The Orange Prize award ceremony fast approacheth. Just 17 days to go (if I'm counting correctly), and I think, I really do think, that I'm going to make it and finish reading the longlist by the deadline. Which boggles my mind - when I said I was going to read it in full back in the distant days of April, I didn't actually believe myself. It never occurred to me that I might actually succeed. First, because 20 books is a lot of books to read in two months, even if you do have a headstart by having already tackled two of the longest ones. Second, because I've been teaching in the evenings this term, and trying to tie up my archives course at the same time, and so reading time has been limited. And third, because I'm generally not very good at finishing things. I adore setting myself reading plans, and drawing up lists, and having a strong sense of purpose; but nine times out of ten this is fleeting and I get distracted from one plan by the next plan and before I know it I'm hot on the heels of another project while its predecessor gets put back, and then put back some more, and then quietly forgotten.
If I'm honest that has almost happened with my longlist reading: an idea for a summer reading project has been bubbling away at the back of my mind for a couple of weeks and it has taken all of my will-power to keep the horses from bolting the stable. I have had to give myself a firm talking-to and focus myself on the remaining Orange books, and have managed it so far. The same cannot be said for my blogging. I may have read (or very nearly read) 16 of the Orange longlist but I have managed to blog about a measly seven of them. Shame on me. This is not for lack of opinions but rather a surfeit of them. I have wanted to write full length posts about all the books, and particularly about two of the shortlisters - The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver and The White Woman on the Green Bicycle by Monique Roffey. But the time has simply never presented itself, and when I have had a few hours to spare I have invariably spent them reading. In the knowledge that it is rather unlikely that I will manage to write about all the books in full (although hopefully I will manage at least the shortlisters), I am going to write some shorter thoughts on three of them now, in the name of catching up a little.
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I read Small Wars by Sadie Jones in the interstices of some very busy days, back now at the end of April. At first I found it quite disconcertingly slow, with none of the dark, verbose emotionality that I had admired in The Outcast. It could have been a novel by a different writer altogether. When I wrote about Jones' debut two years ago I made a lot of the way she strung long sentences together with the barest of connective tissue, and how well she used this to create pace and tension. I assumed at the time that this would become her trademark; that it wasn't so much a narrative choice as a full-blown writing style. But Small Wars couldn't be more different in that respect. It's plain, clipped sentences are less rambling hedgerow and more neat box hedges, at least at first. In context this makes sense, as the point of view characters here are two straitened, extremely English adults - Hal Treherne, a major stationed on Cyprus in the 1950s, and his young wife, Clara - rather than troubled teenagers. They are, if you like, the upstanding people that Lewis and Kit could have been, had they not suffered so terribly at the hands of their parents. Like I say, at first I found it positively soporific: the heat of Cyprus, the inevitability of the couple's stifled and conventional marriage, the slow unwinding of Hal's peace of mind in the face of atrocities commited by and against the island's nationalists. It all seemed rather obvious and, at times, too much like a thinly veiled analogy with Britain's more recent struggles with extremism and guerilla warfare in Afghanistan, with some marital angst thrown in. The narrator is painfully earnest about this on occasion:
'How is the Emergency this week?' and 'What should be done?' were the endless circular discussions at dinners from Government House to the mess at Episkopi, and never a solution and never, like the conflict itself, a final truth you could point to and say, 'There! A solution,' because what is a solution? History doesn't end. Places that are fought over are always fought over, and will always be fought over, and there will never be an end to it, and each conflict is just adding to the heap of conflicts that no one can remember starting and no one will ever, ever finish.
Then, unaccountably, the story gained momentum at the mid-way point and the book became something altogether different and unexpected as Jones' changed key, tapping deep into Hal and Clara's repressed emotions. Again, there is nothing particularly revelatory in it - like The Outcast, Small Wars follows a well-trod thematic path - but Jones' is so good at drawing out the subtleties of the relationship between the couple, that it is impossible not to invest in them. The issue of Hal's conscience, and the growing conflict he feels between his duty to his uniform and his duty to humanity is particularly moving and well-explored. By the end I felt that Jones' had done it again: written an extraordinarily accomplished and powerful book in disguise. Not shortlist material perhaps, but definitely worthy of a longlist place and a wide readership (which no doubt it will get).
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I have had a cursory dabble in Clare Clark's work before. About a year ago I picked up her first book, The Great Stink, and read about twenty pages of it before I set it aside with a lack of enthusiasm. I thought it had a stodgy, verbose and staged beginning, and that turned me off. So, although the synopsis of her third book Savage Lands caught my interest - twenty-three young women are shipped off to Louisiana as 1704's answer to the mail-order bride - I was uncertain about it. I feared that Clark was one of those historical novelists steeped in research who never quite manages to breath human life into their scenes; these fears, I'm glad to say, were utterly groundless. By the time I finished Savage Lands I was a complete convert to Clark's (admittedly unusual) charms. I wasn't always so enthusiastic about it thought. I almost gave up on the book twice, at the 50 page mark and then again at 100. It wasn't that the writing was bad; on the contrary Clark's prose is dense but deliciously rich, like a good, bitter dark chocolate. She excels at describing objects, and tactile experiences, and places. Her descriptions of Louisiana seen through the eyes of our headstrong protagonists, Elizabeth Savaret and Auguste Guichard, are a total immersion experience. Will you excuse a quote at length? Here is Clark describing the Mississippi river:
It eased through the throttle of swamp and forest like a great yellow snake, languid and muscular, exhaling the thick reeks of fertility and decay. In La Rochelle the frontier between water and land was sharply drawn, marked out by the perpendiculars of cliff and castle wall. The savages' river knew no such boundaries. It sprawled tideless in the sleeping waters of creeks and bayous and seeped into the swamps and forests, where its dark quiescence gave the illusion of solid earth. Everywhere a frenzy of vegetation erupted from its skin, propelled by a fierce and vulgar prodigiousness. Even in winter the curves and plans of the landscape disappeared beneath a dissipation of trees, bushes, vines, canes, mosses, ferns and flabby fungi. Roots and branches twisted over one another, coiling and clasping in a thousand sinuous embraces... On warm days the air throbbed with the shameless fecundity of it.
Powerful stuff, and enjoyable too. But I cannot live on the sensual pleasure of description alone, or at least not over the course of 376 pages; the problem was that I didn't connect with either Elizabeth or Auguste for the first third of the book. This is partly, I think, because the narrative is fragmentary, and leaps between the two of them leaving huge gaps in our knowledge of their lives, emotions and motives. We barely have chance to get to know them, so that they appear dwarfed by the magnificent and terrifying surroundings in which they live. In one chapter we are with Elizabeth as she revels in unexpected and intoxicating lust for her new husband, Jean-Claude Babelon; in the next we are with fifteen year old Auguste, who has been left amongst the Ouma tribe by the colony's commandant and charged with learning their language. He too falls under Jean-Claude's spell when Babelon visits the native village in his capacity as an ensign. Barely a chapter later the three have been brought togther, and years have past; Elizabeth has had several painful miscarriages, and Auguste has become a man.
It is also partly because the narrative wrong-footed me, and led me to believe that Jean-Claude Babelon was the driving force of the book. It is an easy trap to fall into - he is the lode-star of both Elizabeth and Auguste's worlds, a bright and beguiling thing to cling to in the face of undeniable hardship and loneliness. It was only after it became clear to me that he was nothing but a cog in the machine of the plot, and that it was the relationship between Elizabeth, Auguste and Louisiana that mattered, that I began to connect with what I was reading. It turns out that this is not really a novel about love, but a novel about the limits of human endurance, and our capacity to survive life sustained by determination and persistance alone. It is a story deeply rooted in the historical period it describes, and also in the colonial mentality. I have a feeling that, if I had been a judge reading it for the second time, it would have found its way onto my shortlist. Which is quite a turn-around from my nearly giving up on it entirely. I'll definitely be digging out my copy of The Great Stink and taking a second look.
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It isn't often that I read something as determinedly experimental as Eleanor Catton's The Rehearsal. It is the kind of book that opens your eyes to how timid and conventional most contemporary fiction has become. Catton isn't Virginia Woolf but while I was reading her debut I was reminded of reading Jacob's Room for the first time, and that electric shock of originality, when you realise that stories can be told in entirely new ways. I can see why the cover of my paperback is covered with plaudits: 'wholly different from anyone else writing today', 'astonishing', 'formidable talent'. Here we have a story about the development of a play by a group of first-year drama students, who decide to take as their subject matter a sex scandal at the local girls school. This scandal may or may not have happened; and the play may be about it or may be it.
Basically it is told in two strands, alternating chapter by chapter. The first follows a group of school-girls in the aftermath of the sex scandal, all of whom take music lessons with a morally ambigious and unnamed 'Saxophone teacher'. There is Isolde, whose older sister Victoria may or may not have had sex with the Jazz band conductor Mr Saladin; and Bridget, who tries too hard to impress and wishes she was Isolde; and Julia, who is older and is (probably) struggling with lesbian feelings for Isolde. The second follows drama student Stanley, one of only twenty hopefuls selected to join the local Institute for actors, as he and his fellow students prepare their end of year show, taking the affair between Mr Saladin and Victoria as inspiration. Each section is carved up into slices headed with days of the week or months of year, but the narrative is not linear, so that the story is fragmentary and circular, often returning to continue scenes begun several chapters earlier or cutting off and never returning. It is told in such a way as to confuse reality and artifice, to the extent that there is no point in trying to sort out who is acting and who is genuine. In the world of The Rehearsal there is no such thing. All the characters respond to life as though they are taking invisible cues, and facing an imaginary but constantly present audience; they speak exactly what is in their minds, no matter how inappropriate, and often articulate their sub-conscious or unconscious feelings in frankly bizarre exchanges. From the beginning it is clear that the characters - or should I call them actors? - are talking to us, the audience, rather to each other.
It is playful and very clever, but also terrifying, as the meaning and motives of the characters' actions are questioned and steadily eroded until what we are left with are vacuous performances. As the Head of Movement at the Institute tells Stanley:
'Every year there's someone like you, Stanley,' he said. 'And someone just like you will come along and fill the hole that you leave when you move on. Every word that comes out of your mouth - they're just lines. They're lines that you've learned very carefully, so carefully, you've convinced yourself they are yours, but that's all they are. They're lines I've heard many times before.' The Head of Movement tossed his head suddenly and snapped, 'Why don't you see me when you look? I could ask that of all my students. All my selfish cookie-cutter students who troop in and out each year like a dead-water tide.'
It accumulates into a powerful statement about our increasingly performative society, in which it has become normal to 'perform' an experience for an audience at the same time as experiencing it personally. So we tweet and blog and update our Facebook profiles, acting out our lives at the same time as living them, to the point where the act of communicating an action validates it, gives it meaning. At the same time it offers a sickening glimpse of the vulnerability and pretentiousness of teenagers, of their confused yearnings and hyperactive imaginings. All this and Eleanor Catton is only 25 years old. It is a very impressive performance from her too.
But having said all that, I'm not sure that I enjoyed the book. This, I know, is probably as much about my impatience with the manipulation of teenagers in literature - from Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye to Curtis Sittenfield's Prep - as anything else. It is not as if we're supposed to connect with any of the characters, but I found myself to yearning to pin them down to some concrete emotions. Julia's nascent fumblings with Isolde, and the intimations of the Saxophone teacher's own lesbian fantasies, left me feeling unfulfilled; and, although the untimely death of one character was a masterful stroke, it also felt a little unearned. There is also be an element of fear; The Rehearsal made me feel afraid. Afraid, that is, of the tenuousness of meaning in our lives, and the impossibility of objective experience. Not, I think, one for my personal shortlist, although I remain thoroughly, if fearfully and disquietedly, impressed by its postmodern virtuosity.
~~Victoria~~