“There were riots in Paris, but there are always riots in Paris”
Post-apocalyptic and dystopian, cynical, cautionary, satirical, hilarious, concern“There were riots in Paris, but there are always riots in Paris”
Post-apocalyptic and dystopian, cynical, cautionary, satirical, hilarious, concerned, realistic, evocative, ominous, thought-provoking … MR ADAM is all of the above and a good deal more besides.
Consider a hypothetical world in which a nuclear accident sterilizes every man on the planet except Mr Adam, a rather unassuming, mildly introverted man with a definite case of low self-esteem, who happened to be working deep in a mine shielded by vast quantities of lead deposits at the time of the accident. Pat Frank’s brilliant (but hopefully not prescient) tale tells the disconcerting story of a shocked world’s reactions to the situation from a variety of possible perspectives – young vs old; male vs female; government or military vs citizens; nation vs nation; and, of course, Mr Adams vs the rest of the world who see artificial insemination (with him as the sole source of semen) as the only possibility for the continuation of the human race (as if that is necessarily a good thing, LOL!).
Easy, easy, easy to recommend to other readers and a definite incentive to explore Pat Frank’s more widely known classic, ALAS, BABYLON.
“Perhaps the best civility, whatever kind of people we are brought up among … is to mind our own business.”
Edwin Drood is a young man betrothed to“Perhaps the best civility, whatever kind of people we are brought up among … is to mind our own business.”
Edwin Drood is a young man betrothed to Rosa Bud in a marriage arranged many years earlier by their fathers. But their feelings toward one another seem to rest in a triangle cornered by uncertainty, ambivalence, or at best platonic friendship. Their meetings typically end in childish bickering and their future marriage seems destined for a loveless failure. Drood’s acquaintance, Neville Landless, on the other hand is entirely smitten by Rosa but Landless knows that his feelings are unrecognized and as a result unacknowledged and unrequited. When Edwin Drood disappears and is presumed to have been murdered, the suspicions of the community naturally lean toward Landless who, in order to remove himself from the dangers of potential prosecution as a murderer, goes on a cross country tramp of uncertain length and destination. In the meantime, Rosa’s music master, Mr Jasper, a cad addicted to opium and a good deal less than a gentleman with honourable intentions, takes advantage of Drood’s absence to advance an unwelcome suit and to push his own lust for Rosa who flees from her boarding school to the hoped for safety of her guardian’s care.
SPOILER ALERT (kinda!!): (From Wikipedia), “Upon the death of Dickens on 9 June 1870, the novel was left unfinished in his writing desk, only six of a planned twelve instalments having been written. He left no detailed plan for the remaining instalments or solution to the novel's mystery, and many later adaptations and continuations by other writers have attempted to complete the story.”
It seems obvious, and perhaps pointlessly self-referential, to suggest that THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD is typically Dickensian in its atmosphere, its character development, and its verbose and loquacious use of lengthy sentences and paragraphs where a couple of words might have served. Dickens fans will eat it up … I certainly did! But, unfortunately, my pique at being left with my appetite for a solution to the mystery unsated, I finished the half-novel feeling a little disgruntled. Doubtless that contributed to my miserly 3-star rating whereas, if finished, it might have earned 4 or 5 stars like the rest of his work.
The distilled essence of religious zealotry, “We do not reason – we believe, and so do you.”
NORTH AND SOUTH is many things – a melodrama; a treatise oThe distilled essence of religious zealotry, “We do not reason – we believe, and so do you.”
NORTH AND SOUTH is many things – a melodrama; a treatise on the human condition in the swirl of the smog and smoke of Industrial Revolution England in the mid-19th century; a romantic soap opera; a history of the awakening of the labour movement and the development of left-wing socialist attitudes; a character driven family drama; an exploration of the evolution of social structure and the rigidity of class mores; a tale of feminism in the face of unwelcome male attention; and a commentary on the power of religious belief.
Months of self-examination and critical thought had led Pastor Hale to what those afore-mentioned religious zealots would characterize as apostasy. While he hadn’t lost his belief in the existence of a benevolent deity, he had reached the conclusion that his personal convictions were inconsistent with the doctrine of the Church of England and that to remain in his long-term sinecure as pastor of the local parish would be, at the very least, hypocritical. Accordingly he reaches the decision to abandon his living as a pastor in the south of England, to retreat with his wife and daughter to a heavily industrialized town in the north where he is a complete stranger with no background baggage, and to seek a modest income as a private tutor.
The stage is thus set for Gaskell’s culture-clash period piece and the off-again off-again (no mistake … I wrote it the way I meant it!) story of the romancing of Margaret Hale, Pastor Hale’s daughter and the erstwhile feminist of the piece who obviously can’t make up her mind as to which shackles of society she cares to set aside and which she considers continue to bind and direct her behaviour.
My 4-star rating is qualified, at best, and must be considered as something more properly on the order of 3½ stars rounded up. The story is interesting and informative throughout but the plot fails to reach compelling or gripping at least half of the time. In fact, truth be told, the story sometimes even drifted into the realm of a struggle and I had to force myself to reach the decision to finish. And that ending just didn’t work for me. It seemed like Gaskell simply decided to set her pen down and wrap up the story. (view spoiler)[Whatever happened for example to Henry Lennox’s obvious machinations to use his legal assistance to worm his way into Hale’s heart?? Her decision to give in, at long last, to Thornton’s overtures must have sent him positively ballistic!! (hide spoiler)]
Well it is what it is. Been there, done that, glad I did it and I’ll definitely read some of Gaskell’s other notable works. WIVES AND DAUGHTERS and RUTH sit on my TBR shelves awaiting my attention.
”I read evil things between the lines in the newspapers, and usually very faintly but sometimes quite plainly I see, behind the transparent front o”I read evil things between the lines in the newspapers, and usually very faintly but sometimes quite plainly I see, behind the transparent front of things, that cave-man face …”
THE CROQUET PLAYER is definitely not the kind of story HG Wells fans would expect if they were looking for sci-fi novels that might compare to the likes of THE TIME MACHINE or THE ISLAND OF DR MOREAU. It is actually a dark, deeply atmospheric ghost story written with a foreboding, “haunting” literary style that would have done credit to the likes of Edgar Allan Poe or HP Lovecraft. The evil in the story arises from a small town named Cainsmarsh in a clear reference to the first biblical murder. While it dabbles briefly in the ultra-religious Calvinistic preaching against the scientific truth of Darwin’s theories of evolution, ultimately THE CROQUET PLAYER is believed by literary scholars to be a cautionary allegorical tale warning England and the world against the dangers of Hitler and his emerging cult of Nazism. In effect, Wells compares an unnamed Hitler to an emerging universal evil in the world that is equivalent to a resurgence of antediluvian and unevolved beast man or caveman. Frankly, I think this is an insult to the behaviour and thinking of pre-Homo Sapiens species such as the Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon and reflects a rather self-righteous view of the advanced moralistic state of human thinking.
I would prefer to consider a somewhat more modern interpretation (strictly my own, I might add) in which the entire story is allegorical INCLUDING the references to caveman fossils and bones. Consider the caveman fossils and bones as being Hitler and the evils of Nazism which ought to serve as its own warning to today’s and future humanity. The frightening ghostly evil emerging from the mists of the story’s locale in Cainsmarsh stands in for the global fascination with neo-Nazism and hard right-wing politics with which the world is currently flirting. Most notably, of course, the USA might do very well to consider HG Wells as having offered a prescient warning against the rising evils of Trump, MAGA Republicans, and their version of neo-Nazism. YMMV and you might consider this idea to be far wide of the mark, but it is what it is.
“It was the first time in her life that she had spoken with a woman daring enough to think and act for herself.”
The informative forward in the edi“It was the first time in her life that she had spoken with a woman daring enough to think and act for herself.”
The informative forward in the edition which I read, defined “odd women” as:
“displaced spinsters … the largely middle-class victims of a cruel and restrictive traditional ethic which allowed women no social or economic alternative to marriage. Convinced that the essence of ladylike gentility was never ‘to earn’, and enslaved by the myth that their femininity depended upon qualities of helplessness and passivity, these untrained women workers were forced to compete for the genteel but marginal wages of a governess or companion when family funds expired.”
Written in an era in which societal norms and the constraints of religion and propriety restricted polite female roles to wives and mothers within marriage - itself constrained by a multitude of unwritten rules - THE ODD WOMEN is a courageous, forward-looking story of a handful of ambitious women who dared to break that mold. Modern parlance would accuse Gissing of indulging radical “woke” feminism. Despite the more traditional, indeed misogynistic tones of his earlier works, in THE ODD WOMEN Gissing explored a multitude of themes from a more enlightened perspective – spinsterhood and satisfaction with a lifetime decision to celibacy; career women and career satisfaction in non-traditional professional occupations; marriage for love as opposed to being strictly a decision of economic security; free love relationships and non-traditional common law marriages; divorce and marital separation; the development of a business school for women; a critique of the traditional, intensely male-focused inheritance laws; and more.
Despite being a Victorian novel (written in 1893), THE ODD WOMEN is reasonably modern in its writing. Its narrative tone (unlike what readers of the genre have come to expect in the more flowery, loquacious and verbose prose of Gissing’s 19th century predecessors such as Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Jane Austen or the Brönte sisters) is surprisingly straightforward and readable with relative ease.
That said, Gissing, from time to time, lapses into a retro-Gothic style that is as thick as any produced by the aforementioned literary lights. Consider this description of a sleepless episode as Monica, one of THE ODD WOMEN’s heroines, suffers through a deeply troubled self-examination of her thoughts and motives:
“Monica was the first to [yield to exhaustion]; she slept for about an hour, then the pains of a horrid dream disturbed her, and again she took up the burden of thought. Such waking after brief, broken sleep, when mind and body are beset by weariness, yet cannot rest, when night with its awful hush and its mysterious movements makes a strange, dread habitation for the spirit – such waking is a grim trial of human fortitude. The blood flows sluggishly, yet subject to sudden tremors that chill the veins and for an instant choke the heart. Purpose is idle, the will impure; over the past hangs a shadow of remorse, and life that must yet be lived shows lurid, a steep pathway to the hopeless grave. Of this cup Monica drank deeply.”
“The old faiths, never abandoned, though modified by the breath of intellectual freedom that had just touched her, reasserted all their power. She saw herself as a wicked woman, in the eye of truth not less wicked than her husband declared her. A sinner stubborn in impenitence, defending herself by a paltry ambiguity that had all the evil of a direct lie. Her soul trembled in its nakedness.”
“What redemption could there be for her? What path of spiritual health was discoverable?”
Society’s tenacious, unyielding grip on women, their minds, and their behaviour was awesome in its power. THE ODD WOMEN is a classic worthy of the term and needs a wider readership if we are to move forward in the recognition of women’s rights as undeniably human rights. Highly recommended.
Solaris had “shown the astonishing faculty of maintaining an orbit which ought, without any shadow of a doubt, to have been unstable”.
Kelvin was a psSolaris had “shown the astonishing faculty of maintaining an orbit which ought, without any shadow of a doubt, to have been unstable”.
Kelvin was a psychologist sent to a research space station orbiting the planet Solaris with the mandate to determine whether the mission should be terminated and disbanded due to a lack of progress. What he finds instead is a crew in dire mental difficulty struggling with the apparent hallucination of figures from their own pasts. Kelvin soon finds himself in his own turn visited by his much loved wife, dead these long years past at her own hand. Is the vision real and, much more to the point, how is Solaris plumbing the mental depths of its visitors and creating these troubling visions?
Situated somewhere in a vast literary tract bounded by horror and paranormal, philosophy, psychology, and sci-fi, SOLARIS is an extended essay musing on impenetrably esoteric themes including Gaia; planets as global lifeforms and planetary sentience; intelligence and motivation; the nature of memory; and the almost infinite possibilities for the nature of extraterrestrial life and intelligence. If John Campbell was pleased at Stanley Weinbaum’s response to his dictum, "write me a creature who thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man" when Weinbaum crafted the ostrich Tweel in THE MARTIAN ODYSSEY or the outrageously bizarre intelligent plant Oscar in THE LOTUS EATERS, then it must also be true that Stanislaw Lem simply smiled, sat back, and said, “Hold my beer”! The mind simply reels:
“It had been accepted that the [Solarian] ocean was an organic formation – a sort of gigantic entity, a fluid cell, unique and monstrous (which they called ‘prebiological’), surrounding [Solaris] with a colloidal envelope several miles thick in places – the astronomers and physicists asserted that it must be an organic structure, extraordinarily evolved. According to them, the ocean possibly exceeded terrestrial organic structures in complexity, since it was capable of exerting an active influence on the planet’s orbital path.”
Yeah … some understatement! Here was a planet capable of guiding itself in orbit in order to maintain indefinite viability around dual suns that should have gravitationally destroyed the planet in a mere twinkling of geological planetary time.
And consider this rather awesome evaluation of the shortcomings of any possible efforts at communication with extraterrestrial intelligence:
“… the most abstract achievements of science, the most advanced theories and victories of mathematics represented nothing more than a stumbling, one- or two-step progression from our rude, prehistoric, anthropomorphic understanding of the universe around us … Gastrom’s conclusion was that there neither was, nor could be, any question of ‘contact’ between mankind and any non-human civilization.”
I would have added narcissistic and egocentric to that list of descriptors to mankind’s contemplation of the universe but neither Lem nor the editors consulted me!
If you like your sci-fi plots crisply detailed and clearly finished with a definite dénouement, climax and ending, then perhaps SOLARIS won’t be your cup of tea. A wide open lack of completion to the story is clearly intended to allow the reader to continue thinking and contemplating on the issues and themes that Lem placed before his readers. Recommended with the caveat that SOLARIS worked for me but it won’t work for everyone.
“… the public is defrauded when it is purposely misled. Poor public! How often is it misled! Against what a world of fraud it has to contend!
Sept“… the public is defrauded when it is purposely misled. Poor public! How often is it misled! Against what a world of fraud it has to contend!
Septimus Harding is a gentleman – both in the 21st century reader’s “refined, scrupulously behaved Miss Manners” sense as well as in the 19th century “man of financially independent means” sense! Happily living on his 800£ annual sinecure provided through the church as the result of a will written several hundred years earlier, Harding serves the dual roles of precentor of the local cathedral and warden of a local almshouse for elderly men. As political notions of socialism begin to appear in the smoky atmosphere of the burgeoning Industrial Revolution, the suitor of Harding’s daughter, Dr John Bold, a zealous hard-nosed reformer with a keen nose for a righteous cause, sees fit to question the fairness and validity of a will that provides an 800£ income to the warden of the almshouse while providing so little, a miserly 12£ per year, for the home’s residents. Indeed, he causes a veritable storm of controversy by launching a legal suit disputing the will and attacking the rights, the ethics, and the wealth of the Church of England and its entitled clergy in the national press.
Without actually taking sides, Trollope has penned a witty, entertaining, and frequently amusing satirical novel that manages to precariously and diplomatically straddle the fence on most of the issues it raises – church wealth; the rights and wrongs of moral crusades; lawsuits and the legal machinations required to settle them; the effect of profound political differences on family relationships; the 19th century version of that most contemporary of issues, partisan “fake news”; right-wing politics of conservative wealth versus left-wing politics of reform; not to mention a reasonably steady stream of jibes at Church politics and its patriarchal misogynistic behaviour scattered at intervals throughout the length of the novel.
Consider, for example, Trollope’s rather forthright description of the apoplectic reaction of Archdeacon Grantly (Harding’s son-in-law) to news of Bold’s lawsuit:
“He would consign to darkness and perdition not only every individual reformer, but every committee and every commission that would even dare to ask a question respecting the appropriateness of church revenues.”
Or to quote the Archdeacon directly when he expressed his ire on the topic to his long-suffering wife:
“… that pestilent, interfering upstart, John Bold – the most vulgar young person I ever met … is meddling with your father’s affairs in a most uncalled for – most – And being at a loss for an epithet sufficiently injurious, he finished his expressions of horror by muttering, ‘Good Heavens!’ in a manner that had been found very efficacious in clerical meetings of the diocese.”
If there is a single, overriding moral takeaway from the novel, it might be that reform for its own sake is not always a good thing and, in some cases, will end up as a case of “Be careful what you wish for!” Definitely recommended as a very readable and thoroughly entertaining 19th century classic, that is much lighter and more easy-going than what readers have come to expect from the likes of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot or the Brontë sisters.
“Her father did not know – she held to it from that time – how much she loved him”
There really can be no other suitable word. DOMBEY AND SON is, “Her father did not know – she held to it from that time – how much she loved him”
There really can be no other suitable word. DOMBEY AND SON is, in many respects, a stereotypical Dickensian tale. It’s dense, it’s long, it’s hilarious, it’s heartwarming, it’s heartbreaking, it’s shocking, it’s complex, it’s multi-thematic, it’s plot-driven, it’s character driven, it’s forward thinking and generally left-wing – in short, it’s Dickensian. And, despite the fact that if general readers, or even confirmed Dickens fans, are asked to name a Dickens title, few will think to mention DOMBEY AND SON, I think it’s one of his best.
Consumed with the desire and the need to see his family name, his wealth, and his business success continued through his only son, Dombey ignores, and indeed comes to bitterly hate, his dedicated, loving daughter who blames herself for her father’s failure to love her. The themes that Dickens tosses into the DOMBEY AND SON kettle are legion – parental, filial, and romantic love; friendship and loyalty; patriarchy and misogyny; evil, theft, and embezzlement; feminism; family; wealth versus poverty; marriage, divorce, and the societal expectations and laws that govern them; and much more.
I can only ask, as a confirmed Dickens fan, what was I thinking of waiting so long to pull this one off my shelf. Definitely recommended.
“Why they make us live in one corner of the city? Why don’t they let us fly planes and run ships …”
Bigger Thomas was not a nice man by any standar“Why they make us live in one corner of the city? Why don’t they let us fly planes and run ships …”
Bigger Thomas was not a nice man by any standards. Any reader, man or woman, regardless of their skin colour – black, white, red, yellow – would encounter significant difficulty thinking of Thomas in more charitable terms than the description penned by the “editor of the Jackson Daily Star, regarding Bigger Thomas’ boyhood there.” He wrote, ”Thomas comes of a poor [ ] family of a shiftless and immoral variety. He was raised here and is known to local residents as an irreformable sneak thief and liar. We were unable to send him to the chain gang because of his extreme youth.” A childhood criminal, in other words, who followed his destiny to a court trial facing charges as a sociopathic and unrepentant adult multiple murderer and rapist.
No reader will shed a tear over Bigger Thomas. How could they? No reader will have a moment’s sympathy for Mr Thomas. Nor will any reader empathize in any way with his plight. But, make no mistake. This is entirely as Richard Wright wanted it to be. When NATIVE SON readers turn the final page, it was always Richard Wright’s hope that any disgust, any dismay, any heartbreak, any sorrow, any embarrassment, any shock, any anger, any emotion at all that a reader might experience, would arise out of his portrayal and scathing indictment of 1930s white American culture. It was not intended to generate pious pity for the black people who were forced to endure that culture. Indeed, the wealth of the white Dalton family and their use of it in ostensibly helping the local black population in Chicago, which THEY saw as pitiable, was demonstrated to be nothing more than ostentatious, sanctimonious and self-serving. The metaphorical equivalent, if you will, of donating a few scraps of fish from time to time for a meager meal, while refusing to allow a black man the right to fish, denying him the ability to learn to fish, refusing to give him the right to own the equipment necessary to go fishing for himself, and forbidding him any access to the water in which the fish lived.
Wright’s portrayal of the nature, the depth, and the completeness of the racism systemic to white American Jim Crow culture in the early 20th century will assuredly take any reader’s breath away. But that hatred was not the only target at which he aimed his talent.
The anti-Semitism that some might have considered to be endemic in North American white Christian culture at the time demonstrated that Hitler’s WW II final solution and attempted genocide in the Holocaust did not happen in a global vacuum.
Fear of Stalin’s Russia and his brand of Communism led to the labeling of any variation of left-wing social thinking in America as Communism. Even those progressive thinkers who advocated for such things as minimum wages, de-segregation, or fair housing bought into the belief that they were espousing Communism. They willingly (and fearfully, I dare say) proclaimed themselves to be members of a North American version of the Communist Party. The continuing propensity of the hard-core right-wing in the USA to label the likes of AOC, Ilhan Omar, Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren as misguided, anti-American Commies did not happen overnight!
NATIVE SON is not an entertaining novel for even a single paragraph. NATIVE SON is a bleak and discouraging novel to read from start to finish. But it is instructive and informative, evocative and thought-provoking. The closing address to the jury by Jewish Lawyer, Boris Max, in which he pleads for mercy for his client and advocates for life imprisonment over execution is positively riveting. Whether it will be persuasive for any dedicated members of the modern right community who persist in their belief that blacks are a sub-standard variation of humankind is an open question.
“HOW goes the night? Saint Giles's clock is striking nine.”
ON DUTY WITH INSPECTOR FIELD is Dickens’ non-fiction short story telling of a night on whic“HOW goes the night? Saint Giles's clock is striking nine.”
ON DUTY WITH INSPECTOR FIELD is Dickens’ non-fiction short story telling of a night on which he accompanied Inspector Charles Field of Scotland Yard on his rounds in one of the gungier, nastier areas on the wrong side of the tracks in London. What the specific intention of walking the beat with him that night was we can never know. Perhaps it was an investigation of current police methods that would find its way into his literary ground-breaking characterization of Inspector Bucket in BLEAK HOUSE. Perhaps it was simply a means of investigating the squalid, demeaning conditions in which the poor, the unemployed, and the immigrants were forced to live in Victorian London. Perhaps it was a searching for fodder to fuel Dickens’ near endless satirical diatribes against the inequalities imposed by the strata of Victorian class structure in England. Whether there was a specific purpose behind the night’s work is irrelevant because ON DUTY WITH INSPECTOR FIELDS makes it clear that Dickens ended the night with material that would serve any and all of those questions.
That said, I personally found ON DUTY WITH INSPECTOR FIELD to be interesting, certainly eyebrow-raising, perhaps even shocking, but I never felt myself in the grip of a compelling story as I do with virtually all of Dickens’ fiction. For me, ON DUTY WITH INSPECTOR FIELD was a case of reading it just because Charles Dickens wrote it, been there, done that and glad I did it. But I’ll take BLEAK HOUSE and Inspector Bucket or sweeper Jo over the non-fiction every day of the week.
If THE VICAR OF BULLHAMPTOM were a contemporary novel, there would be readers who would criticize AnthonThree Victorian novellas for the price of one!
If THE VICAR OF BULLHAMPTOM were a contemporary novel, there would be readers who would criticize Anthony Trollope as having force fit three unrelated short or novella length stories into a single novel for the sake of publication.
The first story is a Victorian social “romance”, reminiscent of Jane Austen’s melodramatic family tales, in which Mary Lowther, very much against the advice of the vicar and his wife, flexes her feminist muscles and insists on the right to choose her life partner on the basis of actually loving the man prior to accepting his offer of marriage. Her inability to stand up to the relentless social pressure that is brought to bear results in a series of catastrophic life decisions. Whether her decisions are right or wrong, sensible or misguided, and whether Mary Lowther exemplifies a “new-age” woman or just one more victim of Victorian patriarchy is left an open question for the reader to judge.
The second story, and for my taste the weakest and least interesting story of the three, is a tale of a local landowner’s intense dislike (not to put too fine a point on it, but it was probably hatred) of the vicar and his childish attempt to disrupt the vicar’s life and livelihood by erecting a competing Methodist church directly adjoining the vicar’s property and by sending slanderous letters to the Bishop questioning the vicar’s behaviour and professionalism.
The third story tells of Jacob Brattle, a miller, a hard-working self-employed intensely focused blue collar man, whose family strays from the strict behavioural demands of the day. His son, Sam, falls into bad company and finds himself in the dock charged with murder and his daughter, Carry, for the heinous offense of having sexual relations with and accepting support from a man to whom she is not married, finds herself labeled a harlot and a prostitute. One might characterize this particular tale as a heartwarming and beautifully touching Victorian variation of a Biblical tale of the prodigal son and daughter.
THE VICAR OF BULLHAMPTON is not a fast-paced novel by any means and the plots, such as they are, are driven by characters and personalities, emotions, social restrictions and culture. Readers who have attempted the likes of Dickens, Collins, Jane Austen, or the Brontë sisters and have been put off by the copious word count and the voluminous descriptive nature of the narratives will find that Trollope’s style, while still clearly Victorian, is somewhat more modern in flavour. That said, I also found it definitely entertaining as well as interesting and informative on the issues of the day. It was somewhat of a surprise to me to find that other reviewers have suggested that THE VICAR OF BULLHAMPTON is not Trollope’s best work. In that case, I'm in luck!! All I can say is that I’m definitely looking forward to another one.
“It has enchained and destroyed its people and their lives, it is a place of contained ill will.”
I have often said that the book that is all thing“It has enchained and destroyed its people and their lives, it is a place of contained ill will.”
I have often said that the book that is all things to all people that attracts unanimous acclaim (or revulsion) has yet to be written. Even when a book, such as THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE attracts such a preponderance of acclaim, there will be outliers. I am an outlier.
No shudders of fear, no frisson of terror, no clenching of the jaw in anticipation of some fearsome manifestation of evil or ill will! Indeed, my experience of reading THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE was limited to two emotions. The first was confusion and a simple failure to understand exactly what the back story was and what powers the author was trying to invest into Hill House. The second was boredom and a weary anticipation of waiting for something interesting to actually happen.
There is no question that the near universal acclaim that has been accorded to Ms Jackson’s novel puts it well into the category of modern classic. And, believe me, I really looked forward to the reading and wanted to enjoy it. But, it was what it was. In fact, it came within an ace of being set aside as a DNF as deep into the novel as twenty pages from the final paragraph.
“His children were meant to be a breed apart, outside the framework of history. He alone would set their course for them, not the revolution, the t“His children were meant to be a breed apart, outside the framework of history. He alone would set their course for them, not the revolution, the times, or the rest of humanity.”
Al-Sayyid Ahmad is a self-righteous, misogynistic and totally domineering bully and tyrant whose ultra-conservative Hanbali sect of Islam rides roughshod over his family like a prison warden. His wife has not been out of the family home and in contact with any men other than her sons for twenty-five years.
“A woman doesn’t know what virtue is, unless she’s denied all opportunities for adultery.”
His three sons, including one who is now considered a man by virtue of his age and employment, turn to weak-kneed jelly in the face of his disapproval and will literally kiss his hand to re-establish what they sadly perceive as paternal love. And as for his two daughters? Ahmad’s attitude says it all,
“A girl is really a problem … Don’t you see that we spare no effort to discipline, train, preserve, and care for her? But don’t you also see that after all of this we ourselves hand her over to a stranger and let him do as he wishes with her? Praise to God who alone is praised for adversity.”
Al-Sayyid Ahmad is also a heavy-drinking, serial womanizer who in today’s terms would be characterized as a party animal. He wields the Qur’an like his own personal weapon and with hypocritical finesse and outrageous self-indulgence cherry picks those verses and lines which justify, forgive and overlook his deviance from the demands of Islamic doctrine.
PALACE WALK is a historical drama that purports to tell the story of a 1920s Egyptian family set in Cairo shortly after WW I and just prior to Egypt’s unilateral declaration of independence from Britain’s “veiled protectorate”. It’s considered a classic masterpiece and I’ll admit to finding it compelling, evocative and quite gripping but I’d also rush to add that, not for a second is it uplifting, pleasant, or cheerful in even the slightest degree. But informative, shocking, evocative, and eye-opening ... oh my word, yes!
There is no love lost between me, a rather hard-core and quite outspoken atheist, and organized religion – regardless of which flavour might be the topic of discussion. In this case, of course, it’s early 20th century Islam as observed by an Egyptian author writing in the mid 1950s. The fact that religious fanatics of the day attempted to kill Mahfouz would suggest that the author’s intention was to clearly portray what he saw as the intensely problematic characteristics of a problematic religion and fervent Muslims refused to accept that criticism. But I also see no reason to think that his intent was other than to portray the Ahmad family in an open, realistic narrative and to expose the manner in which they lived their lives - lives in which their conduct and motives were driven by all-consuming thoughts of Allah and the prophet. Viewed through this atheist’s modern lens, that story was shocking and profoundly disturbing if not verging on disgusting.
Then there was the Islamic preacher who, on those rare occasions on which he was honest with himself, Ahmad viewed as even more debauched than he knew himself to be,
“He believes in two things: God in heaven and adolescent boys on earth. He’s such a sensitive type that when he’s in al-Husayn, [the local temple], his eye twitches if a lad moans in the Citadel.”
Hmmm … plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, n’est-ce pas?
PALACE WALK does, to a limited extent, tell the story of the political demonstrations of March 1919 that ultimately came to be known as the 1919 Revolution. Those “riots” were an integral, indeed critical part of the story of the Ahmad family but, frankly, I thought they were the weakest part of Mahfouz’s narrative and were the reason that I chose to withhold a fifth star.
“Once the revolution knocked on his door, threatened his peace and security and the lives of his children, its flavor, complexion, and import were transformed into folly, madness, unruliness and vulgarity. The revolution should rage on outside.”
That said, I have no doubt that I will be eagerly moving on to PALACE OF DESIRE, the second installment in Mahfouz’s CAIRO TRILOGY. Definitely recommended.
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