Eve's Alexandria

Book Group Reading Notes: Stieg Larsson

A few months ago some of the women I work with decided to form a book club (I admit that I wasn't entirely innocent in this).  I work in a bookish sort of place and we're all big readers but with very different tastes.  Thus when we sit around and discuss books it is very rare that we've all read something; our conversations too frequently turn into mass recommendation rallies and never move beyond the initial statement that we like or dislike a book or an author.  It was inevitable that sooner or later we would stick all of our names in a hat (my red beret, if you were wondering) and pick our first joint read.  We decided to have just one rule: that all books chosen must be new to all the readers, including the chooser.  That eliminated the potential for us to spend the entire time proselytising our favourite books to one another, which would have been fun for the picker but perhaps not for everyone else.   Other than that it can be fiction of any genre, non-fiction on any subject, a graphic novel, poetry, whatever.

December's book was Stieg Larsson's phenomenally successful The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and we had our first meeting to discuss it last Monday evening.  It wouldn't have been my first choice, but then that was the point of the enterprise - to read beyond our comfort zones, in other people's territories.  And in truth I'm glad I had the impetus to read it, because these bestsellers often pass me by and I'm left wondering what all the fuss was about.  Now I know, or rather, I'm left to more informed wondering.

Having gobbled it down in a little under a week, the popularity of Larsson's book (both popular and critical) surprises me for several reasons.  First, because for the first 100 pages it is a glacially paced financial thriller; second, because it is a deeply politicised book throughout; third, because it is a terribly awkward sort of novel. Both plot and prose are ungainly, and occasionally weak.  (I would add 'because it is horrifically and graphically violent' but perhaps that is in its favour rather than against it?)  These points were all made by the group, in one way or another.  Early on in our discussion it was also noted that it is a fragmented book, comprised of two narrative strands which would ordinarily be anathema to one another.  There is the slow-burning frame story, in which a financial journalist called Mikael Blomkvist is found guilty of libelling an international financial agency called Wennerstrom in an article published by his own magazine, 'Millenium'. So far so John Grisham. Then there is the central conceit of the book, in which Blomkvist turns private investigator and solves a brutal forty-year old murder mystery. Much more in the mode of Val McDermid.  The two narratives function almost entirely independently of one another, tied together only by a bit of clumsy plotting and a short length of thematic string.  We generally agreed that this led to odd overall pacing: plot two starts late and climaxes early, while plot one shudders along unevenly from beginning to end.  More particularly the overarching financial story is always something of a foregone conclusion. Larsson (who died in 2004) was a radical left-winger and a financial reporter who specialised in revealing corrupt practises; he was obviously going to write the triumph of truth through journalism.   Wennerstrom is heading for a fall from page 1.  There was no real twist to mitigate the obviousness of this, although the Alias-esque denouement was a bit of a (fun but silly) surprise.

Plot two, the juicy bit, was (we all agreed) much more compelling and unforeseen.  After the Wennderstrom judgement Blomkvist is hired by a retired businessman, Henry Vanger, to investigate the disappearance and probable murder of his seventeen year old niece, Harriet, forty years earlier.  Vanger has been obsessed for decades by this mystery, and has hoarded evidence in an attempt to solve it.  Now, close to death, he is desperate to close the case.  He ostensibly chooses Blomkvist because of an age-old rivalry with Wennerstrom and a belief in Mikael's investigative skills, but to be honest his reasoning is paper-thin and arbitrary.  Blomkvist the PI is difficult to conceive of.  Hence the reason he must team up with an edgier side-kick, the 'girl with the dragon tattoo' of the title, Lisbeth Salander.  Salander is employed by a multi-national security agency; a professional hacker, she specialises in opposition research on potential clients.  Because this is a crime novel, and because it is impossible to have a main female character who is simply clever and charismatic (ala Blomkvist), she is also a borderline sociopath officially under the guardianship of the state.  Emotionally damaged as a teenager (a period Larsson portentously dubs the 'Evil Times'), she now lives a sort of half-life: to her social workers she is awkward, potentially violent and a little slow, to her employer she is a preternaturally gifted, professionally detached analyst. 

I think it is fair to say that it is Salander, rather than the plot or the writing, that has won Larsson most of his acclaim.  She is a very striking creation, with her tattoos, piercings and propensity to hit things.  Before he died Larsson said that he created Salander as an antidote to all those dark, haunted male detectives that abound in Scandanavian crime fiction (think Wallinder). He wanted to make his male protagonist ordinary and well-adjusted, while the auxiliary female (usually the rock on which the man depends) was the unpredictable and unstable factor in the investigation.  He certainly succeeds in this.  Blomkvist was dubbed Blandvist by our group - he is a literary dupe, slow to make deductions except when delivered a flatpack eureka moment by another character.  Rather than being the hero of his own crime novel he spends the better part of his time reading crime novels written by others (Val McDermid amongst them).  Salander is his exact opposite.  Whereas he is transparent, she is shrouded in mystery.  What Blomkvist thinks about himself and what others think about him tallies pretty closely; but Salander is routinely misunderstood, misinterpreted and always underestimated.   Larsson shows her from a multitude of points of view, including her own, and in this way builds a picture of a complex psyche existing in the world.

But, and its a big but, our group had difficulties with Salander too.  We felt that there was an element of exoticism and fetishisation in Larsson's characterisation of her.  In a book which deals with some very difficult issues of misogyny and violence against women, this was discomforting to say the least.  Early on in the novel she is is raped by her guardian, in the most horrific of circumstances, and later takes her revenge on him.  This caused some division of opinion in the group and we were unable to decide whether or not Larsson belittled sex crime by having Salander respond to it in what seemed (to some) a rather nonchalent way.   The treatment of women in the novel is a difficult one to reconcile more generally.  The original Swedish title translates as Men Who Hate Women; and it is an understatement to say that crimes against women are central to the plot. So is Larsson treating misogyny with the right level of moral outrage, or are there elements of the plot that complicate the motives for or, God forbid, condone violence against women?  This issue consumed the latter half of our debate and became a more general discussion about the justification for violence in fiction and film.  I can't really expand without spoiling the mystery, and I can't do that for a book like this with a good conscience.  Generally though it seems to me that Larsson is both sensitive and insensitive in the way he writes about women, pointing up the essential conflict between our conscious opinions and unconscious prejudices.  On the one hand he draws what I consider rather bizarre moral equivalences, and some of the outcomes of the book are difficult to stomach.  For example, we all found it abominable that the main characters should accept the principle of financial compensation for victims as a substitute for the punishment or remorse of the perpetrator.  Then again, there wasn't one of us who didn't cheer on Salander when she turned vigilante against her attacker.  And I think there is something to be said for Larsson approaching the subject of sex-motivated crime at all.  I haven't read a huge range of crime or mystery fiction, but this is certainly the first that had such single-minded non-specific hatred at the centre of it.

Perhaps that is what attracts readers to Larsson.  It is not his labyrinthine plotting or cunning, but his startling simplicity.  There is no mystery in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; there is just savage, terrifying, ordinary violence.  It is a revelation no more or less obvious than its other proposition,  that international corporations are exploitative and that financial markets are corrupt.  It is an idea we are familiar with, but it is a slumbering sort of idea.  It snoozes away in the back of our minds, and if prompted we repeat it without really confronting it.   The point Larsson makes is that we must confront it.  We are all like Blomkvist, in the midst of real crimes we spend our time reading crime novels.  We're horrified by the fiction but ignorant of the realities (and thus implicated in its perpetuation).  Shame on us, he says, we should be more honest with ourselves - this isn't fiction, its the real thing.  To write a novel with such a 'message' is both the height of irony and of moral outrage. 

The final consensus?  That The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is unsatisfying as a plain old crime novel. Good for a brief rush and gulp (we all read it in less than a week) but on further reflection too roughly handed - Larsson lets all his horses out of the paddock too soon - and with unsatisfying outcomes.  It has no grace.  Yet there is no denying that he brings a psychological intensity and liberal energy to the novel which makes up for some of its faults.  I suppose the final testimony is that of the six book-groupers, three have already read the second book in the sequence.  I am not one of them, but that isn't to say I won't follow suit at some future point.

Next month we'll be tackling Crash by J.G. Ballard.  Again, not my choice but much more in my sphere of interest.  I suspect it will reopen our debate about portrait of sex and violence in literature. 

~~Victoria~~

"There is no God and we are his prophets."

He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.

Shades of grey suffuse Cormac McCarthy's stark fable The Road (2006). They lie not in the characters - who are for the most part uncomplicatedly light or dark, this being a fable - but in the blasted landscape of its world, in the ash and dust and dirty frost of the "cauterized terrain" through which the characters struggle.

We're never told exactly what caused the devastation. There are a couple of suggestions that there was a nuclear blast, several years before the story begins, but the why and the how are not the important issues, here. McCarthy is much more interested in effects than causes - beyond certain characters' vague apprehension that the whole thing is a form of divine retribution for some abstract, unknowable crime - and his characters have, in any case, little energy or inclination to dwell on the past. Indeed, it is implied that those who, in the aftermath, thought too much about causes and blame ended up in a frenzy of scapegoating as pointless as it was brutal. The man remembers:

Within a year there were fires on the ridges and deranged chanting. The screams of the murdered. By day the dead impaled on spikes along the road. What had they done? He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it.

Even for those who retain (some of) their sanity, it is increasingly difficult to remember what the world used to be like:

He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already?

The story is an episodic - though entirely gripping - one. As the title suggests, it is about a journey rather than a destination; the unnamed man and his son whom we follow across country, through skeletal forest and freezing plain and brushes with gangs of cannibals, have an interim goal in mind (the coast), but in truth there is nowhere for them to go. There is no refuge to be found where the dangers of this blasted land (cold, illness, fellow human beings gone feral) will not catch up to them eventually; there is no plenty that can be guaranteed to fend off future famine. The people they see are like nightmares, "shrouded" in their own clothes, "Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last."

Nor is anything going to get better; all that remains to them is an existential crisis of cosmic proportions, and frequently expressed in semi-biblical language:

He walked out into the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of an intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

The man and the boy travel because they can do nothing else, because they are continually scavenging for food in a land where nothing grows, and because the man believes it is the only way to keep his son alive. His son - who was born shortly after the world-ending event, and thus has known no other life - is, in turn, the only thing that keeps the man alive. The book's opening line lays out for us the importance of the relationship:

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath.

His son is the first thing the man thinks of whenever he wakes, his safety such an omnipresent concern - and the loneliness of the darkness so acute - that he must reassure himself that the boy is breathing, and that he is not alone in the world. Here is all the tenderness and claustrophobic need that their brief, gruff conversations tend to conceal. The man may be the boy's protector, but the boy is the man's purpose: they are "each the other's world entire."

Starving, ill, permanently exhausted and sunk in quite understandable fear and despair ("There were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead"), the man nonetheless forces himself to go on, for his son's sake. The mentality that has developed in him is, not surprisingly, an embattled one: a desperate, consoling and motivating belief in a black-and-white world, in which the man and his son can only trust each other, and everything and everyone can be sacrificed to his son's well-being:

You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?

Yes.

He sat there cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. Are we still the good guys? he said.

Yes. We're still the good guys.

And we always will be.

Yes. We always will be.

To the man, the two of them are the only ones whose actions and motives are not suspect; by extension, they are the only ones who deserve survival. On several occasions this leads to clashes between the two, since the boy is less jealous of their meagre food supplies than the man is, and more inclined to show mercy and kindness to those they meet on the road. While the man sees only potential threats, the boy (generally) sees only the threatened. It's often hard to be sure who is right, since only the man's fears can ever be proven; it is impossible to be certain that a given stranger will never become a threat, but any outburst of violence makes the man's case pretty definitively.

While it never comes to dominate the narrative, this debate runs through the book, most notably in a deeply discomforting scene in which the pair have the opportunity to free the squalid prisoners of a cannibal gang, but run away to protect themselves from the returning captors. In particular, the issue colours the story's conclusion, when the man finally succumbs to his illness, and the boy almost immediately takes up with some passing (apparently friendly) strangers. Is the boy's ability to trust and be trusted a sign of something messianic in him? Or does he just have lower expectations of life and of people, having never known any different? The former reading certainly seems to be the implication of the ending, but I find it dissatisfying, since it contains a level of sentimentality and escape that is otherwise not in abundance in the book.

(I also found it tough to imagine how the world, as presented, promised much of a future for humanity beyond the present generation. The land shows no signs of becoming any less irradiated by the end of the book, limiting its capacity to sustain human life to a) what crumbs of pre-disaster food remain and b) the aforementioned cannibalism. Neither of which exactly scream long-term prospect.)

I wonder, rather, if our last glimpse of the boy isn't more an expression of the man's dying hope, and regret. Earlier in the narrative, the man recalled something his wife said to him, the last time he saw her:

The one thing I can tell you is that you wont survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.

He has made the boy into something to live for; but in the extremities of shielding him from harm, he has lost sight of everything else. Does life at the end of the world not need to be as desperate and lonely as the man has made it? Has the obsession with staying alive sucked life of its meaning?

The whole thing is mesmerisingly grim. I've always had a weakness for novels of post-apocalyptic despair, as I've mentioned before, but what really drew me in, here, is what McCarthy does with language: the terse dialogue exchanges, the soaring (if occasionally slightly purple) descriptive passages with their stripped-down prose - very little "there was" or "there were", just sentences like "Charred and limbless trunks of trees stretching away on either side" - and incongruous imagery.

I loved the look and sound of this dying earth: its relentless under-punctuated rhythms ("Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease"), its "gunmetal light" and "cold autistic dark", its striking descent into ruin - as here, with snow-laden dead trees unable to bear the weight any longer:

He was half asleep when he heard a crashing in the woods.

Then another. He sat up. The fire was down to scattered flames among the embers. He listened. The long dry crack of shearing limbs. Then another crash. He reached and shook the boy. Wake up, he said. We have to go.

He rubbed the sleep from his eyes with the backs of his hands. What is it? he said. What is it, Papa?

Come on. We have to move.

What is it?

It's the trees. They're falling down.

~~Nic

(My fellow Alexandrian, Victoria, also wrote about the book here, along with Paul Kincaid.)

Reading Notes: A Christmas Carol

 The more I read A Christmas Carol, the more I think Dickens' story is (for me at least) the spirit of Christmas.   It sounds hideously cheesy, I know, and probably I'm as much nostalgic for the Muppet's Christmas Carol (a childhood staple and the absolute best adaptation of the story; no kidding) as I am for the hallowed text. Still, reading it each year on Christmas Eve makes me come over all warm and seasonal. 

Admittedly, tis hardly the great man's best work.  There are a couple of dodgy jokes in there, like the one about the coffin nail being deader than the door nail, and Tiny Tim is a bit cringy with his little crutch, saintly sayings and wheedly singing voice.  But it is such a good natured, good hearted story that all is forgiven.  I don't mean the central arc of Scrooge's miraculous transformation from miser to all-round nice guy, although that never fails to inspire me to try harder to be a kinder person (judge me as you will).  It is the kind little details that make the story such a success.  There is a reason why it is so well-loved amongst Dickens' many Christmas stories; there is more to it than the glaring moral.  It gives us the barest glimpses of a deep, simple humanity. (I heard you groan. Stop that.)  I love, for example,  the moment when Mrs Cratchit brings in her Christmas pudding from boiling in the washing copper, and admits that 'now the weight was off her mind, she would confess she had had her doubts about the quantity of flour'.  And, despite myself, I'm always a tad moved by the Ghost of Christmas Present's whistle-stop tour of simple celebrations from the rough miner's songs on the bleak moors, to the grog shared in a solitary lighthouse, to the ship at sea, where the sailor speaks 'beneath his breath to his companion of some by-gone Christmas Day.'   It is subtleties that Dickens excels at; and I think here they refine his sentiment (and his characters) into something more honest and rounded than the parable they could have been.  The brief, ordinarily fear about the amount of flour in the pudding makes Mrs Cratchit into a breathing, fallible person, and the sailor speaking 'beneath his breath' seems to conjure up his nostalgic reverence and his yearning.  It softens his aspect; brings us into his confidence. 

The whole story is no more than 85 pages in my edition, so the action zings along pretty smartly, but in that space Dickens packs in some lovely descriptions too.   Some are just pure joy:

The poulterers' shops were still half open, and the fruiterers' were radiant in their glory.  There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly-old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling into the street in their apopletic opulence.  There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars... There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made in the shopkeepers' benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks that people's mouths might water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, recalling in their fragrance, ancient walks amongst the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle-deep through withered leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins, squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and besseching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner.  

The compactness of their juicy persons! Don't you just love that?  It is all colours, and textures, and smells and tastes.  And nostalgia, of course.  The ancient walks amongst the woods though autumn leaves: even if you've never experience such a thing, it is an image to conjure with.  It is magical, surely.  Dickens' goes on to describe a grocers' shop with its 'extremely white almonds' and 'candied fruits so caked and spotted with molten sugar that even the coldest lookers on feel faint and subsequently bilious.'   No wonder people love this story.  It makes you feel like Christmas does: indulgent, good-tempered and hungry.  Its mood is infectious, in the way that Scrooge's nephew's laughter is said to be. 

I didn't read the book until I was in my early 20s, and so came late to its finer charms.  I think too many people think they have savoured all its has to offer once they've seen a film of it.  Admittedly, they've probably heard most of the dialogue (sans the odd hardcore Victorian pun) but they're missing all of the best stuff.  The more I read of Dickens, the more I realise that it is the mortar that holds his stories together that make them what they are.  The more you read between the over-familiar lines the better.

Merry Christmas!

~~Victoria~~

 

An Alexandrian Abroad

Happy almost-holidays, everyone!

My review of the marvellous Fire, by Kristin Cashore, has gone up today over at Strange Horizons.

(I also reviewed her first book, Graceling, for SFX; you can see that here.)

If you're looking for something else to help Friday afternoon go more quickly, there's plenty of reading material over at Torque Control, courtesy of the short story reading club: that post contains links to to the various fantastical stories read by the club, and to the weekly discussions about them hosted on the blog. Of those I've read to date, I particularly recommend the ones by Catherynne Valente, Rachel Swirsky, and Theodora Goss.

Other stories that have impressed me recently (ish): Alaya Dawn Johnson, Ramsey Shehadeh and Gwynne Garfinkle at Strange Horizons; and this one by Eugie Foster (discussion here).

And what post about genre short fiction would be complete without some Ted Chiang?

~~Nic

Unwanted Duality

The projector, like a moonbeam, illuminates a bed with pale blue sheets. Beneath them Anna and Lotte fall asleep at night, their limbs firmly intertwined like mating octopuses. Without their noticing, the night tactfully unties this knot so that by morning each wakes up on one side of the bed, their backs adjacent.

I've picked the above lines as my tone-setting quotation for this post because they seem to express a great deal of what is good and bad about Tessa de Loo's wartime-and-after drama The Twins (Dutch original 1993; English translation, by Ruth Levitt, 2000). On the negative side, there's that clunky choice of image to evoke these two little girls, twin sisters, clinging to each other each night (octopuses I can see, but the idea of them "mating" goes beyond simply off-kilter and right into bemusing); more pleasingly, there's the spare elegance of "the night tactfully unties this knot", a kinder precursor to the separations of the plot. But the passage is - rather neatly, for my purposes - framed by two more unsatisfactory elements: the unfriendly precision of "adjacent", which expresses the distance and reserve that will come to replace the girls' intertwining, but which nonetheless sounds like something out of a flat-pack furniture instruction booklet (I cannot tell whether this is down to translation or original); and the imaginary "projector" that is our eye on the scene.

Looking back, as I write this post, it is this last part that lies at the heart of my problem with this accomplished and interesting book: the way the narrative sits back when I want it to explore the characters' heads, and above all the way adherence to the story's structural and conceptual conceit (separated in childhood, the twins grow into two very different women with two very different experiences of WWII) keeps stifling a more organic unfolding of events.

It leaves the reader with much food for thought; I'm just not sure it leaves us with much fuel for feeling.

Part of the problem, as in the passage quoted above, is in the framing. We begin in the Belgian town of Spa, with the chance reunion of the two ageing, ailing sisters of the title. Loud, brash Anna is delighted to have happened upon her long-lost sister, and eager to catch up, but Lotte - who feels a reflexive dislike at hearing German spoken that is not really dispelled when she realises the identity of the speaker - is more reserved. Thereafter, each chapter begins with a dialogue - generally awkward, and highly charged beneath the surface - between the sisters in the present (narrated in the past tense), before descending into flashbacks of their earlier lives (present tense). The tales of the past, although ostensibly sparked by their meandering conversation, proceed linearly, albeit peppered with foreshadowings and tedious "If she had only known then"-type statements; for example:

Without suspecting that this is a dress rehearsal for reality, that she is going to interpret this role for ten years without an audience, Anna presents such a believable, pitiful child on the stage that tears prick the step-aunts' eyes.

In the same vein, the occasional portentousness grates; an early mention of Cologne, the twin's birthplace, leads Lotte to reflect, before the sentiment is really earned by any events described within the book:

As the name of the city continued to resonate in the rest-room that had never known anything other than absolute silence inside its walls, it occurred to Lotte for a moment that Cologne was a cursed city, somewhere you were better off not to have come from, a city totally annihilated to punish the arrogance of a people.

Clang! This is Important!

Anyway, we begin with descriptions of the twins' closeness, as in the passage quoted earlier. Anna breaks her elbow, and "rants and raves like a hysterical countess who has gambled away all her possessions, backed up by Lotte, whose capacity to feel pain and panic extends symbiotically to her sister's body." Some time later, she has the first intimation of what is evidently meant to be a keynote of the novel:

Anna stares at her, overcome by an unfamiliar, terrifying sensation. Through the play and her role in it, Lotte and she for the first time exist as two individuals separate from each other. Each with a particular point of view - Lotte from the hall, herself from the stage. This awareness of separation, of unwanted duality, suddenly upsets her so she storms diagonally across the stage, through the two lovers' reconciliation scene.

Before much longer, both their parents die, and they are separated - after complex family wranglings that are incomprehensible, and utterly arbitrary, to two little girls - and each is taken to live with relatives: Anna to a village in Germany with a suitably wicked step-aunt who treats her as little better than slave labour; Lotte to a life of musical middle-class Dutch privilege. Reading these early sections, I couldn't help but feel as if the separation might have had more impact had we spent more time with the girls when they were together, seeing their closeness through more than snapshots and statements. In addition, the fact that the novel opens with elderly Lotte's "distaste" and "reserve" when greeted with her sister, while perhaps creating some suspense about the revelations to come, rather undermines the intimacy and immediacy of the childhood scenes that follow. The past is never made to feel as real as the present.

Indeed, the separation is treated less like the traumatic beginning to these characters' stories, the shaping moment of their lives, and more like the set-up for a thought experiment: what if? Anna signals this:

Anna sprang up. "Who says we have to behave as though nothing is the matter? I was brought up in a culture you detest. You escaped from it just in time. Let me tell you how your life would have turned out if you had stayed."

That the pair would launch into a discussion of their respective lives does make a certain sort of sense, since the past is undoubtedly something both women have made and remade in their memories over the years. Self-justification, and the conviction of each woman that she has more to lament than the other, colours all their interactions in the present. Lotte finds it hard to credit Anna's description of the cruelties of her step-aunt ("Wasn't Anna exaggerating? Had time distorted her memories? [...] It was all so extreme. Lotte regarded malicious, violent behaviour as a sickness, to be cordoned off safely and kept at a distance"), but it is clear that at least some of her incredulity comes from repressed guilt. (I did wonder, myself, to what extent Anna is a reliable narrator of her past: her self-presentation in the flashbacks as a quiet, self-possessed near-martyr does not track with the brash, crude Anna we see either through Lotte's eyes before the separation, or in the present.)

Furthermore, Lotte has apparently never given much thought to how her own pre-war way of life was sustained. In a telling moment, she reacts with outrage to the sight of a grand old house in Spa gone to ruin; when Anna points out that running such a household requires a large staff and enormous utility bills, she is annoyed at the "pragmatism" and responds, rather petulantly, that "'Everything of beauty is disappearing'". It does not occur to her that dismissing the appeal of Hitler is in some sense an expression of her privilege, because she was never desperate enough to want what Nazism offered to ordinary Germans - indeed, she never had to consider that it might offer anything:

"Hitler would not have got a foothold with us despite the depression..."

"But you hadn't had your confidence taken away like we had. He, this buffoon, gave it back to us. With his marches, party rallies, his speeches. With the most impressive Olympic Games of all time. The foreigners stood cheering on the tribune and Herr Hitler was host to the world. No one was saying, You're no good."

But Lotte also has a more pressing and painful source of hindsight on the matter: her family sheltered a number of Jews during the war, and her lover during that period, Daniel, was a Jewish victim of the Nazis. It is virtually impossible, therefore, for her to imagine that under different circumstances she, too, might have acted differently.

Of course, there is a vast gulf between acting differently - acting less morally - because of circumstances, and such actions being justifiable or forgivable. Anna is hyper-aware of the shadows of Nazism and the blame that attaches to her, as a German who lived through those times and did not question or resist what was going on. Throughout the present-day sections, she vacillates in her response to this awareness. On the one hand she offers herself up, passive-aggressively and thus emptily, as a target for Lotte's anger and grief ("'I am the obvious person, I offer myself, I've certainly stood in hotter fires in my life,'" careful to get in another little dig about how much she has suffered, too; "'You have been projecting all that rage onto me for days, selbstverständlich. [...] Go on, blame me!'"). On the other hand, she tries to explain, and excuse, her complicity in the regime:

"At some point they disappeared: there were no more Jews in our village. No Rosenbaum came to buy cattle any more; a Christian cattle dealer took his place, without ceremony. Yet I never asked: where has the Rosenbaum family gone? Never, you understand. Nobody ever asked anything, not even my uncle."

"What did happen to that family?"

"I don't know! It's true when people say 'we did not know'. But why didn't we know? Because it didn't interest us at all! I reproach myself, now, that I didn't ask: where have they gone?"

There's no sign, of course, that her subsequent self-reproach has extended to making the effort to find out where they went. It would be a formality, certainly, since there can be little doubt what happened to them - but Anna, it seems, finds it easier to self-flagellate than to engage with the notion of the individuals (except, in a limited way, her sister) she harmed, even if only by inaction.

One of the most compelling aspects of the book, in fact, is the characterisation of Anna - at least when she is allowed to stand out, raw and damaged, from the thought-experiment. Just as she accuses Lotte of doing, Anna harbours anger and projects it onto Lotte. It seems to me that Anna's anger, though, is directed not at the fact that the circumstances of her life were so different from Lotte's. Rather, Anna is angry that, having been placed in those circumstances, she was presented with a moral test that Lotte was protected from - one that, indeed, Lotte cannot or will not conceive of - and she failed at it. Her real anger, inarticulate though it is, is directed at herself; meeting Lotte again brings it out, because Lotte is a symbol of how Anna failed:

"I'm telling you honestly ... I really do not know what that is ... family .. or a special family feeling. I'm sorry, but now that you've suddenly returned like a female Lazarus I don't know what to do with you ... Long ago I had already reconciled myself to my fate of being alone on this earth ... I belong to no-one, no-one belongs to me, those are the facts ... I have nothing to offer you..."

"But yet we're ... we have the same parents..." Lotte repudiated weakly, "that must count for something surely? In order to know who we are we must surely know ... how it all began?"

"I know who I am: nobody. That suits me very well!" Bitterness shimmered through her provocative position, making her voice loud and rough. Some passengers looked round. Lotte remained silent, intimidated, she was in a cold sweat. Again she had the feeling that Anna was blaming her. But for what? For still being alive? For wanting to give the term 'sister' meaning?

(There's that clumsiness of phrasing again: "repudiated weakly" is a jarring and unnecessary substitute for 'said' here, and again the overall effect is of melodramatic display rather than inward insight.)

Although she never says as much, it's clear (at least to me) that Anna is hoping for forgiveness from Lotte - that all her justifications and the grim tales of her childhood are an attempt to get someone to understand, and excuse. She does not get it, although as she dies Lotte does, at the last, acknowledge Anna as her sister, closing the distance between them.

There is considerable irony in the realisation Anna reaches after the war, when faced with the hostility of a bus full of non-Germans; having attempted to blurt an apology/denial, and been met with a wall of silence, she "sensed for the first time what it would mean to be a German from now on. To be found guilty by people who knew nothing about you. Not to be seen as an individual but as a specimen of a type". My immediate thought was: yes, not unlike the situation faced by Jews in Nazi-occupied territories during the war. Which is not to say that such pre-judgement is correct, or not hurtful, whoever does it; only that Anna perhaps has less room to be surprised by it than she would like to believe.

The best and most subtle illustration of the faultlines left in (Dutch) society by Nazism comes, in fact, not from the sisters' experiences at all, but from an encounter between a young Jewish man whom Lotte's family has sheltered, and the neighbour in another part of town who was entrusted with looking after his family's possessions while they were in hiding. It is the very end of the war, and the young man cycles, excitedly, to the old house. While he is overjoyed at the prospect of his family home restored (albeit minus his late father), the neighbour is frostily determined to hang on to her war-born windfall. First she tries lying:

"Your father gave them to me," she corrected sharply. "I can still hear him saying: Liesbeth, have these things, we have no use for them anymore, they are nothing but ballast to us."

Then she grows defensive:

"I have nothing to discuss with your mother," she said haughtily. The knuckles of her hands were white, gripping the edge of the table. "Listen," she blurted out, "other people have been living in your house for years. The world has changed and we have all had to adapt, and now you come here out of the blue thinking that everything will be the same as it was..."

I was left feeling that I wish I'd seen more of this, and less of the elaborate, and somewhat artificial, balancing act of the two sisters. Ultimately, the events described were simply too big and too painful for either the detachment or the portentousness with which the book weighs one life against another. I wanted individuals, and at times (especially in Anna's complex story), I found them; but all too often, what I got were not people but symbols. And in a book whose backdrop is the horrors of a depersonalising political ideology, that seems a mistake.

~~Nic

Irish Gothic

I emerge, blinking, into the light of the end of term. Huzzah. Back next week with a couple of longer posts; in the mean time, a reprint of an SFX review from late summer: Heart's Blood, by Juliet Marillier, an Irish Gothic tale with an all-too-obvious ‘twist'.

(And I do mean obvious. Niall was relieved when I got to the end, because it meant that I stopped making irritated tutting noises and reading bits aloud to him.)

--

It’s rarely a good sign when you spot the resolution of a book’s central mystery several hundred pages before any of its characters do, including the narrator. Still less when said narrator’s inability to join the dots is so transparently due to a bad case of plot-induced selective stupidity.

Like many of Marillier’s other books, this is set in a fantastical (and somewhat fluffy) medieval Ireland: in this case, the twelfth century, as the Normans invade the province of Connacht. Having run away from her childhood home – and the abuse she suffered there – Caitrin takes up the job of scribe to a reclusive chieftain, Anluan, who lives in a spooky fortress atop a hill that local villagers warn her is haunted. Cue omnious music...

Marillier builds her atmosphere thoroughly and effectively, creating a strong, creepy sense of place through Caitrin’s disquieted observations. At times it has the feel of Gothic horror, or a du Maurier ghost story (there are also strong elements of Jane Eyre in the romance, in case you hadn't already guessed): appealing, and well done, but it robs the setting of specificity. Much of the story could be happening anywhere, anywhen, and characters expressing some decidedly un-medieval ideas doesn’t help (it’s wrong to judge by appearances, sexism is a social ill, God might not exist, etc.).

The ending – the plot’s resolution, not its revelations – is excellent. That it is emotionally satisfying rather than mawkish is a testament to Marillier’s quiet skill at characterisation, and to the way it draws out the book’s themes of generation-spanning consequences, injustice, and forgiveness. Sadly, it’s not enough to make the process of reaching it – the many, many instances of characters missing the stunningly obvious – less frustrating.

(Oh, and the ‘heart’s blood’ of a the title is a plant, from whose flowers a very expensive ink can be made.)

~~Nic

All the Lady's Men

Phineas Finn is the second book in Anthony Trollope's Palliser series and at 719 pages long is only marginally shorter than last year's read Can You Forgive Her?  It is not a sequel in the strictest sense - of the characters from CYFH only the Pallisers reappear and even they are marginalised  - but the universe is the same and the themes are definitely carried forward.  Our protagonist on this occasion is (rather unsurprisingly) the eponymous Phineas Finn MP, a delightfully charming and politically ambitious Irishman.  The son of a gentrified doctor, he has unenthusiastically trained as a lawyer in London, all the while making connections and studying affairs of state at the moderately liberal Reform Club.  As the novel opens he is offered the chance he has been waiting for to stand as a candidate for Loughshane, a thoroughly rotten borough in the patronage of his father's friend.  Before we hit page 50 he has been returned unopposed and taken his seat in the House of Commons amongst the great and the good of the land.  Just one problem: Phineas is rather short on money.  His father has very graciously offered him a living allowance of £250 a year; but how is this to stretch to cover the expenses of a rooky MP, who must join exclusive Clubs, attend long drunken dinners, hunt, shoot and maintain himself in line with men with incomes of £1000 and more? 

Worse still, Phineas is rather short on class and connections.  For one thing he is an Irishman, which is undoubtedly an impediment in itself; for another, he is barely a gentleman by birth.  True, his father is a tolerably rich man but only through the careful and successful practise of his profession and wealth is relative. Phineas' father is as poor as a church mouse when compared with men like Robert Kennedy, a fellow MP with a country estate and a deer park to make up for his lack of illustrious ancestors.  The only thing in Phineas' favour is his friendship with Lady Laura Standish, the daughter of Earl Brentford, and a political hostess.  Her drawing room is the closest thing the young Reformers of the House have to a salon, and they hang on her every word, competing with one another for her attentions and favours.  She understand that, in her way, she is as powerful as they are, if not more so as she is the means whereby they can meet, network and claw themselves up the parliamentary ladder.  In this sense, her wish is their command.   Still she knows her limits, or rather Trollope knows the limits of his audiences' tolerance for female politicos; Laura Standish is not a New Woman by any means and god forbid she should like to vote:

Lady Laura's father was in the Cabinet, to Lady Laura's infinite delight.  It was her ambition to be brought as near to political action as was possible for a woman without surrendering any of the privileges of feminine inaction.  That women should ever wish to have votes at parliamentary elections was to her abominable, and the cause of the Rights of Women generally was odious to her;  but, nevertheless, for herself, she delighted in hoping that she too might be useful, - in thinking that she too was perhaps, in some degree, politically powerful...

Trollope played these same cards in Can You Forgive Her? His female characters are vibrant, clever, zesty and influential in their sphere; they are thinkers and doers, schemers and manipulators of human emotions, but all within the bounds of petticoats. 

It is not long before Phineas has conceived a love for Lady Laura; a love which she both encourages and dismisses, while she simultaneously courts the attentions of Robert Kennedy.  The two men couldn't be more different.  Kennedy is dour, silent and difficult to like, while Phineas is naturally gregarious:

It soon came to be admitted by all who knew Phineas Finn that he had a peculiar power of making himself agreeable which no one knew how to analyse or define. 'I think it is because he listens so well,' said one man. 'But the women would not like him for that,' said another.  'He has studied when to listen and when to talk,' said a third.  The truth, however, was, that Phineas Finn had made no study in the matter at all. It was simply his nature to be pleasant.

Can a pleasant man be a successful politician?  It remains to be seen in Phineas' case.  Certainly he is a startling contrast to Plantagenet Palliser, the cold efficious aristocrat who became Chancellor of the Exchequer at the end of Can You Forgive Her? I assume the two men will play counterpoint throughout the series and, much against appearances, it is an exciting prospect. 

Clearly Trollope is not Dickens, or Eliot.  His prose style is accomplished and efficient in a Victorian way.  That is to say, it is supremely eloquent, but uneven and occasionally blunt.  The pace of storytelling is quick-slow, at once languid and then impatient to proceed.  But it seems to me that the dialogue is absolutely pitch-perfect.  It is Trollope's gift, and the way in which he really tells his stories, the personal, emotional stories of his characters' internal lives.  He is constantly at work articulating how others perceive Phineas and Laura and Robert Kennedy, but it is only when they speak that they uncover themselves.   Their common everyday words reveal everything - histories, undercurrents - so that the narrator doesn't have to tell anything.  I admire this very much.  It strikes me as a very difficult way to write a story, because the artifice has to be so subtle and so natural.  It is much easier to say what you mean.  Of course, it is hyper-natural - everyone is just a little too witty, just a little too quick - but nevertheless it works.  Certainly it saves Trollope from accusations of dullness - because without the witty repartee the political machinations would quickly wear thin - and from overwhelming masculinity, because the strength of mind therein revealed in the  female characters balances out the dominant maleness of their mileau.  More than that though it makes his novels intimate.

More thoughts on Trollope, no doubt, as I read more.

~~Victoria~~

  

Gone Into the Woods Forever

 

I read about the death of Robert Holdstock, author of Mythago Wood, with great sadness this morning.  He passed away suddenly in the early hours of Sunday morning, aged 61, of an E-Coli infection.  Reading the Guardian's hastily written tribute, I was overwhelmed with fond memories of reading his most famous novel as a teenager, at a time when I was just becoming interested in English folklore.  It seems a shame to me that his work wasn't more widely read outside the sf community (and I'm included in this, as I never read beyond Mythago Wood), despite its incredible historical and spiritual resonances.  His website is here and Nic has reviewed two of his more recent books on Alexandria, The Hollowing and Avilion, if you want to read more about him. 

~~Victoria~~