Adventures in reading
When a young man steals funds from a club, the committee chairman (who’s also parish priest) is determined that he be punished. The rest of the committee, however, don’t want to visit the stigma on the thief’s family, and try to persuade Father Crowley to change his mind. This story explores the complexities of morality, and has a nicely ironic twist at its close. Another good piece from O’Connor, who is one of the writers I’m most pleased to have discovered through this anthology.
Rating: ***½
Lucy Caldwell, The Meeting Point (2011)
Euan Armstrong takes his young family to Bahrain, ostensibly to undertake missionary work; but Euan’s wife Ruth begins to question all that she holds dear when she discovers the true nature of that work. Meanwhile, teenage Noor Hussain has returned to Bahrain from England to live with her father; she has struggled to fit in and is contemplating suicide. But then Noor finds new hope in the person of Ruth, just as Ruth is falling for Noor’s brother Farid.
There are times, particularly towards the beginning, when Caldwell’s description feels over-egged; but The Meeting Point ultimately succeeds because of the elegance with which it portrays its central dynamic. Both Ruth and Noor have unrealistic desires which will inevitably lead them to clash; the progression of those events is thoroughly credible. Caldwell also draws her protagonists deftly; there’s a nice contrast between the broad strokes of Noor’s teenage impulsiveness, and Ruth’s more measured personality. All in all, The Meeting Point is a well-wrought novel that’s very much worth reading.
Friedrich Christian Delius, Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman (2006/10)
Another fine novella from Peirene Press, this one translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch. Margherita is a young German woman who came to Rome to be with her soldier husband Gert, only for him shortly after to be sent to Africa in the aftermath of El Alamein. Now, in 1943, she is alone in Rome, unable to speak Italian, but grateful for the small German enclave which surrounds her. We follow Margherita as she makes her way to a Bach concert, and reflects on her situation.
At a structural level, Portrait of the Mother is masterful, as its 117 pages comprise a single sentence. The affect of this is of a constant unspooling of thought and detail, with certain ideas recurring throughout. Delius captures particularly well Margherita’s naivety, and the irony underpinning it: insulated as she is her little bubble, she can’t comprehend the difficulties faced by ordinary Roman citizens; she’s sure that everything will be fine with Gert, just as she is sure that Rome would never be a target for bombing… Delius’s Portrait is a sharp character study.
M. John Harrison, The Ice Monkey (1983)
One of my reading resolutions for this year is to get around to reading something by M. John Harrison, who has been on my TBR list for rather longer than I’d have liked. I decided to start with collection of seven short stories, which has proven very interesting to read.
The title story sees Harrison’s narrator, Spider, who takes his friend Jones to visit the latter’s estranged ex-wife, Maureen – it doesn’t go well. Later, Jones and Spider go climbing on Ben Nevis, and that ends in tragedy. This piece sets a certain tone that carries through much of the rest of the anthology – many characters have similarly broken lives, for example – but there’s also continuity at a deeper, more structural level. The ending of ‘The Ice Monkey’ reads to me like a formal parody of a horror story, as it goes through the motions of hinting at a supernatural agency without actually doing so with any conviction – as though to emphasise that the mess-ups in the story have very human and natural causes, and there is no escape into the possibility of ‘magic’.
A deliberate turning-away from the fantastic seems integral to the affect of Harrison’s stories, here, as rituals and other strange happenings remain as mysterious to reader and characters alike at the end of a piece as they were at the beginning. In that respect, I’m reminded of when, last year, I read Scarlett Thomas’s Our Tragic Universe, whose aesthetic is also ‘anti-explanatory’ – though I find Harrison’s tales embody their aesthetic more thoroughly.
The Ice Monkey is perhaps best summed up for me by its final sentences. In the closing story, ‘Egnaro’ is the name of a secret place which is heard fleetingly by various of its characters. Where other tales might uncover the truth of that place, Egnaro remains no more than a whisper’ As the story’s narrator remarks:
The secret is meaningless before you know it: and…worthless when you do. If Egnaro is the substrate of mystery which underlies all daily life, then the reciprocal of this is also true, and it is the exact dead point of ordinariness which lies beneath every mystery. (p. 144)
My key lasting impression of the stories in The Ice Monkey is that they highlight such ordinariness. Now I look forward to reading Harrison’s Viriconium, to find out if that impression will remain.
In the autumn of 1944, Gavin Doddington returns to the seaside town and the ivy-choked house where he spent many months as a child with his mother’s friend, Lilian Nicholson. Bowen creates an effective contrast between the different states of the house in her story’s past and present; and I particularly like her portrait of the town of Southstone as having had the last of its life squeezed out of it by its use as a military base (the prospect of an Allied victory has ironically been the town’s undoing, as all the soldiers have left, and with them the town’s purpose). However, these are quite small parts of a long story, and I found most of the rest dull to read. It doesn’t inspire me to read more of Bowen’s work.
Rating: **½
Saki, Filboid Studge, the Story of a Mouse That Helped (2011)
Frank O’Connor, The Cornet-Player Who Betrayed Ireland (2011)
It is the fiftieth anniversary of Penguin Modern Classics and, to mark the occasion, Penguin are launching the ‘Mini Moderns’, a series of pocket-sized story collections and novellas. Fifty titles are published tomorrow and, this week, twenty-five bloggers will each be reviewing two of them. I am one of those of bloggers; my titles are by Saki and Frank O’Connor.
I’m not very knowledgeable when it comes to classic literature, so when I do read and review it, it’s very much in an exploratory spirit. One of my projects so far this year has been to read an anthology of early twentieth-century short stories. Saki and O’Connor are both writers I’ve read in that anthology, of whose work I’d like to read more; so, although I didn’t request them specifically, I was pleased to receive these two Mini Modern collections. I think it’s an ideal format for discovering a new writer: long enough to gain a substantial impression of the author’s work, short enough to give one room to explore further.
***
Both collections begin with a title story that more or less sets the tone for what is to come. Saki’s volume goes by the wonderful title of Filboid Studge, the Story of a Mouse That Helped. Its eponymous story, barely five pages in length, is a satire based around advertising; Filboid Studge is a vile breakfast food that nobody buys; the ‘mouse that helped’ is Mark Spayley, a poor artist who wishes to marry the daughter of Filboid Studge’s manufacturer, and may get his chance – if, that is, he can devise a successful campaign for the product. And Spayley’s campaign is successful: Filboid Studge flies off the shelves, and is eaten stoically, because the campaign makes people feel they should eat it, and ‘people will do things from a sense of duty which they would never attempt as a pleasure’ (p. 3). So, Spayley will have his wish… won’t he?
Two things which stand out for me in this story, and which I see reflected in Filboid Studge’s other tales, are a satirical eye for people’s behaviour, and a closing twist of fate. The former is perhaps best illustrated by ‘Tobermory’, in which a cat is taught to speak and reveals more about the assembled human company than they would wish; but it’s also there in the doggerel recited in ‘The Recessional’, whose would-be poet naturally thinks is brilliant. Then there is a sense of fate giving characters their comeuppance in stories like ‘Mrs Packletide’s Tiger’, whose eponymous society lady wishes to shoot a tiger purely for the purposes of outdoing her rival in terms of display – and it doesn’t work out quite how she intended; or ‘Sredni Vashtar, in which a young boy makes a god out of his pet ferret, and prays for revenge against his overly strict guardian.
Throughout, there’s a great sense of glee to Saki’s prose; one imagines these stories would be excellent candidates for reading aloud. I suspect that Saki’s work is best dipped into rather than read en masse, but I found the seven stories in Filboid Studge a fine sampler.
***
There are four stories in Frank O’Connor’s The Cornet-Player Who Betrayed Ireland, all of which, in their different ways, look at the effect of broader social forces on the lives of ordinary individuals. The cornet-player of the title story is Mick Twomey, the only supporter of William O’Brien in a brass band whose other members support O’Brien’s rival political leader, John Redmond; normally, they put their differences aside in the name of music – but now the band is due to play at a reception for a visit by Redmond, and relations between Mick and his bandmates change irrevocably. O’Connor’s focus here is firmly on his characters, with the politics more in the background (his narrator is Mick’s son, who understands little more than that his neighbourhood is in favour of O’Brien and against Redmond); there’s a gradual, grinding – and thoroughly believeable – inevitability to the way Mick and the band become estranged.
The three other stories in the collection retain this focus on character, but in rather different contexts. ’First Confession’ is the lightest in tone, as a seven-year-old boy gives confession for the first time, and his sister – who was taunting him over the possible consequences – is infuriated to find that the outcome is not what she’d expected. ‘Guests of the Nation’ tells of two Irish soldiers who have befriended their English prisoners, despite the knowledge that the order to execute them may come at any time; O’Connor draws an effective contrast between the impersonal orders being issued by commanders, and the reality of the soldiers’ lives ‘on the ground’. The final piece, ‘A Story by Maupassant’, is perhaps the most intensely focused on character of all in its depiction of a man who comes to realise that his life has become the very thing at which he laughed dismissively as a child.
I’ve enjoyed exploring the work of both O’Connor and Saki in these collections, looking beyond the individual stories. I have no doubt that I’ll be reading both authors again, and seeing what else there is to discover in this series.
Links
I’m going to link here to all the other Mini Moderns blogs, as I come across them.
Farm Lane Books reviews Stefan Zweig and Rudyard Kipling.
Bookgeeks reviews Ian Fleming.
Gaskella reviews H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Coover.
Curious Book Fans reviews Jean Rhys and Joseph Conrad.
Leyla Sanai reviews Vladimir Nabokov.
The Bookbag reviews P.G. Wodehouse and Dorothy Parker.
Savidge Reads reviews Carson McCullers and Shirley Jackson.
Asylum reviews Saul Bellow.
Eve’s Alexandria reviews Eileen Chang.
Novel Insights reviews Truman Capote and Ludmilla Petrushevskya.
Stuck in a Book reviews E.M. Forster and Primo Levi.
Park Benches & Bookends reviews D.H. Lawrence and Malcolm Lowry.
Lizzy’s Literary Life reviews G.K. Chesterton and Angela Carter.
Reader, I Read It reviews Samuel Beckett and Raymond Chandler.
Charles Lambert reviews H.G. Wells and M.R. James.
For Books’ Sake reviews Shirley Jackson and Angela Carter.
Fleur Fisher reviews Kingsley Amis and James Joyce.
I’ve known of Aimee Bender’s name for a while, but couldn’t have told you where I first heard it, or anything much about her writing. However, I’m always interested in books where the fantastic intrudes on the everyday, and how could I not want to read a novel with such a brilliant title as The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake? So I read it and, happily, was not disappointed.
Rose Edelstein is just about to turn nine years old when she tries a piece of the birthday cake her mother has made and discovers that, underneath the flavours of lemon and chocolate, it tastes hollow: ‘My mother’s able hands had made the cake…but she was not there, in it.’ This is Rose’s first experience of her talent: when she eats something, she can detect the feelings of the person who made it; which is how she knows that her mother is troubled, and how, years later, she can tell that her mother is having an affair.
There are tensions within Rose’s family – her mother and father are not in love as they were; her brother Joseph absorbs himself in school and college work, thereby distancing himself from the others – and the girl’s new ability lays the roots of some of those tensions bare for her. This leads to Rose’s having a troubled relationship with food – at one point, she even wishes that she could have her mouth removed, and takes refuge in factory-made foods, which don’t taste so personal – and this is what makes Bender’s novel so elegant: that its fantastic elements work both literally and metaphorically at the same time.
For example, interpret Rose’s talent literally, and she doesn’t want to eat her mother’s cooking because she can’t bear to taste the sadness with which it was made – and the rest of her eating habits are similarly shaped by this magical ability. But another way of looking at Rose’s situation is to say that she has an eating disorder, and that her attitude to food is how she responds to the tensions at home – the effects on Rose’s relationships with other people are much the same either way. Similarly, Joseph gains the ability to vanish and reappear at will; and this can also be taken at face value, or read as a boy withdrawing into his own little world as a coping mechanism.
This theme of abilities and actions having both literal and representational roles extends beyond the supernatural into the more mundane aspects of Bender’s narrative. Rose’s grandmother is a distant figure whose relationship to her family is represented in the novel by the parcels she sends to Rose’s household, which are less gifts than cast-offs (‘mailing her life away’, as Rose puts it). Another example is the hobby of carpentry that Rose’s mother takes up: she meets Larry, the man with whom she has an affair, at her carpentry group; and so the hobby becomes both a constant in her life and a symbol of the Edelstein family’s problems. This, perhaps, is why Rose is so keen to hang on to the tatty old footstool that brought her parents together, because to accept a new one made by her mother would be tantamount to approving the affair.
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is a carefully detailed and nuanced portrait of a family in crisis and a girl trying to come to terms with her situation. It uses fantasy to wonderful effect, making it both tangential and central at the same time. Magical stuff, in more ways than one.
Links
Aimee Bender’s website
An excerpt and interview at Leite’s Culinaria
Chris Kammerud reviews the book for Strange Horizons
Reading this anthology is introducing me to the work of many authors whom I’ve not read before, but one of the drawbacks is that I’m getting only isolated snapshots of what each writer’s work is like, which isn’t necessarily the best way to judge whether I’d like to read more in future. After reading ‘Seaton’s Aunt’, I looked up De la Mare’s entry in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, which gave me the impression of an author whose work I’d find interesting. But I found this particular story — chronicling its narrator’s three encounters with his friend’s elderly aunt, said to be ‘in league with the Devil’ — too dry to engage with. I wonder whether, had I read it in the context of a volume of De la Mare stories, I’d have felt differently.
Rating: **½
The BBC’s year of book-related programming has begun; here is a look at two of the first documentaries.
***
Faulks on Fiction is a four-part BBC Two series in which Sebastian Faulks looks at the characters of the British novel. Later episodes will focus on lovers, snobs, and villains; but this first part was all about the figure of ‘the hero’. This is a term that seems fairly straightforward, until (or so I found) you actually try to define it, at which point it becomes a much more nebulous concept – after all, most novels have protagonists; what is it that distinguishes them from ‘heroes’?
The programme never gave a clear definition of its terms, with the result that, though Faulks was an engaging presenter, his journey through the heroes of British fiction seemed rather arbitrary. The following characters were discussed:
Several questions – which, I’m afraid, I am not widely-read enough to be able to answer – spring to mind after considering both this selection and Faulks’s wider argument:
All these issues could have been addressed if the programme had defined its subject more clearly (though some, especially the lack of diversity amongst the authors whose works were considered, would have been hard to defend even then). All programmes of this nature must be selective, of course, but I would like to have confidence that there was a better rationale behind the selection than ‘books which have received screen adaptations from which we can show clips’ – and I don’t have that confidence.
***
A couple of days later, BBC Four broadcast Henry Hitchings’ Birth of the British Novel, a stand-alone documentary which examined the development of the British novel in the 18th century and the interaction between it and the wider history of the period. This felt to me a more coherent programme than Faulks’s (and Hitchings’ treatment of Crusoe and Jones seemed fuller), perhaps because it was more chronologically bounded. It also covered a considerable range of material, switching ably back and forth between consideration of authors, their works, and the historical context. More so than with Faulks’s documentary, I came away from Birth of the British Novel feeling that I had actually learnt something (not least that I really ought to read Tristram Shandy).
Hitchings’ film also found room to include a female author, Frances Burney (though its suggestion that Burney wrote a form of proto-chick lit was both inherently anachronistic and carried the implied slur that novels by women writers were frivolous from the very beginning – the whole Books On The BBC season really needs to improve its treatment of female authors). I was quite surprised to discover from one contributor (Emma Clery of Southampton University) that women novelists outnumbered their male counterparts in Britain between 1780 and 1810. What those women were writing, and what different avenues it might have taken the documentary down, I don’t know, because the programme didn’t explore it.
This also points to a wider problem with trying to tell a literary history in so confined a space: using the work of individual authors as a framework means that some will almost certainly have to be omitted; and a viewer unfamiliar with the subject matter (as I was in this case) won’t know what is missing. I have no idea what kind of shape the documentary might have had if different works had been discussed, which is why I’d welcome a clearer statement of the rationale behind selections in programmes like this.
Something else that I think Birth of the British Novel in particular could have done with was a definition of the novel. Hitchings made much of the fact that the novel emerged in Britain during this period, and that its writers were testing what the form could do; in this context, it would have been helpful to state what was new about the novel, and how it differed from existing prose forms. The question ‘What is a novel?’ was raised only once, 45 minutes into this hour-long film, when Hitchings asked it of the novelist Tom McCarthy. He laughed and replied, ‘A novel is something that contains its own negation’ – which I’m sure is an interesting idea (though no clear explanation was offered of what McCarthy meant); but it’s of no use at all as the only definition of a novel in a documentary about the emergence of the novel.
***
A flawed beginning, then, for Books On The BBC. Faulks on Fiction got off to a poor start, and the parameters of its format don’t give me much hope that the entire series will be much of an improvement. Birth of the British Novel was good, but had its shortcomings (though a full chronological history in the style of Hitchings’ documentary would be worth watching). Here’s hoping for more from later programmes in the season.
See also
This review at The Arts Desk, which comes to a similar conclusion about the relative quality of the two programmes.
I’ve never read Thomas before, and now I can add him to my list of authors from this anthology whose work I need to explore further. This short piece about a boy visiting his mad grandfather is darkly humorous and contains some wonderful description.
Rating: ****
Elsewhere
Official Dylan Thomas website
Otfried Preussler, Krabat (1971/2)
First published in English under the title The Satanic Mill, this German children’s classic (translated by Anthea Bell) has now been reissued under its original title as part of the Library of Lost Books. It is the story of Krabat, a boy in 16th-century Saxony, who investigates a strange mill and finds himself compelled to become the miller’s apprentice, working alongside his eleven journeymen. The Master teaches his journeymen dark magic, but at a price: every New Year’s Eve, one of them will die.
Some children’s books can, of course, be well appreciated when one reads them as an adult; but I find myself wishing that I’d read Krabat as a child, because I can imagine how much stronger the sense of discovery and excitement would have been. Even so, I very much enjoyed Preussler’s crisply-told tale. What’s particularly striking is how much the book doesn’t reveal; there’s very little about Krabat’s life before the mill, and much about the miller and his powers is also left open to interpretation. As a result, the air of mystery and strangeness around the book never goes away; I was left guessing what would happen up to the very last page – there is no sense in this novel that a happy ending is guaranteed.
Links
Otfried Preussler’s website
Publisher Scott Pack blogs about the book
Daniel Glattauer, Love Virtually (2006/11)
It starts simply enough: Emmi Rothner tries to cancel a magazine subscription, but mistypes the address and her email ends up in Leo Leike’s inbox. He notifies her of the mistake, and all is forgotten until, months later, Leo receives Emmi’s automated Christmas message and yet another email meant for the magazine. So begins an intimate email correspondence underpinned by something that may yet turn out to be love.
Love Virtually is told entirely through the medium of Emmi’s and Leo’s emails (in a nice touch, the novel uses two translators – Katharina Bielenberg and Jame Bulloch, who are a married couple – each working on the messages of one protagonist). At first, I was unsure of this device, as, by their nature, such correspondences are always going to be more interesting for the participants than for outside observers. And, sure enough, there were times when the tone of the emails – enticingly drawn-out for Leo and Emmi, but rather long-winded for this reader – tried my patience.
But, as I got further in (and the novel was swift and snappy enough that this didn’t take long), I warmed to the ebb and flow of the exchange, which is a kind of courtship dance that creates personae for the two correspondents whilst occasionally offering glimpses of the real characters underneath. Both protagonists could gain or lose from the dialogue: Leo is single, though the sparks of his recently-ended relationship have not yet burnt out entirely; Emmi is married with children, but seems to drive the correspondence more than Leo, as it provides her with something that her existing relationship does not. Whatever reservations I might have had towards the beginning, by the end of Love Virtually I was gripped, wanting to know what happened. The ending is judged perfectly, and paves the way for the sequel, which will receive its English-language publication later in the year.
Links
Publishers’ interview with the translators
Love Virtually reviewed elsewhere: Vulpes Libris; Book Monkey; The Complete Review.
Belinda Bauer, Blacklands (2010)
My first choice for the Great Transworld Crime Caper – not that there’s much of the caper about this book – I first came across Blacklands as one of last year’s TV Book Club choices. I didn’t read it at the time, but I should have, because I missed a gem. Twelve-year-old Steven Lamb is preoccupied with finding the body of his uncle Billy, assumed to have been murdered as a child. Steven keeps digging on Exmoor, but without success; in desperation, he writes a letter to convicted child-killer Arnold Avery (one of whose victims is thought to be Billy)) asking where his uncle’s body is – and a game of cat and mouse begins.
What makes Blacklands work so well is Bauer’s sharply observant eye, and the careful positioning of Steven’s and Avery’s correspondence (and the search for Billy’s body) in her characters’ lives. Steven’s Nan – Billy’s mother – is forever scarred by the loss of her son (‘underneath she would always be Poor Mrs Peters’, [p. 8]) , which she refuses to accept. This has translated into a fractured household; Steven’s quest to find Billy is partly an attempt to patch up his family, but also his way of bringing purpose to a life beset by troubles at school as well as home.
For Avery, Steven’s letters also bring a sense of purpose and hope, though a much more chilling one – particularly after an inadvertent reflection in a photograph taken by Steven reveals to Avery that his correspondent is a child. Bauer opens enough of a window on to Avery’s mind to make our visits there deeply disturbing, but not so much that we lose sight of the monster he is. The author also builds tension very effectively as the novel progresses. Blacklands is a difficult read at times, but ultimately I found it a rewarding one.
Links
Belinda Bauer’s website
Blacklands reviewed elsewhere: It’s a Crime!; Petrona; Catherine, Caffeinated.
In pre-First World War London, young writer Tommy Brown befriends old Alfred Oddy. They find companionship in their shared literary tastes, but Tommy comes to wonder just who Mr Oddy is. I find the beginning of this story good, as Walpole evokes a time and place more optimistic and carefree than the one in which he wrote; but the plot is unsatisfactory, as it hinges on an unlikely coincidence.
Rating: ***
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