THE ROAD TO NAB END by William Woodruff

It is rare, at least in English, to find a book written by someone who grew up really poor.  And it’s very rare for that book to be pre-1950.  Off the top of my head, I can think of LARKRISE TO CANDLEFORD and MY FIRST THIRTY YEARS and that’s about it.  THE ROAD TO NAB END is one such.  It’s a memoir of a childhood in the early 1900s in Blackburn.  I had never heard of this Blackburn, but it was apparently a key starting point of the Industrial Revolution, especially in clothing manufacture.  Unfortunately for the author, the Revolution was running out of steam as he arrived, and his family were at the sharp end of it.  Try this:

“I think the damp worried me more than the cold.  There was nothing to stop it rising through the flagstones that covered the floor . . .  The washing hanging from the ceiling didn’t help either.  The cold was sometimes so severe it made us forget the damp.”

“All meals were our favourite meals,” he says at one point, a sentence I have thought of often in my revoltingly privileged life of restaurants and ‘standards’ about food. 

What makes it especially sad is that his parents moved to America in about 1910, and then, in a tragically poor piece of decision-making driven by homesickness, came back again, just in time for the father to be drafted into WWI and clothing manufacture to move to America.  Here is his grandma, when challenged about moving to the US:

“And don’t give me that old buck about love of country.  That kind of talk is for toffs.  You keep the country, I’ll take the money.  Frankly, I don’t care whether God saves our gracious king or not.  I’m tired of the whole rotten lot.” 

She certainly never came back, and ended her life rich and comfortable.

The presence of the WWI veterans is a particularly sad part of this book.  One lies babbling in a bed in the front garden of the house across the street for twenty years, presumably from shell shock or a head injury. 

It’s a clear, straightforward re-telling of a tough childhood, and it made me grateful for my cushy adulthood.

THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI by Pierre Boulle

I’m afraid I couldn’t finish this one, despite its truly wonderful cover and the fact that the edition I have is one of my favourite kinds, falling apart and with brown pages.

THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI tells about the Japanese use of Allied soldiers and forced labour to build a railway in WWII, a terrible project that killed about twenty thousand people. This fictionalized version had a tight plot in this interesting setting, but it was just too silly for me. It’s very much a mid-century male fantasy of tough geniuses.

Boulle was a veteran of forced labour himself, and I would have liked to read a book about his actual experiences. Apparently life being what it is, he did write one, called MY RIVER KWAI, but it has not endured enough to even merit a Wikipedia entry, while this kind of trashy version sold in the millions. Well done to him: I see he was so poor he was practically homeless after the war, so I’m glad he made some money. He then went on to write a wildly different book – wait for it – it’s PLANET OF THE APES (!?!) so he certainly sorted himself out

THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG by Peter Carey

Here’s a book so good it’s almost depressing, like: how has this Carey guy done this?

It tells a fictionalized version of the life of the Australian bank robber Ned Kelly, in the imagined voice of Ned Kelly.  There’s not a lot in the way of punctuation, and sometimes we run dangerously close to getting a bit cute, but overall it’s amazingly successful.  Try this:

“Inside the shanty were much laughing and singing the shadows flitting across the curtains.  Harry Power were dancing I heard not a word about the bunions he otherwise were whingeing about night and day.  I never knew a man to make such a fuss about his feet.”

Or this, about a bushfire:

“God willing one day I would tell that baby the story of the apple gums exploding in the night the ½ mad kangaroos driven down before this wrath into the township of Sebastopol . . “

Or this:

 “. . a number of Chinamen was engaged with a game of mahjong on a wide wooden plank.  These was hard looking fellows all dried out and salted down for keeping.”

It takes you right inside his mind, very successfully.  He grows up in poverty, the child of a transported man, and very much at the mercy of landowners and their corrupt police.  He is almost forced into the life of the outlaw, and is greatly admired by the poor for his success.  I always want to believe the life of an outlaw is glamorous, but this book shows what I guess I always suspect, which is that in fact it is stressful and difficult and given the choice we’d all rather be landowners.  A fantastic book.

CONVERSATIONS WITH GOETHE by Johann Peter Eckermann

I knew this was an ambitious one, but as I have enjoyed such apparent stinkers as BOSWELL’S LONDON JOURNALS 1762-1763, I thought I would give it a go.  I gave it a good two hundred pages but: yikes.  The beginning is pretty interesting, when it is less about Goethe and more about Eckermann.  Eckermann came from a really poor background – his family where subsistence farmers (and I mean for real; they only had one cow).  He was clearly a bright and ambitious boy, and managed to get himself into school, where he has his socks blown off by what I can only call LITERATURE.  You’d think coming from where he comes from, that he’d want to study e.g., law or e.g., medicine, something with money in it, but oh no.  As he explains: “. . .I was dead set against undertaking a course of study simply for the purpose of getting a paid job.”  However after a while he realizes he will have to at least appear to compromise, and agrees that he “would choose a course of study that led to a proper job, and devote myself to jurisprudence.   My powerful patrons, and everyone else who cared about my worldly fortunes but had no idea how all-consuming my intellectual needs were, found this course eminently sensible.”

I just love that part, about his all-consuming intellectual needs.  Poor guy.  He drops out of university, and then makes a lot of generally bad financial choices of the kinds artists do make, but then luckily for him he meets Goethe.  At this point, the book takes a turn for the dull.  Goethe bangs on about a lot of stuff, mostly about how younger generations need to learn from him and his elderly compatriots and etc etc.  Perhaps this dullness is not Goethe’s fault; maybe anyone whose conversation is recounted by someone who is a massive fan would seem boring.  But in any case, I had to quit.  One thing I did find oddly reassuring was how enormously famous Goethe did seem to be in his day, and how rather unfamous he is today.  I guess it’s a comfort in its own way to know that no matter what you do, unless you get to Jesus or Hitler levels, history will not care. 

SEVENTEEN by Joe Gibson

A memoir by a man who at 17 was groomed by his female teacher into a sexual relationship.  He does a fantastic, horrifying job of telling it very much from the perspective of his 17-year old self – how wonderful he found her, how frightened he was of her, and etc.  It must have been very hard to do, because from any adult perspective you can tell she is a strange and manipulative woman, delighted to find someone who will follow her creepy script for romance.  You can tell the author shares this adult perspective, as the post-script takes us to him at 35.  The detailed story ends at his prom, but then he tells us that he ends up getting married to her in his first year of University (in his home town, because ‘you can’t go to Oxford,’ she tells him, because then we’ll be separated); and having a baby in his second year; and another baby in his fourth.  Once he is capable of earning a wage, she never works again.  He hates his job and she convinces him it is his duty to stay with it.  Though he does not talk too much about it, the book absolutely aches with regret for the young years he lost.  What is particularly sad is how clear he makes it that many people – including people in the power structure of the school – who knew what was happening and ignored it, because it was inconvenient for them for it to be happening.  A complete heartbreaker of a story. 

ALL FOURS by Miranda July

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book about the menopause before, but here we are.  Enjoy this, the protagonist on her age, which is in many ways the central problem of the book:

“I was no closer to being sixty-five than twenty-five, but since time moved forward, not backward, sixty-five was tomorrow and twenty-five was moot.  I didn’t think a lot about death, but I was getting ready to.  I understood that death was coming and that all my current preoccupations were kind of naïve; I still operated as if I could win somehow.  Not the vast and total winning I had hoped for in the previous decade, but a last chance to get it together before winter came, my final season” 

‘The vast and total winning,’ we’ve all been there, LOL. 

She decides to go on a roadtrip from California to New York, which her husband thinks will be a good challenge for her.  About a half hour in, she checks into a motel and just impulsively decides to hang out and decorate the room.  She doesn’t tell her husband.  This part I loved.  The protagonist feels no need to explain or pathologize why she is doing it: she just follows her impulse. I found this wonderfully fun and free-ing.  She then SPOILER ALERT falls for a young guy who works at the local Hertz.  At this point, things get a bit more predictable, as we get into how she navigates having an open relationship.  I found this part a bit slow, maybe because it’s a story I feel I’ve heard a few too many times before.  Poly people are much like vegans in being overly willing to tell you all about it.   But even this was enlivened by the intense amount of menopause and more general midlife panic she weaves in.  It shows how few women have really been allowed to write across history, that this experience should be so rarely described.  I love the idea that it might be an opportunity to be more free, possibly even wildly more free.  Though I’m not sure I’m signing up for an affair with the car rental guy. 

GREEN DOT by Madeleine Gray

Here is how this book begins:

“For some years of my twenties I was very much in love with a man who would not leave his wife.  For not one moment of this relationship was I unaware of what every single popular culture representation of such an arrangement portended my fate to be.

Having done well in school but having found little scope in which to win things since then, it is possible that my dedication to this relationship was in fact a dedication to my belief in myself – that I could make a man love me so much that he would leave what he had always known, all his so-called responsibilities, purely to attain my company forever.  I offered nothing but myself, you see.”

That, in two paragraphs, is what the book is about. It is pretty sad, overall.  Especially sad is the lack of cynicism of the man, who does genuinely seem to love her and to suffer over his inability to choose. 

As the author points out, one reason she got so interested in him was because she had no other interests.  This part, perhaps unfairly, I just found annoying. Here she is on how all her old schoolmates are getting jobs:

“Obviously we would all need money to feed and house ourselves when school was over; I didn’t not forsee that.  Maybe for most of us this would mean having to do stuff for companies or whatever happened in business. KPIs? P&Ls? Circling back? But why were we all talking like the way we wanted  to subsist was via indefinitely spending most of our waking hours doing something with very little relation to the formation and development of ourselves, a development which, until this point, we’d been told by our teachers and parents was very important?”

It is a bizarrely youthful contempt for a whole huge aspect of the human experience, which is world of commerce.  A not unimportant part of the world, if you happen to live in late capitalism.  And she does, oh god she does.  Here she is having lunch one day:

“Eating this dry sushi, I am utterly dejected”

So she has standards as to the wetness of her sushi but somehow still feels she should not be weighed down by such petty matters as making an income. 

It was a gripping story of terrible choices and I enjoyed it. 

THE INHERITORS by William Golding

Here is a book about the meeting of neanderthals and homo sapiens, told from the neanderthals perspective.  Unsurprisingly, our species does not come out of it looking good.   It really is incredible how our first instinct is to kill, and our second is to abduct.  You do feel sorry for these Neanderthals. 

The first part is the most successful, where you follow a band of 7 Neanderthals as they move from their winter to their summer locations.  There is an impressive inhabiting of a mind that (from our perspective) is sort of half-way there.  Then they meet the ‘bone-faced men,’ who surprise them by being bone-faced, and even more by existing, as the group had previously thought they were the only bipedals in the world. 

From very first meeting you know it is going to end badly for someone, with the Neanderthals watching with interest as ‘small straight twigs’ are thrown at them by the bone-faced men.  These are of course arrows, and it goes downhill from there.

I have to admit I gave up close to the end.  There was a very very long section in which the Neanderthals were watching the early humans go about daily life in a clearing.  I appreciate Golding was having fun sharing his research with us but I got bored.  However, that said, I still enjoyed it. 

PS: I learnt from the introduction – did you know Golding’s other book, LORD OF THE FLIES was widely rejected by agents while in draft?

SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW by William Maxwell

A few pages into this book, I started to wonder if I’d read something by this author before. And indeed I had, THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS, a memoir about the author’s mother dying of the Spanish Flu. What tipped me off was first the style, and second the fact that the narrator’s mother had just died of Spanish Flu.

Bizarrely, what the child narrator is narrating to us is a real-life murder from his home town. A man’s wife falls in love with his best friend, and leaves him in an ugly and very public divorce. He murders his friend, cuts off the corpse’s ear (?) and then drowns himself. The perspective changes from the child’s, to various of the adult’s, to a dog’s. The dog’s part is by far the saddest.

I admired this book greatly, but at the same time didn’t enjoy it. It was just kind of sad and I wasn’t sure what I gained from it.