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April
2005
The
Accidental Tourist
by Anne Tyler
Sarah
chose this book for its light, indeed gently satirical touch with
a potentially sombre subject, that of grief and recovery. Middle-aged
Baltimore protagonist Macon is an obsessive writer of businessmen’s
travel guides that shield the traveller from the rest of the world.
He is also trying to keep his personal tragedies at bay: the violent
death of his twelve-year-old son Ethan, and the consequent breakdown
of his marriage. Into this grim scenario steps much younger dog-trainer
Muriel on her spiky heels, to tame the dog which Ethan left behind
and which Macon can’t control, and to storm the barricades of Macon’s
heart.
This
book generated a thoughtful and evening-long discussion over a main
single point: the fact that although all of us present found the
book extremely well written and the characters and their dilemmas
vividly and poignantly observed, we all also felt that there was
something missing, some kind of ‘meat’, as Mark put it. At one extreme
Madeleine disliked the book for this reason, and at the other Doug
loved the book in spite of it, but we were all agreed on this basic
point, and we spent the evening trying to work out why it was the
case.
Trevor said he thought the problem was that the book was sentimental,
but no one else agreed with this. We felt that the book precisely
avoided sentimentality by dealing satirically with the characters:
emotionally-repressed Macon and his sister and brothers, all of
whom over-control their domestic world as a way of coping with the
enormity of past grief and abandonment; Macon’s chaotic ‘old-boy’
publisher Julian who nevertheless yearns for domestic stability
in the form of Macon’s sister; cooky, brave and managing Muriel
who yet has her own insecurities, played out in her over-protectiveness
of her puny son; and, notably and hilariously, the dog Edward in
whom the tragedy of Ethan’s death and Macon’s subsequent stress
have resulted in waywardness and aggression.
It was suggested that one key to the problem was a lack of clear
or convincing motivation on the part of the characters: one or two
people found the relationship between publisher Julian and Macon’s
spinsterish sister unlikely and unconvincing; Madeleine pointed
out that it is never made precisely clear why Macon at one point
leaves Muriel to go back to his wife. Someone said that this vacillation
on Macon’s part can be explained, in general terms, by his passivity,
but Madeleine said that in the relevant scene the precise moment
in which Macon has his change of heart is not clear, nor, more importantly,
is the moment or event which precipitates it. We examined the passage
together and found this to be so, and agreed that as a result Macon’s
change of heart seems insubstantial and arbitrary. In the same way,
the ending, Macon’s final ‘choice’ between the two women, also seems
arbitrary rather than inevitable. Sarah then said that a less arbitrary-seeming
ending would make her satisfied with the book, but the rest of us
felt that the problem was more fundamental than that.
I
wondered if it was a disjunction between style and matter.
While reading the book I had found it, like everyone else, very
moving, but as soon as I broke off and when I finally finished it,
the effect instantly faded – I was not in fact moved in any lasting
way, and I began to realise that my emotional response to the book
had been that of recognition rather than revelation. Perhaps
the reason for this was the style: gentle – possibly even cosy -
satire in which the characters are held at a certain distance. Indeed,
they are in fact types, and are ultimately seen as quaint – which
last, Trevor now said, was what he’d been getting at when he had
said the book was sentimental. The minute observation of behaviour
and manners is entrancing but fundamentally miniaturist, and indeed
at odds with the substantial length of the book, 350 pages.
John
suggested that the problem might also be one of viewpoint. While
the tone of the book is gently satirical, it eschews the traditional
satirical mode of omniscience and adheres throughout to Macon’s
point of view. Tyler’s ability to do this while to some extent implying
the viewpoints of the other characters is impressive as far as it
goes, but we felt the stratagem had its limitations: Madeleine pointed
out that the wife from whom Macon is estranged is thus seen in very
one-dimensional terms, and I had found myself frustrated by the
lack of attention paid to Muriel’s crisis over Macon’s abandonment
of her son, precisely because it is given the scant attention which
Macon allows it for himself.
Sarah now said that it was fair enough that we should be kept at
a certain distance from characters and their dilemmas if they are
viewed through a sensibility as autistic and lacking in self-knowledge
as Macon's, but Madeleine said that it’s a novelist’s responsibility
to transcend such a partial viewpoint and allow us to see further
beyond it than this novel does.
By
which time we had drunk all the wine and we were keeping Sarah up
when she had an early start at work next day, so we terminated the
discussion and the rest of us stood up to go.
Sarah said as we left that she was really glad she’d chosen this
book, since we have rarely had so sustained and thoughtful a discussion
without veering from the point.
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May
2005
Atomised by Michel Houellebecq
A
very small meeting but a pretty noisy one as we tried to get to
grips with this book of Trevor’s choosing, which caused a storm
of controversy on publication in France in 1999.
An
indictment of the materialism and individualism of late-twentieth-century
Western civilisation, the book charts its putative dissolution through
the lives of two half-brothers abandoned by their mother in infancy
for the hedonistic hippy lifestyle prompted by the sixties sexual
revolution. The two boys are brought up by different grandmothers,
and in literal and symbolic illustration of the ‘atomisation’ of
our society and the breakdown of the family, are for several years
unaware of each other’s existence, leave alone the fact that they
live nearby and eventually attend the same school. In their very
different ways the half-brothers suffer severe emotional damage.
Bruno, the elder, is a hedonist for whom the chief goal in life
is sexual fulfilment which he is however unable to attain; Michel
is a scientist with little sexual desire and without the capacity
for love. Michel, however, has enough of an intimation of the possibility
of love to envisage an alternative to our corrupt society, a vision
which fuels his genetic research and gives rise finally to a superior,
cloned species replacing mankind and capable of creating a cohesive
society with echoes of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
At the end of the book it is revealed that the whole has in fact
been narrated by a member of this cloned species, towards the end
of the twenty-first century.
There
was dispute in our group, or rather uncertainty, as to whether this
latter-day society was intended by the author as a utopia or a dystopia.
John and Doug were pretty certain that it was intended as dystopian.
John felt that the depiction of its chief architect, Hubczejak,
was ironic, revealing him as egotistic (searching, as he put
it ‘for … not just a way of seeing the world but a way of situating
myself in it’) and shortsighted (His unrelentingly positivist
reading of Djerzinski [Michel] led him constantly to underestimate
the extent of metaphysical change which would necessarily accompany
such a biological revolution), and the fundamental character
of his activities as those of a rarified PR (Whatever his failings,
he understood how to communicate to the public the idea).
I pointed to a significant discussion in the book between Bruno
and Michel about Aldous Huxley. Bruno notes that while Huxley’s
Brave New World is generally considered a dystopia, it’s
actually the world we are striving towards, with control of reproduction
and the elimination of disease, old age and unhappiness. Michel
then points out that writings by Aldous’s brother Julian indicate
that in fact Huxley wrote the book as a utopia, and that it was
only when it was taken as a ‘totalitarian nightmare’ that he affected
a different authorial intention. However, as an early founder of
the New Age centre in Atomised, (a chief acolyte of which
ends up as a Satanic murderer), Huxley is aligned with its moral
corruption or error.
If we are to take the narrator in an ironic light, then many of
the objections to the book expressed in our group begin to dissipate.
Doug and I had commented that the links between moral corruption
and cell mutation are not successfully made, but perhaps this is
the point: the new society is founded on a logical flaw, prefigured
in Michel’s moment of scientific revelation after fasting: The
impression of intellectual stimulation created by fasting is real.
Presuming we can trust the translation, a close look at this sentence
shows that it is only the impression and not the intellectual stimulation
which is real. Anne was irritated by the frequent interjections
of little scientific essays, and the dubious and sweeping parallels
drawn between human behaviour and scientific phenomena: but again,
perhaps the intention here is satirical and a comment on the narrator
and his society.
Or is this special pleading for the novel? Certainly the depiction
of the lives of Bruno and Michel seems heartfelt on the part of
the author of Atomised (and it is known that their childhood
mirrors Houellebecq’s own), and there are certain ambiguities which
make it difficult to determine the moral stance of the novel. It
could be said to be sexist: all women over forty are referred to
as hags - but then that’s usually from Bruno’s viewpoint - and all
the women end up dead, usually dying of cancer or commiting suicide
because of it, unable to bear their own physical corruptibility
- but then Michel and Bruno also self-destruct, Michel commiting
suicide too and Bruno checking into a psychiatric hospital to end
his days. On the other hand, the only altruism Michel can find in
nature is the maternal instinct, and he concludes that only women
are truly capable of love - though, as Madeleine said, that could
be taken as sexist in itself, an abdication of love on behalf of
men.
Most importantly, we felt that the very belated revelation of the
identity of the narrator made it impossible for us to judge the
book on one reading, indeed that we had been played with unfairly
by the author, tricked into reading it in quite the wrong light.
Even that though, we thought, may have been the point: that Houellebecq
is a master of literary provocation, and in the process a profound
questioner of our late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century
assumptions.
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June
2005
Frankie and Stankie by Barbara Trapido
We
gathered on an aptly hot and sticky evening to discuss this novel
about a girl’s white-middle-class South African childhood and coming
of age, set in the fifties against the tightening of apartheid and
interwoven lightly but slyly with an account of South Africa’s racial
history.
Anne
had chosen the book out of interest, understanding it to be very
different from Trapido’s other novels which she had found very readable.
In the event she had found it even more readable than the others
and had completed it in one sitting.
Having spent her own childhood abroad, she had found extremely accurate
the meticulous depiction of the tenor of colonial life, and thought
the starkly contrasted political background a considerable revelation
- with which last we all agreed. Most importantly, she felt that
the book demonstrates more clearly than any other on the subject
how oppressive regimes can be allowed to come to power and be tolerated
once they do, cleverly implicating white middle-class readers identifying
with the world of protagonist Dinah.
Madeleine strongly agreed with this last. She said that the portrayal
of Dinah’s mother brought her up short and made her think. German
and kindly and likeable and with, it is hinted, possible Jewish
ancestry, Marianne is nevertheless utterly apolitical - she knows
that where politics are concerned you should keep your head down
- and has as a young woman worked as a secretary to the Nazi German
Consul in Cape Town, without any conscience or even thought of the
implications.
Dinah gets her greater political awareness from her father, the
son of a Dutch Communist, and the book deals ironically with the
contrast between the protected middle-class world in which she is
growing up and the political situation it’s based on and of which
she is increasingly aware.
Doug,
John and I, however, had problems with the way this disjunction
was handled. The fact is that in terms of plot and event Dinah’s
comfort within this world is never seriously threatened, and while
this may be the point, Trapido’s trademark light and cultivated
irony seems too comfortable to provide any really savage critique.
In addition, while the historical background is conveyed in mini-essays
with a particularly detached irony, Dinah’s personal history is
privileged by length and a vividness which reaches the reader on
an emotional level. The emotional locus of this book - and in a
novel it’s the emotional level that counts - is the white middle-class
colonial world, and thus the book fails to be truly radical and
could even be said to collude on a structural and linguistic level
with that which it purports to critique.
I
said that as a novel the book had disappointed me in many ways -
that indeed it reads not as a novel but as an account or memoir,
lacking the selectivity or cumulative narrative arc of a novel.
While enlivened by Trapido’s characteristic style, it’s essentially
a routine and predictable plod through infancy, primary school,
secondary school, university and emergence into adulthood.
Doug and John agreed, but Madeleine said that she hadn’t been troubled
by this as she had in fact read it as a memoir - that of Barbara
Trapido - and had thus been able to inject her own shape into the
narrative as she read.
I said that we have no right to assume the book is a factual memoir
since it’s packaged and sold as a novel and uses obvious fictionalising
techniques. One of these is the use throughout of the historic present
tense - Lisa and Dinah go to High School in the same year
- which in a novel usually has the effect of creating immediacy
and allowing the reader to identify. However, both Doug and I found
that here it created a kind of glazed distance, skirting as it does
the issues raised by the other, memoir-like aspects of the book
- those of historical perspective and the contingency and particularity
of memory.
I found also that it led to occasional if not frequent uncertainties
in the narrative voice. A passage near the beginning seems firmly
established with the restricted viewpoint and language of the infant
Dinah observing her parents and absorbing their anecdotes: Dinah
who loves poking about finds that her mum periodically hoards dark
Swiss chocolate and Nescafe and Lux flakes in her drawers alongside
little bottles of 14711 cologne. The word periodically
however, with its longer historical perspective, creates a defocusing
shift of viewpoint, consolidated in the next observation which could
not have formed in the infant Dinah's mind: She does this whenever
there’s a whiff of further trouble in the world. Finally, with
the examples that follow - Korea, Suez, Cyprus - which historically,
in Dinah’s infancy, would not yet have occurred, the narration erupts
disconcertingly into a wider, more authorial historical perspective
which is indeed the mode of memoir.
We
agreed that essentially the book hovers between memoir and novel,
after which we could find no more to say, and the discussion, which
had not been very lengthy, petered out - which Madeleine said testified
perhaps to the book’s lack of novelistic depth.
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July
2005
Our Lady of the Forest by David Guterson
It’s
a sad fact for us fiction writers that fiction can’t always compete
with life, and this book of Madeleine’s choosing suffered in this
respect.
There must be few groups of ‘non-literary’ people as dedicated to
reading fiction as those in our book group, and Sarah must be one
of the most devoted to reading, but now, she says, juggling her
job as a doctor with having a baby means she has to schedule reading,
and not always successfully: she came to this meeting having only
read half the book. As for me, meant to be a literary type: since
I was busy rehearsing my one-woman show,
I ended up reading the book in a great rush at the eleventh hour,
and only finished it as Doug drove a group of us up the dual carriageway
to Madeleine’s for the meeting, trying not be diverted by the interesting
conversation Doug and John and Trevor were having around me.
It’ a month and the run of my play since then - for the first year
ever we haven’t met in August, holidays for once pushing the book
group out entirely - and I find it hard to remember our discussion.
Most of all I remember the fact that I had a raging sore throat
and my voice had gone, which was making me panic about my performance,
and that the July evening was a dull and chilly one. However, as
I write, I also remember that both of these things echoed for me
the ethos of this novel set in the autumnal decaying forest of North-American
logging country after the logging industry has collapsed, and in
which a sixteen-year-old girl mushroom-picker, feverish with allergies,
begins seeing visions of the Virgin Mary.
As far as I can remember, all of us said that we found the depiction
of some of the key characters insightful and moving: the struggles
of the young priest with his religious doubts and his sexual attraction
to the visionary, Anne; and those of ex-logger Tom, who has lost
his faith and feels he destroyed the son he can’t love for his lack
of masculine ability, paralysed for life when a tree he had been
ineptly felling crashed onto him.
However, visionary Anne’s mentality remains shrouded in mystery,
and I felt that it could be this which was underlying the dissatisfaction
which I’m afraid all of us seemed to feel with the book.
The book starts out magnificently and evocatively with Anne’s febrile
consciousness as she moves through the wood towards her first vision,
and then quickly switches to a journalistic-style narrative with
references to newspaper and witness accounts. This sets up a, to
me, very exciting dynamic: the tension between the subjective experience
of the visionary and the reaction of more objective witnesses. However,
this dynamic disappears immediately, as we never return to Anne’s
consciousness, and the concern of the book becomes exclusively that
of charting the effects on the community and other individuals.
I feel that this may also be why everyone in the group was irritated
by the intensity and length of the descriptions of the damp forest,
something for which the book has been praised - and they are indeed
striking - but which even Sarah, who normally loves description,
was irritated by: they don’t underpin any truly central emotional
struggle.
Madeleine also criticised what she saw as the tricksy punning of
the section titles, which she felt indicated a certain lack of heart,
although no one else had even noticed this.
She commented that no character in the book found redemption, although
people pointed out that Tom did find a kind of redemption of understanding
in the crisis moment near the end. Others pointed out that his subsequently
regained faith was however an ambiguous redemption: at the last,
he and the priest are both part of a sheltered elite in the new
church built on the site of the visions, while the faithful crowds
must listen to the dedication service relayed outside, soaked in
the rain that still pours through the rotting forest…
Madeleine said she felt that the book was about belief, and people
wondered if the ambiguous ending is meant to illustrate the potentially
dangerous exclusivity of belief systems, a message which after all
is truly important for our times.
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September
2005
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
There
were some vastly differing reactions to this long and complex Booker-nominated
novel. It consists of six brilliantly written and diverse yet linked
stories ranging through time and genre, from the nineteenth-century
journal of a ship’s lawyer passenger to a yarn told by the fireside
in a post-apocalyptic future – the most fundamental link being that
each story becomes a text of importance to at least one character
in the story that follows.
All of the stories, as Doug pointed out in his introduction, are
about some kind of oppression – nineteenth-century slavery, twentieth-
and twenty-first century personal and corporate manipulation and
oppression of the weak and old – leading ominously to the apocalypse
which lies at the heart of the novel both thematically and structurally.
The structure is ingenious and interesting. As Doug pointed out
in his introduction, in the first half of the novel each story is
broken off midway and interrupted by the next story in which it
usually transpires that the rest of the earlier manuscript has been
physically lost. Only the final, post-apocalyptic story exists in
its unbroken entirety at the centre of the novel, and from then
on, in the second half of the novel, as the characters begin to
fight their oppressors, the missing parts of the other stories are
found and we read them in reverse chronological order, ending up
again in the nineteenth century.
Madeleine
had disliked the book and given up on it, but others of us had found
the book hugely engaging as we had read it. However most people
wondered if it amounted to very much in the end. Some, including
me at the time, felt that it seemed a long way round to go (via
all those stories) to say something quite so fundamental and familiar
as that the abuse of power is a bad thing.
New member Jenny said that she found the connections between the
stories somewhat ‘tacked on’ – the occasional shared notion of an
atlas of clouds, the identical birth mark which all of the narrators
carry, hinting at the idea of reincarnation - and others of us agreed.
However I feel in retrospect that the meaning is based more in the
structure of the novel than we recognised in our discussion, and
that the novel is saying something subtler. As a novel about lost,
incomplete and regained stories, its message is the impotence and/or
power of story-telling behind both the will to power and the fight
to resist it. As Adam the nineteenth-century journal writer
concludes: If we believe [ie envision a narrative
in which] … leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable
& the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a
world will come to pass.
This
is not however unproblematic, I feel. As some people in the group
said, it’s ultimately a depressing book: after all, Adam’s final
statement is grimly backshadowed by the apocalypse to come, and
his hope thus a forlorn one. Or is it? This depends entirely on
how fictive we take the stories to be within the framework of the
novel. If by the end of the novel we can view all of the six stories
as mere fictions within its overarching terms, then Adam’s statement
can rise free of them into reality beyond the novel, and the stories
serve as warnings and illustrations of his point.
However, both the investment required by the reader and the engrossing
nature of the stories prime one not to see the stories in this light.
This is illustrated by a disagreement we had about the third story,
a thriller-style novel – The First Louisa Rey Mystery - featuring
a female journalist’s fight to expose corporate greed and a nuclear
cover-up. It is the only one of the six stories to be couched in
the style of an unashamed fiction, the other stories consisting
in turn of a journal, letters, a memoir which will later be turned
into a film, a digitally recorded interview accompanied by a hologram
and a reported confessional oral tale. The first story, the journal,
turns up in the second as a broken book propping up a bed, and the
second story, the letters, turns up in this thriller 'novel' which
in turn will be published by the publisher-narrator of the next.
It was at this point that the fictive nature of the stories became
problematic for me.
If the Lousia Rey story is ‘only a novel’, then it follows that
the earlier stories within it are also to be taken as merely ‘fictional’,
and while this serves the function of freeing Adam’s final statement
in the way described above, one’s investment in the characters and
their mystical links is squandered. Significantly, in his introduction
Doug referred to this third section as a novelisation of ‘real’
events, and he and others were resistant to my insistence that although
I had fervently wished this to be the case, I had looked for clues
to prove it but had so far found none – indeed, the author of the
‘novel’ turns out to be not the real-life Louisa Rey, as I had been
hoping, but a corpulent middle-aged man.
Some
complained that the characters were one-dimensional, even Sarah
who perhaps enjoyed the book most, though she didn’t really mind
that: she felt that it was enough to have such exciting narratives.
A quibble of mine was linked to this: structured around self-conscious
recordings and voices, the novel has something of the quality of
drama and lacks the interiority for which I mainly value novels
and the psychological resonance it gives to any stated moral or
theme. And while the modes allow for such obvious summings-up as
Adam’s, several people felt that the moral of the book was thus
pasted on in an unsubtle way.
We all agreed that Mitchell had a wonderful mastery of voices, and
Sarah and I were enthralled by the language of the two sections
set in the future, an Orwellian development of our own euphemisation
and use of brand names as generic nouns in an increasingly corporate
world, followed by the debased yet poetically inventive lingo of
the post-apocalyptic world in which knowledge is lost. Others weren’t
so enthralled by this. They found it hard to negotiate, slowing
down the reading at a point in the novel when you expected to be
on a roll. I admitted that one thing that had disappointed me was
that while the second language seemed very much a debasement of
the first, we finally learn that the first is an entirely foreign
language to speakers of the second (so that the message of the digital
recording is lost to them). This seems like an inconsistency and
spoiled my previous enjoyment of the striking linguistic connections.
After
which, we ran out of things to say about the book, which people
felt was very strange for such an immense and complex and apparently
important novel.
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