four-year-old cleaner at the university, and a
new crisis sparks when an anonymous letter arrives telling him that
‘Everyone Knows’ and accusing him of using and abusing her. The
writer Nathan Zuckerman, a familiar figure in Roth novels, briefly
befriends Silk at the start of these events, and it is he who narrates
the whole story after (we soon realise) the death of Coleman and
Faunia, so that the events become foreshadowed with doom. Slowly,
as Zuckerman presents the story which he has pieced together in
retrospect, we come to realise the true irony behind Silk’s earlier
disgrace: he was a pale-skinned black passing as Jewish, a secret
he never even told his Jewish wife, and of which his children, including
his Orthodox-Jewish son Mark, are entirely unaware. This is Silk’s
tragic flaw (his human stain) and what makes him a tragic hero in
the mode of the Classics plays he has taught.
The
narrative manipulation of these events, the withholding of information
until the moment when it can truly detonate, the foreshadowing to
create an ironic ache of tragedy, the poignant sense of mystique
created by the use of the unknowing and wondering narrator (Nobody
knows, he rails at the writer of the anonymous note, the young
professor Delphine Roux) - all these are indeed brilliantly done,
and as ever Roth’s prose sweeps one away with its thundering angry
rhythms and rhetorical and intellectual authority.
‘Political
correctness’ is the cause of Silk’s downfall, and the narrative
indictment of this mode of thinking is breathtakingly suasive:
The tyranny of propriety … the bridle it still is on public rhetoric,
the inspiration it provides for personal posturing, the persistence
just about everywhere of this de-virilizing pulpit virtue-mongering
(note those plosive alliterative ps) … that the likes
of a Ronald Reagan call America’s core values, and that maintains
widespread jurisdiction by masquerading itself as something else
– as everything else.
This tirade is in fact Coleman Silk’s, filtered by Zuckerman,
the narrator who so resembles Philip Roth himself and is indeed
writing a novel about Silk called The Human Stain. This slippage
between character, narrator and author (between what Delphine Roux,
first interviewed for her post by Silk, refers to in post-structuralist
terms as mimesis and diegesis) is what is so clever
and unsettling about the book. In this particular book it serves
beautifully Roth’s intention of exposing the con of ‘authority’
(‘Everyone knows’ is the invocation of the cliché and the beginning
of the banalization of experience … all that we don’t know is astonishing
… even more astonishing is what passes for knowing. And earlier:
Simply to make the accusation is to prove it. To hear the allegation
is to believe it.
Unfortunately
however we could not help but find the portrayal of the women in
this novel somewhat suspect in the very ways of which Silk is accused.
We squirmed at the name of Faunia, and the patronisation of its
connotations: a shy or lustful animal of the woods, a noble savage.
And while at one point Roth/Zuckerman provides a wonderfully understanding
account of Delphine’s battle against the patronisation of men, we
could not at all believe her behaviour, which seemed indeed a negative
and stereotyped male fantasy of a feminist.
The
trouble was, because Roth has at times provided such understanding
and such an acute and damning analysis of political correctness
we felt that he had forestalled us from making such a complaint.
Either that, or he was deliberately playing with us in this way
- as John said, Roth is nothing if not a writer in conscious control
of his material; he felt that unlike Updike he was perfectly aware
of when he was being sexist. Either way, as readers we felt manipulated
in a way which did not feel comfortable or satisfying.
I
said that while the prose was powerful, I had in fact noticed an
inconsistency on the first page which right from the start alerted
me to a certain authorial arrogance (unless I was missing something):
...whatever miseries she endured she kept concealed behind one
of those inexpressive bone faces that hide nothing (!). Trevor
said, God, you can’t judge a book on one mistake, but John and I
said, If you can’t trust the language of a book, what can you trust?
As usual I would have liked us to look more closely at the prose
and how it operated than we did, but it was too dark in my corner
of the room to see the text so this time I didn’t even try to force
the point.
Finally
Hans asked if we liked Coleman Silk, and people seemed somewhat
dumbfounded by the question, which is perhaps Roth’s great achievement:
to make the question beside the point for the reader, and to remove
Silk from the realm of black-and-white judgement which in the novel
so traduces him.
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May
2006
The Accidental by Ali Smith
As
some of us had read Ali Smith’s first full-length fiction, Hotel
World, and had found it quite brilliant, I suggested this, the
author’s Booker-short-listed and currently Orange-nominated second
novel.
To begin with, I was somewhat disappointed, as were most of the
others present. Like Hotel World, The Accidental revolves
through separate viewpoints, this time those of the four members
of a family who are spending the summer in a rented house in Norfolk
when a mysterious and hippyish female stranger enters and transforms
their lives. Smith is rightly renowned as a word wizard and a writer
of dream-like yet gritty prose, and the language of the first section,
the stream-of-consciousness perspective of twelve-year-old Astrid,
has been singled out for particular praise. However, I and most
others found this initial section quite difficult to engage with
and a barrier to getting engrossed in the novel. Astrid’s thoughts
are here couched in the defensive and judgemental jargon of troubled
early-teenagehood – everything is ‘substandard’ and ‘typical and
ironic’ – and while the prose brilliantly replicates the tropes
of contemporary teen-speak, I didn’t think it a completely realistic
representation of a teenager’s inner thoughts, which it seems to
me would be less self-consciously guarded linguistically. Where
this section of the narrative does dovetail with my idea of a teenager’s
ponderings – long meditations on reality and language involving
experimental word-play – I found it somewhat self-indulgent, however
linguistically inventive, and the ‘teenaged’ sentence structures
– short sentences with falling rhythms: She is on holiday on
Norfolk. The substandard radio says 10.27 a.m. – felt clogged
and didn’t propel me onwards.
Clare
in particular said she had precisely the same experience, but also
found, as I did, that as the novel moved on between the perspectives
of the different characters, she became drawn in and indeed eventually
found it a compulsive read. In fact, in clearly conscious authorial
strategy, in later sections Astrid becomes progressively released
from her clogged prose, as indeed all four of the family are released
from their blocked and isolated psychological states by the almost
magical and seductive yet subtly violent and ultimately accidental
advent of Amber. Entitled Beginning, Middle and End,
the three major sections of the book paradoxically take the characters
from a point where they are blocked, unable to go forward, ended,
to a new point where they can begin again.
We
discussed what and who Amber is, and on what level we were meant
to take her. Was she real, i.e. were we possibly meant to take her
as figment of the other characters’ collective imagination? After
all, she is surrounded in doubt: she appears to Astrid (and initially
to us in the Norfolk household) like an apparition or a trick of
the light:
There is the shape of someone on the sofa by the window. Because
of the light from the window behind the person, and because of the
flash of light still filling her own eye with reds and blacks, the
face is a blur of light and dark.
There is confusion as to why she is there: each of the two
adults, Eve and Michael, assumes her to be connected with the other
(and they are so isolated from each other psychologically that they
never question this), and the children, equally isolated within
themselves and their own problems, never question anyone on her
presence. Thus she is able her to infiltrate their household like
a ghost, a resident spirit. If this is the case, though, Jenny said,
(ie that they’ve imagined her), she can hardly be said to have transformed
their lives, they must ultimately have transformed themselves.
Sarah
said no, she was definitely real, remember she is seen by other
members of the community, one of whom asks about her once she has
finally gone. But, John said, were we meant to read the novel on
an allegorical rather than a realist level? Is she meant as a kind
of angel, as she appears to be to seventeen-year-old Magnus when
he first encounters her, or even some kind of devil - though in
fact, as Clare pointed out, rather than good or bad, she’s spectacularly
amoral, just the ‘accident’ that happens to the family?
There
is also confusion about her name. In a subtle moment, more or less
missed by the family, the cleaner seems to correct them when they
call her Amber, and it seems that they have misheard her real name.
There is a framing narrative which we assume to be Amber’s in which
she tells us that she was conceived in a cinema café while the film
Poor Cow was running, finally telling us that she was named after
that cinema, The Alhambra. This is a novel turning on concepts of
light and film and illusion. Astrid has a movie camera with which,
as the novel opens, she is filming the dawn of each day; everywhere
that she and Amber walk together in the village surveillance cameras
record them. Amber scoffs at all this, makes Astrid challenge the
surveillance cameras and then drops Astrid’s camera off the motorway
bridge and tells her to look at the world with her own eyes instead.
Film is useless illusion, she seems to be saying, and sure enough
when Amber later views her own films they lack the colour and atmosphere
she remembers.
Yet
Amber herself is part of that illusion. Astrid suddenly remembers
how she really first saw her: waiting on the road by her car in
one of the dawns she filmed. And long after, when Eve looks at the
family snaps of that Norfolk time, Amber turns out, contrary to
Eve's memory, not to be in a single one. And this is how Amber/Alhambra
presents her identity to us, as a compilation of film moments and
personalities which have entered the collective consciousness:
…anything was possible. We had a flying floating car. We stopped
the rail disaster by waving our petticoats at the train … I sold
flowers in Covent Garden. Yet in an elegiac final section she
describes how the cinemas which once projected them have all crumbled
like dreams and gone.
I wanted
to know what all this meant. Did it mean that inevitably now we
live by illusion but we need to be aware of that and of the dangers?
We never really answered this question, though, and perhaps for
this reason, the feeling of things unresolved, most people felt
ambivalent about the book, though everyone agreed that it had made
for a really good discussion, one of our longest yet. Trevor and
Sarah however thought the book great, though even Trevor felt as
most of us did that the orderly presentation of the different narrative
voices was over-schematic and frustratingly predictable. Sarah had
just one tiny quibble: she found affected the way each section began
in the middle of a sentence, and felt the author had only done it
because she could, rather than for any really convincing artistic
reason.
Finally
Sarah pointed out that actually the book is quite funny, which somehow
we had failed even to mention.
It
was quite late by the time we finished the discussion, which meant
that it was even later by the time everyone finally went, not a
single crisp or a single drop of wine remaining.
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June
2006
The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
It
was Midsummer’s Day but it was blowing a gale and freezing cold,
and we turned up in coats at Clare’s to discuss this German novel.
The
book consists of the meditations of the narrator as he remembers
how, as a fifteen-year-old in post-war Germany he was once seduced
by and fell in love with Hanna, an older woman, only to discover
later, when they had long lost touch and he was a law student attending
a war crimes trial, that she was the chief defendant, a past concentration
camp commandant.
Hans, who had chosen the book, was unable to be there, so no one
introduced it, but we all immediately stated that we had really
liked the book, many of us finding it a compulsive read - indeed
almost too compulsive, so that we had read it too quickly and felt
that we hadn’t absorbed it properly.
I
said that I had found it utterly moving, and had been frequently
in tears as I read. I had been stunned by the first chapter, in
which the narrator recalls his first meeting with Hanna. We readers
at this point know nothing of what will ensue, and all that happens
is that, sickening with hepatitis, he throws up in her yard and
she, an unknown and unremarkable woman, swills him down and comforts
him and takes him in hand. Yet this passage, plainly and simply
related, is somehow drenched in a sweet, ineffable sadness which
reduced me to tears. I said that I had not been able to tell – at
the compulsive speed with which the novel immediately made me read
– precisely how this effect had been achieved, I only knew that
it had a feeling of intense distillation.
The
narrator makes clear that this is a memory he has mulled over all
his life, and indeed it so strongly feels like it that people in
the group wondered if the book were autobiographical and suspected
that, at least in this early section, it was.
Almost
as moving, I found, was the second chapter in which the narrator
describes his life-long recurring dream: of the house in this first
chapter, Hanna’s house, transposed into different geographies and
settings, but always recurring.
Sarah
said that she had liked the early part of the book, the part which
deals with the affair between Hanna and the narrator, better than
the second half of the book dealing with the war trial, and felt
that the second had been somewhat tacked on. As a consequence, she
felt that it wasn’t really even a Holocaust novel as claimed by
critics and certainly not the most important Holocaust novel as
many have implied.
Not
everyone agreed with her. We felt that the disjunction between the
two halves of the novel is more complex and meaningful than she
had implied, formally replicating the amnesia of the post-war years
and the dissociation necessary for those, like Hanna, involved in
Nazi activities, as well as the gulf in the narrator’s understanding
once he uncovers the truth about her. He asks outright: what does
he do with his obsessive feelings for Hanna now that he knows? He
can’t simply erase them, or his tender memories, which (as exemplified
in the power of that first chapter) now make up his consciousness
and being? How does he view her once he knows: through his memories,
through the accusations of the prosecution, or through his sudden
realisation, half-way through the trial, that she was illiterate,
and that this explained all her past actions including both the
fact that she had made him read to her and the fact that she had
spent her life sidestepping situations in order to avoid exposing
this shortcoming, sidestepping one time into the camps?
This
is what the novel is about, someone said: the fact that people ended
up as Nazis for very ordinary, everyday reasons, and Sarah reiterated
her oft-stated opinion that we all say now that we wouldn’t have
colluded with the Nazi regime, but that faced with the same situation
we might find it very hard not to.
And
how does the narrator view Hanna now, all these years later, when
the images of the Holocaust have crystallised (into what: the whole
truth, or a partial cliché?) and when Hanna has spent her years
in prison trying to atone?
Trevor
said that what was brilliant about this book was the fact that it
could deal with such huge and complex issues in so few pages and
in such simple, spare language. (We presumed it was a brilliant
translation and were sorry that we were unable to quiz Hans, who
had read it in the German, on the comparison.)
What
is great about this novel, we finally decided, was that it asks
the questions which can’t easily be answered: What is love? How
can we judge the nature of evil? How can we forgive and how atone?
How can we deal with our emotional implication in the past?
In
short, it confronts us with the uncertainty which ideological regimes
would deny.
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