I read this book as part of the 2019 Mookse Madness Tournament and also from intrigue – Penelope Fitzgerald (perhaps appropriately for an author who only began her literary career at 58) is an author I only discovered at 48 and enjoyed each of “Offshore”, “Gate of Angels” and “The Bookshop” – however this is a book of hers which seems to divide opinion, generally lauded by fellow authors and critics as one of the great historic novels (and definitely Fitzgerald’s masterpiece) but generating somewhere between dislike and indifference in most of the Fitzgerald fans I know on Goodreads.
Fitzgerald is an author where I always anticipate with delight spending time in her company – one can imagine her as a fascinating companion for a dinner party, and when reading her books I think of myself as to be a guest inside her writing.
And this book – a biographical tale of the young German/Saxon poet and philosopher Friedrich von Hardenberg (“Fritz”) from the ages of around 22-25, and his love for Sophie (von Kühn) from age 12 to her death at 15 contains much – in perhaps may be the culmination - of what I have come to love in Fitzgerald’s writing, in particular her ability in only a few words to conjour up a place, a character, a feeling. Here in a book which over less than 300 pages has 55 chapters, the book is really a series of scenes/vignettes and her economy of description (often with no real preamble) comes to the fore:
Take for example this description of a Christmas tree
“Inside the library, the myriad fiery shining points of light threw vast shadows of the fir branches onto the high walls and even across the ceiling. In the warmth the room breathed even more deeply, more resinously, more greenly”
Or a painter seeing his own vision and talent going to waste
“making a living by selling sepia drawings of distant prospects and bends in the river with reliably grazing cattle”
Or the capture of the entire inner life of Fritz’s mother in three brief paragraphs in three separate chapters.
Her thoughts when her brother comes to visit her equally proud and argumentative husband
“The Freifrau felt trapped between the two of them, like a powder of thinly ground mill between the millstones”
Her reflections on her own role in the budding reputation of her son
“When Fritz had been born, sickly and stupid, she had been given the blame and had accepted it. When after months of low fever he had become tall and thin, and they said a genius, she had not been given any credit and had not expected any
And her sudden and unrealised impulse when Fritz asks her advice before seeing his father for his permission to be betrothed to Sophie:
“An extraordinary notion came to the Freifrau Auguste that she might take advantage of the moment, which in its half darkness and fragrance seemed ti her to almost sacred, to talk to her eldest son about herself. All that she had to say could be put quite shortly, she was forty-five and she did not see how she was going to get through the rest of her life.”
A long standing official in the salt mines who
“consulted the ledgers only to see that they confirmed the dates and figures he had given. “They would not dare do otherwise” thought Fritz
And unfortunately the actions, speeches and rather misguided attempts to tie mathematics and science to poetry/philosophy of Fritz and the often similar tone taken by the omniscient narrator, rather ruining Fitzgerald’s dinner invitation.
Earlier in the book, the aforementioned painter (who compares himself to a poet) joins Sophie’s family (and her older and very down to earth sister) for a meal
“I am glancing round the table and assessing the presence, or absence, of true soul in the countenance of everyone here” [said Hoffman]
“Ach.. I should not think you are often asked out to dinner twice”
And ultimately that is the failing of this novel – normally when reading a novel with biographical details of an artist or their works (for example “Playing Possum”, “Now, Now, Louison”, “Winter”, “Summer” just to pick a few recent examples) I am drawn to research the subject more.
I will not be inviting Novalis to my reading table twice....more
I don’t believe for an instant that what’s going on out there is what You meant
I re-read this book after many years following the controversial an
I don’t believe for an instant that what’s going on out there is what You meant
I re-read this book after many years following the controversial announcement that the follow-up “The Testaments” was part of the longlist for the 2019 Booker Prize.
I had predicted it’s longlisting - one of the judges (Liz Calder) published Margaret Atwood’s Booker Prize winning book; and the two were close over many years (see this Guardian article https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.th...).
I also predicted the controversy the choice will cause - the book’s publication date was scheduled for after the shortlist announcement and given the worldwide activities already planned around its launch that date was never going to be moved.
So for now we are left simply to look back on the first book. It’s very hard to add anything to what has already been said about it - but this is a book that thoroughly deserves to be the modern classic that it has undoubtedly become.
It is a book which is relevant to today’s world even if some aspects look less relevant - for example the book assumes a stand-off between the superpowers in the “Spheres of Influence accord” despite being written only 5 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
I would argue it remains at least as prescient as “1984”.
It does seem to me the book is often misunderstood though - for example as a book about the dangers of religion, rather than how misogynistic totalitarian regimes (as well as less extreme ones) and their adherents will co-opt and distort prevailing religious systems and scientific theories to justify their aims and methods.
In the final historical notes the late 22nd century Cambridge professor comments on Offred’s account which forms the main party of the book "many gaps remain. Some of them could have been filled by our anonymous author, had she a different turn of mind. She could have told us much about the workings of the Gileadean empire, had she the instincts of a reporter or a spy”.
Atwood has commented when announcing the sequel ”Dear Readers .. Everything you’ve ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book. Well, almost everything! The other inspiration is the world we’ve been living in.”
“To write these things now is to state the commonplaces of history. But to find them out in 1942, to have them break upon you from a June sky, was
“To write these things now is to state the commonplaces of history. But to find them out in 1942, to have them break upon you from a June sky, was to suffer a fundamental shock, a derangement of that area of the brain in which stable ideas about humankind and its possibilities are kept”
I read this book for the 2019 Mookse Madness Tournament, which also gave me the chance to add another Booker winner to my list.
I came to this book new – not having seen the film “Schindler’s List” which made this one of only two books to win the Best Picture Oscar/Booker Prize double.
Most people I think would be much more familiar than me with the story told, from the film, but it is summarised here.
This is a very difficult book to review, clearly a vitally important one and also one that is extremely well reseached, unflinching both in its portrayal of the Holocaust, but also in the actions and characters of those involved, including Schindler himself. It is also tightly written. I struggle however to really see it really is fiction – unlike the author’s “Gossip from the Forest” which although based on true events clearly is fictional.
The version I read had an excellent Afterword written by the author 30 years after the book’s initial publication – in which he describes some of his motivations for writing Schindler’s story, the most interesting one being that he
“saw that at once, as a business man and Abwehr operative, Schindler had contact with every stage of the process of destruction of Jewish Europeans. That is he saw the confiscation of residential and commercial properties … the ghettoisation of the Jews and was part of their exploitation as cheap labour in factories. He saw the unutterably violent liquidation camps, and was a whistle blower as to the existence of .. destruction camps, where death was delivered by industrial gas on a production line scale”
Surely the most important winner of the Booker prize....more
I read this book for the 2019 Mookse Madness Tournament.
Famously The Prime Minister’s wife blackballed The Doctor’s Wife for the Booker due to the sexI read this book for the 2019 Mookse Madness Tournament.
Famously The Prime Minister’s wife blackballed The Doctor’s Wife for the Booker due to the sex scenes.
Trying to find out more about Moore the author, and a little underwhelmed with this book, I came across an obituary in The Independent in 1999. I found this passage interesting:
He had a virtual fetish about writing in the voice, and the skin, of a woman. He defended it lightly, saying, "If I write as a woman, I can do all the autobiographical stuff without getting picked up on it"; but the regularity with which he performed this trans-gender ventriloquism suggests a deeply serious engagement with female emotional responses. The charting of a doomed modern love affair, in The Doctor's Wife, filled with off-puttingly clinical sexual encounters, marked perhaps the low- point of these explorations.
And I found this instructive – one thing that clearly struck me about the book was a man writing seemingly empathetically and sympathetically from a woman’s viewpoint. What I have understood from the obituary and from my Goodreads friends reviews of Moore’s other books – is that this is a skill of Moore – however perhaps not at its strongest here and anyway it was not clear to me why I would not prefer to read a female author doing the same thing with more authenticity.
The plot of the novel is relatively simple, if not almost clichéd: a married woman frustrated with her marriage, has an affair with a younger man.
In this case – the woman is Sarah Redden, in her late 30s. Once a promising student she married young (against it seems the better judgement of her friends who saw her as having a potential career) to a Doctor – Kevin, dedicated more to his patients than his marriage. They have one son – Danny – an increasingly independent teenager, which only seems to add to Sarah’s sense of drift, as does her loss of any childhood faith she had and the difficulties of her home country of Northern Ireland.
Sarah plans for the two of them to revisit their honeymoon hotel in Villefranche on the French Riviera, stopping off first to visit her college friend Peg in Paris (where Sarah had a gap year as a student). The contrast between Peg’s free lifestyle and her own predictability, combined with Kevin’s constant procrastination about when he can fly to the Riviera, snaps something in Sarah who embarks on a overt flirtation with Tom – an American who has just graduated from Dublin – and the flatmate of Peg’s Yugoslavian lover. Tom follows her to Villefranche and the flirtation becomes a full blown affair, the two moving back to Paris where Kevin finds out what is going on, involving her family in his attempts to persuade her back.
The book is enjoyable enough – and Moore does seem to write with some sensitivity and insight about Sarah as commented above, as well as about her brother, roped in to an attempt to change her mind and who rather clumsily tries to conflate her behaviour with a susceptibility to mental illness which runs in their family.
However the same cannot be said of the writing about Tom. He remains an unconvincing and sketchy character (simply having characters remark that he is not a typical American is not really an excuse for not even bothering to write him as an America) – and the book is hindered further by an inadvisable foray into the sordid voyeuristic mind of the hotel guest Mr. Balcer.
The book has the odd literary flourish, for example: brief mid paragraph first person asides; the device of naming Sarah as Mrs Redden throughout as a way of emphasising the constraints her marriage has placed on her, as well as her husband’s assumption of ownership of her; brief references to the Northern Ireland Troubles mirroring the Troubles of Sarah’s marriage and to a breakdown of faith in religion (among the Catholics) and country (among the Protestants) mirroring Sarah’s lack of faith in the sacrifices of marriage.
However none of this lifts the book in my view near what I would consider Booker shortlist territory – and the book contains some clumsy flourishes such as a rather over-the-top behaviour by Kevin when he confronts Sarah and which turns him into a cartoon villain; and some close to unforgivable ones: Kevin saying to Sarah that she is not the heroine of a book.
This was my first book by Brian Moore – previously a name I associated with two iconic lines. One of the great song lyrics “Brian Moore’s head looks uncannily like London Planetarium” and one of the great commentaries : “It’s up for grabs now”. The latter words being etched in my memory, which I fear will not be the case for any aspect of this book – as perhaps shown by my only quotes being from elsewhere.
I don’t know if Brian Moore felt the Booker was “up for grabs now” when he was shortlisted, but I think this should not have needed a Prime Ministerial Consort’s veto for too much explicit sex, but rather a veto for insufficient literary merit....more
He looked up at the masked face [of the IRA gunman] : “We usually take a pint” …. They waited in silence, hearing the footsteps of the milkman cros
He looked up at the masked face [of the IRA gunman] : “We usually take a pint” …. They waited in silence, hearing the footsteps of the milkman crossing the avenue coming in their direction. There was the sound of their front gate opening, the chink of bottles, and the gate shut again. The van moved on.
I read this as part of the 2019 Mookse Madness tournament.
This book shortlisted for the 1990 Booker prize is an examination of the troubles in Northern Ireland and features a literal milkman (as seen in the quote above), a rather nice link to the winner of the 2018 Booker Prize Anna Burns “Milkman”.
Michael Dillon, has reluctantly returned to Belfast from London, asked by his hotel group to turn around a faous hotel in the City. Dillon is having an affair with a young Canadian BBC journalist and, when she is offered a job with the BBC in London, he promises her he will tell his glamorous, bulimic wife Moira (who by congtrast to him was delighted to return to Northern Ireland) that he is leaving her and will ask to be transferred back to London. That night however Dillon is ordered by the IRA - at the threat of them killing Moira - to park his car at the hotel, so they can detonate a bomb they have placed in it.
Brian Moore’s early novels, published in Canada, were thrillers before he moved on to more literary fiction. This novel seemed to me to be an uneary compromise - effectively the worst of both worlds:
A thriller style set up but without very much of the thrill (the plot slightly too dominated literary style by important decisions which are waived or postponed) - or coherence (Dillon is paraniod about being followed on a drive, and about IRA people being undercover, which is understandable given what has happened to him but does not explain why pages earlier he allowed a man he did not know to speak to him privately just because he is wearing an Ulster lapel badge).
But one which is too often drifts into the rather straightforward and explosition (sic) heavy writing style of a thriller.
In respect of the latter the comparison to Anna Burns novel does not to this book any favour
Compare and contrast:
Mr Harbison would never fight a civiil war to prevent Ulster from becoming a part of the Irish Republic, or take up arms to affirm his status as a citizen of the United Kingdom. Mr Harbison, like ninety per cent of the people of Ulster, Catholic and Protestant, just wanted to get on with his life without any interference from men in woolen masks.
To the distinctive literary voice of:
At this time, in this place, when it came to the political problems, which included bombs and guns and death and maiming, ordinary people said ‘their side did it’ or ‘our side did it’, or ‘their religion did it’ or ‘our religion did it’ or ‘they did it’ or ‘we did it’, when what was really meant was ‘defenders-of-the-state did it’ or ‘renouncers-of-the-state did it’ or ‘the state did it’. Now and then we might make an effort and say ‘defender’ or ‘renouncer ….. that flag of the country from ‘over the water’ which was also the same flag of the community from ‘over the road’.
A contrast which was unfortunately rather shadowed in the opening with:
“At a quarter to nine, just before going to work, Dillon went down to reception to check the staff roster for tomorrow”
As opposed to:
The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died. He had been shot by one of the state hit squads and I did not care about the shooting of this man. Others did care though, and some were those who, in the parlance, ‘knew me to see but not to speak to’
Overall this was an enjoyable and easy reading novel - one which shows the difficult/impossible choices/compromises which can be forced in the political arena, but one which in a literary sense is flattered not just by a link to Anna Burns but by the company it kept on the 1990 Booker prize in a year whose included “Possession”, “A Gate of Angels” and “An Awfully Big Adventure”....more
I read this book as part of the 2019 Mookse Madness Tournament.
This link contains a plot description – as well as one of the three central characters I read this book as part of the 2019 Mookse Madness Tournament.
This link contains a plot description – as well as one of the three central characters (who all appear as point of view characters, in some cases all three observing the same scene)
EITHER: A novel about a biographer writing a biography of a second, now deceased writer who wrote essays discussing the difference between novels and biography and who the biographer increasingly feels has ordered his affairs so as to frustrate a future biographer. The biographer also reflects on the tasks of the biographer – how it differs from that of a novelist, how it implies a level of omniscience but how it challenges the extent to which we can understand of the inner lives of those we are closest to, and they of ours. The novel has an omniscient narrator who has read the biographers essay and at times discusses its advice and once even incorporates it to alter the way the novel is being told.
But a novel that is nevertheless much more light-hearted than that description might suggest.
OR: A mid-life crisis story about an educated middle aged married writer who, to his surprise and to the bemusement of his wife, is attracted to, and has an affair with, a young female garden centre manager, after realising her business partner is gay and not her lover. The affair, which the young girl participates in more out of a sense of obligation, helps her to break through her previous indifference towards love – caused by a dysfunctional childhood - and begin a relationship of her own.
But a story which is much more serious than that description might suggest.
And both would be true – and the juxtaposition of the two makes this an enjoyable as well as thought provoking read....more
“Perhaps chance and destiny are interdependent, in that the latter cannot be fulfilled without the casual intervention of the former. A craggy rock
“Perhaps chance and destiny are interdependent, in that the latter cannot be fulfilled without the casual intervention of the former. A craggy rock placed at a distance from the water will never be worn smooth”
This book is a special Booker Prize winner – winning the “Best Of Beryl” Prize in 2011 – where the public was asked to choose between the five shortlisted books of the “Booker Bridesmaid”.
A detailed plot guide can be found here:
http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-ma... Although a succinct introduction to the characters is contained in the following musings by the geologist Dr Potter, one of our three point of view narrators, when he muses on the events that have thrown the other two point of view characters – the foundling turned favourite turned lover and surrogate mother Myrtle, and the street performer turned photographer’s assistant turned lover Pompey Jones, in orbit around the eponymous surgeon and amateur photographer George Hardy.
“Myrtle is an interesting subject – in regard to the question as to whether fate or chance holds the upper hand. The ifs are numerous. If Beartrice had not shown an affection for her, would she not have vanished into the orphanage. What if Pompey Jones’s unfortunate arrangement of the tiger’s head had not ended Annie’s hope of motherhood? If old Mrs Hardy had woken that morning in a cheerful mood, would Myrtle have been required to follow George down to the town. Then there is the matter of his returning to Blackberty Lane by a different route than was usual. If the woman’s screams had echoed unheard in another street, what then”
And this passage also introduced one of the key themes of the book – as covered in my opening quote. This is a book which relies on extreme chance and co-incidence but not as a plot device but more as a way of examining the role of chance and coincidence when set alongside fate/destiny. Reading this work I could not help seeing it as a form of literary antecedent of the work of Kate Atkinson – whose early Jackson Brodie detective novels relied heavily (perhaps too heavily) on coincidence as an explicitly acknowledged plot device, but who then went on to examine this theme meta-fictionally in books like “Life After Life”.
I also wondered about the influence of this book on Sarah Perry’s “The Essex Serpent”: in the Victorian setting; the fascination with geology and the challenge of the work of Charles Lyell to previously religiously held conceptions and certainties; but also in the way in which all the characters seem drawn to another character, an attraction (including a sexual one from both sexes) that does not convey itself to the reader – with George hear being an even more distant figure than Cora.
Photography is another clear theme – the Crimean War was the first to be widely photographed and Bainbridge chooses to have three photographers in the book (George. Pompey and an unnamed war photographer) and to have the six chapters named after and written around six photographic plates (which are dated and described but not shown).
This idea captures the nature of the book – built effectively around six set pieces Interestingly whereas these chapters feature some seemingly memorable scenes – for example: the attempts to cover up the nature of Mr Hardy’s death; an operation to remove the cataracts of an ape; a dramatic fight in a theater based on a deceived sense of honour; fire eater at concert amidst squalor and disease; a man caught in a blast who ends with a missing ear but regained memory: some of these scenes actually fade from the memory, a little like the “regrettable tendency” of George’s photographs to fade to black after being taken. Instead what lingers in the memory more is our growing understanding of the complex dynamics between the characters and more importantly the themes of the book.
Bainbridge I think is also consciously exploring two related themes here via her photographic plate device:
Firstly photography as a medium for capturing reality and contrasting it both implicitly and explicitly with literature and its ability to capture thought and motivation as well as image:
“There’s something of black magic in the photographer’s art, in that he stops time ….. I don’t know that I think much of the camera. It appears to hold reality hostage and yet fails to snap thoughts in the head … The lens is powerless to catch the interior turmoil boiling within the skull”
And secondly and more widely, the idea of differing perceptions of history, and of myth.
As we switch between the three point of view characters we gradually become aware of differences in their interpretations of past events:
“I reckon memory is selective ….. I tried to get Potter to discuss what it meant when events were recollected differently. He said he wasn’t in the mood and had enough lapses of his own without fretting over other people’s”
As an example, late on Myrtle realises 8 years later that her first glance of Pompey, as an unknown “Duck-boy” carrying out an unheralded “Christian-act” was actually a failed street-scam.
Photography itself exposed the true horrors of war and shattered some of its mythical nature.
And we also have Dr Potter who increasingly in his horror at the reality of war turns literally to history and myth – taking refuge in allusions to classical history and literature, rather it has to be said to the disdain of our lower class narrators Myrtle and Pompey “his frequent quotations .. first spouted in a dead language and then laboriously translated, become wearisome” .
In the same way the concept of war – as celebrated in “nauseating displays of patriotic fervor” by politicians and generals in London and in those who are influenced by them in Istanbul, in Potter’s own words “those buffoons who, by reasons of solely of wealth and title, control both government and army” differs from the horrific reality experienced by working class soldiers, including at the end Pompey.
Overall this is an excellent book – a deserved winner of the “Best of Beryl” Booker albeit one which should have rendered that competition unnecessary by defeating “Amsterdam”....more
I read this book as part of the 2019 Mookse Madness Tournament.
… an army colonel who was a poor relations of the Woodcombes of Woodcombe Park found
I read this book as part of the 2019 Mookse Madness Tournament.
… an army colonel who was a poor relations of the Woodcombes of Woodcombe Park found himself stationed with his regiment in Fermoy: his daughter, too married a Quinton and became mistress of Kilneagh. His second daughter married an English curate …. This couple’s only child was bought up in Woodcoombe Rectory and later caused history to repeat itself, as in Anglo Irish relationships it has a way of doing; she fell in love with a Quinton cousin, and became in time the third English girl to come and live at Kilneagh.
The story starts with Willie Quinton looking back on his own childhood and youth - starting in Ireland in 1918 where as an eight year old he lives on the Anglo-Irish family estate - kilneagh - with his father, mother and two sisters, taught Latin and Irish history (and the years of English occupation) by a defrocked Catholic priest. His first-person story chapters are sometimes bookmarked by asides to a second person “you” - his English cousin (daughter of his mother’s sister, married to a curate and living in the rectory next to the family’s English stately home - Woodcombe Park) Marianne.
What starts as an idyllic childhood is overshadowed by Irish politics - the Quinton’s despite their Protestant faith are longstanding supporters of Home Rule and Michael Collins is a frequent visitor to the estate, the return of soldiers from the war to the village adds complications especially as one who is taken back to the Quinton estate is suspected as being a spy for Churchill’s infamous Black and Tans.
When that soldiers is murdered a spiral of violence is unleashed whose impact carries on over generations
This starts with a Black and Tan sergeant leading a raid on the Quinton estate - burning much of the home and murdering Michael’s father and sisters. Michael’s story continues through his school years and into his youth. Michael’s school career starts at a small school in Cork, where the teacher Miss Hallwell becomes obsessed with him and his back story and then goes on to his father’s boarding school. It contiues through his meeting with Marianne, when Michael ignores his increasingly isolated and depressed mother’s wishes and invites his Aunt to visit Ireland.
(view spoiler)[Michael and Marianne fall in love, although each unsure of the other’s feelings, and encouraged by his mother’s maid Josephine, herself having lost out in love, Michael aims to write to set out his feelings only for his mother to committ suicide that day. Before her death she became repeatedly obsessed with her husband’s murdered - and the fact that no one thought enough of their family to revenge his death. (hide spoiler)]
The story is then continued in first person by Marianne including her time at a Finishing School in Switzerland and her return to the old Quinton estate.
(view spoiler)[In Dublin for Michael’s mother’s funeral - and told by Josephine of Michael’s previous feeling for her - Marianne goes on her last night to Michael’s room. Going to the Finishing School, run by a lecherous man and his colluding wife, she realises she is pregnant but returning to Ireland is shocked to find Michael gone. Eventually she suddenly realises from the reactions of others that he murdered the Black and Tans officer in revenge and is now in self-imposed exile, and fired up but her sense of injustice at Anglo-Irish relationships she decides to live in the estate and bring her daughter Imelda up there, depsite everyone else’s advices to return to England. Looking for Michael she visits Miss Halliwell who, still in love with her memories of Michael, curses her as a liar and then when she fears her story may be true calls her daughter to be an abomination and product of sin and hatred.
A brief third party section covers Imelda’s childhood - her confusion about her father who is regarded as some kind of hero for his actions, haunted by dreams of the burning of her grandfather and Aunts and then, after she finds out more details of her father’s brutal knifing of the retired Black and Tans offucer (and the letter from Miss Halliwell condeming her existence) goes mad. At the book’s end Michal returns from exile and in their 70s starts a life with Marianne and Imelda. (hide spoiler)]
Overall this was a beautifully written and strong book with a number of inter-related themes:
The history of Anglo-Irish relationships and the way in which the consequences of those relationships have born out very differently on either side of the Irish Sea, interesting imperial/colonial history in one, but very terribly consequential to the present day in the other
I had never heard of the Battle of the Yellow Ford until Father Kilgarriff told me. And now he wishes he hadn’t. The furious Elizabeth cleverly transformed the defeat of Sir Harry Bagenal into Victory, ensuring that her Irish battlefield might continue for as long as it was profitable … Just another Irish story it had seemed to you …… But the battlefield continuing is part of the pattern I see everywhere around me, as your exile is also. How could we have rebuilt Kilneagh and watched our children playing amomg the shadows of destruction? The battlefield has never quietened.
(And of course this has been exhibited more recently by the Irish Border Brexit issues)
How this has impacted the two countries concepts of history and tradition - captured at the book’s start written in 1983 which contrasts the heritage industry around Woodcombe with the quiet decay - and sad memories - of Kilneagh:
The sense of the past, so well preserved in the great house and the town in Dorset, is only found in the echoes at Kineagh, in the voices of the cousins.
The way in which violence begats violence and leads to a cycle of inescapable but tragic destiny:
There’s not much left in a life when a murder has been committed. That moment when I guessed the truth in Mr Langan’s office; that moment when [Imelda] opened the secret drawer; that moment when [Willie] stood at his mother’s bedroom door and saw her dead. After each moment there was as little chance for any one of us as there was for Kinleagh after the soldier’s wrath. Truncated lives, creatures of the shadows. Fools of fortune, as his father would have said: ghosts we became
There were some elements which struck me as false:
Michael’s recollections of his early days - well before the trauma of the fire which one can imagine would have stuck with him - are simply too detailed.
Trevor like too many novelists and drama/soap-writers should have set up a fertility clinic - as, as happens far too often in fiction, a single sexual encounter produces a baby.
Trevor as well as being a 5 times Booker nominee and three times Whitbread best novel winner (including for this novel) was a renowned short-story writer - and that helped me to understand some of my least favourite and most favourite aspects of this novel..
At times I felt that some parts of this story - in particular the parts at Willie’s boarding school and even more so Marianne’s stay at the Swiss finishing school were effectively extraenous short stories.
Julian Barnes, in Guardian review, of Trevor’s last and postomous short story collection - relayed an anecdote from his literary agent wife, that one technique Trevor uses to inspire his stories “he liked to sit on park benches and eavesdrop on conversations; but that he never wanted to listen to a whole story, so would get up and move on as soon as he heard the small amount he needed to trigger his further imaginings”
It strikes me that Trevor uses a similar technique here - typically the story leads right up to but not within the main pieces of action, and often a true understanding of what happens is only uncovered (for the reader and sometimes for the characters in the book) over time
Some of the strongest and most complex characters - Josephine, Miss Halliwell - are side characters
And the book ends just as its crucial relationship starts to develop (40-50 years after its tentative start ), and with the realisation that perhaps the cycle of violence has come to an end with love replacing hate.
“Murmuring to one another, the elderly couple rise and make their way outside ….One hand grasps another, awkward in elderliness ….. They do not speak of other matters …..They are grateful for what they have been allowed, and for the mercy of their daughter’s quiet world in which there is no ugliness"
The introductory 95 page “pre-history” of the book consists of
Describe Sea Fail to swim satisfactorily in it Reminisce about mistreatment of a woman MakeThe introductory 95 page “pre-history” of the book consists of
Describe Sea Fail to swim satisfactorily in it Reminisce about mistreatment of a woman Make non too subtle allusions to the Tempest Interact awkwardly with locals Worry about Poltergeist Eat quirky meal accompanied by strong culinary opinions (and alcohol) Repeat
The next four hundred or so add on to these shaky foundations a series of: increasingly unwelcome coincidences; ever more overstrained theatrical allusions; progressively more absurd emotional entanglements.
The rather ludicrous plot of this 1978 Booker winner is nicely captured in the Guardian’s digested read
Galley Beggar’s Sam Jordison, reviewing the book for the Guardian Book Club 10 years ago commented “She is a writer likely to divide opinion. For some she is one of the greatest of her generation. For others, although her intelligence and early promise aren't in doubt, her later books exemplify a peculiarly 1970s strain of brown and overwrought prose that is remembered about as fondly as prog rock yodelling solos”.
I felt that the prog rock comparison was extremely apposite:
Art which clearly demonstrates outstanding technical ability (in this case the descriptions of the sea for example are wonderful);
A sense that we are in the hands of someone in very clear command of a complex artisitic undertaking;
Offset by the sheer length and ridiculousness of the end product and a sense of indulgence – that the artist is more interested in their creation than in the reader;
A style which is best described as of its time, which attracts fierce loyalty from those who grew up with it, a devotion which can seem rather baffling to those who didn’t....more
I read this book as part of the 2019 Mookse Madness tournament.
The book is an imagined account of the signing of the Armisitice which ended the Great I read this book as part of the 2019 Mookse Madness tournament.
The book is an imagined account of the signing of the Armisitice which ended the Great War on 11th November 1918. I have read many excellent books in 2014 on the events leading up to the outbreak of that war – not least Christopher Clark’s “The Sleepwalkers”, most of which – but have not found any books this year on the Armistice, so it was a pleasant surprise to come across this non-fictional treatment.
The book concentrates on a retelling of the signing itself – and those that signed the deal. Written in the third person there are really three main point of view protagonists, the main one being Matthias Erzberger, the whose civilian politician lead of the German delegation, under final instructions and authority from the newly appointed Social Democrat Chancellor Ebert, was shortly after distorted into the “stab-in-the back” idea that was tragically for human history the foundational myth of Nazi-ism.
The others are the British admiral Wemyss and the French General (and Allied Supreme Commander) Foch.
Erzberger struggles with the fore-knowledge that he will be blamed and hated for his role in the armistice (unpopular already with Conservative politicians due to his criticism of German colonial misdeeds in Africa. Ultimately he signs the terms while protesting at their unreasonableness and urging his government to push for urgent peace negotiations, with the crucial inclusion of the Americans and Wilson’s Fourteen Points.
Wemyss’s main determination is that the French will not concede Britain’s unequivocal naval terms. As the interactions progress he tries to understand if the Germans are bluffing over the threat of Bolshevism and starvation due to overly harsh terms.
Foch is presented unsympathetically as a rigid and unbending, Napoleonic character, sure of his Catholic faith, military doctrine and the justice of the terms – and of the weight of destiny behind the events: when both French politicians and the German delegates panic that the rapidly changing and deteriorating political circumstances in Germany mean that those delegates no longer have any authority, Foch is unwavering in his belief that the Armistice can and will be signed.
Both the English and French reject the, in their view, naïve level of balance in Wilson’s Fourteen Points, as being inappropriate to the devastation and death caused by the German hostilities and the reality of their military defeat. In one of my favourite lines:
At the mention of that remote platonist of the prairies, a film fell on the eyes of the French generals and British admirals. They looked like man who has been unexpectedly reminder that at the age of fourteen they had learned physics or history from a scholarly man of endearing naïvety.
I found this a powerful, enlightening and entertaining book – achieving a great synthesis of factual accuracy and fictional imagining.
Some closing comments:
One of my fellow Mookse and Gripes forum members has commented that everyone (authors as well as forum members who are champions of books) assume that their book/favourite was a narrow runner up in the Booker.
Interestingly this is the only book that can genuinely lay claim to the title of Booker runner-up, as it was part of the shortest every shortlist in Booker history.
I found it interesting that the events in this Book lead by a tragedy of history to those in the author’s more famous and Booker prize winning book.
Some criticisms: I also found the opening Epigraph a rather gratuitous dig at the French and a possible explanation of the apparent skew in the book against that nation; I found the opening of the book weak with too many portentous dreams. ...more
I have revisited this book due to its inclusion in the 2019 Mookse Madness challenge.
I first read it in 2005 for my Book Group as part of what was (II have revisited this book due to its inclusion in the 2019 Mookse Madness challenge.
I first read it in 2005 for my Book Group as part of what was (I thought) a rather well chosen double selection alongside Zoë Heller's What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal . In fact those two books were the first I read in 2005.
Both are set in schools and both I think have at their heart vicarious living.
Of the two I have to say that at the time I much preferred Heller's book and it is also, 13 years later, the one that stays far more in my mind.
My very brief original review from 2005 (in those days my reviews were purely for myself - to note the plot of the book and my overall impression).
Set in 1930’s – a very short book about an eccentric teacher Jean Brodie (one, so the narrator – one of her girls – points out of a generation of educated ladies who lost their partners 15-20 years ago in the First World War and who are now on a moral quest).
Jean Brodie is unusual in that she is a Junior school teacher and decides to mentor a select group of pupils – her girls, giving them a broad education and also confiding in them while explaining to them all along that she is “in her prime”.
Gradually she begins to life vicariously through to of them – Rose and Sandy, the narrator.
The book is told from the viewpoint from one of her set – who eventually “betrays” her (by mentioning her facist leanings) to a headmaster and teaching staff who have continually been looking for ways to get rid of her.
Found book reasonably interesting and the character of Jean Brodie a reasonably engaging one – but seemed too short to be really compelling....more
“… crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That,
“… crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once”
I came to this book as a result of its inclusion as part of the 2019 Mookse Madness tournament – but it was also an opportunity to add a Booker prize winner to the list I have read (I think this is my 22nd) and one which was generally seen as a surprise pick to represent the 1980s for the Golden Man Booker (surprise as it was picked ahead of Midnight’s Children – which has twice been awarded a Best of the Booker/Booker of Bookers prize I believe).
The plot of the book is summarised here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Tiger) albeit that does not capture the process of memory and of different perspectives on events which drives the book – as the opening quote implies.
Overall I thought this was an excellent book – much stronger than I was expecting. Comparisons with “English Patient” are inevitable and I think it’s a close run thing: Ondaatje’s descriptive writing and command of language gives him an early lead in my view: but Lively I think creates a more memorable and rounded character in Claudia, and is so much better at observing the nuances social interactions (a struggle for social supremacy between Claudia and Japser’s ageing ex-lothario father Sasha for instance, is brilliantly conveyed in a few lines). And this book’s ending, while inevitable, does not mar the story like “English Patient”.
What I really enjoyed in this book was its examination of memory and history: individual memory and how perspective alters over time and varies between different individuals; the contrast and interaction between collective historical narrative and individual experiences.
I had two main criticisms of the book:
The relationship between Claudia and Gordon at first intriguing in its narcissistic exclusionary nature, I think veers too far when it becomes incestuous.
The character of Laszlo seemed to me simply a device to allow Claudia’s life history to encompass not just the World Wars but the events of 1956 (Suez and the decay of British influence being an obvious one given her history in Egypt, but the link to Budapest seeming to me unnecessary).
But overall I found this an excellent read and an unexpected delight....more
I read this book due to its inclusion in the 2019 Mookes Madness tournament.
A book that was shortlisted for the 1981 Booker Prize - a prize of courseI read this book due to its inclusion in the 2019 Mookes Madness tournament.
A book that was shortlisted for the 1981 Booker Prize - a prize of course won by the Booker of Bookers Midnights Children.
An entertaining and cleverly written book – which I would best categorise as a very deliberate mash up of 1950s farce, and early 1980s meta-fictional conceit.
The book serves as an interesting examination of two related creative processes:
(Auto)biography and memior – with Spark simultaneously (among many other ideas): having characters who whose whole connection is their interest in writing their own memoirs; examining in detail two autobiographies – Benvenuto Cellini’s “The Life of Benvenuto Cellini” and Henry Newman’s “Apologia” as well as alluding to Proust; looking at the idea of ghostwritten autobiographies; examining the importance of the mass-autobiographical Who’s Who in determining so much of English culture and class hierarchy for much of the 20th Century
(Auto) fiction – of course something which is more topical now than when this was written (given a year in which Cusk/Knausgaard finished their series); Spark examines the flow of a novel – what it means for a novel to draw from real life, how that very act of writing what one observes can impact on the attitudes of those around the writer, what we mean by the concept of art imitating life and, more to the point, when we say that life seems to be imitating art or for art to turn out to be foreshadowing the future (again something which can seem more topical than ever in an age of Trump/Brexit).
A final comment – the version I read has a really excellent introduction from Mark Lawson and a very bizarre orange, cartoon cover....more
I found it difficult to relate the book to McEwen’s later writing which can, in my view, range from the brilliant (Atonement) to the far too frequently annoying (less any particular book than aspects of his writing).
Probably the two most annoying aspects are entirely missing here:
The insistence on reproducing his research and/or interests in extensive detail – contrast for example the interminable squash game in Saturday with the snooker game here, which does not even make sense with a break of reds and blacks scoring 49.
The prepopenderance of upper middle class, successful, characters living in nice London houses. Here by contrast we have an almost feral set of children living in squalor. Albeit admittedly in what is still a large house (can he write about small houses I wonder) but the last undemolished house in an urban wasteland.
However I found what was also missing was any real credibility to the story line – one which in the key aspect of its unlikeliness reminded me a lot of this year’s Booker longlisted “Snap”. I also had the curious sense that it was literally misplaced and would have worked better in a rural American Twilight zone style setting – one I think McEwen was trying to reproduce in the seeming decay of late 1970’s England.
Overall I now understand why the author was once nicknamed Ian Macabre....more
But overall this is a novel which reminded me a little of a going on a lengthy car journey in a vintage car which exhibits clunky changes of gear, and with a driver who likes to share their observations of each stage of the journey.
The book starts almost as a satire of a Gothic novel – Murdoch rolls out her descriptive powers at their finest to convey the oppressive and terrifying nature of the (unnamed) Irish countryside and the forbidding sight of “The Gaze”
“Not a thing of beauty I’m afraid … Nineteeth Century of course”
Marian’s initial stay (or incareration) in the house, before she is drawn into Hannah’s story, then resembles a rather tedious version of a Victorian family drama
“Marian was beginning to find the late evenings at Gaze rather hard to live through”
Before the revelation of Hannah’s story threatens to turn boring family drama into literally incredible melodrama
“This is an insane story ….. I don’t mean I don’t believe you. But it’s all mad …. Why does she put up with it, who doesn’t she just pack up and go away”
In what seems a pivotal chapter (chapter 12) a discussion between Max and Effingham seems to get at the heart of what really drove Murdoch to write this novel – to explore using fiction philosophy and Plato over Freud, as well as the medieval, chivalrous, religious and philosophical concepts of beauty, guilt, of sacrifice, of pure love
“Plato tells us that of all the things which belong to the spiritual world beauty is the one which is most easily seen here below.” “Max’s oblivion of everything to do with Freud was one of the things which made Effingham love him”
And some rather overt religious symoblism
“I know one mustn’t think of her as a legendary creature, a beautiful unicorn – “The unicorn is also the image of Christ. But we have to do too with an ordinary guilty person ….. Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves”
After some drama, including various crossed-wires between the characters about their relations and feelings, the book seems to be resolving itself into a series of resolutions and happy outcomes
“It was like a comedy by Shakespeare. All the ends of the story were being bound in a good way”
But with the immediate threat to the reader that – unfortunately the story is not over – and will take a different turn
“You both feel you are sitting out the end of some tedious film, don’t you, where you already know what is going to happen …. But perhaps you don’t know what is going to happen, perhaps there are surprises, turns of the story …
The book feels less like a novel, and more like someone interested in setting out their philosophical interests and religious musings into novel form
“Perhaps Hannah is my experiment! I’ve always had a great theoretical knowledge of morals, but practically speaking I’ve never done a hand’s turn”
A novel whose real literary merit is immobilized by the excessive use of allusion:
“Gerald had no theory about Hannah. Gerald not been paralysed by an allegory”
And Gerald as a result has to go and the book seems to return to satire as most of the protagonists are disposed of in a series of incidents, followed by some more, rather obvious allegorical interpretation of the implausible plot:
“Hannah had been to him the chaste mother-godess, the Virgin mother. The sin which Hannah was, through her own sinless suffering redeeming him for had been the sin of his own mother’s betrayal of him with her own father …… Because of his unconscious resentment of his own Mother’s sin of sex, he had been, he explained, unable to establish any satisfactory relations with women other than those of Courtly Love”
And in case it is not clear to us, a series of quotes signal the ending of the story, its imaginative nature and the return of both our two point-of-view characters (Marian and Effingham) and the reader to normal life
“The play is over, the Vampire Play let us call it” “The spell is broken and the magic is all blown away” “We were all the attendants up on that ceremony and we are now all dismissed. So we return to our real life and our real tasks” “It has been a fantasy of the spiritual life, a story, a tragedy ….. He would hurry back to his familiar, ordinary world”
Something the reader greets with the same relief as the characters (especially as the book finished with yet another death):
“His death rounded the thing off, gave it a tragic completeness which made it all the easier to cut free of it” “He was now in a frenzy to be off, to have escaped”
Overall I felt this was a very disappointing book for two key aspects – the first as I have tried to bring out above:
“While you are playing ring-a-roses, others are working the machine”
For the reader at play, the other is Murdoch, but unfortunately (perhaps deliberately) the workings of the machine are rather too obviously on display.
The second reason is that I at almost no point could identify any of the characters in the book, or their behaviour with anything I have observed in real life – only perhaps at one point as Marian’s ambiguous relationship with Denis develops do we glance something that may give the book some grounding in reality
“Her encounter with Denis, for all its surpisingness and oddness, had so much of the feeling of coming into real life ….. this would be the real business which one human being has with another”
But this is quickly taken away and I think it’s an indictment of the writing that there was only one passage in the whole book that I highlighted for a positive reason as one which I thought captured something I had seen in real life:
Out on the terrace, the golden retriever came rushing up to Effingham, planting its paws upon his waistcoat and then rolling upon its back in a fluffy whirl of smiling mouth and waving paws”
I could only conclude that Murdoch at least based on this novel can write of pets, Plato and Philosophy, but not of People. Perhaps behind this all – Murdoch was striving for her more famous and Booker prize winning novel:
“There was a roaring sound behind the rain which was perhaps the sea”
The book opens with the murder of Max Ophuls – a WWII Resistance hero from Strasbourg (itself a dispRevisited for the 2019 Mookse Madness tournament.
The book opens with the murder of Max Ophuls – a WWII Resistance hero from Strasbourg (itself a disputed territory fought over between Germans and French and so analogous to Kashmir), turned maker of many of the institutions of the modern world, turned initially popular ambassador to India turned America’s counter-terrorism chief. He is assassinated by his Kashmiri Muslim driver – a mysterious character called Shalimar the Clown.
The book tells the story of Max, Max’s wife (a WWII secret agent), Shalimar, India (Max’s daughter) and Boonyi – a Hindu from a Kashmiri village. Boonyi is a great dancer and Shalimar a trapeze artist. The village gains fame for its combination of folk theatre/circus (run by Shalimar’s Muslim Dad) and feasts (run by Boonyi’s Pashun – Hindu- Dad) – the village combining the two takes away the feast trade from a nearby mainly Muslim village which is much later the cause of much trouble and tension. Shalimar and Boonyi fall in love and are betrayed – but their village’s famed tolerance means that the union is blessed.
However fault lines begin to emerge – the tolerance of the village becomes harder to maintain as increasingly militant Muslim’s enter the area. Max – a serial philanderer – falls for Boonyi and it is his downfall. Firstly he develops an obsession with Kashmir – then when their affair ends in Boonyi’s pregnancy – just at the time when America’s position in the world is being undone by Vietnam, he is forced to resign by the scandal. The baby is adopted by Max’s wife and renamed from Kashmira to India - and Boonyi returns to her village where she finds that the villagers having officially registered her dead refuse to acknowledge her.
Shalimar vowing a long-term revenge becomes involved in terrorism – initially Kashmir militants but then the Taliban and Al-Qaeda all the time pursuing his own long-term plan of revenge.
After murdering both Boonyi (only after both their parents die) and then Max he pursues India who instead kills him.
The book (as often with Rushdie) is over-packed with allusion – each character seems simply a cipher.
Ultimately the book although at heart a love story is dominated by despair and the descent of both the beautiful valley of Kashmir but also the world into violence and terror (with the book particularly influenced by the post 9/11 world). . Despite this I found the book by far the easiest of Rushdie’s books to read (language is less tortured and magic realism is more measured) and easily (at the time of publication) his best book since Midnight’s children....more
A book I originally read for my Book Group in 2006 alongside re-reading a number of Sherlock Holmes sRevisited for the 2019 Mookse Madness tournament.
A book I originally read for my Book Group in 2006 alongside re-reading a number of Sherlock Holmes stories: I would count myself as a Holmes fan having read all of the original adventures and short stories.
This novel tells two stories from childhood – Arthur (Conan Doyle) and George Edalji – a half-caste son a Parsee Staffordshire vicar.
George and his family do not mix with the community – partly from the prejudice they encounter but partly on his father’s strict views of proper behaviour. George is myopic and lonely – but trains as a solicitor and publishes a book on railway law.
His family, as well as others in the parish are victims of a (or possibly several) hate campaigns. These cease for a long period but then resume with a series of livestock mutilations – the police always convinced that George was perpetrator of the initial hoaxes on his own family arrest him and he is convicted on circumstantial evidence and only released after several years and with no pardon despite a public outcry.
Arthur – by then sick of Sherlock Holmes and at the time lethargic, finds his interest in life awakened by finally agreeing to take on one of the many cases that are sent to him unsolicited due to his fictional creation – and crusades on George’s behalf.
We learn much about Arthur’s growing interest in spiritualism and belief that the 20th Century will provide a scientific breakthrough in understanding of the afterlife.
The most interesting parts are when Arthur confronts the police chief with his clear view of George’s innocence and of the actual truth and is in turn confronted with the view that the real world of crime solving and jury-persuasion as well as the notions of guilt/innocence and of what it means to know something, are much greyer in real life than in the black and white world of Holmes.
The book is written in different chapters from the viewpoint of different characters and in a kind of old-fashioned pseudo-biographical style (which is the same for all characters).
The book is surprisingly gripping and definitely an enjoyable read – although the ending seemed an anti-climax – although partly this was I think deliberate making the very point about the lack of clear-cut endings in real life....more
(view spoiler)[In the first part of the book set on a Summer’s Day (the gathering heat working as a mRevisited for the 2019 Mookse Madness tournament.
(view spoiler)[In the first part of the book set on a Summer’s Day (the gathering heat working as a metaphor for the growing feeling of irrevocable destiny that seems to haunt everyone’s actions as well as the country in light of growing re-armament) in 1935. Briony Tallis a 13 year old would-be author and her family (including sister Cecilia) are visited by their cousins the 15-year old Lola and two younger twins (all fleeing an impending divorce), as well as her older brother back from university with his chocolate magnate friend Paul Marshall. Briony starts by trying to produce a play but is thwarted firstly by the ineptitude of her younger cousins but ultimately by her own growing consciousness of the limits of her literal writing compared to the unfolding complexities of the adult world, which is in turn triggered by a confrontation she witnesses between Cecilia and Robbie Turner (the son of their cleaner, who was supported by Briony’s father through Cambridge). What she thinks was actually an assault on Robbie was in fact an awkward encounter between the two, who were childhood friends, avoided each other at Cambridge, misinterpret each other’s subsequent behaviour but now are growing to realise that there is something between them an awareness bough to fruition (and to an impromptu sexual encounter) by an obscene version of an apology letter than Robbie accidentally sends. This letter is sent via Briony and this, plus her walking in on their sex convinces her that Robbie is a maniac assaulting her sister. The twins go missing and while they are being searched for Briony comes across Lola apparently being assaulted and convinces herself (with Lola’s implicit acquiescence) and the police (with the aid of the letter) that she saw Robbie fleeing the scene.
The second part of the book is Robbie’s thoughts as he takes part in the evacuation to Dunkirk, having secured early release from prison in exchange for serving as a private. Cee has become estranged from her family and waited for him – only for an early call-up to prevent them getting together but does write to him saying that Briony has had a sudden change of heart – giving up university to nurse (as Cee does) and hinting at a recantation of evidence. In this part of the book Robbie dwell son Briony’s motivation (which over years he has traced to an incident when he laughed at a childhood declaration of love from her – an incident we later find that she forgot as soon as it happened) and on his hatred of the gardener’s son – the obvious actual culprit. This section features a detailed account of the horrors and ignominy of the retreat.
The third part is Briony at hospital – clearly trying to work out atonement and finding some form of it in the horrors of nursing the sick and dying of the evacuation. She also during this time receives a refusal from a literary magazine of a story she wrote around the fountain incident (and is told the story needs embellishing with a back story and the motivation of the participants and watcher). It becomes clear that the real culprit was in fact Marshall when Briony goes as a silent watcher to his marriage to Lola. She then, in an unconvincing ending visits Cee (and to her surprise Robbie) to offer her apology and agree to help fight his case – receiving if not forgiveness then some form of atonement in the retraction they ask her to write.
A fourth postscript is set much later – with Briony an elderly author going to a birthday party with her family where the children act out the aborted play from 1935. During this piece it is clear she has just finished writing this book itself but cannot publish for fear of libel until the Marshall’s death (which she realises will be after hers). There is a growing sense of foreboding (or something not quite right) in this section and in a final twist she says that the real story was that both Robbie and Cecilia died (in Dunkirk and a bomb raid) and that there was no happy ending or atonement. (hide spoiler)]
Extremely well written and with some deep themes.
The book is on the surface about atonement and when revealing her “trick”, the elderly Briony bemoans how it is possible to achieve atonement via a novel as the novelist has no higher authority from which to obtain forgiveness and no outside agencies to be reconciled with.
But the book is really about the meaning of fiction – how do we know that the “real” ending is real, what does real actually mean in a work of fiction, what is the meaning of the literary review of a different account of the incident without back story?
Further the earlier parts of the book is principally about characters completely misunderstanding each other’s actions and motivations – if it is impossible to know what someone else is thinking and meaning then the whole idea of narrated multi-character fiction is a fraud....more
Revisited for the 2019 Mookse Madness tournament. One thing that I have been reflecting on is Beryl Bainbridge's literary descendants - and it struck Revisited for the 2019 Mookse Madness tournament. One thing that I have been reflecting on is Beryl Bainbridge's literary descendants - and it struck me that a number of recent Up-lit books (most noticeable "Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine") have borrowed a crucial plot device from this book.
A slowly written, crafted book - full of the pathos of:
The post war struggles of the middle class;
The reality of the hard work and tensions of a dramatics company behind the seeming glamour of the production;
The dislocation of war (almost all the male characters refer back to their experiences);
Class aspirations (Vernon is always struggling to assert himself as a middle class business man, using his supplier of toiletries as a confidant; Stella struggles against her background and misjudges others - she assumes Merideth is upper class and his assistant Bunny working class when the opposite is actually the case);
Unrequited love and longing (despite their being natural pairings almost all of the cast has aspirations to another relationship: not least Stella's infatuation for Merideth who we eventually discover is homosexual and is instead fixated on Geoffrey who had originally made advances on her; even O'Hara used to seducing young starlets feels he is being used by rather than using Stella and seeks in her his lost love);
Tragedy (there are gratuitous scenes such as when a boy carrying a pane of glass slips and bleeds to death).
The book takes time to grip the reader - but the superb ending makes the book....more
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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