Category: british fiction

A PASSAGE TO INDIA by EM Forster

Mrs Moore travels out to India to visit her son Ronny, bringing with her a potential wife, an idealistic young woman named Adela. The two ladies are rather shocked by the insularity of the British in India, and insist on being allowed to meet ‘real’ Indians. Their follows an entertaining comedy of manners, where we learn something about how difficult it is to bridge cultures in any direction, no matter how good the intentions.

Forster has a delightful lightness of touch, and creates a believable little world of Anglo-India. Here’s a description of a teacher:

His career, though scholastic, was varied, and had included going to the bad and repenting thereafter.

The novel then takes an abrupt left turn. Adela is taken to see some local caves by Dr Aziz, an Indian doctor. Adela abruptly rushes back to town, and when Dr Aziz follows her, he finds out that she has accused him of ‘insulting’ her in the dark. Everyone makes such a big deal of this that for a while I thought she had been raped, but in fact it just meant a little light groping. The case becomes a flashpoint between British and Indian, SPOILER ALERT, until at the last minute, on the stand, Adela recants.

Bizarrely, this last section of the novel is no longer a political or social commentary, but apparently a meditation on religion. I know. What? I can’t really explain, as I started skimming after a while. This was a lot of blithering about how ancient the land of India is, and about the ferocity and fear of the eternal, and about the endless echo of the caves. Take this:

“Everything echoes now; there’s no stopping the echo. The original sound may be harmless, but the echo is always evil”

This I find to mean exactly nothing. And there’s pages of this sort of thing. There’s also abrupt and lengthy descriptions of Indian religious rituals.

Let’s end on an interesting note. Here’s a part where he actually says something interesting about spirituality. Mrs Moore dies on her way back to Britain, and these are Ronny’s reflection:

What does happen when ones mother dies? Presumably she goes to heaven, anyhow she clears out. Ronny’s religion was of the sterilized public-school brand, which never goes bad, even in the tropics. Wherever he entered, mosque, cave or temple, he retained the spiritual outlook of the Fifth Form, and condemned as ‘weakening’ any attempt to understand them.

GEORGE PASSANT by CP Snow

This is the second book in CP Snow’s STRANGERS AND BROTHERS series, which is made up of eleven novels. I discovered the series in an odd used book store in Joburg which included such wonderful titles as RHODESIA: A HISTORY IN NEEDLEWORK.

I almost wish I’d gone with the Salisbury’s Womens Assocation take on Zimbabwean history, than GEORGE PASSANT. The first novel in the series, A TIME OF HOPE, was a brilliantly interesting story of the early life of Lewis Eliot. I thus had great hopes of the second novel, that it would follow him into middle age, and hopefully see him divorce his horrible wife. Bizarrely though the second novel goes back in time and picks up the story of George, one of Lewis’ early friends.

George is a free-thinking solicitor, who gathers young people around him, attempting to inspire them to live free of society. Somewhat predictably, this degenerates into sleeping with a selection of nineteen year olds. He is then accused of financial fraud, and Lewis comes to defend him in court. This might have been an exciting trial, if we hadn’t already heard all about it in the first book, up to and including the verdict.

Oh dear. My faith in minor authors is shaken.

TIME OF HOPE by CP Snow

You may recall my depressing conclusion at the end of Trollope’s THE PRIME MINISTER that I might in fact have actually completed the western cannon, and that what lay before me was either minor works by great writers or simply minor writers.

In this spirit I bought TIME OF HOPE by the not very eminent CP Snow. Hurray for minor authors! It is brilliant. And the best part is, that it is only the first in an ELEVEN BOOK SERIES. What is even better than one book? Ten books to follow! The Western cannon is still firing!

TIME OF HOPE tells the story of the early life of one Lewis Eliot. His father goes bankrupt at about the time of the First World War, when Lewis is a small child, and the book follows his attempts to make a life for himself.

It’s an interesting picture of a truly class bound Britain, because even though Lewis is exceptionally bright, and gets excellent results at school, the fact that he has no “connections” means that university is effectively barred to him. He takes an enormous risk, investing his small inheritance in sitting examinations for the bar, and manages eventually to become a moderately successful barrister – a huge achievement for someone of his background.

Showing that human nature does not change much, Lewis is also struggling with trying to disentangle himself from a girl who is clearly bad news. She says classic mess-with-you things like: “I don’t love you, but I trust you,” and “You’re the only one I feel safe with, but I’m not ready for a relationship,” and poor Lewis laps it up. Eventually, like an idiot, he marries her.

I don’t know anything about CP Snow, but I am quite sure that this book is heavily autobiographical. What is most touching about it is the sense throughout that everything he writes is something he has painfully lived. It is clearly the book of an older man trying to understand his past as honestly as he can, and that project – of being honest about what you have done – is always an honourable and a difficult one, whether you put it into book format or not.

Thus then, on his obsession with his horrible wife:

Some secret caution born of a kind of vanity made me bar my heart to any who forced their way within. I had only been able to lose caution and vanity, bar and heart, the whole of everything I was, in the torment of loving someone like Sheila, who invaded me not at all and made me crave for a spark of feeling, who was so wrapped up in herself that only the violence and suffering of such a love as mine brought the slightest glow.

Much though of the novel is very funny. Here he is on his aunt, a battleaxe of a woman:

She believed in speaking the truth, particularly when it was unpleasant.

And on the morality of his era:

It had often seemed to me strange that men should be so brazen with their moral indignation. Were they so utterly cut off from their own experience that they could utter these loud, resounding, moral brays and not be forced to look within? What were their own lives like, that they could denounce so enthusiastically? If baboons learned to talk, the first words they spoke would be stiff with moral indignation

One down, ten to go!

ADOLF HITLER: MY PART IN HIS DOWNFALL by Spike Milligan

This book begins: “After Puckoon I swore I would never write another novel. This is it . . .”

It is a comic recounting of Spike Milligan’s time training as a soldier in the Second World War. It is frequently very funny:

We had ‘Saluting Traps.’ A crowd of us round a corner smoking would get the tip ‘Officer Coming.’ We would set off at ten-second intervals and watch as the officer saluted his way to paralysis of the arm.

There is much of this kind of military fun, including, interestingly, an early and informal Puppetry of the Penis. Penises aside, this is perhaps the saddest comedic book I have ever read. The book is suffused with a sense of loss.

A week’s duty in the hut all centred around the gramaphone lent by Nick Carter, and jazz records I would bring back from leave. Happiness was a mug of tea, a cigarette, and a record of Bunny Berrigan playing ‘Let’s do it.’ Sharing it with a friend like Harry rounded off the occasion. What’s happened to us all since then? The world’s gone sour. Happiness is a yesterday thing.

Spike Milligan suffered profound shell shock during the war, and went on to have multiple mental breakdowns. Often in the book he tells us that he has returned to such-and-such a minor location, in a way that does not strike this reader as terribly healthy. He is quite explicit about all this, early on:

There were the deaths of some of my friends, and therefore, no matter how funny I tried to make this book, that will always be at the back of my mind: but, were they alive today, they would have been the first to join in the laughter, and that laughter was, I’m sure, the key to victory.

My friend and yours Wikipedia tells me that at the end of his life he corresponded frequently with Robert Graves, whose GOODBYE TO ALL THAT I read earlier this year. That book, a grim memoir of shell shock in the First World War, is a perfect partner to this one, set in the Second.

WE ARE ALL MADE OF GLUE by Marina Lewycka

WE ARE ALL MADE OF GLUE tells the story of a middle aged woman whose husband has just left her. She meets an elderly neighbour who is living in a decaying house, which estate agents are attempting to get their hands on in anticipation of a juicy sale. This elderly neighbour is charming and fun and apparently a Holocaust survivor. The odd job man she finds for the house is a Palestinian.

At this point, though I know it is mean, I can only say: blah blah blah. Insights into other cultures, religion in the modern world, ad?@sldiafaseijrtwe. I’m sorry, I just feel asleep on my keyboard.

Here are a couple of searing insights our central character has for us about the Middle East Peace Process:

Zion was their big dream. It was a good dream too. But they found you can’t build dreams with guns. Just nightmares.

Profound. Try also:

Maybe forgiveness isnt’such a big deal, after all. Maybe it’s just a matter of habit. All this mental activity was making me thirsty. I put the kettle on and nipped down to the bakery for a Danish pastry.

That faux naif narrative voice alone is enough to make my eyeballs bleed.

I read Lewycka’s A BRIEF HISTORY OF TRACTORS IN UKRANIAN some time ago, and found it to be a charming and funny book with a heart of gold. I’m even fond of the author, who sounds charming in interviews, and was rejected 36 times before TRACTORS was published. I really can’t imagine what’s gone so totally wrong in the writing that turned out this dreary and simplistic novel. Sorry Marina!

SKIPPY DIES by Paul Murray

SKIPPY DIES is an enjoyable and complex novel, which can’t decide if it’s a tragedy or a comedy.

It’s 616 dense pages, dealing in great detail with a group of fourteen year old boys at a Catholic boarding school, in which tone, theme, and character perspective are all constantly changing.

Any Harry Potter type fantasies tend to get squashed pretty quickly: life in the Tower, an ancient building composed mostly of draughts, is a deeply unmagical experience, spent at the mercy of lunatic teachers, bullies, athlete’s foot epidemics, etc. There are some small consolations. At a point in life in which the lovely nuturing homes built for them by their parents have become unendurable Guantanomos, and any time spent away from their peers is experienced at best as a mind-numbing commercial break for things no one wants to buy on some old person’s TV channel and at worst as a torture not incomparable to being actually genuinely nailed to a cross, the boarders do enjoy a certain prestige among the boys.

Clearly, much of the book is very funny. As the title suggests however, all is not entirely well. Skippy is the student Daniel Juster, who falls madly in love with a girl from a neighbouring school. He is an unhappy and mildly dorky boy, who can’t seem to get up the courage to quit the swim team, which he seems to hate, though the reason for this is not clear. He eventually overdoses on painkillers.

Don’t be mislead into thinking that this is the story of the novel. There are about six major stories: one for Daniel, one for his history teacher, one for this room mate, one for the girl he’s in love with, etc etc. Some of these stories are comic, some sad, all are interesting. There’s a compelling examination of the extent to which the old are ranged against the young, and vice versa, and Robert Graves’ GOODBYE TO ALL THAT (reviewed by me here), about the First World War, is referenced often:

We no longer saw the war as one between trade-rivals: its continuance seemed merely a sacrifice of the idealistic younger generation to the stupidity and self-protective alarm of the elder.

This idea, of the young as constantly betrayed by the old, is very interesting. All is going very well, in short, for the first two thirds of the novel, until sadly the author begins to build in climaxes for each story, and oh god, but they are cheesy.

Guess why Skippy hates the swim team: yes, yes, got it in one, he is being abused. Guess what happens when Skippy’s girflriend gives someone a blowjob to prove she loves him: he records it on his phone. You get the idea. It’s all what elderly newspaper critics would describe as ‘gritty.’

Unfortunately the thematic resolutions are as cheesy as the plot resolutions. Here’s something:

Maybe instead of strings it’s stories that things are made of, an infinite number of tiny vibrating stories.

If I had a penny for every novel that concluded that our lives are just stories I would puke.

Or try this

So this guy’s saying, instead of searching for ways out of our lives, what we should be searching for are ways in . .

Oh dear.

THE IMPERFECTIONISTS by Tom Rachman

THE IMPERFECTIONISTS is a novel about the life of a newspaper, composed of a series of interlocking short stories about the newspaper’s staff. It is a good thing I did not know this in advance, or I would never have begun it.

I make it a policy to avoid such books, as they are almost always painfully pretentious exercises in showing off how wonderfully engaged with the post-modern the author is, how he transcends linear narrative with a single bound, how multi-talented he is, revealing life’s dazzling complexity, etc etc.

Except Tom Rachman is actually multi-talented. He does pretty much leap over linear narrative in a single bound. I feel like he almost even reveals life’s dazzling complexity. I can’t get over it. This is a wonderful, accomplished novel. I can’t think when last I read a book by a living author that is so technically adept.

Rachman moves back and forth across decades, managing a huge cast of characters in a complex array of situations with unselfconscious elegance. Here’s a description of some of the staff, from within one character’s world view:

Dave Belling, a simpleton far too cheerful to compose a decent headline; Ed Rance, who wears a white ponytail – what more need one say?; and Ruby Zaga, who is sure that the entire staff is plotting against her, and is correct.

We learn about each of these people, and many more, over the course of the book. We follow Dave, as he gets his revenge after being fired; Ruby, who spends all her New Years Eves in hotels, posing as a businesswoman, so people won’t know she is alone; Kathleen, who is almost relieved by the freedom her partner’s affair gives her; and so on – you get the idea. Each story is touching, and involving, and interrelates with the other stories in an unforced way.

It’s also immensely well observed. Here’s one character, Abby, being described as she is on long distance flights:

In this state, she nibbles any snack in reach, grows mesmerized by strangers’ footwear, turns philosophical, ends up weepy. She gazes at the banks of seats around the departure lounge: young couples nestling, old husbands reading books about old wars, lovers sharing headphones, whispered words about duty-free and delays.

And very funny:

Arthur’s cubicle used to be near the watercooler, but the bosses tired of having to chat with him each time they got thirsty. So the watercooler stayed and he was moved. Now his desk is in a distant corner, as far from the locus of power as possible but nearer the cupboard of pens, which is a consolation.

So. A very fine novel. The New York Times comments:

This first novel by Tom Rachman, a London-born journalist who has lived and worked all over the world, is so good I had to read it twice simply to figure out how he pulled it off. I still haven’t answered that question, nor do I know how someone so young — Rachman turns out to be 35, though he looks even younger in his author photo — could have acquired such a precocious grasp of human foibles.

I agree. Google image search him to feel depressed, aspriring writers. But don’t read the book. You will want to give up immediately, in the face of such perfection.