Tag: fiction

THE UNKNOWN AJAX by Georgette Heyer

I needed some cheering up so decided to whip through a Heyer. My blog tells me I have read fifteen of her books in the last ten years, and this one was as comforting as any of them.

AJAX tells the story of a bankrupt aristocratic family who, due to a boating accident, are suddenly faced with an unknown cousin as their heir. Their scheme is to marry off the oldest daughter to this man. She violently objects. Being a Heyer, you know this is 100% what is going to happen.

It does indeed happen. But unusually for Heyer it does via lots of social issues, including customs duties, Napoleonic wars, champagne used for boot blacking, and the invention of the spinning jenny. But however she gets there, it happens cheerfully and all ends well. If only real life could step up to the Heyer bar. We seem to have all the social issues with none of the happy endings.

THE BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN by Wallace Stegner

Well here are some pretty serious #daddyissues.  This book tells the story of a couple who get married, have two children, and move restlessly across the Midwest looking to strike it big.  At least the father is looking to strike it big.  The mother is just hanging on.

It’s a broad sweep of middle America across decades, involving possum-hunting and gold-panning and bootlegging and the Spanish Flu.   (This was remarkably like todays’ COVID.  They went on lockdown, they wear masks, it made me wonder if really medical science has not come on that far after all)

The book is so jam packed with incident, some of it so random, that I started to suspect it must be based on  real life.  I also wondered this because it was so completely judgemental towards the father character.   This dad came from poverty, and pulled himself up into wealth.  He couldn’t stand the idea that he was going to be trapped in a $100/month job because of his lack of education and was always looking for the next big break. I found this kind of inspirational, like he was a class warrior.   His youngest son doesn’t take it that way, and is horrified by his bootlegging (but not so horrified that he doesn’t take that sweet moonshine money to pay for his law degree). 

I learn from the Introduction that indeed this is the story of Stegner’s own family.  Sadly his mother, brother and father all died within three years of each other, and it was then he decided to write about them.  This casts the book in a different light for me.  I see what it is, his effort to record and remember them, to create a monument to their messy lives.   I can’t imagine what it must be like to be the only one who remembers your childhood, though I guess that if I am lucky enough to live to a great old age I will find that out.    I wonder if I’ll want to write about it, when its only me left. 

NOTHING TO SEE HERE by Kevin Wilson

A bizarre tale of income inequality and spontaneous human combustion, NOTHING TO SEE HERE is so good it kind of depressed me.

 It tells the story of a young girl, Lillian, from a poor background who works very hard to get a scholarship to a fancy boarding school:

I didn’t know the school was just some ribbon rich girls obtained on their way to a destined future. . . . . I wasn’t destined for greatness, I knew this.  But I was figuring out how to steal it from someone stupid enough to relax their grip on it.

This is in the first few pages.  Already at this stage I had a sinking feeling in my stomach about how magically good this one was going to be. 

At this school, she really, really likes her roommate. Here is part of one of their early conversations:

“. . I want to be so important that if I fuck up, I’ll never get punished.”  She looked psychotic as she said this; I wanted to make out with her.

. . .“I think we’ll be friends,” she said. “I hope so, at least.”

“God,” I said, trying to keep my whole body from convulsing.  “I hope so, too.”

Years later, when Lillian has lost her way and spends most of her time smoking pot in her mother’s attic, this friend asks her to nanny two children who have behaviour issues.  The behaviour issues are they burst into flames when they are upset.  The friend is married to a Senator, Jasper Roberts, and is fabulously wealthy.  Here he is on TV:

Jasper was on C-SPAN, smiling, listening thoughtfully, nodding, so much nodding, like he understood every fucking thing that had ever happened in the entire world.  They would cut to different senators who were on the committee and it was like a practical joke because they all looked exactly the same. 

Part of the weird power of this book is the dreadful acceptance of how the world is; that is, that the rich are rich and will always be rich, and the poor are staying poor.  Eventually Lillian comes to love the children, and there is a degree of redemption in this.  Here is her fantasy of reunion with her mother that never happened:

. . .  And she would hug me and it wouldn’t be weird. It would be like the way somebody hugs another person. And the entirety of my life, everything that had come before, would disappear. And things would be so much better.

In the end though it’s really a sort of bleak novel.  Lillian find some sort of hopefulness, but it’s a narrow, conditional thing, in the middle of world that is totally unfair and will stay that way

THE THORNBIRDS by Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCollough was working as a medical researcher when she found out she was making less than male colleagues.  Determined to make more, she turned to art.  Incredibly, this gambit worked.  This epic of an Australian family was a bestseller and spawned a very popular mini-series. (“Instant vomit,” according to McCollough).

While I can see many issues with this book, including extreme cheese and really stilted dialogue, I have to go ahead and confess: I enjoyed it.   Partly, I enjoyed the plot, with this much older priest falling in love with this young girl.  But mostly I enjoyed the setting.  For example, did you know that if you can shear sheep fast, (three hundred a day) you are a ‘dreadnought’ and can make as much money from betting how fast you can go as from actually shearing.  Also did you know that in shearing sheds:

At each’s man’s stand . . . was a circle of flooring much lighter in color than the rest, the spot where fifty years of shearers had stood dripping their bleaching seat into the wood of the board

Despite this being in many ways an old-fashioned book, McCullough certainly is unafraid to advance a specifically female view of the world.  She has a lot to say about domestic drudgery, and about how no one actually loves any of their kids after the fifth, and about how the men in rural Australia think they are good kissers only because the women are good liars. 

That instant vomit thing tips you off. This lady was a character.  She was convinced all critics knew ‘in their hearts’ she was just smarter and better than them.  She wrote 30,000 words a day, and virtually ‘never made mistakes’ because she had perfect spelling and great grammar.  And she died a millionaire many times over, so take that, other medical researchers

Let me note that I read this in my absolute favourite format, which is a very elderly second hand paperback, with browned pages, and as an amazing bonus it even had a weird newspaper clipping as a bookmark.  Enjoy the mysterious caption especially: “I used to be a teenage doctor until I discovered eminence.”

NIGHT BOAT TO TANGIER by Kevin Barry

It’s rare I loathe a book, but here we are.  It has many good reviews, and was longlisted for the Booker, so I am the minority in this view.  But really.  First of all, it’s all very lyrical.  This is always annoying.  Try how this potentially good piece of dialogue is ruined

Personally speaking, Maurice? My arse isn’t right since the octopus we ate in Malaga.
Is it saying hello to you, Charlie?
It is, yeah. And of course the octopus wasn’t the worst of Malaga.
…. They look into the distance. They send up their sighs. Their talk is a shield against feeling

Second of all, it’s all about tough men, and it pretends like it is supposed to show how terrible the consequences of violence are.  Meanwhile clearly this book is all about the romance of violence.  I don’t need to google the author to find out the author is a man.  It’s almost always men who like to spend their novels thinking about violence, and I don’t think we need to think that hard to find out why that might not be so interesting for women.  I just don’t need to live in their fantasy

CARRIE by Steven King

I picked up CARRIE because I read Steven King’s autobiography, and was curious to see what the book that changed his life was like.

It was his first novel,and he almost fainted when the publisher offered him $400K for it, because he was barely paying his bills at the time.  He’d actually thrown the first draft in the bin, and it only made it to the publisher at all because his wife fished it out and insisted he go on with it.  To read his autobiography, you’d think by this stage he was on the verge of past it, about to sink into a life of low income jobs, nearly missing his potential.  In reading the back cover I discover he was actually only TWENTY-SIX.  For god’s sake, Steven, I don’t think it’s even possible to waste your life already when you’re just in your twenties. It’s only in your forties you start looking down that particular barrel.  Unless of course you commit a murder and get caught.  I was listening to a podcast recently about a man who killed someone at 15, and is getting out now, 40 years later.  First thing he is going to do is have an omelette, he said.  Second thing is go to his parents graves to apologize for throwing his life away. 

It’s possible this post is going off course.  Back to CARRIE.  What I found surprising was how straightforward it was, how little plot it had, and how little real ‘horror’ was involved.  It’s essentially a “worm turns” story, though in this case the worm devours its hometown after turning.  For those who don’t know SPOILER ALERT the book is about a girl who is badly bullied at school and ends up blowing up her prom with her telekentic powers.

Apparently when this was written, horror was very much about shadowy alleys and old parchments, so it was revolutionary in its ordinary setting and conventional protagonists.  It no longer feels revolutionary, but is still a solid, engaging read, and captures very well what it was to be a teenage girl (not that surprising because Steven King you were SO YOUNG WHEN YOU WROTE IT I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT HOW YOU FELT YOU WERE WASTING YOUR LIFE.)

NOTES ON A SCANDAL by Zoe Heller

This is a book about loneliness.  It titillates us with the idea that it is about an extraordinary scandal, but really it is about ordinary loneliness.    

The narrator is one Barbara, an unmarried woman who has been teaching for decades.  She recounts the story of her friend and colleague, 41 year old Sheba, who gets into a relationship with a 15 year student.  This story is ‘not about me,’ Barbara says, but of course it is.  Every story is about its teller.

It opens in the aftermath of the relationship becoming public in the papers.  I found this an interesting description of the press:

. ..  I could never have predicted the hysterical prurience of the response.  The titillated fury.  These reporters write about Sheba as if they were seven-year-olds confronting the fact of their parents’ sexuality for the first time. 

This made me laugh.  I have always thought it incredibly creepy how interested British people are in talking about child abuse, all the while acting like they are so shocked about it.  But anyway this is not the main point of the story.  The narrator is.  She is hilarious and insightful.  Here she is on Sheba’s breasts:

She had a dancer’s bosom.  Two firm little patties riding the raft of her ribs.  Bill’s eyes widened.  Antonia’s narrowed.

And on an awkward colleague

Even his most minor conversational sallies have an agonized, over-meditated quality . . . .  Talking to him is rather like attempting to converse with a school play. 

She is also so lonely it has poisoned her.  Let me just quote at self-indulgent length:

‘Purpose – that’s closer to it,’ Sheba said.  ‘Children do give you a purpose.  In the sense of keeping you busy, in the sense of something to get out of bed and do every morning.  But that’s not the same as meaning.’

I laughed rather bitterly, I’m afraid.  What I thought was: That is the sort of fine distinction that a married woman with children can afford to make.

But she was right.  Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world . . . You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beading their mouths.  You make out To Do lists – reorganize linen cupboard, learn two sonnets.  You dole out little treats to yourself – slices of ice cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall.  And then, every once in a while, you wake up and gaze out of the window at another bloody daybreak, and think, I cannot do this any more.  I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.

She becomes obsessed with Sheba, and is the architect of her downfall, ensuring that she is eventually totally dependent on her.  Here she is talking about others:

There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness – seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middle-class lives.  They function perfectly well in the world, but you can imagine, given a nasty parent, or a prolonged bout of unemployment, how their potential for craziness might have been realized . . .

She is of course also talking about herself. I am not sure what I found so compelling about book.  I think it is because of the lockdown.  I am feeling much closer to craziness myself.

AND QUIET FLOWS THE DON by Mikhail Sholokhov

Here is a novel that assumes you have a much more detailed knowledge of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks than in fact you do.

It begins in a Kossack village, and you learn all about the rural life and the casual rape of the early twentieth century.  There is, as befits any self-respecting nineteenth century Russia novel, a big cast of characters, all of whom have multiple names.  There is lots of bracingly Russian stuff. Here’s an old man:

It’s time – I’ve lived my days, I’ve served my Tsars, and drunk vodka enough in my day

Here’ a wife finding her husband drunk:

Daria thrust two fingers into his mouth, gripped his tongue, and helped him to ease himself

I mean I’ve heard of doing anything for love, but this is ridiculous.  All of this is all just very much prep for what the author wants you to know about, which is the First World War, the Revolution, and the ensuing Civil War.  The author was in involved in the two latter (from age of 13) and it shows.  Try this:

All the objects around were distinct and exageratedly real, as they appear after a night’s unbroken watching

I love the suggestion that we all know what it is like after a night on sentry duty.  He also appears to think we are all equally informed about Russian politics.  The end of the book becomes a haze of revolutions and counter-revolutions.  What was most interesting was to see how the idea that your class was more important than your country took over on the Russian side, and how many people escaped with their lives because of it.

The front broke to pieces. In October the soldiers had deserted in scattered, unorganized groups; but by the beginning of December entire companies, regiments, divisions were retiring from their positions in good order, sometimes marching with only light equipment, but more frequently taking regimental property with them, breaking into warehouses, shooting their officers, pillaging en route, and pouring in an unbridled, stormy flood-tide backto their homes.   

You so want it to end well for them. I guess we know it did not. But at least a good chunk of these young men got the chance to live long enough to see it all go wrong