Tag: male writer

GERMINAL by Emile Zola

I thought I’d give this novel a bash to see how far my attention span has degraded.  In my teens and twenties the vast majority of what I read was massive 19th century novels, and I was curious if I still had the appetite for all that tiny text,  description of landscape, and casual misogyny.  Good news: yes I do! 

This one tells about a man walking through 19th century France looking for a job. He is facing starvation when he lucks into work in a coal mine.  Cue a lot of interesting detail about 19th century mining practices.  As you can imagine its not good: while they don’t get to have much to eat, they do get to have coal lung, and lets not even get into the ponies permanently trapped down there.

I was kind of hoping this story might be about how this guy was delighted to escape from starvation to near-starvation, and went on to build a happy family life in the mines.   LOL no.  He is inspired by the idea of communism and eventually convinces everyone else to strike.  At this point, it started to feel very much like THE JUNGLE by Upton Sinclair (same story, except 1930s/America/ abbatoir), a book that wrecked me in a Chicago airport maybe twenty years ago.  I could just see where we were going with idealism crushed, people starving, immortal logic of capitalism triumphant and etc, and I just couldn’t bring myself to go through it.   So I guess the good news is my attention span’s fine, but the bad news is my emotional resilience is SHOT. 

THE MAN OF PROPERTY by John Galsworthy

This is the first in a series of novels which is part of how Galsworthy won the Nobel.  I enjoyed it, but I am not sure if I will read the whole 1000 page saga which I am told is ‘three novels and two interludes,’ wtf is an interlude.  Anyway, this first novel tells about the unhappy marriage of Soames Forsyte and his wife Irene.  Forsyte comes from a robustly bourgeois background, while Irene is poor.  I have not googled it but I am 100% sure Galsworthy comes from a family with money, because he spends a lot of time banging on about how awful families with money are, how obsessed with property, etc

The couple have little in common and she SPOILER ALERT begins an emotional affair with her husband’s architect. She had already ‘locked her door’ to Soames, and eventually he becomes so enraged that he ‘asserted his rights and acted like a man’.  I was really impressed that a book written this early takes marital rape so seriously.  Irene is extremely distressed, and the architect is too, ending up killed in a carriage accident.  Soames meanwhile is upset too, but mostly because he can’t understand why Irene won’t just accept that she, just like their big house, is his property.

A CONSPIRACY OF PAPER by David Liss

This book sounded great: a historical fiction set among the coffee houses of eighteenth century London in the lead up to the bursting of the South Sea Bubble. Ooh obscure early stock market drama! Count me in.

It is that, but it is also a detective story. I am okay with a detective story but it needs to move quick. And this one moved kind of slow. So I enjoyed all the fun research, maybe there was a bit too much research – there was certainly an awful lot of exposition – but anyway: I had to quit at about 150 pages.

I don’t always record books I don’t finish, but I can just imagine that in 10 years I will be looking for something to read, and think: oh, this looks good! So, here’s something for me in 2034: Sarah, you did not like this book.

NEVER LET ME GO by Kazuo Ishiguro

I loved this book the first time I read it, but on the re-read I was less impressed.  It made me realize I guess that it actually functions very much like a thriller/detective story, and thus once you know what the mystery is, it is much less interesting.   I also found it extremely depressing that SPOILER ALERT the clones don’t even consider fighting against their destiny – to have their organs slowly harvested.  Why is that? What is the message?  That we all are so deeply trapped in our worldview we can’t ever throw it off for any reason?  I don’t know, maybe that’s true, but damn. 

THE DAIRIES OF MR LUCAS: NOTES FROM A LOST GAY LIFE edited by Hugo Greenhalgh

I just love an ordinary person’s diary.  This one is from a man who kept a diary from his 20s till his 80s, and is mostly extracted from his 40s (during the nineteen sixties).  They are mostly about sex, and especially about sex workers.  I have no idea if this is what all of the diaries are about, or if this is just this editor’s interest. 

The editor inserts himself into the story quite a lot.  He was a TV researcher when he first met Mr Lucas, looking for people who were willing to talk about their experience of rent boys.  He maintained a friendship with him for decades after that, in part because he wanted the diaries, and in part because he grew to like him; and indeed Mr Lucas gifted the dairies to him in his will. 

They are a charming/predatory picture of a certain slice of London life. It’s fun to hear places about places you know well .in a very different context.  Picadilly Circus was described as ‘the marketplace of the bugger boys’ by one judge, and it’s north railing was known as the ‘rack’ of the ‘meat market’.  Or, here’s Tower Hamlets:“’Victoria Park is a great haunt of inverts.  I must explore its possibilities,’ he writes in April 1949. . “

It was extremely sad to be reminded of how recently people’s lives were destroyed for being gay in the UK.  At one point, the actor Sir John Geilgud was found by police ‘cruising for sex in a public lavatory’.  They were worried his career was over, but Sybil Thorndike insisted he come on stage with her

“She grabbed him and whispered fiercely, ‘Come on, John darling, they won’t boo me,’ and led him firmly on to the stage.  To everybody’s astonishment and indescribable relief, the audience gave him a standing ovation.”

That’s quite some allyship!  Mr Lucas ended up living a bit of a lonely life, despite all the sex.  He lived for decades in a house about 10 minutes walk from mine, and I plan to go past it, to salute him.  It’s just amazing to think every house in London is packed with not just its current inhabitants stories but those of decades, sometimes centuries, before. 

DOGGERLAND by Ben Smith

Here is an eerie story of the near-future.  Two men live on a decaying wind farm, trying to keep it going with limited supplies.  They are only very irregularly sent food from wherever the mainland is, and that food is all canned.  The younger man in particular does not seem to have ever eaten any food that was not canned.  It’s unclear what exactly is going on in the wider world, but whatever it is, it’s not good.  Probably the most striking part of this book for me was the evocation of the ocean itself, which is empty of fish but full of garbage.  It’s the logical and even likely conclusion of the current direction we’re in, and I just hope I don’t live to see it.  Try this:

“The boy sat in the galley and unpicked the last tangle of plastic from his line.  He’d gone out to check on it, to pass some time, and found a huge shoal of bags that had drifted in overnight – a dark mass, silent and heavy, hanging in the fields as if they were waiting for something.” 

One of the men is constantly ‘fishing,’ but not for fish (there aren’t any) but we guess for signs of the cities now submerged.  I didn’t quite get into the plot, which was mostly focused on the younger man, who had apparently been forced to come to the wind farm when his father ran away.  A lot went on about how he found out his father didn’t really abandon him, and how the older man is a beloved father figure in any case, and etc etc.  Various versions of daddy issues in other words.  But I didn’t really care, the setting was so frightening and fully realized. 

THE WIDE WIDE SEA by Hampton Sides

I’m apparently really into nautical non-fiction at the moment.  THE WAGER, THE MOOR’S ACCOUNT, and now THE WIDE WIDE SEA.  It’s the story of Captain Cook’s third and final (fatal) journey of exploration.  He was all set to retire too, and no one really understands why he decided to go ‘one last voyage,’ given he was already famous and rich.  How could he not see that there was virtually no way, narratively, this wasn’t going to go either tragic or disappointing?

The voyage had two goals, one to find the NorthWest Passage, and the other to return to this young man, Mai, to his home island of Tahiti.  This second part was pretty interesting.  Mai discovered guns at the business end – by being shot at -when the Europeans landed in Tahiti the first time. He was strongly, strongly in favour.  His family had been killed by their enemies on Bora-Bora, and this guy, clearly a total baller, decided to play the long game, i.e., befriend the Europeans, get them to take him to Europe, get European guns, and come back to use them on these bastards from Bora-Bora.  To understand his level of fury, let me tell you that apparently it was not uncommon for Bora-Borans to take the dead body of their enemies and “flatten the eviscerated corpse with clubs, then cut a hole through the abdomen, through which the triumphant warrior would insert his head to ‘wear’ his victim as a sort of macabre serape.”

Mai had been living in the UK for some years, mostly on country estates with the wealthy. He rarely visited towns, but when he did ‘the poverty and hunger he encountered while on brief visits to . . . upset him; he’d seen nothing like it in the land of tropical plenty that was Tahiti.”  He was admired for his quick learning of English, and his freedom with the language; ice was ‘stone water,’ a wasp that stung him was a ‘solider bird.’  One day when offered snuff he politely replied ‘No thank you, the nose not hungry.’    

When Cook finally drops him off, he struggles to reacclimatize of course, and the gun thing doesn’t really work out because the intra-island battles have moved on.  The author, bizarrely, says a bunch of stuff about how sorry he is for Mai, who he feels is ‘doomed . . . to a jumbled, deracinated existence,’  because he has moved around so much and seen so much.  Has this guy never been to London?  About half the population are from elsewhere and I don’t note us all  in despair at our jumbled lives.

I was interested to learn that Cook’s achievements were not just geographical but culinary. I knew scurvy was a bad disease, but did not realize that “ It was generally assumed that scurvy would kill off half the crew members on any lengthy expedition.” The causes of scurvy were not understood till the 1950s, but Cook dreamed up a diet for his sailors which prevented it – his first voyage was three years and they did not lose a single person to the illness, which made him famous and was a huge breakthrough for British imperialism.

Anyway, he ends up being killed by some locals on a beach in Hawaii.  An interesting story. 

THE ROAD TO NAB END by William Woodruff

It is rare, at least in English, to find a book written by someone who grew up really poor.  And it’s very rare for that book to be pre-1950.  Off the top of my head, I can think of LARKRISE TO CANDLEFORD and MY FIRST THIRTY YEARS and that’s about it.  THE ROAD TO NAB END is one such.  It’s a memoir of a childhood in the early 1900s in Blackburn.  I had never heard of this Blackburn, but it was apparently a key starting point of the Industrial Revolution, especially in clothing manufacture.  Unfortunately for the author, the Revolution was running out of steam as he arrived, and his family were at the sharp end of it.  Try this:

“I think the damp worried me more than the cold.  There was nothing to stop it rising through the flagstones that covered the floor . . .  The washing hanging from the ceiling didn’t help either.  The cold was sometimes so severe it made us forget the damp.”

“All meals were our favourite meals,” he says at one point, a sentence I have thought of often in my revoltingly privileged life of restaurants and ‘standards’ about food. 

What makes it especially sad is that his parents moved to America in about 1910, and then, in a tragically poor piece of decision-making driven by homesickness, came back again, just in time for the father to be drafted into WWI and clothing manufacture to move to America.  Here is his grandma, when challenged about moving to the US:

“And don’t give me that old buck about love of country.  That kind of talk is for toffs.  You keep the country, I’ll take the money.  Frankly, I don’t care whether God saves our gracious king or not.  I’m tired of the whole rotten lot.” 

She certainly never came back, and ended her life rich and comfortable.

The presence of the WWI veterans is a particularly sad part of this book.  One lies babbling in a bed in the front garden of the house across the street for twenty years, presumably from shell shock or a head injury. 

It’s a clear, straightforward re-telling of a tough childhood, and it made me grateful for my cushy adulthood.

THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI by Pierre Boulle

I’m afraid I couldn’t finish this one, despite its truly wonderful cover and the fact that the edition I have is one of my favourite kinds, falling apart and with brown pages.

THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI tells about the Japanese use of Allied soldiers and forced labour to build a railway in WWII, a terrible project that killed about twenty thousand people. This fictionalized version had a tight plot in this interesting setting, but it was just too silly for me. It’s very much a mid-century male fantasy of tough geniuses.

Boulle was a veteran of forced labour himself, and I would have liked to read a book about his actual experiences. Apparently life being what it is, he did write one, called MY RIVER KWAI, but it has not endured enough to even merit a Wikipedia entry, while this kind of trashy version sold in the millions. Well done to him: I see he was so poor he was practically homeless after the war, so I’m glad he made some money. He then went on to write a wildly different book – wait for it – it’s PLANET OF THE APES (!?!) so he certainly sorted himself out

THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG by Peter Carey

Here’s a book so good it’s almost depressing, like: how has this Carey guy done this?

It tells a fictionalized version of the life of the Australian bank robber Ned Kelly, in the imagined voice of Ned Kelly.  There’s not a lot in the way of punctuation, and sometimes we run dangerously close to getting a bit cute, but overall it’s amazingly successful.  Try this:

“Inside the shanty were much laughing and singing the shadows flitting across the curtains.  Harry Power were dancing I heard not a word about the bunions he otherwise were whingeing about night and day.  I never knew a man to make such a fuss about his feet.”

Or this, about a bushfire:

“God willing one day I would tell that baby the story of the apple gums exploding in the night the ½ mad kangaroos driven down before this wrath into the township of Sebastopol . . “

Or this:

 “. . a number of Chinamen was engaged with a game of mahjong on a wide wooden plank.  These was hard looking fellows all dried out and salted down for keeping.”

It takes you right inside his mind, very successfully.  He grows up in poverty, the child of a transported man, and very much at the mercy of landowners and their corrupt police.  He is almost forced into the life of the outlaw, and is greatly admired by the poor for his success.  I always want to believe the life of an outlaw is glamorous, but this book shows what I guess I always suspect, which is that in fact it is stressful and difficult and given the choice we’d all rather be landowners.  A fantastic book.