This is a sucky love story with a lot of coochycoo cutesy dialogue between much put-upon Margaret and intense-but-unreliable Colin (yeah, I know I lefThis is a sucky love story with a lot of coochycoo cutesy dialogue between much put-upon Margaret and intense-but-unreliable Colin (yeah, I know I left you for nine months without a word and I’m back with absolutely no explanation but I’m back and that’s what counts, why the long face?). I quickly realised this first I’m-betting-very-autobiographical novel by AL Kennedy was not my cup of tea but heck, it’s in 1001 Books You Must Read By the End of Next Year, Our Enforcement Teams will be in Your Area Shortly so I thought some people think this is pretty good, maybe this nasty mawkish father-daughter relationship will end soon (it does, he dies) and we’ll get on to something more interesting (we don’t, after daddy comes Colin).
There is a most nauseating scene which features both daddy and Colin. Yes, daddy is long dead, but that doesn’t stop our sentimental sunbeam Margaret. So Colin has just proposed marriage, which for him was like pulling teeth –
"I won’t change for you. I’ll change because time passes and I’ll change for us, or even because of you, but never for you. … I’ll wear what I wear and do the things I do. … I’m marrying you for you. Because I like you."
truly, it’s enough to sweep any girl off her feet – anyway Margaret reacts curiously :
She turned her head to one side then tilted it up, “Daddy? Daddy, this is Colin. It would be very nice if you liked him because I do. We would like him to be my husband.”
Daddy does not materialise from beyond the grave to give his ghostly blessing but Colin squeezes her hand very tightly and they both cry buckets. A few pages later Margaret says
"Oh God, I do love you, Colin, you’re beautiful. You are beautiful. I want you take you home with me. I want to eat you up. All of you. Darling, I do love you.”
To which he replies
"Eat me up then. Eat me up."
What, kidneys, liver, spleen, everything? No wait, I’m taking it too literally. This is lurve-talk. Which I think is best kept private, and not faithfully transcribed into your first novel.
In order to convince readers that this is not just a sucky lurve story, A L Kennedy shoehorns a gruesome scene of violence in towards the end, and poor Colin ends up in the hospital with big bandages. But don’t fret, droopy Margaret is there to coo and weep over his manly damage -
"Darling. Ssshhh. I love you as much as I want to now, and you can’t stop me. You know that? You can’t do a thing about it.”
Well, when she’s out of the room I guess he could drag his maimed body over to the window and hurl himself out. That would be my suggestion....more
My name is Martin Lynch-Gibbon. I am a 41 year old hoity toity wine dealer living in London with my wife, a devastatingly elegant old thing called AntMy name is Martin Lynch-Gibbon. I am a 41 year old hoity toity wine dealer living in London with my wife, a devastatingly elegant old thing called Antonia who is old enough to be my mother. Well, she’s five years older than I am. That’s really old you know. But she keeps ladling on the mascara and she still looks not too bad if the light is not too harsh. I am madly in love with her. Now, I also have a girlfriend only because this is the late 50s or some such time I call her my mistress, isn’t that just too too amusing, I know. She is 26 year old Georgie, who is some kind of lecturer, I don’t know what subject, I never asked. I stashed her away in a flat and I go round and give her a good seeing to whenever I feel like it. I always bring along a frisky bottle of Prun Gaacher Himmelreich.
Two days later
Damn, I found out that my wife Antonia is having a deeply passionate affair with her psychiatrist Palmer. She says she has been madly in love with him for a year. How very dare she! Only I am allowed to adulterate, because I am a man, and a wine dealer. And now she has had the temerity to ask me for a divorce! This has put the cat among the pigeons, as now Georgie when she hears about it will want me to marry her. They always do, you know. Well, she is madly in love with me. And quite honestly, she is a pretty good shag, but as a wife for actual me I think not. Sorry Georgie. Anyway I am still madly in love with my wife.
Two days later
Damn! Antonia and Palmer have found out about Georgie! Now I can’t sneer at them like I want to. In fact they are sneering at me! It’s unbearable. I have drunk three bottles of a fairly presentable whisky to help me think it through.
Two days later
Damn! It was the eerie demonic Honor Klein, who is Palmer’s half-sister and an anthropology professor, that stitched me up. So I bashed her face in. Well, anybody would. Okay I was a bit drunk.
Two days later
Damn! I finally realised I am madly in love with Honor Klein! That’s awkward, because I bashed her face in. Oh well, I’m a man and we are very passionate, so I’m quite sure she will forgive me. They always do.
Two days later
Damn! I followed the eerie demonic Honor Klein to Cambridge and broke into her house and blow me down, I found her in bed with her half brother Palmer! What a turn up for the books! I didn’t know where to put my face.
Two days later
I am a very honorable man, as you’ve realised, so I didn’t mention the scandalous scene to Antonia. Anyway, the good news is that my gorgeous spindly wife doesn’t love Palmer any more and she has come crawling back to me. So now I have her back, still got Georgie stashed somewhere, I forgot the address but I’ll remember it soon, and I’ll shag that eerie demonic Honor Klein soon, I know I will. I am a very insightful person.
Two days later
Damn! My brother who always likes to steal my girlfriends came waltzing round with Georgie and they brazenly said they were going to get married because they’re madly in love. This is intolerable. It calls for a drink. Two bottles of a positively cheeky Chateau de Boursault will restore my equilibrium.
Two days later
Damn! I realised I’m actually madly in love with myself. This is awkward. I need a drink.
Two days later
Damn! My brother, my girlfriend, my wife, her lover and his half sister have all sailed to the Caribbean where they are now madly in love with each other. What a bizarre twisted story this has been. Anyone would think I made it all up....more
This is a family saga. There’s this guy, he gets married, she's really fat, anyway she dies, it’s kind of sad. Or more like I knew I was supposed to fThis is a family saga. There’s this guy, he gets married, she's really fat, anyway she dies, it’s kind of sad. Or more like I knew I was supposed to feel sad. Their kid is what the book is about. Anyway she gets adopted and grows up and some other people die and get married, this and that. She gets married too and wouldn’t you know, he dies. It’s kind of funny, no really, it was. But really he was a jerk so she was better off. Then she married her father – hah, not really. It was a Woody Allen type situation. Nowadays I’m sure somebody from child services would have been involved but back then you could pretty much marry anybody. Look at Jerry Lee Lewis. Anyway her and Woody have some kids, everybody grows up and some people die. One of her friends shags a lot of guys, I remember that bit. 54. People get divorced quite a lot. She writes about flowers for a local rag, this goes on for years, and when she gets let go she is like to want to shoot the head off the editor. But she doesn’t, that was kind of disappointing. Not that I am a proponent of gun violence. I am not. But this story could of done with a plane crash or a family massacre to keep up the interest. Or somebody doing something. I know you might be thinking well instead of reading The Stone Diaries you should of been spending your time watching Tokyo Gore Police or House of 1000 Corpses. Well, I guess you may have a point at that.
4 stars rounded down to three because the last 3 sections sucked like a brand new vacuum cleaner
Victorian novels were so freaking long because the authors had absolutely no distractions! They had no Candy Crush, no cute Instagram cat videos, no iVictorian novels were so freaking long because the authors had absolutely no distractions! They had no Candy Crush, no cute Instagram cat videos, no ice bucket challenges, no Pokemon, they weren’t on whatsapp, didn’t have to figure out whether the dress was blue or white, never played Wordle or Minecraft, didn’t know what a sim was, oh, and there was no porn. Well, there was porn, but not as we know it. And no Tinder! The publisher’s reader who first read Barchester Towers complained it was far too long and should be cut down from three to two volumes.
I AGREE!
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THIS NOVEL WAS A BIG HIT
In 1855 Trollope earned less than £10 from his writing (=£1200 in modern money); by 1860 he was getting £3000 per novel (=£255,000).
THE EXCRUCIATINGLY POLITE CIVIL WAR
This novel is about two things modern readers will not care two hoots about : 19th century church politics, and whether the rich young widow will marry a nice clergyman or not. In the first case, readers are expected to know the difference between an archdeacon, a dean, a precentor, a canon, a chaplain and a bishop and why a chaplain could offend the entire town of Barchester by preaching a sermon. There are heavy duty paragraphs all about church etiquette. There was a very mild civil war going on at the time between High Church types and Low Church types. It’s all very rarefied. It is like watching some gentle pushing and shoving between butterfly collectors about whether a new species has been discovered in Uruguay or not. Some readers are going to be eye rolling.
VAMPIRES, LEECHES AND DRONES
The first Barchester novel (The Warden - better than this one) is all about a nice old clergyman who has a sinecure which is a job where you collect a FAT PAYCHECK (or “annual stipend” trala) in return for doing SWEET F.A. The church in the 19th century was, it seems, stuffed full of these non-jobs. In The Warden an annoying young person pointed out loudly and uncouthly that this harmless old fart was collecting a shedload of banknotes every year as the warden of a charity for broke down old men, and the broke down old men were getting ALMOST NOTHING. When this grotesque anomaly was brought to the attention of the harmless old man he resigned out of sheer embarrassment.
He is back in this second Barchester novel being offered not one but two wonderful jobs where he wouldn’t have to do hardly anything. Man, this must be a very sweet old guy. Why do the church authorities want to shower him with unearned income in this way? He turns the first down because it would now involve preaching a sermon every day. Oh no! Too much! What do you take me for, a beast of burden??
So the plot of BT is all about whether this guy or another guy will be appointed to this job or that job, and every job mentioned is carefully labelled with a salary (plus free house and land, naturellement). I myself would label these sinecure holders as vampires and drones and leeches but in Barsetshire they are considered as sweet deserving Godly types who you should never say boo to. There is even a guy who is a canon, which is pretty high up, who hasn’t been seen in England, never mind Barsetshire, for years, because he took himself and his family off to the shores of Lake Como in Italy, because why wouldn’t you. The old bishop just didn’t notice this. When the new bishop requires his attendance at the cathedral to perform his light duties he huffs and puffs his family back to England cursing his fate – why me, o Lord?
You might be thinking that Trollope’s book’s main point is to savagely satirise such nasty goings-on, but it isn’t. That’s all just background radiation to the “small ecclesiastical maneuvers” (in Trollope’s phrase) and the more than somewhat standard romantic shuffling about of the main quincunx of characters.
THE BEST CHARACTER IN THE BOOK
Was not the disabled man-eating Signora Neroni
“You don’t know the intriguing villainy of that woman,” said Mrs Proudie “But you say she has only got one leg!” “She is as full of mischief as though she had ten.”
but the author himself who keeps breaking the fourth wall and chatting casually to the reader, as they used to in those days. Trollope cheerfully points out all this is fiction, he gives spoilers for his own novel because he doesn’t think there should be “secrets” between author and reader, and at one point he says well, this minor character has a very interesting story but I couldn’t include it because Mr Longman wouldn’t let me write a fourth volume!
LaHaye and Jenkins, the Simon and Garfunkel of the Apocalypse, one tall and blond (he did the typing) and the other short and dark (he had the ideas).LaHaye and Jenkins, the Simon and Garfunkel of the Apocalypse, one tall and blond (he did the typing) and the other short and dark (he had the ideas). In the photo on the back they are grinning like maniacs. They are happy.
A REVIEW FOR THOSE WHO HAVE NO INTENTION OF EVER READING THIS
We begin in Israel where a scientist has invented a New Formula which makes the desert bloom. This means Israel becomes the richest nation on earth – the formula earns them far more than their “oil-rich neighbours”. I expect this is from tomato and cucumber exports, it is not spelled out. Now, the Israelis don’t let anyone know their Secret Formula and this leads Russia to send a bomber fleet to “annihilate” Israel. In the world of Left Behind there is no such thing as international diplomacy. It turns out that Russia is in a secret alliance with Ethiopia and Libya. So this vast fleet of bombers appears in the Israeli skies one night without any advance warning (there is no radar or US led intelligence in the Left Behind world either). But miraculously all the airplanes kind of explode in the air and disintegrate, and not a single person in Israel is harmed.
So that was the first thing. The next thing was that a few weeks later millions of people disappeared in the blink of an eye, leaving their clothes and wedding rings behind. Oh, all children and babies in the womb also disappear. There’s a later conversation about how mean God is to deprive abortion clinics of their livelihood just like that. But of course that’s not the main problem – when all these people disappear there are thousands of hideous car pile-ups, plane crashes and houses burn down.
The story follows two guys throughout this mayhem – Captain Rayford Steele, pilot of 747s, tall, bulgingly shouldered, with a terrible guilty conscience. (His crime was that he thought about having an affair, but he didn’t actually have one. But he thought about it.) The other guy is crack reporter Buck Williams of the Global Weekly.
So it’s the Rapture – you knew that. God has gathered up to heaven all the True Christians. I will come to the theological implications of that in a moment but first we must follow Rayford and Buck through many pages where they try to phone people but can’t because the lines are jammed. They can’t get a cellphone connection, they queue for hours for a payphone, this goes on for page after page. And I think the Rapture would be just like that – people frantically trying to find out which loved ones have been raptured – but man it makes for some dull reading. “Buck hung up and dialed his father. The line was busy.” You don’t say so.
I was interested in the craziness that would happen if millions of people were raptured but I was disappointed, our authors aren’t bothered about the huge human drama of it all, they are wanting to get on to the Big Picture – after the Rapture will come The Rise of the Antichrist.
This whole plotline sinks the second half of the book which up to then was kind of goofy but also sort of entertaining too. But now we get really dull stuff about a Romanian politician called Nicolae Carpathia and how he becomes Romanian president and then ludicrously becomes General Secretary of the United Nations. Hilariously, he has a shopping list of demands before he will accept the job :
1) UN HQ to move to Babylon!
2) All member states to disarm totally – 90% of their weapons to be destroyed and 10% to be given to the UN
3) All member states to agree that there should be only one religion, not many.
As they say, good luck with that.
Captain Steele’s wife & son were raptured – his wife had been nagging at him for months about the Apocalypse and the End Times, kind of irritating, but now he sees she was RIGHT ALL ALONG so he goes to see the pastor who confesses he hadn’t taken Christianity seriously so hasn’t been rap….
Wait, let’s try to figure this thing out. If God has taken all the True Christians up to Heaven, those who are Left Behind are the fake ones and the non-Christians.
Not once does this book mention any non-Christians apart from Jews. We must assume that no Muslims disappeared. So Muslim countries never experienced all the plane and car crashes and thousands dying. So from their perspective the whole Rapture must have seemed like God’s punishment on Christian countries for not being Muslim. Now the other point that bugged me was what about all the people who died in these plane and car crashes? Did they all go straight to hell? This is not explained.
So the LB fake Christians figure that God has actually given them a second chance. If they get born again, they will become True Christians and will get to Heaven eventually. Being born again seems to be a matter of being completely sincere plus some fancy mental footwork. It is not really explained.
Anyway, Captain Steele has a big sweating crying conversion scene and he is now a True Christian. He learns from the pastor (also born again) about all these Biblical prophesies. There will now be a seven year period of “trials and tribulations” and there will come The Antichrist and blah blah blah.
A great many pages are then taken up with Capt Steele trying to convert his skeptical daughter. Clearly he thinks she might die at any time then go to Hell. Even though she’s a pretty nice kid. Because the pastor keeps banging on about how there’s no one righteous, no not one. Everyone’s a sinner, even the sweet little old ladies who make the tea.
Well, trying to cram all the weird complicated Biblical prophecy End Times stuff into a novel, even a sequence of 12 longish novels, was never going to be easy. The ludicrous turns of events, the cardboard characters (that’s an insult to cardboard), the drab inept dialogue that exists only to shoehorn more prophecy ideas into the book all make the book collapse into a welter of silliness.
It ends with a now-read-on cliffhanger, but even at the peril of my very soul, I am going to resist ordering volume two. And volumes three to twelve.
We are NYRB Classics and we have perfect taste. For our supremely elegant distinctive and well-beloved book covers we take a gorgeous painting and we We are NYRB Classics and we have perfect taste. For our supremely elegant distinctive and well-beloved book covers we take a gorgeous painting and we cut a big box out of the middle. That’s where the title and the author goes. Right in the middle.
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You might say – Hey, NYRB, why don’t you put your box in a corner, so we can better appreciate the cool paintings and photos you have chosen with such lapidary care? But we say Faugh! Begone with your pettifogging cavilling, we are NYRB and we have perfect taste.
As to the book itself…
A plunge into the brutal world of Greek peasants, early 20th century : a sharp cry of agony, a strange bitter style, a short, uneasy read. ...more
Cute, fit, rich, aristocratic and more than a little dizzy, Raymon is in a serious fix – I think you gentlemen will understand this one very easily – Cute, fit, rich, aristocratic and more than a little dizzy, Raymon is in a serious fix – I think you gentlemen will understand this one very easily – he’s fallen for a 19 year old ladies maid – yes! - and not only that, this ladies maid is a Creole and she has brown arms! And it’s reasonable to conclude that the rest of her person is brown too (although this is not explicitly stated) – and – wait – he’s got her up the duff – what a pickle, right? – but that’s not the worst of it – finally Raymon gets to meet the hot maid’s mistress Indiana and wouldn’t you know – she’s even hotter, and also only 19! So now he’s instantly not in love with the maid and totally in love with Indiana – who is suffering silently in a loveless marriage to a nasty old trout. So he has to ditch the maid and schmooze the mistress under the gaze of the gross old fart and do it without lying or being cruel to anyone because at this point he still thinks of himself as a nice guy! (That changes later.) But, you know, it can be done:
Raymon felt that with a little skill he might deceive both these women simultaneously.
Raymon is such a drama queen. Actually everyone in this melodrama is a drama queen, even the family pets. This is how they roll:
Raymon: I’ll snatch you away from his cruel law. Do you want me to kill him? Tell me you love me and I’ll be his murderer.
(This is like on the first date. I myself would have kept that for the third date but it’s 19th century France.)
Indiana : You make me shudder, If you want to kill anyone, kill me!
Raymon : Die then, but die of happiness!
And he presses his lips upon her head, but George Sand makes it clear that nothing further occurred because at that point she fainted. (I think the art of fainting has been lost. Nowadays people just eyeroll.)
On their fourth date he says
Have I not opened the door of your alcove to the devil of lust?
As Indiana is a nice girl, the answer is no, the alcove door remained closed.
I got sick and tired of Indiana. The girl pretty much does nothing but faint, lie in bed gravely ill, weep buckets, lament and wish for death. The blurb will get you believing that this novel is a diatribe about the “inequitable marriage laws of the time” but actually this is not so. Yes, the nasty old codger is violent but 98% of the story is about how Raymon gets her to fall for him and then realises that he doesn’t love her anymore oh wait yes he does oh no he doesn’t. This is one self-centred young aristo. I would say he needs a strong beating with a baseball bat but that would be to indulge in the very male violence this book condemns. How frustrating.
Raymon is such a ladykiller. The maid says :
Kiss me as you used to and I won’t regret ruining myself to give you a few days’ pleasure.
He has a way with words. He spouts stuff like
I am no longer now your slave or your ally, I am only the man who loves you to distraction and holds you in his arms, you unkind, capricious, cruel woman, but one who is beautiful, mad and adored.
Later he writes to Indiana :
I would give my life for one hour in your arms, but I am capable of suffering a whole lifetime to get one of your smiles.
Here’s the thing – when he says or writes this emotional bullying drivel, he believes every word. Next day is a different story, but at the time, he’s totally sincere.
All this sounds like I enjoyed this novel for its ridiculously over the top silliness mingled with some acidulous observations on the venality of shallow men. But I didn’t. You have to wade through way too much. Characters will spout gruesome gushes of plush purple prose for page upon page, they can all bore for France at the Olympics. And the ending is really quite unpleasant, suddenly turning into a hymn to Catholic piety. The whole thing is absurd and kind of revolting in its overemotional wallowing. I have to admit it’s often kind of funny, in a highly unintentional way. But that’s not a good thing.
Typical sentence from this novel :
He shuddered from head to foot and fell to the floor in a faint.
2.5 stars rounded up to 3 for no very clear reason....more
This is an early Ellroy from back when he was following normal rules of grammar and constructing sentences that had more than four words in them. It’sThis is an early Ellroy from back when he was following normal rules of grammar and constructing sentences that had more than four words in them. It’s a serial killer story told in the first person, in the form of a long written confession, and Ellroy really lumbers himself by telling us on page three that “school records indicate genius-level intelligence” & so everything this nasty guy Martin Plunkett does has to be very very smart and, worse, his manner of writing has to demonstrate a genius-level mind, and this is not easy to do. And in fact it becomes tiresome.
It might be worth mentioning that your average serial killer is not especially bright, and one of the all time worst, Gary Ridgway, was thought by everyone as a very dumb guy. But he was able to avoid the cops for decades.
Anyway, this novel wasn’t especially convincing, all the simmering homosexuality-as-motivation psychology was plain weird.
However, peak Ellroy was just around the corner, starting the year after this one with The Black Dahlia. So forget this, start with that....more
If Pol Pot had succeeded in his insane ambition to create the perfect society, and if his grandchildren had invented the internet, then a hundred yearIf Pol Pot had succeeded in his insane ambition to create the perfect society, and if his grandchildren had invented the internet, then a hundred years or so after that – I hope you’re still with me – you would arrive at the weird half-virtual half-real world of H(a)ppy.
We eschew the old Capitalist Modes of Production and quietly consider them the greatest human evil
Yeah, it is strange all right, but I must say that there’s something of an old-wine-in-a-new-bottle thing going on here.
First, science fiction has got a bazillion stories of utopias that are really dystopian – there’s always some tiny annoying person (our protagonist) who can see that Multivac* has no clothes, that all this glassy eyed repetition of the three basic truths is a strong indication that the whole world has become one gigantic cult and that the sheeple should wake up, you’ve all been here before from 1984 to Logan’s Run to The Matrix.
Second, this novel throws in some left-field stuff – obsessing over the obscure Paraguayan guitarist Augustin Barrios (1885-1944) – a real person; fretting (haha) over whether it’s okay to play a guitar with steel strings; copypasting bits and pieces from the history of Paraguay; and many pages ruminating on how to tune a kora, a west African version of the harp.
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And yes, this is all a bit disorientating, what with all the other bizarre stuff going on, but we have had very weird before too.
Third, Nicol(a) B(a)rker swandives into the world of WILD ‘N’ CRAZY typesetting, with psyched out pages like
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and yes, we have enjoyed stuff like this before too, especially from Mark Danielewski in House of Leaves and The Familiar and going all the way back to 1982 Janine by Alasdair Gray. (James Joyce would have LOVVVVVVED all the typographical possibilities available now, I bet he is looking on from Book Heaven and gnashing his teeth).
So anyway.
This is the first person woozy repetitive meditations of anxiety-ridden Mira, who works on a farm as a cowherd. The cows are “simulacra” but are “utterly lifelike”. Later she gets a dog, or should I say a robodog. But she doesn’t give too many details away about her actual world and how it’s organised. She just frets about not really fitting in and having this creep called Kite breathing down her neck saying stuff like
Your graph is purpling
Or
Something is wrong with Mira. She has retuned her kora.
She really wants to fit into her utopia but something continually niggles, there’s always a loose thread, you know how it is with these protagonists. Tweak tweak, tug tug.
And that's it for the plot.
In the end this was either too deliberately peculiar or not strange enough, hard to tell. Kind of fun, if you don’t mind a lot of repetition.
**old sf joke : the scientists switch on the most powerful computer ever and ask it the first question : Is there a God? After a brief pause the answer comes : There is now…
It’s possible that some readers might be put off by a novel consisting of one 247-page unbroken block of type, no paragraphs, no quotation marks anywhIt’s possible that some readers might be put off by a novel consisting of one 247-page unbroken block of type, no paragraphs, no quotation marks anywhere, containing the bile-filled rantings of a batty old music critic who is an Olympic gold standard hater of ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING. 99.9% of this novel is this guy (Reger) spewing forth his maniacally repetitive rantings on such subjects as Viennese toilets, Austrian schoolteachers, Austrian hygiene (it has been scientifically established that a Viennese uses a piece of soap only once a week), Heidegger (a market crier who only brought stolen goods to the market) and pages and pages about how terrible the writer Stifter is. Who is this Stifter? An author who is almost entirely unknown in the English speaking world, according to Wiki. Is a badtempered old fart spending pages trashing an author you never heard of fun? .......Not really.
This novel, therefore, is one of those plotless incontinent diatribes that are mother’s milk to Bernhard fans. They love this stuff.
REPETITION REPETITION REPETITION
Here’s a flavour of 82-year-old Reger’s monologue. The situation is simple – this old fart likes to go to a particular room in a particular art museum and sit on a settee for hours every other day (except Mondays).
…quite often other people in the Bordone Room would like to sit down on the Bordone Room settee but cannot do so because I am sitting on the Bordone Room settee. By now the Bordone Room settee has more or less become a prerequisite of my thinking. the Bordone Room suits me much better than the Ambassador, where I also have an ideal seat for thinking, on the Bordone Room settee I think with a much greater intensity than I do at the Ambassador
And on he warbles about the Bordone Room settee for a couple more pages then his brain hops on to another obsessively chewed subject ("The White-Bearded Man" by Tintoretto – this one pops up regularly throughout). At other times he can’t stop saying the word twaddle, or mouthpiece. Frankly, he is a bit of an old loony.
DOES HE LIKE ANYTHING AT ALL?
I noticed that you have to get to page 72 before he has something nice to say and it is about Wagner. Then more meanminded raving until page 118 when he meets an Englishman in the museum (where else?) who unaccountably he likes.
ISN’T THIS SUPPOSED TO BE A COMEDY?
Well I thought this was funny –
I have not read a book at home for years, here in the Bordone Room I have read hundreds of books, but that is not to say that I read all those books in the Bordone Room through to the end, I have never read a single book through to the end, my way of reading a book is that of a highly talented page turner, that is of a person who would rather turn the pages than read, who therefore turns dozens, or at times hundreds, of pages before reading a single one; but then when this person does read a page he reads it more thoroughly than anyone and with the greatest reading passion imaginable.
THE HAND-BRAKE TURN
Bernhard, having got you to despise this rancid old man for 200 pages, then lets him reveal to his best mate his true situation, that after the recentish death of his wife of nearly 40 years he has been drowning in grief, and the rest of the book demonstrates that horrible old fart haters can be tender and loving. At the same time you shudder at the marriage that poor woman had to put up with, poor soul. (He would get her to read aloud entire volumes by Kant.) Some readers find this humanising coda to be a profound gutpunch but me I was yeah whatever, you’re still a nasty hysterical privileged old music critic and ain’t nobody will be boohooing at your sparsely attended funeral....more
Patrick Melrose is 42, a London barrister (= pretty rich), married with 2 sons, and has a terrible time of things. This is a feel-bad novel, which youPatrick Melrose is 42, a London barrister (= pretty rich), married with 2 sons, and has a terrible time of things. This is a feel-bad novel, which you already knew it would be if you read any of the previous Patrick Melrose novels. He is not the cheery poster boy for embracing life and loving it, he is the ex heroin addict with a horrible past and a nearly unbearable present.
Edward St Aubyn fritters away his great gifts as a brilliant prose stylist and sculptor of boilingly icy dialogue on a whole lot of tired old stuff we have read a million novels about already : psychological observations of the married middleclass male, his struggles with fatherhood, his struggles with alcohol, his struggles with his penis, his adultery, his mid life crisis thing – and just to gain the reader’s total sympathy, Patrick’s main problem in this book is how his mother has given away the family chateau in France to some new age charitable foundation dedicated to drum banging and past life retrieval and fiddling about with people’s souls which is run by a dippy Irishman who is not at all as dim as he looks.
(As well as new age fads, Patrick/Edward spends his big vocabulary trashing other easy targets, like fat Americans, rich Americans, American motels – all this is tiresome. )
A lot of Mother’s Milk is taken up by intensely detailed accounts of infancy, and once again, we have kind of had this a lot before. Although his device of making the five year old talk like a thirtyfive year old is kinda funny.
But this is really the father’s story. Patrick Melrose writhes in great spasms of disappointment the whole time. I would guess that none of this is something us readers will be shedding big jewel-like tears over. Oh oh oh, this huge French house should be mine, mine mine - I mean ours, dear. He is already rich enough, on what planet should he be even richer?
We have to read Mother’s Milk for something other than an interesting plot or engaging sympathetic characters or unusual subjects. It’s the last place you would look.
Instead we get unremitting and highly, highly entertaining nastiness. Reviewers call this novel venomous, caustic, sardonic, scathing and ascerbic, and I do not disagree. Untrammeled self-loathing male arrogance has rarely been more elegantly spewed forth :
He could live without her as long as he knew that she couldn’t live without him. That was the deal the furiously weak made between their permanent disappointment and their temporary consolation.
If he had one thing to say to the world, it was this : never, never have a child without first getting a reliable mistress.
He envied the male spider who was eaten straight after fertilizing the female, rather than consumed bit by bit like his human counterpart.
Very occasionally our author allows Patrick’s wife one of these one-liners. They are staying in a motel and she is thinking about its delights :
And a machine down the corridor whose shuddering ejaculations of ice reminded her unwillingly of the state of her marriage
It’s a shame we didn’t get to the part where she kicks out this drunken motormouth Olympic gold standard self-pitier.
3.5 stars for all the great you-can’t-say-that! moments....more
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