So, here is my review. I always do one of those. Absolutely,I shall now tell you all about Death and….
Mmmmhmmmm
Mr Pick
Now, pick what… er ah yes
….wick.
So, here is my review. I always do one of those. Absolutely, I'm just going to.....
It is a gigantic novel which for the first 1000 pages seems…..
Uh? Oh sorry… yes, what? It’s all about some … young guys becoming ….. ill….
Ah where was I? ….. illustrators. In the early 19th whatever. I have to be honest here, it just
It’s something to do with Dickens. I think I remember that…
But don’t quote me because
I have to say that it
Didn’t.
Seem. Mmmhmm.
It didn’t seem to have
To have much
Of a
Story to it.
Story to it. Hmmm, mumble mumble.
So I found it quite…………………………………. Hmmm, mumble mumble
I gave up. No, not quite. No. That’s not it.
It gave me up. It said you know, really, I don’t think that you are the right reader for me. I feel I should be with somebody else. Somebody with more patience. You, you just can’t sit still for more than five minutes. You seem to want explosions and sex and jokes. You don’t have any inner peace. So the sun has set on our relationship. I already met someone else. At the library. She’s good and kind. She knits her own breakfast cereal.
Well, I was kind of relieved. There was no bitterness, we just smiled kinda sadly and that was it....more
Here is another Modern Victorian escapade in which all the fetid pustules of scabbiness are left in – indeed, lovingly THE HANGDANGLE OF THE APPENDAGE
Here is another Modern Victorian escapade in which all the fetid pustules of scabbiness are left in – indeed, lovingly preserved and appreciated – by the wheedlywise eyebrow-hoisting elbow-jogging don’t miss-that, take-a-look-down-here Cook’s tour guide of a self-consciously 21st century author, which means that every so often Lynn Shepherd will give us comments like
It is as if a switch has been flicked – an analogy which is at least thirty years away, by the way
Or
He thinks no more of owning a gun than of taking laudanum when he has a toothache, though both would brand him as a dangerous delinquent now
Or even
It will not surprise you to find that this part of London is not much frequented by the idly inquisitive (though Charles Dickens himself will make almost exactly this journey in a few months’ time).
Michel Faber in his totally wonderful Crimson Petal and the White brings this possibly-a-little-too-cute technique to a fine frosted Christmascakey mix which is delicious to lick right off of your fingers, I positively deliquesce at the memory. But Lynn Shepherd is like an earnest toiler, she dances not, she ploughs on, no pirouettes but a great deal of plottish barging about.
And then there is the matter of the dialogue. Dialogue that never emitted forth out of any human mouth except the suborned orifices of actors, who had an excuse, they were paid, they had no other job in the offing. Look :
Tulkinghorn (for it is he) : You are interfering in matters you cannot possibly understand.
Charles Maddox : Oh but I do. I understand a good deal more than you realize.
Reader (for it is I) : Groan…
Young Charles appears to have a keen eye for a well-turned cliché – a few pages later we have him saying :
You’ll have to try harder than that, Bucket. You can’t pin this one on me.
[Audience of goodreaders : Oh yes he can! Charles Maddox (swinging round, breaking the fourth wall, realising he’s in a pantomime) : Oh no he can’t!]
Well, we do know that this novel is a kind of riff or spin on Bleak House, and I am sure you can find equally horrible stuff in that brilliant novel, but still, do we have to have foisted upon us the poor dying sweeper Jo who says a lot of stuff like :
I’ve been a-chivvied and a-worried and a-chivvied but now I is moved on as fur as I ever can go and can’t move on no furder. It’s time fur me to go down to that there berryin-ground. Let me lay there quiet wiv him and not be chivvied no more.
( I had to mop up my tears with large-sized teatowels at this point, and wring them out in the bath.)
Actually our author is upfront about her sources - her novel, she explains in the acknowledgement section, takes place in the "space between" Bleak House and The Woman in White, and has more than a helping of Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor stirred in.
Well, I like to poke my appendage into the oily scum of any available Victorian aperture along with the best of you, of that you may be assured, but Tom All-Alone's (retitled The Solitary House for American readers because, you know, they just don't get Dickens references over there) was more like a funfair ghost train than reimagined Dickens. Lots of things went BOO, lots of icky stuff went whizzing by your left ear, spiders and skellybobs hangdangled down in your hair, EW!, and we all went WOO! and came out into the ordinary autumn daylight and found we were still alive and didn't remember too much. ...more
The Modern Victorian Novel : a Scrummy dish for All the Family
Ingredients
½ cup Wilkie Collins 3 oz finely ground Sarah Waters 2 oz Crimson Petals and Wh The Modern Victorian Novel : a Scrummy dish for All the Family
Ingredients
½ cup Wilkie Collins 3 oz finely ground Sarah Waters 2 oz Crimson Petals and Whites 1 lunatic asylum 1 Railway disaster or if not available, a Coal Mine Explosion will do 3 or 4 Drunks and Uncouth Persons A fresh bunch of Scullery Maids and Servants 1 Master 1 Mistress 1 Rambling Manse 2 Crowds A large bag of hard luck 5 teaspoons of child prostitution 2 oz grated Freudianism 3 lb. meaningful dreams Undercurrents of Lesbianism to taste As much droll slang as you can stomach Toss together in a big manuscript and hope it all comes right in the end
***
This was a bit of a shaggy dog story, or shaggy maid story, where you think every part of this novel is pinched from somewhere else but heck, it’s still fun, and anyway, tell me something that’s completely original in this day and age, right? This is post post modernism or wherever we’re at, beyond irony, beyond plagiarism, if it feels good do it. So this was fun fun fun till her daddy took the t-bird away. Which is to say that the problem was not in the telling of the tale, that was rollicking, if tonally precarious to the point of no longer being slightly credible, but who was counting; the problem was that the tale spluttered and melted and came apart, the denouement could not match the buildup, a shame really. With a whizbang plot (instead of a lot of peculiar circumstances gesturing vaguely towards a plot) this would have been a corker but without one it’s all a bit mere. It was a big bag of Cadbury’s Caramel Nibbles – O my God did I just eat the whole bag?? And you’re left feeling a bit guilty but you got to admit you liked it while you were doing it.
Just realised that this Poor Things is the very book that the big new movie Poor Things that apparently everybody is talking about is based on.[image]
Just realised that this Poor Things is the very book that the big new movie Poor Things that apparently everybody is talking about is based on....! Now I need to see it...!
*****
original review :
Almost the only thing that dragged me away from this rollicking novel was a school production of Oliver in which my daughter Georgia (soon to be 16, can that possibly be?) was cavorting and twirling as part of the chorus line (oom-papah, oom-papah, that's how it goes!) , and then warbling a solo Where Is Love as Mrs Bedwin The Housekeeper over Oliver's sleeping form – she looked so pretty with her hair piled up on her head, something she never does in real life. There was a schoolgirl usher who sat next to us on the front row, and before the performance started, she got chatting. We asked her if she had wanted to be in Oliver, and she said she had been, but had to drop out, because her dad just died. What?? You can imagine our interested smiles freezing and dropping to the floor in splinters. Oh yes, it was just a couple of weeks ago, and her mum is still in the hospital very ill from the same thing as killed her dad. What???? We really didn't know what to say, and she seemed so matter-of-fact about this ghastly tragedy. At that uneasy moment, the orphans arrived and started lining up for their gruel.
After the whole thing was done and we had gone through every single part of the evening and told Georgia precisely who was good or bad, what we thought of the sound effects for Nancy's murder and the cut of Mr Bumble's jib, we mentioned this awful story. Oh that was Grace, she said, rolling her eyes. She was going to be Mrs Bumble but she was kicked out for not turning up to rehearsals. No, her dad hadn't died and her mother wasn't in any hospital with a life-threatening ailment. I think I would have heard about that! Grace is a compulsive liar. Everyone knows that!
And so is Alasdair Gray. Poor Things is a Victorian narrative by a "Scottish public Health Officer" named Archibald McCandless which is immediately contradicted completely by a letter/essay written by the principal of the narrative, his wife Bella Baxter aka Victoria McCandless, which is in turn cross-examined and undermined to an extent by a series of contemporary notes appended by "Alisdair Gray". Some novels given to japery-wheezy faux-academic pastiche do this – check out House of Leaves for a rock and roll example, or Pale Fire by Nabokov, probably the grandaddy of the genre. It's great fun – how could it not be when you get, for instance, the great Glaswegian seducer Duncan Wedderburn justifying himself in terms such as these:
No delicious scullions, tempting laundry manglers, lucious latrine scrubbers ever lost a day's work by dallying with Duncan Wedderburn, though the shortness and irregularity of their free time meant I had to court several at once.
Or again, savour the Dickensian turn of phrase of Bella, our heroine, talking about a trip to Argentine to try to discover some of her own mysterious history:
In Buenos Aires we tried to visit my parents' grave, but Baxter found the railway company that paid for the interment had put them in a graveyard on the edge of a bottomless canyon, so when Chimborazo or Cotopaxi or Popocatapetl erupted the whole shebang collapsed in an avalance to the bottom crushing headstones coffins skeletons to a powder of in-fin-it-se-im-al atoms. Seeing them in that state would have been like visiting a heap of caster sugar.
I've now read four Alasdair Gray books, all completely different from each other, except as regards to their linguistic effervescence. Lanark is the big masterpiece. But if you fancy a bit of Victoriana with a dash of Breughel, a spoonful of Engels and a garnishing of Mary Shelley, Poor Things will do for you as it did for me....more
If a novel of nearly 900 pages can be summarised in one phrase then Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell may, I think, be described as a stately, sly, witty,If a novel of nearly 900 pages can be summarised in one phrase then Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell may, I think, be described as a stately, sly, witty, intricate, comic retelling of Dracula, with digressions and very little blood.
Count Dracula takes life from beautiful young ladies, enslaves them, enchants them, enraptures them, steals them away, into his own twilight (oops, sorry) vampire world – they become something other than what they were, undead, not alive yet not dead, creatures which do his bidding (the company I work for does something quite similar so it appears to be legal). In Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, a fairy does exactly the same thing, but there's no blood involved, just a little magic. In Dracula it takes quite a while before the heroes realise what’s happening to their gorgeous young women (in both books the gorgeousness is emphasised, I do like that, you know, since they're imaginary why can't they be drop dead too? hmm, probably the wrong phrase). But compared with Mr Strange and Mr Norrell, the Dracula boys are quick on the uptake. Because we’re past page 600 before the penny drops in this one.
THE ARBITRARINESS OF MAGIC
One of my problems with this giant enfolding fog of a book is the nature of magic itself. In Dracula Van Helsing lays out the rules about vampires for the readers – they can do this but they can’t do that; sunlight, shape-shifting; silver; crosses; all of that. He later wrote the Observer Book of Vampires (Heinemann, 1911) and it's all in there. The rules are the rules. Many young leary vampires have been struck off for thinking that they were too cool for rules.
Governing committee : You were seen buying maximum factor sunblock in Superdrug three Saturdays in a row.
Young cool vampire : Yeah well, my girlfriend wants me to go camping with her family next week.
Governing committee : Under section 3 subsection 2 paragraph B I hereby strike you off the official list of vampires.
YCV : But but
GC : Beat it, kid, don't waste our time. This is a serious business.
But there are no rules for magic - at least, none discernable. The rule seems to be - sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Mr Strange goes to war to help the English fight Napoleon Boney. In Portugal he is able to create good roads where only mud tracks exist for the English Army to march down. Later he is able to make magical hands arise from the earth and entangle the French troops; but he doesn’t do any magic to prevent the English troops being massacred by cannonballs and artillery – what, no magical winds available to blow the cannonballs off course? But pardon, Mr Strange, elsewhere don’t you say that weather magic is the easiest sort to do? So whyever not? Well, we are not told. He never thinks of doing it, never thinks of alleviating the English troops’ suffering. Susanna Clark says in an interview that she wished to show that people’s romantic or over-optimistic notions of magic were to be disappointed by the unsatisfactoriness of her version of magic. I take that argument, it’s a good one, but it does not solve the difficulty of arbitrariness and the lack of any rules or boundaries. When anything can happen, and then at some other point, for unknown reasons, the same thing can’t happen, the element of tension simply disappears in a cloud of smoke – poof! As if by magic.
BIPOLARITY
I thought that the villain in this novel was certainly suffering from undiagnosed bipolar disorder. Alas that the story took place in the 1810s, when mood stabilising medication had not yet been developed. If the gentleman with the thistledown hair had been prescribed Carbamazepine, Lamotrigine or Lithium I am quite sure the whole thing with the ladies would have never happened and the misunderstanding and antagonisms between him and the two magicians would never have arisen in the first place.
STYLE
It has been said this novel is like Dickens. It is not. Those who say that have not read Dickens. Do not believe them. It is said that this novel is like Jane Austen. Okay, with your left eye closed and your right eye squinched up and tilting the novel at a slight angle, then yes, it is. But don’t say it too loudly or Jane Austen fans might beat you lightly with their lace doileys.
PACING
The good news : the story definitely picks up around page 650. That is the good news.
SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK?
For readers thinking about giving this one a go , you should know a few things. Half of this novel is quite a bit longer than most other novels, so unless you like slow, laborious build-ups (this is not the magical equivalent of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill), intricate fake-scholarly footnotes recounting mad details about non-existent books, people, folk-tales, all pseudo-erudite tomfoolery calculated to flesh out the magical world whilst at the same time giving the reader many large winks along the lines “aren’t we having some scholarly fun? Isn’t this a thinking person’s hoot?”; unless you like many pages spent fretting about whether Mr Norrell will lend Mr Strange a particular book (this will-he won’t-he theme gets a little tiresome, so I’ll let you know – big plot spoiler - he doesn’t – now you can skip those bits); unless you like your reading to be languid, leisurely, luxurious, learned, leavened with loopy legerdemain and long, long, long, this may not be the one for you.
At the very heart of certain narratives is a lacuna, to which the reader is drawn ineluctibly, as the centre of a whirlpool of meanings. It may indicaAt the very heart of certain narratives is a lacuna, to which the reader is drawn ineluctibly, as the centre of a whirlpool of meanings. It may indicate something essentially unknowable, ineffable - the lacuna in the Old Testament is when God tells Moses I AM THAT I AM, which lets us know in no uncertain terms that this thing is not of logic or language, whatever it may be; the lacuna of the New Testament is Christ's three days in the tomb - we are not told anything about that, it is unknowable. Or this gap in the story may indicate simply something someone does not wish to tell us - the very heart of the matter, the thing of shame, the motive. Here the gap is a void or avoidance. Psychologically powerful avoidance fuelled by intense guilt makes a hair-raising narrative, as the reader, writer and protagonist gradually converge together and find themselves in the belly of the beast - two memorable examples from non-fiction are Fritz Stangl's horrible wrestling with his past as commandant of Treblinka in Gitta Sereney's series of interviews with him ("Into that Darkness") and Michaud & Aynesbury's interviews with Ted Bundy ("Conversations with a Killer"). In both cases we are caught up in the subtle and confrontational stratagems the interviewers use to get the monster to acknowledge an identification with the previous self who committed the atrocities. Stangl ferociously hangs on to the "it was just a job, a really really difficult job" line until he cracks - and how dramatic to read that a day or so after he finally - finally - admits that he was personally responsible for what he had done, he dies of a heart attack. Bundy constructs a way of describing his crimes by "speculating" about them in the third person, contemplating how the person who perpetrated them "might have been" feeling, of how he "was reacting inappropriately to stress in his life". He edges to the very rim of acceptance of guilt but can't manage the swan-dive into what we non-serial killers assume to be the cleansing waters of catharsis which await those who accept their crimes and seek atonement. Alias Grace's story likewise is a stately sarabande of 550 pages around the central question - did she do it? Suspended from that mystery, the ponderous but pillowy narrative describes the life of Grace Marks in her own languid hyper-observational manner (a great fictional voice) and counterposes this with the fervid cavortings of the brain doctor sent to ferret out her great secret. He's quite a scream. So anyway, this book is squarely in that genre I call Modern Victorian, in which the contemporary novelist writes us another great big Victorian story but being modern can put in all the filth and flesh, all the naming of parts which the real Victorian novelists couldn't do. It turns out, from what I've read so far, to be a great idea. Consider these -
1) The Crimson Petal and the White (Michel Faber) - completely brilliant and nearly 1000 pages too
2) The Quincunx (Charles Palliser) - completely brilliant and just over 1000 pages
3) Fingersmith (Sarah Waters) - yes, just about completely brilliant too
4) The French Lieutenant's Woman (John Fowles) - acknowledged by all to be fairly brilliant
Very glad to add Alias Grace to this select list and will be happy to grab up other Modern Victorians as they swim my way.
Alias Grace likes, in its modern way, to leave a lot of stuff unanswered and without chucking in a huge horrid spoiler here, I can't reveal why I think that part of the Central Revelatory Scene was pure codswallop, but that didn't make no never mind. Margaret Atwood's big book sails onward, sad, sumptuous, and very slightly sexy too....more
If every other novel was like this it would be terrible. I'd never leave the house. I'd call my office : "sorry, can't make it today, I have 450 pagesIf every other novel was like this it would be terrible. I'd never leave the house. I'd call my office : "sorry, can't make it today, I have 450 pages to finish, I'm sure you'll understand, put it down as a family emergency" and eventually they'd email me - "you're fired" - but I wouldn't read the email. My cat would have to become feral. Empires might tumble, Bob Dylan might be chosen as the next Pope, I wouldn't notice.
Anyway, fortunately, most novels aren't either this good or this long, so we can live reasonably normal lives.
The Quincunx involves lots of delicious Victorian squalor, detail upon detail of filth and horror, the bilgewaters floweth and the sewers burst forth, there are villains, people have goitres, there are beatings, and I think there's a little donkey in there somewhere....more
This totally wonderful novel does exactly what the title says, it fingers your myth, it steals up on your soul and breathes down its neck and a shuddeThis totally wonderful novel does exactly what the title says, it fingers your myth, it steals up on your soul and breathes down its neck and a shudder of pleasure is felt to the ends of all your extremities, your brain will wobble, your hair will vibrate strongly, and your eyebrows will be thrust up and down like energetic trampolining children as the intricate-clockmaker plot fastens your eyes ravenously to every page - draw the curtains, do not charge the mobile phone, tell your friends you have gone to Tibet for three weeks, or Saskatchewan if that's less likely to make them worry. If there's an earthquake or a revolution you won't notice. In that way this book is close kin to The Quincunx and The Crimson Petal and the White. I want to be buried with all these three novels. So, you may know it's a Modern Victorian novel, which is a mini-genre I love & want more of, and you may also have heard that in this particular Modern Victorian lesbians are somehow involved. It is true, but what is more to the point is that a completely enthralling love story is portrayed, which happens to be between two women.
In 2003 The Crimson Petal and the White was published to much acclaim. I read it and awarded it five plump wobbly stars. But other readers had other rIn 2003 The Crimson Petal and the White was published to much acclaim. I read it and awarded it five plump wobbly stars. But other readers had other reactions. In his forward to this slender collection of short stories, Mr Faber says that he gets letters from his readers and he keeps them in a box. So that’s surprising right there – who writes to authors? I would never have the nerve. I mean, what would you say to Shakespeare? Dear Bard, I must say that I thought The Tempest was a wonderful note on which to bring down the curtain, as it were, on your illustrious career. You are my favourite Elizabethan playwright. Have a wonderful retirement. Your friend, P Bryant. Dear Brett Easton Ellis, I have now spoken with my lawyers and if you attempt to contact me again or come within 100 yards of myself and my immediate family (note – mother in law not counted as immediate) you will be in breach of the court order and prompt action will be taken. Yours, P Bryant. Anyway, Mr Faber received letters saying “Why do you make me suffer more?” and “I implore you, please please please” and another said “The Crimson Petal is the most frustrating, maddening masterwork that I have ever trudged through in my life…novels are supposed to have satisfying tight endings…” so basically everyone got to the end, all 835 pages, and found there was no ending, it just stopped.
It was like the old refrain : “if you want any more you can sing it yourself”.
It was really a bit rude. 835 pages and no ending?
People really got into this novel. He quotes a note from a gentlemen in Lancashire :
A few days before Christmas I was half awake and the first thought that came to me was what I could obtain as Christmas presents for Miss Sophie, Sugar, and Mrs Fox. Then suddenly I realised who they really were.
Well, Mr Faber relented, kind of, and wrote this collection of stories about the fates of the characters in his giant novel. It does answer most questions, and I thought it was splendid, but I’m pretty much a Faber fanboy. ...more
You know in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind they've invented this brilliant device for erasing specific memories and the whole plot revolves aroYou know in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind they've invented this brilliant device for erasing specific memories and the whole plot revolves around people who meet each other after they've had their memories of each other already erased, so they re-meet and re-love and it's all poignant and kind of whoah and oops I kind of gave the plot away - well, you should have seen it by now, come on, it's years old. Anyway, I'd love that particular invention to be true true true so that I could hustle down to the memory doctor's office and after having ALL of my romantic entanglements DELETED from my brain, obviously that would be the very first thing to do, then I'd present the doctor with a list of books to delete; and The Crimson Petal and the White would be right there in that little list, and it would, of course, be just so that I could have the pure unsullied delectable pleasure of reading it for the first time - again.
This is such a corking good page turner like if some giant Dickens and The Quincunx and The Worm in the Bud (great book about the Victorian sexual underworld) and some other stuff were shoved in the blender and then written up by a guy who really knows what he's doing.
Now, the ENDING of this huge novel was criticised greatly as being NOT AN ENDING at all but merely a dribbling away. So please note that there is a book called THE APPLE which is short stories accounting for the rest of all the characters' lives, and that's great and essential too.
I envy you people who have not read this.
And I'd also ask for my memory of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to be deleted too, that would just be a little bit of post modern humour to share with the memory doctor. Oh, and the memory of writing this review....more
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