Tag: UK

TROUBLES by JG Farrell

This author was kind of a jock at university. Then he caught polio, poor guy, just a couple of years before the vaccine was invented, and had to abruptly enter an iron lung to stay alive. Sport’s loss was literature’s gain, because he’s a wonderful writer. This book tells the story of a WWI veteran who goes to visit a woman he met in Brighton during his leave. She says she is fiance; he can’t remember if she is or not. It gets weirder from there. The alleged fiance lives in an enormous decaying hotel in Ireland, and dies almost immediately after he gets there. For some reason he stays on, while the hotel crumbles around him. A bunch of stuff then happens that has something to do with Irish political history, I could not follow all that. But I enjoyed it nonetheless. Here is a taste, when they brought in the family dogs to try and chase out the huge family of cats who were living in abandoned rooms:

“But it had been a complete failure. The dogs had stood about uncomfortably in little groups, making little effort to chase the cats but defecating enormously on the carpets. At night they had howled like lost souls, keeping everyone awake. In the end the dogs had been returned to the yard, tails wagging with relief. It was not their sort of thing at all.”

THE SEIGE OF KRISHNAPUR by JG Farrell

I found this book in my house, but have no idea where or when I got it. It’s part of the EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY series – a fantastic series I used to read a lot of back when I haunted the Harare City Library – so I assume I picked it up based on that alone. And once again EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY has come up with the goods. I’d never heard of this JG Farrell, but this is a banging book. It is a fictionalization of the Siege of Lucknow in 1857, which I’d also never heard of, in which a group of English colonials withstood a long siege by the rebellious Indian army. It is a hair-raising story of delicately brought up people reduced to eating rodents, but it is a also a hilarious book of ideas. Try this description of a young man:

“From the age of sixteen when he had first become interested in books, much to the distress of his father, he had paid little heed to physical and sporting matters. He had been of a melancholy and listless cast of mind, the victim of the beauty and sadness of the universe. In the course of the last two or three years, however, he had noticed that his sombre and tubercular manner was no longer having quite the effect it had one had, particularly on young ladies. They no longer found his pallor so interesting, they tended to become impatient with his melancholy. The effect, or lack of it, that you have on the opposite sex is important because it tells you whether or not you are in touch with the spirit of the times, of which the opposite sex is invariably the custodian.”

This gives you a flavour. It would have been really easy to write a book of stereotypes, because these poor starving people are so obviously getting what they richly deserve, but somehow he avoids it. Strongly recommend! So strongly in fact that I immediately read his next book TROUBLES. Of which more shortly.

WIGS ON THE GREEN by Nancy Mitford

I love Mitford’s THE PURSUIT OF LOVE. According to my blog I’ve read it an embarrassing 7 times. I was thus delighted to come across this book, her third and a very obscure one, quite accidentally. (By accidental, I mean in the Waterstones in John Lewis, when I was looking for a laundry hamper. Why is there a Waterstones in John Lewis? Why is it by the laundry hampers?)

I don’t like any of her other books, but hope springs eternal I guess. Hope was misplaced. It’s dated and awkward. Of interest though is that she was worried about being sued by her sister, the famous fascist Unity Mitford, as it is in part a satire of Unity’s strange, jokey right-wing sensibility as the ‘greatest heiress in England’ (she was 6 ft 1).

As a child, apparently, Unity shared a room with her other sister, Jessica, a committed communist. They divided the room in half with chalk, one side with pictures of Lenin and the other with swastikas. In later life, Unity travelled to Germany where she got a lot less jokey. Apparently she actually dated Hitler, or was at least used by Hitler to make Eva Braun jealous. She later shot herself when war was declared, which I for one am not at all sorry about.

What does inspire me about this book, in a strange way, is how bad it is. The style is close to THE PURSUIT OF LOVE but also very far away. It’s inspiring to see how someone can work through from this very uneven early work to that classic.

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.

INTERMEZZO by Sally Rooney

I am a mega-fan of Rooney’s first book, CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS, which is one of the handful of books I have ever read twice in a row. I have been less of a fan of her other books, and especially of the last one BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU? Much of what I enjoyed about the first one was the comic and contemporary spirit, and as we went along I felt we were getting more and more miserable. This one is a return to form. It tells the story a pair of brothers and their various romantic entanglements, and is exceedingly more-ish. I enjoyed it a lot, especially the journey of one character who has to slowly give up his implicit assumption that he is and can be ‘normal,’ which I found to be quite liberating.

My only issue with it was tbh a bit of a political one. In all Rooney’s books there is a strong perspective that anyone who works in any area of commerce is obviously some kind of sad, dead-eyed zombie in slave to our capitalist masters. Apparently the only acceptable professions are like lawyer, journalist, arts administrator. You can work as e.g., a barista, but only if you feel utterly polluted by it. I just find this bizarrely decadent. As if any of these delightful professions would exist without this economic model. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

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.