Author: sarahwp

This book tells the story of a doctor assigned to a hospital on the Eastern Front in the First World War.  It is in a ruined church in the mountains, and the doors are all bolted not for fear of soldiers, but for fear of wolves.  The doctor is in fact just a medical student who skipped a lot of classes and has no practical experience, so he learns on the job from a nun who is a nurse there. 

It’s pretty hair-raising, as all novels of the First World War are, and likewise suffers very much by comparison to ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, as all novels of the First World War do, the towering achievement that that book is having basically trumped forever any efforts in this department.  That said, I did learn some interesting things from it. 

First, one forgets that the Hapsburg Empire was an Empire, and a big one; I guess I was born on the side of the winners of that war, and so have not been brought up to know much about the losers.  Second, I learnt that lice was a really serious issue; people did not take their clothes off for months and the itching was maddening.  I went down something of an internet blackhole on this one, and – fun fact: the expression ‘having a chat’ comes from the lice problem in this war.  Soldiers called them ‘chats’ and used to spend huge time sitting around talking to each other while they burnt them out of the seams of their clothes.  Third, I learnt some more about shell shock.  Affected people literally could not stand up, their legs getting all wiggly and rubbery, or suddenly went blind and/or deaf (not biologically, but genuinely).  You can find videos of it online, and it’s more shocking than you would think.  I can’t even imagine what you could see that would be so bad you would be unable to walk afterwards.  I sincerely hope that I never find out.  Lastly, I learnt more than I wanted to about the terrible practice of Anbinden.  This is where someone accused of cowardice would be tied to a tree for a few hours.  Doesn’t sound so bad, except it’s -20C. 

In the end, SPOILER ALERT the doctor ends up sleeping with the nun, and then is separated from her by the fortunes of war, and then searches for her for two years and finds her but she has moved on – to an ex-shell shock patient of his about whom he felt guilty.  I think it is supposed to feel redemptive. 

I enjoyed this book overall, despite the ending.  It had a strong narrative, and an interesting and well-researched world.  Funny to say though, I know I will forget it almost immediately.  I think this is because it has a kind of emptiness to it.  I’ve found this before, where a book that ticks all the boxes – narrative, tone, character – and yet you don’t care.  My theory is that this is because a book needs to be about something else than narrative and character; it needs to have an idea behind it, of some kind – an emotional centre or theme that sits outside the story.  Like LESS is about making peace with yourself; and CALL ME BY YOUR NAME is about regret; I couldn’t say what this one is about.  But at least I know now all about lice and Anbinden.

Yes, the Heyer kick is still ongoing. And this is still the books bought in a dusty second hand store on a rain day. 

Heyer here tries to veer from her standard plot outline, with unhappy results.  This one is a story about a couple who marry for convenience (one for money, one for a title), and end up in love anyway.  Sounds unlikely as a plot, and indeed it doesn’t really work.  However, who cares: it has narrative drive and fun, which is what you really want anyway.

It’s always a gamble to try a 1930s sci fi.  Especially when it is in addition a satire on global politics.  And especially when the author is mostly famous for a another book  (Actually a play, RUR, which gave us the word robot).  The heavy emphasis on lizards is also not a good sign.

This was a gamble that paid off.  WAR WITH THE NEWTS is a very strange, very contemporary book, that is made up of bits and pieces of news reports, scientific studies, and ordinary narrative.  It begins with the discovery of some large undersea lizards, whose population is kept small by shark attacks.  A crusty old sea captain discovers they are teachable, and once they have knives, the shark problem is very much handled and their population explodes.  Humans find lots of uses for the newts, especially in construction and manufacturing.

Being humans, we also of course conduct terrible experiments on them, or try to educate them, or get them to cover their genitals.  Slowly it becomes clear to everyone that the newts are building up armaments under water, but the countries can’t agree to do anything about it, as they are all solving for short term self-interest rather than long term human survival.  It doesn’t end well. 

I find it interesting that Capek wrote it as a satire in the lead up to the Second World War, because it is depressingly relevant to the following current problems: imperialism, Trump, climate change.  Especially climate change.  I guess we don’t change so much. 

On the back of this book, one of its critics describes it as: “Lives of the Saints retold by Karl Ove Knausgaard.” My initial thought was: what?  

Pliny discovers that the civic religion is in decline, the temples are empty, no one at the marketplace wants to buy meat that’s been sacrificed to the gods, and from what he’s gathered, the principal reason for this . . . is the success of a sect he’s never heard of before: the disciples of Christus.  They get to together in secret.  Pliny’s chief of staff thinks it’s to have group sex.  . . . (Pliny) makes inquiries, sends someone, and the results of his investigations are disconcerting.  When they get together, these people limit themselves to sharing a frugal meal, smiling, and singing hymns.  So much mildness is worrying.  Pliny would have preferred debauchery, but he has to face the facts: no one’s sleeping with anyone.

It’s amazing, really.  The power of ideas to change the world is something really remarkable. 

I also learnt a lot about other philosophies in competition with Christianity at that time.  Enjoy this as a last snippet, which should make you think twice about our own capitalist world:

Whether Epicureans or Stoics, all the wise men taught that fortune is changing, unpredictable, and that we must be ready to lose all we have without a murmur.  None of them, however, would have recommended or even entertained the idea of getting rid of it on purpose.  They all considered what they called otium – that is, leisure and the free use of one’s time – to be an absolute condition of human accomplishment.  Seneca, one of Paul’s most famous contemporaries, says something quite nice on that topic: if by some mischance he were reduced to working for a living, no big deal; he’d just kill himself.

After reading this book, I realised I’ve read another book by this same author: THE ADVERSARY.  Memoir? History?  No, it’s a straightforward piece of true crime.  This author is truly kooky. It gives me hope for the world of publishing. 

Yes I read another one.  I should have been reading ‘modern classic’ THE KINGDOM by Emmanuel Carrere, but honestly, what can you do?  Sometimes you just want to read trashy fun. 

It is possible to buy Georgette Heyer books on Amazon, but this is not the right and proper place to buy them.  This one I bought in a dusty second hand book store.  Amazing.  It was even rainy at the time.  Wonderful.  I only went into the store to dry off my coat.  Ideal.  For bonus points, it was in the old Regency town of Lyme Regis (bonus points for you if you know what major Regency novel this town features in). 

Also note the edition.  Of late there has been an effort to republish Heyer with tasteful covers and quotes from respectable authors.  I don’t begrudge this effort on the part of her estate to make money, but this is frankly not the right and proper way to read them.  You need old editions, with cover designs that just drip with contempt for the imagined female reader.  You also need a dusty, dodgy smell.  Suffice to say, this edition met these standards and then some. 

I used to read Heyer a lot as a teenager, but I only restarted in the last year or so.  I read this curled up in a bed in on holiday while it rained.  I won’t bother to tell you what it’s about, they’re always about the same thing.  This  is not why you are reading it.  It’s because when you look up at the end of the book, your afternoon has disappeared, and the rain has cleared. 

I liked Rooney’s first book CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS so much that after I finished reading it Ire-read it immediately  I don’t like this one, her second, quite as much. That said, I started reading it at 11pm and then somehow forgot to stop.  I can’t remember the last time I read a book in a single sitting, especially overnight.  So when I say I didn’t like it quite as much, this is more a compliment to CONVERSATIONS than a commentary on NORMAL PEOPLE.

NORMAL PEOPLE tells the story of Marianne and Connell. They meet in high school, where she is wealthy but not popular, and he is the reverse.  He gets to know her because his mum is her mum’s cleaner.  They start having sex, but he insists on keeping it secret, and eventually invites a girl who is always rather horrible to Marianne to the school dance.  Marianne does not take this well.  It sounds like the kind of drama that can happen in high school which is easy for adults to dismiss, but in this telling it is horrible and affecting, much like it is when this kind of thing actually happens to you in high school.  The pair split up and then meet again in college, and their relationship is off and on again over a number of years.  

There is a not very successful sub-plot about Marianne’s abuse at the hands of her mother, much like the not very successful ‘self harm’ sub-plot in CONVERSATIONS.  I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that perhaps the author feels like we need some kind of damage to get us to care about a character.  The end also is not so very successful for me – it wants to be a happy ending, but somehow Rooney can’t quite let it be. Whatever, these have got to be minor caveats because the fact remains I stayed up till 3am on it.  To tell you the truth, I was shocked when I looked at the clock, amazed that it had been four hours instead of five minutes.  

What I find particularly joyful about it I think is that Rooney is a young (twenty six!) and the book feels like a young person’s book; and yet it is at the same time delightfully Victorian.  Unlike much modern writing, which feels itself superior to such boring antiques as plot, or character, here is a writer who clearly loves a narrative.  She describes for example how agitated Connell feels when he has to stop reading Austen’s EMMA, and comments:

It feels intellectually unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying each other. But there it is: literature moves him. One of his professors calls it the pleasure of being touched by great art.

Undoubtedly a pleasure I had from this book

This book won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002.  It’s readable and engaging, but for a book that is not in fact that old it seems very elderly.  It is a straightforward slice of life of a divorced man in a small town, and is full of guilt about his mother, and a bitter ex-wife, and his love for his daughter and etc etc.  I didn’t dislike it that much while reading it, but I guess in retrospect I sort of did.  It was a good display of a sort kind of narrative, but to my mind not much beyond that.  I didn’t feel there was much new about it, in terms of ideas, or characters, or setting.  I wasn’t sure what the point was, really.

I will make this minor sidepoint.  The author clearly thinks women in their forties are past it, and know themselves to be so, which is weird, and contributes to the dated feel not a little.  It reminded me of SEX AND THE CITY, which I caught on TV the other day.  There is a lot of emphasis about how if you are not married by thirty you are on the shelf, which seems laughable today.  I’m so glad I wasn’t born any earlier. 

I am not quite sure why it is I like Graham Greene’s novels so much.  If his novels are described – all tortured men in the mid-twentieth century – they don’t sound like something I’m going to really enjoy.  Yet I  really do like them, almost more than I want to.  They’re drenched, all of them, in guilt and regret.  This doesn’t sound very appealing, I know, but somehow I always find them very consoling. There’s some absence of judgement them, some generosity: like life’s so incredibly hard, he’s proud of you for just getting through it.  It’s soothing. 

A SORT OF LIFE is the first installment of his autobiography, and tells the story of his own life up to his thirties or so. It made me understand him a little better.  First, for a man whose books feel so modern to me, in being so equivocal and undecided, he is older than I thought.  He was born 1905, and has a childhood of illnesses – measles (twice), pleurisy, appendicitis, etc: you wonder what his parents were doing, and then remember how very modern a miracle vaccination is.

Perhaps, until one starts, at the age of seventy, to live on borrowed time, no year will seem again quite so ominous as the one when formal education ends and the moment arrives for the whole future.

He finds employment at a newspaper, and then his first book is a success.  This is the beginning of failure, as he tells us in his cheery fashion; he quits his day job on the back of that first success, and thereafter writes two flops in a row.  He converts to Catholicism, and is much happier; but your heart breaks for him:  

The first general confession, which precedes conditional baptism, and which covers the whole of a man’s previous life, is a humiliating ordeal. Later we may become hardened in the formulas of confession and skeptical about ourselves: we may only half intend to keep the promises we make, until continual failure or the circumstances of our private life finally make it impossible to make any promises at all and many of us abandon confession and communion to join the Foreign Legion of the Church and fight for a city of which we are no longer full citizens. But in the first confession a convert really believes in his own promises. 

Like the bar of the City Hotel in Freetown which I was to know years later it was the focal point of failure, a place undisturbed by ambition, a place to be resigned to, a home from home.

If there is one thing you can usually rely on commercial fiction for, it is a plot.  In exchange for this, you get some schmaltz and lazy thinking.  Sometimes you waver and think, oh well, let’s read this, at least it will be entertaining.  Thus, my impulse purchase of STANDARD DEVIATION, whose cover quote from Nigella Lawson told me everything I needed to know about it’s level of ambition.

Unfortunately, STANDARD DEVATION is not like most commercial fiction.  Sentimentality, this it has.  Predictable self-discovery, yes.  Characters working too hard at being charming, yes.  Special needs children, definitely.   But narrative forward progress, no.

It was cynical and dull in equal measure.  Serves me right for deciding to waste my short life reading what I knew to be rubbish.