Perhaps five years ago I saw a one man show at the Edinburgh Festival, which was a tour de force performance by Bette Bourne as Quentin Crisp, with Crisp as an old man in his filthy London flat. I recall very vividly the fact that he hadn’t done any housework for ten years, and that his opinion was that after the first few years the dirt doesn’t get any worse – you just have to hold your nerve. Inspirational.

Crisp was an original thinker in all sorts of areas. He very early on accepted that he was gay, and rather than attempt to hide it as so many did in this period (the 1930s), he chose to flaunt it. It was astonishingly brave. I have to say, after a while, I began to find it foolish. He insisted on wearing makeup, hair dye and nail polish, and thus was beaten up on the streets frequently. It’s an odd mix of courage in who you are and flagrant exhibitionism. It also makes it clear how far the gay rights movement has come, that no one really seems to feel any more that you have to be a ‘girl’ or ‘girly’ in order to like boys.

Crisp is a person who has struggled much, and thus his book is full of a curious and rather sad kind of wisdom. As for example, when he is talking about a friend of his who worked day and night at his screenwriting. Eventually, this person had a huge and impressive career in television, and Crisp observes that such success requires not just energy but optimism. The first, Crisp says, he has; the second he does not. This is I think an interesting analysis of why it is that some people work hard, and some do not: it’s not so much laziness, as pessimism. Or realism, I suppose.

After his round the world voyage on the Beagle, Charles Darwin spent the next forty years in his suburban home with his family, and it was there that he did the real intellectual work that made him famous and changed the way we see the world. CREATION tells the story of this period.

The Darwin family was close and loving, and much of the appeal of the book lies in an account of their ordinary lives. Darwin is thrilled by the birth of his first child, writing to a friend in the manner of all new parents: “He is a prodigy of beauty and intellect. He is so charming that I cannot pretend to any modesty. I defy anybody to flatter us on our baby, for I defy anyone to say anything in its praise, of which we are not fully conscious.” However, he also takes the opportunity to examine genetic inheritance in action: he was “always anxious to observe accurately the expression of a crying child . . . though his sympathy with the grief often spoiled his observation.”

Darwin spent many years studying barnacles, in his study, and one of his sons “ .. . when they went one day to play with the Lubbock children at High Elms, asked where Sir John (the father) did his barnacles” The nanny, Brodie, famously once said “it was a pity Mr Darwin had not something to do like Mr Thackeray (the author). She had seen him watching an ant heap for a whole hour” Darwin’s great love of his subject, be it barnacles, ants, or other, shines through the book. He comments charmingly: “I am at present red-hot with spiders; they are very interesting, and if I am not mistaken, I have already taken some new genera”

Darwin’s oldest daughter, Annie, dies of ‘fever’ (probably TB) at the age of ten. This death was particularly important in disabusing Darwin of a belief in a benevolent god, and gave him more impetus to pursue his ‘godless’ view of evolution.

Interestingly, Darwin had ten children. Or to be more accurate, his poor wife had ten children. The last eight were back to back in twelve years, making her life a

“treadmill of pregnancy, delivery, suckling, weaning and waiting for the next conception. After bearing her fifth child, she wondered if she might have ‘the luck to escape having another soon,’ but Charles did not seem to have appreciated her feelings. She was pregnant with the sixth a few months later.”

This is really, really, unattractively Taliban of Darwin. Mrs Darwin must have been totally psyched to menopause.

I confess, I didn’t quite finish this book. It got a bit boring and blah-blah-blah towards the end. The author is the great grandchild of Darwin, and this is his only book, and it shows. I suspect I’d much rather read a book by someone who came to Darwin through great love, than through luck and inheritance. This is why I like Paris Hilton. She could just have relied on her family money, but she went ahead and at least she made something of herself, even if that something is sort of horrifying.

Stop the presses, it’s a Booker winning novel that isn’t crap! I’m amazed. It won in 2004, so maybe back then they were still awarding actual good novels, and since then it’s been getting gradually more pretentious.

THE LINE OF BEAUTY tells the story of a middle class young man named Nick who after attending Oxford moves into the family home of one of his wealthy classmates. He lives there for some three years, and the novel follows his time with them. It traces two romances: his romance with his idea of the upper classes, and his exploration of gay life in London.

It’s immediately absorbing, with everything seen through the lens of Nick, who is a highly sensitive, highly self absorbed young man. It’s also immensely well observed. Here is Nick leaving a party: “He waited a minute longer, in the heightened singleness of someone who has slipped out for a minute from a class, a meeting, ears still ringing, face still solemn, into another world of quiet corridors, the neutral gleam of the day.”

It’s also Victorian in the exuberance and detail of its characters. There’s Gerald, the father of the family he’s living with who knows the “price of nothing but champagne and haircuts,” (this is definitely a goal I have), or Lady Partridge, a family friend, who examines what Nick is reading with “the mocking contentment of the non-reader.” I also enjoyed the gentle influence of the Victorians in the moral voice of the narrator. (For example, Nick at favourite cruising spot ” preened in pardonable ways” we are told)

There’s some awkwardness when the book bounces ahead a number of years, but Hollinghurst manages to resolve the book’s arc neatly and satisfyingly. A great book, that while very long is over far too soon.

Sometimes you begin a novel and immediately feel comfortable. You know right away that this novelist understands the importance of plot, of interesting characters, of climax and resolution. For some readers, this will mark him out as a second rate. Some readers, clearly on a different intellectual plane to mine, feel that the truly quality novel should require more effort to read than it took to write – that is, be plotless and boring.

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP has plot galore. It begins before Garp’s birth and follows him through childhood to his career as a successful writer, to his murder at the hands of extreme feminists. It’s absorbing from the first page. Occasionally Garp’s short stories are inserted in the text, which usually is for me – like dreams – something to be skipped. However so able is Irving as a writer that he manages to mix these fictional fictions with his fiction and still keep the arc going. Amazing.

An important theme of this novel is the impact of feminism on American society. One realizes, when seeing how hard Irving has to work to engage with feminism, how central the oppression of women was to the functioning of that society. It’s hard to understand now, from our perspective, all this agonizing; and it’s an interesting counterpoint to the last book I read, Simone de Beauvoir’s MEMOIRS OF A DUTIFUL DAUGHTER, which is about the very birth of feminism.

Garp, in a typical male-author-of-the-70s kind of way, is happy in his marriage but still has a bunch of stupid and mildly gross affairs (babysitters etc). This is not a very successful part of the novel. I think that certain experiences of certain demographics should be considered as having been entirely described. Certain authors have entirely covered certain areas in detail, and should be considered as owning those areas. Eg: unemployed families in the Midwest during the Great Depression (Steinbeck; childhood in France at the end of the nineteenth century (Proust – take note de Beauvoir). Unfortunately, adulterous men in late twentieth century America is John Updike, not John Irving, I’m afraid.

I became familiar with the private life of Simone de Beauvoir about a decade ago when I read the three volumes of the Sartre’s letters to her. I know these two are central figures in the existential movement, which redefined modern consciousness, etc etc, but what I really got from his letters was that Simone really needed to break up with Sartre. They were having an ‘open’ relationship, allegedly, which mostly just involved Sartre sleeping with lots of skanks and describing it to her in dreadful detail, e.g., her pubic hair was brown, (I am not exaggerating). Oh GOD Simone. Break up with him.

Anyway, this memoir covers her early life. To learn how she was brought up, in what a conservative and repressive environment, makes you all the more amazed that she managed to become who she was: a central figure in twentieth century thought, and, incredibly SINGLE. Take her father’s compliment to her: Simone, he said, you are fit to be a companion to a hero. Wow.

The young Simone loves Jo, the independent hero of LM Montgomery’s LITTLE WOMEN. I found this quite charming, as lots of studious spotty girls have loved Jo. There’s something very charming about LM Montgomery reaching out to Simone de Beauvoir, who reaches out to us today. It’s the thin line of smart and overly serious girls through history.

She graduates from pleasure reading to very serious philosophical reading, attending the Sorbonne. Simone and co. were just on the verge of developing that godless cosmology which has given birth to our tired, cynical LOLcats age, but they still worked on it in the spirit of their times, which a tireless and touching optimism, totally foreign to us today.

Here she is on socialists: I thought the word had an evil ring; a socialist couldn’t possibly be a tormented soul; he was pursuing ends that were both secular and limied: such moderation irritated me from the outset

. Or on her boyfriend, who is not sure what to do with his life:

Afterall, I told myself, I have no right to blame him for an inconsequence which is that of life itself: it leads us to a certain conclusions and then reveals their emptiness

There are glimpses of the later, letter writing Simne with whom I am familiar. Here is a man off to the war, and leaving her his favourite clock for safekeeping. She barely knows this man, and he confesses, apropos of nothing:

. . .he was a Jew, an illegitimate child, and a sexual maniac: he could only love women weighing more than fifteen stone.; Stepha had been the one exception in his life: hehadhoped that, despite her small stature, she would be able to give him, thanks to her intelligence, an illusion of immense size. The war swept him away; he never came back for his clock.

And on Sartre:

He was still young enough to feel emotional about his future whenever he heard a saxophone playing after his third martini.

Clearly I am still young, I feel emotional about everything after just one martini. Maybe I’m not young, just a lightweight.

Also touching is Simone’s friendship with Zaza, a girl she met in high school, who renamed her friend throughout her early life, fighting with her a brave battle against family and society. Zaza dies of meningtius, which Simone believes is exacerbated by her battle against her family’s marriage plans for her. The last line of the book is a tribute to her:

She has often appeared to me at night, her face all yellow under a pink sun-bonnet, and seeming to gaze reproachfully at me. We had fought together against the revolting fate that had lain ahed of us, and for a long time I believed that I had paid for my own freedom with her death.

The battles of these early feminists puts into rather harsh relief women today who can’t even face having a little argument with their own husbands about having to do the dishes. Nice work, twenty first century ladies.

This novel begins with an elderly lady deciding to get married, and broadly follows the impact that this has on her immediate family. I found this to be a very carefully executed and tightly edited modern novel, so well-behaved as to be entirely forgettable.

I use my Kindle to note interesting passages or ideas in books, and it’s rare for me not to find any at all in a book; but I’m afraid that this was case here, and I don’t think it’s just because I read it on a 17 hr drive from Cape Town to Joburg. It found the family dynamic to be entirely ordinary, the arc predictable, and the themes old hat. I almost feel bad to take such a dislike to a book so ordinary.

I’ve read and loved ALL THE PRETTY HORSES and THE ROAD. The latter I finished in tears as the bath water cooled around me. In this case, third time is apparently not the charm because I found BLOOD MERIDIAN a disappointment.

I suspect this is because I can now see the book as part of a pattern of the author’s interests. It is set in the American West, and is about a group of men who ride out to kill some other men. Just like THE ROAD and ALL THE PRETTY HORSES were about men on a quest to kill other men. Two are sort of horse related, one more cannibal related, but that’s the basic MO. It’s violent, everybody’s silent, everybody’s men.

I guess I found it sort of dull. I mean just try this:

They rode in a narrow enfilade along a trail strewn with the dry rounds of turds of goats and they road with their faces averted from the rock wall and the bake-oven air which it rebated, the slant black shapes of the mounted men stenciled across the stone with a definition austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that authored them and continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god.

The choice of the word ‘enfilade’ was the one that cracked this camel’s back. I mean REALLY, CORMAC MCCARTHY REALLY? Do you really need to use a shooting term for describing people walking in single file? And when I say people, I mean men. Because Mr McCarthy sure as hell is not interested in women. I can’t recall off hand any women in these books, but if they do exist and I’ve forgotten I bet you any money they are rape victims.

There were still beautiful bits.

The floor of the playa lay smooth and unbroken by any track and the mountains in their blue islands stood footless in the void like floating temples.

I love that about the mountains. I can hardly look at them anymore without hearing that line.

What makes me especially sad is that I think this may have ruined THE ROAD for me, which was previously one of my favourite books. It’s no longer a great book about meaning in the face of adversity, but rather some plump middle aged man sweating out his fantasies.

A PRIMATE’S MEMOIR is an account of the many years the author spent studying a particular troop of baboons in the Masaai Mara.

Sapolsky is at his best when recalling his baboons. Much of his work entails watching their behavior over very long periods, and so he develops a real – and possibly not very scientific – fondness for individual baboons, and is deeply affected by their fate. I had no idea baboons had such complex social lives, or such different characters, and I can understand how he came to be so involved in their private lives. It made me feel bad about eating meat.

The author also spends much time discussing the people he met during his long periods in the bush, and the strange vacations he took to such holiday destinations as Uganda (immediately after the fall of Idi Amin) and rural Sudan. Often this is very interesting, as Sapolsky just caught the end of an Africa now largely lost. Thus, for example, when he talks about double story buildings to the Masaai, they consider them as simply a village upon a village, and wonder what happens when the cows in the upper village urinate – does it hit the heads of those below?

Sapolsky is a very funny writer, with a great love for and knowledge of the African bush. He is on less certain ground when he speaks of the African people. He seemed to me to be frequently exoticising those he met, and occasionally stereotyping them. Thus, one character is described as having ‘bantu stoicism’ while white people are routinely referred to as ‘colonial whites’. At least its equal opportunity offense, to Africa’s majority and minority alike; and it didn’t bother me too much as I just skimmed those bits, to get back to the baboons, whose society he actually knows something about.

I felt a powerful need of the infinite consolation of Trollope. And infinite is the word, as this, his longest novel, is a stonking 800+ words. They pass by in a minute. I can’t believe it’s already over.

Admittedly, it was a long, fairly complicated minute, with multiple plots and a huge swathe of London life all crammed in there. In a sign that THE WAY WE LIVE NOW is in fact the way we still live now, the central character, Mr Melmotte, is running a massive Ponzi scheme. His daughter, initially meek, falls in love with a useless chap Felix Carbury, and tries to run away to New York with him. Meanwhile Felix’s sister Hetta is loved by her forty-something cousin Roger, but she is unfortunately in love with Roger’s best friend, Paul, who is unfortunately engaged to an American, Winifred Hurtle, who once shot a man in Utah, who – you get the picture.

I don’t know what is about Trollope that is so soothing. I think it is in part that his stories are long, and neatly crafted, and you can rely on them to take you away from your long and apparently bad crafted life. It’s also his great moral surety, which I’m not sure anyone in our culture has been able to enjoy since the Somme.

Take this, where he is discussing Paul’s unwillingness to break up with Mrs Hurtle, when he realizes the engagement is a mistake:

In social life we hardly stop to consider how much of that daring spirit which gives mastery comes from hardness of heart rather than from high purpose, or true courage . . . The master who succumbs to his servant, is as often brought to servility by a continual aversion to the giving of pain, by a softness which causes the fretfulness of others to be an agony to himself . . . There is an inner softness, a thinness of the mind’s skin, an incapability of seeing or even thinking of the troubles of others with equanimity, which produces a feeling akin to fear; but which is compatible not only with courage, but with absolute firmness of purpose . .

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I still can’t get over that he wrote all these novels while working full time at the post office.

Nancy Mitford was one of the Mitford sisters, infamous between the wars in England for their eccentricity and – for a least one of them – their fascism.

Nancy was not the fascist; instead she is a rather fine and very funny novelist. These three novels are about a large family, and the love affairs of various of the women in the family.

It is SO FUNNY:

The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life’s essential unfairness.

And also, as you can see, true.

Early on, you think you are just hearing a normal conversation between two children about a trip abroad, then you get: “Perhaps you won’t be alone,’ I said. ‘Foreigners are greatly given, I believe, to rape.”

And here’s a pencil sketch of an uncle’s experience in the Boer War: “Four days in a bullock wagon, he used to tell us, a hole as big as your fist in my stomach and maggoty! Happiest time in my life.”
And

His general attitude to what he called the man in the street was that he ought constantly to be covered by machine-guns: this having become impossible, owing to the weakness in the past of the great Whig families, he must be doped into submission with the fiction that huge reforms, to be engineered by the Conservative party, were always just around the corner.

It’s most interesting to read a woman who is writing right at the beginning of women being able to express themselves, and provides a startlingly counterpoint to twentieth century male fiction.

I have often noticed that when women look at themselves in every reflection, and take furtive peeps into their hand looking glasses, it is hardly ever, as is generally supposed, from vanity, but much more often from a feeling that all is not quite as it should be

Here is a young woman talking about a happy mother:

It was her sixth child and third boy, and we envied her from the bottoms of our hearts for having got it over.

And here is her view on bringing up your child without staff:

I have seen too many children brought up with Nannies to think this at all desirable. In Oxford, the wives of progressive dons did it often as a matter of principle; they would gradually become morons themselves, while the children looked like slum children and behaved like barbarians.

And on the joys of marriage

But of course I had already dived over that verge and was swimming away in a blue sea of illusion towards, I supposed, the islands of the blest, but really towards domesticity, maternity, and the usual lot of womankind