Eve's Alexandria

Recent Reading: Round-Up #1

Tomorrow is January 31st and the last day in the current From the Stacks challenge, which, you may remember, I embarked on back at the end of December.  And, would you believe it, I have actually accomplished my goal and read the five books on my list.  I even finished a few days early. 

I accept your enthusiastic and resounding applause.

I started off with The Apple: New Crimson Petal Stories by Michel Faber, which turned out to be pleasant and enjoyable, but nothing compared to the magnificent tome from which it takes both its inspiration and its marketability. The Crimson Petal and the White rode the wave of Victorian pastiche with both style and energy: a weighty tome, cut from the finest grade paper, beguiling from the first line of the first page.  The Apple is soft fluff in comparison; the cotton candy of Victorian historicals. For the most part, at least.  Stories like 'Christmas at Silver Street'  and 'Chocolate Hearts from the New World', which imagine Crimson Petal's lead characters in the years and months before they become subject to the novel, make for pretty reading but petty narrative.  Unlike Susanna Clarke, whose Ladies of Grace Adieu was sufficiently disengaged from her magnum opus to stand-alone, Faber has chosen stories that require a certain affection from the reader.  In his introduction he claims they can stand-alone, but this is clearly not so - who can intelligently read about William Rackham's future if they don't know his history with Sugar? Indeed, the only stories that really rise above the legacy of Crimson Petal are 'A Mighty Horde of Women in Very Big Hats, Advancing', about a child's experience of a women's suffrage rally and 'Clara and the Rat Man', about a prostitute and her strangest client.  Whether these warrant the hardback price is questionable: if you've read and loved Crimson Petal, then probably yes, and if not, probably no. Buy The Crimson Petal and the White instead! 

I then moved on, working my way through The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzenitsyn, before I washed up on the shore of The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco.

Now, I know Eco mostly by reputation having only previously read The Name of Rose, but I'm aware of several of his penchants and literary tics: his moral dialogues, philosophical musings and Russian doll structures.  The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana has all of them squared, and is something of an oddity of a novel because of it: I mean to post in full about it soon.  Similarly The Invisisble Man by H.G. Wells.  I admit that I was uncertain about delving into this one and quavered over whether or not to pick it up, thinking that it would be too familiar a story, or too melodramatic a prose style, or just plain silly.  I was wrong of course, on all counts. Wells is a consummate story teller, and a surprising stylist, and only silly when he means to be - The Invisible Man is visceral, unrelenting and unflinching; a work of psychological realism if there ever was one. 

What all this amounts to is a very successful challenge - I completed it for a start, but I also read books I wouldn't ordinarily have picked up of my own volition and enjoyed them.  I didn't feel in the mood for Solzenitsyn, or Wells, or Eco but I read them anyway and feel enriched for it. (Hurray!)  So much so that I decided to do it again.  There are a plethora of other challenges to try, I know, - the Classics one sounds especially tempting - but the From the Stacks challenge suits my needs so well that I think I might make it a permanent fixture.  Esther will pick me 5 books from the TBR stack every 2 months, and I must read them, whether I have a passion to or not.

Last night she picked out these for me:

1. Father and Son by Edmund Gosse - I picked up this little NonSuch edition as a remainder at the Minster Gate Bookshop for £2.99 after readng a biographical article about Gosse in the LRB. This is a memoir of his late Victorian childhood - both of his parents were members of the strictly religious Plymouth Brethren and he grew up stuffed full of missionary narratives, biblical literalism and hellfire before becoming a provacative, free-thinking academic in adulthood.  Also interesting to me because Peter Carey used Edmund as a model for Oscar, also a child of Plymouth Brethren in his brilliant Oscar and Lucinda.

2. Pavane by Keith Roberts - I seem to remember that Nic bought me this for Christmas 2005 (or was it 2004?) and I've been meaning to read it ever since.  An alternate history, it imagines an England in which Elizabeth I was assasinated and the Spanish Armada successful conquered the British Isles, bringing Catholocism and the Inquisition with them...

3. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson - I read Gilead last year and raved on and on about it until Esther read this, Robinson's first novel, to shut me up. Now she keeps raving on and on...

4. Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters - Which I bought after it won the Guardian First Book Award in 2005, but haven't gotten around to yet.

5. Other Stories and other stories by Ali Smith - She shook my hand and gave me her own reading copy of The Accidental and so now qualifies for a rare honour: the reading of the ouevre.  I don't ordinarily read multiple works by the same author in quick succession, mostly because I don't feel I have the time to focus so intently, but now and then an author comes along and demands that sort of attention. Ali Smith is definitely something special.

All of these I mean to read by the end of March, interspersed with other bits of pieces and my non-fiction reads and, of course, the Bible, which I've been neglecting recently. (I got bogged down in the prohibitions of Leviticus and the many different ways to sacrifice an animal but hopefully will be emerging with thoughts on it some time soon.)  Not to mention the fact that the Orange longlist is announced in late March...

~~Victoria~~

Pure Intentions, Juxtaposed

Clare: Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly, without warening. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting. Why has he gone where I cannot follow?

Henry: I hate to be where she is not, when she is not. And yet, I am always going, and she cannot follow.

There is something perfectly simple, and - by certain measures - simply perfect, at the heart of The Time-Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. This may not be immediately apparent from the premise, which runs roughly like this (slight spoilers herein, although to be honest it's nothing you won't see coming 100 pages off)... Girl meets boy (well, man; 30 years her senior, in fact). Boy disappears. Girl meets boy again, repeatedly, at random intervals. Boy is often naked in fields. Boy turns out to be an involuntary time-traveller from the future. Girl spends life dreaming of boy (time travel being, after all, really quite attractive). Girl grows up and marries boy (younger version). Boy keeps (accidentally) leaving girl and coming back. Boy eventually sees future without him in it, draws obvious conclusion. Boy decides to keep this information from girl, so as not to upset her (yeah, that'll work). Boy dies tragically and girl is left, bereft, for the next fifty-odd years of her life. Exeunt.

Perfectly simple? For the most part, yes: the prose is unremarkable but smoothly readable; the central conceit works as both neat relationship-dynamic metaphor and the ultimate in 'high concept' one-line pitches. The narrative is essentially an angsty love story, trained like a laser sight on the emotional lives of its two main characters (who share first-person narration duties), with very few divergences: they love each other, but circumstances frequently force them apart, with poignant results. Can't say simpler than that.

Simply perfect? Conceptually, there is much to enjoy. There's the sheer fun that Niffenegger has with the plot engine, for example, which occasionally lands our time-traveller, Henry, in situations like this:

I am standing across the street from the Art Institute of Chicago on a sunny June day in 1973 in the company of my nine-year-old self. He is travelling from next Wednesday; I have come from 1990. We have a long afternoon and evening to frivol as we will, and so we have come to one of the great art museums of the world for a little lesson in pickpocketing.

"Can't we just look at the art?" pleads Henry.

As an examination of a life-shaping romantic relationship, moreover, the novel provides both delightful wish-fulfilment and quiet, perceptive, telling moments. I was particularly taken with one side-effect of Henry's uncontrollable leaping in time: both he and Clare, at certain points in the story, experience a sort of double-vision of the other, a layering of past and present (and future) within a single moment. Henry repeatedly (and involuntarily) visits Clare in her youth, and when he speaks to her he can see the woman she will become - the one that he, in his own present, loves and has married - and all the intervening stages. Sometimes, the simultaneity can be very direct, and disorientating:

She is standing before me completely naked. It is a sort of miracle: all the little marks I have become fond of have vanished; her stomach is flat, no trace of the pregnancies that will bring us such grief, such happiness. This Clare is a little thinner, a lot more buoyant than the Clare I love in the present. I realise once again how much sadness has overtaken us. But today all of that is magically removed; today the possibility of joy is close to us.

Similarly, Clare has met older, future versions Henry many times before, at the age of 20, she finally encounters Henry as he is in the present - a rather feckless, (unsurprisingly) commitment-phobic 28-year-old, whose time-travelling has yet to take him to her. (Thus he has no idea who she is, yet, although that doesn't hold her back for long). Clare falls for the Henry of the present because she already loves the person he will grow into; she has known him all her life. She continues to see past- and future-Henries even after this; on one occasion, encountering his 33-year-old self from the future, she confesses to him that she prefers him a little more mature, and longs for the day when her present Henry gets there. There is a particular vivid joy to all this - and a poignancy, of course - like being able to interact with memories that one never previously possessed. The past is always very tangibly within reach, even if neither Henry nor Clare have any control over when it will manifest; renewal and rediscovery are constants for them.

Where things get more interesting (for me) is in the less-rosy picture lurking beneath. Clare and Henry, at different times of their lives, are both having a relationship with someone who knows them in the future. Someone who knows what they will do, what they will say, how they will think, how they will change: the person that they will become. When 13-year-old Clare asks Henry about fate, and God, Henry immediately recalls the range of opinions that Clare will have on the subject - from unconsidered faith to scepticism to outrage - at different stages of her life. The obvious problem of determinism thus arises:

Clare pours the rest of her coffee into the Meadow and takes a doughnut. Then she says, "You're making me into a freak."

I don't have a ready reply for this, since the idea has never occurred to me. "Uh, no I'm not."

"You are so."

"Am not." I pause. "What do you mean, I'm making you into a freak? I'm not making you into anything."

"You know, like telling me that I like coffee with cream and sugar before I hardly even taste it. I mean, how am I going to figure out if that's what I like or if I just like it because you tell me I like it?"

Niffenegger fudges this issue, I feel - the debate continues with Clare complaining that she wants to know the future, but not to be told what future-she likes; Henry replies that she still has free will, whatever he tells her. Yet the question of how she is influenced by his knowledge of her as a person is largely sidestepped; even if it is implicit elsewhere in the story, it is not directly engaged with. Henry might not be able to make Clare like her coffee in a different way, perhaps (although here I think Henry underestimates the pervasive strength of a teen crush bordering on hero worship, especially one as experientially and emotional unequal as Clare's for him - how could she not emulate him, and his image of her?), but he is surely shaping her in a multitude of intangible ways. The same happens in reverse, to a lesser extent, when Clare meets Henry in the present, before he knows her - Clare now has the advantage of a host of memories the other does not yet share, and she, too, seeks to mould Henry to the image of him that she has cherished her whole life, the older, more mature man she idolised and waited for.

The legacy of this is clear in the (more than merely impulsive) way 20-year-old Clare latches onto 28-year-old Henry, and in the whole way that she thinks about the two of them together:

"I love him. He's my life. I've been waiting for him, my whole life, and now, he's here." I don't know how to explain. "With Henry, I can see everything laid out, like a map, past and future, everything at once, like an angel [...] I can reach into him and touch time...he loves me. We're married because...we're part of each other..." I falter. "It's happened already. All at once."

There is something more than usually stifling about this; it is as if Clare has no will or volition of her own, but is content simply to surrender to her fate. Indeed, we see repeatedly how Clare has built her whole life around Henry. Virtually every passage from Clare's point-of-view deals with her interacting with Henry at some stage of her life; on the few occasions where he does not feature, she is thinking about him (longingly).

A plot device (relatively) simple and (almost) perfect, then. I may have my reservations about the dynamic between the characters, but this disquiet, at least, seems to be intentionally evoked by the author. My real caveat is that I don't think I'm the right kind of reader to fully appreciate the specific type of perfection of The Time-Traveller's Wife. I have friends who were reduced to floods of tears by the ending, but I'm afraid I just wasn't feeling the bittersweetness. The novel is undoubtedly a page-turner, despite the lack of suspense imposed by the back-and-forth structure, in which several plot developments are necessarily revealed ahead of time, and others are fluffed for no apparent reason (step up, FutureHenry talking to current Henry about the couple's efforts to have a child). The characters are often engaging (though neither quite as remarkable as they perhaps ought to be, for the eternal-love-across-time aspect), the various details of their milieux well drawn, the angst and tenderness all present and correct.

But over 500 pages of two people gazing, lovestruck, at each other - or, when apart, thinking, lovestruck, of each other - is about 200 pages too many, for my taste. I found myself longing for something to offset the relentless romance (I realise this probably makes me a cold, heartless absence of a human being; 'tis a cross I must bear, etc). There are moments of poignance, but too often the attempted tear-jerking crosses over into simple jerking-around: Clare's multiple miscarriages are a blunt weapon, in terms of plot and tone, when they should be an achingly-precise blade. My enjoyment, and emotional engagement, were slowly smothered by such revelations as the thuddingly-dull way Clare spends the rest of her life (fifty years!) after Henry's death (not that I'm suggesting for a moment that she should forget him, but has she really so little life of her own?):

Clare: [I] sit looking at the lake, wondering if he will come today. It's not much different from the many other times he was gone, and I waited, except that this time I have instructions: this time I know Henry will come, eventually. I sometimes wonder if this readiness, this expectation, prevents the miracle from happening. But I have no choice. He is coming, and I am here.

What I really wanted was a little more of this:

Henry: When I am out there, in time, I am inverted, changed into a desperate version of myself. I become a thief, a vagrant, an animal who runs and hides. I startle old women and amaze children. I am a trick, an illusion of the highest order, so incredible that I am actually true.

Time travel as a way of exploring separation and loss in relationships is all very well (and, as I have said, is very well done) - but time travel that also provided a few more episodes with a different pace and tone, woven through the central story for contrast and light relief, would have been even better.

~~Nic

(who has been waiting since Alexandria's inception for an excuse to use some Tool lyrics as a post title)

A Day Without A Cloud

Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, the eponymous protagonist of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, is a poor man, an uneducated man, possibly even illiterate.  An unsensitive man, neither passionate nor perceptive; not a poet, or an artist, or even a craftsman. Arguably he is stunted, both emotionally and intellectually, possessed of few dreams and almost no ambition. He is almost entirely undistinguished.  A peasant too, he is the kind of man who traditionally has no place in the fiction of the Russian greats - a common 'Ivan' (the name is synonymous with 'John' in English) with little in the way of dramatic charisma to tempt Tolstoy or Dosteyevsky or Gogol or even Bulgakov.  But he is a protagonist nevertheless and a hero of sorts in Solzenitsyn's answer to Mrs. Dalloway: one day in a man's life and, in that day, his whole life.

It is Russia, 1951 and Shukhov is entering the ninth winter of a ten year sentence in a Stalinist prison camp for 'special' (read: political) prisoners.  His days begin with the sound of 'reveille' and the nagging cold:

'As usual, at five o'clock that morning reveille was sounded by the blows of a hammer on a length of rail hanging up near the staff quarter. The intermittent sound barely penetrated the window-panes on which the frost lay two fingers thick... It was cold outside...'

He almost never oversleeps but gets up at once, eager for the ninety minutes of free time before prisoners have to assemble for work; he dresses himself in his thin clothing, each item clearly marked with his number and pulls on his 'valenki', the fur-lined boots that keep his feet from turning numb and white.  He trudges with his conrades to the mess and crams in to secure his share:

'They sat in the cold mess-hall, most of them eating with their hats on, eating slowly, picking out putrid little fish from under the leaves of boiled cabbage and spitting the bones out on the table... The skilly was the same everyday. Its composition depended on the kind of vegetable provided that winter. Nothing but salted carrots last year... This year it was black cabbage.'

Afterwards he assembles with the rest for the trudge to work, tieing rags around his face to protect it a little from the searing cold and hoping that his 'team' of bunkmates, number 104, are given a gentle duty.  As it is, on this day, they're sent to lay concrete blocks in what seems an entirely futile attempt to build a power station - like much of the prisoner's work it is never adequately explained or justified.  They're constructing a 'compound', complete with workshops, houses and a power station, but for what, in the middle of nowhere, on barren ground?  Nevertheless, and despite the cold, the men and Shukhov especially throw themselves into the task, setting up an efficient production line and working to a gruelling rhythm.  At day's end they trudge back to camp, eat more skilly and some bread, and retire finally to bed, where Shukhov wraps up his feet in clothes and his jacket in an attempt to keep them warm during the night.  There the novel ends but, we imagine, Shukhov goes on forever: rising with reveille, freezing and sweating at his work, trudging home; rising, freezing, trudging; and on and on.

It makes me cold just thinking about it: -30 degrees, with the wind biting through all your defenses and no respite, nothing to break up your arduous routine or spice up the poor food.  Little in the way of diversion, with no expectation of seeing loved ones or even hearing from them more than once or twice a year.  Your sentence stretching out in front of you, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 years, with extra added on, perhaps, because of a minor infraction or because of some administrative muddle.  The camp becoming your way of life because you have no choice; hope ebbing away.

But really Solzhenitsyn's novel is not about hope; nor is it about despair or the antithesis of hope.  On the contrary, it is about contentment.  Obviously not the warm fluffiness that immediately springs to mind, but the kind of contentment that comes from a complete acceptance of the limitations of life, without yearning or desiring, and a determination to live as close up to those limits as possible.  In some ways it is even about happiness.

As I said in the beginning: Shukhov is an unambitious man and in the world of a Stalinist gulag this is an extroadinary trait.  He doesn't want to escape and he doesn't allow himself to properly contemplate a future of freedom.  Around mid-morning on the day we spend with him he muses over what he will do when he is finally released; his wife has written to him about the huge sums of money to be made from carpet-painting, a skill newly practised in their village, but he thinks little of this idea:

'There was was easy money to be made, you see, and made fast... But, candidly, he didn't want to turn carpet-painter... He still had a good pair of hands, capable hands.  Surely, when he was out, he'd find work as a stove-setting, a carpenter or a tinker?  Only if they deprived him of his civil rights and he couldn't be taken on anywhere, or if they wouldn't let him go home, would he turn to those carpets for a spell.'

Because Shukhov wants little, he accepts little and finds it acceptable.  During eight years of imprisonment he has seen any number of changes made: he has known winters without boots or bread, and so on the day we meet him he is thoroughly pleased with his furry 'valenki' and thrilled at the turn of events that leaves him with two portions of bread instead of one.  Little boons, like the potato in his evening skilly, are a true pleasure.  Nor does he resent the work he is conscripted to do on an almost daily basis. Although the work is hard and back-breaking, he gives himself up to it and revels in what he can achieve - during our observation he becomes so invested in building the walls of the power station that he works into his lunch break and after the bell for the end of the work day.  He is surging after something, a sense of fulfillment.  It is not joy, but is fierce like joy: it is taking the full extent of his life in his hands, even if that comes to very little.

Shukhov is not the novel's only survivor either, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is populated by individuals who have coping mechanisms.  There is Tyurin, Shukhov's foreman, a man who doesn't even squint as the Siberian wind blows into his eyes and a prisoner simply by virtue of his 'kulak' heritage - his father was a rich peasant with ideas in compatible with the communist regime.  His rigidity, and his manipulation of the camp's power structures, mean that he can maintain a form of meaningful life.  At the other end of the social spectrum is Tsezar, a middle class prisoner who receives regular food parcels and has wheedled privileges, like his fur-lined coat, from the camp guards but who is, nevertheless, willing to work hard.  And Shukhov's opposite is Fetyukov, a weak sniveller who only appears in the narrative to beg, borrow or slink off with other mens' shares.  Finally, there is Alyoshka, an angelically gentle Ukranian Christian whose faith generates kindness and resiliency in equal measure.  What all of these men share is their ability to operate within constraint and under circumstances of extreme repression - they're like weeds growing out of deep snow.

Solzhenitsyn's form effectively mirrors his characters' circumscription.  Focusing not on plot but on circumstance and minutiae, and restricting himself to a defined period and a documentary style (even going so far as to call it what it is) he creates a world of vividness.  The novel has some immensely powerful, lucid moments, many tied up with the pursuit of survival: with the cold, with food or clothing, and with commaraderie.  And by virtue of this spotlight on the minute-to-minute experience, it finds a balance between expressing the full horror of the Gulag and containing it, domesticating it.  A balance between the long story, of a life ruined, and the short story, of (as Shukhov describes it) 'a day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day.'

~~Victoria~~

In which we confess...again

Now it's true that I should be writing something intelligent about One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich right around now or, failing that, at least something faintly amusing and postmodern about Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair.  But this week Esther and I went shopping instead:

No, your eyes do not deceive you: the first ten installments of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series (yum!); ten Gabriel Garcia Marquez novels, including the wonderful, life-changing Love in the Time of Cholera; two Persephone Press books; three Viragos, including the much-recommended Precious Bane by Mary Webb; plus a Toni Morrison, a Rider Haggard, a Mark Dunn, a book about pigs and the Covent Garden Soup recipe book (to go with our new blender!).

There were a number of temptative factors. Firstly, the...*cough*... Book People. I know we shouldn't. But how do you resist ten books for £10? How?!? And secondly, Fossgate Books. I'm not sure how we managed to live in York for 18 months without discovering this absolute Eden of a secondhand shop - ramshackle, yes, with books piled every which place and a stairway determined to pitch you to your certain death, but blissful.  The proprietor knows his small presses and seems to handpick his secondhand fiction, culling off the well-thumbed thrillers and multiple copies of Dan Brown and Maeve Binchy, and cutting straight to the literary chase.  The Leonora Carrington is especially rare, and it isn't often I see Persephone Books secondhand - he mentioned that he always bought them up as soon as he saw them. Good man.  A place to frequent methinks.

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On an entirely different note, I see that Zadie Smith is exhorting us to be better readers and less cynical critics in The Guardian Review, singing us the old tune about writing/reading being a two-way street and about 'failed readings' from hasty critics.  I'm not sure how I feel about this, although I can't help but smile and reminiscence about our interchange about On Beauty back in May 2006 in which I considered the reviewer's duties to an author:

'to engage with the written word thoughtfully at a visceral level, to question its values and its purposes, and then to *write* back.  Sometimes writing back involves sharp opinions and sharp words.  No doubt it involves being critical and, certainly, it always involves being honest.'

I think perhaps her 'tips' have a particular relevance (or non-relevance, depending on how you view them) in the blogging world, where opinions are made, disseminated, galvinised and changed so quickly. Or should I say so hastily?  Perhaps I shall think on this some more over the next few days and post on it particularly later in the week.

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Oh, and before I forget! The lucky recipient of my extra copy of Master and Commander, as decided by the guinea pigs, will be...Margaret.  I will be dropping you a request for an address in the next few days. :-)

~~Victoria and Esther~~

Mutually Assured Deception

I was constantly distracted by the knowledge that this magnificent illusion would have at its heart a secret of infuriating simplicity. The central rule of magic always holds good - what is seen is not what is actually being done.

The Prestige (1995), Christopher Priest's tricksy tale of a pair of feuding stage magicians in Victorian England (recently adapted, of course, into a beautifully-constructed film) is a novel of many layers, and one that is impossible to discuss properly without revealing its secrets. Since I don't wish to spoil the surprise(s) for anyone who hasn't read the book (or seen the film), this (like the book) shall be a post of two halves - I'll signal when I'm heading into Plot Twist Land.

The bulk of the story - beyond a few brief present-day episodes, that frame the action, examine the legacy of the feud and provide for a creepy closing image, but otherwise add little of note - is told through a pair of deeply-unreliable first-person narratives, taken from the writings of our two magicians, Borden and Angier. These are arranged as two consecutive chunks of text, rather than as chronologically parallel accounts. Labourer's son Borden's tale comes first; it is a sober, reflective and rather maudlin memoir, composed after (most of) the events of the novel have taken place, around 1903. Upper-class gent Angier's takes the form of a diary, charting his career from its rebellious adolescent origins to its high point - the runaway success of the central magic trick, his version of Borden's 'The Transported Man' (in which he seems to disappear from one part of the hall, and reappear instantly on the other side) - and beyond. The latter, being of the moment, is much more ebullient, full of excitable mood swings:

10th October 1877

I am in love! Her name is Drusilla MacAvoy.

15th October 1877

Too hasty by far! The MacAvoy woman was not for me. I am planning to kill myself, and if the remainder of these pages are blank anyone who comes across this diary will know I succeeded.

Yet neither is quite what it first appears. Angier, we come to realise, repeatedly tears out the more embarrassing or revealing pages of his diary, continually seeking to reshape his past and his identity to present needs - and to justify his increasingly extreme actions in pursuit of the feud. His phrasings are more often than not carefully ambiguous (witness his euphemistic term "the prestige materials" for the abhorrent side-product of his transportation trick), as though he cannot admit the truth even in his most private records. This fits with his impatiently iconoclastic, corner-cutting approach to his trade - leading him to dismiss tradition, seek to steal the secrets of others, and find shortcuts to wealth and success, such as his fake seances. He has no feel for magic:

My weakness is that I never understand the working of an illusion until it is explained to me. When I see a trick for the first time I am as baffled by it as any other member of the audience. I have a poor magical imagination, and find it difficult to apply known general principles to produce a desired effect. When I see a superb performance I am dazzled by the shown and confounded by the unseen.

For Borden, meanwhile, magic is both an artform, and his whole life; he always seeks to push back boundaries and learn new wonders, all the while viewing matters like Angier's seance with contempt. He weaves magical theory into the structure of his account in order to call into question the veracity of everything he says. He compares the act of his writing to the misdirection required when performing a trick: the false display of empty hands, or box, or hat, just prior to producing the trick's object from apparent thin air. It is a display that the audience knows is false, but one it willingly accepts for the sake of being amazed by the illusion - something Borden calls the "Pact of Acquiescent Sorcery".

I say to you, "After all, what would I have to gain by writing a false account, when it is intended for no-one's eyes but my own, perhaps those of my immediate family, and the members of a posterity I shall never meet?"

What gain indeed?

Because I have shown my hands to be empty you must now expect not only that an illusion will follow, but that you will acquiesce in it.

Already, without once writing a falsehood, I have started the deception that is my life. The lie is contained in these words, even in the very first of them. It is in the fabric of everything that follows, yet nowhere will it be apparent.

Yes, all very meta. In reading any book, we enter into a pact with its author - while knowing that, in a work of prose fiction, everything is constructed and controlled by an external agency, we still, willingly, allow ourselves to be caught up in the trickery (if the work is successful, for whatever value of success we subscribe to). In the suspension of disbelief stakes, we seek - and, hopefully, find - consistency in characterisation, plausibility in world-building, dialogue that rings true for all that it ultimately comes from a single person's imagination. It's all pure sleight-of-hand, but we go into each new reading experience wanting it to work. (Unless we're really, really keen on snark...).

Borden and Angier are each other's audiences, ultimately; in their mutual hatred, they implicitly consent to be so, each needing that mirror image to fuel his own ambition even as he deplores everything it stands for.

The pace is unhurried - indeed, some parts of Angier's section drag rather lifelessly - and the tone is not nearly as mannered as I'd expected (expected for no good reason, I suppose, except that every other book set in the nineteenth century these days seems to pastiche its prose style, too). The feud is slow-burning, unfolding over the course of decades - unlike the rapid-fire, slightly overdramatic process of the film version (in which the conflict is launched in a more striking but also rather more morally black-and-white, and thus less interesting, way). Here, the conflict is also less obviously the spearhead of the story, which in written form can afford to be more expansive in its treatment of character and theme - taking more time, for example, to explore how keeping secrets by trade might impact upon one's personal life (both men juggle a string of affairs alongside their troubled family lives). Finally, while the film telescopes the plot into, essentially, two major revelations, the book works by much more subtle means, wrong-footing us consistently rather than abruptly.

[And here we head into spoiler-ville...]

This wrong-footing is integral to the structure of the book, since the unreliability of the narration goes even deeper than is first apparent. It becomes obvious quite quickly that Borden's narration is the work of two individuals - he and his long-hidden brother - who are so absorbed in playing the same role that they can no longer quite tell themselves apart. Yet we also learn, near the end of the novel, that a third hand has interfered: that none other than Angier was responsible for the eventual publication of Borden's memoir - and that it underwent substantial revision:

For a start Borden will be appalled to discover, as he soon will, that what he sees as his greatest professional secrets have been published without his permission. His chagrin will be the deeper when he realises that I was responsible. He will be further confounded when he works out that somehow I was able to do this from beyond the grave. [...] Finally, should he read the annotated text he will discover the true subtlety of my final revenge.

In short, I have improved his text by making it less obscure, by expanding on many of the interesting general topics which he merely adumbrate, by illustrating his absorbing theory of acquiescence with numerous examples, by describing the methods of many of the great illusionists.

This throws everything we thought we knew into confusion (and probably also explains why - as Abigail Nussbaum recently complained - Borden's writing seemed oddly polished and verbose for a man of his education and class). To what extent is Borden's account really Borden's at all? Are remarks like the following really his, or more of Angier's revenge?

Jealousy made my rage worse. IN A FLASH, Angier's catchpenny title for his version of, his damnable improvement on, THE NEW TRANSPORTED MAN, was unmistakably a major illusion, one which introduced a new standard into our often derided and usually misunderstood performing art. For this I had to admire him, no matter what my other feelings about him might be.

The misdirection also takes place on the level of thematics. We are led to look for secrets both by Borden's cryptic statements, quoted above, and by what we know to be the subject matter (stage magic) - so much so that we might easily, like Angier, overlook the obvious (that Borden has a double, his brother, that he signals his technique right from the start in his anecdote about Ching Ling Foo and the glass bowl) in our eagerness to tease out the complex. At the same time, the constant talk of the simplicity and triviality of a magician's secrets is itself a feint, concealing (in Borden's case) the long years of cruel sacrifice and self-discipline that lie behind the trick. The real revelation is not that there are two 'Borden's, or that the solution to the trick is simple - it is that Borden's commitment to his art runs so deeply. This is something Angier realises only late on:

This is not because the premise itself is implausible - after all, my man Cutter had worked it out for himself - but because of the endless ramifications of living with the deception. What about everyday life?

If Borden is not one man but two, and one of the men is always in hiding so that the other might seem to be the 'only' Alfred Borden, where and how is the hiding going on? What happens in the life of the hidden man while he is hiding? How does he make contact with his brother?

[...] what of Borden's wife? And what of his children?

Angier himself, the flashy showman, out for fame, money and the quickest possible route to the top, can barely conceive of such clarity of purpose. In his editing of Borden's account, he admits, he has deliberately made Borden's secret sound even more mysterious - all the while playing up its supposed triviality (this quotation comes from Borden's section, but seems from tone and content to be the sort of thing Angier would have added):

Some years ago, a magician (I believe it was Mr David Devant) was reported as saying: "Magicians protect their secrets not because the secrets are large and important, but because they are so small and trivial. The wonderful effects created on stage are often the result of a secret so absurd that the magician would be embarrassed to admit that that was how it was done."

Angier's own secret - that his transportation is done by creating copies of himself - is even more horrible. Yet it is, characteristically, one that was enabled for him by another's invention, one that is achieved and over very quickly each time, and one which his assistant can help him with when it comes to the grislier aspects ("with a minimum of fuss"). (I assume these copies are dead, or very short-lived, unlike in the film, although I don't think this is ever clear and may be another example of Angier's willingness to leave out the distasteful parts of his story).

Angier himself, meanwhile, gives the impression of losing a grip on his identity, increasingly referring to himself in the third person, and talking of his "transmission" as "a rebirth, a renewal of self". This sense of a double life created through fidelity to secrecy, to such life-shaping deception, is seen repeatedly through the novel: Borden and his hidden brother, Angier and his "prestige materials", Angier and the abandoned lifestyle that comes with his real name - plus, Angier and his limelight-stealing drunken actor double (in an earlier version of the trick), the trend of both men dressing up to infiltrate and sabotage each other's acts, and assistant Olive/Olivia's switching of sides for various reasons. Borden even has twin children. Angier's use of Borden's identity - in the memoir - as a shell to be animated by his own musings on magic is but another example, and perhaps its most striking.

So, then: a slow novel that was expertly pared-down for the cinema, but also an extremely clever one that definitely rewards reflection - even if said reflection almost leads me to wonder whether the whole thing perhaps only exists in Angier's head (which, I suppose, is where the framing story comes in - it at least confirms that Borden really existed...).

Every word I have written here is true, and each one describes the reality of my life. My hands are empty, and I fix you with an honest look. This is how I have lived, and yet it reveals nothing.

I will go alone to the end.

(So says Borden. Or maybe Angier. Argh!)

~~Nic

Doves, Entangled in a Snare

'...Shrewd Odysseus!...You are a fortunate man to have won a wife of such pre-eminent virtue! How faithful was your flawless Penelope, Icarius' daughter! How loyally she kept the memory of the husband of her youth! The glory of her virtue will not fade with the years, but the deathless gods thekselves will make a beautiful song for mortal ears in honour of the constant Penelope.'

- The Odyssey, Book 24 (191-194)

...he took a cable which had seen service on a blue-bowed ship, made one end fast to a high column in the portico, and threw the other over the round-house, high up, so that their feet would not touch the ground.  As when long-winged thrushes or doves get entangled in a snare...so the women's heads were held fast in a row, with nooses round their necks, to bring them to the most pitiable end. For a little while their feet twitched, but not for very long.

- The Odyssey, Book 22 (470-473)

Such are the epigraphs to Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad, the second book in my From the Stacks Challenge and the third installment in Canongate's Myth Series.  Each determinedly signposts  one of the book's narrative strands: the first, with some irony, points toward Atwood's Penelope, her plain-spoken first-person 'heroine', and the second, with no hint of irony at all, toward her poetic Chorus, the twelve hanged maids.  This sinister snippet of the Odyssey's plot (and it really is hardly more than a snippet) becomes the keynote of Atwood's retelling of Homer's classic narrative and is, as the author herself hints in her short introduction, its raison d'etre.  The book's title, and its narrative structure, misdirect us to assume that The Penelopiad is about Penelope, Ulysse's long-suffering wife, when really its focus (and power) is elsewhere and is always sliding sideways.  I could fancy this up and say that it is a function of the narrative's play with liminality, and that it vividly highlights women's roles - economic, social and personal - in the margins of story and history. But what I really mean is this: The Penelopiad is about the twelve hanged maids.

[Note: The original hardback cover is beautifully representative of this too. On the front is the single female, Penelope, hogging the limelight, but on the back, more haunting and twice as evocative, are the hanged maids.  While reading I was repeatedly drawn back to them; in this case, the back is the front.]

We meet Penelope as she watches the modern world from the vantage of extreme hindsight.  She assures us of this in the first line - 'Now that I'm dead I know everything' - with a confidence that suggests she is both omniscient and all-understanding.  She goes on to question the received versions of the story (legend? myth?) of which she is part, lamenting that all she became after her trouble with Odysseus - 'tricky and a liar' - was an edifying legend: 'A stick to beat other women with. Why couldn't they be as considerate, as trustworthy, as all-suffering as I had been?'  Now though she means to do a little story-telling of her own; now she means to set us straight.  She's a revisionist.

She begins with tales about her childhood - about her feckless Naiad of a mother, and her infanticidal father; about her breasty cousin Helen and about the race Odysseus ran to win her hand when she was fifteen years old. (He cheated, apparently.) And throughout she has that matter-of-fact Atwood tone to her - a hybridisation of self-deprecation and brutal self-honesty:

'As for me... well, people told me I was beautiful, they had to tell me that because I was a princess, and shortly after that a queen, but the truth was that although I was not deformed or ugly, I was nothing special to look at.  I was smart though... That seems to be what I was known for: being smart.  that, and my weaving, and my devotion to my husband, and my discretion... would you want to conjure up a plain but smart wife who'd been good at weaving and had never transgressed, instead of a women who'd driven hundreds of men mad with lust and had caused a great city to up in flames?

Neither would I.'

She's entertaining; a witty word-smith not unlike her creatrix.  She likes to play with tonal associations, and enjoys modifying her discourse for the audience she conceives for it:

'And so I was handed over to Odysseus, like a package of meat. A package of meat in a wrapping of gold, mind you.  A sort of gilded blood pudding.

But perhaps that is too crude a simile for you. Let me add that meat was highly valued among us - the aristocracy ate lots of it, meat, meat, meat, and all they ever did was roast it: ours was not an age of haute cuisine.'

We see that she has her weaknesses, of course, her jealousy over Helen being the most clear and obvious - they exchange biting words in the underworld - but she encourages us to glide over her more insidious tendencies.  Alternatively, she actively refigures them - her apathy becomes cunning inactivity, her indecisiveness is transformed into an angelic kind of patience.

Which makes me certain that the key to grasping The Penelopiad (specifically as a 'retelling') is realising that Penelope herself is as 'tricky' as her husband and that, if she is not exactly a liar, then she is at least a raving apologist.  She wrong-foots us with that confidence of hers and with her generous breadth of voice. She acts like she is speaking the language of truth, when really she is telling us a story: another myth, a pack of lies. Worse still, it is her personal myth.  We're always inside her comfort zone.

The Penelopiad is not all Penelope though.  It is punctured by 10 Choral interludes, all of them acting as deflatory counterpoints to the main narrative and sung/chanted/recited/acted by the twelve maids, those infinitely flexible servant girls who Odysseus condemned to death on a rope.   They're incredibly insistent, and haunting, and from their first appearance onwards their thematic centrality is clear.  Immediately after Penelope has promised us 'a thread of my own', they break in with A Rope-Jumping Tune, a slightly thicker thread of their own:

we are the maids

the ones you killed

the ones you failed

we danced in air

our bare feet twitched

it was not fair

The reader is reminded of the ending when they've hardly begun, reminded that no telling is virgin ground.  Eternally marginalised by the official version of events, the girls are determined to be noticed, using all kinds of voices, even rattling off Penelope's own verbal freefall in Kiddie Mourn, A Lament by the Maids:

'We too were children.  We too were born to the wrong parents.  These parents were not not gods, there were not demi-gods, they were not nymphs or Naiads... We were told we were dirty.  We were dirty.  Dirt was our concern, dirt was our business, dirt was our speciality, dirt was our fault. We were the dirty girls.'

Their sinister inteludes become the real story, more visceral and more pointed than Penelope's new myth about herself.  They become the revelation, the keynote, clearly demonstrating that for all her bravado and gumption, Penelope's expose is just another cover-up. She is, in some ways, as passive, patient and culpable in their deaths as she ever was:

'What could I do? Lamentation wouldn't bring my lovely girls back to life.  I bit my tongue... Dead is dead, I told myself.  I'll say prayer and perform sacrifices for their souls. But I'll have to do it in secret, or Odysseus will suspect me as well.'

Not wholly culpable of course, and the maid's Chorus makes that clear too - they direct their baleful gazes at Telemachus, Penelope's son and the man who strings up the rope, and at Odysseus too, not to mention at classical Greek culture (in a wicked satire of an anthropological article) and at narrative form itself.  They use a myriad of different strategies, from poetry to soap opera, to sneak under the narrative radar and to un-marginalise themselves. Of course, you wouldn't expect any less of Atwood: she always takes her novels beyond the obvious discourse.  The Penelopiad might look like your run-of-the-mill feminist reinterpretation of a patriarchal cycle but it is more, so much more than that. 

The Myth series is supposed to be about re-shaping 'timeless and universal stories', a conceptual mission that I have some problems with (for a start, if they're so timeless and universal in the first place, why doe we need to retell them for the 21st century?)  In my view 'reshaping' and 'retelling' can all too easily devolve into crude analogy, or become a matter of stylistic 'redressing' (or, worse, window-dressing).  Without the twelve maids this is what The Penelopiad would tend towards - a parallel yarn, an easy sell, a bit of a leech.  What I mean is: Penelope is the big name on the ticket but the maids are what you should go and see.

~~Victoria~~

Possession

She is the only woman who has allowed him to watch her as intently, as much and as long, as he wants, and the reason for this comes to him one night. She is self-possessed. There is nothing he can take from her by looking.

At the thought, he gets up from the bed and goes to the window, rests his forehead on its cold pane. She possesses herself. How much more this makes him want her!

It's grim up North. Nowhere more so - to judge by Kathryn Harrison's The Seal Wife (2002) - than early twentieth-century Alaska. Particularly so for a repressed, introverted young representative of the Weather Bureau, named Bigelow, who is given a small plot of land near Anchorage and tasked with observing and reporting on the climate. It's an unattractive assignment, and the setting - for all the rather dramatic beauty of its surroundings, which Bigelow intermittently appreciates - is unforgivingly harsh, on both a physical and an emotional level, a constant endurance test for its (mostly male) population of transient workers. Even the name expresses its isolation and transitoriness:

Bigelow disembarked in Anchorage, and by the time he'd thought to turn himself around and look back toward the ship that had brought him, it was gone. Anchorage - a place for ships to pause, to drop anchor for only as long as it might take to disgorge freight and passengers.

Bigelow's initial impression, or fear - that "he's arrived in a land that will insist on its strangeness" - is borne out in the tale that follows, an almost hallucinatory study of loneliness and the various ways a man can fail to understand. Driven to distraction by isolation and sexual frustration (Anchorage, we are told, boasts only "a handful of women among thousands of men", with depressingly inevitable results), Bigelow is drawn to an Aleut woman living in the vicinity of Anchorage. After stalking her for a while, he embarks upon a sort-of relationship with her (by which I mean he goes to her cabin every so often and has perfunctory sex with her; in return, he brings her food).

They have no shared language; Bigelow speaks for speaking's sake, but she ignores him so profoundly that he assumes she is mute. He cannot comprehend her silence, or her lack of any discernible expression (or the "private" nature of the pleasure she derives from sex, to which his presence seems to be largely incidental); she neithers protests nor precisely encourages, and so lies beyond his range of experience. Predictably, he becomes obsessed with "understanding" her - i.e., with provoking a understandable response, an acknowledgement that she might need him as he needs her, and thus a sense of ownership:

She opens for him, yes, but only her legs, and all the rest that she does - preparing food, mending furs, even waxing his boots - strikes him as an elaborate decoy, a way of distracting him from her deeper self, her deepest self, all that he wants most to penetrate.

She.

Inside her is a name, a word he wants to know. To possess.

He longs to be noticed by her, to make his mark in some clear, obvious way. There is a parallel, of course, with his official purpose in Alaska, as there is with that of the all the non-indigenous residents of the area (mapping, mining, building railways, educating): to record, to conquer, to render wilderness manageable and comprehensible. To find, or impose, "A line that exists independent of inscription: a track through the wilderness, a boundary drawn between one reading and another" - an objective, universal truth. But, like the Aleut woman, the landscape is aloof, and resilient in the face of attempted exploitation:

Bigelow's breath clouds before his face, hanging still in the wordless winter air. He tries to picture himself in the landscape before him. He turns, making a full circle, trying to impose an image of himself on what he sees, but he can't. The scale is wrong, or the sky, the way its presses down on the land, and its emptiness, birds as evident in their absence as when they crowded out the sun. Can a man exist here? Can Bigelow?

Both in the title, and in an episode involving a captured seal - which is described in very similar terms (bright black eyes, curious lack of resistance) to the Aleut woman - there is a hint that there might be something else at work, that she might be a seal wife, or selkie (who appear in various forms in legends from north-western Europe), but this goes largely unpursued, and certainly passes Bigelow by.

Bigelow thinks of the Aleut woman only in relation to himself and his own desires, never as an autonomous individual, and so when she abruptly disappears he has no conception of where she might have gone - or why. It takes him a substantial portion of the book to even begin to imagine things from her perspective:

[M]aybe she was just tired of Anchorage, of its mud, its blocks of ugly houses, the clatter of hammers hitting ties, the seemingly inexhaustible, even rising, tide of railroad workers and prospectors, men who watched as she walked down the street. Men who, deprived of woman, reverted to animals, hands down their trouser fronts, eyes narrow, appraising.

Even here, he "sees her as they saw her" - he sees the scene through the eyes of the appraising men, not hers. Similarly, a subplot involving a woman named Miriam - who has such a terrible stammer that her only capacity for speech is to sing the words of others - is redolent with Bigelow's selfishness, and his romanticisation of his dependent lust.

The prose is as stark as the landscape, sparsely matter-of-fact about its grimy human world. It blossoms, occasionally, in descriptions of Bigelow's (non-sexual) interior life - his sense of wonder (and intellectual joy) at the displays on offer from the weather, especially of the transitory variety:

Bigelow records ephemera: clouds; a fall of rain or of snow; hailstones that, after their furious clatter, melt silently into the ground. Like recounting a sigh.

In subject matter and stripped-down style, The Seal Wife reminded me a lot of Alessandro Baricco's Silk - but I found it much less beguiling than the latter (but then, Silk was very much an exception to my general impatience with impressionistic books in which nothing much happens). Perhaps this was because I found Bigelow thoroughly unlikeable, perhaps because it was longer than it really needed to be - or perhaps just because it doesn't shy away from the grubbier side of what languid, unspoken longing is really all about...

~~Nic

A Very Nautical Christmas,

(Or, A Post Part-Written on Boxing Day 2006)

I’ve just finished reading a wonderful book, of the kind that turns you, temporarily at least, into an anti-social biblio-mole. [The ‘bibliomole’ is able to go for days at a time with only minimal social company and is content with the occasional meal, delivered book-side, which can be eaten blind and without the complicated operation of utensils. (Forks are just about possible, so long as the food isn’t drippy; knives and spoons require too much hand-eye co-ordination.)]

…Arguably it was not the best kind of book to be reading at Christmas time, when family is clamouring around and demanding your already much-divided attention (‘look at this Barbie! It speaks Spanish!’; ‘mince pie?’; ‘The Queen’s Speech is on’ etc, etc.), but, then again, perhaps it was the perfect anecdote and escape to all that chaos.

Either way, the novel in question was Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian and you should go out and find a copy right now (or scroll to the end of this post!).  I tell you this for your own good.  (Hobgoblin thinks so too.)

Originally published in 1970, it is the first in O’Brian’s very famous and much lauded series of naval adventures centred on the irrepressible Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend, naval surgeon Dr. Stephen Maturin.  It begins in April 1800, in Port Mahon in Minorca, just as Aubrey -, garrulous, somewhat plump and a Tory – meets and befriends Stephen Maturin - half-Irish, ‘cadaverous’ and a natural philosopher - and is given his first command as Captain of the sloop Sophie.  Further awarded the opportunity of a ‘cruise’ - a prize-hunting mission along the coast of Spain likely to enrich him and his crew immeasurably - Aubrey offers Maturin a place on board the Sophie as ship’s surgeon, and soon embarks on a series of breathtaking engagements with the enemy (apparently based on real clashes between Lord Cochrane and the French and Spanish in his sloop the HMS Speedy).  These form the main body of the novel, which is wickedly episodic (oftentimes disconcertingly so), until circumstance finds Jack and Stephen made prisoners on the Rock of Gibraltor just before the climactic Battle of Algeciras in the autumn of 1801.   

Admittedly, there is a lot of jargon to this naval jaunt – lots of sails being hoisted, lots of tacking, lots of land to the leeward and all that – and a good deal of talk about different kinds of boats too – frigates, sloops, xuebecs, brigs and ships-of-the-line.  Which is confusing at first (and, if you’re like me, will always be so), but quickly becomes engaging, if only because O’Brian is so obviously an author in love with his material. Certainly, he knows his business, but more than that he writes about the sea, and the ships that plough it, with a touching poetry:

‘ – a vessel ready for inspection, holding her breath in case any of her beautifully trim rigging with its geometrically perfect fakes and perpendicular falls should be disturbed. She bore as much resemblance to her ordinary self as the rigid bosun, sweating in a uniform coat that must have been shaped with an adse, did to the same man in his shirt sleeves, puddening the topsail yard in a heavy swell; yet there was an essential relationship and the snowy sweep of the deck, the painful brilliance of the two brass quarter-deck four-pounders, the precision of the cylinders in the cable-tier and the parade ground neatness of the galley’s pots and tubs all had meaning.  Jack had whited too many sepulchres to be deceived…’

How to resist this? Even if you have no clue what a ‘fake’ is, or which sail is the ‘topsail’, or which deck the ‘quarter-deck’, there is something compelling about it. (The idea of a sail ‘puddening’ particularly satisfies me…) O’Brian’s writing is ever active without being rough, detailed without being superfluous, gentile but never dull. All historical fiction should be this way: immersive, vivid, intimate, and yet also somehow alien and exotic, emphasising both our closeness and our distance from what is past.

The thing that brings us in close in O’Brian’s case is characterisation, and particularly the fascinating, (dare I say charming?) friendship that springs up between his violently different principle actors. When Aubrey and Maturin first meet at a music recital, Jack is all uniform, flesh and vigour, pounding his fist up and down on his knee to the beat, while Stephen is ‘a small, dark, white-faced creature in a rusty black coat – a civilian…wearing a wig, a grizzled wig, apparently made out of wire, and quite devoid of powder’. Jack’s first impulse is to hit his cadaverous neighbour with a chair, while Stephen regards the Captain with a haughty disdain. Each intuits a man wholly and disagreeably unlike himself. Until, that is, the next day, when, meeting by chance in the street, they realise their mutual passion for music – Jack for the violin, Stephen for the cello – and a strange compatibility. 

Indeed, it is their dichotomy that draws them together – they are perfect antidotes for each other. Sounding boards. Or ‘better angels’. Or whatever you like.  Stephen, melancholic and amused mostly via irony, is much in need of Jack’s bumptiousness and less-than-sharp wit, while Jack’s chunky heroics would spell disaster if not mediated by Stephen’s astute caution.  Their exchanges, which are frequent, are clear highlights of the novel.  Like this one, for example, one of the many occasions on which Stephen’s passion for all things natural overcomes his natural reserve:

            ‘Did you see that hoopoe?’ cried the man in the black coat. [Stephen.]

            ‘What is a hoopoe?’ cried Jack, staring about.

‘A bird. That cinnamon-coloured bird with barred wings. Upupa epops. There! There, over the roof! There! There!’

‘Where? Where? How does it bear?’

‘It has gone now. I had been hoping to see a hoopoe ever since I arrived. In the middle of the town! Happy Mahon, to have such denizens. But I beg your pardon. You were speaking of wetting swab.’

‘Oh, yes. It is a cant expression we have in the Navy.  The swab is this’ – patting his epaulette – ‘and when we first we ship it, we wet it: that is to say, we a drink a bottle or two of wine…’

‘Indeed?’ said Maturin with a civil inclination of his head.

‘…I am so happy that you saw your epop.’

Or this one, after Jack has been forced to take a creditor’s son as a midshipman on a run to (our very own) Alexandria:

‘It might be just as well if everybody were impotent,’ said Jack sombrely. ‘It would save a world of trouble.’

‘And having seen the parents I am impatient to see this youth, the fruit of their strangely unattractive loins: will he be a wretched mammothrept? A little corporal? Or will the resiliency of childhood…?’

‘He will be the usual damned little nuisance, I dare say; but at least we shall know whether there is anything to be made of him by the time we are back from Alexandria.  We are not saddled with him for the rest of the commission.’

‘Did you say Alexandria?’

‘Yes.’

‘In Lower Egypt?’

‘Yes. Did I not tell you? We are to run an errand to Sir Sydney Smith’s squadron before our next cruise. He is watching the French, you know.’

‘Alexandria,’ said Stephen, stopping in the middle of the quay, ‘O joy, I wonder you did not cry out with delight the moment you saw me. What an indulgent admiral – pater classis – O how I value that worthy man!’

‘Why, ‘tis no more than a straight run up and down the Mediterranean, about six hundred leagues each way, with precious little chance of seeing a prize either coming or going.’

‘I did not think you could have been such an earthling,’ cried Stephen. ‘For shame. Alexandria is classic ground!’

‘So it is,’ said Jack, his good nature and pleasure in life flooding back at the sight of Stephen’s delight…

Of course, Stephen’s passion for plants and birds and a hundred other things, is routinely thwarted by Jack’s sheer bloody-mindedness, or by his dedication to the ‘Service’, and the divergence of their final aims and ambitions seems set to become more and more of a wedge between them.  But, for now at least, they go together: a strange companionship, but true.  I honestly can't wait to read on - I have Post-Captain at the ready.

(And did I mention that I love the film with Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany? I actually think it does a creditable job of capturing the spirit of O'Brian's novels, or the first one at least.)

And finally, because I love you all, and because it was recently BAFAB week, I want to give away a copy of Master and Commander, free. The only stipulation being that, should you receive and read it, you’ll blog about it.  So if you would like to go into the draw for it, note below. (NB: You should!)

~~Victoria~~

The Glass Ceiling; or, A Love That Dared To Speak Its Name?

I must tell you I am not as you left me [...] I long to be with you again and tis impossible for you to ever believe how much I love you except you saw my heart.

[--the future Queen Anne, writing to Sarah in the mid-1680s]

Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (1660-1744), was a formidable woman living in turbulent time. She was shrewd, ambitious, hot-tempered, and strong-willed, a royal favourite and hugely-influential political player during a period of multiple upheavals: the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (which, though neither revolutionary nor especially glorious, ousted the Catholic James II from the throne), the 1707 Act of Union between England and (a subjugated) Scotland, the end of the Stuart dynasty in 1714, no less ten general elections between 1694 and 1714, and the on-going development of faction-ridden Parliamentary politics into the defining feature of British government. All this - and the myriad personalities and interests and overseas wars that fed into it - forms the backdrop to Ophelia Field's lengthy and overtly sympathetic biography of Sarah, The Favourite.

Field's major interest, as her title indicates, is Sarah's role at Court and her relationship with Queen Anne (1665-1714). Their intense friendship - one in a series, for Sarah and more especially for Anne - dated back to well before Anne's accession to the throne. Her attendance upon Anne, and Anne's extremely vocal regard for and dependence upon her, gave Sarah a position of considerable influence. She put this to use for her husband, John, and his allies - to the extent that Marlborough himself was frequently the one left to run the household and raise the children while Sarah resided with Anne - winning stipends and governmental posts for them. Together, they gathered a fortune, helped topple a king, and bolstered Anne's position against her sister Mary. Sarah also worked in furtherance of her own ambition and political sympathies - she was a Whig by inclination and (self-)education, albeit not to that extent of her close friend Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and aided the Whig cause with the Queen when she could. She was a conduit to Anne, through whom all requests for favour were channelled (or not); Anne's husband George, by contrast, was cultivated by no-one.

Sarah was neither the first nor the last of Anne's favourites (all of whom, unlike Elizabeth I's, were female), albeit probably the most significant one. Field devotes a substantial portion of the book to a discussion of the nature of Anne and Sarah's relationship. Most of Sarah's letters to Anne were destroyed (by the latter), but Anne's side of the correspondance survives, in which - as the extract I've quoted at the top of the post demonstrates - Anne laid out her affection and devotion in no uncertain terms. This was not unusual, either for Anne or for the time. Friendship between women during this period was often expressed in language that to us is surprisingly eroticised, but to contemporaries was largely conventional and unremarkable. Anne's sister Mary addressed her close friend Frances Apsley as her "husband", and wrote to her declarations such as,

What can I say more to perswade you that I love you with more zeal then any lover can I love you with a love that ner was known by man [...] to kis the ground when once you go to be your dog in a string your fish in a net your bird in a cage...

One of the strengths of Field's biography, it seems to me, lies in her consideration of the much broader (and bolder) meaning of friendship during this period. Devotion to and love for truly close friends could be as strong and lasting - or even more so - than those within marriage; for women in particular, same-sex friendship might mean the only type of social relation in which they were not inescapably inferior and subordinate. This latter factor is reflected in the nicknames that Anne and Sarah adopted in their later correspondance, addressing each other as Mrs Morley and Mrs Freeman - that is, as (low-born) social equals.

And the lines, it seems, did blur. The extent to which any of these relationships were also expressed physically is, of course, impossible to tell from the historical record. Male homosexuality was a crime and thus can be traced through legal cases; not so for women. Furthermore, while lesbian relationships were certainly not unheard of (and could be another weapon in the slanderer's arsenal), they were viewed as isolated acts, rather than set-in-stone definitions of identity.

All caveats aside, Anne's affections certainly seem to have tended towards the distaff side. Sarah's predecessor as Anne's Lady of the Bedchamber was one Lady Cornwallis, to whom Anne penned letters of such passion that they were censored by her father's orders (surely suggesting that they were perceived to go beyond conventional language and the "schoolgirl crushes" dismissed by many biographers). Sarah herself, in a rare surviving letter to Anne of July 1708, is quite direct in her characterisation of the Queen's preferences:

I remember you said [...] of all things in this world, you valued most your reputation, which I confess surprised me very much, that your Majesty should so soon  mention that word after having discovered so great a passion for such a woman. For sure there can be no great reputation in a thing so strange & unaccountable, to say no more of it, nor can I think that having no inclination for any but of one's own sex is enough to maintain such a character as I wish may still be yours.

This is part reproach - prompted by jealousy (and snobbishness) over Anne's increasing favour to the upstart, low-born Abigail Masham - and part veiled threat in an attempt to preserve her position (Sarah would later take this further, patronising a number of anonymous pamphlets decrying Anne and Abigail's closeness). The other major source we have for Sarah's views on all this come from her published memoirs (and their various drafts). In the 1715 version, narrated to her co-author in third person, for better distance and objectivity, we get the following commentary:

This favour quickly became a passion; and a passion which possessed the heart of the Princess too much to be hid. They were shut up together for many hours daily. Every moment of absence was considered a sort of tedious, lifeless state. To see the Duchess was a constant joy; and to part with her for ever so short a time, a constant uneasiness, as the Princess' own frequent expressions were. This worked even to the jealousy of a lover. She used to say she desired to possess her wholly. [emphasis in original]

The fact that the bulk of the heat-of-the-moment material comes from Anne's direction, coupled with Sarah's undoubted ambition, has led many writers to conclude that the relationship was at best one-sided, at worst unrequited, encouraged by Sarah only for political ends. It is impossible to be sure; however, Sarah seems to have been a largely unromantic person in her own writings (her letters to John, with whom she is known to have had a very close relationship, are markedly pragmatic and undemonstrative in comparison to his, even in the days of their courtship), so her apparent coldness may not be all it seems. (Field is largely convinced, describing the women's relationship as a "fraught romance", although acknowledging that Anne was likely the more smitten).

Sarah's position, however she maintained it, was not popular; political ambition was held to be a masculine quality, political power an exclusively male preserve, and Sarah was pilloried for daring to so aspire. The advent of a free press after the Restoration of 1660 allowed for an avalanche of popular pamphlets and newspaper pieces that savaged her reputation from every angle, making her, in Field's words, "probably the most continuously libelled Englishwoman of her lifetime". Her involvement in the elections of November 1705 - in aid of her family and allies - earned her comparisons with that other most-hated (and even more nepotistic) favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham (whose overweening influence, coupled with truly spectacular military inexpertise, had finally seen him assassinated during the reign of Anne's grandfather, Charles I; incidentally, Buckingham is widely believed to have been James I's lover). Upon Sarah's fall from the Queen's favour in 1711, Viscount Bolingbroke wrote to the Examiner celebrating Britain's liberation from,

the Caprice of an Insolent Woman. Unhappy Nation, which expecting to be Governed by the Best, fell under the Tyranny of the Worst of her Sex! But now, Thanks be to God, that Fury, who broke Loose to execute the Vengeance of Heaven on a Sinful People is restrained

This sentiment is something of which she was all too aware, and was careful to downplay in her memoirs, disclaiming responsibility for influencing the decisions of her 'betters'. For all her clear and widely-acknowledged influence - and the respect of men such as her husband and more particularly of Godolphin, who discussed politics with Sarah as if she were a fellow government minister - Sarah met a glass ceiling when she went after more overt political power. Anne, by far the weaker and lazier of the pair, met similar resistance (and caved much more readily), although under Sarah's guidance she did make an effort to present herself as more suitably masculine (a queen could not afford to be too feminine, for 'feminine' meant submissive - not a desirable quality in a monarch, as Mary I's subservience to her Spanish husband had proven the previous century). Anne's authority was steadily scaled back by her ministers - and Sarah, as her influence waned and she eventually fell from favour, found a favourite's role in government could be very fleeting.

Sarah did not give up politicking, but in her post-favourite life she turned her attention increasingly to clever and prudent investment (through which she made more than enough money to constitute a private, independent income, along with the settlement she received upon John's death in 1722), the building and embellishment of the new Marlborough estate of Blenheim Palace, and the management of her public image and legacy through memoirs and the sponsoring of satires. The memoirs, much-revised - in her 1715 version, Sarah crossed out all her co-author's sycophantic references to her beauty and indiscreet mentions of her accomplishments, leaving behind only praise of her "spirit" - were finally published later in Sarah's life. They received a positive review, in 1742, from none other than Samuel Johnson, who recognised Sarah's purpose in writing and publishing (itself still seen as a rather immodest activity for a woman):

The parent of all memoirs is the ambition of being distinguished from the herd of mankind.

She also, as Fields puts it, "ran her family like a miniature Court", marshalling her offspring and in-laws like some latter-day Catherine de' Medici, to create a web of political and social connections. She had poor relations with most of her children, to the extent of almost complete estrangement after John's death. She had never had much time for her daughters, much preferring her husband's company or that of her closest friends, and the cold legacy of this early neglect was exacerbated by her hard-headed approach to their marriages, which were conducted for the Marlboroughs' political gain to the exclusion of sentiment. Not uncommon, of course; but Sarah would countenance no escape for her deeply unhappy daughters, nor even for her granddaughter, Anne, whose husband was abusive.

Field goes to some length to present a sympathetic portrait of Sarah, and to some extent she succeeds; certainly, the biography is a useful corrective to the centuries of bad press Sarah has received for, quite simply, failing to measure up to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century images of womanhood. Still, other modern works make clear how much of an ogre Sarah could be to her family, threatening with disinheritance any who did not obey her; she, too, had her favourites, while those who earned her antipathy were rarely able to work their way back into her good graces. The prose mostly flows well, but the detail can be dense and the profusion of people with shared first names (there are a multitude of Annes, Marys, and so on) are not always differentiated as clearly as they might be. Finally, as is always a risk in biography, Field's closeness to her subject sometimes leads her into editorialising and assumptions regarding Sarah's feelings that can hardly be borne out by sources, like (emphasis mine):

During the ceremony Sarah may well have pondered Anne's Tory proclivities and her own position at Court

or

The question now was not whether Sarah had to leave her posts, but how. [...] There must also have been unadmitted pain that Marlborough was unwilling to resign on her behalf.

Yet there is much to admire and enjoy about this largely unsentimental account of a decidedly unsentimental woman, one who gained power in a man's world and who was systematically scorned for it. Or, in the words of Mary Delariviere Manley (normally hostile to Sarah), from The Adventures of Rivella (1714):

If she had been a Man, she had been without Fault.

~~Nic

(who just about restrained herself from launching into a tirade about Charles I during the writing of this piece. be thankful!)

Book Pile, The - 2007

A happy 2007 to everyone from the denizens of Eve's Alexandria! We hope your holiday season was all things wonderful, and that your book shelves are heaving under the weight of new acquisitions, gifted and bought.  Ours certainly are. Witness the prodigious bookpile:

Having gathered in York for the New Year, we've spent a considerable amount of our time in and out of bookshops around town and this is our collective haul, plus Christmas presents.  Beautiful, yes?  In fact, I think it may be our biggest pile, ever...although we did have bibliolicious help from Niall and Alex, honorary Alexandrians for at least the weekend.

And, if you're interested, some close-ups:

 

~~Victoria, Nic, Esther, Emma, Niall and Alex~~