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March
2003 - Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001)
This was in Doug's house, newly decorated with polished floors.
All these people put me and John to shame. Very squashed, because
we had two new members, and only Mark wasn't there, we didn't know
why this time.
Doug brought in a brand-new designer-type deck chair, and new member
Neil sat down on it and split the canvas and went right through.
Everyone liked Atonement, though on the whole people felt
cheated by the postmodern ending, where it turns out that all of
the book preceding is in fact a novel written by Briony, the main
character, and that the other characters didn't after all have the
ending she'd invented for them.
Jeanne kept opening her mouth, and in the end everyone told each
other to let her speak.
She said she didn't know what we wanted: we'd all said we liked
it, that it had held us in a spell and even at times made us cry,
yet here we were picking holes. She said that as a writer she'd
give anything to write like that, and, as another fiction writer,
I knew she was especially talking to me.
I refused to be chastened.
Trevor said he fancied the pants off Briony, and we pointed out
to him that for half of the book she was all of thirteen.
He refused to retract.
He added that actually, though, he didn't like her in the final
part, in fact he thought she was awful. We all demanded to know
why and Don said in disgust no doubt it was because she'd got wrinkled
and old. Trevor protested, no, it was because she had turned into
a patronising old bourgeois, and Don said, Exactly.
Sarah then said that actually, though she loved the book for its
brilliantly descriptive prose she never liked Briony, not one bit,
in any part of the book.
Trevor said also that the crime Briony commits and needs to atone
really struck a chord with him, because when he was ten or so he
didn't deliver the harvest basket to the sweet old dear he was meant
to and took it home instead, telling his mum she hadn't been in,
and actually feeling terrible. But that unlike Briony, he got found
out and punished, because the old dear rang the school in a blazing
fury and complained.
Doug and his wife Helen had provided very lush nibbles - grapes
and nuts and fancy crisps and several kind of dips - but people
didn't really touch them because the discussion was so intense.
After Don and Jeanne had gone, we went on discussing the novel,
the first time a novel has inspired us to do it.
Next morning we discovered why Mark hadn't turned up. His partner
Kirsten had gone into labour; he was passing in the car with her,
on the way to hospital, just as we were all arriving at Doug's door,
and the baby, a girl called Lily, was born even as, unknowing, we
sat discussing Ian McEwan's brilliant manipulation of point of view.
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April 2003 - Slaughterhouse 5
by Kurt Vonnegut (1970)
I met Don in the charity shop on the day of the meeting and asked
him if he'd read the book.
He nodded then rolled his eyes and said: 'I'm saying nothing!'
That evening he and Jeanne arrived for the meeting at mine and John's
without their copy of the book, which was pretty unusual as Don
likes to refer to the text of a novel and read out passages he considers
well written.
It was quite a small meeting. Our two new members didn't come back
this time, and Jeanne and Don had met Mark in the park with his
partner and new baby, and Mark had said he would be off on a trip
after all.
Trevor introduced the book. He said it was basically about Vonnegut's
own difficulty in writing about his second-world-war experience
of the bombing of Dresden, and that the invention of the character
Billy Pilgrim, who also experienced Dresden but gets abducted by
aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, is a kind of 'cushion' for
the experience, making it possible for Vonnegut to write about it
from a more objective distance. He said that actually, he could
have done without the first chapter which gives an account of Vonnegut's
difficulties in writing about the subject before the story of Billy
Pilgrim gets going.
I said that I liked the first chapter, I loved the honest
way Vonnegut puts his cards on the table and dispenses with the
con of 'authorial authority' and admits how difficult it is to address
such a traumatising subject.
Jeanne said that she too had liked the first chapter but that was
all. She said she simply couldn't take the stuff about aliens, and
quite frankly and most unusually for her, she gave up on the book.
Don said that actually she threw the book across the room, and he'd
picked it up and said he'd read it, but found he hadn't liked
it either, himself.
Sarah said she felt the same, she'd found the sci-fi alien sections
thin and sketchy, so you couldn't sink into them in the way she
likes to do with any world she's reading about in a novel.
I said, But wasn't that because they weren't really science fiction
but a kind a metaphor for Billy Pilgrim's war-traumatised and -dislocated
state of mind? and Trevor, Doug, and temporary member Matthew, who
was staying with me and John, agreed. Those sections were a kind
of joke, I said. Sarah
retorted that that was the only way you could take them.
Don then said it made him angry the way Vonnegut used the Tralfamadorian
sections as an excuse not to deal head-on with the war: the way
Billy Pilgrim kept getting whisked away from the war to Tralfamadore
or another point in time.
We protested: but wasn't that the point - the fact that war
experiences can be so terrible you can hardly dwell on them or deal
with them? Especially when society expects soldiers to put their
war experiences behind them, and in particular, concerning the firebombing
of Dresden, since after the war the British and American governments
covered it up? And in any case, it wasn't that Billy kept being
whisked away from the war so much as whisked back to
it: he had come 'unstuck' in time, as Vonnegut puts it, because
you can never really leave unresolved traumas behind. But Don was
unmoved and insisted that plenty of writers had dealt with war experiences
better than that.
I said I thought Vonnegut did deal with them - that Billy's
war experiences were as vivid and moving and in fact more humane
than any fiction about the war I'd read, and when the novel jumped
back to the war scenes it was nearly always to the point it had
left off and followed the war story through.
Don, who was a schoolboy during the war and had cousins in active
service, said that he couldn't agree that the war stuff was truthful.
In particular, he objected strongly to the stereotype depiction
of the British officer prisoners of war.
Doug didn't think that that was meant to be the truth about the
officers, just the way they seemed to Billy.
Trevor backed Doug up in this. Yes, he said, the whole thing is
Billy's experience. The book was not about the war, but about
Billy's experience of it and his difficulty in dealing with
it.
Don didn't find this acceptable. We had come to an impasse. Don
now pointed out that John had been very quiet so far, keeping his
cards close to his chest. Don was particularly interested to know
what John thought of this book because the time before, when Don
had especially praised the war section in Atonement, John
had said he found it boring and that he was bored with the war and
novels about it - which Don admitted he had found annoying.
John, who was born during the war, said now that he hadn't really
meant he was bored with the war. He said that actually it was very
important to him and he felt he'd been affected by it badly because
of what it had done to his father. What he'd meant was that he was
fed up of attitudes and books that failed to get to grips with its
true psychological dimensions. The soldier character in Atonement,
for instance, was meant to be delusional due to his shrapnel wound,
but you never properly shared in the psychological reality
of his delusions. Whereas
the psychological reality was exactly where Slaughterhouse 5
was located, and for this reason it was a truly great book.
Doug and Matthew and Trevor and I nodded vigorously, but Don and
Jeanne and Sarah were anything but convinced.
We had to agree to differ.
Then we ate up the nuts and crisps, rather greedily and neurotically,
and talked about the war that was happening now, which none of us
wanted to have happened, and suddenly we were all in agreement.
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May
2003- Affinity by Sarah Waters (1999)
As Jeanne had not yet chosen a book, we had suggested she did so,
and she’d chosen this lesbian story of Victorian spiritualism.
Not
long after the decision, I met Mark at the shops, pushing his little
boy in the buggy, and he said he’d glanced at the book and didn’t
fancy it much, but he’d definitely be there this time, even if he
hadn’t managed to read it, because he wouldn’t mind starting to
have some input into the decisions - as long as he was in the country,
of course.
However,
he was in Sydney when we went to call for him on the way over to
Don and Jeanne’s.
Doug
didn’t come, either, and when we got there Jeanne said it was perhaps
just as well as she’d been worried about the seating, although Trevor
and Sarah both sat on the floor anyway, to be near the crisps and
shortbread because neither of them had had time for any tea.
The
book divided the group.
Jeanne,
as she’d already implied, loved it without reservation, as did Trevor
and Sarah. Don too was very keen.
Jeanne
was full of admiration for the convincing and evocative depiction
of Victorian London and Millbank prison where much of the action
takes place, and for the brilliant portrayal of the psychology of
the protagonist Margaret, and the extreme cleverness of the plot
which most of us agreed was pretty impressive.
Trevor
said, yes, it was a cracking read. He said he’d been in the bath
when he got to the end and he was so amazed he shouted out loud
and kicked his legs up and splashed water everywhere and spilt the
beer he was drinking, and his wife came running up to see what was
going on.
Don
said he saw it as a deeply psychological novel about seduction,
and Trevor said yes, you could tell from the first page that it
was all about sex, even though it was all so Victorian and repressed,
and this gripped him from the word go.
Then
new member Madeleine (who had come back again this time) said that
she agreed with all that, but nevertheless she felt there was something
missing, as if there was another, deeper novel inside this one trying
to get out.
I
said that that was how I felt too. I said that, partly perhaps because
of all the hype over Sarah Waters, but also because of the quality
of the prose, I kept expecting, and hoping, that this was a novel
about the subconscious, or maybe inspiration or empathy, or the
transcendence of the human spirit over loss and terrible physical
conditions. And that, in contrast to Trevor, when I got to the end
I was extremely disappointed, if not very annoyed, to discover that
it was basically just a mystery story and in fact utterly depressing
and without redemption in its message about the human spirit.
Jeanne
was shocked that I didn’t find the brilliant psychology of the characters
enough and Don said, Yes, you were looking for something that wasn’t
there. I said, Well, yes, but that’s what I look for in books: some
kind of greater metaphysical breadth than I found here, and then
Don agreed that actually he did too.
Then
John spoke up for the first time and upset people again by saying
that in fact he had found the book boring: all those historical
details larded on just because it had been researched.
I
said I agreed with him but -
And
Trevor interrupted and told me I couldn’t say that because -
And
John interrupted him to point out I hadn’t said it yet, at which
we all laughed and Trevor said sorry and looked sheepish, by which
time I had forgotten what I had to say.
Then
I remembered it and said that the painstaking recording of social
detail was in fact artistically apt, because the protagonist was
consciously adopting a stance very true to the Victorians, that
of an anthropologist recording her findings in her journal - though
in fact using this as a smokescreen for her own turbulent emotions.
However, I did agree that I had found that it smacked somewhat of
a device and, that ultimately the book was a bit research-heavy,
and Don agreed.
I also said that I found the other, interspliced diary of the spiritualist
Selina to be a somewhat tricksy device, psychologically false in
fact, since no one ever writes a diary in the novelistic way in
which hers is done - ie deliberately withholding until the end the
most crucial information.
As
for Margaret’s diary, on the other hand, she is the last to realise
anything about herself - after the other characters and after the
reader - and this is brilliantly done, and everyone wholeheartedly
agreed.
Then
John read out the note Doug had sent, saying that he had found the
novel ‘mediocre at best, and as for the ending - enough said!’ and
Jeanne could hardly believe her ears.
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June
2003 - Surfacing by Margaret Atwood (1972), Virago
John
chose this book about a young woman who returns with three friends
to the remote Northern-Quebec island of her childhood to search
for her missing father. He chose it as one of his all-time favourite
and most admired novels, to the great delight of three others of
us, Don, Doug and me, who had also read it in the eighties and felt
exactly the same about it.
To the astonishment and disappointment of us four, this years-later
second reading left us feeling that the book was less great than
we had thought, and those present who were new to it - Trevor, Sarah
and Jeanne - also had great doubts about it.
We spent the meeting discussing why this change in attitude should
have occurred.
Firstly, our admiration for the prose was undiminished, and the
newcomers to the book agreed wholeheartedly that it transports you
vividly and utterly convincingly into the world of the Canadian
lakes and into the troubled mental state of the alienated nameless
narrator-protagonist. Sarah, who knows this part of Canada, said
the book captures beautifully and entirely accurately its character
and atmosphere, although the rest of us felt the portrayal had such
a ring of truth we didn’t need such real-life verification.
Don said that the main problem for him this time around was that
in spite of the vivid depiction of the protagonist’s state of mind,
he was no longer convinced by the overall psychology of the book.
He was especially dissatisfied with the portrayal of the other three
characters and their mistaken ‘alternative’ ideology: it seemed
too judgmental and far too simplistic a depiction, and those three
characters emerged merely as ciphers. I pointed out that this was
a function of the alienated psychology of the narrator, who is finding
it hard to relate to them and doesn’t even want to - ie. this is
how she sees them. Everyone, including Don, agreed that this
was true, yet we did all also agree that there wasn’t enough authorial
compensation over this not to make us feel that the book itself
colludes with the shallow depiction.
None of us who had read it previously had felt this at all the first
time round, and we concluded that then we had been entranced by
the very existence of these characters in a novel: contemporary
figures of the time in then-contemporary dilemmas, making the novel
then seem vibrantly topical and fresh.
Don also said that a lot of the dramatic tension of his first reading
was lost for the second, because this time of course he knew what
had happened to the father. This in turn shifted his attention to
the nature of the protagonist’s parents (which he hadn’t considered
the first time round). This time he felt that since the parents
were untypical, even idiosyncratic, in the way they had isolated
themselves and their family on the island, the protagonist’s dilemmas
over them failed to be universal. Not all of us agreed with this
last point. Some of us felt that the ambiguity of the parents (half
in touch with nature, half colonisers and destroyers of nature)
was a key element in the novel’s extremely universal theme of civilisation
and materialism versus nature and spirituality. However, we couldn’t
help agreeing that the parents remained shadowy, and that although
this was to a great extent the point, on a second reading (with
the truth behind the father’s disappearance pre-empted) it seemed
more of an omission that the protagonist’s pre-alienation relationship
with her parents is never greatly realised. This is an issue which
some of us felt is resolved in Atwood’s much later novel Cat’s
Eye which covers a lot of the same material.
Doug, who had read and loved the book as a fifteen-year-old intensely
interested in all things alternative and 'transcendental', was now
dismayed to find it showily over-poetic and intense and very much
a ‘young person’s novel’, and fervently wished he hadn’t read it
again and destroyed his vision of it.
As for those entirely fresh to the book:
Sarah basically found it irritating, and lost patience altogether
with both the protagonist and the novel when the protagonist descends
into her spiritual back-to-nature ‘madness’, which Sarah saw as
a ridiculous pratfall into hippy-babble.
Trevor too, was firm in his opinion that at this point the novel
gets rapidly worse. The thing that interested him about the novel
was, as usual, the sex: the complicated sexual relationships between
the four young people, which of course get very quickly abandoned
as a focus of interest for the protagonist and the author. Although
some of us protested that this was unfair (since the socio-sexual
relations are not the focus of interest of the novel) we couldn’t
help feeling that he had a point when he protested that actually,
the protagonist is dead interested in her own sexual standing
in the group, in spite of what she tells herself. Some of us felt
that this was a result of the author’s own ambivalence over this,
and that it was another clue to our new sense that the overall psychological
integrity of the novel was flawed.
Jeanne said that while in view of the current international situation
she was hardly a supporter of Americanism at the moment, she was
very troubled by the black-and-white anti-Americanism of the novel,
which seemed consistently to equate Americanisation with dehumanisation.
Doug pointed out that there are moments when the novel appears to
subvert this idea - for instance, when the ‘Americans’ fishing on
the lake turn out to be Canadians, and when the protagonist admits
her own collusion in ‘Americanisation’. However, we did all feel
that Americanisation was always presented in the book as a major
problem - the problem - and was equated fundamentally
with the protagonist’s emotional alienation and damage.
All in all, we found it extremely interesting that two readings
of the same book, in two different cultural climates and with the
space of twenty years between them, could give us such very different
reactions.
This led us onto a more general discussion about how we read books,
and about how we choose them in the first place. Trevor said he
always reads the beginning, and we all agreed, except Doug, who
interestingly said that he specifically avoids the beginning when
glancing through a book with a view to buying it, because beginnings
are so often misleading. Most of us agreed that the cover is all-important
in attracting you to a book (however much you know it's a superficiality),
but Doug again disagreed and said pithily that he's a title man
himself.
Then somehow, perhaps because of the psychology of the novel, we
got onto a discussion of Freudianism, which Trevor said he found
quite disgusting.
It was a warm evening, and still light, and the ethos of the outdoors
seemed to seep into Trevor’s sitting room. Trevor took his shoes
off. When we left he followed us out into the dusk barefoot as the
hippies in the novel, and, in spite of all our criticisms, Margaret
Atwood’s prose and the vivid world of the book went with us all
the way down the road.
This was a Monday. On the Wednesday, our usual day, Mark called
at mine and John's at lunchtime to say he'd be making the meeting
for once, and was dismayed to remember that we'd changed the day
for the sake of Madeleine (who hadn't been able to make it after
all, however), and to find that the meeting had been and gone.
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July
2003 - Arcadia
by Jim Crace (1992)
It
was a very hot evening and, aptly, we sat in Sarah's garden to discuss
this book about a countryside ideal.
Most of the men wore shorts. There was old-fashioned misty-yellow
lemonade set out on the wrought-iron table, and Neil, who is Sarah's
husband, already had a big glassful, but most people went straight
for the wine, as usual.
It was a small meeting even though Mark, unusually, had managed
to come.
Sarah introduced the book (which had been her choice), the story
of Victor, an old and lonely millionaire who decides to use his
millions before he dies to make his mark on the city which produced
him, and of the effects of his decision on others.
She said she liked the book chiefly for its descriptive prose and
its character of a morality tale or fairytale, and the way it created
a whole distinct, vivid and atmospheric world she could get lost
in, which is what she likes to do when reading a novel.
She liked too the exploration of a situation in which somebody tries
to put something back into the community from which he has benefited,
only to get it horribly wrong. She appreciated the town/country
theme: the fact that the messy market which Victor plans to improve
and elevate represents in the book a piece of countryside right
at the centre of the town, and the paradox that although Victor
thinks of himself as belonging to the country, having been brought
from there as a baby, he is thoroughly imbued with urban capitalist
ideology, and his plan to make the market into more of an Arcadian
idyll will only urbanise it. She was also very taken with the notion
in the book that the rigid forces of urbanisation can never entirely
obliterate the anarchic human spirit of places like the old market,
which will always crop up again elsewhere.
None of us disagreed with Sarah over any of this. We all liked the
thematic concerns of the book, Don in particular (and, he reported,
Jeanne, who hadn't come - conked out by the heat and finishing her
own 70,000-word novel). He said that he and Jeanne had once been
caught up in exactly this situation, trying to stop the destruction
of a vibrant old markeplace to make way for a giant Marks and Spencer,
and failing. He was quite thrilled by the mythic way the book tackled
it, a way that reminded him of Robinson Crusoe and Lord
of the Flies.
He and Jeanne were also bowled over by the powerful motif of fire
in the novel, which as Sarah had pointed out, was an archetypal
symbol and actual agent in the book of destruction leading to renewal.
However,
although everybody else acknowledged the power of the mythic form
in general, and agreed that the description and the evocation of
atmosphere in this book were impressive, we had been left feeling
lukewarm about it.
Mark said that he found the book itself cold, and several of us
agreed, and we spent the discussion trying to work out why.
John was one of those who thought it cold, but he was keen to point
out that rather than an authorial mistake, this had been deliberate
and in fact interesting strategy, which he had encountered in others
of JIm Crace's books. He said that if Crace had wanted to tug our
heartstrings about Victor, he could have started with Victor's childhood,
but he had presumably made a conscious decision to begin at the
time when Victor had turned into an irritable and self-absorbed
old man.
Mark
said that this was the problem: the characters themselves were emotionally
cold. They
didn't relate emotionally to each other.
Don said, Well, you don't expect psychological subtlety or realism
in a morality tale, but I pointed out that there is emotional
subtlety: the relationship between Victor's right-hand man Rook
and secretary Anna, for instance, is quite delicately anatomised.
There was general agreement that some of the characters - such as
the dynamic young aunt who helps looks after the child Victor and
the self-conscious architect employed for Victor's big plan - are
touchingly drawn.
Mark said, Well, they all turn their backs on each other in the
end.
Again, this didn't seem to anyone else a valid objection,
because
- as Trevor (who was away on holiday) would no doubt have said -
in a situation of rampant capitalism people do, and it's
one of the main points of the book.
I said that I thought the problem - and my big problem with the
book - was the narrative voice. The story is told in formal, indeed
old-fashioned diction, and with a somewhat neutral or disinterested
attitude to the characters and events. It is a voice which is largely
disembodied, on a first reading at any rate, since the identity
of the narrator is not immediately revealed, and after it is - he
is the 'Burgher', a columnist on a local newspaper - he quite deliberately
keeps in the background and has no apparent impulse or motive for
telling the tale. When, right at the end of the book, his involvement
is explained, it turns out to be no more than pragmatic and disinterested
(or even self-interested): he has been commissioned to write Victor's
life. These artistic choices, and the implication of refusal of
commitment in the narrator's pseudonymous status, as well as the
connotation of detached pragmatism in his byline, were no doubt
deliberate on the part of Crace, formal representations of his theme,
in which, as Don pointed out, the main character is no person but
the market itself. However, I found the effect of these narrational
stratagems defocusing and alienating.
Some people in the group objected that a detached and old-fashioned
narration was apt for a morality tale, but I countered that this
wasn't so much the universal voice of traditional tale-telling as
that of one particular fogey whom it was hard, in the reading, to
place.
Something else that troubled me about the prose was its heavy insistent
iambic rhythm, which in fact is not stylistically in character for
a journalist narrator. John said Yes, at moments it reads like Rupert
Bear, it even makes unintentional rhymes. Others differed
and thought the rhythm apt for a fairytale. I said I didn't think
that any fairytale well told ever had such an insistent and booming
rhythm drowning out potential shifts of mood and meaning, and which,
when it's suddenly broken (as it often is in the book), makes the
prose seem suddenly very clumsy. Doug said that, on the contrary,
he found that very clever.
Don conceded that there was one part of the book he found fault
with: the section which relates Victor's childhood.
He had been powerfully struck by its central situation, Victor's
failure to be weaned from his mother's breast, in service to the
market forces of begging (which as Sarah had commented, led to his
emotional and social maladjustment in adulthood). It was close to
Don's heart because once, in Eastern Europe, Don had made the mistake
of suspiciously demanding to see inside the bundle which a woman
begging from him was touting as her 'baby' (in spite of Jeanne's
protestations, for god's sake to just give her some money) - only
to find, when the woman finally reluctantly gave in and let him
peep, that there really was a two-week-old baby inside. Even so,
he found the presentation of Victor's childhood sentimental.
Neil
said he had another problem with this section, a problem of veracity.
It is clear at the end of the book that Victor has given the Burgher-narrator
only patchy information about his childhood. Therefore much of the
intimate detail of this section must be merely the (somewhat indifferent)
Burgher's speculation, and so in retrospect lacks authority as an
insight into Victor's emotional journey.
Don also found it unconvincing that a man as emotionally and socially
naive as Victor could have achieved his transformation from beggar
to millionaire (although the rest of us had found this acceptable
human inconsistency).
All in all, the book left most of us as emotionally unengaged as
Victor himself and his detached journalist narrator. If this had
been an authorial intention, most of us felt it was a mistaken one,
as it left us uncommitted to the book and largely unaffected by
it.
Maybe it was this, or maybe it was the fact that we were out in
the garden, but the discussion had kept breaking up anarchically
into simultaneous sub-discussions.
It was very clammy and clouding over, and the swifts which nest
in our attics were wheeling overhead and screaming madly. I suddenly
remembered a mistake I had found in the novel, and Sarah, a keen
birdwatcher, remembered that it had struck her forcibly too: a reference
to swifts sitting with swallows on wires at the end of summer, when
in fact swifts don't settle and leave for the south the first week
or so of August. This had made me suddenly doubt altogether the
authority of the authoritative-sounding narrative voice and the
erudite-seeming passages about plants and exotic vegetables I hadn't
heard of.
We all mused on the fact that the swifts would soon be gone,
and then suddenly there were huge drops pinging on the wrought iron,
and we all dashed inside and talked about altogether different matters,
such as our holidays.
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