Category: fiction

SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING by Alan Sillitoe

I am always struck by how vanishingly rare it is to read a book by a working class person before about 1950.  Here is one.  It’s a hair raising account of heavy boozing and factory work in Nottingham, and you know all you need to know when I tell you this book is where the expression ‘Don’t let the bastards get you down’ comes from.  Try this sample:

“Factories sweat you to death, labour exchanges talk you to death, insurance and income tax offices milk money from your wage packets and rob you to death. And if you’re still left with a tiny bit of life in your guts after all this boggering about, the army calls you up and you get shot to death. . . .  Ay, by God, it’s a hard life if you don’t weaken, if you don’t stop that bastard government from grinding your face in the muck, though there ain’t much you can do about it unless you start making dynamite to blow their four-eyed clocks to bits.”

‘It’s a hard life if you don’t weaken!’  I love that

This author began life as a factory worker, but then married a poet and used his army pension to move to Spain to write.   I was touched to hear he wrote this under a lemon tree at Robert Graves’ house, who was the person who encouraged him to write the life he knew.  I love Graves’ GOODBYE TO ALL THAT,  a wonderful book about binning your life and becoming a bohemian, and it was sweet to meet him at second-hand through this other writer. 

THE WALL by John Lanchester

In this book set in the far (near?) future, England is surrounded by a wall which is perpetually guarded against ‘the enemy’ who are desperate to get in. 

The exact situation is not described, but you get the impression there has been a massive raise in sea levels globally, and that the enemy is desperate climate migrants.  Much of the book is a straightforward adventure / romance story, focused on one man who is serving his mandatory two years on the wall.  SPOILER His unit allows an incursion, so they are all set adrift in the ocean.  Despite it not really going anywhere in terms of plot after this, I still found it a compelling story of an all-too-possible world.  Probably my favourite part was how it was well understood by the entire culture that the older generation was entirely at fault and they were ostracized appropriately. 

HELP WANTED by Adelle Waldman

It is striking how few novels there are about the world of work. I wonder why that is? Work is the place where most people spend most of their adult lives, and yet somehow it doesn’t seem to qualify as literary content. Maybe it’s because jobs are too specific? Or maybe on some level we are don’t feel that they are our ‘real’ lives, and so don’t deserve real consideration? In any case, here is one. It’s about the team that unloads boxes at a lowbrow department store. It’s enjoyably about the mechanics of the work (not easy) and about their efforts to get rid of their noxious boss by getting her promoted away from them. It’s unavoidably also about how stressful and precarious it is to work a minimum wage job in the US. This aspect of it veered a little awkwardly close to education/lecture/etc, but Waldman is a good enough writer that the book survives all the same.

As side note on the author. Waldman’s first and only other book was the magnificent THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P, a brilliant evocation of a literary Brooklyn, which I have read multiple times. That was however overa decade ago; apparently the author did not write another because (to her own surprise) she did not have any other ideas. It’s funny how minds work.

SALEM’S LOT by Stephen King

This is an imagination of what would happen if a vampire moved into a small town in New England. It’s was fun and very easy-reading, but I find I kind of forgot about it seconds after reading it. It’s King’s second novel, after CARRIE, which is a book that I find I often still think of even years later. I guess it’s because there are tons of vampire stories, but not too many about period-power. Though curiously both involve a lot of blood 🙂

WEIRDO by Sarah Pascoe

Here is a book in which the worm refuses to turn.  It starts off as kind of a love story, with a girl running into a boy she used to have a crush on in a London pub.  You find out that the crush was so large that she followed him – without his knowledge – to Australia, so she could manufacture an accidental meeting.  This is crossing a line, but okay, maybe it’s a quirky love story.  Then you find out that once she got there, she was very worried that Australia – the whole country –  might be being staged for her benefit.  Things get weirder from there.  It’s a really compelling, and claustrophobic narrative voice. 

I know it doesn’t sound it, but it’s very funny.  For example, at one point she says: “If there’s anything I’ve learned in my thirties, it’s don’t cut your hair while crying.”   It’s also an interesting meditation on obsession.  At one point, there is a parable about a monkey who puts his hand in a jar to get a treat, and then, because his hand is full, can’t get it out again.  The lesson being: 

“If you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.” 

I like this.

THE PUMPKIN EATER by Penelope Mortimer

There are many novels about unhappy marriages. This is a particularly good one. I had never heard of THE PUMPKIN EATER before, but I am informed by the Introduction that is among the first and most important of the twentieth century. I don’t know about that, but I thought it was banging.

Try this description: “His eyes twinkled as though hung in his head to frighten the birds away”

The book tells the story of a woman on her third marriage, with a large number of children. She gets pregnant again and her husband is not happy, so she agrees to an abortion and sterilization. The day she gets back from the hospital, she finds out he is having an affair. This is back in the day when cheating was more acceptable, but she does not find it to be very okay. To be fair to him, she herself admits she is unhealthily obsessed with children, and especially babies. She makes this interesting summary:

Now I realized how completely I had been absorbed by Jake. I needed the outside world, but had no idea where to find it. For the first time, I needed friends; there were none.  Over-indulgence in sexual and family life had left us, as far as other relationships were concerned, virginal; we said we had friends much as schoolchildren, busy with notes and hearts and keepsakes, say they have lovers.

I found this so interesting! It’s rare you see this idea expressed, but I think it is in fact very common for married people to be extraordinarily lonely and friend-less, and not even know that they are.

CHARLOTTE GRAY by Sebastian Faulks

Here is a novel about a female spy. It starts as a straight-forward love story, then becomes an espionage novel, and then loses its way for a bit, struggling to connect the plotlines while getting deep into French politics in WWII.

It’s engaging throughout, which is a feat at 500 + pages, and is remarkable for deep research and believable characters, even when the plot is a little shaky. I was especially struck by the presentation of how ordinary French people reacted when their neighbours were collected into railway cars and sent ‘east’. How did they react? Apparently they were not just fine with it, they actively applauded. It is pretty chilling.

Also of interest was the worldview of those who signed up to the ideas of Vichy France: that is, that German was clearly going to win the war, so it made sense to accept this early and get France the best seat possible in the ‘new Europe.’ One can see the pragmatism of this view. It is darkly funny how completely wrong they were. What I learnt from this is that when you are being ‘pragmatic’ (i.e., dividing up your neighbours clothes between yourselves) you better make sure you are making the right bet, because if you are not, you are truly left with nothing, not even your dignity.

THE SUITCASE by Sergei Dovlatov

I picked up this book in the week Alexi Navalny died. It’s like a very tiny tribute to that remarkable and heroic tradition of Russian dissent of which he was an heir.

It begins: “So this bitch at OVIR says to me, “Everyone who leaves is allowed three suitcases.  That’s the quota.” LOL! You know you are in for a good dictatorship story when it begins with encounters with bureaucracy. I myself have fond / horrifying memories of a certain 12 hour long queue to get a Zimbabwean passport in 2010.

The novel is structured around the stories of each of the items he was supposedly allowed to take out of Russia. It is both hilarious and sad. How hilarious is this:

Two hundred years ago the historian Nikolai Karamzin visited France.  Russian emigres there asked him: “What’s happening back at home, in two words?”

Karamzin didn’t even need two words. “Stealing,” he replied.

A great book.

BEER IN THE SNOOKER CLUB by Waguih Ghali

This is a novel about an Coptic Egyptian dealing with some pretty modern problems. It’s the 1950s, he comes from money, he gets involved in the wrong side of of the revolution, he moves to Europe, and he becomes poor in that really penniless way that only intellectuals seem to be able to manage.

He suffers a lot, and I felt for him, but I also wanted to shake him. One of his big problems is that he doesn’t feel like he is ‘Egyptian,’ because he is relatively well off and a Copt (so speaks French and English rather than Arabic). There is nothing that annoys me quite so much as this unthinking agreement we all seem to have that you can only ‘really’ be part of a country if you are part of the majority of that country. When he moves to Europe he also does a lot of suffering, because he feels that while he has been on some level formed by European ideas he does not fit in there either. This also makes me want to shake him, and say: it’s fine to also not be part of Europe! A hybrid person is still a real person!!

These are I recognize all the struggles of the colonized intellectual, so perhaps that this seems so clear to me in the twenty first century is because I stand on the shoulders of those of the twentieth, who did the suffering for me. Poor Ghali, he killed himself in London in 1968.

SOUTH RIDING by Winifred Holtby

To show there has been a book written about everything, here is one on local government.  It is a touching story of a Yorkshire community in the 1930s, covering the rich, the poor, and everything in between. 

It’s shockingly contemporary in many ways.  Most affecting is the story of a very bright teenage girl whose mother dies giving birth to an eighth child, and who thus has to drop out of school at 15 to look after the other kids  Note, the doctor had told the mother she should not have another child, and she did not want one, but I guess she could not refuse her husband, who got a bit drunk and after all it wasn’t his death sentence and THANK GOD FOR BIRTH CONTROL.

Also THANK GOD FOR VACCINATION.  The author, Winifred Holtby, died at 36, of kidney issues from the Scarlet Fever she had as a child.  She knew she had only about two years to live and dedicated it to finishing this book.  It was her fifth, and she was disappointed none had been very warmly received.  This one, published posthumously, was a huge hit and is now considered a twentieth century classic.   

Side bar, this Winifred Holtby was a dear friend of Vera Brittain (whose TESTAMOUNT OF YOUTH I read a couple of years ago).  They lived together when they moved to London after university, and then, touchingly/weirdly, carried on doing so even after Vera got married.  To answer your question, the husband did not like it, no. 

How much do you love this line from the introduction, about how Winifred was in 1935 “staying in Hornsea on the Yorkshire coast in order to escape the distractions and fatigue of life in London  . . .”  The distractions and fatigue of a life in London!  I hear you Winifred, I hear you.