In the Introduction, Roth’s work is discussed thus:

. . . his pervasive theme, the relation of the individual to the state. He says his characters are not “intended to exemplify a political point of view – at most it (a life story) demonstrates the old and eternal truth that the individual is always defeated in the end.

Sounds right up my alley. Also, many people have recommended this book to me. Thus I am disappointed to be disappointed.

The book tells the story of a young man from a military family, whose own career is less than illustrious. It’s less than illustrious in large part because he keeps making bad decision, barely thought out, and acting as if some sort of automaton, not thinking about his actions. One cmes across these sorts of characters all the time in serious twentieth century fiction, and I strongly suspect this is supposed to be some sort of comment on the human condition. However I just find it annoying. I want to give him a slap and tell him to take some responsibility for his life. His father’s story is interwoven with his, and is the most touching part of the tale. His butler, who he rarely speaks to but has been with him for forty years, dies, and the grim and authoritatian man begins to unravel

Some parts of the novel are beautiful, as here:

. . feeding the swans, trimming the hedges, guarding the springtime forstyhias and then the elderberry bushes against unauthorized, thievish hands, and, in the mild nights, shooing homeless lovers from the benevolent darkness of benches.

And some parts very funny:

He thought about his mother: her life was one long frantic search for some kind of extra income.

And sometimes dodgy/gross. Here is an older woman feeling motherly towards her young lover:

. . . as if her womb had birthed him, the same womb that now received him

I wonder if some of my trouble comes from the translation. We had “luscious clods of soil,” which worried me, but I could believe that might be right; then we had “spacious cups of tea,” which I very much doubt, then someone is the “spit n image” I mean surely someone with English as a first language works at Penguin and could have run their eye over it?

This is an ambitious book, attempting to cover a whole long life, spanning much of the twentieth century, by means of a personal diary.

The book begins with Logan Mountstuart as a teenage boy, and the adolescent voice is captured extraordinarily well.

Went for a walk through Edgbaston, already consumed with boredom, and looked in vain at the big houses and villas for any sign of individual spirit. The Christmas tree must surely be the saddest and most vulgar invented by mankind. Needless to say we have a giant one in the conservatory, its tep bent over by the glass ceiling.

I know, we have had teenage boy comedy angst done well before (Adrian Mole et al), but just because it’s not original doesn’t mean it isn’t funny.

Logan attends Oxford in the 1920s (I know, we’ve had that novel several times as well), and dreams of being a writer (ditto). The girl he wants to marry him refuses, so he asks another, who turns out to be quite the wrong kind of woman for him. He has some minor literary success. He gets divorced. He develops a drinking problem. And so on and so forth through the twentieth century, including two more marriages, a successful book, a failed book, many magazine articles, Paris, Barcelona, the Spanish Civil War, solitary confinement in Switzerland in the Second World War, more drinking, running a gallery in New York, and etc. We may have had all of these novels too, but not all at one go.

What impressed me most was the ever changing narrative voice, as Logan ages. This I think is real feat on Boyd’s part. The diary breaks off for years, on occasion, and then restarts, and yet somehow you are always interested and engaged and turning the page, even when it really should be bed time, which is I think a real achievement in terms of engaging storytelling. It’s also interesting to see how the world changes over his life, as it will over all our lives if we are lucky enough to live so long. Here is he on his early life in Paris:

Mine was a generation that unreflectingly went to prostitutes, almost in the same way as one would go to the theatre.

There is a lot about the experience of visiting prostitutes in this book, which made me think about the fact that I can name countless accounts I have read of that experience and yet can think of virtually none describing what it is to be a prostitute. I guess that’s not a newsflash: poor women don’t have time to write.

Of most interest to me in the end in this book was the conclusion, where he is old and poor and living on dog food. First of all, it scared me. I don’t want to ever have to contemplate pet food! But then he moves to rural France, to work on what he plans to really be his great novel, and is always talking about it in the diary. He has a much happier life in France with the local community, and is found dead and smiling in the back yard with a bottle of white wine by his side. No trace of the book can be found, and his gardener explains that he helped him burn a huge pile of papers, very cheerfully, the week before. It was really very touching. You think the novel is going one way: you are reading the life of Logan Mountstuart, famous author; then you realise you have been reading life of Logan Mountstuart, ordinary guy.

When I contrast what I have achieved in my measurably brief life with what Stanley has achieved in his possibly briefer one, the effect is to sweep utterly away the ten-storey edifice of my own self-appreciation and to leave nothing behind but the cellar.

This is Mark Twain on the life of Henry Morton Stanley. And truly, it was a remarkable life. I am definitely going to have to start working harder.

Stanley was born illegitimate in Wales, and ended up in the workhouse. He ran away to sea, and ended up in America, where he fought on the side of the South in the Civil War. Then, once he was captured and it was clear his side was losing, he changed to the North. He became a journalist, travelling all over the world. Dr Livingstone had by then not been heard of for a number of years, so he dreamed up the stunt of finding him, and thus began one of the greatest journeys of the modern world.

You don’t decide it will be a good idea to walk from Zanzibar to the Congo before the invention of effective anti-malarials, or indeed even after their invention, unless you have some pretty severe personal problems. In these, Stanley was not lacking. You also need to be almost insanely tough, and this Stanley also was.

He made several multi-year journeys through Africa, in horrific conditions, including bogs, marshes, forests, inter-ethnic wars, ulcers, fevers, starvation, malaria, slavers, and cannibals. At the end of one journey, when they heard the midday cannon at Mombasa, one man ran off (with his parrot), suddenly running quite mad, and never reappeared. Being on the march was like being on a lifeboat, with all the attendant horrors and decisions about when to start eating each other, with the added bonus of malaria. On one trip, Stanley had it 27 times.

Apparently there is a tradition that holds that Stanley was a terrible racist, who’d beat a black person to death as soon as look at them, and the author is at pains to defend him. Indeed, much of his private diaries speak of his love and respect for the porters who he walked with for years, and of his deep horror at the slave trade. Many porters signed on for multiple trips, which certainly doesn’t suggest he was a monster. Part of his reputation is due to one of his deputies who lost his mind, and – don’t read this if you are delicate – bought a girl so as to watch her being eaten by cannibals. His diary records her begging for mama and papa.

It is about the slave trade that this book most enlightened me. One hears a great deal about slavery in the West, but apparently the Arab slave trade was just as great, much older, and lasted much longer, involving (according to some reports) almost a HALF MILLION people a year throughout the late nineteenth century. This seems to have been anecdotaly true. For example,

Wade Safeni, his coxswain and translator on Lake Victoria, told him that eight years previously this whole region ‘was populated so thickly that we travelled through gardens and fields and villeages every quarter of an hour.’Today, this same country was very sparsely populated.

I did not know that most slaves were sold into slavery by their neighbours. Stanley is always haranguing villages, who explain on many occasions: “It is the fault of the Arabs who tempt us with fine clothes, powder and guns.” Depressing. Also depressing are Stanley’s repeated attempts to ransom away at least the children when he meets slavers.

We tend to look down on the Victorian relationship with Africa as self-evidently racist and wrong, compared to the current world view, lit as it is by the light of SOAS. The author makes a very interesting case that in fact the British that stopped the Arab slave trade, at vast expense, and to the loss of many sailors’ lives – in large part, though not solely, because they thought it was the right thing to do. He contrasts this with the current lack of involvement in Rwanda, Darfur, etc etc. This is I think a useful corrective to the Victorian bashing that is currently fashionable.

Eventually Stanley, who sounds very gay to me, did manage to get married. Unfortunately, his wife was a town mouse, commenting piteously: “I want to see hansom cabs, omnibuses, and ‘extra specials’ running, and handsome policemen, and the jostling multitude. I only put up with trees.” And so his African adventures came to an end.

Just as a side point, its interesting to note what made Stanley so tough. In addition to having survived the brutality of the workhouse, Stanley also survived one of the worst slaughters of the American Civil War, the battle of Shiloh. Terribly sadly, his seventeen year old friend was killed, who had marched into battle “with some violets in his cap, hoping that the enemy would take that this for a sign of peace and not kill him” Stanley commented later “I cannot forget that half-mile square of woodland . . .Only thirty minutes sufficed to drive out all that we had ever heard of goodness, love, charity, all memories of church, God, heaven”

The novel NIGHTMARE ABBEY does not have much of what you might call a plot, though it does have a great name. When I am stupidly rich and live in a big house, this will definitely be on the name shortlist.

Essentially, it is a sort of gothic sartire on the romantic movement, and in particular on the love of the morbid. As I don’t know much about this movement, if was hard to find it funny. I suppose it is how Kardashian jokes will be in a hundred years. Okay, five years. Okay, next year.

However, there are glimmers of how funny it could have been, had only I been alive two hundred years ago. Speaking of young men:

” . . . when they should be brought out of the house of mental bondage–i.e. the university–to the land flowing with milk and honey–i.e. the west end of London.”

Or here’s a poet on writing:

Modern literature is a north-east wind – a blight of the human soul. I take credit to myself for having helped to make it so. The way to produce fine fruit is to blight the flower. You call this a paradox. Marry, so be it. Ponder thereon.

Love Peacock also has a great name himself. Maybe that can be my pop star name. I know this is becoming a bit of a theme in this blog, but I am once again weirdly touched by Wikipedia’s description of the life of eighteenth century writers’ lives:

In his retirement he seldom left Halliford and spent his life among his books, and in the garden, in which he took great pleasure, and on the River Thames.

This novel was written in 1766, just at the dawn of the novel form, and it certainly shows. The charming, completely unbelievable central story, of a vicar and his family, is constantly interrupted by an array of other forms: the ballad; the sermon; the religious argument; and, what the hell, let’s have another ballad again.

The story – when you can see it for the ballads – is focused on the vicar’s evil landlord, and his cunning and successful plan to seduce and then abandon one of the vicar’s daughters. This prostrates the vicar, which I didn’t quite understand, as he seems to not put much stock in his daughters. In the early stages of the book, when one of the girls claims she had read enough to join in one of the (eternal) religious arguments. The vicar finds this hilarious, and responds:

“Very well . . . . that’s a good girl, I find you are perfectly qualified for making converts, and so go help your mother to make the gooseberry pie!”

I’d like to shove the gooseberry pie down his stupid throat: screaming ‘Dorothy Parker! Virginia Woolf! Joyce Banda!’. When the unfortunate girl is gone, he mourns her in the most touching manner:

“The honour of our family is contaminated . . . had she but died!”

However much of the book has a certain moral charm, and is full of wise advice:

Man little knows what calamities are beyond his patience to bear till he tries them

and, the last line of the book:

It now only remained that my gratitude in good fortune should exceed my former submission in adversity

This high moral tone is interesting, because apparently Goldsmith himself was a notable gambling addict, and only barely graduated from his theology degree: “his education seemed to have given him mainly a taste for fine clothes, playing cards, singing Irish airs and playing the flute.” This makes him sound like rather a fun guy and makes me regret my misspent university days, which I mostly used for studying.

Let’s end with this lovely description of the vicar’s wife, in an argument:

The dispute grew high while poor Deborah, instead of reasoning stronger, talked louder, and at last was obliged to take shelter from defeat in clamour.

I love that. It’s practically been worth all the ballads, just to get to that one line.

This is the story of a British journalist, sent to Vietnam in the 1950s to cover the violence there, who slowly comes to regard Vietnam as his home.

There are sections which are truly lovely, and make it obvious why this is regarded by many as a classic of the twentieth century. Here is the journalist on his time in Vietnam:

When I first came I counted the days of my assignment, like a schoolboy marking off the days of term; I thought I was tied to what was left of a Bloomsbury square and the 73 bus passing the portico of Euston and springtime in the local in Torrington Place. Now the bulbs would be out in the square garden, and I didn’t care a damn.

As someone who lived in London for many years, and indeed on the route of the 73, I’m oddly touched by his mourning for that city.

Here also is a lovely vision of the life he left back in London (his marriage collapsed just before he moved) through the lens of his night editor:

The editor would joke to the night-editor, who would take the envious thought back to his semi-detached villa in Streatham and climb into bed with it beside the faithful wife he had carried with him years back from Glasgow. I could see so well the kind of house that has no mercy – a broken tricycle stood in the hall and somebody had broken his favourite pipe; and there was a child’s shirt in the living-room waiting for a button to be sewn on.

The kind of house that has no mercy!

The plot of the novel revolves around this journalist having his Vietnamese girlfriend stolen by an idealistic American, who is involved in some decidedly idealistic espionage. It is around questions of plot that this novel gets a little dodgy. First, the Vietnamese girlfriend is a really horrible stereotype, so it makes it hard to care who gets her. I know I am terribly sophisticated and supposed to be able to look past the general misogyny to the author underneath, but this ‘childlike’ ‘silent’ ‘unfeeling’ girlfriend just defeated me.

We are also on less sure ground when it comes to his attempts to describe the war in Vietnam. At one point he comes across two dead civilians – mother and son. Now, I’d defy any narrator to comment on this in a way that could make one laugh, but how dire is this:

He was wearing a holy medal round his neck, and I said to myself, “The juju doesn’t work.” There was a gnawed piece of loaf under his body. I thought, “I hate war.”

Oh dear! We were definitely on safer ground with London.