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April
2008
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
Three
parallel narratives, featuring respectively Virginia Woolf struggling
with her demons, a young woman, Laura Brown, trapped in suburban
motherhood in the nineteen-forties and longing to escape and read
Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway, and a middle-aged woman Clarissa
arranging a party in the nineteen-nineties for an old lover who
is dying of Aids and who once nicknamed her Mrs Dalloway after that
fictional Clarissa.
Ann,
who had suggested this novel, said that in the event she wasn't
sure what she thought of it, as she didn't feel that the perspectives
of the three women were sufficiently differentiated and in particular
she couldn't get to grips with the Laura Brown character: she understood
the trap Laura was in but couldn't see how such a strong-willed
character could have got into such a trap in the first place.
This
caused some surprise: others felt on the contrary that the characters
were very well differentiated, and those who had grown up in sixties
suburbia in Britain had found Laura Brown and her position entirely
recognizable. Indeed, everyone else thought this book was wonderful
- even Jenny. Initially Jenny had resisted the idea of this book
as she didn't like parallel narratives, but even though the connections
between the different strands had seemed superficial she had found
it absorbing, and in any case at the end it is revealed that they
are not separate stories at all.
We
had quite some discussion about this last. Trevor said that when
he suddenly realized the connections so near the end he wondered
if he had been really thick in not guessing them before. I said
I didn't think so: I thought it had been deliberate structural strategy
on Cunningham's part to spring a surprise. I thought that there
was nothing so moving as to discover that an old woman you were
despising along with one character was in fact the same person as
a young woman you'd been identifying with, and Hans strongly agreed.
On
the other hand, I couldn't help questioning this strategy, since
had we known the connections as we were reading there would have
been resonances which inevitably we missed - though as Jenny said,
the thing about great literaure is that it makes you want to read
it again, and on a second reading we would experience them.
I
think we were in no doubt that this was great literature. John had
been seriously ill while I had been reading it, and the book's overriding
theme of death had at times made it quite difficult for me to read,
yet I had always gone back to it: it had seeped into my consciousness
the way great literature does. The only other quibble was Doug's:
he wondered about the occasional breaches of the novel's convention
when we are given the viewpoint of minor characters; yet Doug was
perhaps one of the greatest admirers of this book.
It
wasn't overall a long discussion. It was the kind of occasion, I
think, where a book hits you in the gut, and intellectual discussion
seems not quite the point.
Next time, we're discussing Clare's choice, Anne Enright's recent
Booker winner The Gathering.
Click
here to see a list of the books previously discussed
Archive discussions
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