Reading synchronicities

Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable creatures

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Bookcover

Cover image courtesy HarperCollins Australia

Most readers experience, I think, periods of reading synchronicity when we read books in close succession that are related in some way. I am experiencing such a period now as Tracy Chevalier‘s Remarkable creatures is the third book I’ve read recently to deal in some way with the first decades of the 19th century. The others are David Mitchell’s The thousand autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America.

Tracy Chevalier would not normally be high priority for me, but this book intrigued me because of its period and setting. You see, it is set in Lyme Regis in the early 1800s, and that rings a special bell for me! Yes, it’s to do with Jane Austen. Not only did she visit Lyme Regis, but she set a significant scene in Persuasion there*. So, my appetite was whetted.

But, I must say, I was somewhat disappointed. It’s not that I expected a lot, really, but I did expect a little more than I got. In other words, I didn’t expect exciting or innovative prose, but I did expect writing that wouldn’t bother me. However, it did, and this was mostly due to a lack of subtlety. The best writing shows, not tells, but there was way too much telling in this book, and it falls into two main types:

  • Giving “facts” that we should know. Here is Elizabeth over-explaining Mary’s calling her “Ma’am”, when she’d previously called her “Miss”:

And she was calling me “ma-am” now. Spinster or not, I had outgrown “miss”. Ladies were called “miss” while they still had a chance of marrying.

  • Describing something, such as a character’s emotions, when it should be (and usually is) apparent. Here is a bit of petulance that sounds rather silly in the first person voice of a supposedly mature Elizabeth:

As angry as I sounded, I was also secretly pleased that Colonel Birch had discovered the value of my fish enough to want one for himself.

(For a humorous review of an unsubtle book, do read Kerry, aka Hungry Like the Wolf, on Ken Follett’s The pillars of the earth.)

There are also a couple of rather gratuitous references to Jane Austen and her novels, gratuitous because the main characters don’t read novels and the reference to Austen adds nothing significant in terms of plot or characterisation. It’s as if Chevalier knew Austen went there and decided to draw on Austen’s current popularity by making the connection:

One of Miss Austen’s books had even featured Lyme Regis, but I did not read fiction and could not be persuaded to try it. Life itself was far messier, and did not end so tidily, with the heroine making the right match. We Philpot sisters were the very embodiment of that frayed life. I did not need novels to remind me of what I had missed.

Enough of all that, however. Let me give a quick rundown of the plot. It tells the story of two women who were fossil hunters in Lyme Regis in the first half of the nineteenth century. They were Mary Anning (1799-1847), a poor working class woman whose fossil finds helped change the course of paleontology, and Elizabeth Philpot (1780-1857), a gentlewoman who befriended Anning and who was particularly interested in fossil fish. Using known facts and novelistic licence, Chevalier has written an engaging story that focuses not only on the fossils and their impact on scientific and religious thinking of the time but also on the difficulties faced by women, particularly those unmarried like Philpot or unmarried and uneducated like Anning. Philpot says early in the novel that

… I had to find a passion: I was twenty-five years old, unlikely ever to marry, and in need of a hobby to fill my days. It is tedious being a lady sometimes.

Chevalier shows the financial precariousness of women, their lack of power, and how easily they can be exploited. Women, for example, were unable to belong to the Geological Society of London, and Mary’s collections (in particular) were written up in scientific journals by men, often with no credit given to her contribution. This is the real story of the novel and Chevalier captures well the circumscribed lives of women, and the challenges they faced in living independently. And yet, she undermines this by fabricating a jealous falling out between Elizabeth and Mary over a man. Did Chevalier really need to do this to make the story exciting?

That said, the characterisation is effective overall. She differentiates the two main characters not only by their very different voices, but also by creating a conceit for each of them. For Elizabeth it is her describing what people “lead with”. The forthright Mary, for example, leads with her eyes, while one of the foppish male characters leads, she says, with his hair. Good one, I thought! Mary’s conceit is being the “lightning girl”. The book begins with her being struck, but not killed, by lightning when she was a young girl. Lightning thereafter becomes a motif in her life for surprising or lucky events and for strong feelings.

Chevalier also writes some lovely descriptions – of people and landscapes:

While I accommodated her absence, a dull ache in my heart remained, like a fracture that, though healed, ever flares up during damp weather.

and

Lyme Regis is a town that has submitted to its geography rather than forced the land to submit to it …It is not planned, like Bath or Cheltenham or Brighton, but wriggles this way and that, as if trying to escape the hills and sea, and failing.

This is an enjoyable book for the glimpse it gives into the lives of two interesting and little known women, but the writing, for me, doesn’t quite do the story justice. For a more positive review, you may like to read Lisa’s at ANZLitLovers.

Tracy Chevalier
Remarkable creatures
London, HarperCollins, 2010
352pp.
ISBN: 9780007178384

*It is also the setting, of course, of John Fowles‘ The French lieutenant’s woman.

Sarah Waters, The little stranger

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The little stranger, by Sarah Waters

The little stranger (Book cover courtesy: Virago Press)

I’m not quite sure I know where to start with this one –  the ghost story that isn’t. Or is it? The little stranger is my second Sarah Waters’ novel. I found The night watch riveting, and I did see and enjoy (but not read) her very Dickensian Fingersmith.

Like The night watch, The little stranger was shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize. It’s an easy read, and rather a page-turner, but by the end I have to say that I felt a little unsure about what I’d read. In one of those interesting bits of reading synchronicity, I recently read Helen Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’s last stand. It is very different to this one, and is set a few decades later, but they both deal with the loss of “old families” and the breaking up of their estates. Waters, though, is the far superior writer.

So, what is the plot of The little stranger? Its first person narrator, Dr Faraday, was born to the working class but, through family sacrifice, has pulled himself up into the professional middle class. After a brief flashback to a childhood memory of Hundreds Hall, where his mother had worked as a housemaid, he proceeds to chronicle the relationship he develops with the Hall’s family when he is in his late 30s and practising in the nearby town as a GP. The family comprises the mother, Mrs Ayres, and her adult children, Caroline and Roderick. The book is set soon after World War 2, and the story he tells occurs over the period of about a year, but is told from the vantage point of some three years later.

Waters is best in her vivid description of the house, its inhabitants and its increasing dilapidation. I’m tempted to read the house as a metaphor for the society it represents – for the days of elegance and upstairs-downstairs that are now on the way out.  And, extending this idea, “the little stranger” (or “dark germ”) that seems hell-bent on bringing about the house’s destruction could then be seen as a metaphor for the rapid modernisation that was occurring in post-war England and that was pushing the old families to the brink of economic and, thereby, social ruin. After all, servant Mrs Bazeley reassures the young servant girl Betty that “it” is not interested in them.

To support this way of looking at the novel, here is Dr Faraday early-ish in the novel:

But Hundreds Hall had been made and maintained, I thought, by the very people they were laughing at now. After two hundred years, those people had begun to withdraw their labour, their belief in the house; and the house was collapsing, like a pyramid of cards. Meanwhile, here the family sat, still playing gaily at gentry life, with chipped stucco on their walls, and their Turkish carpets worn to the weave…

And here is Dr Seeley (to whom he later goes for advice):

The Ayreses’ problem … is that they can’t or won’t adapt … Class-wise they’ve had their chips. Nerve-wise, perhaps they’ve run their course.

Quotes like these support a social change interpretation. And yet, perhaps it is more psychological? Dr Seeley suggests that part of one’s psychology, one’s dream-self , can break loose and become some sort of “psychic force”:

The subliminal mind has many dark, unhappy corners, after all. Imagine something loosening itself from one of those corners. Let’s call it a – a germ. And let’s say conditions prove right for that germ to develop – to grow … What would this little stranger grow into? A sort of shadow-self, perhaps a Caliban, a Mr Hyde. A creature motivated by all the nasty impulses and hungers the conscious mind had hoped to keep hidden away: things like envy, and malice and frustration…

Somewhat supporting this interpretation is Caroline’s report of her mother as saying:

the house knows all our weaknesses, and is testing them one by one.

And so what do you think? Psychological/psychic or social? Or perhaps bit of both? That is, the arrogant upper class family out of touch and unable to adapt (social) releasing all its weaknesses (psychic). I’m not sure that Waters makes the case clearly enough – partly I think due to the ambiguity posed by the narrator.

Her characterisation is in fact coherent and convincing, except for the narrator. How are we to read him? Is he genuine – does he really care for the family? Does he genuinely care for the house and its history? Or, is he a social climber who wants his way into the house any way he can. I must say I couldn’t fully work him out. Is he reliable? The tone is quite reminiscent of that in Ishiguro’s wonderful Remains of the day. Like Ishiguro’s butler, Dr Faraday tells the story from some time after the events, and he peppers his account with such words as “recall”, “I think I noticed”, “must have”, words that suggest that all may not be as he sees it. And in some ways it isn’t, but there is no intriguing twist, neither is there a traditional resolution. As I read I wondered whether he was stringing me along, whether he was the cause of the malevolence. He did after all chip away a decorative acorn from the house on his youthful visit:

I was  like a man, I suppose, wanting a lock of hair from the head of a girl he had suddenly and blindingly become enamoured of.

If he was the malevolence, there is no evidence to suggest it is anything other than unconscious. And further, if he was, it certainly makes the whole class divide story more complex – and, more interesting.

Regardless, though, of how the end comes about, of “who” (one? many? none?) is responsible, it is pretty clear that the winners – if there can be such things in the messy game of life – are the old underclass. Hundreds was, in Dr Seeley’s view, “defeated by history, destroyed by its own failure to keep pace with a rapidly changing world”. It is not surprising, I suppose, that by the end the narrator is both “baffled and longing”.  Social change never has been easy!

Sarah Waters
The little stranger
London: Virago, 2009
450pp.
ISBN: 9781844086023

Don DeLillo, Midnight in Dostoevsky

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Do reading synchronicities affect our comprehension? Well of course they do, since everything we do affects our comprehension to some degree doesn’t it? Anyhow, I have just read Don DeLillo’s short story, “Midnight in Dostoevsky” (you can read it here), and, as I read it, I couldn’t help bringing to mind Salman Rushdie’s The enchantress of Florence. Whether that’s valid or not is, I suppose, up to others to decide.

The plot concerns two college boys who spar, who indeed become disconcerted if they concur:

This was not supposed to happen – it unsettled us, it made the world flat – and we walked for a time in chagrined silence. Even in matters of pure physical reality, we depended on a friction between our basic faculties of sensation, his and mine, and we understood that the rest of the afternoon would be spent in the marking of differences.

At the beginning of the story the two boys see a man, and they start sparring about him. It starts with what sort of coat he is wearing but, over time, moves into less apparent things such as where he’s from. Interspersed with this are other scenes, including a few from their Logic class. Are you starting to get the connection with Rushdie? It’s the imagination-reality nexus I’m thinking about…the point where imagination and reality meet and merge.

Russian Ushanka Hat

Russian Ushanka Hat (Courtesy: Eugene Zelenko, via Wikipedia, under CC-BY-SA-3.0)

It’s a gorgeously ironic tale, with the boys attending a very dry Logic class (in the evocatively named Cellblock) taught by the rather inscrutable Ilgauskas “who was instructing us in the principles of pure reason … he challenged our reason for being, what we thought, how we lived, the truth or falsity of what we believed to be true or false”. This class nicely counterpoints the flights of fancy the boys engage in when they are alone:

“Think of the hat he’d be wearing if he was wearing a hat,” I said.

“He’s not wearing a hat.”

“But if he was wearing a hat, what kind of hat?”

As I said, this is a story about imagination versus reality… The boys’ fascination with the man continues, as their imaginings become more and more intense (but never moves into actual fantasy the way Rushdie does in his novel).

“Feel the air. I say minus nine Celsius.”

“We’re not Celsius.” [narrator]

“But he is, where he’s from, that’s Celsius.”

That did make me laugh – fiction becoming, in a sense, reality for a while!

We then discover that Ilgauskas reads Dostoevsky (“day and night”) and so our narrator starts to read Dostoevsky too, finding it “magical” that the book which he leaves open at a page in the library is there the next day, open at the same page. In a great leap, he decides that the man is Russian, and that Ilgauskas is his son. His friend Todd says, “Does he have to be Russian to read Dostoevsky?”. Our narrator answers:

“That’s not the point. The point is that it all fits together. It’s a formulation, it’s artful, it’s structured.”

Wow, is this DeLillo’s fiction manifesto? I love it and I love the way this fiction manifesto also works for reason and logic, even though Ilgauskas says that “we  invented logic to beat back our creatural selves”. Creatural? A lovely bit of wordplay: one dictionary provides several meanings including “a living being” and “an imaginary or fantastical being”; another dictionary says “anything created” and “an animate or living being”. Now, that word packs a punch in this story!

The story continues, with the inevitable desire to check the reality of their fiction…but I won’t give any more away. Suffice it to say that this is one delightful and very intelligent story, well worth the read.

(Oh, and as for reading synchronicities? It’s quite possible that had I not just read the Rushdie, I might have come at the story from quite a different angle, such as looking at the relationship between the two boys – but I’ll never know now!)

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

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An interesting question to ponder when thinking about Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is the significance of the title. While the place Wolf Hall, the family seat of the Seymour family, does get a few mentions it does not really function as a location. Wolves, however, are one of the subtle motifs running through the novel. As its protagonist remembers late in the book:

…homo homini lupus, man is wolf to man.

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

Cover image (Courtesy HarperCollins Publishers)

And, after reading the novel, it would be hard to refute this notion! Wolf Hall is set in England between 1500 and 1535, with most of the action taking place between 1527 and 1535. It deals primarily with the lead up to and first years of Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, but as seen through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell. Its plot centres on the machinations involved in dissolving Henry’s marriage to Katherine (Catherine) of Aragon, who had failed to produce a male heir, so he could legally marry Anne Boleyn; its real subject matter, though, is far wider than that. Its time period – the early years of the English Reformation – and its plot mean that it deals with the major issues of the time, including England’s separation from Rome, the translation of the Bible into English and the relaxing of rules regarding access to the Bible, the Act of Supremacy, and succession to the throne. Running through this are the jostlings for power, the skullduggery, and the betrayals (and suprising acts of loyalty) that are the hallmarks of the Tudor Court. Man was indeed wolf to man then (and I sometimes wonder how much has changed?).

This is an exquisite – though large! – novel. It won the 2009 Booker Prize: I can’t compare it with the others because I haven’t read them, but I did enjoy this immensely. In my recent review of The enchantress of Florence – and what fascinating synchronicity to read these two in sequence – I said that the one word I would use to describe it was “paradoxical”. The word I would use for Wolf Hall is “subtle”. It is subtle in so many ways – in its narrative style, its humour, its irony, its symbolism, its descriptions, its juxtapositions. Nothing here is heavy-handed or overdone.

But first, its narrative style. I was forewarned about Mantel’s use of “he” in this novel and perhaps this helped, because I rarely found it difficult or confusing. In fact, I rather liked the style. It’s a bit like a first-person novel told in third person – third person subjective (limited) point of view, I guess – and so the use of “he” reminds us that it is HIS perspective we are getting. Everything we know we know through him, through his thoughts and through his interactions with others. I found this approach intriguing – it gave immediacy and distance at the same time. And this brings me to the man himself.

Thomas Cromwell, for those who don’t know their English history, rose from very humble beginnings to being Henry’s trusted chief minister. He did this by dint of his character and the timely beneficial patronage of Cardinal Wolsey. He became street-smart in his youth but he also educated himself in the culture (literature and art) of the times. He could speak Latin, Italian and French. He was an accountant and lawyer.  He knew about trade. He was no slouch in the kitchen either. He was, indeed, a jack-of-all-trades. Here is a description early in the book (1527):

Thomas Cromwell is now a little over forty years old. He is a man of strong build, not tall. Various expressions are available to his face, and one is readable: an expression of stifled amusement … It is said he knows by heart the entire New Testamant in Latin … He is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcom, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury…

A man, that is, not to be trifled with – and yet he is a man who develops a large and loving household full of loyal children, relatives and “wards”. Some of the loveliest sections of the book are set in his home, Austin Friars. He is also loyal – sticking by Wolsey, for example, in his decline – and firm, hard even, but not cruel.

However, I don’t want this review to be as long as the book and so shall move on. I loved Mantel’s descriptions – they are always short but highly evocative. Here is the Duke of Norfolk:

The duke is now approaching sixty years old but concedes nothing to the calendar. Flint-faced and keen-eyed, he is lean as a gnawed bone and cold as an axe-head;  his joints seem knitted together of supple chain links, and indeed he rattles a little as he moves, for his clothes conceal relics…

And here is another telling description (after charges against Wolsey have been written):

It is a wan morning, low unbroken cloud; the light filtering sparely through the glass, is the colour of tarnished pewter. How brightly coloured the king is, like the king in a new pack of cards: how small his flat blue eye.

Delicious aren’t they?

The novel ends at an intriguing point – but I won’t give that away here except to say that it does not conclude with the end of Cromwell’s life. That, we believe, is the subject of a sequel.

I would love to keep writing about the characters, the language, the way Mantel puts it all together – such as the way she drops hints then explores them later – but that could become boring. Better for you to read the book (if you haven’t already). Instead, I will end with what is probably the book’s overarching theme – that of “how the world works”, and that is through machinations behind the scenes:

The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman’s sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rosewater…

It was ever thus, eh?

Hilary Mantel
Wolf Hall
London: Fourth Estate, 2009
653pp.
ISBN: 9870007292417

POSTSCRIPT: Steven, at A Momentary Taste of Being, posted a link to this fascinating article by Hilary Mantel on Thomas Cromwell. It is well worth a read.

Simon Armitage’s The odyssey

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Mostly when we travel we listen to the radio or music, but on our recent trip we listened to a 3-CD dramatisation of Homer’s The odyssey. The set was lent to us; the dramatisation was done by poet Simon Armitage for BBC-4. As my friend who lent it to us said, you need to get used to the British accents telling an ancient Greek story in modern idiom, but once you get used to that…well, this is a pretty good way of familiarising yourself with (or reminding yourself of) Homer’s work.

Odysseus and Penelope

Odysseus' return (Courtesy: OCAL @ clker.com)

The odyssey of course is Homer’s (ignoring here discussions of authorship) telling of Odysseus’ long journey home to Ithaca from the Battle of Troy. Armitage’s version begins with Zeus and Athena arguing over Odysseus’ fate and these two link the different phases of the story as we progress through them. This version essentially follows the sequence of the original but is pretty fast and furious, focusing mostly on the action and drama of the story…and that did, I must admit, get a little tedious for  a while around the middle of the production.

In other words, not much time is given for dwelling on the nuances or underlying themes…and there are many themes to explore in this work, including cunning and courage, fidelity and trust, the power of the Gods (in ancient Greek life), loyalty and greed. Some of the “truths” ring a little strange to our ears. Not only do we (most of us anyhow) no longer believe that our lives are at the mercy of the Gods, but there is also the old double standard: Penelope remained faithful while Odysseus had his flings. But other “truths” – the role of cunning, courage and loyalty in survival, and the vice of greed and gluttony, for instance – still work today, albeit in different settings.

I was intrigued though by Armitage’s allusions, such as the Bible’s “stranger in a strange land” (The Book of Exodus, King James’ version) and Shakespeare’s “screw your courage to the sticking-place” (Macbeth). But then, I guess literary allusions are as valid in adaptations as they are in original works?

There’s not much more I want to say about the adaptation: it’s fun, it’s well performed and it usefully and entertainingly recounts a classic tale. I’d recommend it on those counts.

The odyssey – Homer (Audio)
Adapted by Simon Armitage for full-cast dramatisation
BBC Audiobooks, 2004
3 hours running time

POSTSCRIPT: In the interests of maintaining synchronicities, a month or so ago I reviewed Arnold Zable’s Sea of many returns which focuses on Ithaca, and its literal and mythological contexts of “home”.