| |
December
2007
Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
Well
now, here's an illustration of the contingency of reading.
Ten
years ago when Fugitive Pieces was published I read it greedily
at a sitting and when I got to the end put it down and thought to
myself, 'That is one of the most brilliant novels I have ever read.'
Ever since, I have told people how brilliant, and important, it
is: a novel which unfolds innovatively into two linked 'pieces'.
The first is the story of Jewish Pole Jakob who as a child during
the war escapes a Nazi raid in which his parents are killed and
his sister lost, presumably seized and taken to the death camps.
Having hidden by burying himself in the woods, he is finally rescued
by Greek scientist and archaeologist Athos who happens to be working
nearby on the lakeside site of a once-drowned city, and who smuggles
him back to his island home of Zakynthos. Athos nurtures Jakob through
his loss until his own death in Toronto to which he and the growing
Jakob have moved - a city conversely built in the bowl of a dried-up
prehistoric lake. The second part of the novel is the years-later
story of a young academic, Toronto-born Ben, who has lived with
a different kind of loss: the loss of innocence and security in
having parents who experienced and survived the death camps, an
insecurity which once caused them to refuse to leave their house
with young Ben when it was flooded by the river, and all of them
thus nearly to lose their lives. Now, at a party, Ben and his young
wife meet Jakob, now a poet and translator, and both he and his
wife develop a fascination with Jakob which deeply affects their
lives.
The
rich themes of loss, erasure and exhumation are vividly carried
in the images of the child burying himself in the wood, the drowned
city and the flooding river - and in the academic and not-so-academic
obsessions of the characters: the snow-burial of Scott's doomed
Antarctic expedition, Athos's interest in fossils and geology, Ben's
study of weather and the practice of biography. This and the lyrical
prose (Anne Michaels' previous reputation was as a poet) were what
entranced me the first time round.
So
how to explain the fact that when I read it again ten years later
I was dismayed to find I thought that, in spite of its merits -
including the most beautifully honed and profoundest sentences -
it seriously fails as a novel? For what strikes me now is that those
ideas and images which once so bowled me over are not anchored on
any novelistic scaffolding. The book does not take the structure
of a novel but, as someone in the group said, rather that of an
extended poem. There is no narrative tension, since in passing we
are told the outcomes (first the death of Athos, and then that of
Jakob) while the 'story' is still in progress, and also because
the 'action' is constantly arrested by brief philosophical disquisitions
or lengthy historical or scientific essays, the events seeming indeed
merely triggers for the latter, in the manner which operates in
poetry. Indeed, the only way to read this book, we all agreed, was
to read it as a poem - ie, to stop at these points and ruminate
consciously about such statements as 'Every moment is two moments',
or the tale of Scott in the Antarctic, or a description of a weather
pattern or geological process, and work out how they related to
the recent action between the characters. The trouble is, I found
that this time I was not prepared to do this, I wanted the events
and relationships to transmit the ideas more dynamically, and at
a deeper gut level, and sometimes found these gnomic pronouncements
pretentious or even at times clumsy.
And
little of the 'action' is dynamic: most of it is reported rather
than dramatized, and therefore, in spite of the seemingly rich imagery,
it lacks vividness. Nor is it convincing when it is dramatized,
as the author makes the basic error of feeding information to the
reader through unrealistic dialogue, and the characters all talk
like each other and like self-conscious poets. And here's the crux:
although the two separate parts are intended as separate first-person
narrations (the first Jakob's, the second Ben's), it's very hard
to tell them apart (and people said they kept getting mixed up between
Jakob and Ben and forgetting that they were separate characters):
ie there's no apparent distinction between narratorial and authorial
voice.
I
could hardly believe that I had had two such different reactions
to the same book. All I could imagine was that my earlier reading
was affected by the fact that I had at the time already conceived
a novel of my own on similar themes of loss and suppression (although
it would be several years before I wrote it, and it has still to
find a publisher), and was simply gobbling up ideas and images which
chimed with my own: ie, at the time all I was interested in were
the ideas, so I didn't notice that the book didn't work as a novel.
However,
although Hans and John agreed with my new assessment (Hans had failed
to finish the book), the others felt I was being far too harsh.
Doug said that although he could see there were faults with the
book, he had been really impressed by its other aspects, and Ann
agreed. Trevor and Jenny said they'd really liked it, and all four
said that they hadn't at all minded having to read the book slowly
and thoughtfully, putting it down to think about the meanings and
the connections, and Jenny had been so impressed and touched by
one sentence about the nature of grief that she had marked it and
read it out:
If one needs proof of the soul it's easily found. The spirit
is most evident at the point of extreme humiliation.
I have to say, however, that this is one of those lines which
seemed so profound to me the first time round, but when I really
examine it now (and try to tie it in with the story) I'm not at
all sure what it means.
Then
Hans and John had a seemingly inconsequential discussion about an
incident in the book in which Nazi soldiers on Zakynthos amuse themselves
by throwing down their olive stones for starving children to rescue
and nibble clean. Hans said he was left wondering whether this was
a historical truth. John said, Of course it was, people were really
starving during the war. And then I realized that this illustrated
an essential point about the book. Laden as it is with scientific
and historical facts, this novel had left Hans uneasy about some
of its 'facts'. But it's not factual but emotional truth which novels
can best provide, and if a novel works properly on a fictive level,
creates a universe which seduces and convinces, we just don't start
questioning its 'facts'.
At
which Ann said she wondered if this novel were based on something
close to the author but which she had been told, which would perhaps
explain its flavour of an account rather than a properly dramatized
(and thus objectified) story, and the general consensus was that
this was probably the case. Not that any of its four supporters
really minded this effect.
See
how dependent a book is on the reader?
January
2008
Travels With My Aunt by Graham Greene
Jenny
chose this book because she wanted a laugh. One of Graham Greene's
'entertainments' (as opposed to his more serious novels), it's the
first-person narration of middle-aged bachelor Henry Pulling, newly
retired from his position as a bank manager and committed to his
safe suburban life of tending his dahlias - until, that is, the
day of his mother's funeral when he meets an aunt he hardly knows.
From this point on, his life is overturned: he is hurtled into an
itinerant world of hippies, smugglers and war criminals which he
has hardly guessed exists.
Jenny
said she had been richly rewarded: the character of Aunt Augusta
is a wonderfully eccentric one, although she said with a giggle
that she thought she would be a real pain to be related to in real
life.
Nearly
everyone else agreed that the book had been fabulously entertaining
and also brilliantly written. Well, I couldn't disagree with the
latter: as usual with Greene there's a clarity to the prose - a
sense of everything clearly visualized - which involves you
from the first sentence. But then I said that actually I had a problem
with the book because it was so rightwing. People seemed surprised
at my making such a serious and political objection to a piece of
such light entertainment, but I said that it was precisely because
the book was so light, and treated with such urbanity subjects which
are actually very serious, that I found it rightwing. It's not that
I think you can't treat such subjects with humour, and I certainly
wouldn't have minded a savage satire - indeed, I'd have loved one
- but I found the urbanity hard to take (the apparent cosy stance
that this murky underworld was just a good laugh), especially when
you take into account the ending, which I won't reveal here, and
the treatment of the fate of one of the characters, Wordsworth.
Hans
said that actually, he agreed with me, he'd had similar thoughts
himself: to what end was this brilliant writing being employed?
but that hadn't stopped him enjoying the book as it had me.
And
then people couldn't think of anything much more to say about it,
and we hadn't even been discussing it for half an hour. There was
a bit of a silence and then John said, well perhaps we should consider
if Greene did in fact have a more serious purpose. Maybe the book,
published in 1969, was a comment on the changes in society at the
end of the sixties - and indeed Henry says at one point near the
end that he had been brought up unprepared for the modern world.
But then someone else pointed out that the world he encounters after
leaving his old-fashioned suburb is in fact even older, with its
roots in the war and thirties Bohemia and back further (indeed Aunt
Augusta is described as dressing somewhat in the style of 'the late
Queen Mary' and thus identified with an older world). Or,
said John, maybe it's about the way people exist unthinkingly, and
that Henry who has unthinkingly obeyed the tame suburban rules can
also, ironically, succumb unthinkingly to a quite opposite mode
of existence.
But
Clare said that maybe we were seeing too much serious purpose in
the book, and I said well, in any case I still didn't find the humour
savage enough, and somehow began to feel grumpy, quite the po-faced
lefty, and not very sociable either, and sat and demolished a bowl
of carrots instead, and Clare accused me of eating all the hummus.
February 2008
Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov
It
seems to be generally agreed that Lolita
is the best novel we have discussed, so when John suggested another
Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark, everyone jumped on it.
This
book, written some twenty-three years earlier, follows the same
Nabokovian scenario, with differences: that of a middle-aged man
caught in a doomed passion for a childlike young woman.
Originally
written in Russian with the title Kamera Obskura and soon
after translated into English as Camera Obscura, it was eventually
retranslated by Nabokov himself - and, I understand, to some extent
revised - and republished as Laughter in the Dark. The bones
of the story are set out at the beginning of Laughter in the
Dark:
Once
upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus.
He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for
the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his
life ended in disaster.
This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that
had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and though
there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss,
the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome.
Thus
it is established that what will be of interest is not the what
of this story but the how, and what follows is an omniscient-author
view (not unlike the encapsulated panoramic view through a camera
obscura) of the circumstances, coincidences and manipulations -
all masterfully handled - through which Albert Albinus is ruined
at the hands of the gold-digging prostitute Margot and her diabolical
lover, Axel Rex.
The
theme of the novel is clearly that of insight, conveyed through
images of darkness and brilliant light. Albinus is sadly lacking
in moral insight and, symbolically, falls in love with the unsuitable
Margot in the dark of a cinema and eventually is physically blinded.
Most
people had enjoyed the book immensely, but Doug surprised us all
by disagreeing. He said he found it impossible to care about the
fate of any of the characters, and found it quite unconvincing that
Albinus should leave his wife for Margot. There followed a long
discussion about this last: people said, Well it was passion, irrational
passion! But Doug said that was precisely what he didn't get any
sense of with the stuffy Albinus.
It
is true that most people had been surprised, after the psychological
complexity of Lolita, that the characters in this book are indeed
stereotypes. The book has a cartoon quality, as colourfully vivid
indeed as a camera obscura image, and to a great extent relies on
farce. It is therefore only by accepting these terms, and indeed
entering into Nabokov's contract and taking pleasure in the process
of narrative (rather than expecting psychological complexity
or expecting to identify with the characters) that one can fully
enjoy this book.
March
2008
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
Trevor
suggested this novel which concerns a young married but sexually
estranged couple, Port and Kit Morseby, who escape the aftermath
of the Second World War by travelling to North Africa and later
into the Sahara, only to find themselves divided further.
Trevor
said he thought the novel would raise some really interesting issues,
but as it happened no one else was fired enough by it to discuss
it with much passion. Two people said that they couldn't even finish
it, Jenny because she simply found it boring and Ann because, having
lived in that area of the world, she found it unrealistic.
Trevor
found this hard to believe. He said he thought it was great: didn't
we all think it was dead exciting and vivid, for instance, when
Port went off on his dangerous sexual adventure at the beginning
of the novel? And weren't the larger-than-life mother and son, the
Lyles, whom they meet along the way - with the hint of their incest
- fascinating? And what about that amazing scene when the dogs are
running around in one of the towns with pieces of the body of an
abandoned baby?
People
seemed a bit nonplussed by Trevor's reaction to the novel. Sure,
these things were vivid, they said, as were the striking descriptions
of the North African towns and the Sahara, but what about the central
characters? They just weren't at all likeable and you couldn't care
about their story.
I
said that you don't need to like the characters to like a novel
- though Jenny said she did need to like at least one - but I did
agree that you do need to have some emotional investment in their
fate. I wondered if the reason we didn't is that although we are
treated by the omniscient narrator to very detailed accounts of
their feelings and motives, those accounts are very clinical and
so those feelings and motives remain at a distance to us.
The
book is in three parts and, for reasons I won't reveal here, in
part three Kit has an adventure alone, joining a merchant camel
train in the desert, and in this part the book undergoes a pretty
radical change of style. John said he said he found this third part
the best, in fact he really only liked this part, at least things
start happening and the pace of the prose hots up - and Trevor quickly
agreed. Doug and I cried that we much preferred the first two parts,
in fact we hated the last part, not finding it believable in the
slightest. Trevor said, But Kit had no choice but to join the caravan,
and she had no choice but to succumb to whatever the merchants then
demanded of her. I said, that's not the point: I can well imagine
in theory that this would be the case, but the novel doesn't convince
me, ie the way it's told, and Clare said, You mean the writing,
and Trevor said sardonically, Oh, the writing!
I
insisted. I said it is the prose in part three which is unconvincing
- rushed and staccato. Clare said, but rushed and staccato prose
can be appropriate, after all Kit's in a state of turmoil. I said,
Yes, it can - for instance I thought the rushed (though fluid) prose
replicating Port's typhoid delirium is beautifully done and this
is one of the points in the book I find psychologically and emotionally
involving - but in part three the prose rhythms and the sentence
constructions seem rushed to me in the sense of being unconsidered,
even lazy.
John
said that what he liked about this last part was that in focussing
on Kit it made the book about women and the condition of women,
and most of the men agreed. I said that I didn't actually think
that this was a specific intention on Bowles' part, as not only
are parts one and two more about Port than Kit, I had read in Michael
Hofmann's introduction to the new Penguin Classic that when Bowles
had got to the end of part two he had decided to use a different
writing method for the rest of the book: automatic writing (which
eschews thought or conscious 'art') - which would also explain not
only the change in style but the nature of the prose here. In other
words, I felt that by loosening the reins of his artistic consciousness,
Bowles had merely reproduced here an unconvincing male fantasy about
a woman, a fact which showed up in the prose.
At
which Trevor insisted once more that this was how Kit would have
behaved.
Ann
said that she wasn't even convinced by Kit's behaviour in the first
two parts, which was why she had stopped reading before then. Also,
she had found the book unremittingly colonial in its perspective,
and that it colluded too far with Port's racist view of Arabs as
'monkeys'. (How on earth could they have made a film out of it at
that rate? I asked, and Clare, who had seen the film, said that
they had excised all the racism and romanticised it all, especially
part three, and indeed bleached it of the real theme - the emotional
and existential barrenness of the characters - so that in fact it
had been like watching paint dry.) Some people quibbled with Ann's
point, saying that there were some sympathetic Arabs in the book,
that the author is not necessarily to be identified with Port, and
that even Port despises the anti-semitism of the Lyles. But as Ann
said, the perspective of no Arab is ever represented (although she
guessed that was par for the course at the time of the novel's writing),
and it's all relative.
And
then Trevor said how much he'd enjoyed the exciting bit towards
the end and Kit's imprisonment and escape, and explained to us doubters
why she would have acted exactly as she did.
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.
|
