June 2004
The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills

We met at Martin’s to discuss this quirky novel about a group of three fence-builders who travel from Scotland to England to work and are increasingly overtaken by surreal and sinister events.
It was Martin who had chosen the book – because, he said, having read it twice previously and thoroughly enjoyed it each time, he was nonetheless still stumped as to what it was supposed to be about. Now that he had read and enjoyed it a third time, he had come to the conclusion that it was intended as absurdist and was more able to accept its ambiguities.
Everyone else agreed that the book was an immensely enjoyable read. We found the portrayal of the workers, their work and their attitudes to their job and their employers – uncomprehending yet wily, shamed and resentful yet shameless and lackadaisical, and often full of suppressed violence – beautifully observed: laugh-out-loud funny and often touching. We all agreed that the prose, while apparently simple, was almost magically resonant.
Many of us were unconvinced, however, that the book worked as absurdist literature. It’s true that there is a tragi-comic absurdity about the gang and their alienation from the purpose of their work. The whole story, too, is shrouded in moral ambiguity: it’s never quite clear whether the workers are victims or exploiters, and when people are killed on the work site, it’s debatable how far the deaths are accidental. Yet the ending, while it too seems ambiguous, seemed to some of the group an attempt to provide a moral gloss. For me it was an aspect of the mode of narration which cut across the absurdist elements: the spell-like repetition of events told with incantatory repetitive wording are the tricks of fairytale, with its distinct black-and-white moral framework.
The social and psychological realism with which the characters were observed also seemed to indicate realist rather than absurdist authorial concerns.
Apart from Sarah, we were agreed too that there was an unsatisfying disjunction between this realism and the surreal and fairytale elements. While the men and their work are described in minute and specific social and psychological detail, there is none of the character development one might consequently expect, and as in a fairy story the deaths that occur have no psychological effects on them, or indeed any social consequences. The very surreal ending, when it becomes clear that the three men are unwittingly building a sinister death-camp-type trap for themselves, felt to some people tacked on.
Only Sarah didn’t mind that it was hard to work out the precise symbolism of the fences and the obsession of the men’s employer with the unnecessary straightness of each fence they build.
Don said the book was about authority and hierarchies. John similarly wondered it if was about colonisation, as invested in the Scottish-English tensions in the plot and between the characters. I thought it might also to some extent be about the nature of reality – the way the deaths are covered up and then ignored, the way characters swear by clearly dubious ‘truths’: the idea that truth and reality are not as straight as the men’s employer would like it to be.
Trevor then seemed to draw all these notions together by saying that, as a manual worker and service provider himself, he felt that the book was more mundanely but satisfyingly about the slippery morals operating in this kind of work, and those of a society based on it. He viewed the men killed accidentally-on-purpose in the book as extreme symbols of the way that in life botched jobs are so frequently covered up and clients made to pay for them.
He then told us about some real-life cover-ups he’d witnessed. We’d also had a long digression about absurdist literature, and Jeanne said with some irony that we had in fact spent more time discussing other things than the book itself, which illustrated how thin it was. Mark said he couldn’t believe that we’d spent as much time discussing the book as we had, and that he doubted that the author had spent as much time as we had thinking about its meaning.
We all got quite animated, and the door of the room, inadvertently left open by someone returning from the lavatory, was quietly closed, and we realised we’d got too loud, with the real-life social consequence that we’d woken Martin’s small children who had to go to school next day.

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Anne suggested this book. As a textile conservator, she listens to a lot of novels on audiotape while she works, and has found that traditional narratives lend themselves far better to this medium than modern novels with non-linear structure and scant use of plot. Consequently, she had worked her way through all of Trollope’s Barchester novels except this one, another satire on the institutions of mid-nineteenth century English society - the Church of England, the Press and Parliament - and also, in particular, on the destructive potential of over-zealous reformers. It is the tale of a mild clergyman who becomes unwittingly embroiled in a public controversy over his wardenship of an almshouse for old men.
At our meeting in Anne’s flat she introduced the book and said that although - interestingly - she had found Trollope's prose tedious to read rather than listen to, she had nevertheless very much enjoyed the portrayal in this book of the life of the almshouse and of small-town clerical society.
Of the rest of us, who were generally unfamiliar with Trollope, most had similarly mixed reactions though were less positive than Anne towards the book, the exception being Martin who had found he liked it very much. Most found Trollope’s prolixity immensely tedious, the sections of satirical mock-heroic coming in for strong criticism (and many saying they’d skipped them), these sections recalling the much earlier Pope and Dryden and thus giving the book a particularly dated feel for a mid-nineteenth-century novel.
Don objected to Trollope’s narratorial intrusiveness and tendency to ‘tell rather than show’ and failure to allow the characters to breathe for themselves. Some of us felt that this technique was acceptable in a broad and even savage satire, as much of this book is, and others thought Don’s criticism applied inappropriate modernist and psychological standards to a novel written in a pre-Freudian context. Don insisted however that many nineteenth-century novels manage deep psychological insight.
Some pointed out that there was psychological exploration of the Warden in his dilemma, and we came round to the conclusion that the book foundered on a conflicting mixture of modes. Jeanne noted that the love situation between the Warden’s daughter and his reforming persecutor remained unaddressed in psychological and moral terms, and that a pivotal narrative opportunity was thus wasted by the author.
I said that the examination of the Warden’s moral crisis had however finally won me over and indeed moved me to tears, at which Don protested that the Warden had had no such thing as a moral crisis but was merely worried about his reputation, and for the first time that evening our discussion, which had been as genteelly suppressed as the world satirised in the novel, exploded into a proper argument, with everyone else against Don on this point.
After which, we talked of other things and ate the particularly tasty nibbles and dips which Anne had laid on.

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August 2004
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

We met at Trevor’s to discuss this book of his choosing, the famous and once infamous 1959 novel about the obsession of adult Humbert Humbert for twelve-year-old Dolores Haze (Lolita), his subsequent possession of her and ultimate loss.

Introducing the book, Trevor said that he had found it even more brilliant than he had remembered. Part of the brilliance, he said, was that the author avoided making this basically tawdry tale titillating, and that this was down to the integrity of Nabokov’s superb prose and especially to his humour - the fact that in every scene Humbert’s lustful obsession was distanced for the reader by being made funny. The rest of us agreed that there is savage humour throughout, and in particular we relished Nabokov’s inventive and ironic verbal punning, but we could not view the book as exactly funny. Jeanne and I had found the book, on the contrary, almost unbearably sad.

Our sadness was not just for Lolita but also, and indeed in particular, for Humbert. This last surprised me. Like Sarah I had first read the book as a teenager, and like Sarah I had come away then with a sense of Lolita’s surprising power over Humbert, but (while knowing that reading Nabokov then had strongly influenced my own writing) I expected now to have a different view and to see Lolita’s ‘power’ as an aspect of narratorial or authorial sexism - Humbert or Nabokov excusing the adult male seducer via the patriarchal stereotype of the wily woman-child. I discovered however on this years-later current reading that the portrayal of the relationship is far too subtle and complex for such easy feminist objections, and that both this and the earlier reading Sarah and I had given it were far too simplistic: the terrible poignancy of both Humbert and Lolita is their duality.

Trevor did assert that Humbert is simply a monstrous sexual predator, but the rest of us had to strongly disagree: rather, we said, Humbert is caught not only on lustful obsession but also in a romantic love which idealises the love-object (Humbert’s ideal being a tragic combination of the innocent and the corrupt) and is thus inevitably doomed. I had expected this time round to find Humbert a self-deluding unreliable narrator, especially since, as John pointed out, his initial intention in writing his ‘memoir’ is to prepare a case for the court at his trial for murder. But this intention dissipates, and right from the beginning Humbert is painfully and explicitly aware of his own evil and indeed of both his own and Lolita’s duality. It is Humbert who finally and consciously reveals that Lolita sobs every night in the bleak No-Man’s Land of the motels they frequent on the run together; it is Humbert who suddenly openly admits: You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go. It is himself - the dirty old man in himself - he is trying to kill when he shoots the man who, it turns out, seduced and corrupted Lolita before Humbert ever got to her (and who with terrible black comedy just won’t die) - a man who, in this book full of images of repetition and mirrors, mirrors Humbert in looks and obsessive literary habits.

All three significant female characters in this book end up dying - Humbert’s first childhood sweetheart (thus arresting herself in her own pubertal image and trapping him in eternal pursuit of it), Lolita’s mother, whom he marries to get access to Lolita (most conveniently run over the moment she rumbles him), and Lolita herself (dying in childbirth once she has outgrown her usefulness as a ‘nymphet’). I was ready to see this as traditional sexist revenge on women on the part of the author, but I could not: as Don said, in the context of Humbert's psychology there seemed something right about their deaths, however contrived - an emotionally logical consequence of Humbert’s self-styled ‘satanic’ obsession, the deadly linkage in his mind of innocence and love with corruption and lust.

Though published in 1959, this novel, as Trevor said, is astonishingly modern in tone, atmosphere and subject-matter. What we found most achingly sad of all about its portrayal of arrested and damaging sexual obsession was that it touched a deep pulse in contemporary society, a pulse which we felt is throbbing right at the centre of our modern Cult of Youth.

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September 2004
Under the Skin by Michel Faber

We went to Don’s to discuss this book, chosen by him, about a mysterious woman who drives the roads of the Scottish Highlands picking up lone male hitch-hikers for a sinister purpose.
Don said he was blown away by the book, and Jeanne concurred: having previously disliked it, on this second reading she had been enthralled.
Don kicked off the discussion by noting that some critics had commented that the book was difficult to pin down with regard to genre. His own feeling was that while the book does indeed break the confines of the science fiction genre it borrows, this doesn’t matter: the mode the author sets up is carried through rigidly and entirely logically and the result is a profoundly moral book.
I agreed that it’s perfectly possible for a book to leap the boundaries of genre and indeed play with them, but I didn’t agree that the terms this book sets up are unproblematic.
It’s hard to report our discussion of this book without giving away the mystery at the heart of the narrative and thus spoiling its main point for any new reader, and this is linked to my problems with the book’s terms.
The book is located essentially in the viewpoint of the woman driver, Isserley, and begins in this way, but it very quickly becomes clear to the reader that there is much about her that is distinctly strange and that the truth about her is being withheld from us authorially. This seemed to me, as I read the beginning, merely tricksy, and I felt that my attention was being played with on a non-serious level and squandered.
Don said that this wasn’t just tricksiness: withholding the truth about Isserley while giving us her viewpoint was essential strategy in the author’s aim of making us identify with a person we would otherwise have seen as Other. John compared it to the authorial strategy of Lolita (discussed last time): there too, he said, you are forced to identify with a basically unpleasant character.
I said, But it works in Lolita because we are given intimate insight into Humbert’s psychology, whereas here, for a good section of this novel, we are denied even the basic facts about Isserley - and not only that, we are forced to be aware that facts are being deliberately withheld from us (or rather only gradually revealed to us), indeed titillated with this, which militates against total identification.
Indeed, it’s clear by the end of the first chapter that we have been initially deliberately misled about the nature of Isserley’s motives towards the hikers, and once I had adjusted I felt that I must have missed essential clues and had to read the first chapter a second time in order to see things in their new light before I could go on. This deepened my sense that the book was not making an honest contract with the reader and, in spite of my interest in the mystery surrounding Isserley, left me unengaged on that level where your deep emotional attention is committed to a book.
The book is clearly allegorical, but most usually in an allegory the terms of the alternative world portrayed are made clear in order to focus attention on the moral order of the real world being allegorised. The thrust of a good proportion of this novel, however, and the consequent focus of the reader’s attention, is the unravelling of the mystery of the nature of the alternative world being presented - the puzzle of who Isserley is, the society she comes from and the sinister industry of which she is the outrider. Narrative tension is created by only gradual revelations - which Jeanne said she thoroughly enjoyed - and many of the narrative choices and much of the diction are thus geared to put us off the track about the nature of this world. Although I pride myself on being an attentive reader, I was so put off track (and fundamentally unengaged) that I missed the crucial clue indicating that Isserley and her kind are indeed aliens in a very traditional science-fiction sense, and was much taxed trying to work out inconsistencies which dissolve once this is understood!
Inconsistencies remain for me, though, and they are an aspect of the genre uncertainty. The contemporary (Scottish) world in which the novel is set is presented for the most part in scrupulously naturalistic terms, a common technique in science fiction about aliens: the hitch-hikers speak and think in specific contemporary registers, revealing lives grounded in the accurately contemporary. But this then raises the question of the conviction of masses of lone hitch-hikers being whisked off the face of the earth, as happens in the book, in a rural environment without anyone noticing, leave alone a huge national scandal occurring.
Trevor and Don said, But it’s a fantasy!
There is indeed much in the novel fantastic enough to have caused me to take it mistakenly as an allegory of the same kind as Animal Farm or Gulliver’s Travels (and thus to miss the science-fiction tropes). But the naturalistic treatment of Scotland and the hitch-hikers doesn’t seem to me to bear the eruption within it of the non-realist (the unremarked nature of the hitch-hikers' mass disappearance), which seems then simply unrealistic. It’s no accident that allegories are traditionally set in worlds unequivocally removed from our own: the strangeness not only gives us detached insight into our own world but solves the problem of conviction.
Sarah, arriving late because she hadn’t been able to get her new baby off to bed, said she thought of the book as a fairy story (and that she’d thought it great). It’s true that the traditional fairy story negotiates a border between quotidian society and Other Beings (traditionally fairies) (and thus between our social and subconscious selves), and that the now traditional science-fiction aliens story is an extension of it. But since the book breaks the boundaries of that genre, I felt that labelling it in this way didn’t get it off my hook.
I also said that I found that the thematic focus of the book - the question of how we regard and treat other species - was somewhat narrow, or rather was made somehow narrow by the book.
Don and others protested strongly that its thematic scope was much wider than that - there was the wider issue of environmental plunder as evidenced in the ruination of the world of Isserley and her kind.
However, I felt that the book did not successfully sustain this as a theme. One can perceive on an intellectual level that Isserley’s hostile and ruined home world serves as a warning to ours and indeed Isserley notes the pollution on the Scottish beach. But the message is weakened emotionally by Isserley’s overriding attitude to our world as pure and beautiful in contrast to her own. Again, one can intellectually extrapolate and conclude that this purity is indeed what is threatened, but in a novel it’s the emotional impact which counts and, as Don had pointed out earlier, the descriptions of our world, seen through Isserley’s eyes as pure, are the most emotively convincing in the book.
Few in the group agreed that this detracted from the environmental message. Don said he also saw links with Nazism, and others mentioned the present-day treatment of Iraqi prisoners. I did concede that, prior to the meeting, John and I had noted the similarities of this book with Magnus Mills’ The Restraint of Beasts (discussed in June 2004), and also that we had all made a link between that book and the Nazi death camps.
I did agree, too, that Under the Skin is based on a wonderfully striking idea which kept me reading in spite of my dissatisfactions, and that it was written in brilliantly spare yet descriptive prose. And, though not as bowled over as Don was by Isserley’s emotional disintegration as she comes to understand the moral reality of her activities, or the class issue between Isserley and her kind, I did find these moral struggles engaging.
Doug, on the other hand, said that while he had very much enjoyed the start of the book, he had soon become bored with it. In particular he found the scenes in which Isserley picks up hitch-hikers tediously repetitive, and Trevor agreed.
And then it was time to go, and as we stepped out of Don and Jeanne’s house it started raining very suddenly and hard, and the three of us who had decided to walk struggled back through sheets of flying water which really did seem to indicate the ominous changing for the worse of our world.

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October 2004
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
by Mark Haddon

Doug said he chose this best-selling winner of last year’s Whitbread Award partly because he thought it would cause a lively discussion in a group with a member (Mark) who feels so strongly that most hyped novels, and many winners of literary prizes, are anything but great literature.
In fact, Mark wasn’t present for the major part of the discussion, as he was putting his children to bed.
Doug briefly described the book: a ‘cross-over’ novel for adults and children, the first-person narration of Christopher, a fifteen-year-old boy with Asperger’s Syndrome and the story of his self-appointed task of unravelling the mystery of the murder of a neighbour’s dog.
Doug said he had found the book thoroughly enjoyable and everyone agreed: we had all been entirely engaged by it and most of us had consumed it in one sitting. We had found it touching and funny, and on the whole thought it rang very true, including those who had professional knowledge of the syndrome, Sarah as a doctor and John as a child psychologist.
Doug said that there were however one or two moments that didn’t ring quite true for him: there is an episode, for instance, when Christopher is embarking on a (for him, very frightening) train journey, and the police, alerted by his father, mistakenly allow him to give them the slip (which he does more or less inadvertently). The rest of us agreed that this seemed a little unbelievable and therefore narratorially manipulative. Other moments, however, such as those revealing Christopher’s relationship with his teacher Siobhan seemed utterly true and both funny and moving.
Some people commented that it was great that the book has done so much to draw public attention and understanding to Asperger’s Syndrome, though both John and Sarah pointed out that there is a danger of the book and other works such as the film The Rain Man sentimentalising the condition by concentrating on those individuals who, unlike the majority of people diagnosed as Asperger’s, have a specific genius talent (in both of these cases for mathematics).
Doubt was then expressed about the believability of a special school being able to lay on the A-level Maths teaching which Christopher has clearly had.
Doug’s main criticism was that, because the novel was located within the viewpoint of a narrator to whom the emotions of others are much of a mystery, we are denied insight into the motives behind the actions of Christopher’s parents which - in his father’s case especially - seem on the surface outside the bounds of normality.
However, both John and I thought that giving us this insight would have been technically/artistically possible: Christopher is, after all, a classic unreliable narrator; the author leads us to understand things Christopher doesn’t - this is how, in a book with a narrator with a self-confessed lack of sense of humour, much of the humour arises. The parents’ psychology could have been revealed by developing a technique already used in the book, the discovery by Christopher of letters written by his mother.
There was generally too much agreement for the lively debate Doug had hoped for, and we couldn’t find much more to say about the novel itself.
I reported that I'd recently met a couple in a neighbouring reading group, and that they had told me that the women in their group hadn’t like this book nearly as much the men had, and the man had said quite cheerfully that he thought this was because men, on the whole, were more Aspergic in personality than women.
Everyone laughed, but Sarah said wickedly that she agreed: men are obsessive and more emotionally cut off than women and more interested in numbers and facts than human relations.
None of the men rose to her bait, Don saying that they were all far too much in touch with their feminine sides to do so.
Mark, who had arrived by then, said that doctors were rather Aspergic, but Sarah refused to rise to the bait in turn and agreed: how could doctors do their jobs without being obsessive and cutting off emotionally for a lot of the time?!
I then happened to say that it bugged me that I still didn’t get one of the mathematical puzzles Christopher presents in the book, and John told me not to be so Aspergically obsessive. Then Doug’s wife Helen came through from working on her statistical reports in the next room and said that she had read the book too, and loved it because she totally identified with Christopher, which made everyone laugh again, but whether such an act of empathy makes her Aspergic is of course a moot point…
After which Mark finally got the chance to address his continuing area of concern and wanted to know how on earth such a tiny if competent and enjoyable book could have won a major literary award over everything else in the field that year.
John said, Well, how can we expect every book that wins an award to be great: how can we expect more than two or three great books every decade?
Anne said she felt it didn’t matter if less than great books are lauded or popular, because it’s time that weeds out the bad from the good. And in illustration she told us that the major art gallery for which she works had conducted a study of their past projects to discover which of them had had lasting impact, specifically comparing those that were popular (and geared to the ‘market’) with those of which they had been most artistically proud. It had turned out that those with lasting impact were those of which they were most proud.

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