Eve's Alexandria

Spear-calloused but beautiful

I read the Iliad a couple of years ago, and was startled to find Achilles such a figure of conflict and indifference.  His arrogance, pride and rage dominated my reading, and tainted his fabled heroics so that even his moving grief over the death of Patroclus was clouded by dislike.  Still I felt sure that future readings would show me Achilles from other angles; that, as often happens, the reader I would be on another occasion would see an entirely different man.  As it happens I didn't have to wait for a re-read of the Iliad for a reappraisal, because I came upon Madeline Miller's debut The Song of Achilles first.

I first heard about the book on BBC Radio 4.  It was a cultural segment on a news programme, and Miller had been invited to defend her novel against the criticisms of a representative from a group that champions the Classics (which I forget the name of, and Google can't help me).  He was arguing that contemporary novelisations of Homer's epics were counter-productive and even harmed the reputation of the Classics.  Firstly because they misled readers about the plot, characters and themes by mixing in 21st century sentiment and morals; and secondly because they falsely raised expectations about the contemporariness of the material and dumbed it down.  He was particularly offended that Miller had written a book that cast Achilles' as homosexual and Patroclus as his lover and partner.  The sensible and fair-minded way that Miller - a teacher of Classics herself - responded to this provocation convinced me that I had to give the book a try. 

Her version of the story is intimately narrated by Patroclus himself, and takes us from his childhood right up to (and beyond) his death at the battle of Troy over twenty years later.  It begins with his exile to the kingdom of Phthia, then ruled by Achilles' father, Peleus.  Despised and bullied by his own royal father, eight year old Patroclus was goaded into the manslaughter of a noble's son and then cast off and sent to grow up as an orphan in King Peleus' hall.   He is small, clumsy and useless at the martial games that the other boys play; and yet for reasons he cannot fathom finds himself an object of  Prince Achilles' interest.  The pair are of an age but whereas Patroclus is unimpressive, Achilles is the golden son of a King and a Goddess, destined for greatness from the moment of his birth. Everyone wants a piece of his glory:

In the huge hall, his beauty shone like a flame, vital and bright, drawing my eye against my will.  His mouth was a plump bow, his nose an aristocratic arrow.  Seated, his limbs did not skew as mine did, but arranged themselves with perfect grace, as if for a sculptor.  Perhaps most remarkable was his unself-consciousness.  He did not preen nor pout as other handsome children did.  Indeed, he seemed utterly unaware of his effect on the boys around him.  Though how he was, I could not imagine: they crowded him like dogs in their eagerness, tongues lolling.

Patroclus is helpless to resist the attraction and watches Achilles 'like a fish eyeing the hook', with both fear and self-destructive longing.  He can't understand why, in the fullness of time, Achilles starts to watch him back.  The two become companions, and then inseperable friends, and then passionate lovers.  In the eyes of the world their relationship makes no sense.  Patroclus is an exile, a loser, while a prophecy foretells that Achilles will become the greatest warrior his people have known or will ever know.  But although Patroclus accepts his lesser status willingly - I did not mind when I lost, he says, to such beauty - Achilles stubbornly holds him as his deserving equal.  The all-consuming love they feel for one another shapes not only the course of their lives but the course of the war in Troy.

Love and the Gods drive the action. Patroclus and Achilles' love for one another; Achilles' self-love; and the terrifying love/hate of his divine mother and the rest of the Gods.  The unexpected balance of the book reflects this.  War is only announced at the mid-point and we are almost two-thirds of the way through before the Greeks arrive at Troy.  The ten years spent fighting there flash in a chapter or two before the gut-wrenching final act is bearing down on us.    The bones and sinew are recognisably Homer's - the events, the figures who act their parts in them - but the flesh and the feeling belong to Miller.   She reads the epic through an intimate, personal lens.  The question that fascinates her most is: who is Achilles?  Is it possible for him to be both a man - son, lover, boy - and a hero?   She spends a great deal of time watching him grow, gather strength and struggle to come to terms with his fate through Patroclus' eyes.  With a lover's access she can gain insight into the two divergent aspects of Achilles' being.  As here, on the morning of the first battle:

Achilles stood, and I watched as he strode towards them - the way the bronze buckles on his tunic threw off fire flashes, the way his dark purple cape brightened his hair to sun's gold.  He seemed so much the hero, I could barely remember that only the night before we had spat olive pits at each other, across the plate of cheeses that Phoinix had left for us.  That we had howled with delight when he had landed one, wet and with bits of fruit still hanging from it, in my ear.

This last a reminder not only of Achilles' of humanity but also his youth: he and Patroclus are just 18 years old when they arrive at Troy.   His fate - 'What I was born for...' - only intensifies their relationship, as it pits them against the ferocious will of the Gods.

The writing throughout is strikingly beautiful, in a style that clearly echoes Homer's: Miller likes simplicity, colour, light.  She likes to disrupt the gentle flow of her prose with violent images, so that when we first meet Thetis she is a vision of pallid divinity, except for 'her mouth...like the torn open stomach of a sacrifice, bloody and oracular.'  At other times she plays with the opposite, interweaving grotesque descriptions of death in battle with strange images of tenderness.  Patroclus describes Achilles' coming back from a day of slaughter: 'He is red and red and rust-read, up to his elbows, his knees, his neck, as if he has swum in the vast dark chambers of a heart.'  Achilles' role as death-bringer and tender lover are rolled into one around the image of the heart.  I was moved to tears more than once. (In fact, I haven't cried so much since The Book Thief.)

Miller's version of the story goes a long way to demystifying Achilles for me.  Through her eyes I see clearly how he is backed into a tight corner: he has accepted his premature death at Troy in return for being remembered and honoured for all time.  When his honour is impuned by Agamemmnon his legacy is placed at risk, and the possibility of a wasted sacrifice - wasted life, wasted love and the pointless loss of his innocence - drive him into a helpless rage.  When Achilles' refuses to fight, and contributes towards the deaths of thousands of Greeks as a result, Patroclus abhors his hubris - Our word for arrogance that scraps the stars, for violence and towering rage as ugly as the Gods' - but Miller makes it explicable in a way that it wasn't before  Miller has given me a reading of the Iliad that I can connect with, and work from.

Is it unethical of her to have created this reading?  For her to have turned the Iliad into the greatest gay love story never told, and to have imputed motives and feelings to Achilles' that Homer couldn't have imagined?  These are interesting questions, similar in some ways to ones we have asked before about the use of real historical figures in fiction.  Achilles' is such iconic figure that radically reinterpreting his character is surely akin to doing the same with Elizabeth I or Winston Churchill.  The Classics' advocate seemed to understand it that way at least.  In his eyes Miller has harmfully distorted a literary truth with her story.  Perhaps he would have preferred if she had written a non-fiction book instead, a critical analysis of the Iliad drawing the same conclusions.  That would have been easier to dismiss I think.   Fiction is a more dangerous tool, because it engages imagination and deeper emotions, and allows Miller to go further than she ever could on the evidence alone.  In the same way that a novelist can go beyond the evidence of their historical sources in a way historians cannot, she can go beyond the text of the original.  Going further like this can mean going very wrong, but it can also mean going very right; and The Song of Achilles falls in the latter category.

The Classics advocate is simply wrong if he believes that the reason we should read the Iliad in the 21st century is to experience the story as its first listeners did.  This is both impossible and unthinkable because for it to mean something we have to reconcile our 21st century selves to its content and themes. Otherwise it becomes a purely academic experience.  The Song of Achilles is an act of reconciliation, plugging me into Homer in ways I hadn't imagined.  I'm sure I won't be the only one who revisits the original with better care and greater interest as a result.  Now, if only Miller would do the same thing for the Odyssey.

~~Victoria~~ 

 

Runaway First Person

He taps in extreme well-being. And right away, he's swamped. In a world of free information, the journey of a single step begins in a thousand microcommunities. Inconceivable hours of global manpower have already trampled all over every thought he might have and run it to earth with boundless ingenuity. Even that thought, a digitally proliferating cliche...

I think it's fair to say that Generosity (2010), by Richard Powers, was the outlier on this year's Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist. There's one every year - the leftfield pick, published outside the genre - and while I don't wish to suggest that I approached Powers' novel with a prejudging wariness, it's true that, over the years that I've been blogging the award, these lit-fic entries on the shortlist have rarely been to my taste. (With the exception of the marvellous Far North, which, if there was any justice, would have taken the prize last year.) It's not that I will only read sf, or am opposed to literary fiction (far from it); it's that the novels concerned don't seem to perform either of their modes particularly convincingly. It's as if the two genres somehow cancel each other out, leaving behind little but a bunch of ideas that genre-sf did to death decades ago, which are also couched in the overwrought sentences of a writer who thinks terribly, terribly hard about language, but still hasn't really worked out what to do with it.

Enter Generosity, and I think you can probably guess where I'm going with this. Alas, no, it's not another Far North. In Powers' favour, the treatment of his sfnal Macguffin (genetics), while hardly cutting edge for the genre, is both more or less topical and much less hackneyed than, say, Margaret Atwood's foray into the same field with Oryx and Crake. (As a rule, I adore Atwood's work, but Oryx and Crake is a not a very good novel.) Unfortunately, and for reasons that are at least thematically understandable, he chooses to pair genetics with postmodernism. Yay, it's another fictional story about how fictional fiction is! Largely narrated by a writer teaching creative writing! How astonishing and revolutionary! I never heard of such a thing before! As my esteemed co-blogger here at Alexandria is fond of saying, shoot me with a spoon. (Dreams of Speaking has nothing much to do with the point I'm making here, but any excuse to link to it again...)

Again, to be clear: it's not that I hate postmodernism, or am uninterested in interrogating the assumptions of narrativity, etc. etc. (Actually, the latter is kind of my day job.) It's that I'm bored with postmodernism for its own sake - when it's presented as if drawing attention to narrativity remains something revelatory in itself, as opposed to a technique that's at least as old as Don Quixote. Especially when it's this solipsistic and tedious:

This place is some other Second City. This Chicago is Chicago's in vitro daughter, genetically modified for more flexibility. And these words are not journalism. Only journey.

This appears to be turning into a rather grumpy post, so I think I'll call it a night and resume on the morrow.

--

Let those two little dashes stand in for the two and a half months in which I failed to resume this post. Ahem.

So. An early middle-aged man with stalled writing career, named Russell, takes a job teaching evening classes in creative writing at his local community college; he narrates the results to us, with excruciating self-consciousness, via a persona self-described as "hapless" and "flavorless", as if hanging a lampshade over some of his faults in advance might encourage us to indulgently overlook them, or to ignore the problems that go deeper than his self-deprecation. (It doesn't work.) Among his otherwise interchangeable students is a young woman named Thassadit Amzwar, an Algerian who has fled the horrors of civil war for a new life in Chicago, and whose primary quality is that despire all she has suffered - "misery that would have broken saints", Russell opines - she is happier than anyone else around her. She "radiates awe at ever having survived adolescence", we're told, and soon the others in the class are "addicted to the woman's elation".

Thassa's uncanny joy comes to attract attention from both science and the media, and at length she is being tested for the presence of a 'happiness gene', while Russell is, of course, worrying about what all this means for the future of writing fiction. There is some interesting stuff in here about how people might react to such investigations, and in particular the role that popular media plays in mediating public understanding of science, both responsibly and otherwise; we're shown snippets of sensationalist documentaries, online discussions, and even a televised debate as news of the discoveries begins to filter into public awareness. Russell, with predictable melodrama, reimagines Thassadit as a trafficked child sold into eeevil scientific slavery, reflecting gloomily that research into how genetics affect behaviour "would never have passed my ethics board", because he finds the idea of free will rather poetic, even if the reality is a bit more complex and even if understanding that reality might actually improve some people's lives.

For a while it seems like the intermittent postmodernism of the narrative might be a jumping-off point rather than a punch-line. The televised debate - between a novelist and a scientist - raises some interesting issues. The novelist becomes the harbinger of doom, declaring that

genetic enhancement represents the end of human nature. Take control of fate, and you destroy everything that joins us to one another and dignifies life. A story with no end or impediment is no story at all.

The scientist, by contrast, suggests that knowing more about human nature is unlikely to change it in any fundamental way. Even if it might be possible in the future to introduce the so-called happiness gene into a wider section of society, it will never stop us imagining other possibilities. Through him, Powers posits the emergence of a revolutionary new type of fiction:

We'll never feel enhanced. We'll always be banned from some further Eden. When fiction goes real, reality will need a more resistant strain of fiction.

And it's true that I wanted to cheer at a well-deserved put-down - with reference to Brave New World - of the novelist's idea that pain is somehow ennobling, and that we are lesser without it:

That book is one of the most dangerous, hope-impeding, ideological rants ever written. Just because the author is stunted by some virtuous vision of embattled humanism, the rest of the race is supposed to keep suffering all this time?

A shame, then, that so much of the book revolves around Russell's paean to human suffering, in the form of his essentially self-centred worship of Thassadit, and the novel's failure to problematise this in any compelling way. Thassadit, you see, is idealised and exoticised relentlessly; she is the Noble Savage transplanted to the 21st century, continually referred to as "the Algerian" or "the Berber" and extravagantly admired much more than she is treated like a human being:

"May I go next?"

Before Stone can wonder how she learned her modal verbs better than the native speakers, she starts her entry. Her voice is one of those mountain flutes, somehow able to weave a second melody around the one it plays. Russell misses the gist of the words, he's so wrapped up in the cadence of the sentences. It's something out of the dawn of myth, set in a Chicago all but animist.

I might have taken passages like this - in which Russell is so caught up in his imagining of Thassadit that he doesn't listen to, or report on, a damn word she says - as a commentary on how idealisation of the Other is no better than kneejerk denigration. The image of womanhood on a pedestal, the noble savage, the magical negro: this is just objectification with a smile, which essentialises and depersonalises its target even as it claims to Really, Really Admire it. (You know the school of thought: No, really, I'm not sexist, I'm just in awe of how women manage to find things in supermarkets while their menfolk wander around in passive aggressive, not-at-all-learned helplessness! And isn't it amazing how women are just naturally so much better at housework than men; it couldn't possibly be because I never lift a finger to help - or, gods forbid, to do something on my own initiative - because I'm too busy thinking big, manly thoughts. Etc.) The object is worshipped, but only if it continues to conform to the ideal form created for it; it certainly doesn't get to have thoughts or feelings of its own outside that mould.

Alas, my confidence in this as a reading drained away as chapter after chapter went by with neither voice nor much in the way of agency for Thassadit. (Well, there is one tiny point-of-view scene, on pp. 253-4 of the copy I read.) Then there's an exceptionally tone-deaf episode in which one of the guys from the class, overcome by Thassadit's inner glow, tries to rape her, only to be fought off by the sheer strength of her saintly forgiveness. (Russell, predictably, blames himself: "You know this story. Everyone knows this story but her. The Berber wouldn't know how to read this story for the life of her." Another character tries to jolt him out of this solipsism, but the way she does it is really not an improvement: the attack failed, so clearly Thassa can take care of herself, so clearly everything is all right!) Reader, I felt ill.

As the story wears on, Thassa becomes not more but less real. When she - guess! - starts to suffer the effects of unlooked-for world-wide fame (she has no antibodies against unhappiness, we're told), Russell's attachment to her grows to fetishistic proportions. This might be interesting - Thassa is increasingly subsumed into the role Russell once imagined for her, someone "who might have walked out of a story he once dreamed of writing" - except that there is nothing to challenge Russell's storyfication of her. The more the idea of new ways of writing are floated ("post-genomic fiction, one that grasps the interpenetrating loops of inheritance and upbringing so tangled that every cause is some other cause's effect"), the more this feels like an age-old story in which the lines of power are wearyingly familiar: the privileged write the world after their own, limited imaginations, and everyone else can either sit on their pedestals and beam, or be crushed in such a way to give the narrator something to angst over. Ennoblingly.

~~Nic

Bring Up the Bodies

I am so so so so so so so so so excited. May 2012. That's only 6 months away. And now BBC and HBO are in on the act.  I think I may have to go and lie down.

~~Victoria~~

Patient readers

The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai was one of my many stock suggestions to the library, and they bought it.   I had a read a positive snippet review in the Guardian and thought the premise sounded fun.  Ian Drake, a ten year old boy tricks his favourite librarian into kidnapping him and taking him on a 1000 mile road-trip from Missouri to Vermont.  Sounds good, right?  A paean to children's books and childhood reading with a librarian for a heroine!  Because the library bought it at my suggestion I felt honour bound to read it immediately.  Hence it skipped right to the top of the TBR pile last week.

At first it seemed like it would be a very quick read.  The story is told by Lucy Hull, the librarian turned childnapper, and her voice is quick, witty and eminently readable.   I might be the villain of this story, she begins with mysterious verve, Even now it is hard to tell.   Her late twenties have rolled up on her suddenly (as they tend to do) and found her in Hannibal, Missouri, the head children's librarian in a backwater branch library.  The children's section is stuck in a glorified basement.  Storytime on a Friday afternoon is the most lively things get.  She spends her winters drawing posters for her summer reading challenge, and her evenings on platonic dates with Rocky, a wheel-chair bound colleague.   Otherwise she returns home to her flat above a theatre, where she has to live quietly because of performances, and organises her books into thematic piles.  She can't even flush her toilet until late at night lest she disturb rehearsals. 

Lucy has built this life for herself as a gesture of independence from her wealthy parents, Russian emigres who may or may not be mixed up in the mafia.  And she has found some satisfaction in amongst the children's books, developing the reading of her young patrons, although not nearly enough.  Amongst the most regular, and most characterful, of her young customers is Ian Drake.  He dances in on his tippy-toes several times a week, and is a devotee of story-time, sucking up fiction and non-fiction at a terrifying pace.   Lucy feeds his passion for reading, but surreptitiously.  His parents are evangelical Christians and have embargoed books which include '"witchcraft/wizardry, magic, occult religions, weaponry, adult content, the theory of evolution and halloween".  Lucy has to slip them to Ian issued on her own library ticket.

One day he slips her somthing back: an origami Baby Jesus he had made.  Unfolded it turns out to be a print-out of an email from Ian's mother to one Pastor Bob of Glad Heart Ministries.  The Drakes are concerned that their 10 year old son may be gay, and have enrolled him in a class to teach him the joys of heterosexuality.  Is Ian trying to send Lucy a message?  Is it a cry for help?  She is appalled but paralysed by indecision until one morning she opens the library to find Ian asleep in the fiction aisles.  Before she can think of the ramifications he is in her car, and she is helping him to run away.

But run away where and to what?  This is where my reading of the book came unstuck.  It continues to display lots of excellent qualities. I loved the intertextual flirting with iconic children's books; and Ian's sweet, confused idiosyncracies make for a charming portrait of a 10 year old boy.  But they are packaged with some rather baggy, uninspired plotting; and quirky Lucy begins to sound like a stuck narratorial record, retracing the same moral ground of guilt and indecision.  The pair bounce from motel to motel, having encounters with Lucy's parents, an erstwhile boyfriend, some ferrets, KGB agents and an affable priest along the way.  Lucy worries interminably about being caught, or being followed, and wallows excessively in self-pitying inertia.  And it goes on, and on, and on, and on, until I would have given anything for the poor librarian to grow a backbone and do something.  Take Ian home again, or escape with him to the Canadian wilderness, or even dump him on the doorstep of a police station.  

It takes a while to wake up to the fact that Lucy is a disconnected egotist, and that her little escapade with Ian is more about her own dissatisfaction than his wellbeing.  She repeatedly asserts that the story she is writing isn't about her - that she is "practically a ghost" - but it patently is.  We learn more about her, her family and her upbringing than we ever do about Ian.  Auxillary characters wither and die out of shot while she harps on about her immigrant roots and conflicted relationship with America.  Poor Rocky, apparently her best friend in Hannibal, is brushed out of her life almost completely and his unrequited love for her doesn't even warrant a throughaway reference in the epilogue.

Clearly the novel is political - it's about how hateful the Christian right can be, and how important it is to guard against freedom of speech, freedom of expression and (of course) freedom to read books.  The Borrower sets the children's books Ian is denied up in direct contrast to the book he is allowed to read, the Bible.  Lucy envisions reading widely and freely as Ian's eventual salvation from narrow-minded bigotry:

I believed Ian would get his books, as surely as any addict will get his drug.  He would bribe his babysitter, he'd sneak out of the house at night and smash the library window.  He'd sell his own guinea pig for book money.  He would read under his tented comforter with a penlight.  He'd hollow out his mattress and fill it with paperbacks.  They could lock him in the house, but they could never convince him that the world wasn't a bigger place than that.  They'd wonder why they couldn't break him.  They'd wonder why he smiled when they sent him to this room.  I believed that books might save him because I knew they had so far, and because I knew the people books had saved.

It's all very Jeanette Winterson; and I too believe that books save people.  But for me the polemic is too close to the surface of the novel, and becomes especially overwrought in the cutesy epilogue.

I've since heard that The Borrower owes a lot to The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken, and that the latter is the better book.  It's in one of our branch libraries at the moment and I'm calling it in to compare and contrast.

~~Victoria~~

 

And so our thoughts turn to Christmas...

The Christmas lights and street decorations have started to go up in York.  The Shambles and Stonegate are the first to get the treatment, sporting great garlands of greenery and fairy lights.  By St Nicholas' Fayre at the end of November every street in the city will be trussed up with little Christmas trees and decorations; all of the (actual) trees in St Sampson's Sqaure and on Parliament Street will be hung with lights that flicker and 'fall' to look like snow.  The streets will be overwhelmed with stalls and with hordes of visiting shoppers on the hunt for that perfect Christmas present.  Residents will shoot out for the first Thursday evening of the Fayre (no coach groups; few tourists) and then retreat to their homes for the weekend to avoid the mayhem. 

The festive season has come early this year for us too, as we spent nearly the whole of today making Christmas cakes.  Next Sunday is actually the traditional 'Stir-Up' day, when Christmas puddings and cakes are made, but I'm working then and since it's really a full weekend task (with all the fruit soaking, the intensive stirring and then the 3 hours cooking time per cake), we decided to bring it a week earlier.  A week later and the cakes wouldn't have time to drink up all the alcohol we'll 'feed' them between now and Christmas week.  Six weeks of intensive basting, re-wrapping and icing makes for the moistest cake I think.  Esther and I make lots to distribute around our families.  My grandma used to do this when I was younger, but now she isn't able to (although she still insists upon making the Christmas pudding, using my grandad as fetcher, carrier and stirrer) and so I've taken up the mantel.  

(Lest you fear Alexandria has been transformed into a baking blog, I assure you I'm getting back to books in just a moment.)

This has necessitated the return to the shelf of one of my Christmas guilty pleasures: Nigella Christmas , a bumper seasonal compendium of all things domestic goddess.  Therein Nigella tells me how to make Christmas cocktails, Christmas canapes, Christmas dinner, Christmas cakes; how to use up my left-over champagne (I struggle to imagine such a thing!) and a dozen things to do with the never-ending turkey.  There are lots of pictures of her looking manic, bosoms heaving, cradling trays of mince pies or huge clove studded hams.  Everything is red or green or snow-flecked.  It's shamelessly kitsch, and I love every page of it.  Each year I heave it off the bottom of the book shelf and rediscover again my desire to make my own mincemeat, to spend 12 hours making Christmas cakes and to produce piles of 'edible' tree decorations that we never eat.  It gives me ridiculous pleasure. 

If you hadn't already guessed, I'm one of those people who likes Christmas. I think because I'm a fan of preparing for things.  I like anticipating something, rolling it around and around in my mind, and no other holiday comes with the same prepatory baggage as dear old Christmas.  I realise it isn't everyones cup of tea, and the day itself can often be a letdown, but the ritual of the baking and the present buying/making/wrapping satisfies me immensely.  In my mind it really does have that glow of peace and goodwill about it, a true Dickensian expansiveness.  When I was a child, Christmas was the only time of year when my brother and I would call truce on our sibling war, and become best of friends for the span of three days.  A lot of my happiest memories are Christmas memories. (Except for the year when said brother pulled the legs off my new Barbie within minutes of my opening it.  That was not a good day.)

And, of course, with the cakes in the oven and some Christmas music playing (yes, I know, shameful), my thoughts turn prematurely to Christmas reading.  Every year I read Dickens' Christmas Carol on Christmas Eve.  But I also like to have another big Classic on the go, something meaty and satisfying for by the fire.  Dickens has been my companion the last two years: Great Expectations in 2009 and Bleak House in 2010.  Should I continue in that vein this year?   I'm considering either David Copperfield or Nicholas Nickleby.  But then perhaps I should make a change and go with another Victorian whopper.   (I could read Claire Tomalin's biography of Dickens as a substitute!) I've already considered and rejected Hardy, Eliot and the Brontes, but Trollope is a possibility.  I have three of his books waiting in the wings: Orley Farm, The Way We Live Now and The Eustace Diamonds.  The latter is the third of the Palliser series, which I began the year before last.  Or I could finally give Vanity Fair a go?  Or embark on Gaskell's last novel, Wives and Daughters? 

Or perhaps I should sidestep the Victorians altogether and re-read some Austen, or try some Maria Edgeworth (I have both Patronage and Helen); or some more Walter Scott.  Or disavow the big Classic and go for a fat historical novel instead, like Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety?  How can I possibly choose.  Good job I still have six weeks to work it all out. 

~~Victoria~~

 

A Short Letter to Robertson Davies

Dear Professor Davies,

I hope that is an acceptable form of address. Given the way your novels skewer pretention of any sort I imagine the 'Professor' part might raise a wry smile, just visible through that excellent beard of yours. 

I've recently finished reading your novel Tempest-Tost - the first book in your Salterton trilogy - about the  amateur dramatic staging of Shakespeare's Tempest in a small Canandian university town.   And I felt compelled to write you this short blog missive.  It's in place of a review or a longer piece of critical writing.  I imagine you raising your eyebrows at that, because you were a professor of literature and perhaps you would have preferred an essay?  Or perhaps a blogger's license to say pretty much what they like in whatever format they like would have suited you?  You see, I wanted to tell you things I liked about your book without getting bogged down in the detail, and the best way to do that seemed to be to enlist them in a letter.

1. I like the way you show how serious you are about literature by being anything but serious about it. 

At the beginning of the book you define literature as 'ambiguous and unsupported assertions by men of lax mind', and poke fun at your characters' as they reverently pontificate about The Bard.  You hold up literary Professor Vambrace as a figure of fun, make light of his determination to obscure rather than illuminate the play with his esoteric interpretations of the text.  All the while you demonstrate how it isn't the people who interpret the play, but the play that interprets the people, drawing out their frailties, hopes and secret selves.

2. I admire your humane cruelty. 

It's an oxymoron (how Shakespearean!) but you make it possible.  There are very few unambiguous characters in the novel, perhaps none at all.  They all have their weaknesses, sometimes revolting ones, and you make the most of them.  None more so than your anti-hero Hector (aptly named?) Mackilwraith, the pudgy middle-aged maths teacher who falls for the beautiful 19 year old Griselda.  Could he be any more ridiculous, with his shiny suits and his outmoded ideal of a girl's honour and unrealistic dream of romance?  He is ridiculous, and hopelessly tragic; a joke to everyone but himself.  And you.  You know he is a a deluded fool - you say it over and over - but you also know that his 'simple wish to have fun' and to 'live my own life and make my own way' has been hopelessly thwarted by his upbringing and his native personality.  We can laugh at him with you, but you make us understand how much it hurts him to be laughed at.  You poke fun, but with generosity, so that we see the fullest possible picture of a person.  Thus we know that Griselda is flighty, oblivious and egocentric, but also full of courage and determination to be herself; and we know that Bonnie-Susan 'The Torso' Tompkins is a flirt and a tease but with a heart of gold.  Even Professor Vambrace, who is pretty unforgivable in most respects, has his love for his daughter Pearl.

3. I love your close observation of individual natures.

Although this book ostensibly belongs to Hector's story, it is very clearly an ensemble piece.  You give a lot of time to picking out details of your wider cast: Solly Bridgewater's relationship with his hypochondriac mother; Robert Tasset's military arrogance; the rivalry between Nellie Forrester and Valentine Rich; even Freddy Webster's ambitions for her champagne cider.  Almost to the extent that what we have here are a series of vignettes, short stories with shared characters.  Some are very very funny indeed.  The sale of Valentine's grandfather's estate for example, and the parable of the first editions she fails to recognise and sells at a pittance.  Or Solly's painful attempt at a bachelor drinks party in his bedroom, which descends rapidly into fisty-cuffs.

I'm not quite sure what I expected from your work Professor Davies.  I had this idea in my head that you were Canada's answer to Kingsley Amis, which I suppose is a little bit right and mostly wrong.  You were contemporaries, and made fun of academics, but that may be the end of the similarities.  I'd need to read more of you both to know for sure.  I also had a vague notion that your fiction had mystical or otherwordly elements.  Perhaps it does later on, in the Deptford or Cornish trilogies?  Which is not to say I'm disappointed by Salterton; only surprised to find it so grounded in the real-world silliness of human life.  Perhaps its the beard that made me think you were solemn.  I didn't expect you would make me laugh outloud.  I'd never seen that twinkle in your eye, or the expressive character of your raised eyebrows.  

If it weren't too presumptious I'd say I was looking forward to getting to know you better.  Leaven of Malice next. From the library, of course.

Yours sincerely,

Victoria