Eve's Alexandria

The Vaulted Sky

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest--that I loved the best--
Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below--above the vaulted sky.

I first read John Clare during my first semester at University - our syllabus was a whistle-stop tour of poetry from Chaucer through to Heaney.  We were reading four or five poets a week, and Clare came lumped with Burns, Wordsworth and Coleridge.  Not surprising that his peasant pastorals were passed swiftly over in such illustrious company.  I don't remember very much of what was said on him in lectures; at least, not about his poetry.  But I have always remembered a little of his biography: the son of a poor illiterate labourer, born in a nowhere Northamptonshire village, who briefly took the world by storm with his poetry of rural life before ending his life broken and forgotten in an asylum. And then there is his incredible walk - penniless, half mad and alone - all the way from a private asylum in Essex back to Helpston in Northamptonshire.  It is a truly iconic moment in literary biography.

Adam Fould's second novel, The Quickening Maze, takes Clare for its strange and wonderful lynch pin. It is set in 1840/1 (just before the famous walk), the action taking place at Dr. Matthew Allen's Beach Hills Asylum in the Epping Forest where Clare was held between 1837 and 1841.  The plot, if the novel can be said to have such a thing, is beautifully simple, charting the inexorable decline of Clare's mental state and the unloosing of his self-hood which categorised his later life. His story brackets the novel, which opens with a prologue recalling his childhood and ends on the road to Helpston. Gathered inbetween is a cast of characters, some real historical figures, some not: Alfred Tennyson, for example, in mourning for his beloved friend Arthur Hallam, the Allen family and a religious ecstatic called Margaret. But Foulds, like Clare, is a poet and this is a poet's book: it is about words, not events. What happens in it is not really the point.  I mean, there are incidents (a woman is raped; another is courted by a bluff manufacturer; a business investment goes horribly wrong) and historical thematics, but these things are not the point. Its focus, its langorous movement, is a homage to one form in the guise of another. Prose serving poets and poetry.

I find poetry difficult; it doesn't make immediate sense to me. Which is not to say that I can't appreciate it - I have studied poets and, with help and effort, found inspiration and understanding. It doesn't come naturally though; it is not the same as when I read prose, and fall in love instantly.  This probably means that I am a limited reader, but it also means that I very much appreciate what Foulds' does in translating one medium into another in The Quickening Maze.* It almost seems like a cliche to say that it is 'beautifully written', so instead I will say that it is sensitively and thoughtfully written.  For the most part it is about the experience of life through words, about how language - the words we conceive and what we understand by them - shape us.  Thus there is Clare's relationship with nature, which drives him to the edge of reason; and Margaret's relationship with God, which subliminates her selfhood; and Matthew Allen's relationship with his own genius, which only serves to highlight the shortcomings of everyone else. It is a meditation on nature, and how it impacts on our emotions.  It is also about life's velocity, the way it feels quick-slow-quick, so that we run and then walk and then run again. This is an effect not dissimilar from the effect of metre in poetry; it is novel with great rhythm.  Let me show you what I mean; a short passage will do.  It occurs early in the book, when Clare has been tramping the asylum grounds like a dog on a short leash:

Ants fly over, carry beyond him. He can’t follow them further. Like a lock gate opening in a canal, the water slumping in, his heavy rage returns. He presses himself to the tree, looks down and sees the roots reaching down into the earth. The admiral’s hands. He has them himself for a second, thick, rooty fingers, twisted, numb. He shakes his hands and they’re gone. They reappear at his feet, and clutch down. The painful numbness rises, his legs solidifying, a hard rind surrounding them, creeping upwards. He raises his arms. They crack and split and reach into the light. The bark covers his lips, covers his eyes. Going blind, he vomits leaves and growth. He yearns upwards into the air, dwindling, splitting, growing finer, to live points, to nerves. The wind moves agonisingly through him. He can’t speak.

The prose is almost sexual; the writing intimate, and acute, conveying such an intense oneness with nature, at once terrifying and thrilling. 

I note that some Amazon reviewers of the novel struggled with it, because Clare and his history were not familiar to them.  Which led me to wonder if prior acquaintance with the characters and period is a necessary with this book. Like all historical novelists working with real individuals Foulds is plumbing (and therefore, expecting) a depth of foreknowledge in his readers; it is this foreknowledge that allows him to offer up nuggets of fact so sparingly. It strikes me that The Quickening Maze must seem a very vague novel without a ready built structure of events to support it. Similarly, it must help to know at least some of the poetry (Clares' and Tennysons') that weaves in and out of the text. So much so that I would say it was an inaccesible novel, if it wasn't clearly worth it for the words alone.

It is true, though, that words alone do not a novel make. Character is necessary too, and Foulds has some acute observations to make about his lead actors, namely Clare, Tennyson and Matthew Allen. He inhabits them well, drawing out their conflicts and impersonating their idiosyncracies.  He is not so good at his female characters (although Margaret is something of an exception).  Hannah Allen, for example, is the novel's inevitable passionate teenager, but any subtly in her character is warped out by a trajectory that carries her through a romantic obsession with Tennyson to a respectable marriage to a factory owner.  Her mother, Eliza, is almost entirely missing from the narrative, although it is possible to see this as intentional.  Like many women of her age she is taken for granted, by her husband and her children, the Angel in the House, taking care of the practicalities while the rest of the world swims about in a current of experience and feeling. Possibly Foulds intended her as the unsung helpmeet, offstage.  But I am unconvinced.  The rest of the novel does not reflect contemporary wisdoms in this way, and the narrator is omniscient, so it feels like an omission.

Perhaps it is because The Quickening Maze is better at extrapolating from historical realities, and building upon individuals who have left figments of themselves in poetry, biography and PhD theses, than it is at the purely imagined person.  Foulds is a master at extrapolation, at enlarging and imagining from life, but he is not so sure or so deft at the act of creation. He writes with an inspired grace about things he has experienced - like forests, and food, and the sky - and likewise translates his research. In that sense he is a poet successfully transitioning into prose.  However, he does not (yet?) have the great novelist's knack for playing God - for giving birth to something entirely fresh and new. We must continue to await his final transformation - poet into novelist - with anticipation. The Quickening Maze is not quite there yet.

~~Victoria~~

* Notably Esther, who does have a natural affinity with poetry, did not like the book as much as I did. She found it forced, and occasionally overwrought.  It would be interesting to know if other poetry fans felt the same.

Unlikely Reads: P.J. Parrish - Dead of Winter

 I sometimes receive unsolicited review copies of books I wouldn't dream of reading.  Mostly thrillers, some romance, the odd bit of crime fiction.  I imagine this is true for anyone who has requested books from publishers in the past - your name goes on some mailing list and, at intervals, books get fired at you unrequested. For the most part these books find their way into charity bags, or onto Bookmooch.  The odd one finds its way onto a book shelf, only to be weeded out at a later date.  Very occasionally, though, I pick one up and start reading it. 

Last week I was browsing around my shelves eating breakfast, and picked up a crime thriller that arrived the day before: Dead of Winter by P.J. Parrish, published by Pocket Books (an imprint of Simon & Schuster).  I read the blurb - police officer looking for refuge and a quiet life moves to the Michigan wilderness only to find himself investigating a serial killer targeting local cops - and smirked a bit. There were plaudits on the front cover from Michael Connelly and Lee Child, whose names I recognise from the best seller lists, and the dreadful tagline 'Revenge is a dish best served cold...'.  Straight to the charity shop, I thought, but opened it anyway.  The epigraph was Nietzche: Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.  And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.  I read the first three pages.  A police officer was murdered; the tension was good and the writing wasn't bad.  So I did the fatal thing: I put it in my bag and took it to work.  I finished it this morning, all 390 pages of it.

Did I enjoy it? Absolutely. Would I read another P.J. Parrish? Almost definitely.  Was it good? Hmmmm. Yes, and maybe, and not really.  Dead of Winter is a marvellously formulaic book - you know what you're getting from the moment you begin to read.  Louis Kincaid, the police officer seeking a quiet life in Loon Lake, Michigan, is obviously going to solve the crime by putting his life in danger; his shifty partner, Jesse Harrison, clearly knows more than he is letting on; and what are we betting that the culprit is right under our noses.  By page 40 I was pretty sure I knew 'whodunnit', and it turned out I was more or less right, give or take a few details. The crimes are not eccentric; the clues are your usual cliches - calling cards left by the bodies, and watches that have stopped several hours after a murder, that sort of thing; and the motives are pretty clear cut.  So why keep on reading? 

First, because it has been a while since I read a book which knows exactly what it is about: out with the complex themes, in with the clear-cut.  Second, because it is a relief to read a book written solely for entertainment which is so cleanly and professionally executed.  It turns out that P.J. Parrish is actually a pseudonym for two sisters, Kristy Monty and Kelly Nichols, and that Dead of Winter is the second in a series of novels featuring Louis Kincaid.  Kelly supplies the plots, while Kristy does most of the writing.  When I first read this I was slightly disappointed - I prefer the idea of a novel as the product of a single consciousness - but I shrugged it off because it makes so much sense in context.  Dead of Winter feels like a book negotiated between two minds. All its rough edges have been polished off by being rattled around.  Which is not to suggest that there isn't the odd clunky line, or nugget of cloying sentiment.  It isn't Shakespeare, and I can't concur with Lee Child that its 'beautifully written', but its certainly neatly written.  More importantly, the dialogue is crisp and fluent.  It trips very easily along and begs to be read.  It is probably this quality that got me hooked in those initial pages. 

Finally, it has ambition in terms of character.  Louis Kincaid is unexpected, not because he is bi-racial (although this is made more interesting than I initially predicted), but because he is so young (just 25) and so unjaded.  All the series' detectives I'm familiar with - Rebus, Wallinger, Frost - have been hardened and roughened by experience; their 'issues' are like shrapnel, so deeply embedded in their spines that they can barely bend.  In contrast Louis is soft and tender.  Of course he has a personal history - an alcoholic mother, unresolved anger at his white father, guilt over his neglect of his foster-parents - because this is what we require to justify his drive to be a police officer.  But he isn't utterly damaged, and I like that because it suggests that his creators see him as a person rather than as an archetype.  Similarly his relationships are dynamic and interesting.  He isn't emotionally constipated like so many of his peers; he hasn't buried his empathy so completely in order to protect himself from a surfeit of feeling.   Dead of Winter is particularly good at drawing out his complicated loyalty to Jesse Harrison, whose temper sometimes expresses itself in racial taunts.  Harrison is haunted by a difficult childhood and sickeningly desperate to play 'cop', partly for the power it gives him and partly for the sense of honour and meaning.  His role in the book is half cliche (inevitably), but also something else.

There is also the decision to set the book in the 1980s - in fact, in 1983, the year I born.  This creates a smoother path for the development of the race theme, but also allows the authors to get playful with gender prejudice. The best encounter of the book is between Louis, who is used to causing consternation amongst the predominantly white communities he polices, and a female Sheriff, who causes him similar consternation.  I read online that the Parrish sisters have recently started another series of crime thrillers with a female protagonist, and I can see how fertile that ground will be.  I'm looking forward to reading more from them, and will probably back-track to pick up the first Kincaid book, Dark of the Moon.  Not because P J Parrish is the next Ian Rankin, a crime writer about to break the genre barrier and become mainstream, but because when I'm looking for a canny, compelling guilty pleasure I could do much worse. 

~~Victoria~~

Those Magnificent Kinden in their Flying Machines

As promised yesterday, here's a reprint of a review I wrote for SFX magazine, issue 186 (Sept 2009). It's about the third volume of the 'Shadows of the Apt' series: Blood of the Mantis, by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

(My reviews of previous volumes in the series are here and here.)

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This is an intriguing development: a fantasy series whose third book is actually shorter, by some two hundred pages, than either of its predecessors. To be encouraged, we think.

There are reasons beside the pagecount to give this a look. While the first volume introduced the high concept – an industrialising humanity shares physical and mental traits with insects – with a quest structure and some adolescent protagonists, the second gave us all war all the time as the Wasp Empire’s conquests spread. Blood expands the scope further, and brings a richer diversity of tone. We travel to fascinating new societies, like swampy Jerez and the sinister, semi-mythic cities beneath its neighbouring lake. Particularly well-drawn is Spider-ruled Solarno, whose fractious politics boils down to “shouting”, as snappy, appealing new character Taki puts it. A Fly pilot, Taki is in some of the book’s best sequences: aerial dogfights with the Wasps.

With so many storylines jostling for space, the (relative) brevity is not an unqualified good. Two compelling strands take place largely offscreen: Dragonfly noble Salma’s successes as guerrilla leader and his increasingly revolutionary turn (he has, we’re told, "a smile baked hard and sharpened to an edge"), and halfbreed Totho’s slide towards the Dark Side as an artificer collaborating with the Wasps, who justifies the brutality of his growing power to himself by recalling past slights incurred for his mixed lineage. Plotting and prose are still rather by-the-numbers, and the occasional cliffhanger chapter endings are clunky rather than suspense-building. But this leaner instalment goes to interesting places, notably its exploration of how culture clashes between kinden affect even the most intimate relationships, and the way war warps aggressors and defenders alike.

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Tchaikovsky’s website contains a number of original short stories set in this world – including contributions from guest authors and fans. While browsing the site I also learned (from a comment near the end of this thread) that he's planning at least 10 books in the series!

~~Nic

In the Grim Darkness of the Lowlands, There is Only War

Preparing to re-publish another SFX review - of the third volume in Adrian Tchaikovsky's fun, and increasingly interesting, 'Shadows of the Apt' fantasy saga - I realised that I forgot to put up my review of the second instalment. (May have had something to do with the fact that I wrote the review three days before handing in my doctoral thesis; was a touch distracted, perhaps.)

So, here it is: Dragonfly Falling.

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Middle book syndrome. (Or, increasingly in epic fantasy, middle three-books syndrome.) We all know it: since the story neither begins nor ends here, many authors seem disinclined to let anything begin or end here – giving us, instead, lots of middle and little forward motion.

Dragonfly Falling resumes the tale of an industrialising world whose human races share physical and mental characteristics with insects: Bees fly, Mantids are ferocious fighters with inbuilt claws, Ants have hive minds. Happily, it avoids many of the typical middle book pitfalls. Tchaikovsky introduces new characters, opening up fresh perspectives and threads in his plot, just as the Wasp Empire is opening up new fronts in its war with, well, everybody. The world is thereby broadened and deepened, to its benefit: the contrasting cultures of Ant cities Sarn and Tark add welcome nuance to the core idea of inherited traits, as do the increasing numbers of halfbreeds and free spirits we meet. Biology, perhaps, is not destiny, and the character development is excellent.

The pace and tone show less variety. There are a lot of balls in the air, plot-wise, but most amount to the same thing: war. With the invasion of the Lowlands in full swing, not a chapter goes by without people fighting, preparing to fight, or talking about fighting. Between the siege of Collegium, “city-state of tinkerers and philosophers” and home to Book One’s protagonists, and the refreshing frequency with which people switch sides, there is a lot going on; but too much that is too similar to hold the reader’s interest throughout.

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There are also a number of new kinden introduced in this second volume, including Fire Ants and a creepy Mosquito (who is, entirely appropriately, a sort of vampire). Thankfully, the Slugs are apparently no longer with us...

Review number 3 will be up tomorrow!

~~Nic

Africa, like a fever (or More Doris Lessing)

There are two short prefaces to my edition of This was the Old Chief's Country: Volume One of Doris Lessing's Collecting African Stories (which was published in 1973).  The first is from the 1964 edition (which was itself a reprint of the 1951 edition); the second is from 1973.  Both seem to reveal important things about Lessing as a writer, and particularly as a writer about Africa.  I'm beginning to suspect that it is in this guise that I most admire her - the desperate longing for the veld, and the burning injustice of the 'colour bar' (as she calls it) are the life's blood of the early work I've enjoyed so far.  In the 1964 preface she says:

Writers brought up in Africa have many advantages - being at the centre of a modern battlefield; part of a society in rapid dramatic change. But in the long run it can also be a handicap: to wake up every morning with one's eyes on a fresh evidence of inhumanity; to be reminded twenty times a day of injustice,. and always the same brand of it, can be limiting. There are other things in living besides injustice, even for the victims of it.

You can see this conflict very clearly in Martha Quest and in the short stories in This was the Old Chief's Country.  Martha, for example, is an essentially divided figure: half of her is utterly repelled and emotionally provoked by the racial injustice of the colonial world she lives in, but the other half is hard to it, ambivalent, even accepting.  It is this dual nature that leads her to attend radical political meetings one evening, and go dancing at the Sports Club the next.  Every time she works herself up into an idealogical frenzy, she is overwhelmed by the enormous horror of the reality and the smallness of her personal actions.  This leads her to stagnate, smug in her convictions but unmotivated to act upon them.  I can imagine a similar effect upon Lessing's psyche.  Perhaps it goes a little way to explaining why her writing is both raging - blistering, angry, unforgiving - and lethargic with brutal cynicism.  She is tired of the horror; her imagination is overloaded with suffering. 

I have been particularly struck by one story in the collection thus far, A Sunrise on the Veld.  This was one of those originally published in 1951 and, according to Lessing, largely ignored by contemporary critics.  In hindsight though I think it gives enormous insight into her writing mind, or her writing persona if you prefer.  It is very short and very simple.  A white teenage boy, giddy on his own power, wakes up each morning at 4.30am.  He dresses, collects his gun, calls his dogs and sets out to hunt on his father's African farm.  Each morning he follows the same ritual routine, holding his glorious young body in check until eventually, inevitably, it becomes too much and he bursts:

Suddenly it all rose in him: it was unbearable.  He leapt up into the air, shouting and yelling wild, unrecognizable noises.  Then he began to run, not carefully, as he had before, but madly, like a wild thing.  He was clean crazy, yelling mad with the joy of living and a superfluity of youth.  He rushed down the vlei under a tumult of crimson and gold, while all the birds of the world sang about him.  He ran in great leaping strides, and shouted as he ran, feeling his body rise into the crisp rushing air and fall back surely on to sure feet; and thought briefly, not believing that such a thing could happen to him, that he could break his ankle at any moment in the thick tangled grass.  He cleared bushes like a duiker, leaped over rocks; and finally came to a dead stop at a place where the ground fell abruptly away below him to the river.  It had been a two mile long dash through waist-high growth, and he was breathing hoarsely and could no longer sing.  But he poised on a rock and looked down at stretches of water that gleamed through stooping trees and thought suddenly, I am fifteen! Fifteen! The words came new to him; so that he kept repeating them wonderingly, with swelling excitement; and he felt the years of his life with his hands, as if he were counting marbles, each one hard and seperate and compact, each one a wonderful shining thing.  That was what he was: fifteen years of this rich soil, and this slow-moving water, and air that smelt like a challenge whether it was warm and sultry at noon, or as brisk as cold water, like it was now.

I hope you'll forgive the long quote - I wanted to write it out in full.  First, because I think its a lovely piece of writing (I'm a punctuation fiend, as you may know, and I love the way Lessing punctuates); second, because I think it captures something of Lessing's feelings about Africa.  Not the haunted, prejudicial, brutal colonies that she writes about elsewhere, but the country itself, as it would be in its purity.  The boy's tumult of joy, of raw energy, is bound up with the land he's running through, the air he's breathing.  Again, in the preface of 1963, Lessing writes:

I believe that the chief gift from Africa to writers, white and black, is the continent itself, its presence which for some people is like an old fever, latent always in their blood; or like an old wound throbbing in the bones as the air changes.  That is not a place to visit unless one chooses to be an exile ever afterwards from an inexplicable, majestic silence lying just over the border of memory or of thought.  Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.

I love that: like an old fever.  Only Doris Lessing could describe something she loves as being 'like an old wound throbbing'.  But that is what makes it so powerful.  When Lessing talks about loving Africa, she is not talking about a sentiment or an affinity. She is talking about a possession, a sort of corruption of her being, by something crushing in its intensity.  It is not always pleasant.  In some ways it is downright damaging.  A Sunrise on the Veld ends with the death of a buck, although it is killed by nature rather than by the boy's shotgun.  He comes across it screaming in pain, a broken leg having left it vulnerable to attack by a colony of black ants.  They swarm over it, tearing it slowly, piece by miniscule piece.  It is a horrifying death, and the boy watches it.  It comes into his mind that he should shoot it, to end its pain, but he doesn't.  He is overcome again:

It was a swelling feeling of rage and misery and protest that expressed itself in the thought: if I had not come it would have died like this: so why should I interfere? All over the bush things like this happen; they happen all the time; this is how life goes on, by living things dying in anguish.  He gripped the gun between his knees and felt in his own limbs the myriad swarming pain of the twitching animal, and set his teeth, and said over and over again under his breath: I can't stop it.  I can't stop it. There is nothing I can do...  The knowledge of fatality, of what has to be, had gripped him and for the first time in his life; and he was left unable to make any movement of brain or body, except to say: 'Yes, yes. That is what living is.'  It had entered into his flesh and his bones and grown into the farthest corners of his brain and would never leave him.  And at that moment he could not have performed the smallest action of mercy, knowing as he did, having lived on it all his life, the vast unalterable, cruel veld, where at any moment one might stumble over a skull or crush the skeleton of some small creature.

He 'could not have committed the smallest action of mercy'.  It is a shocking thing to write, and a shocking thing to think: that cruelty is inevitable and that pain is a given.  You can see how such a realisation could shape a person, if they could come to accept it as truth.  I am forced to recall a passage from Walking in the Shade, the second volume of Lessing's autobiography.  She is describing her feelings after the death of her mother, with whom she had always had a difficult relationship.  I'm paraphrasing from memory, so forgive any inaccuracy, but she writes about how she was filled with a terrible, pressing grief that verged on rage (it is always rage, with Lessing) - at the waste of her mother's life, at her own actions .  And then she writes about how brutally and quickly she suppressed it.  She doesn't quite say: C'est la vie. People die.  What is the point in crying over it?  But she almost does.  It was one of those moments in the book, and there were several of them, when I was forced to look into the heart and mind of someone whose workings are so radically different from my own and face up to their difference.  Perhaps these African stories give some explanation of it.  Perhaps it is Africa, in both its guises, as colonial nightmare and as terrifying landscape, that shapes Lessing's work more than anything else.  This is a new idea for me, because I have always thought of her very much as a 'Western feminist writer', but more and more I think that is a misguided assumption.  At least in her early work, and in her autobiography, she is very much a writer from and about Africa.

~~Victoria~~

Reading Notes: The Booker Prize and Doris Lessing

• I know you will all have seen the Booker Prize shortlist by now. Although I haven't seen too much heated debate about it in the blogosphere, I know its probably because I'm not looking very hard.  However, there was a very interesting discussion about the merits and demerits of honouring historical fiction over on the Guardian blog.  What do I think?  I think its a wonderful list.  True, I've only read four of the longlisted books in all and so am not entirely qualified to judge the competition.  But three of those books - Byatt, Mantel and Waters - are on the shortlist and have to be amongst the best I've read this year.  I can't imagine there being many contenders to better them.   Who will win?  The commenters opinion over at the Guardian blog seems firmly divided between Mantel's Wolf Hall and Coetzee's Summertime.  I can't comment on the latter, because not only have I not read it, I've never read *any* Coetzee.   For me, Mantel is the one to beat.  I finished Wolf Hall over a month ago, and I still have that twinge of excitement in my stomach when I think about it.  I note that the media is couching it more in terms of a clash between Byatt and Coetzee, which is inevitable given that they have both won previously.  Personally I don't think The Children's Book is a winner - its excellent, but perhaps not vivacious enough in light of the competition.  Pit it against Wolf Hall, which is its equal in length and learning, and it looks positively languid.  Then again, I have a sneaky suspiscion we should keep an eye on the outsiders.  Simon Mawer might be the one to watch - The Glass Room has been less of a headline grabber, but everywhere I see it reviewed the praise is ecstatic. 

• I finished Doris Lessing's second novel, Martha Quest, last week.  Overall, I didn't admire it quite so unreservedly as The Grass is Singing.  First, it is not so neat and whole - it is the first book in a series of five written between 1952 and 1969, known collectively as The Children of Violence, and consequently feels incomplete by itself.  Second, it is raggy and poetic with only bursts of the bony grace that made the first novel so extroadinary.  Third, it isn't as subtle psychologically - its emotional range, or at least the way it articulates emotional range, is wide but lacking in depth.  Finally, it is clearly born out of Doris Lessing's own biography. The eponymous heroine, Martha Quest, is Lessing by another name and it was difficult not to read the book as an early fictionalisation of Under my Skin (the first volume of her autobiography, which I read last year).  Saying all that, I still enjoyed it immensely, and it still provoked me to think and feel strongly about her all over again.  I've said before that my interest in Lessing, which began when I read The Cleft and hated it, is part morbid fascination, part disgust and part idolisation.  When I read her I feel in extremis, flung back and forward between admiration and distaste, intense enjoyment and intense frustration. Martha Quest both hardened and softened these feelings.  Hardened them because this book is the epitomisation of everything I find discomforting about Lessing - her bruising, brutal and unquestioning honesty! - and everything I find thrilling about her - her self-deprecation, her acute social observations and her descriptions of Africa.  Softened them, because it is obviously the work of a powerfully human young writer.  I folded down so many corners of the book, wanting to come back to specific quotes, that it would be criminal not to write a full post about it.  Next weekend, perhaps.

• Lessing is a puzzle to me because I don't understand my urge to read her.  It is quite rare that I read one book by an author and then dash headlong into another; usually it is because I am giddy with excitement.  Not so with Lessing. I want to read another Lessing book immediately in the same way that you want to look closer at something that makes you sqeuamish.  I feel it is necessary.  So, knowing I would finish Martha Quest, I tootled off to the third floor of the university library and came home with a copy of her first collection of short stories, This Was the Old Chief's Country (1951).   So far I'm enjoying them, although they're less literary and more overtly political than her long-form work (although that is political too, of course).  I particularly relish her descriptions of the African veld. More on that another time.

~~Victoria~~

A Roundtable on 'Lavinia'

Over the past several months, a pair of Alexandrians (Nic and Jo) have been having a gloriously rambling email discussion with Niall Harrison, Adam Roberts, and Abigail Nussbaum about Ursula Le Guin's wonderful Aeneid-retelling, Lavinia (2008 in the US, 2009 in the UK).

Since the end product was, to put it mildly, quite long, we've split it between the participants' blogs. The first part can be found at Torque Control, the second at Punkadiddle, and the third at Asking the Wrong Questions. Below is the fourth and final part. Enjoy.

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Nic Clarke: Unlike Jo, I have to say I'm largely content with Le Guin's decision to mingle fantasy and sort-of history. Firstly, from a purely practical point of view, I've no idea how you'd go about finding historically-accurate information about the inner religious life of a woman in pre-Roman Italy; archaeology aside, I'm pretty sure everything that comes down to us from anywhere near the period was written from firmly within the Roman mindset. Secondly -- and I'm drifting away from Jo's objections now, into my own ranty little world -- if there's one thing that unfailingly irritates me in retellings of this nature (whether on film or in books), it is the push for historical accuracy, as if somehow the story is thereby made more important/relevant/real. (Stand up, Troy ... On second thoughts, don't.) The war in Latium, the fall of Troy, King Arthur, Robin Hood: they were never really history in the first place, for the most part. Rather, they have always been stories, and to my mind they should be allowed to still be stories, and valued as such; the fantastical is intrinsic to them and to the world in which they were originally (!) told. Plus, the original poem was all about idealising a not-terribly-historical Italian past.

Niall Harrison: For all that I like it, my reservation with the novel lies in its in-between-ness. To put it in the terms Adam was using, perhaps I'm not convinced that Le Guin quite translates from the lyric to the narrative thoroughly enough; for all that Lavinia's life is a life, with the joy and the heartbreak and the tedium and the excitement attendant on that, it's also very instructive;, there are those epiphanic moments. The world that Lavinia constructs is a world where moral choices may be difficult, but they are always clear, a world where even if still nasty, brutish and short, lives are meaningful in a way that they I don't believe they ever were in our past.

Perhaps if I'd found the last third of the novel relatively disappointing, as Abigail did -- if I felt that the shape had gone out of Lavinia's life with the end of Virgil's story -- I wouldn't be so bothered by this. But actually, I thought Le Guin did such a good job of giving Lavinia's life its own shape that, although I felt the end of Virgil's story very clearly, I never felt that the book lost its way after it. Possibly this is because Lavinia's motivations match up with those presupposed by Virgil: it lends the feeling that Virgil was just observing events, rather than creating them; travelling to this world and reporting, rather than creating it. The upshot is, though, that I feel there's an undercurrent of the bad kind of escapism in the book, a sort of consolation that, as Jo says, idealizes the past.

Nic Clarke: As Abigail said, Lavinia's story is all about; her fate, and what happens when that fate, as it were, runs out without her life doing likewise. And I'd like to pick up on Abigail's point about Lavinia's choices. I think I, too, had expected Le Guin's Lavinia to kick against her fate (as determined for her by both her father and her poet-creator) more than she does. It's a testament to how well Le Guin builds Lavinia's world, and Lavinia's fidelity to its gods and spirits, that Lavinia's choice is believable

It's not an uncomplicated choice -- in marrying the interloper to prevent worse bloodshed, Lavinia also ensures Italy's conquest, and the eventual smothering of the world she knows. But the book's emphasis on Lavinia and thus the marriage make for an interesting counterpoint to the poem, which makes much less of the marriage and ends on Turnus' death -- or, more particularly, on Aeneas' (Rome's) uncontrolled wrath (furor) sending the unreconciled shade of Turnus (Italy) screaming from the world. Lavinia compromises, and lives, and perhaps enables something of her world to survive into Rome, and the realm of story.

Abigail Nussbaum: Though in general I agree with your point that the drive towards historical accuracy in retellings like Lavinia or Troy is a deceptive, and ultimately perhaps destructive one because that reality isn't as important as the story, I think Le Guin is making the opposite point -- that by infusing a minor and, in the original work, nearly inhuman, character with humanity, she is bolstering the story (and this might go some way toward addressing my complaint that Lavinia's desires seem to dovetail so perfectly with her role in the story).

That's the first half of the novel, however. The metafictional reading rather breaks down once, as Nic puts it, Lavinia outlives her destiny, which leads me to conclude that I have no idea what Le Guin was trying to do with the novel.

On the inherent limitedness of Lavinia's options, and the assumptions the other characters make that she is a pawn in a greater political game ... It occurs to me that one of the ways Le Guin defuses that reading is by stressing Lavinia's commitment to her duty, and even more so the fact that in her mind, duty, morality, and piety are roughly the same thing.

Nic Clarke: Yes. This is very Roman. My impression is that Lavinia is almost paradigmatically a proto-Roman matron.

Abigail Nussbaum: And it is, I think, another aspect of Lavinia's alienness, much like her belief that she walks with her gods (and especially given the famous anthropological bent of Le Guin's SF I wonder whether Lavinia isn't closer to that genre than to fantasy). This still, however, doesn't address the problem that Lavinia chooses Aenas over Turnus not because duty dictates it, or even because she wants to prevent bloodshed and avoid becoming another Helen, but because she just happens to have fallen in love with him. This as opposed to the story of Aenas and Dido which, as Virgil tells it and Lavinia perceives it, is the tragedy of people caught between their desire and their duty. Lavinia is praised -- by her contemporaries, by Virgil, and by Le Guin herself -- for her dutifulness and piety, her clear-eyed comprehension of what is right and proper, but there's a difference between knowing what's right and doing right that Lavinia is hardly ever confronted with. The closest she comes is when Aenas's son kills her friend's pet and brothers, and even then she's mostly sorry for having to lose her friend, not conflicted about whose side she should be on. There is, in fact, very little conflict in the character, which in a way makes her as flat as Virgil's original.

Jo Coleman: I absolutely agree that there is very little conflict in Lavinia's character, and that this makes her somewhat flat. I think this is one of the things that left me with a sense of blankness at the ending of the novel. Yes, we are reading about someone whose fate has already been decided, but the fact that Lavinia's fate and her own desires are so close seems for me to raise the question, why are we reading about her at all -- apart from the interest raised by  the metafictional comparison? But then, perhaps we are too used to finding conflict in our characters, and Le Guin is purposefully challenging her reader by portraying someone whose fate and will/decisions/autonomy are not in conflict -- a sort of anti-Oedipus, as it were!

Adam Roberts: I don't see that Lavinia's character is 'flat', although I think I have a sense of what everybody else means when they talk in those terms. As narrator she is necessarily before us all the time. Jo's Anti-Oedipus reference intrigues me enormously. I don't know whether or not the point of the reference is to pick up on the celebrated Deleuze-Guattari rejigging and upending of Freud. But it seems right to me, actually: one of the main things Deleuze-Guattari are arguing in that book is that human desire is always immanent in what they call the social field of production ... not production in the sense of tractor factories, but in the larger sense in which human beings are genuinely machinic, generating or producing affect, culture, themselves, history, things, feelings and so on.

I'm not suggesting Le Guin has been reading Deleuze-Guattari, but I think she is aware that it is not really enough to contextualise a character within a familial setting only (the original Freudian myth; one of the things on which D-G set their sights); nor even within the larger social context of village or nation. It's necessary to situate her also in history, which is one of the roles Vergil plays, and the larger discourse of fate.

Looking again at my old student-copy of the Anti-Oedipus, I came upon their discussion of the connections between "alliance" and homosexuality; and it strikes me that one thing we haven't touched on in this (I know: already lengthy) discussion is Asacanius's gayness, and the way he is trapped by (literally) patriarchal expectations in that role. Talking of "primitive" societies, they say:

Wherever men meet and assemble to take waves for themselves, to negotiate for them, to share them etc., one recognises the perverse tie of a primary homosexuality between local groups, between brothers-in-law, co-husbands, childhood partners. Underlining the universal fact that marriage is not an alliance between a man and a woman, but "an alliance between two families", "a transaction between men concering women" ... through women men establish their own connections. (Anti-Oedipus, 180)

What's interesting about this, I think, is that the main thrust of Lavinia is precisely to delineate both this sort of social nexus and a proper man-woman marriage (ie not one that is simply dynastic); and to show that it takes a huge amount ... it takes a whole war ... to enable somethig so rupturing and radical to come into the world. Although of course the marriage of Lavinia and Aeneas is also dynastic.

But I'm conscious now that I'm opening another can of worms at the end of a discussion which, though fascinating, has already gone on for many thousands of words.