I am apparently well mad for the seventeenth century at the minute. Here I am with another book about the English Civil War. This one is a murder mystery. It tells the same story from four different perspectives. It’s a really fun mishmash of all kinds of ideas: Venetian travelers, cadaver acquisition, Royalist plots, Quakers, mental health problems, you name it. The part I found most striking was the fierce debate about whether experimentation was the right way to build scientific understanding. This sounds bizarre: like, obviously it is? How else are you supposed to know anything? But in the seventeenth century this was a revolutionary idea, with most people thinking it was presumptuous to question the wisdom of the ancients. It’s a bit like when I found out that people used to object (!) to handwashing. There is something so fun about finding out how constructed your worldview is.
Tag: fiction
IN MEMORIAM by Alice Winn
I started this book at 10pm, in bed, and next thing I knew it was past midnight. I hadn’t even looked up. It’s a long time since I got absorbed in a book so easily. It reminded me of childhood, when I used to often read for hours. I finished the whole thing the next day, despite being kind of busy. I chose long bus routes on purpose so I would have time to read, and it’s a long time since I enjoyed a London bus so much.
The story starts in a boys’ boarding school in England. The one boy, Gaunt, is in love with the other boy, Ellwood. It’s hard enough at the best of times to tell if someone likes you back, but it’s especially hard for Gaunt, because its 1913, and despite all the boys sleeping with each other in this place (?) it’s also profoundly homophobic. And that’s the other part: it’s 1913. Gaunt enlists when the war starts, and we go to the trenches. Ellwood follows him out there.
The book is inspired by the IN MEMORIAM section of boarding school newspapers, that used to carry reports of deaths of old boys. Before the war, this section was short, but after 1914 it became lengthy, there as large numbers of teenagers from the fanciest schools started dying. It’s sad to think, for the younger boys, waiting to turn 18, how they went from the it’ll-be-over-by-Christmas enthusiasm of 1913 to just-waiting-for-my-turn-to-die in 1917, 1918.
Reading this book gave me some hope that my phone has not permanently damaged my attention span. What I need to be doing is spending more time on finding books I might actually like, because when I do, it’s like I am nine again, the internet’s not been invented, and my mind is still my own.
THE MARCH by EL Doctorow
A novel showcasing a really remarkable skill. It tells the story of Sherman’s march south during the American civil war through many tiny vignettes of people of all kinds. What artistry! What ability! I don’t know who this EL Doctorow is, but he is amazing.
Writing aside, it was also interesting to learn more about the war. Sherman apparently went along burning down houses and towns to get the South to surrender, only not burning them down if the Southerners had already done it themselves. Particularly extremely heart-breaking to read about is how the slaves waited on their plantations for Sherman to arrive, and when he did, simply followed him away. It is just wild and sad and happy to read about their first days of freedom
THE MARCH by EL Doctorow
A novel showcasing a really remarkable skill. It tells the story of Sherman’s march south during the American civil war through many tiny vignettes of people of all kinds. What artistry! What ability! I don’t know who this EL Doctorow is, but he is amazing.
Writing aside, it was also interesting to learn more about the war. Sherman apparently went along burning down houses and towns to get the South to surrender, only not burning them down if the Southerners had already done it themselves. Particularly extremely heart-breaking to read about is how the slaves waited on their plantations for Sherman to arrive, and when he did, simply followed him away. It is just wild and sad and happy to read about their first days of freedom
THE L-SHAPED ROOM by Lynne Reid Banks
A novel about someone who gets pregnant before abortion is legal. Surprisingly, it is kind of uplifting. The woman concerned is middle class, and is offered an abortion by a proper doctor in a hospital. She decides this would be ‘taking the easy way out,’ (?!?) so keeps the baby. A lot of crazy things happen, such as jaw-dropping rudeness from strangers, getting fired for being pregnant (?!?), and similar. I can only say again: THANK GOD FOR FEMINISM.
Despite all this, it is curiously mostly a story about how going outside your comfort zone – in this case, she moves into a working class bedsit, and becomes friends with black people and Jewish people – can actually provide you with new opportunities and new freedoms. It’s a strangely happy book.
There was much to admire in the writing. As a little sample, here she is coming to her father’s office to tell him she is pregnant. She got pregnant the first time she ever had sex, with a fellow actor in the small-time repertory company she is with:
My father often said he didn’t know where all my ‘acting nonsense’ came from. If he could have seen himself putting on his head-of-an-industrial-empire act in that shabby, poky office, he’d have known it came straight from him. They way he glanced up from his work, looked at me for a second as if trying to place me, then let a tired smile play around his lips – it was a perfect performance of the weary tycoon smiling tolerantly at the carefree daughter who knows no better than to interrupt his Atlasian labours. . . . In some strange way I was almost looking forward to telling him now. I was glad I’d decided to do it at his office. I wasn’t afraid of him here. I saw him here, not as my father, perpetually demanding strengths and achievements of me, but as a supremely unimportant cog trying to pretend it was the whole dull wheel
KINTU by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
A pretty unusual book, being a story of four generations of a Ugandan family. It was a sophisticated piece of writing, moving between the pre-colonial and the contemporary period. Historical fiction set in Africa is pretty rare, so I enjoyed the ambition of this book. My challenge was the same as for all multi-generational stories, which is that it can feel like a series of short stories, and I am not a big fan of short stories. They feel to me like getting dumped: you are just starting to care and then all of a sudden it’s over.
THE RED AND THE GREEN by Iris Murdoch
Here was a really strange book where there was a nephew in love with an aunt, an aunt in love with a nephew (unfortunately a different one), an uncle with a lot of weird religious issues and all of this going on against the backdrop of how everyone really feels about the English in Ireland. SPOILER ALERT: they don’t like it.
I got about three-quarters of the way through and just had to stop. The incest, the obsessive Catholicism, I just couldn’t get into it. And the whole time one of the nephews was boldly heading towards what he thought was going to be a great victory for Ireland in an uprising happening at Easter 1916. He was to be garrisoned at the Post Office. I know next to nothing about Irish history, but I am pretty sure that was happened at the Post Office was not very nice, was in fact rather bloody, and that certainly it was not a victory. I just couldn’t hang in there for it.
AS MEAT LOVES SALT by Maria McCann
This book was five hundred pages long and I could easily have read another five hundred. I am in mourning that it’s over. It’s set in the English Civil War, and I now feel a weird sense of ownership of this period like: don’t you KNOW how terrible the siege of Basing House WAS? This is a fairly big leap from the beginning, when I was not sure which side Cavaliers were vs Roundheads.
It tells the story of one Jacob, and is mostly a love story about him and a man he meets in the army. Interestingly though, Jacob is not what you would call a nice man. He is very very needy and possessive, and this shows up, in time-honoured fashion, in domestic violence. And just regular violence. I read one review that said that put them off, but for me it made it more interesting. It was very compelling to see how it all made sense to him in his own warped world. Plus which, I am not sure that people who had to deal with the rigours of servant life in the seventeenth century, and then were in a terrible war, and then, and I didn’t really understand this part, were in some kind of utopian effort to claim common land as farm land (?) and then emigrated to America, are necessarily ready to be judged by today’s morality. The siege of Basing House alone!
I am desperately trying not to just immediately start another McCann. I don’t know who this lady is but I LOVE HER.
CLEOPATRA AND FRANKENSTEIN by Coco Mellors
A readable little book about a marriage between a young woman and a much older man that goes very wrong. I whipped through it, but somehow it didn’t touch me. I think maybe there was too much drama? I have always struggled to understand tortured relationships.
VLADIMIR by Julia May Jonas
A wonderfully fun, salty novel, written from an unusual perspective: that of a woman in her late fifties. I don’t want to get all identity-based about everything, but wouldn’t it be interesting to know how many more books have 50-something male narrators than female ones? I bet it is like minimum 10x
Anyway in this book, enjoyably, the woman has a huge crush on a much younger man. He dresses well:
(I) had forgotten the specificity and light irony of urban style. My husband wore what he wore because he believed in it – he had lost the sense of costuming and presentation that well-dressed city dwellers naturally possessed. That perambulating sense of always being on display.
“Specificity and light irony” – I love it! She worries about her wrinkles, stops eating carbs, gets him drunk, and then goes direct to drugging him and tying him up. I had great hopes for where this was going. Then it took an abrupt left turn into much more ordinary territory. But I still had a lot of fun. Try this, when she is angry at her husband:
. . . lightning bolts of anger shot from my vagina to my extremities. I’ve always felt the origin of anger in my vagina and am surprised it is not mentioned more in literature
And this, when someone compliments her for all the art and poetry on her walls, and she replies:
But does one always want to be surrounded by so much culture? There’s something exhausting about being constantly bombarded by everyone’s best efforts
It was very pithy and interesting, even if I would have preferred the plot to go another way. I even liked this last reflection on what she had or hadn’t done:
Getting away with something, not getting away with something, moral retribution. I don’t matter, you don’t matter. To think we do is just marketing. It’s this cult of personality.