GOODBYE TO ALL THAT by Robert Graves

Graves wrote this memoir when he was just a year older than me, 34, going through an ugly divorce, and on the point of leaving England forever. It is an awesome exercise in wholesale bridge burning.

It makes me feel like writing my memoirs, except that fortunately for me I have not had quite such an event filled life as Graves, who was in that unlucky generation that left high school in 1914, and so swapped one uniform for another, entering the First World War as teenagers.

We begin with his childhood, which is largely spent in one of these famously damaging English public schools, and he seems to have been accordingly damaged. He is bullied relentlessly (honest to god, where are the ADULTS in these places? When I was teaching I regarded one of my main jobs as keeping a beady eye on the big ones – anyway), until he takes up boxing. He has some success with this, and that seems to help keep the worst kids off him. He’s also astonishingly frank, for a book written in 1934, about falling in love with a younger boy, Dick.

On graduation, he volunteers for the army and is sent to France. The first dead person he sees there is a soldier who has killed himself rather than carry on, and things go downhill from there. Graves writes a very straightforward account, including detailed accounts of the bungling by high command. At one point he is declared dead, and his mum gets the condolence telegram, but with all the rude health of nineteen he pulls through.

On one of his leaves he marries a young woman and when the war ends they live in Oxford together. You might think, from the prosaic way he writes, that he was not as damaged by the war as some; but then he calmly tells you all about how he keeps seeing dead people piled up on the streets, and how these daymares are with him constantly until at least 1928.

He has four children by his wife, who is an early feminist, and when they lose all their money in a failed business venture, very laudably pitches in with this mountain of childcare for many years. Even more laudably, given that this book is written during a bitter divorce, he refrains from bashing on the feminist wife too much.

A grimly honest account of an interesting thirty four years.

THE LAST RESORT by Douglas Rogers

This book tells the story of the author’s parents’ attempts to hold on to their land during the decade of Zimbabwe’s collapse from about 2000 on. The perspective is surprisingly honest: Douglas Rogers couldn’t wait to shake the dust of Africa from his feet, and can’t understand why his parents would fight to stay.

Rogers grew up on various farms in eastern Zimbabwe, and once he left school fled this rural idyll as fast as he could. On retirement, his parents bought a rocky piece of land and decided to run a backpackers lodge, which did well initially, until the economy, and thus the tourism industry, began to crumble.

That Rogers worked as a journalist for many years is abundantly clear from this book. The style is simple and unaffected, and the plot moves quickly enough to keep the attention of any commuter. This is almost to a fault; the book is sort of forgettable, though the story is not.

After the backpackers left, the prostitutes started arriving, then a small dagga business (that’s pot to the non-African readers), then the dispossessed farmers (both black and white), then the illegal diamond dealers, then, most dangerously, the MDC activists in hiding during the dark days of 2008 (that’s during the bloody elections, non-Zimbabwean readers). Meanwhile the possibility of their land being seized was constantly in the air; at one point they found out that their property deed had been cancelled, and ‘vested in the president,’ without their even being informed.

It’s a very intimate portrait of his parents, and of their struggle to maintain not just their lives (it gets very dodgy at the end), and their land, but their definition of themselves as Zimbabwean. In the final chapters, when the father is taking considerable risks protecting the MDC members, there’s a very sweet section about how, for the first time in his life, and for the first time in the history of his family in Africa (an impressive 350 years) he is at last on the right side of history.

This books sounds quite tragic, but is largely written in the comic vein, which is I think very Zimbabwean. It also a story more of victory, than of defeat. I hope that’s very Zim too, though possibly not.

Here’s a rather sweet interview with the author.

I DREAMED OF AFRICA by Kuki Gallmann

This book recounts the author’s life in Kenya. Originally from Italy, she had always been fascinated by Africa, and eventually moved there with her second husband, buying a large ranch on which they kept cattle and provided a safe haven for wildlife.

She provides an interesting picture of Kenya in the 70s and 80s, at the tail end of the Happy Valley period, and includes many accounts of her intimate experience with African wildlife. The heart of the book however is her various bereavements. Her husband is killed in a car crash, and then a few years later, her son, an amateur herpetologist, is killed by a puff adder. Their funerals are minutely recorded, as are those of two or three of her friends.

Now, you would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by this.

I think I may have a heart of stone.

Great suffering does not necessarily make a great novel. Heartfelt sincerity, while important, is not all you need. (Oscar Wilde: “All bad poetry is sincere.” Ouch)

Now, before you start hating me in the Comments, let me give you an extract, and you hand on heart try and tell me that this is not dreadful:

There, on the extreme edge of the Great Rift Valley, guarding the gorge, grows an acacia tree bent by timeless winds. That tree is my friend, and we are sisters. I rest against its trunk, scaly and grey like a wise old elephant. I look up through the branches, twisted arms spread in a silent dance, to the sky of Africa . . . A last eagle flies majestically back to nest on steep cliffs.

Clearly, while she may have dreamed of Africa, she did not dream of writing without cliché.

In the interests of fairness, I should say it is very readable, especially if you skip the funerals. I couldn’t sleep last night, and polished off about 200 pages from 1am.

I admire the lady, who has a genuine and inspiring love for the Kenyan landscape, and has had a genuinely terrible time; but I just cannot admire the writer.

BOSWELL’S LIFE OF JOHNSON

This is a book I have been meaning to read for some time. It’s one of those books one ought to read. So, I’ve read it. Alright, most of it. I had to give up. And I feel terribly guilty. How charming is this, from the Preface, obviously written by a much better person than me:

Loyal Johnsonians may look upon such a book (the abridged ‘Life’) with a measure of scorn. I could not have made it, had I not believed that it would be the means of drawing new readers to Boswell, and eventually of finding for them in the complete work what many have already found – days and years of growing enlightenment and happy companionship, and an innocent refuge from the cares and perturbations of life. (Princeton, June 28, 1917)

Dr Johnson’s fame rests primarily on the fact that he wrote the first English dictionary. In other countries this was apparently the work of entire institutes, not just one man, so this is no small achievement. Dr Johnson was apparently a great conversationalist, and was much admired across eighteenth century London. And by nobody was he more admired than Boswell, who set himself, after every night out, to recall Johnson’s words and set them down. On the one hand, I found this a bit bizarre and stalkerish. On the other, there’s something touching, and not at all contemporary, about so unashamedly and entirely admiring someone. So we learn a lot about Johnson’s opinions. Here’s one I really feel:

When I was running about this town a very poor fellow, I was a great arguer for the advantages of poverty; but I was, at the same time, very sorry to be poor. Sir, all the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil, shew it to be evidently a great evil. You never find people labouring to convince you that you may live very happily upon a plentiful fortune.

Or:

Johnson, upon all occasions, expressed his approbation of enforcing instruction by means of the rod. ‘I would rather (said he) have the rod to be the general terror to all, to make them learn, than tell a child, if you do thus, or thus, you will be more esteemed than your brothers or sisters. The rod produces an effect which terminates in itself. A child is afraid of being whipped, and gets his task, and there’s an end on’t; whereas, by exciting emulation and comparisons of superiority, you lay the foundation of lasting mischief; you make brothers and sisters hate each other.

I got a good way through the book, but eventually I got bored and had to give up. There were large sections that seemed obscure and eighteenth century, and I constantly felt like I was missing the point. Also, it had no shape. Like real life, it had no plot, no structure or meaning, and I don’t read books to spend more time in real life, but less.

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD by Thomas Hardy

I’ve been having some trouble sleeping so am often awake from 3 am for a bit, and was the other night. At some point one does have to read FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD, and I guess this was my point.

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD tells the story of one Gabriel Oak, a shepherd who has managed to take out a loan to get his own flock and some land. He asks a local young lady, Bathsheba, to marry him. She refuses. Some time after this his young dog in an excess of zeal keeps chasing the sheep till he forces them over a cliff.

George’s son (the dog) had done his work so thoroughly that he was considered too good a workman to live, and was, in fact, taken and tragically shot at twelve o’clock that same day – another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise.

Gabriel is thus destitute again, as all his investment, the fruit of ten years work, is wiped out. This all happens before page 33. I was not surprised. I know very well not to trust Hardy, his books are hectic. He will crush you soon as look at you. I learnt this from reading JUDE THE OBSCURE, and I won’t give away the plot, but suffice to say, don’t get too attached to the children.

Anyway, Bathsheba has inherited a farm, and employs Gabriel, much to his chagrin. She marries a certain Sgt Troy who is irritatingly obviously going to be trouble, and he is, eventually faking his own death after his pregnant ex-girlfriend appears and dies of starvation on the doorstep. When he resurrects himself Bathsheba’s new boyfriend shoots him dead, and goes to jail himself. Enter Gabriel, and a happy ending.

So a story not lacking in drama, much of it stupid. However it was entertaining, and there is a supporting cast of yokels which is hilariously well written. Also, Hardy as a philosopher has much to say that is of interest – I enjoyed this, on Gabriel after his loss:

He had passed through an ordeal of wretchedness which had given him more than it had taken away. . . . . There was left to him a dignified calm he had never before known, and that indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of aman, is the basis of his sublimity if it does not. And thus the abasement had been exultation, and the loss gain.

THE MOON AND SIXPENCE by W. Somerset Maugham

I love Maugham’s book OF HUMAN BONDAGE, so I was excited to find this in my cousin’s bookcase.

THE MOON AND SIXPENCE is very loosely inspired by the life of the nineteenth century painter Paul Gauguin. It tells the story of one Charles Strickland, an English stockbroker who leaves his wife and children and runs away to Paris. Everyone assumes he is in love with another woman, but in fact he is in love with oil painting. This is met with general boggling by all his acquaintance.

He paints furiously while in Paris, and almost dies of starvation there. He eventually takes a passage working on a ship going east. When he finds Tahiti, he feels himself at last at home, moves in with a local woman, and continues to paint furiously till he dies of leprosy.

This book is quite interesting in terms of considering what qualifies as a worthwhile goal for your life, and in terms of what it means if your goal is not one that anyone else understands:

Each one of us is alone in the world….We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them. We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener’s aunt is in the house

.

So interesting, but, I thought, a little trite. The above is sort of like OF HUMAN BONDAGE, but on a bad day.

It also all seems to be written by W Somerset Misogynist. It’s only 217 pages, but manages all sorts of unexpected and distasteful discussions of his early twentieth century views on gender:

When a woman loves you she’s not satisfied until she possesses your soul. Because she’s weak she has a rage for domination, and nothing less will satisfy her. She has a small mind, and she resents the abstract which she is unable to grasp. She is occupied with material things, and she is jealous of the ideal. The soul of man wanders through the uppermost regions of the universe, and she seeks to imprison it in the circle of her account – book.

Now, I never knew I could use my trusty account-book for encircling unwary souls! My small mind shall get right on that.

I am not surprised this has all come out in a book on Gauguin. I never liked those pictures of women he made, who all just stare out at you, half-naked, as if they had a secret and mysterious message, that message being BOOBS.

THE ENGLISH PATIENT by Michael Ondaatje

Honestly, I wanted to like this book. I wanted to so much that I forced myself all the way up to page 125, before I just had to give up.

It is focused on a villa in Italy in the aftermath of the second World War in which live a group of shell-shocked characters: a severely burnt pilot, his nurse, a sapper who is in love with the nurse, and an ex-spy, with no thumbs, who is also in love with the nurse. Could be interesting, right? Sounds like the bare bones of a good movie, right?

OH IT IS SO POETIC I WANT TO PUKE. I was worried right from the get go, because there are a lot of prepositions, which in my experience is always a bad sign. So it begins: “She stands up in the garden . . . ” then “She has sensed a shift . . ” “Every four days she washes his black body.”

Mr Ondaatje likes a literary flourish. Let me just give you the first and last lines of a couple of sections, chosen quite at random.

“. . . her body full of sentences and moments, as if awakening from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.”
“This cools her and she likes it when she goes outside and the breezes hit her, erasing the thunder.”
“Someday there would be a bower of green limes, rooms of green light.”

I know this novel won the Booker, and all that, but I can barely choose a paragraph at random without being irritated. Homicidal, actually, by page 125.

LETTERS BETWEEN A FATHER AND SON by V.S Naipaul

I don’t know much about VS Naipaul, beyond his A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS, which is a wonderful novel. It’s set in Trinidad, and the book’s so good that ridiculously, I now feel whenever I hear about Trinidad that I have some kind of personal relationship with it.

LETTERS BETWEEN A FATHER AND SON is made up of correspondence between VS Naipaul, his father and his sister, written during the period after he left Trinidad for Oxford University. There is much discussion of the prosaic – money movements, sending socks, and so forth; but also much discussion about writing – the father has literary ambitions, and encourages his son endlessly; and many heart-to-hearts, especially at the end when ‘Pa’ dies unexpectedly.

There was a lot I could relate to in these letters. I also left a developing country for a developed one, and the attempt to reconcile these worlds, the apologies for not writing, the death of pets and passage of time were really quite touching.

I actually felt quite sorry for VS Naipaul, or Vidia, as his family call him. He seemed to me to struggling with some very serious mental colonisation. For example, hilariously, he is all ready for the beauty of an English autumn! Clearly, he has done a lot of reading Keats (here for his Ode on that season), and not a whole lot of waiting on an open platform for the 4.52 to Charing Cross.

He is entirely convinced that in escaping Trinidad he has made a great escape, from a place which is self-evidently less interesting and less worthy of notice than wonderful, wonderful England. And yet, at the same time, what is he constantly writing fiction about? That terrible, boring place, Trinidad. And he doesn’t seem to see any contradiction there.

A very sad strand in these letters is the desire of Vidia’s father to become an author. Vidia is very close to his father, and we learn a lot about this. Pa is hampered by a lack of time, as he has to work constantly to support his many children. (VS does not come off at all well in this respect, as he writes very pointedly to his mother after his father’s death, telling her to tell his younger sister to not to have too many children! As if his poor mother was having them all by herself, asexually, like an amoeba)

A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS is in fact apparently a version of the story of his father’s life, and I find it rather sad that that should be Naipaul’s masterpiece in the end. Immediately after Pa’s death, he writes to his sister, saying:

In a way I had always looked upon my life as a continuation of his – a continuation which, I hoped, would also be a fulfillment. It still is; but I have to abandon the idea of growing older in Pa’s company; and I have to get the strength to stand alone. I only wish I have half Pa’s bravery and fortitude.

Indeed it seems that for many A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS is the book on which his reputation rests. IN A FREE STATE I believe won the Booker (but let’s face it, that was also won by the wretched FINKLER QUESTION), and I don’t believe we need to know any more about the literary quality of that book than that large sections of it are set in ‘an unnamed African country.’ Because obviously all of Africa is pretty much the same.

Mr Naipaul, take a tip from Mr Marley: Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds!

CAN YOU FORGIVE HER? By Anthony Trollope

This is the first novel I have read on my new Kindle. I feel weird about it. I am, proudly, a late adopter of technology, and here I am leaping in to the e-book.

I didn’t have much choice. I have moved to Kenya, where there are not really a great many bookstores or libraries, and I felt a probably unhealthy degree of fear at the prospect of running out of things to read. Let’s be serious, we definitely don’t want to be left to our own thoughts.

So I bought a Kindle and it’s already got ten books on it, and took up no space at all in my luggage.

This is a good thing, as Trollope’s CAN YOU FORGIVE HER? is an impressive 900+ pages. Stephen King apparently christened it CAN YOU POSSIBLY FINISH IT?, while contemporary critics called it CAN YOU STAND HER?

These people are all mean. It’s a pretty good book. It’s the first in Trollope’s Palliser series. Regular readers may remember how much I loved his Barchester books (here, here, here, and here), and I’m all ready to begin with the Pallisers. How I love Victorian fiction! How I love books that are free for the Kindle! I leave you to decide which is the stronger motivation for this new Trollope kick.

The HER that you may or may not FORGIVE is Alice Vavasor. She broke off her engagement to her cousin George when he cheated on her, and got engaged to another man, John Grey. She then got spooked about him, and broke up with him, getting engaged again to her cousin, and then eventually going back to John Grey. This sounds like a month in the life of the average sixteen year old, but I guess was a bigger deal in the nineteenth century. There are two parallel stories, a comic one about Alice’s aunt, who is wealthy and has two middle-aged suitors, and a more serious one about Lady Glencora, Alice’s friend, a wealthy young woman who has been forced to marry a man she does not love, and seriously considers leaving.

The book is almost melodramatic in tone, with cousin George going mad as the book goes on, and attempting murder; Lady Glencora’s lover considering suicide; and Alice just slutting it up left and right. It is in that way very different from the Barchester novels, but is similar to them in Trollope’s easy, fun prose, psychological insight, strong character development, and involving storytelling.

I’m being flip about the slutting. What I found most engaging actually about this book was Alice’s struggle to determine what she wants of life. She gets spooked about John Grey because she suddenly fears she will be unhappy at his country home, and might be happier as a politician’s wife, with her cousin George in London. She has a really hard struggle within herself as to what she actually wants or needs from her life, and I think most of us can relate to that.

She eventually, once she thinks she has lost it, realises that the quiet and prosaic life is her real choice. Comments Trollope:

“All her misery had been brought about by this scornful superiority to the ordinary pursuits of the world, – this looking down upon humanity.”

BLACK BOOK and BLEEDING HEARTS by Ian Rankin

I’m reading so much of this for work that this is practically becoming a Rankin blog. I will name it Blankin. Or Rog

I recently reviewed KNOTS AND CROSSES, the first Rankin book, and here in BLACK BOOK Rankin the genre writer is firmly established. Detective Rebus no longer has too much of an inner life, or any gross sex scenes. Plot-plot-plot, that’s what we like. The aforementioned plot centres around a fire in a hotel, the guilt felt by the perpetrator, and the attempt by Rebus to pin the fire on its instigator, local tough and long term nemesis Ger McCafferty. Bizarrely, Rankin still finds a role for a paedophile in this story. He is seriously well into paedophilia. Curiously Rankin also talks repeatedly about how pretty this fourteen year old girl is who has a minor role in the plot. Let’s not think about it.

BLEEDING HEARTS was written under the nom de plume Jack Harvey. Apparently the Rebus books were taking only three months to write (what a surprise) so Rankin decided while living in bucolic splendour in France, to write mainstream thrillers also. In this one the story cuts between a first person narrative (of the baddie, I think we are supposed to find this innovative), and a second person narrative of the detective hunting him (a fat New York private eye). There is a cult involved, and a stupid twist where the victim turns out actually to have hired the SPOILER ALERT assassin herself in order to commit suicide.

If you skipped everything since SPOILER ALERT as you are thinking of reading this book, I advise you to think again. There are long lists of gun types, and poorly drawn cult members, and worst of all our thirty five year old assassin is pursued by a twenty two year old beauty who is totally and unbelievably sexually confident and bizarrely interested in this weird old man who has obvious psychological problems.

What boggles my mind is how MANY books I have by men in their thirties and forties that feature heroes in their thirties and forties being pursued by nymphs in their twenties. I mean, seriously, wouldn’t you be embarrassed to publish such obvious wish fulfillment?