Eve's Alexandria

"My mind is not all it should be."

It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance. But that was much later. In the beginning, there was simply the event and its consequences. Whether it might have turned out differently, or whether it was all predetermined with the first word that came from the stranger's mouth, is not the question. The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell.

I'm not sure I could say that I enjoyed Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy (1987), exactly, although there were bits of it that I liked very much, and more that I admired. But overall it offers a prime example, I think, of a mismatch between book and reader, or a mis-timing: had I only read it five or ten years ago, etc. I was looking forward to experiencing Auster's work, which came highly recommended. As it is, however, these three short novels - City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1987) - unhappily combine my two biggest bugbears of recent years: drearily self-important mangst, and slightly stale postmodernism.

I'll take the latter first, for here the unfortunate mismatch lies. As discussed last month, I've grown increasingly impatient with the exploration of fictionality for its own sake; there seems to be a lot of wheel-reinvention going on, none of which comes close to the deftness of Borges or the infectious fun of Don Quixote. (I'm just so jaded, man.) Still, there is a huge amount of cleverness in the way Auster plays with the form and tropes of detective stories to unravel his protagonists' inner lives - or possible more accurately his protagonist's, since all three are essentially the same solipsistic and emotionally absent bundle of deadpan neuroses - and (more interestingly) the reality of their worlds.

In City of Glass, bereaved novelist Daniel Quinn avoids the numbness of his "posthumous life" by fictionalising himself, vanishing into the parallel existence offered by "the mask of his pseudonym", growing steadily more convinced that his invented detective is a real person ("He had, of course, long ago stopped thinking of himself as real. If he lived in the world at all, it was only at one remove, through the imaginary person of Max Work. His detective necessarily had to be real"), and ultimately adopting the identity of Paul Auster, the stranger for whom he keeps receiving phonecalls.

By a simple trick of the intelligence, a deft little twist of naming, he felt incomparably lighter and freer. At the same time, he knew it was all an illusion. But there was a certain comfort in that. He had not really lost himself, he was merely pretending, and he could return to being Quinn whenever he wished. The fact that there was now a purpose to his being Paul Auster - a purpose that was becoming more and more important to him - served as a kind of moral justification for the charade and absolved him of having to defend his lie. For imagining himself as Auster had become synonymous in his mind with doing good in the world.

As a result of embracing the name - and thus in some senses the life - of Auster, Quinn gets mixed up in an obscure mystery involving a man named Peter Stillman. Stillman, the source of the quotation that forms the title of this post, warns Quinn/Auster that Stillman is not his real name either. As a child, not-Stillman was kept locked in a darkened room for nine years by his father. Quinn tells himself that this is "something happening the world", not a story, but he nonetheless writes notes on the case in the same red notebooks he uses for his fiction. As Quinn becomes obsessed with the case, his grip on reality - inevitably - steadily loosens. At first, this is expressed in fairly minor things, like losing track of time:

It was strange, he thought, how quickly time had passed in the Stillman apartment. If his calculations were correct, he had been there for more than fourteen hours. Within himself, however, it felt as though his stay had lasted three or four hours at most. He shrugged at the discrepancy and said to himself, "I must learn to look at my watch more often."

Time's slipperiness expands to include whole days, making the progression of the calendar seem dependent on the success of Quinn's investigations ("This is New York, and tomorrow will be June third. If all goes well, the following day will be the fourth. But nothing is certain"); at length, even our apparently omniscient narrator cannot provide any objective reality, since he is dependent on Quinn's own notebooks to reconstruct the tale. Quinn thinks he sees two Stillmans, prompting him to "crave an amoeba's body", so that he can follow both at once. Finally, the instability comes to affect even the sanctuary of his home; after a prolonged period spent living rough, Quinn tries to go home but finds someone else living in his apartment. (Naturally, he therefore moves into the now dead Stillman's place and, holed up in the fateful darkened room, loses himself in writing. I rather liked this as an ending.)

The second part of the trilogy, Ghosts, also deals with a never-ending, purposeless case that ends up consuming the private detective investigating it. It's also where Auster - or at least his fictional alter-ego - started to lose me.

Ghosts steps up the surreality, and the postmodernism, by paring down setting and character to a minimum: much of the story takes place in one apartment, over a prolonged period of time; there are very few characters, and with one exception (if I remember rightly), all are named after colours in a way that effaces their individuality and makes them seem almost interchangeable. The opening line takes the laconic style of hardboiled fiction to parodic levels:

First of all there is Blue. Later there is White, and then there is Black, and before the beginning there is Brown.

Blue, the PI in question, spends much of the story carrying out desultory surveillance on the apartment of Black, at the behest of White. The task proves to be so opaque and unrewarding that Blue is driven to alleviate his boredom in a variety of ways: little by little, he starts to impose a narrative on Black's comings and goings, and to step out of the role of observer by interfering in the tale he is creating. Deconstructed to the point of meaninglessness, like a pointillist painting seen from about an inch away, it's all mordantly amusing, although it does tip over into ponderousness every so often:

Little does Blue know, of course, that the case will go on for years. But the present is no less dark than the past, and its mystery is equal to anything the future might hold. Such is the way of the world: one step at a time, one word and then the next. There are certain things that Blue cannot possibly know at this point. For knowledge comes slowly, and when it comes, it is often at great personal expense.

But in general it's all quite fun. What really began to try my patience during Ghosts, and even more so in The Locked Room, was the self-involved hysteria that creeps in beneath the laconic surface. Blue's essentially empty obsession, to which he could put an end at any time but for sheer inertia, gradually transforms into the silliest kind of oh! no! existential! crisis!

Then there are the times, following through with this thought, that Blue believes the only logical explanation is that Black is not one man but several. Two, three, four look-alikes who play the role of Black for Blue’s benefit, each one putting in his allotted time and then going back to the comforts of hearth and home. But this is a thought too monstrous for Blue to contemplate for very long. Months go by, and at last he says to himself out loud: I can’t breathe anymore. This is the end. I’m dying.

And Blue's crisis is, of course, far too important to discuss with his girlfriend/fiancee, who doesn't even get her own colour, because of course she doesn't have an existence independent of her relationship to him:

Unfortunately, thoughts of the future Mrs. Blue occasionally disturb his growing peace of mind. Blue misses her more than ever, but he also senses somehow that things will never be the same again. Where this feeling comes from he cannot tell. But while he feels reasonably content whenever he confines his thoughts to Black, to his room, to the case he is working on, whenever the future Mrs. Blue enters his consciousness, he is seized by a kind of panic. All of a sudden, his calm turns to anguish, and he feels as though he is falling into some dark, cave-like place, with no hope of finding a way out. Nearly every day he has been tempted to pick up the phone and call her, thinking that perhaps a moment of real contact would break the spell. But the days pass, and still he doesn't call. This, too, is troubling to him, for he cannot remember a time in his life when he has been so reluctant to do a thing he so clearly wants to do. I'm changing, he says to himself. Little by little, I'm no longer the same.

Blue rebuilds his image of her in his mind - ending with her face, ladies and gentlemen - but makes no effort at all to actually speak to her. After all, why bother with a real woman - who might come between you and months of serious navel-gazing mangst! - when you can have an imaginary one instead.

The Locked Room picks up on many of the same notes and motifs - alienation, effaced identity, small locked rooms, red notebooks, the disinclination to speak to one's womenfolk - as well as one of the earlier characters (Quinn, who this time is referred to as a private detective without comment). Another alienated and essentially blank young man, this time narrating in the first person, starts investigating the disappearance of his friend Fanshawe, an unpublished writer. Despite the fact that Fanshawe is supposed to have been his bestest friend in all the world, the main thing the narrator can think about is the hotness of his (Fanshawe's) wife, Sophie. Well, he does also fret about becoming Fanshawe's literary executor - at the request of Fanshawe, made before his disappearance, Sophie has summoned the narrator to judge whether or not Fanshawe's work is any good - because he sees possibly destroying the work as synonymous with killing Fanshawe ("I had been given the power to obliterate, to steal a body from its grave and tear it to pieces").

Sophie, for her part, does the properly female thing of a) absorbing her grief about Fanshawe into her pregnancy ("When the tears stopped, however, she found herself without regrets. Fanshawe had been given to her for a number of years, she decided, and that was all. Now there was the child to think about, and nothing else really mattered"), and b) looking beautiful for the narrator, or at any rate acting as a blank slate onto which the narrator can project his fantasies about her thoughts and feelings:

As she walked into the restaurant and saw me sitting at the bar, she gave me a warm, complicitous smile, as though telling me she knew how beautiful she was, but at the same time commenting on the weirdness of the occasion—savoring it somehow, clearly alert to the outlandish implications of the moment. I told her that she was stunning, and she answered almost whimsically that this was her first night out since Ben had been born—and that she had wanted to "look different".

And so on. It's all a bit tedious, and the story that develops is essentially a much more direct and ploddingly unsubtle retread of the themes of the first two parts. Through his work as Fanshawe's "spokesman", editing his unpublished writings into finished books, the narrator finds himself increasingly absorbed ("trapped") into Fanshawe's identity. His even discovers a letter from Fanshawe that urges him to marry Sophie. (He does.)

Like the protagonists of the previous stories, the narrator begins feeling very strange ("The sky was growing dark inside—that much was certain; the ground was trembling. [...] From one moment to the next, I seemed to be in a different place, to forget where I was"), but this time Auster cannot resist spelling out his meaning for us:

We all want to be told stories, and we listen to them in the same way we did when we were young. We imagine the real story inside the words, and to do this we substitute ourselves for the person in the story, pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves. This is a deception. We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another - for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.

The combination of heightened emotional pitch and utterly deadpan prose that follows, as the narrator goes into the now-inevitable fugue state, doesn't quite lose its peculiar charm, but The Locked Room, unfortunately, never really builds upon the previous two instalments in the trilogy in any interesting or different ways. It is a recapitulation, a histrionic greatest hits, rather than a culmination - and it is this, I think, that left me with an overall feeling of disappointment with the trilogy, when there was so much about the earlier sections that I liked. Less than the sum of its parts.

~~Nic

Catching Up

It occurs to me that I've been rather lax about reposting my reviews for SFX magazine here, lately.

My review of Elspeth Cooper's somewhat disappointing debut Songs of the Earth appeared on their website in June, and shortly afterwards in the magazine; below is another review of a debut fantasy, from late summer: Daniel Polansky's hardboiled, and rather better, The Straight Razor Cure.

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The Straight Razor Cure is not just 26-year-old Polansky's debut novel, it's also the launch title for publisher Hodder & Stoughton's revived fantasy and sf line. No pressure, then.

 A hardboiled noir set in an invented city not unlike early 19th-century London, told in a voiceover - sorry, first-person narration - saturated with world-weary snark, this is a thoroughly entertaining page-turner. It centres on a disgraced former detective turned drug dealer, nicknamed the Warden, who - much against his better judgement and carefully cultivated indifference to others - is drawn back into the game when he stumbles across the brutalised body of a child in his neighbourhood.

Somewhere between Lynch and Abercrombie on the grim fantasy scale, Cure wears its world-building lightly; while the nature of the tale means that we see little of society beyond cops, criminals, and victims, the host of small details thrown up during the Warden's investigations means the city feels like a place that functions outside the frame of the story. In particular, through his narrator's interactions with the city's immigrant underclass (Chinatown, thinly veiled), Polansky sensitively and economically sketches out the contours of a community ducking its host country's distaste while also fulfilling its needs.

The whodunnit is strung out long past the point where its solution is obvious, but there is at least a reasonably convincing character reason for the narrator's selective plot blindness, and the consequences are both bleak and far-reaching.

~~Nic

Oh 2012, hear my resolve

I have just one reading resolution in 2012, and it looks like I share it with lots of other people in the blogosphere.  Some are scaling Mount TBR.  Others are challenging themselves to a TBR Double Dare; still more are reading Off the Shelf.   All of us share a frightening backlog 'to be read' pile/shelf/room of books that prays on our minds and into which we repeatedly fail to make inroads.  You know the story.

In 2011 I read only 4 books acquired before 2011, out of 300+sitting unread on my shelves. At the same time I read only 51 of the books I acquired this year (around about half, and I've been restrained).  At this rate I will be 500 books deep in 4 years time.  I daren't even think about what is lurking virtually on my Kindle.

This is the first year that I've taken a record of this particular reading stat, and I'm appalled at myself.  I'm not exaggerating.  The situation seems pretty drastic.  It's quite a sobering thing, especially as I'm now absolutely out of space for book shelves.   There is a Tori Amos song on one of the rareties albums about a little girl who won't take out of the trash, and it flows out of her house and fills up her town, and then her country, and then the earth, and then the sky, etc.  (I can't remember the name of it. Nic? Esther?) The book situation is not quite that bad but it's certainly out of control.

And so for 2o12 I am joining all those other bloggers in resolving to make a dent (and it will only be a dent unfortunately) in my TBR numbers. 

Based on my reading stats for this year - just over 50 titles - and considering that next year will probably be the same, I think at least 40 of the books I read in 2012 should be  from the TBR pile.

I'm not going to make a list of what they will be.  Let serendipity and whim guide me to my shelves!  Non-fiction, or fiction; classics or contemporary fiction; poetry or plays or whatever.  I'd like to think that I can do it.

It leaves me about 12 new 2012 reads to play with.  I'm thinking six of those will be Orange Prize shortlisters (you never know, I might have read or own a few of them already); and four will be book club reads.   One will absolutely definitely be Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel, because no resolve in the world is going to be strong enough to keep me from that.  I may not be able to queue at midnight but I'll come as close as I can. Another is going to be Claire Tomalin's biography of Charles Dickens, because of the bicentenary.

I tell myself that I shouldn't really have any problem reading from the TBR, although I'll only believe it next December when I look at the statistics.  Surely it's so huge and varied that I just need a very little will power to do it.  And since my only criteria is books acquired before 1/1/2012 it means that this year's Christmas gifts count.   Admittedly this rule has led to a brief midnight episode of panic buying to acquire some of the books I've heard about on 2011 Best of Lists around the blogosphere.  But I gave myself a good talking to about that. 

The main problem will be trying not to acquire any new books to tempt me throughout the year.  Perhaps I should put £8 in a savings account everytime I would have bought a book and see how much I'd have at the end of the year, as an incentive?  I have also determined not to download hundreds more classics to my Kindle, even though they are free, or to borrow lots of new books from the library.  Because the point here is not about saving money, it's about behaving like a reasonable, sensible human being.  It's also about finally enjoying some of the books that I bought with a great sense of anticipation and which I then allowed to languish until the excitement was gone.  Wish me luck.

~~Victoria~~

Eight of the Best of 2011

Looking back over my 2011 reading I have been surprised by how few books I have really, truly loved. I blame this partly on a lack-lustre Orange Prize, and partly on uninspired reading choices on my part.  My reading resolutions are designed to counteract that in 2012.  That said, the eight books below were absolutely wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.  And - I can't quite believe this - I actually blogged about seven of them!  I think that must be some kind of record for me.  Links are to my posts. 

Independent People by Halldor Laxness

The most wonderful of all.  This was the first book I read in 2011 and also the best, hands down, no competition.  So glorious and unrelenting, battered by freezing Icelandic winters and lit by wide white skies.  The feeling of reading about Bjatur's harsh, devastating life has stayed with me powerfully all year.  I have raved about it to lots of customers in the library ('Any new Scandanavian crime you say?  How about this 80 year old novel about an Icelandic sheep-farmer? You won't regret it.'), and will happily rave on for another year.  I almost daren't read anymore Laxness though, just in case I'm disappointed. How could any novel equal this?

 

The Emperor's Babe by Bernadine Evaristo

I never would have predicted that a novel in irregularly rhyming couplets would be on my end-of-year best list, but here it is.  Evaristo's moving and scatalogical tale of the 3rd century child-bride Zuleika and her affair with the Emperor Septimus Severus is absolutely irresistable.  The language is boisterous and bold; the story is startling and biting.  It was published in the same year as Zadie Smith's White Teeth and, despite sharing a lot of themes with that book (and being at least as good if not better) it sank without a trace.  Injustice!  It was the first choice of the museum book group that I organise, which is mostly comprised of ladies of a certain age.  They all adored it too.  One says she bought a copy for every adult member of her family for birthdays this year; another, an academic, sent out copies to her colleagues in her home college in the US and it's now on their contemporary poetry syllabus.  Result. 

Repeat It Today With Tears by Anne Peile

If there was any justice in the literary prize world then this book would have been on the Orange Prize shortlist.   It is a slim but meaty debut novel about incest between an unwitting father and the daughter he never knew in 1970s London, written with intense narratorial confidence.  I was hooked from the first page, and discomforted and thrilled by the sympathy Peile inspired in me for Susie, the victim-manipulator of the piece, and her father.  

Vinland by George Mackay Brown

I will remember 2011 as the year that I discovered Mackay Brown.  (I could just as easily have nominated Greenvoe for this list, which was the other novel of his I read recently.)  I've no doubt that starting the year so well with Laxness put me in mind for more moody novelists from freezing northern islands.  In Mackay Brown's case the islands are the Orkneys rather than Iceland, but the two places seem to share a close aesthetic and poetic kinship.  Vinland is one of only five (or arguably six) novels GMB wrote, as he was predominantly a poet.  Ranald Sigmundson, a former Viking raider, is it's rather taciturn hero and the backdrop is 10th century Orkney.  It's not rip-roaring adventure though; it's the spiritual poetry of the earth, the sea and working men and women.

There but for the by Ali Smith

My apologies to Ali Smith for this being the only book of my eight that I didn't manage to blog about.  I read the book in the summer when I was in a state of extreme distraction, preparing to be 'best woman' at a friend's wedding and thinking more about speeches, dresses and which flowers to have in my hair than about the cream of British contemporary fiction.  Despite that I still recognised that Smith had done it again (been brilliant, I mean) with her four perspectives on the actions of Miles, the dinner party guest who locks himself in a spare room and refuses to leave.  I very much hope that it will be on 2012 Orange Prize shortlist so that I have an excuse to re-read and rethink it.

The Hare with the Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund de Waal

The only non-fiction on this year's list and well-deserving of its place I think.  Another selection for the museum bookclub (the third on this list; Vinland was another), it traces 264 Japanese netsuke ornaments from 1860s Paris to London in 2010 as they pass through the hands of successive generations of de Waal's maternal family, the Ephrussis.  Along the way we bear witness to cultural, social and political upheaval across late 19th and 20th century Europe, always through the shared experience of the netsuke and other art objects in the Ephrussis collections.  I know that not everyone has had the same ecstatic reading experience I did (sorry Jenny!), but I think de Waals name on the cover could convince me to read almost anything.  Maybe even a history of ceramics.

Tempest-Tost by Robertson Davies

Another great discovery for me this year.  I enjoyed Tempest-Tost so much that I felt inspired to write its dead author a letter of thanks.  It was Davies' close, temperate observation of individual characters that did it for me.  On the surface the novel is a light farce about an amateur dramatic production of Shakespeare but on further acquaintance turns out to be a dissection of human frailty.   I was so glad to discover that this was not only the first book in a trilogy, but one of many novels by Davies.  I can't wait to try the Deptford Trilogy next.

 

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Finally, an unabashedly gay reading of the Iliad from the viewpoint of Patroclus, by an American Classics scholar.  This is the only 2011 release to make my list and was a real impulse read from the library after hearing a debate about it on Radio 4.  The reasons to read the novel?  The studied spareness of the prose, cleverly emulating Homer, and the heart-achingly lovely relationship between Patroclus and Achilles. 

And so there we have it, and I suppose not a bad run for a less than average reading year.  At least three of these writers - Laxness, Mackay Brown and Davies - will be on my list of authors whose backlists are all must-reads; and I'll be watching for new books by Miller and Peile with avid interest.   Plus, look at my gender balance: 4 books by men, 4 by women; and three of the men my biggest discoveries of the year.  So perhaps my resolution to read more men wasn't such a dead loss afterall.  

~~Victoria~~

2011: Reading Resolution Debrief

I've been looking back at 2011's reading resolutions.  You may remember them: read more men, read more in translation, read more from the TBR.  It suddenly occured to me to wonder whether, at this late stage, I've come even close to fulfilling any of them.  This year has been a slow year for reading all round, with just 53 books read (as I type this; I may finish one or two others before New Year's Day).  And it turns out - no big surprise here - that I have almost entirely failed to meet any of my resolution targets.  Here is this year's statistical breakdown with some commentary:

Total books read: 52

Books by men: 17
Books by women: 35

I said I would read more books by men in 2011 and, in both number and percentage, I actually did.  Last year I read 9 books by men out of over 60 in total (I'm still shocked by that!), a measly 14%. This year I read 17, almost double, out of a smaller overall total of 52, which equals 32%.  Just under a third.  So the gender gap has narrowed, but the disparity is still alive and kicking (and, let me be honest, if I'd read no non-fiction this year there would be six fewer eligible titles).  My yearly Orange Prize challenge is the killer.  18 of the 52 books I read this year were from the prize longlist, ergo over a third of my reading was necessarily going to be by women.  It's becoming apparent that the only way to truly overcome the problem is to cut loose from the Orange next year.  I've been thinking about this for a while anyway, because when I'm reading so little giving over 3 months to a prescribed list of 20 books is too much.  It's been a good five years but it's time to let the longlist drop I think and stick to the shortlist. 

Fiction read: 44
Of the Fiction:
     Novels: 43
     Short story collections: 1
     Novels Composed of Linked Short Stories: 0

     Graphic novels: 0
     Poetry: 1 
     Plays: 0

Diversity is clearly not my strong suit, and that's not for want of pleasure in plays or graphic novels or short stories.  It's simply a matter of bias towards novels (and fat novels at that).  To be fair to me the poetry stat under-represents my intake a little.  I've only read one collection from cover to cover this year, but I've dipped in and out of many more (Alice Oswald, David Harsent, Don Paterson, Ted Hughes, Phillip Gross to name a few) without concertedly tackling them.  Still, I want to have a better fictional diet.

Speculative/SF: 3

Historical (ie. set 30 years in the past from time of writing; not including flashbacks): 10

Crime/Thriller: 2

It's been a non-genre year.  Again, the Orange Prize is partly to blame for this, and book groups too.  But it's more that I haven't been reading a lot; my big reads (classic and contemporary) have been taking longer and there has been less and less room for genre in the interstices.

Most works by the same author: 2 (almost 3) George Mackay Brown

And I will be reading a lot more of him in the New Year too!

Nonfiction read: 7 (would be 10, if you count the three long-term NF books I have on the go)
Of the Nonfiction:
     Essays: 0
     Biography /Memoir: 3
     History: 1
     Literary Criticism: 1
     Politics/World Affairs: 2

Non-fiction always takes me much longer to read, and this year I've been preoccupied with lots of work reading (policies and consultation documents on libraries and archives galore) that has got in the way of non-fiction time.  So I'm not so disappointed in this stat as I might be.  I want to read more non-fiction, like I want to read more of everything, but I recognise that it won't always be possible.  I've also been working through John Reader's magisterial Africa: A Biography of a Continent, which is huge and in short chapters.  These are quick to read in odd moments, which has suited me, but make the book seem interminable!  And my project around Rachael M. Brownstein's book on heroines has continued, though slowly. 

Books in translation: 4
Re-reads: 2

My second resolution was to read more in translation.  Again I did improve: four in 2011 is better than the big fat none of 2010.  Still, it's tragic that I didn't do better.  I started off so well with Halldor Laxness' Independent People and then forgot all about my determination.  The other three translated novels I read were Cheri by Colette, Pig Tales by Marie Darrieussecq and Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius.   The two re-reads were Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel and Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson, both of which I revisited for book groups.

Books that were written before 1900: 2
Books that were written after 2000: 11

Only two classics this year, but fat ones: Daniel Deronda by George Eliot and The Mysteries of Udolpho by Anne Radcliffe.  I won't beat myself up about this too much, because a steady stream of 2-3 classics each year simply prolongs the pleasure of reading them over a lifetime.  And I've started Nicholas Nickleby and that sort of counts as a third for this year's quota.  Eleven books before 2000?  Again, given the number of books read overall I don't think that's too bad.  It could be better, but then couldn't everything?

Books from the TBR (acquired before 1/1/2011): 4

This is the stat that makes me feel slightly sick with myself.  When I was looking over my list of read books I felt a mounting panic as I realised how many of them were new acquisitions.  How could it be that I'd only read four (FOUR!) books acquired before 1/1/2011?!  This is simply not acceptable, and not just from the point of view of my personal reading development.  It has financial and psychological implications too.  I must take some action before a) I'm completely overwhelmed, and b) I've invested hundreds more pounds in books I'll never ever read at this rate.  Like any person with a compulsive habit I have to sort myself out next year, big time.

And after all that a new set of reading resolutions for 2012 will be coming soon...

~~Victoria~~

Hedgerows ruddy as a battle

Sarah Hall has form, and her new short story collection The Beautiful Indifference is on the top of it.  I pre-ordered it months ago when I first heard it was coming out, and then forgot all about it until an anonymous parcel arrived a few weeks ago with it nestled inside.  Straight out of the packet it came and in went my bookmark. 

There are just seven stories in all, none longer than 40 widely spaced pages.  Five are about failing or faltering romantic relationships.  Death - of animals, of people - is a constant.   Each of the 185 pages is ripe with the uneasiness and queasy disorientation that are Hall's distinctive calling cards.  

'Butcher's Perfume' was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2010, and is a stand-out opener about the horse-breeding Slessor family, and the terrible revenge they take after an animal is cruelly killed.  Told by an outsider - Kathleen, the unlikely friend of teenaged Manda Slessor - is primed with exquisite tension, setting the knife-edge tone of the rest of the collection.  It is typical of Hall in other ways too: being set in Cumbria, and intimately concerned with the experience of landscape.  The sense of place and history of place is extremely strong; the Slessors an incarnation of it:

People said she [Manda] was raised to it, with that family of hers.  ... They'd been forged from the old rage of the north, it was said.  They were not drovers or farmers, not the quiet settlers of the borders.  They can from gipsy stock, scrappies, dog-and-horse-breeders, fire-mongers.  These were the ones who lit the beacons when other folk hid in cellars and down wells.  They smeared offal on their chests and waited at the citadel with their bearded hounds for the Scots.  ... The men would take up arms.  The women would braid boars' hair into their own.  They'd murder their infants birthed to the offcoming sires.  Where does history end, we were once asked in school.  You may as well ask where true north begins.

The north isn't the only place thus invoked.  'The Bees' is a Cumbrian woman's descent into hell, otherwise known as London; 'She Murdered Mortal He' is set in an unnamed African beach resort only just opened to tourists; and the glorious 'Vuotjarvi' (longlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award in 2011) on the shores of one of Finland's sixty thousand lakes.

My favourite story - a difficult decision for me to make, but make it I must - was 'The Nightlong River'.   It distills everything that I admire about The Beautiful Indifference into one slight but perfectly formed capsule.  Oblique, elegiac and disturbing at once.  The narrator is Dolly, whose sister Magda is dying of a poorly diagnosed cancer.  Winter is coming, the deepest darkest winter in long years, and with it an invasion of mink, 'villainous wee devils' who 'slaughtered for the slenderest tast of blood seemingly'.   The men of the sisters' rural community decide that nothing but a complete and ruthless cull will answer; Dolly decides that there could be no better Christmas present for her withering sister than a cape made from the wee devils' blooded skins. 

The story is all blood and snow.  It is two-toned: red and white.   A glut of red berries and late autumn fruits is a sign of the harshness of the coming winter, paralleling to Magda's never-ending trickling menses, a symptom of her illness.  The descriptive language is intimate, visceral, uncanny:

We knew from the November berries what the next months would bring.  Everywhere they were hung and clotted in the bushes, ripe and red, like blisters of blood.  The hollies came out in autumn... Rose hips clung on well past their season, until the bird eventually went with them.  The yarrow and rowan hung out their own gaudy bunting.  But it was the hawthorn that was the truest messanger that year... The hawthorns sent the hedgerows ruddy as a battle.  It meant a full winter of snow.  ... So the berries told us, and we were warned.  But they were gorgeous in their prediction too; they lit the back roads with a bright skin-light, even as the first daads dusted the fells, and the becks stiffened, and the feathers of rooks stick to the walls.

The coat that Dolly makes Magda is both horrifying - 'a little gamey' - and a tender offering of sisterly devotion.  This is what Hall is best at.  That strange and wonderful juxtaposition of what is most terrible and what is most lovely; of fleeting glorious love-making next to pain and loss.   Just so in the title story 'The Beautiful Indifference' in which another woman, also dying we surmise from cancer, spends one last weekend with her lover in York before giving herself up to the inevitable on a glorious Cumbrian moor.

The only duff note for me was 'The Agency', a piece about a woman who turns to an escort service for sexual fulfillment.  It was claustrophobic - the woman moves from her kitchen, to her car, to sexual rendevous, back to her home - and  sallow amongst the wildness of the rest.  But one cuckoo in this brood isn't worth dwelling on.  More, more, more please.

~~Victoria~~

 

Merry Christmas Reading

I've finally made those Christmas reading decisions...

 

~~Victoria~~

No Complaining

Ian Rankin is the brightest star in the Scottish crime fiction firmament.  His Rebus novels already have the aura of genre classics about them.  He is often to be found on British TV these days, commenting on everything from politics to art and literature; and seems like a balanced, well-informed and sagely character.  I've wanted to read something by him for a long time, but the Rebus series was daunting in its length and threw up a familiar dilemma.  Should I start with the first book, written back in the 1980s when Rankin was a rookie, or one of the more recent critically acclaimed installments?  If I started further along in the series I would miss subtleties of character and back-story; but if I started at the beginning I would have to read half a dozen novels to get into the rhythm of Rebus. Impasse.

Then I read a review for Rankin's newest book The Impossible Dead and realised it was the second in a fresh series featuring a new detective, Malcolm Fox.  Fox is, in many ways, the antithesis of Rebus: he doesn't drink, he lives a quiet, neat life and he works in the Complaints and Conduct division, investigating police corruption.  The perfect solution! I could start a series at the beginning, before it had really established itself, but still get a handle on Rankin's mature style.  Impasse overcome.  So I duly purchased The Complaints for my Kindle and embarked.

That was almost a month and half ago, and I finally finished the book this morning.  It would be an understatement to say I found it hard going.  This often seems to be the case for me with crime fiction.  I'm interested for the first quarter of the novel while the characters and the scenario are established; but once the mechanisms of the plot start to shunt and whirr and take over I rapidly loose interest.  The problem being, I think, that I'm not all that interested who dunnit.  I can live without knowing who the murderer/blackmailer/bad cop is, and I feel that the race to discover them gets in the way of the good stuff.  I realise this is My Problem and that it gets in the way of my writing in a balanced, fair way about the reading experience (which certainly wasn't all bad).  In an attempt to counteract my negative bias, I've drawn up a bald list of things I did and didn't like rather than embarked on a critical rant.  Fair is fair.

And so I liked:

• The backdrop of Edinburgh in 2008, with the financial crisis just beginning and the city's transport infrastructure in chaos because of the installation of the new tramways.  It made for a touchy, edgy backdrop to the police corruption shenanigans and I enjoyed the way Rankin used it to shape the action, making his characters adapt to get around it.
• The fastidiousness of Malcolm Fox, who notices little things about people.  The early part of the book was dominated for me by his observations of people's clothing, and voyeuristic accounts of what they ate and drank, when and how much.  Even in the final tense scenes of the book there is almost a page long dialogue about what two characters would like to drink: whisky or tea?  This formed the core of Malcolm's character for me: a details man, an observer, a cataloguer, not a do-er.
• The book shelf sub-plot, wherein Malcolm spends the whole of the book trying to rearrange his books.  At the beginning of the novel, when all the drama is starting to ramp up, Fox decides to re-order his shelves, and removes all the books into piles on the floor.  They then sit there throughout the novel, occasionally getting reconfigured into new piles while the shelves remain empty.  Only as Fox gains clarity on his case does he put first one book and then several back.  I thought this was a nice comment on his mental state and thought processes, but also a pretty analogy for Rankin.  He metaphorically removes all his previous books from the shelves, clearing out Rebus, and only as his new series takes shape does he start to reassemble his ouevre. 
• The blossoming relationship between Fox and Jamie Breck, an officer under investigation for paedophilia who is drawn into the maelstrom of Fox's investigation into Edinburgh property magnate Charles Brogan. A bromance if ever there was one, as the pair tease and banter their way to the denouement.  Late in the book Fox suggests to another officer that he and Breck were set up, that they were brought into each others' orbit because their compatability was obvious.  Fox would see things in Breck that he lacked - youth, creativity, reckless courage - while Breck would benefit from Fox's caution, experience and eye for detail.  I hope they continue to work together.

I didn't like:

•  The female characters.  Are you at all surprised?  There are plenty of women in the book but their roles are very limiting.  There is Fox's sister, Jude.  She's a battered woman, clinging stubbornly to the man who hurts her (and who turns up murdered early on in the plot, hooray!).  There is Annabel, Jamie Breck's girlfriend, who exists solely to bring the boys pizza and feed them evidence from the investigation of the aforementioned murder (she is also a police constable on the force).  There is Annie Inglis, who runs the 'Chop Shop' investigating sexual crimes against children.  She's there to add some sexual tension for Fox, and to help Rankin draw out his sad history with women (divorce, of course); and she has a petulant teenage son, just, you know, because.  And there is DI Stoddart, a Complaints officer from Aberdeenshire, who looks very stern; and a leggy journalist who makes Fox rather hot under the collar for about five minutes.  Oh, and I almost forgot Joanna Broughton, whose role is to be the daughter of one swindler and the wife of another.  None of these women are more than cogs in the plot machine, or filler that hold the (male) pieces together.  
• The crime narrative, oh dear.  I've already mentioned my lack of enthusiasm for the actual crime element of crime fiction, but I'll expand a little.  The Complaints has a convuluted plot.  It's all about police corruption (obviously) and the involvement of a network of officers in the financial double-dealings of Scottish gangs and crooks.  Some of these crooks wear suits and live in very expensive penthouse apartments; and others hang out in dives in Dundee.  They're all mixed up in the property market crash, and the financial crisis, and the human fall-out of this is what drives the book forward.  The murder of Jude's boyfriend and the setting up of Malcolm Fox and Jamie Breck to take the blame are the outward showings of the rot at the heart of the system.  Which is all well and good, but despite all the twists and turns and the long drawing out of the reveal, too much is obvious or, conversely, obscure, to make it really heart-thumpingly interesting.

Now I'm thinking to myself that reading The Complaints rather than a Rebus novel was a mistake.  I can see from it all the things that make Rankin a superior crime writer, but I didn't enjoy it and that inevitably puts me off reading further.  So what should I do?  Should I pick a Rebus book at random and read, or go to the beginning, or should I leave Rankin for the moment and try some other crime writer?  And if so, who?

~Victoria~

 

Demimondaines

Now the English Protestant ladies' virtue is chastity! There are but two classes of women among them. She is a bad woman the moment she has committed fornication; be she generous, charitable, just, clever, domestic, affectionate, and ever ready to sacrifice her own good to serve and benefit those she loves, still her rank in society is with the lowest hired prostitute. Each is indiscriminately avoided, and each is denominated the same—bad woman, while all are virtuous who are chaste.

Thus wrote the courtesan Harriette Wilson (1786-1845) in her notorious memoirs. Proto-feminist excoriation of moral double standards was not her primary purpose in writing, although it lends the book a considerable appeal today. In fact, the Memoirs, a recounting of her life as a courtesan, were an elaborate money-making scheme; Harriette wrote to each of her former paramours, offering to discreetly leave out their name, in return for a blackmail payment. (Double standards there might have been, but men could still be socially - and in certain cases, politically - embarrassed if a courtesan chose to kiss and tell with enough publicity behind her.) The Duke of Wellington, famously, told her to "Publish and be damned!"; but others duly paid up.

The Memoirs were born, it seems, partly out of a desire for revenge upon the men who had repeatedly broken promises, and partly out of a pressing need for some sort of financial security, caused largely by said broken promises. Amid the decidedly limited career options for women in this period, as Katie Hickman's Courtesans (2003) makes clear, the life of a courtesan offered greater freedoms than that of a wife. But in the case of wives and courtesans alike, the women were essentially dependent upon men's continued favour if they wanted to eat - something that Hickman, I think, occasionally skims over in her desire to (quite rightly) celebrate the strength of will and unusual status of these fascinating women.

The potential rewards were considerable, particularly from the perspective of the present. Not just the income, although that, too was considerable, at least for those women at the top of their profession. Gifts and fees from admirers and patrons, or regular stipends from long-term lovers, allowed these women to maintain themselves in some opulence, at least so long as they remained fashionable. Hickman notes how Cora Pearl (1835-86) and her fellow demimondaines were attended the Opera in Paris once a week "covered in jewels" and "de l'air grave et imposant d'ambassadrices en exercise", as a captivated contemporary witness put it. The money, in any case, was necessary if the courtesan was to keep attracting, and retaining, lovers; there is a clear sense of the vicious circle involved in Hickman's account of a figure like Sophia Baddeley (1745-86), who ran up large debts in an effort to keep her career going after she was unceremoniously dropped by her rich patron, Lord Melbourne.

Life as a courtesan also offered a degree of independence that, however limited and precarious by modern standards, was considerably greater than the alternative. Several of the women discussed here made their objections to marriage, and their preference for an officially single life, very clear. Sophia Baddeley was, at least according to reports of her, quite explicit:

The young gentleman, I believe, loves me to adoration but I will not be his wife notwithstanding, nor will I be the wife of any man; for I can never submit to the control of a husband, or put it in his power to say I have been imprudent in life.

(As I say, at least according to reports of her. Herein lies one of my reservations about Hickman's book, as to some degree about Daughters of Britannia: there is frustratingly little discussion, in the main text, of the sources for some of this information. Often I had to have recourse to the footnotes to discover whether statements had come from one of the women directly, or had been attributed to them by others - in the case of Sophia Baddeley, in an account by a close friend and confidante, published two years after her death. Given the amount of popular, salacious fiction surrounding courtesans in their day, it would seem worthwhile to spend a bit more time discussing evidence.)

Harriette, again, sounds strikingly modern in her declaration, "I will be the mere instrument of pleasure to no man. He must make a friend and companion of me, or he will lose me." This, too, is appealing. Life as a courtesan did not preclude long-term romantic attachments, but it certainly changed the basis on which they were formed and conducted. Elizabeth Armistead's (1750-1842) relationship with the prominent politician Charles James Fox, which lasted from the early 1780s until his death in 1806, is an interesting case in point. In his early letters to her (hers to him do not survive, unfortunately), he discusses politics with her as an equal; his endearments include lines like "my dearest mistress, friend, and wife".

But her past, even after she gave up her career, largely prevented her from being received in mixed-sex gatherings - the idea of courtesans mixing with respectable women seems to have been a dread taboo throughout the period covered by Hickman - and even after the pair married in 1795, they did not make the formal union public until 1802 (apparently at Elizabeth's insistence, not Charles'). The Fox family, however, were warmly accepting of their scandalous new addition, and this clearly outlasted Charles' lifetime; Elizabeth's funeral, over thirty years after Charles' death, was attended by many of her relatives by marriage.

Others, however, remained fiercely and contentedly single. English-born, Paris-resident Cora Pearl, meanwhile, described her own attitude to men as one of "instinctive horror" that manifested in "coldness and utter contempt", although she also said, rather archly, "I have often made an exception in favour of the individual!" While I don't share her misandry - frankly understandable though it is in the mid-19th century - I did warm to her very much thanks to another quotation Hickman picked out:

My independence was all my fortune, and I have known no other happiness; and it is still what attaches me to life.

This, I found simply inspiring, especially coming from a woman who had to work so hard - and ultimately, to suffer a great deal - in pursuit of that freedom.

If the benefits were great, so, too, were the risks, too; some of the women discussed here by Hickman, Cora Pearl among them, ended their days in desperate poverty, after their lovers moved on or casually forgot their promises to them. And it is hard to feel entirely sanguine about arrangements like Sophia's with Lord Melbourne; he may have paid her well, but she was expected be available for him whenever he wished, and he seems to have had no compunction at all about cutting off her only means of support when he tired of her. (Also, by Hickman's account he bored her senseless.) Their position was ambiguous. They were prostitutes, and yet not; entitled to a certain respect - notably for their wit and intelligence as much as for their looks - but shut out of the (double-edged) protections that patriarchal society offered to women. Harriette might have been the "barometer of all that was in vogue", but respectable women would not have dreamed of associating with her.

Hickman gets a little carried away, perhaps, with the bullish self-presentation of Harriette and the rest; I'm not sure I buy assertions like this:

Delightfully unencumbered by most of the prevailing notions of female propriety, they had the liberty to be themselves in ways that were absolutely denied to other women.

This, I think, goes too far. Courtesans were still, at heart, performers, whose made their living by captivating men - and, if necessary, by feigning being captivated in their turn. Closer to the mark is the more balanced judgement offered elsewhere in the book, which makes clear the appeal of the demimonde without implying that it was a lifestyle that did not require compromise: "Harriette liked her independence, she liked having a good time, and she liked sex; as a courtesan she could have all of these things."

By the late 19th century, such things had become more controversial than ever. Hickman has fun with the pronouncements of Dr William Acton, who gave voice to what became an oft-repeated cliche of Victorian womanhood - the cult of meek frigidity - apparently largely in order to reassure uncertain young men on their wedding nights. "The majority of woman (happily for them) are not very much trouble by sexual feelings of any kind", he opined. "What men are habitually, women are only exceptionally", he added; such exceptional women were "essentially aberrant creatures, nymphomaniacs, either potential, or actual, inmates of insane asylums". He concludes,

No nervous or feeble young man need, therefore, be deterred from marriage by an exaggerated notion of the duties required from him. The married woman has no wish to be treated on the footing of a mistress.

These changing mores are reflected in the experiences of the most recent of Hickman's subjects, Catherine Walters (1839-1920). Walters found herself with a passionate young admirer who had fully bought into the sort of ideas aired by Acton, even as he paid a courtesan for sexual favours. He declared, in a hilarious bout of wilful self-deception, that Catherine

had never till she met me found the actual lover of her perfect choice, the man to whom she had surrendered all as she had surrendered it to me, and so had given me the right to call her mine, a miraculous virginity which entailed on me a corresponding duty of perpetual love service not less binding than that sanctified by marriage vows.

If only courtesans could enjoy sex - and for that, be outcast - it was also increasingly the case that only courtesans could indulge in something as filthy as (oh no!) being clever:

Ever since the late nineteenth century, women had been bombarded as never before with literature - pamphlets, sermons, manuals and homilies - about their rightful place in society: they were born to obey men, belonged in the home, and any activity which might lure them away from it was not only inappropriate, but actually degrading. Great intellectual talent could never be anything other than a misfortune in a woman, wrote Sarah Jane Ellis, the writer of a number of best-selling manuals for women in the mid-nineteenth century: "a jewel which cannot with propriety be worn." ("The crimsoning blush of modesty," added the High Tory clergyman Richard Polwhele, "will always be more attractive than the sparkle of confident intelligence.")

Reasons to be cheerful you don't live in the 19th century, #237485...

~~Nic