Year: 2017

This is the last novel in a quintet I wrote about at great length here.  I’ve not got a great deal to add, except to say how incredibly more-ish it is.  I would happily read five more.  It’s like mainlining plot.  I  must just say how deeply annoying this review is in the Guardian:

And yet there remains something deeply and comfortingly old-fashioned about what we are told will be the last slice of Cazalet life. . .  it cleaves to the reassuring form of the family drama, in which people come and go, get born and die off, fall in and out of love, and either stay firmly on track or go spectacularly off the rails. Even in 1990, it was hardly innovative, and now, despite our Downton-friendly, pastiche-loving times, it is difficult to imagine many more novels like this appearing. . 

I suspect this person of being a judge on that waste-of-time prize the Booker, which just loves to reward ‘innovation’ in novelistic form – ie, the pretense that books are better without plots.   This is all nonsense.  I bet if you asked this person what their family was like, they would reply exactly as above – people come and go, fall in and out of life, etc.  LIFE IS PLOT.  And I bet this person, just like everyone else who ever lived, doesn’t like hearing other people describe their dreams (” . . and then the horse turned into a handbag . . “).  And why is that? BECAUSE PLOTLESS STORIES ARE BORING

I probably should not have begun this book by reading the Introduction by the author.  She described the book as a ‘modern classic,’ which it may or may not be, but it is certainly not something you can say about your own book.  It is like admitting you are pretty: no one with even basic social skills would do that.  Also, she dwells extensively in the Introduction on the deeply obvious point that there is a fine line between autobiography and fiction.  Anyone who feels this needs to be re-stated is, in my opinion, not very bright.  I KNOW I AM SO HORRIBLE BUT IT IS HOW I FEEL.

Introduction aside, there were some elements of the book that I enjoyed.  It’s about a young girl being brought up by an eccentric and fervent Christian mother, and is often very funny. Here, for example, is where she goes to see a girl she admires who works at a fish stand:

Week after week I went back there, just to watch.
Then one week she wasn’t there any more. 
There was nothing I could do but stare and stare at the welks.  Whelks are strange and comforting.
They have no notion of community life and they breed very quietly.
But they have a strong sense of personal dignity.
Even lying face down in a tray of vinegar, there is something noble about a whelk.

One can’t deny this is hilarious.  However while the main story is engaging and fun, unfortunately there are also long stretches of – get ready for it –  disconnected fragments of fairy tales.  I know! It’s worse than dream sequences.  I showed her by skipping these bits entirely.  Modern classic indeed.

Once upon a time a young man was savouring the pleasures of a new car.  He was thinking that there were really occasions when a car seemed to drive itself as it were, seemed to respond to some remote stimulus independent of the driver.  It had its moments of cursedness, of course, when it whined and snorted for no particular reason, then there were moments of heavenly smoothness when it floated on the crest of some intangible wave . . . It was like when you have gone into a woman.  Some of the time is taken up with clumsy flopping about; trying futilely to find the perfect position and rhythm.  Then there are moments of complete synchronization of limbs which seem to come about without effort.

It was going to be one of those mad, mad Mondays in Lagos, when motor traffic was snarled up all over the town in hot, murky despairing stretches.  The people who owned cars all observed the ritual of the beginning of the week with religious fervour.  On Monday, after the weekend interruption, they resumed the grim scramble for crusts that feel off the tables of the great of the earth. 

For instead of continuing to function and perhaps getting the better of time and circumstances, he simply allowed them to take the initiative and suppress him.  In life as in sports the important thing is not to win but to go on performing.

(Christianity) offered the negative values of self-denial and humility.  These values were contrary to his concept of himself.  And they were certainly not of much use to his people.  Self-denial was not much of an achievement, if you were born in circumstances under which it was inescapable. . . . An attitude of stoicism was possibly the best response to such a hard life but it would be cruel to try to make what was obviously a heavy burden appear like a virtue. . . . But if intellectually he had drawn away from Christianity, emotionally he was attracted back.  Especially during his period of despair.  Christianity was invented by underdogs for underdogs.  And Onuma had become one of the deprived of the earth.

Well let’s file this under DROP EVERYTHING AND START READING THIS.   It’s a story about love, and youth, but also – in a complicated way – about age, and loss.  It is on the face of it a tale of a few weeks in the lives of a pair of young lovers, but is somehow also a story about their whole lives, and about how rare happiness is, and how impossible to hold on to. 

At first the enjoyment of the book is in the vivid reconstruction of a teenage crush.  I had forgotten how painful and horrible that experience is, and it makes me glad to be a grown-up.  The crush is conducted in utter secrecy, as this is the mid-eighties in Italy and the pair are both men.  This reminds us that while first love is awful, forbidden first love is far worse.  Elio, the younger of the two, experiences wild excitement and horrible self-consciousness.   Here he is reflecting on something the other man, Oliver, has said to him in passing:

“If not later, when?” What if he had found me out and uncovered each and every one of my secrets with those four cutting words?  I had to let him know I was totally indifferent to him

Oliver returns to America at the end of the summer and eventually we hear he is going to marry. Elio’s father comforts him as he tries to deal with this news:

If there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don’t snuff it out, don’t be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we’d want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything – what a waste!

Elio goes to see Olive many years later, to find the feeling is still alive between them:

.. . we’ll speak about two young men who found much happiness for a few weeks and lived the remainder of their lives dipping cotton swabs into that bowl of happiness, fearing they’d use it up, without daring to drink more than a thimbleful on ritual anniversaries

The day I finished the book I went to the cinema to watch the movie.  I just somehow needed to go through it again, and, despite my summary in the first paragraph, I’m still not sure quite what to take from it. I think its something about how happiness is elusive, and to be treasured; I think it’s also about death; but I can’t quite put it into words.  I see that the author is a noted Proustian scholar, and that doesn’t surprise me at all, though I couldn’t say why exactly either. Read it and let me know what you think.  

What I got from this book is that Stephen Fry is a very nice man in fairly urgent need of an editor.  I collected this book from a pile given away for free on the street, and read it when I ran out of books I’d actively chosen.  Keeping a sufficient flow of books arriving sometimes feels like a least a part-time job.  

The book covers Fry’s time at university and the first few years afterwards. This is a brief period, but somehow takes 400 pages to tell.  This is partly because he has so much success to recount.  It is hard not to read this as a story of privilege and victory, as Fry has an agent before he leaves university and is thereafter almost always in work, going from television to West End to journalism.   

What cuts the honey is the vinegar of Fry’s sadness.  I have heard he suffers from depression, and I can believe it, based on this book.  He takes an extraordinarily bleak view of many topics.  He deeply romanticises Cambridge and after a long lyrical piece on punting on May mornings, here he is: 

Don’t be too hard on them. Suppress the thought that they are all ghastly tosspots who don’t know they’re born, insufferable poseurs in need of a kick and a slap. Have some pity and understanding. They will get that kick and that slap soon enough. After all, look at them now. They are all in their fifties some of them on their third, forth or fifth marriage. Their children despise them. They are alcoholics or recovering alcoholics. Drugs addicts or recovering drug addicts. Their wrinkles, grey, bald, furrowed and fallen faces look back every morning from the mirror, those folds of dying flesh bearing not a trace of the high, joyful and elastic smiles that once lit them. Their lives have been a ruin and a waste. All that bright promise never quite matured into anything that can be looked back on with pride or pleasure. They took that job in the city, that job with merchant bank, stockbroker, law firm, accountancy firm, chemical company, drama Company, publishing company, any company. The light and energy, the passion, fun and faith were soon snuffed out one by one. In the grind of the demanding world their foolish hopeful dreams evaporated like mist in the cruel glare of the morning sun. Sometimes the dreams return to them at night and they are so ashamed, disappointed that they want to kill themselves. Once they laughed and seduced or were seduced, on ancient lawns, under ancient stones and now they hate the young and their music, they snort with contempt at everything strange and new and they have to catch their breath at the top of the stairs.

This is an extraordinarily dark view of life after college, and makes me feel very sad for Fry. 

Less sad, more revolting, as if often the case of memoirs on professions that require your parents to have money to (politics, arts, media), is the tinyness of the world involved.  The same small set of people are involved from university onwards. This is the UK for you, and I am fairly inured to it by now.  Not Fry’s fault of course, and he name drops absolutely as lightly as possible, but still hard to swallow.   

I had a bit of a DEFCON 5 moment while on holiday in Cyprus when I ran out of reading matter.  I borrowed a book from our host for a day at the beach, choosing a re-reread, Stella Gibbon’s classic COLD COMFORT FARM.  I recalled this as being a delightful, easy read, about the power of a comic worldview.  It tells the story of a young woman who goes to live with her relatives in a farmhouse that is a sort of mix of the worst of Hardy, Bronte, and Laurence.  She resolves the various issues – incest, madness, etc –  with a jolly mix of common sense and cleanliness. 

I have a distinctly elderly version of this book, bought in a charity shop. The back cover tells us, with what I read as an air of embarrassingly incredulity:  “The hero of this blistering, mightily successful first novel, like its author, is an American negro.” 

It is indeed a famous piece of African American literature, and so I wanted to like it, and at first I thought I did.  I early realised that disappointingly it is not in fact about a man who was not visible, but despite this, the beginning was still very interesting.  The lead character, who is eager for formal education, is expelled from university (for complicated reasons, largely but indirectly to do with race) and moves to New York. There follows a search for employment, and time at a paint factory -and then for me the novel started to off the rails.  There is some kind of electroshock therapy, and then some kind of strange secret political organisation, and then I lost interest.  As a teenager I would have had the discipline to push through, but as an adult I know when a book is going to bore me, and I am just not dutiful enough to the canon anymore to keep going.  I am not sure if I should be happy about that or not.   

Since Maria had decided to die, her cat would have to fend for itself.  She’d already cared for it far beyond the point where keeping a pet made any sense. Rats and mice had long since been trapped and eaten by the villagers. Domestic animals had disappeared shortly after that. All except for one, this cat, her companion which she’d kept hidden. Why hadn’t she killed it? She needed something to live for; something to protect and love – something to survive for. She’d made a promise to continue feeding it up until the day she could no longer feed herself. That day was today. She’d already cut her leather boots into thin strips, boiled them with nettles and beetroot seeds. She’d already dug for earthworms, sucked on bark. This morning in a feverish delirium she’d gnawed the leg of her kitchen stool, chewed and chewed until there were splinters jutting out of her gums 

I am told that he posed several groups before the cinematograph, though obliged repeatedly to retire to the ship’s side.  Yesterday he was developing plates with the developing dish in one hand and an ordinary basin in the other!

The seas were continually breaking over these people and now and again they would be completely submerged.  At such times they had to cling for dear life to some fixture to prevent themselves being washed overboard, and with coal bags and loose cases washing about, there was every risk of such hold being torn away

Some 6 or 7 killer whales, old and young, were skirting the fast floe edge ahead of the ship; they seemed excited and dived rapidly, almost touching the floe. As we watched, they suddenly appeared astern, raising their snouts out of water. I had heard weird stories of these beasts, but had never associated serious danger with them. Close to the water’s edge lay the wire stern rope of the ship, and our two Esquimaux dogs were tethered to this. I did not think of connecting the movements of the whales with this fact, and seeing them so close I shouted to Ponting, who was standing abreast of the ship. He seized his camera and ran towards the floe edge to get a close picture of the beasts, which had momentarily disappeared. The next moment the whole floe under him and the dogs heaved up and split into fragments. One could hear the ‘booming’ noise as the whales rose under the ice and struck it with their backs. Whale after whale rose under the ice, setting it rocking fiercely; luckily Ponting kept his feet and was able to fly to security. By an extraordinary chance also, the splits had been made around and between the dogs, so that neither of them fell into the water. Then it was clear that the whales shared our astonishment, for one after another their huge hideous heads shot vertically into the air through the cracks which they had made. As they reared them to a height of 6 or 8 feet it was possible to see their tawny head markings, their small glistening eyes, and their terrible array of teeth–by far the largest and most terrifying in the world. There cannot be a doubt that they looked up to see what had happened to Ponting and the dogs . . . Of course, we have known well that killer whales continually skirt the edge of the floes and that they would undoubtedly snap up anyone who was unfortunate enough to fall into the water; but the facts that they could display such deliberate cunning, that they were able to break ice of such thickness (at least 2 1/2 feet), and that they could act in unison, were a revelation to us. It is clear that they are endowed with singular intelligence, and in future we shall treat that intelligence with every respect.

The great trouble with (the dogs) has been due to the fatuous conduct of the penguins. Groups of these have been constantly leaping on to our floe. . .  They waddle forward, poking their heads to and fro in their usually absurd way, in spite of a string of howling dogs straining to get at them. ‘Hulloa,’ they seem to say, ‘here’s a game–what do all you ridiculous things want?’ And they come a few steps nearer. The dogs make a rush as far as their leashes or harness allow. The penguins are not daunted in the least,. .  . and then the final fatal steps forward are taken and they come within reach. There is a spring, a squawk, a horrid red patch on the snow, and the incident is closed.

Titus Oates is very near the end, one feels. What we or he will do, God only knows. We discussed the matter after breakfast; he is a brave fine fellow and understands the situation, but he practically asked for advice. Nothing could be said but to urge him to march as long as he could. One satisfactory result to the discussion; I practically ordered Wilson to hand over the means of ending our troubles to us, so that anyone of us may know how to do so. Wilson had no choice between doing so and our ransacking the medicine case. We have 30 opium tabloids apiece and he is left with a tube of morphine. So far the tragical side of our story.

The sky completely overcast when we started this morning. We could see nothing, lost the tracks, and doubtless have been swaying a good deal since—3.1 miles for the forenoon—terribly heavy dragging—expected it. Know that 6 miles is about the limit of our endurance now, if we get no help from wind or surfaces. We have 7 days’ food and should be about 55 miles from One Ton Camp to-night, 6 × 7 = 42, leaving us 13 miles short of our distance, even if things get no worse. Meanwhile the season rapidly advances.

Lost track of dates, but think the last correct. Tragedy all along the line. At lunch, the day before yesterday, poor Titus Oates said he couldn’t go on; he proposed we should leave him in his sleeping-bag. That we could not do, and induced him to come on, on the afternoon march. In spite of its awful nature for him he struggled on and we made a few miles. At night he was worse and we knew the end had come.

Should this be found I want these facts recorded. Oates’ last thoughts were of his Mother, but immediately before he took pride in thinking that his regiment would be pleased with the bold way in which he met his death. We can testify to his bravery. He has borne intense suffering for weeks without complaint, and to the very last was able and willing to discuss outside subjects. He did not – would not – give up hope to the very end. He was a brave soul. This was the end. He slept through the night before last, hoping not to wake; but he woke in the morning – yesterday. It was blowing a blizzard. He said, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’ He went out into the blizzard and we have not seen him since.

In the end, they die just 11 miles from base camp.  Their compatriots find them dead when the summer comes, with the diaries, and various terribly sad letters to their families and friends. 11 miles!  It’s makes me sad again just blogging it.  For Scott there is much consolation in the valour of human endurance and death with honour. 

We are showing that Englishmen can still die with a bold spirit, fighting it out to the end. 

 It’s 1912, so there hadn’t been a European war in century, and this long period of peace is perhaps why he felt that this was something that needed proving.  It was going to be proved a lot from 1914 onwards.  Indeed, many of the men who survive the trip to the Antartic also serve in the trenches, and if they made it through the former don’t usually make it through the latter.  It adds another layer of shadow to the story.

 I read the journals while on holiday on a hot beach, so Scott’s life couldn’t feel more different from mine.  But it’s so very human.  Here’s a comforting piece from an earlier diary he thought people would never see. 

 What a pleasure it must be when the right word is forthcoming at the right place, or when without trouble argument succeeds argument  .  . . I write of the future; of the hopes of being more worthy; but shall I ever be – can I alone, poor weak wretch that I am, bear up against it all.  The daily round, the petty annoyances, the ill health, the sickness of heart – how can one fight against it all.  No one will ever see these words, therefore I may freely write – what does it all mean?