| |
October
2008
The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor
Group
member Trevor suggested this novel which begins in 1921 when the
head of an Anglo-Irish household shoots at and wounds a potential
arsonist, after which he and his wife are compelled by fear to leave
their County Cork home. Desperate not to leave, and not understanding
why they must, their eight-year-old daughter Lucy hatches a plot
to prevent the departure, but inadvertently leads her parents to
believe that she is dead and consequently leave without her, cutting
all ties in order to deal with their loss. The story then follows
the life of Lucy, brought up by the servants left behind and tied
to the house and to her guilt, longing for the return of her parents
and redemption.
Trevor said that when he began this novel he thought it was fantastic.
So much happens right at the beginning: the foiled raid on the house,
Lucy's running away and the terrible mistaken conclusion of the
parents. But as he went on reading he began to feel less sure: obviously
the point was that nothing happened after that, that Lucy's ironic
fate, after trying to take control, was to end up passive and basically
miss out on life, but he had the growing feeling that as a result
there wasn't really enough in this book to justify its length and
that it would have made a better short story. But then he really
didn't know what to think, as all the review quotes on the back
cover said how marvellous it was.
Doug said that he thought it was a wonderful story, but he hadn't
at all liked the style of the book (and he too thought it might
have better suited novella length). John asked him what he meant
by the 'style' and Doug said he meant the prose style. I said that
I too hadn't liked the prose style: to my shock I had found it over-abstract
and formal, distancing and failing thus to make the characters live.
Clare quickly said, but isn't that the point, the characters don't
live: all of them, and most especially Lucy, are condemned to a
half-life? I agreed that that was true, but I still didn't think
that the language worked well to to convey this psychological state.
It reminded me of the prose of the Nadine Gordimer we had read,
The Pickup, and similarly
featured a frequent and clumsy use of the defocussing word 'what'
as a noun: ...the men who had once come in the night would have
by now lost interest in what they intended... ... they went to the
creamery together for the first time since what had happened...
...his experience was puny compared with what still continued for
the girl he believed he loved. Clare said, But the whole point is
that characters in the book don't talk about things, they don't
refer to things directly: the book is after all about silences and
the consequences of silence. Fair enough in theory, I said, but
I still thought that the prose was clumsy and distanced the reader
from the characters' experience of alienation: what about the frequent
use of the passive tense, eg when school had been finished with
rather than 'when Lucy finished/left school' and He spoke of that
afternoon and was listened to politely rather than 'Lucy listened
to him politely'. Clare said, But this underlines the passivity
of the characters. I said that there was other clumsiness, though,
which seemed less like authorial strategy and more like mistakes:
tautologies and lack of verbal economy, eg, Her fingers today were
slow in what was required of them and ...this was an outcome that
might yet come about.
Doug, Anne and John nodded agreement, but Jenny said that nevertheless
she liked the book because it was a great story, and Clare said
firmly that whatever we said she had found the book extremely moving
and it had meant a great deal to her. I had to agree that in spite
of my reservations about the prose it was a great story. John said
that we couldn't ignore this, that people had thought it was a great
story, and we needed to think about why this was so. I said that
if someone told me the story over cup of coffee in a cafe I would
have thought it as good, so it was a separate thing from the execution
in the novel, but Clare felt that it was the novel she was responding
to. John asked her why she so engaged with it, and she said that
it recalled for her her feelings of abandonment when she was sent
away to boarding school. John wondered if she was though therefore
perhaps bringing things to the novel rather than taking things from
it, and Clare said, Maybe.
Ann, who also went to boarding school, seemed far less impressed
by the novel. John now said that he wasn't actually as moved by
the story as others of us: indeed, he found it pretty unbelievable.
He didn' t find it believable that the parents could so easily disappear,
and Ann agreed. She has recently been researching her own grandfather,
an archeologist, for her PhD, and has found that at the time of
the novel upper-class people like the Gaults moved from country
to country via recommendation (rather than passports) which would
leave a trail, not to mention the paper trail which would have been
left by their cashing in of their shares - a point which had occurred
to both John and me. (As a textile conservator at the Whitworth
Gallery Ann is an expert needleworker, and she also said that the
authority of the novel was spoilt for her by the author's mistakes
about embroidery). Personally, in the light of cases like that of
Madeleine McCann, I found psychologically unbelievable the Gaults'
ability to accept so quickly the death of their child without the
evidence of a body, but most of the group seemed to have no problem
with this, unlike me finding the fishermen's explanation adequate
to convince the parents.
John said that the thing he really disliked about the book was its
colonialist tone. He thought that this was created by the aspects
of the prose style I'd pointed out, and drew our attention to the
omniscient opening:
Captain Everard Gault wounded the boy in the right shoulder
on the night of June the twenty-first, nineteen twenty-one. Aiming
above the trespassers' heads in the darkness, he fired the single
shot from an upstairs window and then watched the three figures
scuttling off, the wounded one assisted by his companions.
In fact, John said, this passage begs questions which we are clearly
not expected to ask: Was Everard really aiming above the trespassers'
heads? (The novel appears to expect us to accept this.) As an ex-army
captain could he really have been that bad a shot? And, Trevor added,
isn't it harder to misfire downwards if you're aiming upwards?
I said that, as for viewpoint, the whole novel takes the colonialist
one. Jenny said she wasn't sure about this: what about the servants,
Henry and Bridget, they were Catholics, and they were very sympathetic
characters, and what about the fact that the boy who is wounded
ends up being looked after in the mental asylum by Lucy? I said
that last was quite right wing, the fact that narratorially he was
dismissed into madness. Jenny said, How on earth is that right wing?
and Ann said, Well, the boy's story could have been presented as
a foil to that of the Gaults' but instead he was simply a pawn in
the Gaults' story, which was the primary story, and indeed narratorially
he is just in service to Lucy's own (do-gooding) redemption. And
then people remembered how much better the Republican and Protestant
viewpoints had been counterpointed in Jennifer Johnston's How
Many Miles to Babylon? and how brilliant we had thought that
book.
Everybody now agreed that none of the characters in this book ever
really came to life, and that even as far as Lucy was concerned
there were serious gaps where you might have expected emotional
development - which, though it may have been the intention of the
author, was unsatisfying for the reader. Several moments which were
theoretically key to the story were glossed over emotionally, dismissed
in a sentence or two, and Lucy's immediate reaction to her father's
reappearance just about omitted altogether.
I said in mitigation that one thing that did really strike a chord
with me was the fact that the story of Lucy Gault has to be simplified
and indeed altered, its nuances lost, in order to achieve the legendary,
folklore status it does amongst the local people - but this didn't
seem to strike much of a chord with the rest of the group, and people
looked at me rather blankly. Someone, I think Jenny, said to much
agreement that she had really liked the depiction of the way the
neighbours, the O'Reillys, slowly encroached on the Gaults, taking
back into Catholic ownership the colonized land, and someone else
pointed out the similarity between this and the situation in Coetzee's
Disgrace which we have also
discussed. John said that it also echoed Chekov's Three Sisters,
a
production of which some of us had recently seen, in that the
land had been gambled away at card games.
After which, the conversation about the book ended somewhat abruptly,
and next thing we were planning our group Christmas dinner.
December 2008
The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant
Clothes
and the things they represent - social and psychological - are of
abiding interest to Ann, a textile conservator - as they are indeed
to me: I was very pleased when she suggested this book, the story
of narrator Vivien Kovaks, the London-born daughter of Hungarian
Jewish refugees, and her relationship in adulthood with the uncle
from whom her parents are estranged, a character based on the notorious
fifties slum landlord, Rachman.
However, introducing the book, Ann said that she felt the clothes
theme was disappointingly undeveloped. Clothes did constitute a
fair element of the book - mainly of the story of Vivien who, learning
nothing from her silent and hermetic parents about their background,
must seek an identity for herself, which she does partly via clothes.
However, Ann said, the idea seemed to lie on the surface, and wasn't
linked with that lost background in any resonant way that she could
see, as promised by the quite brilliant title. Most people in the
group didn't particularly care about this - most weren't that bothered
about clothes in the first place - and everyone resoundingly agreed
that the story of Uncle Sandor which is slowly revealed to Vivien
is engrossing.
Well, everyone had enjoyed the book and had found it a great read,
but our group has got so critical nowadays that I'm afraid to say
it didn't come out of our discussion in any way unscathed. Ann found
a dissonance between the story of Vivien growing up and the later
episodes: the first seemed felt but the latter rather made up, at
which others agreed and listed all the things they had found 'made
up' or unconvincing: Clare said that though we were told that Vivien
was heartbroken at the loss of her young husband, there was no sense
of her grief. And what was all that about him dying, everyone wanted
to know? What was the point of not even revealing straight away
how he had died, and indeed giving the wrong impression by talking
instead about (other) examples of sudden accidental deaths? John
said he felt that what was going on here was that things weren't
properly imagined; he felt the same sort of confusion over Vivien's
wedding: initially, he got the impression that her wedding had been
a small one (because it was done through the focus of Vivien's parents)
and only later is it revealed that it was a society wedding. Others
agreed. The way Vivien and Sandor met was far too coincidental,
they said, and they didn't find it believable that Vivien should
invite her unknowing parents to the birthday party Sandor holds
for her. Ann said that she wasn't convinced by the time shift of
Sandor's slum landlordism to the sixties; Rachman was very much
of the fifties, and the excuse that Sandor had come to England later
didn't hold water because, as even the book says, it was immediately
after the war that there were killings to be made in buying up cheap
property.
John
wanted to know what the book was supposed to be saying: was it meant
to say that people like Rachman were OK really, or something? I
said that I thought the point was to show that evil doers can't
be dismissed as 'pure evil' (as indeed the mother of abducted Sharon
Matthews had been described the very day of our discussion), 'the
face of evil', as both Rachman and Sandor were described by the
press; that what's far more frightening is that the people who conduct
evil deeds are on the contrary human. But people said they didn't
find the book portrayed this convincingly, Vivien didn't seem to
have much of a convincing dilemma over this, and Clare compared
the book unfavourably with Bernhard Schlink's The
Reader, which we've also discussed.
I said, But didn't you find the prose engaging and witty? and everyone
agreed that yes, they had, and then Jenny said, My god, what's wrong
with us, I said I liked this book! And then she said, Well, I still
do anyway, and everyone agreed. Go figure.
January
2009
The String of Pearls by Joseph Roth
We
met at Clare's to discuss this book, translated by Michael Hofmann,
which she had suggested. It's the story of the events which ensue
when the Shah of Persia, on a visit to Vienna at the end of the
nineteenth century, desires a beautiful countess and decides that
he must have her, and the knock-on effects on characters from various
strata of Viennese society.
I have to say we were more than a bit confounded by this novel.
Having read Hofmann's translation of the very psychological The
Reader, we were perhaps stupidly expecting something in the
same vein, and were surprised to find this a somewhat old-fashioned
omniscient tale. But we felt it was something about the novel itself
which was difficult to grasp. As the novel follows the chain of
consequences, the focus shifts from character to character, following
each to their ruin and then leaving him or her and moving onto the
next with an abruptness we found odd. Ann and I felt strongly too
that we were missing things - that there were references we weren't
getting, and possibly ironies and jokes. We had no idea whether
this were the fault of the novel or the translation or indeed our
own lack of historical background, but since this was after all
a novel about the tenor of Viennese society at the centre
of a crumbling empire, we found this frustrating. We were especially
suspicious of the translation when it came to the representations
of colloquial speech, which seemed awkward, and we wished that our
German-speaking member Hans had been there to advise us, and indeed
look at the original as he had with The Reader. Especially, though,
we kept not being able to visualise things: for instance, we imagined
the characters in Edwardian costume, but then suddenly there would
be an indication that a character was dressed in more modern clothes.
Clare
suggested that this was an effect deliberately created by Roth,
as an indication of the flux and confusion of the society being
portrayed. She suggested too that the abruptness of the changes
of focus between characters was a formal replication of the effect
on them of the disintegrating society. Nevertheless, she had to
agree that there had been something unsatisfying about it all. Every
one of us, it turned out, had been reduced to reading Hofmann's
introduction for clues as to how we should take this novel, yet
had found that it provided few, concentrating on the more superficial
tropes such as that of doubling and on teasing out the parallels
with strands in others of Roth's novels. So, still confounded and
unsatisfied, we dropped the subject of the book and turned to other
more gossipy matters.
February
2009
Chronicle in Stone by Ismail Kadare
Report
written by Clare:
Elizabeth was unable to be at the reading group meeting when we
discussed this book. Towards the end of the evening, after possibly
too much wine, I rashly agreed to write about our discussion in
Elizabeth’s stead. It is now near the end of May and I was
reminded in our May meeting of my promise. The tone was such that
I feel duty bound to try and write something. There was some acknowledgment
that ‘we’re not all experienced writers’ like
Elizabeth, so with that in mind….
Doug, who had chosen the novel, outlined the story of a medieval
city in Albania, with the citizens’ preoccupation with superstition
and witchcraft. The narrator is a young boy, son of a family whose
stone house has a central place in the community, having a well
in its cellar. The boy is shortsighted, but the hazy, running together
of experiences is more than visual. Features of the city, people
and events, are indistinct and the boy narrator’s preoccupation
with the macabre, bizarre, sexually unusual, convey a world through
a child’s eyes. We enjoyed the vivid characters, old crones,
the life of the city and the city as a character itself. We generally
agreed, though, that the language and perception was often that
of someone much older than Kadare’s narrator.
The political backdrop is of the Second World War and national resistance
movements. These impinge on the city and the boy’s experience,
as the military occupation of the city changes from Italian to Greek
armies several times. The transitions are almost comical: one group
marching out, southwards, as the other marches in from the north.
The changes in power seem arbitrary and disconnected from the life
of the city and its people. The first awareness of something going
on further afield, is the sight of aeroplanes passing overhead.
The boy narrator is in awe of a large aeroplane that lands by the
city, becoming almost emotionally attached to it. Yet this contrasts
with a sense the book conveys, of the ancient city and its people
being violently shocked into the twentieth century.
We moved to discussing Albania, its political and cultural characteristics
in this period, helpfully illuminated by Ann’s knowledge of
this region. One effect on me of reading this novel was to make
me curious about Albania as a country, its people and history, knowing
so little about it.
It was a generally well received book. I don’t remember anyone
registering dislike – just that observation that the linguistic
competence and maturity of observation were not consonant with a
boy narrator in his early teens.
March
2009
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
Jenny
suggested this novel about Roseanne McNulty who is nearing her hundredth
birthday in the Roscommon mental hospital to which she was committed
as a young woman, and her psychiatrist Dr Grene who becomes intrigued
by her as the hospital is made ready for closure and his own retirement
approaches. Jenny had been interested in the book because her own
aunt had been similarly committed for purely moral reasons and in
the same way had become so institutionalized that she never left.
The story is told in two alternating first-person narrations: the
secret memoir that Roseanne begins writing, in which she looks back
over her life and the tragic circumstances, rooted in political
and religious conflict, which led her to the asylum, and the journal
which Dr Grene begins at the same time to record his professional
progress - in particular his unsuccessful attempts to draw Roseanne
out - but which also lapses into a private memoir.
I think Jenny wasn't disappointed, and on the whole the group was
enthusiastic about this book. People found it a moving, indeed heart-wrenching
story, and most especially people loved the writing: Hans arrived
with his copy bristling with post-it notes marking sentences and
passages he especially liked. It's 'poetic' in that there is a lyrical
rhythm and it is profound and startling in its observations. Here's
Roseanne summing up a truth behind her own tragedy: '...history
as far as I can see it is not the arrangement of what happens, in
sequence and in truth, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and
guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth.'
Yet the prose is marked by the tics of the characters' psychology
as each tries to recall and make sense of their experience, stopping
and starting and questioning both their memories and expression.
Writing that Roseanne has clearly suffered great pain, and that
this 'actually gives her her strange grace', Grene then
comments: 'Now, that is not a thought I had before I wrote it
down.' In this way the memoir form of the book is unusually
dynamic: the journals are not merely vehicles for a story; the actual
writing of them moves the characters' development forward. And in
this way the book is about not simply Roseanne's particular story
- shocking and moving and tied up with the political history of
Ireland as it is - but the ways in which we process our own stories
and negotiate the aspects of them that are unknown to us.
I said that one thing I loved most about this book was its humanity
- the fact that Roseanne never shows bitterness towards those who
have wronged her, looking for humanity in even the near-inhuman
Father Gaunt, main perpetrator of her wrongs, and the way that both
she and Grene constantly reach for understanding. Everyone agreed.
Then I said that I did have one caveat about the book, which in
fact I was reluctant to mention because I loved the book so much,
and it was the same one that the judges had (unusually) admitted
to when awarding the book the Costa Prize: I didn't like the way
the revelation at the end (which I won't give away here) was achieved.
It wasn't convincing, I said, and Ann, Doug and John strongly agreed.
Jenny and Clare didn't quite agree, though, I think: they pointed
out all the aspects of the plot which explained the ending and meant
that it did all fit together. I said yes, it did all fit together
on the level of plot, but I didn't think it worked on the psychological
level: there were not enough pointers on that level to make me feel
'Ah yes, of course!' when the truth was revealed. Hans and Doug
strongly said that they felt that I'd got to the nub of it. In fact,
some people in the group hadn't actually grasped the plot connections,
and I think that this was why, because it wasn't backed up by a
psychological resolution.
Then Doug revealed that he hadn't liked the book nearly as much
of the rest of us, and this seemed to be because he found other
aspects of it unbelievable: the fact that Roseanne could have been
incarcerated merely on moral grounds and for the rest of her life,
and the appalling coldness and cruelty of the priest and her mother-in-law
who had put her there. There was now a chorus of objection: Jenny
referred back to her aunt, and Clare, who is a psychotherapist,
said that she had worked with women in such circumstances as late
as the seventies and eighties, and not even in rural Ireland as
in the book, but in England. I said that there were exactly parallel
stories in the Irish side of my own family, in which people were
excommunicated by priests and shunned by the family for similar
moral, political and religious reasons. In fact, I said, when I
had previously read Barry's earlier novel, The Whereabouts of
Eneas McNulty, in which a minor (though not insignificant)
character in The Secret Scripture takes centre stage, I
felt as though Barry had somehow heard about a particular member
of my own family. Thus I found myself in a very weird situation,
for me: it's usually Trevor in the group who appeals to life to
justify novels, and I who wag my literary finger and insist that
appeals to life are irrelevant because a book has to convince on
its own.
Indeed, I said, one of the things which moved me tremendously about
The Secret Scripture is that it picks up and makes central
an encounter in The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty which
there seemed strangely incidental yet remained one of my strongest
and most resonant memories of that book. Perhaps what is so moving
about the cross-novel connections which Barry creates is the way
that they formally demonstrate the marginalization of people and
their searing experience in a situation of political and religious
prejudice. And I must say that everyone in the group, none of whom
knew of the other book, was very intrigued by this connection.
And then, for the rest of the evening, we discussed the real-life
issues which the book and Doug's objection had raised.
|
