SMALL WORLD contains some of the same characters as the first book of the trilogy, but is to my mind a much less successful novel. It follows a bunch of academics around a series of conferences across the world. It was clearly written when international travel was still new and exotic, which makes it hard to relate to; but so does the sheer number of characters, and the many odd narrative arcs they are engaged on.

It’s still enjoyably comic, which kept me going to the end. Here’s his opening:

The modern conference resembles the pilgrimage of medieval Christendom in that it allows the participants to indulge themselves in all the pleasures and diversions of travel while appearing to be austerely bent on self improvement. To be sure, there are certain penitential exercises to be performed – the presentation of a paper, perhaps, and certainly listening to the papers of others. But with this excuse you journey to new and interesting places, meet new and interesting people, and form new and interesting relationships with them; exchange gossip and confidences (for your well-worn stories are fresh to them, and vice versa); eat, drink and make merry in their company every evening; and yet, at the end of it all, return home with an enhanced reputation for seriousness of mind.

Knowing quite a large number of academics, I have to say this is an entirely accurate analysis of conference attendance.

I often taken worthwhile life lessons from books, and here’s a phrase from this one that I will remember, though it comes originally from William Hazlitt: “The art of pleasing consists in being pleased”. This I find to be very true. There’s nothing that makes you more attractive to other people than appearing to be happy yourself. It’s perhaps not a recipe for total authenticity in human relationships, but there you go; nothing’s perfect, and at least you’ll be popular.

This is the first book in the Campus trilogy. In it, a university professor from Rummidge (a loosely disguised Birmingham) gets to swap places with one from California. The British professor is rather unsuccessful, the American one quite successful; and yet the swap works so well for both that they consider swapping not just lives but wives as well. The novel is enjoyably comic. Here we are on a Sunday walk: ” . . .to try and find some new, pointless destination for a drive, or to trudge out to one of the local parks, where other little knots of people wander listlessly, like lost souls in hell, blown by the gritty wind amid whirlpools of litter and dead leaves, past creaking swings and deserted football pitches, stagnant ponds and artificial lakes where rowing boats are chained up, by Sabbatarian decree, as if to emphasize the impossibility of escape. La nausee, Rummidge-style.”

I can’t tell you if the couples do complete the swap, because the novel ends quite randomly mid-plot point. And Refer here’s how I feel about that sort of thing . . .

So much did I enjoy EXCELLENT WOMEN that I dove right in to another Pym. While the last one was recommended by Philip Larkin, this one was recommended by Jilly Cooper. A more varied pair of admirers is hard to imagine. Though JANE AND PRUDENCE is a different story with different characters, it feels like a continuation of EXCELLENT WOMEN. In this case, the excellent woman is Jane, who is married to a vicar, and doing rather a poor job of being a vicar’s wife. Her best friend is Prudence, who is – horrors, horrors – unmarried. The story follows the attempts of Jane to set up Prudence with a local bachelor.

The novel is charming and comic. Here is Jane to Prudence:

‘You’ve got a new dressing-gown,’ she said, trying to keep out of her tone the accusing note that women are apt to use to each other, as if one had no business to spend one’s own money on nice clothes.

As with her previous novel, love does not conquer all. The bachelor is gobbled up by another, more aggressive, spinster, and Prudence ends up in a sort of lukewarm alternative relationship.

I didn’t quite enjoy this novel as much as the previous one, perhaps because I am now a bit more familiar with Pym’s tricks, but it was still enormously enjoyable. It felt a bit more like absorption than reading.

So desperate am I for interesting things to read that I am reduced to reading second novels by authors whose first I did not enjoy. I didn’t much like HOUSE OF SLEEP, but thought I might as well try THE ROTTERS’ CLUB anyway, as it Coe’s most famous novel, and, I figured, might represent one of those very common cases where an author only has one good book in them. This is after all one more good book than most people ever manage.

THE ROTTERS’ CLUB is indeed a step up on HOUSE OF SLEEP. Again it follows a group of friends, but this time it is focused on high school – Birmingham in the 1970s, to be exact, but as always with novels of adolescence, it could be almost anywhere, at any time. Coe does a great job of creating a huge set of characters, each with an interesting arc, which is not an easy feat. The central character is Benjamin Trotter, who is wildly in love with a girl who is obviously terribly bad news. He gets her at last, prompting a chapter which is a single sentence of joy, apparently the longest in English literature, of 13,995 words.

The ending is a bit abrupt and dubious, with the narrator commenting: “But stories never end, do they? Not really. All you can do is choose a moment to end on.” Many novels close with this kind of caveat, as if it is okay that the novel does not have a neat ending because, after all, life has no neat endings. This I fundamentally disagree with. Novels should be an improvement on life; and one of the key areas in which life needs improvement is in its chaotic, meaningless conclusion.

This book follows a group of friends from university through to adult life. The author tries to make sleep a theme, with one character a narcoleptic, one an insomniac, etc etc. The thrilling conclusion takes place at a sleep clinic. I admired the attempt at thematic coherence, but overall found it a bit dull.

This anthology captures the huge breadth of human experience across our continent. For me, there were three standout stories:

POISON by Henrietta Rose-Innes (South Africa, 2008), a fantastic little story about a women stranded at a gas station while some large scale industrial disaster is happening
DISCOVERING HOME by Binyavanga Wainaina (Kenya, 2002), a description of a young man coming home from university to Kenya
THE MUSEUM by Leila Aboulela (Sudan, 2000), a sweet and sad story about a Sudanese girl at a UK university who can’t quite get up the courage to begin a romance with a local boy

I had often thought of the Caine Prize as rewarding a certain dark view of the African experience, but reading this anthology corrected that view: it’s a broad swathe of all kinds of Africaness. There’s not much out there rewarding quality African artists, so thank you Caine sponsors!

I love the ‘Staff Recommendations’ section of a bookstore. There’s something very charming and local about it, and one often finds quality there. If you’ve chosen to work at a bookstore rather than say a frozen yoghurt store it’s probably because you actually like books, and I find the recommendations are often unexpected and educational. It occurs to me as I type this that this may be because rather than just ‘liking’ books, given this economy, people working retail jobs in bookstores all have Masters degree in Lit. We’re all going to hell in a handbasket. Anyway, back to Barbara Pym. Philip Larkin once said “I’d sooner read a new Barbara Pym than a new Jane Austen.” I can’t quite agree with him there, but Pym is a fine writer, and I enjoyed EXCELLENT WOMEN.

Mildred Lathbury is single and over thirty, which apparently means she is a confirmed spinster, and is expected to devote her life to helping others. She is also a clergyman’s daughter, which apparently makes it all much worse.

Platitudes flowed easily from me, perhaps because, with my parochial experience, I know myself to be capable of dealing with most of the stock situations or even the great moments of life – birth, marriage, death, the successful jumble sale, the garden fete spoiled by bad weather . . . ‘Mildred is such a help to her father’ people used to say after my mother died

A glamorous couple moves into her apartment building, and she is slowly drawn into their lives. The marriage is falling apart, and the husband, good-looking and fun, starts to spend a good amount of time with Mildred.

You might feel like you can probably guess where the novel is going, but in fact you can’t. Mildred is always cautious about what all this means, and indeed she is quite right to be. He returns to his wife, Mildred turning out to have been no more to him than a comfortable sofa and a cup of tea; and curiously, Mildred is not very bothered: she enjoys her freedom, and was getting tired of having to make a man dinner on demand. It’s a strange little book, mostly comic, but with a little touch of sadness; though one can’t quite tell if there’s any reason to be sad. It’s odd Larkin compared her to Austen, because it’s rather anti-Austen, in it’s own way, with Mildred ending up alone and happy. Or sort of happy.

As she herself says, early on, having described her appearance as mousey and unremarkable:

Let me hasten to add that I am not at all like Jane Eyre, who must have given hope to so many plain women who tell their stories in the first person, nor have I ever thought of myself as being like her

Apparently I am in the mood for novels about mid-century men losing their wives. Herzog has recently been dumped by his wife, and is slowly losing his mind. He endlessly writes letters to different people, with the novel moving around across his entire lifetime. Usually I find this kind of thing deeply annoying in novels, but Saul Bellow is a remarkable writer and manages to hold it together. Here for example is Herzog’s lawyer:

Simkin, sitting in his office, occupied a grand Sykes chair, beneath enormous rows of law books. A man is born to be orphaned, and to leave orphans after him, but a chair like that chair, if he can afford it, is a great comfort.

Hilarious.

Less hilarious is the reminder of world population in the 50s:

I know its no cinch to manage the affairs of this planet with its population exceeding 2 billion. The number itself is something of a miracle and throws our practical ideas into obsolescence.

Apparently in forty years since we’ve managed to triple world population. That is something of a miracle.

It was also interesting to see in this novel, as in THE SPORTSWRITER which I read recently, that in the past, the wife got to keep the children, no matter what. It’s pretty disgusting and sexist. So is Herzog’s view on a twelve year girl he sees riding a horse:

In jodphurs, boots and bowler she had the hauteur of a female child who knows it won’t be long before she is nubile and has the power to hurt.

I have some experience in the twelve year old girl area, having been one myself, and I can assure you that your nubility (?) never crosses your mind.

Herzog eventually attempts to murder his wife. I can’t tell you if he succeeded, as fifty pages from the end, my shampoo burst on the book. Sorry Saul Bellow.

This is among the first ever accounts of drug addiction, and is as boring and as glamorous as every other account of drug addiction.

Every druggie’s story includes an awful lot of banging on about taking drugs, I guess because the authors are drug addicts. I was amazed by the similarity between this book, written 1821, and BAD NEWS by Edward St Aubyn, written 1997, which I read earlier this year. Apparently the druggie experience has changed little in the last century and a half. It’s truly incredible how interesting De Quincey thinks the number of drops he took on each day is. Unusually, he isn’t shy to elaborate on why he took so many drugs – that being, he really liked taking drugs.

I speak from the ground of a large and profound personal experience: whereas most of the unscientific authors who have at all treated of opium, and even of those who have written expressly on the materia medica, make it evident, from the horror they express of it, that their experimental knowledge of its action is none at all.

Indeed, his entire first half of the novel is called THE PLEASURES OF OPIUM, while the second half is THE PAINS OF OPIUM

I found this book a trifle boring, but also rather charmingly well written. Try this, on walking around London:

Some of these rambles led me great distances, for an opium eater is too happy to observe the motion of time; and sometimes in my attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical priniples, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and headlands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I cam suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and sphynx’s riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I concieve, baffle the audacity of porters and confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen.

It makes you wish he hadn’t wasted his time being an opium fiend, and instead actually worked on being a writer.

This novel is an interesting window into New York in the 1920s. It tells the story of two mixed race girls, Clare and Irene, who were friends in childhood. As adults, Clare now ‘passes’ as white. She is married to a white man, and is lonely, so takes the dangerous step of mixing once again with the non-white community. Irene is married to a black man who is a doctor. Their marriage is in trouble, and she begins to suspect that Clare is having an affair with him. She ‘outs’ her old friend to her white husband, and there is a strange interaction at a party, where Clare dies by falling from a window, and it is unclear if her husband kills her, Irene kills her, or she kills herself. It’s an interesting little book, but I’m sorry to report that I read it so long ago I can’t remember much else about it . . .