A sharp glinting sliver of horror not confronted, glanced at and shuddered away from, then finally grasped. Sometimes the things that are closest to yA sharp glinting sliver of horror not confronted, glanced at and shuddered away from, then finally grasped. Sometimes the things that are closest to you are hardest to see. Now I have to know more. This tiny novel is not to be missed. It will only take you 90 minutes, or less. ...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
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.
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.
My driving instructor used to say that he wanted me to drive in such a manner that if there was a cup of tea sitting on the roof of the car there woulMy driving instructor used to say that he wanted me to drive in such a manner that if there was a cup of tea sitting on the roof of the car there wouldn’t be a drop spilled by the time we came back, and this novel does just that. Its hardcore gentleness is a mask for a melancholy swandive into the grim realities of being old and useless and lonely and on the way out.
These four old codgers in London in the 1970s, none of them have any family or friends, they work together in an office doing virtually nothing for an unnamed organisation while a fine layer of dust sifts gently over their lives and having completed their waxing decades ago, if they ever did wax, they are for sure waning now. The two women retire partway through the story and the whole thing is about all the things they then don’t do, and just a few tiny things they do. We are very familiar with this kind of soft, hushed comedy here in Britain. It turns up (beautifully) in Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor, (not so beautifully) in How it All Began by Penelope Lively, and more recently in The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling (that one modulates from gentle to less gentle comedy and finally to lurid tragedy. But it starts in Barbara Pym territory). And it can be seen in a zillion sitcoms. And in the funnier films of Mike Leigh.
Also, Barbara Pym very deliberately turns this novel into a repository of cliched, worn-out, tedious, tiresome well known English phrases and sayings – her characters have their whole lives been prisoners of convention in deed and in thought, so they come out endlessly with stuff like
That’s about the size of it Beggars can’t be choosers Pushing the boat out Nice work if you can get it They’ll hardly thank us for that Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb It’s almost like old times One is at a slight disadvantage Thank you for nothing And so on, and on.
I like my comedy to have a little more grit, bite, nastiness and and bile than this, but I will say that the sense of teetering on the edge of eternity, the uneasy apprehension of the thin membrane that separates sanity from chaotic horror, drifts through these unremarkable scenes like poison gas. ...more
There were too many sentences in this book. This is a hefty 436 page very long very autobiographical novel which tells a straightforwardly miserable sThere were too many sentences in this book. This is a hefty 436 page very long very autobiographical novel which tells a straightforwardly miserable story about an alcoholic mother and her youngest son. It’s the Shuggie and Agnes Show but there are no laughs and any dancing is a pure embarrassment. Instead there is a whole lot of effing and blinding and throwing things, and enough tears to float a flock of geese. Not only is nobody laughing, the only smiling is of that ghastly fake sort when Agnes is trying to pretend she’s sober.
This is Glasgow in the 80s and 90s, wall to wall unemployment and life lived through a thick fog of cigarette smoke and Stella Artois. All the welfare benefit payments dished out to Agnes go swirling down her throat and the two kids she has left have to find their own food. Leek, Shuggie’s older brother, has only one word of advice to him – leave as soon as you can.
The heartbreak is that Shuggie loves his fall down drunk mother to distraction, and as is the way these things go sometimes, between the age of 10 and 15 he becomes her parent, and finds himself having to do a lot of nasty stuff that no kid should ever have to do for his mother. All of which we get in great detail.
Since this book gets nothing but 4 and 5 stars and as you know it won the big bad Booker Prize it’s clear that readers appreciated the banquet of human unhappiness that is this forlorn relationship. After his brother and sister escape, Shuggie is on his own with his terrible mother. If this was a movie, a Lowest Point would be reached but then some glint of light would appear in the form of a decent man, finally, after all the drunken one night stands. He would find Agnes sparked out on the floor and discover there was no food in the house (“What’s this? Nothing to eat all day Shuggie?”) and he would stick around and some tiny unextinguished spark of humanity would begin to grow in Agnes’ mind.
But this is no movie script so that doesn’t happen. There are hundreds of pages in this novel where not only do things not get any better, they never even look for a minute as if they could possibly get better, and Shuggie Bain turned into johnny one-note.
The big thing about The God of Small Things is the prose, it’s quite something. To be more specific, it’s phosphorescent, forensic, moist, listopian, The big thing about The God of Small Things is the prose, it’s quite something. To be more specific, it’s phosphorescent, forensic, moist, listopian, inflammable, jubilant, childlike, zygotic, hierophantic, susurrant, daemonical, yeasty, garrulous, exact, oleaginous, quaggy, kleptomaniacal, newlyminted, refulgent, blinding, xenogamic, wounding, vulpine, uncanny and taxonomical but allegedly never aleatory.
Buried under and squirreled away in the middle of this great mass of mostly (beautiful, confounding) child-eye-vision noticing and describing is a knot of connected violence (random and intended), the engorged heart of the matter, that throws various lives round as you might expect. Readers have to be patient, this is not about plot, it’s about how a writer can arrive out of nowhere and at age 35 publish a first novel that creates a bidding war then knocks everyone out and then wins the Booker Prize.
After that, by the way, there was (fictional) silence .
SOME AUTHORS WHO TOOK A WHILE TO FOLLOW UP THEIR SUCCESSFUL FIRST NOVEL
Joseph Heller – 13 Years (Catch-22 1961 to Something Happened 1974) Marilyn Robinson – 24 years (Housekeeping 1980 to Gilead 2004)
And the champ
Henry Roth – 60 years (Call It Sleep 1934 to Mercy of a Rude Stream 1994)
Ms Roy is in the middle, she only took 20 years to follow up The God of Small Things with The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.
But back to this extraordinary book. Here’s a flavour of what you are going to get. First a description of how one character descends into muteness:
Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory; dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there.
But a whole lot of this book, maybe most, is seen through the eyes of two children aged seven, so we have a lot of almost Joycean weirdness like this:
Estha saw how Baby Kochamma’s neckmole licked its chops and throbbed with delicious anticipation. Der-Dboom, Der-Dboom. It changed color like a chameleon. Der-green, der-blueblack, dermustardyellow. Twins for tea It would bea.
And we have many, many little lists too :
Then the policemen looked around and saw the grass mat. The pots and pans. The inflatable goose. The Qantas koala with loosened button eyes. The ballpoint pens with London’s streets in them. Socks with separate colored toes. Yellow-rimmed red plastic sunglasses. A watch with the time painted on it.
SIMILEWATCH
As usual I like to spot the funny similes that authors love to heap up, it’s like some of ‘em think similes are what writing a novel is for. Here are some favorites (my own little list) :
Like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant Like substandard mattress-stuffing Like shining beads on an abacus Like a room in a hospital after the nurse had just been Like lumpy knitting Like hairy cannonballs Like an unfriendly jewelled bear Like sub-tropical flying-flowers Like an absurd corbelled monument that commemorated nothing Like a press of eager natives petitioning an English magistrate
INDIAN WRITERS
For me they divide into the plain
R K Narayan Rohinton Mistry Adiga Aravind Sunjeev Sahota Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
And the flowery
Salman Rushdie Nadeem Aslam Kiran Desai And Arundhati Roy
Which is not to say that the plain can’t turn a delightful phrase or the flowery can’t think up a decent story.
I CONFESS I AM A LITTLE SURPRISED
That The God of Small Things gets so much readerlove as it does. It’s eccentric and often confusing, maddeningly detailed and slow-burning and I can imagine it won’t be everybody’s bright green mocktail with a paper umbrella. The 336 pages can read like 500 at times, because there’s an intricate (disrupted, fractured) sequence of events and understandings to be fitted together, and the author takes her own time.
So, I know it won the Booker Prize, but don’t let that put you off....more
Whatever novel I read after Middlemarch was going to have a hard time. It was a rare thing to inhabit the mind of George Eliot for two weeks, nothing Whatever novel I read after Middlemarch was going to have a hard time. It was a rare thing to inhabit the mind of George Eliot for two weeks, nothing after that was going to be even half as good, probably. Anita Desai drew the short straw and she won’t be happy about that. Sorry, Anita. Your novel is okay-ish, that is, it’s not terrible, but er… well… hmmm….
Actually, between you and me, I didn’t think it was up to much. It gets a lot of Goodreads love but I could have done without it. I can’t think I would ever bitterly regret not having read this novel. Four middle-class kids grow up in Delhi, the parents are distant bridge-playing don’t bother me I’m busy types. The kids are frankly kind of cliched – arrogant son who expects sisters to obey his every whim, older plain Jane sister at war with everybody & taking all responsibility, younger pretty sister something of an airhead, youngest brother mentally impaired. He is obsessed with an old wind-up gramophone. He plays the same bunch of 78s over and over. That would get on your nerves. I like “Lili Marlene” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” as much as the next guy but I couldn’t take them every day of the week. And I thought the number of times Anita Desai detailed this obsessive behaviour was verging on the obsessive itself.
Half the book is set in the present where the family has disintegrated – cue much moping and maundering about the past, the past oh the past and how the house needs repainting now and wasn’t it sad when the cow fell in the well; and the other half is in 1947 just before Partition when fortunately for this family they avoid all the mayhem.
One of the major conflicts in the story is when Bim (older sister) is trying to decide whether to sell the shares in their father’s insurance company. I mean, it’s not Dostoyevsky, is it.
I saw that in 2004 the Sunday Times played a sneaky trick on the book world. They sent off the opening chapters of three Booker Prize winners to some I saw that in 2004 the Sunday Times played a sneaky trick on the book world. They sent off the opening chapters of three Booker Prize winners to some agents and publishers pretending they were new unpublished novels, to see if a) they were recognised, and b) if they weren’t recognised, if their excerpts would get any attention. Only one of their victims wanted to see more of the work. The three novels they used were In a Free State by V S Naipaul, The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer, and this one, Holiday by Stanley Middleton.
The other thing I saw is that this guy Stanley Middleton wrote 44 novels and pretty much nobody reads him any more. Well, a lot of writers have written 44 novels that nobody reads no more but the idea makes me feel so tired. All that clack clacking on a typewriter. Miles and miles of ribbon.
Holiday is like Mr Phillips by John Lanchester. In that one a middle class nobody has lost his job but doesn’t tell his family so he leaves the house pretending to go to work and mooches about all day and the novel is what’s going on in his head. In Holiday a different middle class nobody has left his wife and gone on holiday and mooches about all day and the novel is what’s going on in his head.
Cue ten thousand gloomy, piquant, self-loathing observations about English life.
But right now I’m done with English self-loathing. You can have too much of a good thing....more
Firstly, I am informed that you died in 2000 at the age of 83, but I feel this should not mean that I am unable to write to you, aDear Miss Fitzgerald
Firstly, I am informed that you died in 2000 at the age of 83, but I feel this should not mean that I am unable to write to you, although I do realise an answer may not be forthcoming as soon as I might wish.
I recently finished your novel Offshore. It was a pleasant contrast to the previous novel I read, which was Crime and Punishment. From lengthy Russian existential horror to slight English whimsy! Like lying down in a sunlit meadow after being involved in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
But I do have a complaint to make, hence this letter. Your novel is set in 1962, there are dates and ages of characters provided to establish that, plus Martha the 12 year old girl loves Elvis and Cliff Richard. So that’s clear. But then on p137 a teenage boy from Austria pipes up and says
I am very much looking forward to seeing Swinging London
Miss Fitzgerald, he could not have said that in 1962 as London had not started swinging yet. You might say the swinging began around 1964/5 with the advent of the Mods but as far as I know the term was first used by Time Magazine in April 1966. So this appears to be an anachronism in your novel.
The error is continued and compounded when Martha and this Austrian lad visit boutiques which are described just like they would have been in 1967:
Heinrich and Martha went in and out of one boutique after another, Dressing Down, Wearwithal, Wearabouts, Virtuous Heroin, Legs, Rags, Bags, A paradise for children, a riot of misrule, the queer looking shops reversed every fixed idea in the venerable history of commerce. Sellers, dressed in brilliant colours, outshone the purchasers, and instead of welcoming them, either ignored them or were so rude that they could only have hoped to drive them away.
What a glittering description of the Kings Road boutiques five years after your novel was set! I was wondering if this was some deliberate alienation device or if you just had some kind of major brain fade when you wrote this, and no one, agents, editors, reviewers, nobody noticed. Or if they did they did not think it worth mentioning.
But I did.
Otherwise, Offshore was the perfect antidote to Dostoyevsky, who, in turn, is the perfect antidote to novels like Offshore.
Hoping you are having a reasonable time in the afterlife,
1) Western writers on British India seem a bit obsessed with sex between English women and Indian men. There was A Passage to India by Forster in 19241) Western writers on British India seem a bit obsessed with sex between English women and Indian men. There was A Passage to India by Forster in 1924 – the plot turns round a charge of rape of an English woman by an Indian man. Then The Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott in 1966 – another charge of rape of an English woman by an Indian man. Then Heat and Dust in 1975 which gives us the shocking tale of an English woman who elopes with an Indian man.
2) This novel is another of those very melancholy drooping meandering quiet humble softly despairing everything under the surface not really a plot at all books like Hotel Du Lac and Staying On and The Remains of the Day. They can be brilliant – Remains of the Day is really great – but sometimes you want to light a jumping jack under their arses. Heat and Dust was just eurghhhhhhh.
3) 1975 must have been a dire year if this won the Booker Prize....more
Roddy Doyle is a wonderful comic writer - The Commitments and The Snapper are both Recommended - but this one is off-the-scale irritating. People who Roddy Doyle is a wonderful comic writer - The Commitments and The Snapper are both Recommended - but this one is off-the-scale irritating. People who finish it and even actually like it clearly love kids way more than I do....more
“What’s this? Three measly stars for a book by a writer Mr Robert McCrum called “the greatest living writer of English prose” and said A Bend in the R“What’s this? Three measly stars for a book by a writer Mr Robert McCrum called “the greatest living writer of English prose” and said A Bend in the River was his masterpiece. And he includes it in his list of the 100 best novels EVER. Like, EVER.”
“Well, you know, a cat may look at a king and blah blah…”
“So what was the problem this time? Or maybe you just don’t like novels anymore? Ever thought of that?”
“Well I guess I thought that VS Naipaul was Johnny One Note. You’ll remember him :
Johnny could only sing one note And the note he sang was this:
Everything’s going to hell in a hand basket, especially in Africa.”
“That’s it? 300 pages of everything’s going to hell?”
“Well, yeah, kind of. Salim the narrator is totally depressed and almost sleepwalks through the whole thing, except the part where he beats up his girlfriend ('I used my foot on her then'), he sparks into life for that bit. Oh, and the girlfriend says she didn’t mind.
Do you want me to come back? The road is quite empty. I can be back in twenty minutes. Oh, Salim. I look dreadful. My face is in an awful state. I will have to hide for days.
This girlfriend also says this famous quote :
Women are stupid. But if women weren’t stupid the world wouldn’t go round.”
“Ah, I am detecting another snowflakey response here…”
“It’s just the usual thing – it would be infantile to think the author is nasty like his own characters – but it does seem the beating up of the girlfriend was something the author actually did do at least once, according to the authorised biography.”
“But I think it’s a well known fact that VS Naipaul was not going to win a prize for selling the most gingerbread cookies on behalf of the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association, he was pretty much a professional curmudgeon. So none of this is hold the front page.”
“Well, I acknowledge that to be quite true. But I’m a bit bemused by how much praise this miserable novel gets. A Bend in the River is an equal opportunities slagfest, everybody gets it in the neck, Africa, Europe, the USA, there’s a general all-purpose sneer and despairing shrug that can feel stifling for a poor reader. Like, come on, VS, don’t you have a good word for anything? No? But the book itself is a complicated case.”
“How so?”
“Well the author was from an Indian Hindu family but he was born in Trinidad then moved to England. This novel is about life in Zaire, as it was then, under the unpredictable great ruler Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga who had a baffling way of describing his politics : “neither left nor right, nor even centre”. So this is a post-colonial country and Naipaul the outsider is writing about Salim, another outsider. For pages and pages we get generalisations about Africa flung about like confetti and the strong implication is that Mobutu, and by extension other African dictators, are making a terrible job of running the country. But Salim is such a passive whiner – everything is mildewed, my shop is going down the drain, I hate all my friends, I’m rotting away here in the back of beyond which I volunteered to come to. Oh me, oh my. It's impossible to drum up much sympathy for his sorry ass.
Everyone had become more greedy and desperate. There was this feeling of everything running down very fast, of a great chaos coming
and so forth....”
“So to counter the bracing misanthropy of Sir VS Naipaul, Nobel laureate, (you see how the establishment loved this guy) you should probably read Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane next, or perhaps The Little House on the Prairie."
Bells in many readers’ heads will be clanging repeatedly as they devour this frankly vicious novel. The frumpy 62 year old spinster Barbara Covett, a Bells in many readers’ heads will be clanging repeatedly as they devour this frankly vicious novel. The frumpy 62 year old spinster Barbara Covett, a teacher, who gloms onto svelte hippyish upper-class 41 year old Sheba Hart (ages are most relevant as will be seen) the moment she bicycles into the school playground to take up pottery teaching puts out a very strong TOM RIPLEY vibe as she strives mightily to become Sheba’s BFF and to ooze into Sheba’s very bloodstream, like psycho Tom does to Dickie Greenleaf. My money says that Zoe Heller’s bookshelf contained a well-thumbed copy of The Talented Mr Ripley.
In turn borderline personality Barbara bequeaths a good chunk of her curious manner of expression to ELEANOR OLIPHANT :
Later she discovered that she and Connolly had unknowingly set up camp in the area of the heath frequented by homosexuals. The man who disturbed them had not been a Peeping Tom but a queer Lothario in search of a conquest.
and
It became clear - again too late - that he had been going for a kiss on both cheeks. The immediate introduction of physical intimacy was a horrid misjudgement on his part, I felt. He had never so much as shaken my hand before.
This is pure Eleanor! My money says that Gail Honeyman’s bookshelf contained a well-thumbed copy of Notes on a Scandal.
But the exaggerated comical locutions fade into horror as the tale unfolds and the depths of Barbara’s loneliness, neediness and self-loathing are revealed. Tom Ripley may be Barbara’s unacknowledged father but Barbara is Eleanor’s stark raving mad aunt. Don’t invite her for Christmas!
And regarding the salacious plot, we may recall CELESTE PRICE from Alissa Nutting’s recent outrageous novel Tampa, immediately renamed Boylita by waggish reviewers. This is because Sheba Hart, 41, as we have noted, is having an intensely sexual relationship with her 15 (later 16)-year old pupil Steven Connolly. My money says that Alissa Nutting’s bookshelf also contained a well-thumbed copy of Notes on a Scandal. (Along with Lolita and The Kama Sutra).
And there’s also a faint trace of ANNIE WILKES about our Barbara. You remember fate delivers author Paul Sheldon into Annie’s sturdy hands in Stephen King’s Misery & when he seems like he’s getting better and going to leave her she gives him a few whacks to keep him in his place - she loves him so much, you see. And Barbara, in her closeted Ripleyesque way, loves Sheba; so much that she also clobbers her to stop her leaving. But in a non-violent way. Equally unpleasant though.
(Some geekish readers will also recall the fate of the guy in Evelyn Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust from 1934 – the basic idea is exactly the same as in Misery. My money says that Stephen King’s bookshelf contained a well-thumbed copy of A Handful of Dust. Did Zoe Heller’s bookshelf contain a copy of Misery ? Let’s not get too carried away – that way madness lies.)
And modern readers may well remark to their spouses or colleagues or pets that the scandalous relationship detailed herein is a ringer for that between the 15 year-old future President of France EMMANUEL MACRON and his then 39 year old teacher Brigitte Trogneux. But since that all happened in 1992-ish and Zoe Heller’s novel was published in 2003 I can’t see any direct connection there. And anyhow, it’s lovely to see that in M Macron’s case it all worked out splendidly. For the characters in Notes on a Scandal, not so much....more
Alex opened the blinds and pulled open the glass doors to the balcony, did the washing-up quickly, rinsing out the milk carton of its clotted curds beAlex opened the blinds and pulled open the glass doors to the balcony, did the washing-up quickly, rinsing out the milk carton of its clotted curds before throwing it in the kitchen bin. She put a couple of bottles of beer and some water in the fridge for later.
If you like that kind of thing, you’ll love this novel.
****
STUFF DOES NOT HAPPEN MUCH
This is about two English families growing up between the 1970s and 1990s in a town up north called Sheffield. There are five people in one family and four in the other and so if you are keen on maths you have already deduced that there are nine major characters.
Nine characters and twenty years. Ordinary people, ordinary lives. This is not a thriller. Indeed, the author goes to great lengths to remove any possibility of thrilling the reader. It is remarkable how very few things happen to these people. It is in fact quite amazing the amount of dull stuff you can say about nine different characters. For instance, a guy retires. We get a page about what present his colleagues thought appropriate to give him. We get six pages about the retirement party, then some pages about what he did when he was retired – he pottered about. Is there a point to this? No, he’s just a character who retired, like what people do.
When something you could describe as “something” happens to one of our characters, there are maybe five or six of these somethings in the 738 pages, the novel becomes like a galvanised frog, making a couple of frantic hideous lurches, before settling down again into a somnolent catalogue of recent British interior decoration :
There was no space to dance in this little room, with its bulging fat tasselled three-piece suite decorated with a brown forestry pattern around the low coffee table
or
Alice couldn’t help looking about her at the house: the new Turkish rug, the old wood and glass coffee-table, the glass-domed preserved flowers on the shelf and the other knick-knacks, the new pair of sofas, which had replaced the three-piece suite
OKAY, A LITTLE BIT OF STUFF DOES HAPPEN
Some readers who are more kindly disposed towards this novel than myself will point out that there is a death by auto-erotic asphyxiation and that one of the nine main characters has a brain haemorrhage, and another appears to be eaten by a shark, but I say is that all you can come up with in 738 pages? I know novels that do all that in the first chapter. Autoerotic asphyxiation is the least that happens to people in some novels I have read.
Around page 520, yes, it’s true, something interesting appears to take place, a court case and a crisis in a marriage. But this is immediately followed on page 543 by five solid pages of travelogue (“beyond and below the crags, heading down into the valley that divided Rayfield Avenue, Ranmoor and Lodge Moor on one flank from Hillsborough and the moors on the other…”). Oh and the main defendant, who looms so large in the first part of the novel, we never find out what happens to him, he just disappears, poof! That was kind of just a little bit very aggravating.
THE NOVELIST’S NIGHTMARE
If I was a novelist this would be one of my nightmares. There is a scene around page 337 where two existing flatmates are doing a series of interviews of people applying to be the third flatmate. The interviews become increasingly absurd and cruel. Pretty good scene, in fact. Ho ho. But the exact same thing happens right at the beginning of the 1994 movie Shallow Grave. Did our author see the movie and it was a George Harrison/My Sweet Lord type of thing or was it a flat out coincidence? Ugh, if you found out afterwards, you would hate that.
THE TOTAL CARICATURE OF THE LEFT
One of the characters, Timothy, turns into a radical and at this point the novel stumbles into the total caricature of the left. Here’s the cardboard cutout feminist lefty Trudy on p392 talking to a miner’s wife during the famous miner’s strike :
“We feel your pain,” Trudy said exuberantly, and, as she always did, tried to embrace the chief mining wife. They sort of submitted to it, but you could see what they thought about Trudy, who, with her views on the systems that made deodorant, both vaginal and armpit, and shampoo seem necessary, wasn’t all that nice to be embraced by or even come very near to.
That’s Philip speaking, not one of his characters. I mean, FFS, right?
There’s another of these radical minor characters called Stig, a vicar’s son
Tim observed, with speechless envy, Stig’s sardonic habit of addressing his parents, to their resigned faces, as “Vicar” and “Fat Marge”
I mean, I just don’t believe any son would address his mother as Fat Marge even if she was made of a yellow butter substitute spread used for baking and cooking.
Mr Hensher’s editorialising continues during the miner’s strike.
The community hall, cluttered up now with banners and collection tins and boxes of donated cans of food, waiting for the boot-faced NUM wives to hand out to supposedly deserving cases. The food got collected in Sheffield town centre, half by the boot-faced contingent and half by a lot of silly students being supported through university by Mummy and Daddy
OLD FARTS AT PLAY
There are many moments where you think that Philip Hensher has been going around interviewing pensioners for this novel, and the pensioners would say things like “Remember how people would pause tapes on video players, this was before DVDs, young fellow, and someone would say that if you paused a videotape too long it would catch fire and burn the house down” and Philip would furiously write this down and it would appear on page 414.
RUBY TUESDAY IS NOT A BEATLES SONG
Gradually it became clear that Philip Hensher wishes to use this novel to catalogue 20 years of middle-class provincial fashions – their cuisine (“Jane had scallops wrapped in prosciutto; Robert had a porcini risotto”) interior decoration, furniture, architecture, cars, alcoholic and drug intake and municipal development. Everything is gradually filled in, like Sim City. Gastro-pubs, futons, Amstrad computers with start-up discs, hot-desking, they all march on at their appointed time. But there is one huge area he avoids and that is pop culture. We follow his five assorted kids growing up into their 30s and in the whole 738 pages there is one reference to David Cassidy and someone thinks Ruby Tuesday is a Beatles song. (Okay, I did like that small joke). There are more references to Bruckner than The Sex Pistols. So none of these kids followed The Human League or Pulp (both Sheffield bands with thousands of fans)? None of them ever listened to non-classical music or went to any movies?
I STUMBLE INTO THE LIGHT, CROAKING
Yes, I made it onto the last damned page. You know, this may come as a shock, but I think it could have done with a bit of pruning. Take out the descriptions of vol-au-vents and you’ll lose 42 pages right there.
PS - for a long novel about ordinary people in which very little stuff happens and yet strangely the said novel is brilliant, see The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett (1908)....more
Novels narrated by an oddball young boy are standard stuff - off the top of my head The Butcher Boy (great), The Curious incident of the Dog in the DrNovels narrated by an oddball young boy are standard stuff - off the top of my head The Butcher Boy (great), The Curious incident of the Dog in the Drunk Tank (pretty great) and Extremely Loud and Horribly Close (nooooooo!). This particular oddball is an 11 year old who is nearly 5 foot 10 and big with it, and talks in a manly tone of voice. (His parents are tall too. It’s a tall tale.) But the stuff he thinks are just as daft as any other 11 year old, and the family shenanigans he has to put up with are just as predictable as a jillion other kids, alas. Feckless father, harried mother, cramped living conditions, nasty bully at school, working class Irish, blah blah, this kid moans a lot but he should have been grateful he wasn’t in Angela’s Ashes, now that was something to complain about.
The kid is full of obsessions, as young persons are wont to be. His are : his lovely mother’s knockout looks (John is textbook squeamishly oedipal); his unique ability to detect lies in other people; The Guinness Book of Records; and describing meals.
Man alive, you would think this would be a family of porkers, the amount of eating that goes on in these pages. But they aren’t so we must conclude that he just describes every single breakfast, lunch and tea and all extracurricular snacks throughout this year-long tale of woe.
Let us take a core sample :
We sit at the table and eat cream of chicken soup… Granny’s eating habits make me feel sick. My father is nearly as bad. Compared to my mother they are like wild dogs. P25
The eggs are not boiled long enough and are too runny to eat. The white is the worst part, a raw clear liquid. (And so on). P 34
I make myself some toast with blackberry jam p 38
When we get home there’s a chocolate cake that Granny has made, fresh out of the cooker. I take a big slice and go to my room to eat it. P 58
So diligent is young John the giant in recording his calorific intake that even meals that don’t happen also get listed:
I hope she’ll go to the kitchen and make me a toasted ham sandwich or get me some biscuits but she doesn’t. p 78 (Get it yourself, you idle blighter.)
And this goes on throughout the novel.
WELL, WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
A year of a family disintegrating. John’s belief that he can detect lies in adults plus his belief that people should tell the truth explodes the situation, when he tells his mother what his dad has been up to. So, I guess, MJ Hyland is showing us how the fifty shades of untruth that we deal with every day of our lives are essential for the maintenance of anyone’s sanity. Don’t ask, don’t tell is the bedrock of a civilized society. What you don’t know doesn’t hurt you.
IS THIS VOICE CREDIBLE?
Here is John the 11 year old narrating his story on p 228 :
My new teacher is a short, fat woman with the cropped brown hair of a man. She wears glasses and whenever she asks a question she takes them off and dangles them in her fat hand.
I don’t think 11 year olds are going to mention the dangling, even if they notice it. On p 232 :
As I kiss her, I notice a hole in the elbow of her nightdress and another larger hole under her armpit. I can see her skin and part of her breast under the hole. I look away.
This is not an eleven year old speaking. This is a literary author pretending to be an 11 year old. You have to suspend a lot of disbelief to go with the flow here, but MJ Hyland makes it easy. John’s strange slightly robotic narration is hypnotic. I read this in 2 days. I was sorry when it ended. So answering my own question : no, not at all believable, but it doesn’t matter. Maybe all fiction is like this – none of it is credible, but it doesn’t matter. That’s not what we read it for.
When you reread an old favourite you run the risk of finding out it wasn't that great, but that didn't happen here. Not at all. Brilliant medieval sorWhen you reread an old favourite you run the risk of finding out it wasn't that great, but that didn't happen here. Not at all. Brilliant medieval sort-of-quasi-murder-mystery in which an entire troop of strolling players turns into a collective detective - that's a good enough idea right there but it's not the main one here - which is no less than the dawning of modern self-consciousness - I know, sounds very pompous. But it's not, it's so neatly expressed and it sends a shiver through your very readerly spine. You'll wish you were a porcupine so you could have more spines to shiver.
The Sisters Brothers is the son of True Grit, a funny, heartbreaking 5 star novel from 1968. Same genre – unconsciously-hilarious wild west memoir wriThe Sisters Brothers is the son of True Grit, a funny, heartbreaking 5 star novel from 1968. Same genre – unconsciously-hilarious wild west memoir written in curious stiff slightly formal and stilted but purely beautiful language beginning at the beginning and driving the surprising narrative always forward without stopping to apologise to all the dead people and animals encountered en route.
At this point you may say that this thing has also been done recently and won a big bad Booker for itself - True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey. Yes, it is very similar, but Peter Carey over egged his pudding to a most nauseating level. You could not believe a word of it. It was catwalk fashion, it wasn’t what people really wear. Patrick DeWitt does not make this mistake.
Pedants and proofreaders may go a little crosseyed looking at the title, their eyes searching searching for the missing apostrophe – surely it should be The Sisters’ Brothers? But could they have made such a terrific error? No error, this is the story of two guns for hire whose surname is Sisters, and is narrated by the frankly fat one (he goes on a diet around page 50) Eli Sisters. They are already famous for shooting people and this is the story of how they came to change their ungodly lifestyle.
All the way through Eli struggles with the horrible stuff these brothers find themselves doing. He doesn’t want to shoot all these people but he finds he seems to have to. It’s upsetting. He gets so mad at these people making him have to shoot them that he wants to shoot them. What a conundrum!
Horses, especially a wonky donkey of a horse called Tub, feature very prominently. Strong believers in animal rights and all vegans should be advised that there are more than a few scenes in here that are guaranteed to make all individual hairs on their body, should they have any, stand straight up perpendicularly. Poor old Tub. And what happens to the beavers is most distressing too.
What happened to the fifth star? Well, Eli Sisters is a compelling narrator all right but him and his brother are a tough sell. They’re really not nice people! And the ending, the one after the actual ending, was strange, like one of those unresolved chords they sometimes end a song with.
So, 4.5 stars. Don’t feel bad Mr DeWitt, I don’t never hardly give out 4.5 stars....more
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