Eve's Alexandria

Secrets From Which the Privileged Are Barred

She will never again help me; she will never again react to the real or imagined circumstances of her life with the disgust, the shudders, that made me want to weave its rhythms and images together in a joint collaboration, active and shared, the convulsive game of two shipwrecked women who do not want to abandon the hope of being saved on a barrel. She has merged once more into the distant light of three centuries ago, a light which shines full into my face.

Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1651) was, by any standard, a remarkable woman. An artist by profession in an age when successful women painters were vanishingly rare - barred as they were from the halls of art academies, and dismissed or shunned as little more than scandalous curiosities - she battled through prejudice, social stigma and violence to make her living and her name.

Artemisia (1947) represents a remarkable, powerful attempt by Anna Banti (pen-name of Italian novelist, art critic and translator Lucia Lopresti, 1895-1985) to engage with Gentileschi as artist, woman, daughter, and emblem. (I read the 2004 edition, translated by Shirley D'Ardia Caracciolo, with an introduction by Susan Sontag.)

Like its subject, the novel survived a torturous history to reach the form in which we have it today. The original, complete draft of it was destroyed in August 1944, "due to events of war which were unfortunately in no way exceptional" - that is, when the  Nazi force occupying Florence used mines to demolish most of the city's bridges and surrounding buildings. Banti was devastated, but could not let Artemisia's story lie. She began to write it again, she says in her brief foreword,

To justify the heartbroken obstinacy with which my memory never tired, during subsequent years, of remaining true to a character of whom it was perhaps too fond.

The second version is anything but a standard historical novel; it is threaded through with Banti's burning desire, made more urgent by the setback, to do justice to wronged but tenacious Artemisia ("One of the first women," she notes in the foreword, "to uphold, in her speech and in her work, the right to do congenial work and the equality of spirit between the sexes"). Or, as it is expressed in the opening pages of the novel, which describe Banti picking her way, dazed, through the ruins of Florence:

Under the rubble of my house I have lost Artemisia, my companion from three centuries ago who lay breathing gently on the hundred pages I had written. At the same time as I recognise her voice, hordes of swirling images pour out from hidden wounds in my mind.

Throughout, the author's sense of loss and dislocation mingle with the character's sadnesses. The result is a curious, but very rich and beautiful, amalgam of historical novel, biography and meditation, in which Banti imagines holding conversations with Artemisia, and the evocation of her character's emotions are amplified by her own. It reads as an attempt, partly, to recall the lost words, and partly to recover the lost creation, who has taken on such a life of her own as to become a companion in difficult times. They are co-conspirators, sharing pain and triumph alike, or co-dependants even; there is a clear sense that Banti needs troubled Artemisia as much as she imagines the reverse to be the case; she talks of "keeping her company", but also of "dragging Artemisia on a walk through the Boboli gardens, battered and deserted after the departure of the refugees". At times she experiences their closeness in a very physical, immediate sense:

In the dark, in the brutal roar of war, Artemisia's face, underneath my tightly-closed eyelids, becomes inflamed like a hot-tempered woman's. I could reach out and touch it; in the middle of her forehead I can see the vertical line she had from an early age and which deepened as she grew older. She begins to scream in my ear like a furious sleepwalker; she has the jarring voice and mangled accent of a lower-class girl from the Borgo.

The  novel charts a roughly chronological, but heavily impressionistic and fragmentary, course through Artemisia's life, beginning with her slightly wrong-side-of-the-tracks childhood and its central concern: her father and his art.

"Now he's doing a Saint Sebastian, completely naked, with the arrows and the wounds and the blood running down. Yes, real blood," she specifies shamelessly, spurred on by the amazement in the blue eyes, "whoever's modelling for Saint Sebastian has to put up with being hurt." When she talks of her father, of his painting, of his successes, with a mixture of innocent invention and plain truth, Artemisia in her haste swallows both the sounds and the meanings of words.

The image is of an innocent, irrepressible girl, devoted to her father and to her sickly friend Cecilia. Banti makes the most of this brief taste of female friendship, one of the very few in Artemisia's life, and of the social pressures upon it: the difficulties of maintaining a friendship when one is not allowed to travel the city without a male escort, and how easily it is crushed by the demands of marriage (very early, for girls in this period) and running a household. Banti inserts herself into the story, imagining their interactions as if she were there with them ("I can see the effort of the trembling gesture with which Cecilia pushes the [sweets] towards her friend, the shiny skin of her small hand. I do not know how Artemisia takes them").

The narration continually swings back and forth between first- and third-person, between Artemisia's voice and her own and some combination of the two, often with character and author addressing each other directly. As biographers and historical novelists often seek to vindicate or explain their subjects by providing them with (largely imagined, or extrapolated) intellectually-satisfying consistency of motivation and emotionally-satiating psychological trajectories, so Banti offers comfort to Artemisia, speaking to her across the centuries through both fiction and narrative voice. When Cecilia dies young from her illness, Banti comforts the girl, putting her sentiments into reported speech like a character in the story:

I begin anew to console her. "She knew nothing about it, she knew nothing of love, of desertion, of betrayal." [...] In my improvised role of comforter, the words I had written and lost become priceless, as though they were a unique text, and my grief is made all the more acute as Artemisia, her confidence restored, regains her dignity.

This blurring of the various Artemisias - historical individual, fictional creation, emotional ghost - and the accompanying conviction, that restoring the lost written portrait will also restore Artemisia and make author and subject alike whole once more, recur frequently in the early part of the novel:

To have remembered that at the age of ten Artemisia used to say, "Now he's paintin' for the monks," truncating the flow of her inherited Tuscan speech with a harsh borrowed accent, seems to me a measure of success, evidence of my belief in her story.

This is particularly pronounced when Banti recounts the defining crisis of Artemisia's young life, which took place in her mid-teens. By this time she was already a painter of some note; the picture to the left is her Susanna and the Elders (1610; image from Wikipedia, click for larger version). But the customary channels of artistic training were closed to her, since she was a woman. In 1612 her father, Orazio - himself a painter - found her a tutor, Agostino Tassi. Tassi raped her. When Tassi did not make amends by the accepted means of marrying Artemisia, Orazio brought him to court over the matter; Artemisia had to testify, and suffer a further ordeal as she was subjected to a physical examination and judicial torture to 'prove' her case.

The rape and its aftermath is approached here with a mixture of delicacy, pain and anger, fracturing the narrative such that the events are only glimpsed obliquely, largely through their emotional impact on Artemisia and Banti. "Unsteadily she follows the troubled remembrance of what I had written, of what I had tried to guess or sacrifice to the accuracy of her story. [...] Artemisia confesses to me: 'He was ugly, Agostino was, thickset and sallow.'" These are whispered confidences between women.

The resultant disgrace is inescapable; but in some senses it also seems, in the novel at least, to liberate Artemisia; she tells us, "So I said, I'll go on my own: I thought after that after my disgrace I at least had the right to be as free as a man." Being such a subject of scandal already, it is a less precipitous - if still profound - step for her to strike out alone, and seek to make a living from her art.

It is a lonely life, however, being an independent woman, pursuing her own dreams in a time when this could only be done by sacrificing everything else: her patrons and customers have no respect for her even as they sit for their portraits (the ladies, she reflects, "would not hesitate to discredit her, declaring her to be of low and worthless character"), and while she eventually marries for the sake of form, her husband and his family can never overcome their discomfort with either her past history or the fact that she has an income of her own. For much of the time they are estranged. Sometimes she imagines a more conventional life for herself, marrying into a well-to-do family ("she would not meet her husband until everything was final, just like a well-brought-up young lady") and giving up her painting to look after a household.

But she finds freedom in her art ("Only with herself, on the canvas, is she able to speak
it, and she receives a response not only from the artist but also from the young Artemisia desperate to be justified, to be avenged, to be in command"), often (but not exclusively) painting violent, vengeful Biblical scenes, like the Judith and Holofernes shown on the cover at the top of this post. There is comfort, too, in the pretense of respectable widowhood and the company of widows, those marginal, discomforting figures:

"If only I were not a woman," that futile lament. Far better to ally herself with the sacrificed and imprisoned, participate in their veiled, momentous fate, share their feelings, their plans, their truths; secrets from which the privileged, men, were barred.

As the novel progresses, and Artemisia herself grows in stature and confidence and selfhood, the importance of Banti's lost manuscript's words decline, or is surrendered, to the new force of personality inhabiting her imagination. "Even if I saw the lost manuscript with all its marks, its blotches," she says, late on, "lying beside me on the grass that still resounds with the noise of the cannon, I couldn't be bothered to read a line of it."

Banti engages with the issue of fictionalising a historical individual head on, and compellingly. She acknowledges the input of both an uncomfortable, selfish sort of wish fulfilment and a striking authorial intimacy in the process of writing Artemisia, dramatising her manipulation both through the structure of the narrative and through direct statements:

Now it is for my benefit alone that Artemisia recites her lesson; she wants to prove to me that she believes everything that I invented, and she has become so docile that even the colour of her hair changes, becomes almost black, and her complexion olive, such as I imagined her when I first read the accounts of her trial on the mold-spotted documents. I close my eyes and for the first time use "tu" to her.

She notes the distance between 'her' Artemisia, a puppet of her authorial will and imagination, and the real but ever unreachable woman behind her ("I form these words on Artemisia's lips. She must have uttered them at least once"). At other times, particularly later on, she casts herself as a ventriloquist, a mouthpiece rather than a maker - "Perhaps this is Artemisia's reply, a sudden reflex, outside my control, which through me is put into words" - although never without that uncertain "perhaps". For Banti the remaking seems to go both ways: she and Artemisia shape each other, and expose one another's weaknesses in the process of comforting them. "We are playing a chasing game, Artemisia and I," she says. "We also try to catch one another, not without laying snares, which range from the obvious and material to the most subtle." This mutual reliance, the resonance between the emotions of author and subject, is - Susan Sontag argues in her wonderful introduction - especially present when it comes to their problematic relationships with the men in their lives.

One of the major influences on Banti's creative life, Sontag writes, was her sense of being overshadowed by the prominence of her husband, Roberto Longhi. This is reflected, she argues, in the foregrounding of Artemisia's feelings towards her father: she loves him, and is trapped by him. What haunts Artemisia, even in her middle-aged success, is that her life - both the aspects she has chosen, like her career, and those she did not, like her rape - has cost her father's "difficult love", whose "great value is as a sword that slays all weakness, the very image of which is enough to pierce through". He, too, cannot bring himself to see her as he once did, disgraced as she is.

Indeed, Artemisia's longing for her father's approval emerges more vividly from the narrative than even her rape does. She imagines herself "crawling on the ground to show him, as it were, the color of her own contrite blood, a pointless fantasy." Late on, Banti gives us a scene - surely imagined, for comfort? - in which Orazio visits his daughter and at last expresses his appreciation of her art; Artemisia feels "happy and safe", "vindicated" by the "recognition". It is the transporting moment of the narrative. Envisioning the two of them not as father and daughter but as "two minds", Artemisia is at last "released in a fervour of demonstrativeness that gives her courage, raises her head and her eyes."

The book was not at all what I expected, I must confess; but I found it impossible to resist either Artemisia's story or Anna Banti's charged, resonant presentation of it. Highly recommended.

~~Nic

Here we go again...

The Booker Prize longlist has just been announced and, despite counselling myself repeatedly to leave well alone, I find myself drawn in.  Because it is actually a very exciting list.  No, really.  I mean it.  It feels very fresh.  Look, there is even a thriller on there.  My only concern is that male authors outnumber female by 8-3, but I can get over that since eight of the books are on my TBR list already and only one doesn't interest me at all (the Linda Grant sadly, which I abandoned when it was on the Orange longlist).   My library hold list is literally bulging with everything available.   

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (Atlantic)

Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold (Tindal Street Press)

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry (Faber and Faber)

From A to X by John Berger (Verso)

The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser (Chatto & Windus)

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh (John Murray)

The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant (Virago)

The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher (Fourth Estate)

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill (Fourth Estate)

The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie (Jonathan Cape)

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith (Simon & Schuster)

A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz (Hamish Hamilton)

~~Victoria~~

'What a strange and sad thing to be a man...'

The blogosphere jury is decidedly split when it comes to Andrew Sean Greer's The Story of a Marriage.  Mark Thwaite (he of Ready Steady Book and The Book Depository) has lambasted it as 'a tissue of cliches and clunky metaphors: it looks beautiful and accomplished (and it is exquisitely paced and sometimes wonderfully written) but is set up merely to "push your buttons"'  Asylum's John Self concured: 'I’m reluctant to make this post into a simple catalogue of my criticisms of the book, though that might be inevitable, as there isn’t much I can think of that I liked about it.'  Meanwhile fellow litbloggers Lynne (of dovegreyreader) and Kirsty (of Other Stories) have offered up enthusiastic praise. I can hardly resist wading (somewhat belatedly) into the frey to add my own feelings to the record.  [NB: At which point, in the name of full disclosure, I should note that Faber sent me a proof copy of the novel several weeks ago.]

It is not quite a matter of I love and yet I hate - such heady emotions are rarely to be aroused.  It is more, perhaps, that I enjoy and yet I heartily dislike.   The Story of a Marriage is an exceptionally well-paced, decidedly well-written novel, a showcase of mannered prose that I could barely resist.  I read it quickly in the garden, accompanied by ice-cream and cold beer.  It was certainly not the least amongst these pleasures.  But.  But.  As I gulped it back I became as aware of the book's demons beating down its better angels.  So that, yes, it is beautiful and tender; at the same time, it is also a litany of tired morals and gender cliches.  It has a terrible beginning - a disgracefully superficial first line: 'We think we know the ones we love.' - and a sweet, almost irresistible ending, with lots more of the terrible and irresistible in between.

Much has been made of the novel's plot and its set-piece revelations, somewhat (I think) to the detriment of the criticism of it.  The mainstream media reviews tended to pad sheepishly around the narrative, saying barely anything at all because they couldn't properly engage with it. In an attempt to bypass the issue of whether or not Greer succeeds in drawing the reader into these piffly little mysteries, which are nothing but smoke screens for the real issues at hand, let me offer a bald, short synopsis.  Look away now if you don't wish to be spoiled.  Pearlie Cooke - narrator, dutiful housewife and devoted mother - and her husband Holland are black in 1950s San Francisco and quietly bearing the social ostracism that entails; their only son, Walter, is a sweet pliable boy, disabled by polio.  They are relatively well-off, with a dog and a dishwasher and a car.  Pearlie and Holland sleep seperately, but the arrangement seems to suit them both and they are a picturebook kind of happy.  One day a well-dressed white man called Buzz Drummer turns up on their porch and, with an air of unreality, tells Pearlie that he was her husband's lover during the war.  He brazenly offers her money - over £100,000 - if she will help him to win Holland back and thereby engineer the end of her own marriage.  Believing that her husband is homosexual, and interpreting this as the source of their sexual distance, Pearlie agrees, perhaps a little too readily.  And so the novel bowls along to its inevitable conclusion when Holland, a silent dark figure whose personality is entirely constructed for the reader by the interpretation of others, must decide whom he loves. 

The mysteries, thus plainly reduced, are nothing but white elephants and trickery, rabbits pulled from a hat.  Greer is addicted to subverting our expectations (or what he assumes to be our expectations). We think Pearlie is white because, well, if she weren't it would be in his first description of her, wouldn't it? Aha! Psych! We think Holland is straight because he isn't effeminate. How conservative of us!  And then we assume he is gay and repressed because Buzz says so. So naive.  We think Pearlie is making a selfless sacrifice. But wait, the narrative soon reveals otherwise.   This is how it works on us: liberal readers enjoy the revelations because they reinforce their smug assumption that everyone else is too prejudiced to have spotted them coming a mile away (I must count myself in this group); conservative readers enjoy them because, really, at their heart they're not liberal at all. 

Make no mistake, The Story of a Marriage is a singularly conservative novel masquerading as a new liberal fable.  Everything about it - its length; its clumsily delineated setting; its gaudy 1950s of segregation and red panic - screams parable.  It reinforces all of our assumptions about race and sexuality - that marriage is the building block of society; that being black and successful is all about becoming whiter at heart - while gesturing madly to its own daring for subverting them.  It is a story about the triumph of traditional institutions - marriage and motherhood and the nation - over alternative lifestyles; about normality carrying the day over aberrant behaviours.  Who does Holland choose in the end?  Pearlie, of course, his dear wife and the mother of his imperfect but perfect child.  Not Buzz, the cowardly scheming homosexual - the white devil must be, and is, cast out.  Greer makes us complicit in this triumph of good 'ole family values. We think: how daring to choose tradition over controversy in such a open-minded novel.  It is incredibly manipulative, cleverly turning us against our instincts and making us pleased with ourselves for it.  Devishly insidious and, I must admit, ingenious; and all in under 200 pages.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Pearlie's voice is at the base of it, since she is our elderly narrator telling us the story of her life in retrospect.  The best that can be said of the novel's conservatism is that it is a function of her character.  She is a woman of her time: the central mystery of her life is her marriage, intimately tied to the esoteric workings of her man's heart.  Being a wife is a species of spiritual vocation for her, a calling which is both grounded in her being and beyond her.  'What is a wife?', she asks:

If they take away her children, her husband, her house and belongings; if they send down a destroying angel to this female Job and tear one son from her arms and another from the schoolhouse so his textook falls to the floor with a thud, send agents to drag her husband from his home; if they take away the telephone table in the hall; the geraniums wilting in the flower box and the beans that have to be used before they go bad and the new hat that she hasn't yet figured out how to wear? If they take away the dog? If they take away her favourite wooden spoon? Her brother? Her ring? What is the smallest atom of a wife that cannot be split apart?

Pearlie's intimation is that there is something, some essential and transcendent wifeness at the bottom of being a woman. The Story of a Marriage is her narrative of its discovery.  Like the many 1950s housewives of our imagination, Pearlie is sorely tempted by the idea of freedom. (This is allowed because Greer never misses a cliche - she is docile and giving; and repressed and yearning at the same time.)  She almost admits to the reader that her motives for reuniting Holland and Buzz are mixed. Yes, she is being the selfless wretch, giving up her husband for his greater happiness - this is the image of herself that she likes the best - but at the same time she is dreaming of sexual liberty.  Her conspiratorial meetings with Buzz are made more exciting for her by the idea of what people think of a handsome white man in earnest conversation with a black woman; her imagination is piqued by the assumption that they are having a transgressive affair.  A late night taxi ride home from a dance, sans Holland, offers her the opportunity to dabble with adultery:

Here was my life alone. And the thought was so astonishing, so pleasant and free, that I started to laugh like a child and couldn't stop, all the way back across the bridge.  Shorty would take my hand and smile at me and kiss me and once again I would convulse with laughter. 

All of this is only a dalliance however, a flirtation with controversy, that will be shot down in the final pages of the novel by the actuality of Pearlie's long fulfilling marriage to Holland after the trials of Buzz are over.

Pearlie is also an adherent of the cult of the strong, silent black man.  Holland Cooke is the epitomy of this stereotype: beautiful, yet taciturn; fatherly, and yet heroic; silent, and yet devoted.  He has no voice of his own, but he hardly needs one as the reader is kept so busy making assumptions about him.  This is Greer's intention, of course, and it feels sympathetic. Poor Holland, never able to tell us his own feelings! Poor Holland, endlessly put upon! I was apt to feel an empathy for him too, to share in Pearlie's exclamation: 'What a strange, sad thing to be a man'.  But then it occured to me what a sinister empathy this was; and how quickly I had invested in the compassionate subjugation of the angel in the house.  I reread a single paragraph several times over:

I turned my body to face Holland completely - my listening posture - and his face was as square and golden as an idol's, his eyes bright, his striped shirt undone beneath his cardigan, one button dangling from an unravelling thread.  He sat and planned his words. What a strange and sad thing to be a man. How awful to be beaten by life as much as anyone and yet never be allowed to mention how it feels. To sit in your house that you have paid for with your labor, beside a wife who knows your youthful secrets; to have traveled around the world to escape the prejudices of home and find them, now merely whispered, in the neighbourhood around you; to have the past knock on your door in the form of Buzz Drummer. I cannot envy men their silences.

Here was the patriarch at rest, in the comfort of his home, with his doting wife by his side and the whole world attuned to his needs, even despite his blackness; and here was his wife, practically weeping for his vulnerability, devoting herself to his comfort and safety despite his clear social and economic advantage over her.  Here was a sympathy that women have been misplacing for generations, and there I was, feeling it too.  I had tuned straight into womens' instinct for self abnegation in the presence of their menfolk and, I swear, if I had had Andrew Sean Greer in front of me at that moment, I would have put my knee into his groin.  Not gently.

I tremble at the thought of how easily and how charmingly the book turned me against myself and everything I hold to be true.  'Marriage is a fairytale' Pearlie goes on to opine, 'and, like those stories, it requires a bewitching bargain.'  Implicitly it suggests that women give themselves up for love and that, while this may be sad, it is also beautiful, like the suicide of a biblical virgin under threat of rape.  Is this what the blurb means when it calls The Story of a Marriage 'a heartbreakingly beautiful love story'?  Our hearts are broken by the forfeit of our lives, but remade by the love of a good man?  Involuntarily, I shudder.  I must come to the conclusion that it is one of the darkest novels I have read, a horror story disguised in the fine clothes of romance.

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I try to take heart where I can.  I find hope in the possibility that Greer is blind-siding us, that the book is not about his revelations about race and sexuality at all, but about how quickly and willingly we buy into them. So: when he gives us Pearlie and Holland's saccharine happy ending, their decades of devotion and their healthy, successful college-educated son, he is provoking us to explore the compromises we will make to see this happy ending.  Will we allow the uproarous swell of normality, the repression of our politics and the possibility of Buzz's painful loneliness, just to see the sunset on the happy couple?  I wish it to be so, since this was the question I was left asking myself: which of my beliefs have I jettisoned in order to smile and gulp down The Story of a Marriage? I fear, however, that I am stretching the benefit of the doubt.  Mark Thwaite called it mawkish cliche; I agree, but I think it is also far more dangerous than that.

~~Victoria~~

"She was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life."

Your grandfather likes to think that all the stories in the world are his to tell, she says.

Just the important ones, our grandfather says. Just the ones that need telling. Some stories always need telling more than others.

Some time ago, we held a round-table email discussion about Girl meets boy, the excellent latest release from one of Alexandria's favourite authors, Ali Smith. Girl meets boy is another entry in Canongate' multi-author 'Myths' series, which Vicky has been following eagerly (she discussed Margaret Atwood's contribution on this blog last year). As we've come to expect, Smith tackles the series brief in style, exploring gender, sexuality, radical activism and social change through a modern-day reworking of the story of Iphis and Ianthe.

Iphis was a Cretan girl, who was raised as a boy due to some serious marital miscommunication (Daddy, naturally, really wanted a boy). Iphis did fine until one day she fell in love with a girl, Ianthe. Luckily, a helpful goddess turned Iphis into a real boy so that s/he might marry Ianthe. Happily ever after? By the standards of the day.

Smith, too, provides a happily ever after, of a rather different nature (clue: this story's Iphis isn't magically transformed into a boy for the sake of the wedding pics; another clue: the final section opens with, "Reader, I married him/her."). But she is also interested in how the fight for an 'unconventional' happily ever after might change the world at the same time. Girl meets boy is set in Inverness and London, and centres on two sisters - unfocused, forthright Anthea and shrill, fragile Midge - and the conflict and reconciliation between them when Anthea falls for a genderqueer woman, Robin. "She was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life", Anthea reflects at one point.

She was as brave and handsome and rough as a girl. She was as pretty and delicate and dainty as a boy. She turned boys' heads like a girl. She turned girls' heads like a boy. [...] She was so boyish it was girlish, so girlish it was boyish, she made me want to rove the world writing our names on every tree.

The participants in the round table were Vicky, Jo, and I (Nic) from Eve's Alexandria, together with Niall from Torque Control. With one thing and another I've had the messages sitting in my inbox for months. Finally this weekend I got round to supplementing it with some quotes from the book, and turning it into a post: enjoy!

[NB Square brackets indicate anything I've added to others' comments to clarify what is being responded to, since there was a certain amount of cross-over and back and forth within the emails. I've also chopped up some of the responses to slot them in with the points they are replying to.]

Ah, I love Iphis, Robin said. I love her. Look at her. Dressed as a boy to save her life. Standing in a field, shouting at the way things are. She'd do anything for love. She'd risk everything she is.

Victoria:

Let me begin by saying: I loved it. But then I love everything Ali Smith does, and sometimes I think it's because she is just my kind of writer, always taking things in directions that please me. I'm not sure though that it really did enough to explore the myth at hand - like Atwood and Winterson (very much like Winterson) I sometimes felt it was more about parallels than something fresh. And is saying, 'Look, the myth has a similar resonance for us today as it did then' by rewriting it, exciting enough, or ambitious enough to warrant a novel? The Myth series is going to get old, pretty quickly if that is all there is at the bottom of it. Then again, I think Smith does express the ubiquity of myth, the melting-pot-ness of it, very well, and I liked that she created a myth of her own at the beginning, with the suffrage narrative, and so moved it beyond a purely lesbian/gender narrative, and beyond the core myth at hand.

Jo:

I disagree, I think that playing around with the resonance of the myth today is fresh in itself. In a way it's a strange idea to RE-write myth - what does that mean? Does it have the underlying assumption that the myth has to be unpicked and done all over again better? This is what I felt when reading Atwood's Penelopiad - it was so full of fury towards the original story that the myth may as well have been run over by a steam-roller. Smith told her story, and used the myth to energise and enrichen it. It wasn't so much re-writing the myth as writing with it, and that makes much more sense to me.

Nic:

Loved, loved, loved the juxtaposition of the two myth retellings at the centre of the book. More specifically, I loved the irreverent, discursive style of the second, which not only contains lots of fun, geeky asides of the type I could imagine any of us making if we were telling the story (the part about Atlantis and pumice stone...!), but also works as a lovely shorthand, in-character way to pack a lot of deeper issues into just a few pages: reading myth today, finding its encoded meanings, exploring what is relevant and what is absent and what can be subverted, and (close to my own heart...) what a myth tells us about the society(/ies) that produced and valued it. Plus, y'know, they continue to be enormous fun as stories.

I agree with Vicky that it doesn't engage as directly and completely with the myth as it might - although on at least one level it does so fundamentally, since the overt and deliberate refusal to re-gender the love story into a heteronormative one is a direct subversion of and challenge to the assumptions of the original. But I do think that Anthea, Robin and the myth operate more as catalysts and touchstones for Smith's real story, which is the enlightenment of Midge and, by implication, the possibilities of social change more broadly; they aren't really the focus.

That aside, I think the book does a lot with Myth as a concept. There are personal myths, for example - the stories we're brought up with, the ones that shape our values and affect how we present ourselves to the world:

Nobody grows up mythless, Robin said. It's what we do with the myths we grow up with that matters.

I thought about our mother. I thought about what she'd said, that she had to be free of what people expected of her, otherwise she'd simply have died. I thought about our father, out in the garden in the first days after she left, hanging out the washing. I thought about Midge, seven years old, running downstairs to take over, to do it instead of him, because the neighbours were laughing to see a man at the washing line. Good girl, our father had said.

(And that's the first time I've ever noticed how infuriatingly gendered is even such an apparently harmless and universal term of praise/approbation!)

There are also social/cultural myths (both reinforcing and challenging received ideas; the Burning Lily story, but also all the various assumptions of binary gender, some of which amount to urban myth), and newly-created myths (I owe to Niall the observation that advertising is presented as modern myth-making). Myth as propaganda for, and expression of, one outlook or another; myth also as a way of introducing the unfamiliar (difficult ideas, and/or change) via the familiar (a love story, a coming-out story).

Victoria:

And, of course, there is her prose, which is better as far as rhyme and metre goes than any contemporary poetry I know. Her free association passages (I'm thinking particularly of the bit of part 3 where Robin and Anthea have sex) are difficult to resist and at first I wasn't sure whether it wasn't just the rush that made me giddy with admiration, but when I parsed it down it works just as well. She just makes words so damn sexy! Perhaps her free fall prose would be best described as erotic? Not just the sex scenes, but all of it... the final passages too?

Nic:

Is the prose erotic? I think I'd go with giddy and exuberant rather than (necessarily) erotic, but yes - it's heady stuff.

Jo:

I loved it too, specifically the exuberance of it - the way Smith managed to capture the pure joy of the myth itself, and really place that joy  - the joy of transformation - in the twenty-first century. I really would go with erotic to describe the prose - it didn't seem giddy to me, maybe because the richness of her imagery seems to me grounded in the amazing-delicious rhythm of the sentences. :-)

Niall:

This is one of the things I love about anything Ali Smith writes, the now-ness of it, particularly as brought out in the language she uses, and I agree that Girl Meets Boy is no exception.

Nic:

Lots of great stuff about sex and gender - playing with boundaries - highlighting without belabouring the fact so many people's discomfort with same-sex love stems from a perception that it involves (is produced by) 'unnatural' gender behaviour, and that if only people corrected themselves along binary lines they'd be sexually 'normal' again. Also the hollowness of Midge's assumptions - based on received prejudices and the media representations of lesbians (mention is made of Judi Dench's character in Notes on a Scandal) - that Anthea is doomed by her orientation to live a loveless life, even as she remembers Anthea and Robin "laughing with outrageous happiness".

Midge, though. How old is she meant to be, again? Because she comes across as having the wit and emotional maturity of a sixteen year old. This was fine for her homophobia chapter, which I found hilarious (if perhaps a little overplayed given the speed and completeness of her later conversion to the side of Sensibly Subversive) - I loved her inner monologue intruding despite her best efforts:

(My sister is a gay.)

(I am not upset.) (I am fine.)

(It'd be okay, I mean I wouldn't mind so much, if it was someone else's sister.)

(It is okay. Lots of people are it. Just none that I have known personally, that's all.)

But it played oddly in the context of her high-flying(?) career; I found myself unable to credit how anyone so dim and craven could ever have got or kept a job that apparently relies on talking bollocks faster and more forcefully than anyone else in the room. (Unless we're supposed to assume that she only has the position she does because her boss is a lech? Certainly she's not mortgage-paying, since her house is inherited, so perhaps she hasn't been working at Pure very long?)

I felt for her during the trip to London, though, even if her boss was on the fairly extreme side of caricature.

Jo:

[Re. is it Anthea and Robin's story or not?]

That's interesting; it didn't occur to me at all. I thought it was about Andrea and Robin - or more - hmm. I want to be psychoanalytically cliched now and say I read Andrea and Midge as two parts the same person. I don't think each of them individually were particularly developed  - I agree that Midge seemed oddly immature  - although I could certainly imagine her as a young graduate quickly being promoted, with business sense but no emotional maturity. But to me they seemed to tell the same story of rebellion - (as proclaimed by Midge's motorbike) from different levels. Andrea from the idealistic, dream level - what you would do if you could do anything - perhaps from the mythical level - and Midge from the day to day drudgery of it. Midge was emmeshed in society - and Andrea free of it, outside of it - but I could read them as two different tellings of the same journey. Hmm in which case you would have to read Midge as also possibly homosexual - but I think that her running/panicked homophobic monologue - the confusion with her name - the remembered scene in the classroom - all make this possible. :-)

I wasn't convinced by the grandfather's story of Burning Lily [the sufragette] though. I just didn't see enough of this grandfather to believe that he'd tell gender switching stories about his childhood. Somehow it seemed too forced a gender challenge to me - unlike everyone else in the book, I didn't believe in his transformation - what did you all think?

Nic:

On the grandfather: yes, probably, although he's mostly a device - and another roundabout reteller of myths. I loved this:

On her twenty-first birthday, the day that the beautiful (though not near as beautiful as your grandmother, obviously) the day that the beautiful Burning Lily became a fully fledged grown-up - which is what's supposed to happen on the day you're twenty-one - she looked in the mirror and said to herself, I've had enough of this. I'm going to change things. So she went straight out and broke a window as a birthday present to herself.

Victoria:

I was wondering how people took to the polemic in the penultimate section? Is a myth the right place for statistics? Oooh but that makes me think (in a non-sequitur kind of way) of how the novel works on two levels, like myth and life itself. With the myth being used as a tool to illuminate and interpret the story, but the story underneath is not a retelling of the myth... it is just a story, in its own skin. Hmmmmm. So... it isn't necessarily parallelism at all. The myth and story are different. They're too seperate things, working in tandem (and sometimes) opposition like theory vs. practise? The myth is the gloss, not the text?

Nic:

See above, re. myth as propaganda. Lies, damned lies, and statistics - or rather, their use and abuse, especially in media representations of market and scientific research - are one of prerequisites of modern myths, aren't they? Maybe they're our version of Delphic prophecy - it's all about how someone in authority interprets them for you. ;-)

Jo:

Yes I liked it. It has to be a risk, filling the final part of your book with angry statistics, but it seemed to resonate with the myth itself - because isn't Iphis's story about the interaction between fact and fiction, and whether the two can work together? Continuing with a comparison, as feminist literature I found it a much more wonderful read than Atwood's - whereas Atwood's message was - it seemed to me clumsily - 'this is what wasn't spoken in the myth, the REAL story' Smith was using the myth alchemically to narrate the possibility of transformation - and then putting in front of reader the real materials to be transformed - but with lightness and humour so even filling pages with statistics seemed part of the poetry.

Niall:

Before I say my piece and make you all hate me (I liked it, but I had reservations), I want to throw this quote out there:

And also, don't forget, the story of Iphis was being made up by a man. Well, I say man, but Ovid's very fluid, as writers go, much more than most. He knows, more than most, that the imagination doesn't have a gender.

This read to me as an idea that Ali Smith wants us to take seriously. I'd be interested to know how far you all agree with it, in two ways:

(1) Is Ovid indeed very fluid, as writers go?

(2) Is it true that the imagination doesn't have a gender? Is it even possible? If it is, exactly what does it mean?

Nic:

[I obviously forgot to respond to this at the time, so, quickly: I've never really thought of this before, but I suppose there is a certain fluidity to Ovid's writing, particularly for his deeply misogynistic time. I was very struck, when reading his Heroides - a marvellous collection of poems, each one told in the voice of a different, and differently-wronged, woman from Greek mythology - by his ability and willingness to get inside the heads of his female narrators/monologuers. Sympathetic and righteously angry - you have to love it! On the other hand, this is the author of the Ars Amatoria etc., which, though hilarious and wonderful in their own way, take a rather cynical/more typically Roman view of women...]

Jo:

Hmm. Interesting.

I'm not so sure about Ovid's fluidity - I haven't read enough of him to qualify an answer - but I think it's true  - or rather, I'd like to think it's true that imagination doesn't have a gender. Surely imagination by definition is the ability to step out of the boundaries (gendered or otherwise) of identity and speak from within another plane. I think that the voice that speaks the imagination is likely to be gendered - i.e. - the art will often be heavy with the gender of the artist - but this doesn't have to be the case and perhaps Smith is saying - in the ideal artist shouldn't be.

Phew it's a little early in the morning for such topics.

Victoria:

Firstly, I don't know Ovid at all, except by reputation, and so it is impossible to say whether Robin's analysis is right or wrong, or whether Smith means us to know one way or another. On the second point I partly agree with Jo, but with a caveat.

I'd like to think so too [that imagination doesn't have a gender], but I'm not sure I can entirely conceive of it. Imagination is not an element, like oxygen, and it has no independent, objective life beyond the individual until it is turned into something else - a novel, a painting, a symphony. It is a quality of a personality, and it seems impossible to me that it shouldn't be flavoured by the identity of the person from which it stems. That identity is inevitably 'gendered', even if that 'genderedness' is characterised by fluidity. I would agree that imagination is beyond biological sex - beyond simply 'male' or 'female'- but since gender is an all encompassing spectrum I can't see it existing beyond that.

Niall:

I think we're meant to take Robin's word for it, because Robin is presented throughout the book as someone who knows what she's talking about -- almost an ideal for Anthea to aspire to.

Victoria:

I agree though that Smith is saying the artist should be beyond categories, like 'boy' and 'girl', or beyond boundaries between masculine and feminine. It is these constructed denominators that Robin and Anthea confuse in their graffitti, when they sign themselves off randomly one or the other, so claiming both and rejecting both at once. But I think this is different from being beyond gender.

Niall:

I agree with this; my reservation about the book is that I don't really think Smith succeeds in moving beyond categories herself, or perhaps that she's not actually that interested in doing so. Two thoughts:

(1) I am uncomfortable with the portrayal of Midge, particularly early on. It's not just that I don't find her particularly convincing as a career professional, though I don't, it's that I don't ever feel that Smith wanted to make her convincing. In her first chapter, Midge's discomfort is played for laughs, it's not a serious part of her personality worthy of examination in the way that, say, Anthea's feelings for Robin are. There's something almost contemptuous about that, to my mind. I'd like to have seen more compassion for the character; as it is it's almost as though she only exists to be the character who is transformed (redeemed), not as a person we should ever expect to really understand or sympathise with.

(2) It is a discomfortingly sexist book. The majority of the men are irredemable because of their manly ways, and the two men that are acceptable are (a) barely on-screen and (b) explicitly defined as acceptable because of the ways in which they are feminine. Midge is attracted to the feminine aspects of Paul; grandfather tells stories about his time as a girl, and in pictures of him are described in terms of typically feminine traits. (It's possible to see Ovid being almost excused from maleness is a part of the same pattern.)

Meanwhile, all the female characters are basically sound people (Midge does get transformed, after all, and not in a way that makes her any more masculine), Robin's adoption of some typically masculine traits is presented as a good thing to the extent that it allows Anthea to recognise her sexuality, and there is no suggestion anywhere that pure femininity is Bad-with-a-capital-B in the way that pure masculinity is portrayed as being.

I'm not criticising the book because it is sexist per se. It makes it a little harder for me to get sucked in, because within the parameters of the world Smith has created I literally don't exist, but I think I understand what she's doing and why (and not every book has to have a space for every person, after all). Specifically: the original myth is hostile to female-ness, so one of the ways in which she's responding to it is by creating a story that is hostile to male-ness. She's not being mean about it, if that makes any sense. In the original story, two women living happily ever after is unthinkable, and has to be prevented by magical intervention; here, the final chapter repudiates the idea that a fantastical resolution is needed or even desirable. Anthea and Robin can live happily ever after together because, well, why shouldn't they?

What I do think this does, though, is undermine the argument that Girl Meets Boy is about fluidity of gender in any adventurous sense; it's more a straightforward inversion of the original myth than
perhaps it at first appears. Yes, there are characters who cross between masculine and feminine, but the virtues of doing so flow entirely in one direction.

Vicky:

Yes, I was discomforted by this too. It is not that the novel explicitly hates men, although the men in it are pretty hateful, but that it offers no likeable male characters. As you say, both Paul and grandfather are both defined by their femininity and, to an extent, by their rejection of the male category. It is difficult to locate masculinity in the novel at all. I don't think there is a model for femininity either, but at least, as you say, it isn't thoroughly denigrated. I wondered at first if Midge's bulemia might reveal itself as a symptom of tortured femininity, of the desire to be petite and beautiful and to emulate models that destroys confidence and self-esteem. But in the end I don't think this happens. Rather, it is more about her will to self-control and to subsume her (very normal) desires in favour of (a rather twisted) 'normality'.

Taking a different view down the same sightline, I thought the novel was also rather 'heterophobic'. That is, it privileged relationships between same-sex couples, or between couples where at least one partner had a fluid gender identity(the grandparents; Midge/Paul). Heterosexuality got very short shrift indeed - Midge's Pure colleagues (I haven't got the book with me, so I can't remember their names. The ones from the pub; Norman possibly?) spoke in a sexual patois that was both disgusting and degrading, and her boss Keith was no better.  I also thought there was a correlation was being drawn between individuals who are exploitative and manipulative (i.e. the Creatives from Pure), the ethos of the greedy modern world and heterosexuality. Almost like heterosexuality = a form of consumer slavery; a perpetuator of inequality. At the same time the homosexual or transsexual relationships were figured as radical, loving and cohesive, and associated with conscience and civil action.

Niall:

Now for a bit on aspects I liked. As Nic implied, I thought the ways in which the book plays with the idea of myth, brings out the element of advocacy about it by refiguring it as advertising or propaganda, were one of the best things about it. For me the single most affecting moment was when Midge goes to bail Robin and Anthea out, and starts berating them -- "Do you really think this will change anything?" to which Anthea simply says, "yes", and Midge says, "OK then". It's very nicely done, and is part of why I'm confident Smith is making her book deliberately sexist -- it's because Girl Meets Boy is itself a kind of advocacy, a kind of advert, just as much as the original myth ever was.

(And the slogans were marvellous; I'll be disappointed if I ever go to Inverness and they're not there!)

Hanging from the family tree

It is a cliche universally acknowledged that women's fiction, both by them and for them, is about one of two things - romantic love and families.  More than occasionally it is about both things at once.  This is one of those bogus truisms that simply refuses die, up there on a par with the idea that all women love shoes.  On the one hand it is undeniable: walk up to the 3 for 2's in Waterstones and read the backs of 10 books marketed at women. See?  On the other it is clearly ridiculous: turn left into genre fiction and read the blurbs of 10 SF or crime novels, by women and bought by them in their thousands, and the story is entirely different.  The cliche is both alive and dead at the same time, which makes it all the more frustrating to counteract. 

I admire the neatness of Lauren Groff's solution to the problem (because it is a problem) in her debut novel, The Monsters of Templeton.  If you can't beat the cliche, then you may as well jump on in and leave your footprints all over it, writing a novel about romance, adultery and the cracks in family life in as weird and offbeat a manner as possible.  If you do it well, like Groff patently has, then maybe, just maybe, both Stephen King and Laurie Moore will give you praise quotes for the cover and you will know that you've passed out the right side of innovation.

Willhemina Sunshine Upton, the only daughter of a former hippy (hence the 'Sunshine'), is 'bright as all get out' , writing a PhD at Stamford on the earliest humanoid migration into Alaska.  The first woman to win a place in the front-line of her specialism, she is chosen to accompany her supervisor, Primus Dwyer, to the primary dig site.  It is the first step on the way to a vaunted academic career. That is, until Dwyer fondles her knee on the plane and she makes the worst decision of her life:

I had two choices then.  One: I could have very politely placed his hand on the armrest between us, and continued my sentence, and we would have had a very nice trip together, and I would become an honorary man for the summer, and good buddies with all the Harvard boys, and when we returned the conquering heroes in the autumn, they, feeling brotherly, would have done everything in their power to help me along in my career.  Two: I could have raised an eyebrow back. 

Inevitably their affair is discovered - there is only so much you can hide while living out of a tent with a dozen other people in the middle of nowhere - and, caught in the act, Willie is forced to high-tail it back to her home town, Templeton, to nurse her wounded pride.  She knows that she has made the most fatal mistake that a professional woman can make: she has admitted that she has a sexuality.  And the worst of it is yet to be discovered - she is also pregnant.

Unfortunately, home isn't the haven she remembers. Her mother, the stiff-backed crotchety Vivienne, has disavowed the liberalism of her own youth, taken up with an evangelical preacher and decided to confess her sins. She has some revelations of her own for her daughter, no matter how inconvenient the timing.  As if things weren't bad enough, it turns out that Willie isn't who she thinks she is.  She is not the result of a drug-fuelled liason with an anonymous hippy as she had always been told.  No, not a bit of it.  Instead, her father is a respectable resident of Templeton, although her mother refuses to admit precisely who.  He could be almost anyone.  In the absence of anything better to take her mind off her enormous screw-up, Willie submits to her curiousity and armed only with a vague genealogical clue from her mother, sets off to 'discover' who her mystery father really is. If she can't dig up the bones of the first human, then she can at least unearth the man who made her.

At the same time, in the self-same novel, a dead monster, some sort of prehistoric Nessie, surfaces on Templeton's lake Glimmerglass:

The fog was still deep when Dr. Cluny found the monster on his morning row.  I imagine how it went: the slide of the scull's knife across the lake, the oar heads casting rings on the water, the red bow light pulsing into the dark. Then, sudden, looming over the doctor's shoulder, an island where there had never been an island, the vast belly of the dead beast.  Gliding backward, the doctor couldn't see it.  He neared; the bow-ball of his boat pushed into the rubbery flesh like a finger into a balloon; the pressure of boat versus skin reached a tensile limit without piercing anything; the boat checked its bow-ward motion, and jerked to stern.  The doctor turned but he was only prepared for the possible, and didn't at first know what was before him.  When he saw the large and terrible eye still milking over with death, the good doctor blinked.  And then he fainted. 

Willie, whose ancestral home backs onto the shore, is there to watch it dragged towards land; is there to reach out her hand and touch it in the quiet moments before the world's media descends on the scene.  Rising up out of the water, it is like a myth passing into reality, or the herald of one type of fiction becoming another: post-romantic crisis fiction turned sharply into genealogical fantasy. It is quite the natty transformation.  As the novel unfolds it is patterned with the tropes of both chick-lit and genre fiction, it is less and less surprising to find Willie - romantic lead; budding historical investigator - in the presence of both her ghostly ancestors and her ageing prom date, dealing with both immortal apothecaries and her best friend's real-life illness.  The veil between mimesis and magic turns out to be very thin indeed. 

This brand of fictional stew-pot isn't new, exactly. Not at all, in fact.  Magical realism is a mainstay of the contemporary repetoire, and the children's section of any bookshop is piled high with stories about teenager's dealing with divorce and faery invasions at the same time. Buffy graduated from high school and served fast food on the hell mouth.  Not to mention the fantasy literature genre itself, and the New Weird, and all that jazz.  Kelly Link has been writing stories like Groff's for a decade.  This accumulation of forebears can claim some credit for the reality-fantasy mind-meld at the heart of The Monsters of Templeton.  But there is still something exciting about telling Willie's kind of story - this stereotypical 'woman's story' - in this way.  It is the cliche and not the cliche; the story that makes and breaks the myth. I can see why the Orange New Writer's judges went for it.  It is more than a little transgressive in context.

That Lauren Groff can actually write is of added benefit.  Sometimes, at least.  The Monsters of Templeton is a novel told in numerous voices - Willie's primarily, but also those of her ancestors, through letters, diaries and, with a post-modern nod, their own fiction.  Templeton is modelled on Groff's own home town, Cooperstown, and Willie's ancestors are loosely based on the family of the writer, James Fenimore Cooper; many of the genealogical mysteries the novel explores are real ones.  Groff is determined to have all the thematic fun she can from this conceit.  Characters from Fenimore Cooper's most famous novel, The Last of the Mohicans, emerge as 'real' figures in Willie's ancestral back story, before being written into the fiction of Groff's analogous Jacob Franklin Temple, who is himself a fiction of her own.  As if it were not enough to blur fantasy and reality, she also begs to exacerbate the tension between history and fiction.

There are others narrators as well: the 'Running Buds', Templeton's jogging club, who speak with the single voice of the town itself, and even the Glimmerglass monster, which has its posthumous say.  On the whole the gear shifts between past, present, singular, multiple, living and dead narrators are well executed, although it would be true to say that Groff is a better ventriloquist of some voices than others.  Unfortunately, the weakest of them all - Willie's self-deprecating monologues - dominate, while the best amongst them are shorter and farther between.  There is a definite correlation, for example, between Monsters' best bits and its historical sections - the parts of the novel in which Willie's ancestors, who played a vital role in the founding and shaping of modern Templeton, reveal themselves in their own words are very good indeed.  Lauren Groff writes tolerable, if slightly portentous, prose for a contemporary writer, but she hits the nail square as a historical novelist.  The past will bear verbosity and the heaviness of fate much better than the present.  It will absorb all sorts of omens and foreshadowings that will sit like lead in the context of the 21st century.  Which is not to say that it is any less subtle, only that it demands a different sleight of hand: Groff can pitch the cadence of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries rather sweetly, but she struggles with the sentiment of her own century.  So that this excerpt from the fragmented diary of Sarah Franklin Temple Upton, Willie's fey, half-mad great-grandmother, works:

...days pass, days pass, dark then light, Templeton glowing in the fog, the brilliance of noon... so many ghosts in the water I see now, everyday day I go down, press my ear close to the water until I drench the small hairs on the lobe... beseeching, mournful.  The men have bloated skin, and the women's hair has come loose and floats cloudlike behind them, sunnies and pumpkinseed-fish scattered in it... a man with my father's face, wrists blooming roses of blood... two brothers with frosted lashes an lips, ice skates on their feet, pounding at the surface as if it were glass... small Indian girl who looks at me with serene and unforgiving eyes as she floats, naked, bruises like plums on her thighs... young men in boater hats... Yes: everyday I see more of them, the drowned ones. It is perhaps not madness; they are so clear...

While Willie's description of swimming in the same waters, just a hundred years later, doesn't quite sit level with her modernity:

I felt an overwhelming sadness, a sudden memory of one time in high school when I slipped to the country club docks at midnight with my friends, and, giggling, naked, we went into the dark star-stippled water, and swam to the middle of the lake.  We treaded water there in the blackness, allof us fallen silent in the feeling of swimming in such perfect space.  I looked up and began to spin.  The stars streaked circular above me, my body was wrapped in the warm black, my hands had disappeared, my stomach was no longer.  I was only a head, a pair of eyes... even on that long-ago night, I could feel a trememdous thing moving in the depths below me, something vast and white and singing.

The difficulty is not the quality of the writing, per se, but its appropriateness to its subject.  The syntax is slightly off, given the text around it, and the constructions are archaic - 'my stomach was no longer'?  No longer what?  Like too many contemporary writers, Groff has a tendency to conflate nineteenth century syntax with meaningfulness, turning word order into a cheap signal of mystery and otherness. 

It irks me particularly because there is enough emotional power to be found in Willie's situation without pumping in the adjectives.  This is difficult to believe, I know.  The plot is heavily contrived - what mother in the world would encourage her adulterous daughter to work through her problems by chasing up her great-grandfathers at the local archives?  Not many, I imagine. But the idea of Willie's missing father is in the right place, and allows Monsters in to the heart of the difficulty we all have identity and belonging.  How delicate is that balance between our independence of spirit - our reckless tendency to raise that inappropriate eyebrow; our own carefully tended ambitions - and our yearning for roots, our desire to point backwards to the place we came from and feel that, yes, that is also part of me.  We march out into the world... 

And yet, we cling to these things.  We pretend to be able to understand. We need the idea of the first humanoid in North America though we will never find him; we need the mass of ancestors at our backs like ballast.  Sometimes, we feel it's impossible to push into the future without such a weight behind us, without such heaviness to keep us steady, even if it is imaginary.  And the more frightening the future is, the more complicated it seems to be,the more we steady ourselves with the past.  I looked at my father...and felt an impossible relief.  If it didn't matter, not really, that I had him at last.  It didn't matter, and yet, in my illogical, unfathomable heart, it did.  It was glad to have his real, breathing self on that long road behind me.  I was glad to know he was there.

We are all glad to know where we came from, I think; either that or we wish to know.  There is a reason why family history is now a multi-million pound industry - we place a high premium on digging up our fathers. 

~~Victoria~~

(NB: This post brought to you in spite of internet goblins, a computer virus and a geriatric laptop. Apologies for spelling mistakes or syntactical weirdness, I had to 'shoot the bridge' and rush to the finish line before everything went permanently kaput.)

Dog-paddling against the tide

So, last night I wrote a 2000 word post on Lauren Groff's debut novel, The Monsters of Templeton (as well as other things, like the tension between history and fiction, and the cliche of women's fiction).  I'd spent three hours writing it, on my day off, and I was quite pleased with it.  Then I foolishly clicked publish just as my internet connection died, and my laptop flipped out with the blue screen of death.  And everything I'd written was lost. Zap.  And I had only saved the draft at the half way point.

I didn't cry, but it was a close call.

I'm not ready to rewrite it yet, or tap out any other review either, so that will have to wait.  However, I did just finish Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: One Year of Seasonal Eating, and it is the sort of book that you don't so much review as recommend. So:

It is a very good book indeed. I enjoyed it immensely, partly because Barbara Kingsolver is an extroadinarily charming writer and partly because what she writes makes a whole world of sense about what is wrong with our food industry.  The book recounts the Kingsolver's family's (largely successful) attempt to eat locally, seasonally and organically for a whole year, and involves their moving from Arizona to Virginia in search of a sustainable, small-holding life style.  Yes, at times it comes across a little sappy, and maybe a little smugly too - we don't all have an acre in which to grow half a ton of tomatoes and enough chard to feed an army, or a meadow in which to graze free range chickens and turkeys - but mostly it is a paen to simplicity told in monthly installments, a rallying cry to eat as well and as ethically as possible.  It is a book about trying to make the right choices in the face of the incredible wrongness of 21st century Western diets.  There can't be much wrong with that, especially when so beautifully expressed.  Some of descriptive gardening passages are lovely, and because Kingsolver keeps her preaching at a minimum, it is difficult not to yearn for a big welcoming hug in her kitchen:

Good people eat. So do bad people, skinny people, fat people, tall and short ones.  Heaven help us, we will never master photosynthesis. Planning complex, beautiful meals and investing one's heart and time in their preparation is the opposite of self-indulgence.  Kitchen-based family gatherings are process-oriented, co-operative, and in the best of worlds, nourishing and soulful.  A lot of talk happens first, news exchanged, secrets revealed across generations, paths cleared. I have given and received some of my life's most important hugs with those big oven-mitts potholders on both hands.

It would be overwrought to suggest that this book will change your life, or to declare that it will has changed mine (any more than another book on this subject would, at least).  But it definitely provoked me to change some our household habits. We're only buying free-range chicken from now on, no matter how cheap the alternative; and we joined a local fruit/veg box schemes that delivers each week.  Both have been a revelation, and I have Barbara Kingsolver to thank for it in some small way. Is it sad that I'm looking forward to trying some of her recipes and feeling homely while I cook them?

I promise the Lauren Groff post when I've overcome my rage at loosing it the first time.

~~Victoria~~

Breaking Vessels

A sort of spiritual hush has come upon me since I moved in here; I don't want to do anything, I don't want to see anyone, there's nothing to dream about, I'm too idle to have ideas - but I'm not too idle to think: these are two different things, as you know very well yourself. Memories of childhood crowded in on me at first... wherever I went, whatever I looked at, they rose up from all sides, clear, clear to the tiniest details, and seemingly fixed in their sharp definition... Then these memories were replaced by others, then... then I gradually turned away from the past, and there only remained a sort of drowsy weight in my breast. Imagine! Sitting on a weir underneath a willow tree, all of a sudden I unexpectedly burst out crying.

[--'Faust']

The much-delayed second instalment of my Russian Reading Challenge list was the beautifully-packaged Hesperus volume, Faust, containing a pair of novellas - 'Faust' (1956) and 'Yakov Pasynkov' (1855) - by Ivan Turgenev (1818-83).

[For reference, Faust, italicised, will be used to refer to the volume as a whole, and 'Faust' for the individual novella.]

Turgenev is probably best known today for his excellent novel Fathers and Sons (1862), which explores and humanises contemporary divisions in political and social attitudes through the conflict between progressive/"nihilist" young Bazarov and his traditionalist father. (Parents thinking their children are hooligans lacking proper values and respect, and children thinking their parents are so boring and behind the times: one of the oldest stories in the world?) Turgenev was himself politically engaged, being a passionate opponent of serfdom - driven in part by guilt, perhaps, since he was born into a wealthy, landowning family. In the repressive political climate of the early 1850s, his writing on the latter subject forced him into exile in Europe, although ultimately his words apparently contributed to the Tsar's decision to abolish serfdom, in 1861. (I suspect that Russian writers getting exiled, for one reason or another, is likely to be an overarching theme of these posts...)

Turgenev came increasingly to admire Europe - he had also been a student in Berlin - and spent much of his later life there, often in the company of his long-time paramour, the actress Pauline Viardot (he never married). This stance was a source of tension in his relationships with his author-contemporaries like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, who considered Turgenev to be overly enamoured of Western ways. Both of the stories in Faust come from this turbulent period of Turgenev's life, surrounding his exile and return. Both of them have rather melancholic overtones, and each is deeply engaged with Western European - particularly German - literature, in variously referential (in 'Faust') or thematic (in 'Yakov Pasynkov') ways.

'Faust' is told through a series of letters, written by one Pavel Alexandrovich, a middle-aged scholar returned to his rural childhood home and duly wallowing in a mixture of nostalgia and lofty smugness, to his friend Semyon Nikolayich. While Pavel clearly now considers himself an educated urban sophisticate, risen above his origins, his return home re-opens old wounds, and his narrative is - as the quotation at the top of this post shows - if not quite artless then certainly open about his emotional vulnerabilities.

The most difficult of these old wounds, it turns out, is a remembered (and soon rekindled) childhood crush, whose object, Vera Nikolayevna, remains in the area and is now married with children. In his introduction, translator Hugh Aplin comments that Pavel's feelings probably reflect Turgenev's own, since at the time of writing he, too, had just returned to the scene of an old, doomed love affair (with Tolstoy's sister). Pavel recalls - in typically solipsistic style - how, as a youth, he became aware of his feelings, and how her mother, Yeltsova, put him off:

Finally, one morning, everything suddenly became clear to me. "What more I am to seek?" I thought. "Where am I to aspire? After all, the truth is hard to come by. Wouldn't I do better to stay here and get married?" And just imagine, this idea of marriage didn't scare me at all at the time. On the contrary, I was glad of it. Moreover, that same day I announced my intention, only not to Vera Nikolayevna, as might have been expected, but to Yeltsova herself. The old woman looked at me.

"No, my dear," she said, "you go to Berlin, do a little damage to yourself. You're kind; but a different sort of husband is needed for Vera."

I dropped my eyes, blushed, and, what will probably surprise you still more, inwardly concurred with Yeltsova straight away. I left a week later.

(As an aside, I do find the tendency of Turgenev's male protagonists, in both these novellas, to blush and cry and otherwise be demonstrative about their emotions quite fascinating; I wonder whether this is a reflection of different cultural gender norms, or another sign of how Romanticism influenced the author - on which more below - or both?)

The formidable Yeltsova, dead by the time of Pavel's return, overshadows the story in more ways than one:

In the drawing-room above the sofa hangs a portrait of that strange woman, amazingly like her. I was struck by it as soon as I went in. She seemed to be looking at me sternly and carefully. We sat ourselves down, reminisced about the old days, and little by little our conversation developed. I kept on involuntarily glancing at the gloomy portrait of Yeltsova. Vera Nikolayevna sat directly beneath it: that's her favourite place.

Vera's choice of seat is, of course, representative of how her mother has shaped her life and continued to do so. Growing up, Vera was forbidden to read any work of fiction, since Yeltsova

feared like the devil anything that might affect the imagination; and so her daughter, right up to the age of seventeen, had not read a single story, nor a single poem, whereas in geography, history and even in natural history she would quite often have me stumped - me, a graduate, and quite a good one, as you perhaps recall.

When Pavel meets Vera again in adulthood, he finds that she has continued to abide by her mother's preferences (because, she says, she believes that "'everything Mother did, everything she said, was the truth, the holy truth'"), and still has not read "'these invented works'". There is also a strong suggestion that being a wife and mother has left Vera with no space in her life for the luxury of reading, but naturally the unattached Pavel refuses to countenance this. He tells her, "'I'm convinced you're depriving yourself of the purest, most legitimate pleasure.'"

Before long - with her husband's indulgent blessing - Pavel cajoles her into reading both poetry and prose, including Goethe's Faust. Vera drinks it all in, and Pavel finds his appreciation for great writing boosted, and altered, by the fresh insight she brings. He, of course, trots out all the misogynistic cliches of his time, writing rapturously of her "innocence of a child [...] and an innate feeling for beauty", her "feminine charm" like "the white wings of an angel", and glossing their relationship as one in which he is"educating" her, and she changing him "without noticing it herself" - since a woman can only be edifying to a man through her purity of spirit, never through conscious intelligence, of course.

Although new worlds of imagination, aesthetics, and possibilities now open up to Vera, the emotional strain of all that Romanticism - and repressed romance with Pavel - takes a toll; Vera becomes "pale almost to the point of transparency [...] tried, inwardly disturbed" (something Pavel finds immensely "pretty") and suffers languidly:

"I've been awake all night," she told me. "I've got a headache; I came out into the air - perhaps it will pass."

"Surely it's not because of yesterday's reading?" I asked.

"Of course; I'm not used to it. In that book of yours there are things I simply can't escape from; I think they're what is burning my head so," she added, putting her hand to her forehead.

"That's splendid," I said, "but this is the bad part: I'm afraid this insomnia and headache might dispel your desire to read such things."

"Do you think so?" she said, and, in passing, broke off a wild jasmine twig. "God knows! It seems to me that anyone who once steps onto this road will never turn back."

Pavel is too self-absorbed, and too smitten ("How wretched I am! How I love her!" he writes), to see the warning signs; he is, moreover, undergoing a something of a mental paradigm shift of his own. Just as Vera finds new access to emotion through the imaginary, so Pavel discovers that there's nothing quite like the real thing:

Manon Lescauts, Fretillons - these were my idols. Such idols are easily smashed; but now... only now have I learned what it means to fall in love with a woman. I feel ashamed even to talk about it; but it is so. I feel ashamed... Love is, after all, egotism.

Like any good tortured Romantic hero, Pavel produces plenty of anguished tears and overwrought commentary (again, note the interestingly gendered gestures of emotion here):

I cannot re-read this letter; it has been torn from me involuntarily, like a groan. I cannot add anything, relate anything... Give me time: I'll come to my senses, take a hold on my soul, I'll speak to you like a man, but now I should like to lean my head on your breast and...

Naturally, the whole thing is palely doomed from the start, and the crisis point proves suitably melodramatic. One evening, the pair share a kiss ("our first and our last"), only for Vera to leap away "with an expression of horror in her widened eyes", having seen (imagined) a vision of her mother in her moment of bliss. She duly falls ill and wastes away, while Pavel angsts about - further adventures in solipsistic misogynistic cliche! - the fact that Vera was a "precious" vessel that he has "thoughtlessly" broken. (I was put in mind of nice, noble, strangleable Angel Clare in Tess of the D'Urbervilles.) Nineteenth century love, eh?

'Faust' is a rich, lucid example of its type that, in this reader's opinion, works all the better for being so short; it is much easier to appreciate and enjoy such intense, self-centred emotion when it is fleeting. The second novella, 'Yakov Pasynkov', packs a similar amount of compressed sensibility into its even briefer page count. The title character here is equally moved by poetry, but in a very different way than Pavel, even if the outcome of his tale is no less unhappy.

In the terminology of Turgenev's later essay 'Hamlet and Don Quixote' (1860), Pasynkov is the sincere, idealistic idiot savant - "ever cheerful in spirit" - to the brooding, self-absorbed Hamlet of the narrator (and of Pavel in 'Faust'). Again, in 'Yakov Pasynkov', the motive and emotive power of literature in the characters' lives is central, as is the nostalgic weight of the past and of lost youth; furthermore, a minor theme of 'Faust', that of the conflict between love and duty, between the individual and wider society, receives much greater attention. As Sofia, object of the narrator's thwarted affections, put it near the end:

"Our life does not depend on us; but we all of us have one anchor, from which, unelss you yourself wish it, you will never break away: a sense of duty."

Most of the story is taken up with an interlinked series of disastrous romantic tangles - everyone loves the wrong person, every misses opportunities through chance or others' deceit, etc. - that are greeted with the expected anguish and longing. But arguably the central love story of the piece, just like its thematically-contrasting personalities, lies between the title character and the unnamed narrator.

Pasynkov has been a dearly-loved and much-admired friend of our impetuous narrator since the pair were students together at a German-run boarding school. One day in their teenage years, out in the garden under the lilac bush, Pasynkov won the narrator's heart - I use the phrase advisedly - by reading him some of Schiller's poetry:

From that day, from that very reading, alone together in the garden in the shade of the lilac, I came to love Pasynkov with all my soul, became good friends with him and subordinated myself to him completely.

If Pavel is given to rapture when describing Vera in 'Faust', he has nothing on the narrator's extravagant infatuation for Pasynkov. One passage particularly struck me, both for how it conveys the transcendent power of reading (or hearing), and for, once again, the overtly 'feminine'-coded - that is, written in the mooning, swooning way that women are conventionally portrayed in such stories - response of the male narrator to the one who excites his admiration. It is worth quoting at length, I think:

But it was a particular joy for me to go for a walk alone with him or to pace up and down the room beside him as, without a glance at me, he recited poetry in his soft and focused voice. It truly seemed to me then that he and I were slowly, little by little, becoming detached from the earth and carried away somewhere, to some radiant, mysterious wonderland... I remember one evening. He and I were sitting under the same lilac bush: we had come to love that spot. All our fellows were already asleep, but we had got up quietly, fumbled our way into our clothes in the darkness and stolen outside 'to dream a little'. It was quite warm outside, but a fresh breeze blew at times and made us huddle still closer to one another. We talked, we talked a great deal and with fervour, so that we even interrupted each other, although we did not argue. Countless stars shone in the sky. Yakov raised his eyes and, gripping my hand, exclaimed softly:

'Above us

Heaven and the stars eternal...

And then above the stars their Maker...'

A reverential tremor ran through me; I turned quite cold and fell onto his shoulder... My heart was overflowing...

All this is seen, undoubtedly, through the rose-tinted gaze of a middle-aged man recalling the intensities of adolescence from the perspective of a jaded, stunted middle age.  But as a portrait of a friendship - and, arguably, something more - it is a beautiful piece of writing and much more compelling than any of the other supposedly romantic attachments in the story. That Pasynkov's charismatic idealism cannot long survive the rigours of the real, adult world will come as no surprise to anyone, I'm sure; while he remains cheerful to the end, end he does - in a high fever Romantic manner.

~~Nic

Two can play at that game

Or, Another piece of self-promotion in lieu of content. 

I finally finished my archives assignment last night - unfortunately I've exceeded the word count by 600 but, bah, I'm unrepentent - and so am planning on a relaxing, Wimbledon-fueled weekend. Strawberries and cream on the lawn and walks by the river and other English summer pursuits are planned, not to mention some much neglected reading.  So no reviewing this weekend I'm afraid; indeed, no typing of any kind.  I am going entirely computer free - it's going to be the printed word all the way!

However, I do have a little something to offer in the meantime.  Over the last few weeks I have been taking part in an email discussion about Adam Roberts' ninth novel, Swiftly, with fellow Strange Horizons reviewers Niall Harrison, Paul Kincaid and Dan Hartland.  Safe to say that we have all had rather different views on it - Niall and Dan admired it while I was largely sceptical and Paul hated it with a fiery passion.  The debate got rather heated at times (challenges issued; gloves thrown down, etc. etc.) and I think the end result is well worth a read, if you like that sort of thing.  You can find a transcript (very neatly edited by Niall) at Torque Control.

Let me fill you in on the book's synopsis:

It is 1848 and the British Empire has grown rich exploiting Lilliputian slaves - the finesse of their working allowing unheard of feats of minature engineering; even Babbage's computing device has been made to work.

But now the French have formed a regiment of previously peaceful Brobdingnagian giants and invasion looms.

In a world where humanity is both smaller and larger than it once was, love and hate loom large. Mankind discovers itself at the centre of scale. Lilliptians are twelve times smaller than us but there are those twelve times smaller than them, and twelve times smaller again and so on. And the scale of being goes up from Swift's giants also...

A rip-roaring 19th century adventure, a love story and a thought-provoking pre-atomic SF novel about our place in the universe.

[NB: Again, I shudder at the use of 'rip-roaring'. Ugh.]  Sounds good, yes? And parts of it were very, very good - the first two  sections were exactly the sort of scintallating pastiche that I would expect from Roberts.  But I found the third and fourth sections disappointing, for reasons I attempted to articulate in the email discussion.  Here is a snippet, cut to (hopefully) express my overall judgement on the book:

I think Swiftly fails because it wants to merge an early device - of fiction as a carrier for ideas - with a species of post-Victorian realism and a contemporary vision. It turns out to be like mixing oil and water, so that which ever way I look at the novel it has holes in it or strange growths sticking off it. Which makes for an interesting intellectual exercise, but not a strong, rounded novel. It would have been better, I think, had Swiftly jettisoned mimesis altogether and gone completely wild, throwing continuity and character to the wind. Better a complete disavowal of narrative traditions and the making of something new, than a clashing mismash of flesh-and-blood realism with puppet-characters and allegory. [....]The text does speaks, but only convincingly as regards theme and structure. These it ruminates over in abundance. I also think [...] that structure is meant to act as a function of character and plot. In this case, it is Roberts’ first cause, the God of his text; the structure of his world = the structure of the novel and its inhabitants. I just don’t think that it works.

With that, I leave you to your weekend. Have a good one.

~~Victoria~~