This is a fat slab of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, snap some off and shove it in your gob. I defy you to tell me you don’t like it. Well, I am very sorry if This is a fat slab of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, snap some off and shove it in your gob. I defy you to tell me you don’t like it. Well, I am very sorry if you are on a diet. Oops.
JB Priestley was a huge seller back in the day (20s and 30s) but “nobody” reads him anymore, in the same way nobody listens to Rudy Vallee and his Connecticut Yankees or watches Shirley Temple movies (quite rightly!).
No, sorry, that sounds a little mean. We can’t all be reading everything that people used to think was the bee’s pyjamas and the cat’s toboggan, or whatever the saying is. If we did there wouldn’t be any space for new stuff.
So that means there must be some sort of process to save the really great stuff from oblivion and let the merely good stuff slide. And the process is that mysterious one whereby some books are bestowed with the title of “classic” and most aren’t.
Some “classics” were big sellers in their day AND they got to be called classics, like Booth Tarkington. Some “classics” sold totally zilch and had to be dragged from their graves by fanboys decades later, like Moby Dick. And of course many very big sellers entertained the people hugely but never got any kind of status & so faded into oblivion like Marie Corelli and Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
I’m guessing that JB Priestley is sort of in the phantom zone, not quite forgotten but not quite read anymore. Naturally if they make a cute miniseries of Angel Pavement starring Timothee Chalamet as Harold Turgis and Jennifer Lawrence as Lilian Matfield, etc etc, then Angel Pavement will sell another million immediately, as it did in 1930.
JB never got called a classic because the critics hated him and he hated them along with their darling James Joyce which from JB’s point of view they could shove up their arse. So this is why they always said that JB was middlebrow rubbish. And he is if you live on the Parthenon heights where you breakfast on sliced Thomas Bernhard and dine on a huge wedge of Robert Musil with a soupcon of Clarice Lispector to follow.
Anyhow, if you ever wondered what life in a small dull London office in 1930 was like, then wonder no more. I liked it. It was normal. It was funny and sad and horrible and then funny again. There are some hugely entertaining characters, although you would never be inviting them round for tea, in fact you wouldn’t want to poke any of them with your grandmother’s ten foot barge pole, but that just makes it more fun....more
Good and bad things are inextricably smooshed together in Iris Murdoch’s hoity toity novel. For a start, don’t look for any characters that don’t go tGood and bad things are inextricably smooshed together in Iris Murdoch’s hoity toity novel. For a start, don’t look for any characters that don’t go to Oxford or don’t live in London, unless it’s a gardener. We are in the land of posh. But then, you can’t really dislike a 1958 novel that has such a sympathetic presentation of a gay man who keeps falling for (very) inappropriately young boys.
On the other hand, it’s kind of aggravating that everything, like I mean EVERYTHING in this novel, is symbolic – obv THE BELL is (both of them); the dog is; the swimming nun is; the weather is; the butterfly the lady rescued in the train compartment is; the lake is; the big country house is; there is nothing in an Iris Murdoch novel that doesn’t symbolise something else, something really chinscratchingly abstract probably. It’s kind of exhausting, your brain at some point will go yeah yeah, okay okay.
YOU SAY PHILOSOPHY, I SAY TOMATO
People say oh Iris Murdoch wrote philosophical novels. Well, occasionally the action stops and the characters start to mull. This is what I mean. Some guy is spouting on page 131:
Ideals are dreams. They come between us and reality – when what we need most is just precisely to see reality. And that is something outside us. Where perfection is, reality is. And where do we look for perfection?...
And blah blah blah. I guess it’s philosophy, but it sounded like profound white noise to me a lot of the time.
It's like she writes serious farces; the plot is full of wacky unlooked-for things happening that might be thought of as funny, but no, wipe that smile off, Iris is going to muse upon them for a page and find some jawbreakers in them.
KEEP AWAY FROM RUNAROUND SUE
There is a dour scholar who has a flighty young wife. I don’t know if Iris was trying to make him a comedy character but he is inclined to say stuff like
Your escapades have diminished you permanently in my eyes.
And later
Don’t paw me. I’m not sexually attracted to you at this moment. I sometimes wonder if I ever will be again.
When his wife Dora apologises for whatever it was she’d done wrong (being alive probably) he says
How absolutely not enough that is!
Hilarious!
A TYPICAL CAREFREE MOMENT FROM THE 1950s, BEFORE ALL THIS HEALTH AND SAFETY NONSENSE MADE LIFE UNBEARABLE
It was foolish of him to have had that second pint of strong cider; he was so unused to the stuff now, it had made him quite tipsy. But he knew he would be all right once he got into the van; the driving would sober him up.
(And the driving does sober him up!)
A TYPICAL CAREFREE MOMENT FROM THE 1950s, BEFORE HARDCORE PORNOGRAPHY WAS MADE COMPULSORY FOR EVERYONE
Toby [he is 18 by the way] was not in the habit of sitting and brooding. Usually he was active, practical, and without a care in the world. With the simplicity which goes with a certain sort of excellent up-bringing* he had regarded himself as not yet grown up. Men had never troubled him nor women neither. “Falling in love” he regarded as something reserved for the future.
(*i.e. English upper middle class)
AND YET
I kind of liked this – the whole thing of an atheist writing about sincerely religious people was very good, most of the characters weren’t made of cardboard, it kept me reading all the way to the end but would I recommend it to you lovely GR people?
We both had the same reaction to this thing about PHILOSOPHY which everybody and his kidnapped dog goes on about in all other reviews. (There is a kidnapped dog in this book.) And our reaction was
APPLESAUCE
Ok, two things. First thing, Iris Murdoch was a 24 carat solid gold actual real world philosopher. At age 28 she was lecturing in philosophy at Oxford University, and she wrote the first book on Sartre in English. She was the hot potato of thinking real hard. But second thing is that I dragged my sorry ass over to the London Review of Books where I read my LAST FREE ARTICLE on Under the Net by Michael Wood (“Don’t Worry about the Pronouns”). He is a guy who thinks philosophy is oozing out of every pore of Under the Net, and this is because he thinks parts of this novel are an early parody of structuralist thought and that characters like Finn the silent moocher or Hugo the rich firework manufacturer represent particular Wittgensteinian arguments.
I will take a wild guess and say that this will not appeal to the general reader much.
Instead most readers will find Under the Net is a fairly comical farce involving a penniless translator who ricochets around London and Paris like someone in the throes of the manic phase of a bipolar disorder. He is constantly deciding after not seeing an old girlfriend for years he is suddenly IN LOVE with her, or out of the blue decides that this woman will definitely be IN PARIS RIGHT NOW and of course he will be able to find her because Paris is so small; and he realises that the very thing to resolve his current complicated problems is to KIDNAP A DOG. And he makes gigantic assumptions about everyone, which (no spoiler) are discovered to be quite inaccurate. This whole cockamamie tale is one giant shaggy dog story which wiki expertly defines as
an extremely long-winded anecdote characterized by extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents and terminated by an anticlimax.
Unreal characters have very unlikely things happen to them like the ex-gf’s sister is now a big movie star who is now being stalked by his old friend the fireworks manufacturer. Who is now a movie producer. And the dog is a famous movie star too. And Jake our hapless writer will break into your house if he feels like it because he can pick locks.
I think the dog is logical positivism (note that it was in a cage but was freed by Jake) and the lock picking tools must be Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, the masterwork by Wittgenstein.
JOKING ASIDE
This all sounds like I did not have much time for IM’s first novel but I was quite charmed while I was reading it, she drags us along in double quick time and all is fun and fireworks. She has a spiffy style. There are a couple of moments of drunken despondency and moaning about futility but you have to take the rough with the smooth. So I kind of enjoyed it, whilst not understanding what the heck was really going on, just like Jake....more
Reviews routinely call this a masterpiece, people say it’s “as full of suspense as any novel”, its prose is beautiful, it’s “a necessary and essentialReviews routinely call this a masterpiece, people say it’s “as full of suspense as any novel”, its prose is beautiful, it’s “a necessary and essential book” and “everyone should read this book” and the author got the Nobel Prize, so you are already thoroughly intimidated before you pick up The Bridge on the Drina and when it fails to ignite, when it seems to be made of melted tarmac and every sentence seems calculated to induce a light hypnosis, the sort where 20 minutes can go by without you noticing, you have to figure it’s you that’s wrong, not everybody else, but there it is, it can’t be helped. There’s no point in faking book-love.
This is not a normal novel with a plot and a handful of main characters. It’s about 400 years of Serbian history, as refracted through a magnificent stone bridge which was completed in 1571. The bridge changes everything for the people in the otherwise unremarkable town of Drina. Trade and armies flow over it, lovers have assignations, it’s used for executions. Ivo Andric’s book is like the imperturbable river under the bridge, he is going to flow through his 400 years at a slow but steady speed. He finds interesting and illuminating anecdotes here and there, and characters appear, last for ten pages, then drift downstream. This is the method.
The building of the bridge by Ottoman engineers (it took five years) was like a disaster for the townspeople – men were pressed into service, often without pay, everyone’s life was upended, so a couple of radicals decided to sabotage the whole thing. They were caught and there was an excruciating detailed account of the execution by impaling of the main saboteur. That got my attention. It was hair-raising. So I thought I was going to like this book – give me a gruesome impaling and I’ll follow you anywhere – but all the other tales of the town that Andric picked out just seemed a little on the dull side, and his unvarying and totally humourless prose did not help at all. Two hundred pages later the only thing I could remember was the guy who got impaled.
I freely concede that everyone is right about this book and I am wrong. ...more
Was there ever a title of a short novel that more accurately summarised what it was about? This is the third I read recently in which a guy excruciatiWas there ever a title of a short novel that more accurately summarised what it was about? This is the third I read recently in which a guy excruciatingly contemplates his impending death. (It’s not like I’m seeking out such bleakness, it’s just like when three buses come along at once.) The other two were The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy and The Seven who were Hanged by Leonid Andreyev, and although this one by Victor Hugo was very intense and compelling, the other two were better. This one is excellent but those two were brilliant.
The guy in this book has been sentenced to execution by guillotine and we see as the hours tick by how his mind scurries like a trapped rat here and there turning over a myriad of mad ideas of escape, yearning for his little daughter, observing his fellow prisoners (including a great scene where a lot of miserable-but-pretending-not-to-care convicts are fitted with chains and shipped off to do hard labour for life), raging at the throngs of rubberneckers waiting to see his grisly termination. This is all good.
But there were two large omissions. I thought a guy in his situation would obsess over what brought him to this terrible situation, his crime, what led to it, how he thought it was justified and the lawyers were incompetent, that kind of thing But he never thinks about his crime at all; he mentions in passing that it was a murder, that’s all we know. Maybe this was deliberate – Hugo didn’t want to distract from his anti-capital punishment message.
The other thing was that aside from a paragraph of deranged fantasy he doesn’t think about what might be his post-guillotine fate. Will God forgive him or is he going to Hell? What will Hell be like? You get the impression people in 19th century France took religion really seriously, so you might think he would be wondering about how unpleasant it all might turn out, since the guillotine was not the end, just a machine to bundle you rudely into the next more alarming phase of your existence.
But still, a quick, fiery, cruel read.
PLAYLIST
I don't know any songs about being guillotined, so here are some about being hanged.
I like oddball novels but I couldn’t like this one that much. The point was more or less lost on me unless it was just another exploration of misogynyI like oddball novels but I couldn’t like this one that much. The point was more or less lost on me unless it was just another exploration of misogyny like every other novel or movie or documentary is these days. So of course our wannabe serial killer says stuff like
I raised my voice to set things straight and keep a female lacking in IQ from becoming arrogant.
Reviewers compare this novel to Celine (yeah, I can see that), Houellebecq (mmm, sort of), Genet (aww well I read The Thief’s Journal so long ago I don’t know), Dostoyevsky – specifically C&P (you’re kidding right?), Camus (because he wrote about a murderer? Hmmm), Beckett (oh well for like one paragraph) and Salinger (er…no). Meanwhile this novel’s title forces us to compare it with the incomparably unpleasant American Psycho (which was written 2 years before this one) and there is no comparison whatsoever. The nasty musings on what our antihero Greg wants to do to his girlfriend hooker Germaine take up about two pages, and you also get occasional outbursts like
If I could kill all the women on Earth, I would begin with my mother…I would pull out her heart of stone, cook it in my shop’s furnace and eat it with sweet potatoes, licking my fingers, the rest of her body rotting away in front of me…
Next to Patrick Bateman’s actual-or-are-they-fantasized-who-really-cares murders this is a kindergarten outing with little kittens and woolly lambkins. The title of this book is therefore very cheeky.
Young Greg is a self-employed motor mechanic with an obsession about Angoualima, who is the country’s most famous serial killer. Maybe half of the novel is taken up by his dubious accounts of this guy’s exploits, visiting this guy’s grave, worshipping him, having imaginary conversation with him, and it gets really tedious :
People also imagined …that he lived in freight trains because, in order to fool the police, he was able to turn himself into a package or blend into a herd of sheep
And there’s a WHOLE lot of “O master what must I now do?” stuff.
The author has one great idea which as far as I know might be lifted straight out of Congolese life – his places have insane names. So the district Greg lives in is called He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot. And there is a local bar called Take And Drink, This is the Cup of My Blood. And a street called Daddy-Happiness-That’s-Me street. I liked that a lot until all of these funny names were repeated for the 150th time.
This was pretty ridiculous but also kind of cool. There is a whole lot of bad things happening every five minutes to this preacher and his family but This was pretty ridiculous but also kind of cool. There is a whole lot of bad things happening every five minutes to this preacher and his family but the motto is don’t worry be happy because five minutes later a guy will come in the room and say oh yeah like that person that you thought was dead well here he is or we have just found the thrice damned villain that made off with the honour of your daughters and here he is.
It is all like to make your head whirl more than somewhat but who is taking any of this seriously, nobody, that’s who. It’s a comedy but as it was written in 1766 you shouldn’t be expecting much rotflmao. That has drained away with the passage of the long decades.
A CHALLENGE
They are so articulate in the 18th century. Like, way more than we are now. They will say stuff like
Forgetful of your age, your holy calling, thus to arrogate the justice of Heaven, and fling those curses upward that must soon descend to crush thine own gray head with destruction!
Next time you are in the midst of some bitter verbals with your family, your kids or your neighbours or the police I will bet diamonds you can’t come out with a ridiculous but cool sentence like that. That is my challenge. I could not do that. Let me know how you got on in the message section below.
MAJOR NAMECHECKS
Just to say how much a bestseller this was, it gets a mention in Middlemarch, Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield, Little Women, Emma, Frankenstein and Goethe was a fan too.
LIBERAL VIEWS PROMOTED
He goes off into riffs, rants and outright op ed articles from time to time, you could do that when writing novels was so novel there weren’t any rules. One of these op ed pieces is how they shouldn’t execute people for stealing, only for murder. So in regards to horse stealing the Vicar says
It is far better that two men should live than that one man should ride
In 1766 that was radical liberal hot potato stuff. So fair play to the Vicar.
PICK UP ARTISTS
The big villain in this story is what we would call a pick up artist. His principal technique is to be rich, young and handsome so you would not think he might have much trouble, but his targets were modest unspoiled young ladies from good families and they tended to be resistant to casual shagging so he developed methods which included daylight abduction, fake marriages, impersonations and fake duelling. Underneath the sunny silly comedy of this novel there lurk much darker things.
FAVOURITE WORD OF THE BOOK
Sussarara.
gentle or simple, out she shall pack with a sussarara.
It means being yelled at or roasted or even thwacked. What a great word, we should revive it and give it a nicer meaning. It should mean something like
The pleasant moments experienced on waking up before you remember what happened last night [image]...more
First, great title. I thought …. Mmmm, how much worse, dear? Tell me.
Second, great cover. That smooshed-in blurt of a head…. Perfect. Round of applausFirst, great title. I thought …. Mmmm, how much worse, dear? Tell me.
Second, great cover. That smooshed-in blurt of a head…. Perfect. Round of applause to Kim Jakobsson.
Third, format. Well, this is a teensy novelette, you can read it in like minus ten minutes. It’s in epistolatory form, emails and instant messaging transcripts (it’s the year 2000). So it’s just like Pamela by Samuel what’s his name written in 1730 or thereabouts. That’s like 2000 pages and all in letters. In those days they wrote with quill pens made out of ducks and probably used ducks blood for ink, I don’t know, I’m no expert, don’t quote me. Only probably, I haven’t read Pamela and there is no possible way I will ever read Pamela, I would say it’s unlikely that Pamela was ever forced to bash a salamander to death. This is a guess, for all I know Pamela is beating on salamanders on every other page.
Fourth, plot. This is all about a slave/mistress relationship and I got to say that the main plot development took a lot of swallowing, which if you have read this already, you will know what I mean.
Fifth, level of gruesomeness/horror/disturbingness. The author in their note at the end says they wrote this in
A nightmarish fever dream of inspiration, an arduous ordeal of painstaking creativity.. I quite literally pushed myself to dangerous areas of my mind during those five days of creative Armageddon.
No disrespect to Eric LaRocca but maybe they doesn’t get out much. There are some verrrry gruesome books and stories out there, not to mention movies. This was like a 3.5 on a scale of 1 to 10. It was a trifle nauseating in places, and I most people shouldn’t read this while eating lunch. But people, you shouldn’t read and eat anyway. You might get stuff on your book.
Sixth, rating. I think if Eric had pushed the creative Armageddon into a second week and doubled the number of grisly events, each getting nastier, this could have been a solid three. It ended where it should have kept going. I know, Mr Unreasonable. That’s me....more
An electrifying memoir/novel about what is now called bi-polar disorder but in the 1980s was called manic depression. The first half of this excruciatAn electrifying memoir/novel about what is now called bi-polar disorder but in the 1980s was called manic depression. The first half of this excruciating account of the author’s own tribulations gave me a brilliant picture of a man in the grip of the manic upswing of this disorder. He thinks he’s God, maybe Christ, and there are all these codes and secret messages embedded into the banalities of everyday life – colours, shapes, what is in a junk shop window, the first word a person says to him – all these things take on enormous meaning. He has to immediately see an old friend NOW even though it’s two in the morning because now he knows that guy will have a very important message to give to him – so off he goes. That kind of thing. Totally exhausting.
The second half of the book is a bit of a rinse repeat experience, except for the failed suicide attempt. The way he failed was that he lost an arm and a leg by jumping in front of a train.
Companion books
(from ones I've read, there will be jazillions of others)
Henry’s Demons by Patrick Cockburn – the book that give me a similarly gripping account of schizophrenia.
Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen – an interesting but flawed memoir
The Room by Hubert Selby Jr – a disastrous unreadable novel about insanity by the author of the brilliant Last Exit to Brooklyn
And let’s not forget the grand-daddy of all “trapped in the head of a madman” novels :
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky ...more
THE BIZARRE CASE OF PATRICK HAMILTON AKA MR SNAKES AND LADDERS
Let’s start with the father – he was posh, loaded, alcoholic, “untrustworthy and vaingloTHE BIZARRE CASE OF PATRICK HAMILTON AKA MR SNAKES AND LADDERS
Let’s start with the father – he was posh, loaded, alcoholic, “untrustworthy and vainglorious”, a theosophist, a non-practising barrister and a fascist, and when young he fell in love with a prostitute and married her. That marriage was terminated by her jumping in front of a train (at Wimbledon Station). I don’t know why. This father was also “a truly awful novelist”.
Patrick was born in 1904, son of the second wife. Because his father was a useless spendthrift he had to leave school aged 15. He wrote his first novel aged 19 and it was published when he was 21. Not particularly successful. But his second novel Craven House a year later was a hit. He was already being compared to Dickens, Gissing and Sinclair Lewis at age 22.
When he was 23, he ALSO fell in love with a prostitute. The excruciating account of this affair is recorded in his 1935 novel The Midnight Bell. Read it and shudder.
When he was 24 he wrote a play “Rope”. It was a BIG hit (and was filmed in 1948 by none other than Alfred Hitchcock.) He wrote at age 25 “I am known, established, pursued. The world is truly at my feet.” He didn’t need to write anything else, this play was continually on stage somewhere for the rest of his life.
Got married in 1930 but not to the prostitute. Then, walking home along Earl’s Court Road in London with his wife and sister in January 1932
WHAM
a car hit him. Michael Holroyd says:
For a time his life was in danger, but after some months he made the best recovery possible, though he was left with a withered arm and, despite plastic surgery, marks and scars on his face, particularly his nose, which had been almost torn off.
By now he had become an alcoholic, and also a Communist. He never gave up either. By the 1940s he was on three bottles of whisky a day.
In 1938 came a SECOND monster hit play “Gaslight” (which added the term gaslighting to the English language). This was filmed with none other than Ingrid Bergman in 1944.
Throughout all this he wrote 12 novels, four plays and ten radio plays.
His masterpieces are The Slaves of Solitude, Hangover Square and the three novels that form the trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky.
(Note - this information cobbled together from the introductions to all the PH novel I have - the Wiki page is quite deficient.)
THE WEST PIER
We are again deliciously plunged into PH’s patent excruciatingly-observed sociologically precise and psychologically horrible world featuring the romantic illusions and disillusions of a group of four young people who have the bad luck to have a fifth in their midst, a malevolent human tarantula called Ernest Ralph Gorse. He believes he is a superior type of being who can at will bamboozle, confound and defraud all the lesser types in his orbit, and we see him do just that. All his dodges, lies and manipulations work perfectly. There’s no chance of him being exposed. He has perfected the art of gaining trust. Only when they find he had driven off with all the money do they realise they have no idea where he lives, no way of finding him ever again.
The pleasures of this novel are the same as those of The Midnight Bell, which are very great. PH’s humour is deadly, he is a virtuoso of haplessness. At the same time when Gorse gets away with it, you think – well, that is exactly what would happen But I hate it!
When I read in the introduction to the Gorse Trilogy that the next two novels were also all about Gorse scheming to defraud a woman and then getting away with it, my enthusiasm drained away. Much as I love PH, this is too much bleakness. One book of Gorse was enough.
This review discusses the whole plot, so SPOILERS all the way.
*
The Bible is full of tremendous soundbites that don’t stand up to much scrutiny.
Judge This review discusses the whole plot, so SPOILERS all the way.
*
The Bible is full of tremendous soundbites that don’t stand up to much scrutiny.
Judge not, lest ye be judged.
Well, there goes one entire branch of government. In Disgrace everybody gets very harshly judged. The main guy in whose loathsome mind we are trapped for the whole journey is a supercilious condescending white professor. You will already know we are in post-Apartheid South Africa so race is central to everything that happens. This guy David Lurie has a sense of entitlement the size of Table Mountain, especially when it comes to women. He’s 52 and up to now he’s been a self-satisfied sexual barracuda, women fall for him right and left. And he judges them, each and every one.
He reminded me of an English Literature professor version of Jack Donaghy from 30 Rock who one day barks an order to his assistant about an older female member of staff
Fire her. And don’t ever make me talk to a woman that old again.
Prof Lurie loves to swoop down on one of his 30-years-younger students and impress them into sex by waving his big hard professorship in front of them.
He letches after the 20 year old charms of Melanie Isaacs. The reader is not sure if this girl is black or white, it’s left ambiguous. (In the movie she was played by a light skinned black actress.) He coerces her into sex a few times. Looking back, he realises that she wasn’t really into him, how sad. But no, he didn’t force himself, he thinks :
Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core.
This is queasy stuff. If it was undesired to the core, then, er, wasn’t it rape? This whole novel is about queasy stuff, written in a cool swift style.
Melanie complains to the university authorities about his sexual harassment of her. They request him to appear before a panel of judges. Professor Lurie hates to be judged. He should do the judging, not them. They ask him oh so respectfully about the nature of his relationship with Miss Isaacs. Well, he thinks, even if it was a bit rapey, that’s my nature. I was overtaken by Eros. Beautiful women don’t own their beauty. It’s for everyone, especially 52 year old white guys. Yes, he really thinks that. He thinks you can’t legislate people into being untrue to their natures. You might just as well command a frog to become a wombat or a lion to stop biting those young soft gazelles. He is an essentialist.
So he refuses to apologise and he is fired out of the university. He goes off to stay with his lesbian daughter Lucy who lives way out in the countryside on a tiny farm looking after dogs and growing flowers, all jolly and bucolic until the big disaster happens.
Three black guys saunter by the farm one day and break in and beat up the professor & set him on fire (sounds worse than it was) and gang rape Lucy (just as bad as it sounds). She then decides not to tell the cops about the rape. Later, the youngest of the home invaders appears as a house guest in her black next door neighbour’s house. And she still doesn’t want to say anything. And she’s pregnant.
Her passivity and decision to stay at her farm alone and in danger, a total capitulation to the perpetrators, a disgraceful thing, you might say, is incomprehensible to many readers and seems only to make sense if it’s read symbolically.
Because the symbolic meaning of all this hot mess is reasonably clear. The white people are now living under a different dispensation, and they better get used to their new subservient role. David complains bitterly, and daughter Lucy meekly accepts this transfer of power in a spirit of reparation. (We notice that both of them in different ways chose not to defend themselves.)
That seems to be the jist of the thing, and if so, it’s brutal, and it’s not surprising that the ANC denounced this novel as racist in April 2000. (When JM Coetzee won the Nobel Prize three years later they retreated somewhat and embraced him as a great South African.)
I confess I couldn’t stop reading this but I found I did not love it like so many people have. I mean the whole thing is like staring at a nasty traffic accident.
Characters: for a tiny book I counted 24 characters with names – that’s like a Time: A couple of weeks in February in 1974
Place: Cologne, West Germany
Characters: for a tiny book I counted 24 characters with names – that’s like a lot, don’t you think? Probably about 15 have speaking roles so it’s probably a good idea to keep a handy list so you can immediately check who Moeding or Schonner or Brettloh or Straubleder is. Of course if you have a great memory for German names you’ll be fine.
Subject: the deliberate destruction of ordinary people’s lives by the rancid loathsome shameless degenerate tabloid press, which is still with us to this day.
Method : an official report into the murder of Werner Totges, reporter, by Katherina Blum, 27 year old caterer, housekeeper and occasional waitress.
Mood : ironical, playful, a little smirky if we’re honest
Religion : these people are a little too busy for God right now. This is a crisis!
Situation: there’s no doubt she shot that disgusting reporter guy, that’s not a spoiler, but untangling the skein of events that led to the fatal discharge is the thing we are engaged upon. But what was Ludwig Gotten doing at Katherine’s flat? Didn’t she know he was on the run from the cops? That was why the press started in on her.
Language : Because this is all straight-facedly pretend-officialese, we have sentences like There is always the possibility that certain relatively clear pointers toward a relationship between various events and actions will be misinterpreted or lost as mere hints.
Rating : Three stars
Cultural impact : Immediately made into a movie. In the book the outlaw Ludwig Gotten is an army deserter and thief. In the movie he becomes a terrorist on the run which makes sense as the Baader Meinhof Gang were in full flow at the time. I think Heinrich Boll should have thought of that angle himself, it makes the tabloid frenzy about his character more understandable.
Apology to German speakers: there are an awful lot of umlauts missing from this review.
First half of this was quite fun, with the 71 year old revered retired Judge’s 42 year old daughter Laurel and his also-around-42-year old new wife FaFirst half of this was quite fun, with the 71 year old revered retired Judge’s 42 year old daughter Laurel and his also-around-42-year old new wife Fay building up to a colossal knock-down dragout donnybrook as they tend the old fart who has been put into the hospital with a torn retina. After the operation the doctor says the Judge has to lie still on his back for six weeks or so and he is the most compliant of patients. This finally gets on Fay’s nerves to the point where she freaks out and tries to drag him out of bed – all of this was entertaining and I was looking forward to what happened after the funeral but, a few flounces and low-class insults sprayed around like insecticide later, Fay vamooses for many pages and the reader descends into the maundering griefstricken memories and psychological self-maulings of daughter Laurel. It has to be admitted that these long-ass indirect interior monologues are a stone drag, and the brief viperish reappearance of Fay is way too little way too late.
A very uncomfortable and inescapable theme throughout this novel is class. Laurel is all refinement and gracious manners and devoted filial love (along with also being a stoical young widow and a painter); Fay is an uneducated grasping vulgar gold-digger with no heart who bitterly resents having to spend time with her inert husband in the hospital and later finds the only use she has for his funeral is that it provides the perfect opportunity for her to do some hyperventilating operatic weeping and wailing over the open coffin which is observed by all, thus concluding all duties to her late husband prior to taking over his mansion. Plus, her family is wheeled in for the funeral and they turn out to be practically hillbillies and subtly or not-so-subtly mocked at every turn.
In the tiresome last third Laurel has all the fine authentic deep feelings which it appears we are being led to admire, and Fay is brought back to demonstrate how appallingly nasty and grasping she is, and how noble Laurel is. It’s difficult to think that a Pulitzer prizewinner would be as crudely snobbish and cheaply insulting as I’m making out here, but I couldn’t read Fay’s character in any other way – she has absolutely no redeeming features.
Eudora Welty does have a fine turn of phrase, it is true, and here is my favourite sentence in the book :
As they proceeded there, black wings thudded in sudden unison, and a flock of birds flew up as they might from a ploughed field, still shaped like it, like an old map that still served new territory, and wrinkled away in the air....more
They look out of the bus window and what the hell is that a guy with a bear on a chain? Where? Can’t see anymore. Well, it looked like a guy with a be They look out of the bus window and what the hell is that a guy with a bear on a chain? Where? Can’t see anymore. Well, it looked like a guy with a bear on a chain.
Yes, it was…. And his story is the third of these five interlinked-kind-of (see above) sorry tales of modern India. The guy with the bear is from a drastically poor village, one day he just finds a bear cub
The trembling, blinking creature is slightly larger and weightier than a fat dog
and a lightbulb goes off in his dim, cruel mind – this could be a money-making proposition. You know, a dancing bear. So begins the most upsetting, horrific 75 pages I read so far this year. This bear is the most memorable character in the whole book.
The other main story (100 pages long) is about Milly, a poor girl from the village, and her grim progress through her allotted trail of miseries. She never quite comes to life as a character, but I thought well, that’s appropriate, since the iron fist of Indian poverty never allows her to come to life in her own life, so to speak.
So yes, this is another 260 pages of unhappiness for you. Does anyone smile on any of these pages? Well, some of them laugh at the bear.
The Shangri-Las’ follow-up to “Leader of the Pack” was a jaunty song called “Give Him a Great Big Kiss”. Considering the tormented psychodramas of theThe Shangri-Las’ follow-up to “Leader of the Pack” was a jaunty song called “Give Him a Great Big Kiss”. Considering the tormented psychodramas of their other singles, this was their happiest moment. In the song lead singer Mary is bragging about her new boyfriend ("Tight tapered pants, high button shoes/He's always looking like he's got the blues"). The other Shangri-Las pepper Mary with sceptical questions (they always had talking bits in their songs):
“Well, what colour are his eyes?” “I don’t know, he’s always wearing shades”
You can hear them thinking “Oh yeah?” One of them asks “Is he a good dancer?” Mary gets irritated: “Whaddya mean, is he a good dancer?” “Well how does he dance?” And Mary after a pause says softly
"Close. Very very close..."
When I was reading The Maltese Falcon I was waiting for someone to ask me how faithful the famous film is to the book. Nobody did, but I would have said
"Close. Very very close."
Every scene was filmed, every line of dialogue I could hear issuing forth from the mouths of Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor and Sidney Greenstreet. And this became so intrusive that I thought well, there is no point in reading this book if you have seen the movie. Dashiell Hammett’s prose is as plain as plain can be – it’s his characters and dialogue that are engaging. The movie (thanks to John Huston and his cinematographer Arthur Edeson) turns this plain prose into the signature style of the quintessential noir thriller, which is a great improvement. There’s no doubt, the film is better in every way.
So I stopped halfway. First time I abandoned a book for that reason.
I can see that in 1926 this was a strong proto-feminist whimsical thoroughly English magical realist subversively satanic cri de coeur but for me it wI can see that in 1926 this was a strong proto-feminist whimsical thoroughly English magical realist subversively satanic cri de coeur but for me it was more of a shoulda coulda woulda.
This posh family gives up trying to marry off daughter Laura so she stays at home looking after dear widower Daddy until she is 28 when he pops his clogs. After that she is effortlessly absorbed into her brother’s family as a Useful Aunt to perform child minding and doily re-arranging tasks and pretend to enjoy ghastly conversations at miserable dinner parties for twenty years. Inside she is in a state of carpet chewing agony, she is suffocating, drowning, dying, and one day she can’t take it any more and she ups and announces she wants to go and live all alone in a teeny village nobody has heard of.
So this novel can be set alongside The Life and Death of Harriett Frean by May Sinclair and Skylark by Deszo Kosztolayni, for instance, but the difference is that the casual oppression is mixed with a big basketful of complete silliness. We have a witches sabbath (this turns out to consist of folk dancing) and we have friendly chats with Satan, the Evil One, re-configured as the Cosy One. . If you sell this Satan your soul he will attack your enemies with curdled milk and wasps, he will ensure they put on their jumpers the wrong way round and inside out and that they stub their toe on the way to bed and the wrong newspapers get delivered to their house occasionally. You can imagine Miss Willowes knitting this particular Satan a cardigan for the winter months
And plus, it didn’t seem to make sense that to complete her rejection of the cloying overbearing insufferable men of her family Miss Willowes would find it necessary to place herself in the power of another big strong male figure.
Robert McCrum included Lolly Willowes in his book The 100 Best Novels in English. Now, for sure, Lolly Willowes is a shoo-in for The 100 Most Charming Oddities in English but one of the all time best? I think Satan must have been messing with Mr McCrumb’s brain....more
Ten large bags of BLANDNESS 14 kg of EVASION 27 litres of VAGUENESS A bucket or two of INSINUATIONS A generous grating of DARKThe recipe for this novel is
Ten large bags of BLANDNESS 14 kg of EVASION 27 litres of VAGUENESS A bucket or two of INSINUATIONS A generous grating of DARK HINTS Mix well with five enormous slabs of CRUSHING CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS Sprinkle with DISCONCERTINGLY INCOMPLETE SELF-DECEPTION
Serve ice cold
***
Everyone talks in stilted formal plum-in-mouth style :
It was the greatest impertinence to come here like this and disturb your afternoon.
Excuse me for mentioning this to you, Father. No doubt, it would have already occurred to you.
We at our office are at something of a loss as to the most appropriate way of showing our respect.
And all the dialogue in the entire book plus a great deal of the mournful meanderings that is the rest of it is like this. So this short book does need some patience. It will be hard for a modern reader not to be doing some furious eyerolling, pencil tapping and/or knee twitching during the reading of this book.
Oh, and there is a plot, I guess, but you’ll have to find it with a magnifying glass and get an expert to check if it really can be classed as a plot.
And plus, this book, as every review rightly points out, is THE EXACT SAME STORY as his very next novel The Remains of the Day which is a stone classic and way better than this one. (The story being that old farts after World War Two uneasily contemplate being on the wrong side during the war.)
If you like the sound of all this, give it a whirl. I hope I have not put you off.
I’m supposed to be reading Buddenbrooks but holy cow, it’s so extraordinarily dull, nothing at all seems to happen, and I just thought well, Thomas MaI’m supposed to be reading Buddenbrooks but holy cow, it’s so extraordinarily dull, nothing at all seems to happen, and I just thought well, Thomas Mann wouldn’t mind if I took a break, like Ross and Rachel did, and I read this short one in a day or so.
It’s one day and a long night in the life of a mid fifties gay English professor of English in California at the end of November 1962, and it’s a mordantly melancholic rumination on being past it but not wanting to be. At one point he looks in the mirror and thinks legs are quite good, chest muscles don’t sag, but – sadly –
The neck is loose and scraggy under all circumstances, in all lights., and would look gruesome even if he were half-blind. He has abandoned the neck altogether, like an untenable military position.
This story is all about grief – George’s lover Jim recently died in a car crash (naturally the family didn’t expect George to attend the funeral as he was just Jim’s “room mate”). George is trying not to spiral down, he still likes to ogle other men and flirt with his pupils. He is trying to make life go on, as it should go on, like when they tell you “well, life must go on”.
There are some great bits of early sixties casual sexism to be found here. George’s colleague says his wife recently got a job :
“We’re in the chips since I put Marinette to work.”
(What a name, Marinette. Kind of like marionette.)
George says
“So you’re fixing your own breakfast?”
And the guy says
“Oh, I can manage. Till she gets a job nearer. Or I get her pregnant.”
Later George spends an evening with his English neighbour lady friend Charley and we get a page of very judgy comments about her ending up with
Oh, and if she must wear sandals with bare feet, why won’t she make up her toenails?
Well, of course, being gay in the early 60s meant having to adroitly fend off the judginess of absolutely everybody as you earnestly pretended to be straight, so we should let him off.
I was sorry to finish A Single Man, since that means I’ll have to go back to Buddenbrooks now. ...more
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