Tag: UK

MONEY by Martin Amis

This was one of the more famous books of the 1980s. I cannot say I am feeling it. It tells the story of an author whose book is being made into a movie. He has an alcohol problem and rolls joyfully/miserably through various excesses of his private and professional life. It is a novel of voice, the exuberant voice of the alcoholic, and I think we are supposed to be shocked and titillated by how transgressive he is. A woman at a bar is a ‘big bim,’ he has lots of thoughts on black New Yorkers, etc. I just found it kind of snore.

SIDE BAR: I am 100% sure that this author has daddy issues, just on general principles, because men like this always do. I note that Martin’s father, Kingsley Amis, was also an author and wrote the book LUCKY JIM, also a novel in the voice of a disillusioned man. This one, just as transgressive, is wonderful and heart-warming and made me feel free to hate my life. I am sure these two books are in some kind of dialogue, but can’t be bothered to Google to find out how.

SUPER-INFINITE by Katherine Rundell

I don’t know why but somehow I took it into my mind to read this biography of Renaissance poet John Dunne. It was pretty interesting but extremely random. I found learning about the Renaissance pretty interesting, as for example, that they used to serve a roast pig with a roast chicken posed on top of it, dressed up as a jockey.

It was comforting to learn that despite being today regarded as a major poet, Dunne was in his time as confused as the rest of us. As he explained to his friend in a letter: “I would fain do something.” His problem was figuring out what. He fell madly in love with a rich girl who abandoned her family to be with him. She then spent her entire adult life pregnant, dying in her twelfth childbed at age thirty-three. As I so often reflect in reading about history, THANK GOD FOR BIRTH CONTROL.

Interestingly Dunne often wrote his poems in letters to his friends, and did not keep copies. They poems only survive because they were copied by others, and handed around. He had no way of knowing how popular they were. It is quite possible that some of the ones that are most famous today he had already forgotten about in his own lifetime. He eventually went into the church, becoming a famous speaker, with 6,000 people (!) coming to see him at St Paul’s.

Particularly impressive was how he handled his death. As he lay dying, he not only gave instructions for the carving he wanted on his tomb (him, wrapped in his own winding sheet); but also got out of bed and got into his winding sheet, so the artist could sketch it and take his comment. It still stands in Westminster Abbey, being one of the few that survived the Great Fire of London a hundred years later.

LOVE LESSONS and LOVE IS BLUE by Joan Wyndham

I REALLY loved this one. I have already recommended it to about five people, none of whom seem enthused.  It is the real dairies that the author kept as a 19 year old in London during WWII.  They brought her huge fame when published in the 1980s, after her granddaughter found them in her attic. 

Part of the interest is a day-by-day account of what it was like to live in London during the war.  But, curiously, that’s not really most of what it focuses on.  She’s a 19 year old girl, so mostly it’s focused on BOYS.  She is desperate to lose her virginity, and then when she does, desperate to have an orgasm (takes 4-5 boys, all of whom we learn about).  She is very jealous of her friend, who claims she can have one just by leaning on a railing (!)  I don’t know what I thought a diary by a wealthy teenage girl in the 1940s was going to be like, but I did not expect it to include the taste of semen (bitter almond, in her opinion)

There is also something exceedingly touching about hearing about someone’s daily life long ago in a city you currently live in.  One night, for example, just before the Blitz begins she tell us they: “climbed the hill that looks over Highgate and lay in deck chairs at the top, smoking in the moonlight.”

Or once, when she is with her friend they see an old man on that street

“Dorothea said, ‘That is Professor Freud.’  Back to Chelsea in a tube like an oven.”

Living in Chelsea she meets many artists – Julian McLaren Ross (read his OF LOVE AND HUNGER here), Augustus John, and Dylan Thomas, who gropes her.  She volunteers for the WAAF, where she has a job tracking planes.  She meets a man who has managed to get out of Poland, and, awfully, no one believes him when he tells them about the concentration camps, thinking it is too dreadful to possibly be true.

I find in writing this summary I struggle to capture what I loved in this book so much. I think it is partly the dailyness of it (cold peas for supper!) and the indomitable spirit of the young woman, who seems to find so much to enjoy in those days. 

WEIRDO by Sarah Pascoe

Here is a book in which the worm refuses to turn.  It starts off as kind of a love story, with a girl running into a boy she used to have a crush on in a London pub.  You find out that the crush was so large that she followed him – without his knowledge – to Australia, so she could manufacture an accidental meeting.  This is crossing a line, but okay, maybe it’s a quirky love story.  Then you find out that once she got there, she was very worried that Australia – the whole country –  might be being staged for her benefit.  Things get weirder from there.  It’s a really compelling, and claustrophobic narrative voice. 

I know it doesn’t sound it, but it’s very funny.  For example, at one point she says: “If there’s anything I’ve learned in my thirties, it’s don’t cut your hair while crying.”   It’s also an interesting meditation on obsession.  At one point, there is a parable about a monkey who puts his hand in a jar to get a treat, and then, because his hand is full, can’t get it out again.  The lesson being: 

“If you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.” 

I like this.

TRAVELS INTO THE INTERIOR OF AFRICA by Mungo Park

Here are the deliriously wild real-life diaries of an English man’s solo effort to find the source of the Niger.  He does not start off solo, but it goes that way pretty fast.  In 1794 he is employed by some geographic association for the task, after the man who went before him  “had fallen a sacrifice to the climate, or perished in some contest with the natives.” 

He starts off from the Gambian coast, on foot.  He meets a huge variety of people, and is an object of great interest.  In many villages he spends hours taking on and off his coat for an audience who have never a white person, or a coat, before.  In one village the women come in to find out from him if he is truly a man (!) and he volunteers to show ‘the youngest and prettiest one’ his penis.  They find this hilarious.

I had always heard that one reason African people did not unite to fight off colonialisation is that they did not (understandably) immediately realize the threat, being too deeply involved in their own centuries-old conflicts.  This book shows how that could be so, for a huge amount of it is about who is at war with who and what that means for Mungo.  Also shockingly interesting is his estimate that only about one in four of the Africans he meets are free, the rest being slaves.  (Apparently there were two levels, if you were a local, you had some rights, but if you were a foreigner you really had none)

Mungo gets robbed quite a bit, and eventually is actually imprisoned by some Arab nomads. He has more time than he wants to observe them, and notes that “ as (their) pastoral life does not afford full employment, the majority of the people are perfectly idle, and spend their day in trifling conversation . . .”  WHERE DO I SIGN? 

He also notes some pretty interesting female beauty standards: “A woman, of even moderate pretensions, must be one who cannot walk without a slave under each arm to support her, and a perfect beauty is a load for a camel.”  He saw young girls sit weeping over their food, being forced to eat until they vomited, so they could grow fat. Again, WHERE DO I SIGN. 

This part is pretty bleak actually, as the translator (a 9 year old boy) calmly explains to him that his captors are debating between putting his eyes out and murdering him.  Eventually he escapes with only the clothes he is wearing and his horse.  He is lost and has no water.  He lies down to die, first letting his horse go (as the last ‘act of humanity’ he will ever do); and then it starts to rain.  He manages to meet some more people and is able to exchange buttons on his waistcoat for food.  It is hair-raising.   Eventually he makes his way back to the coast, never having got near the source of the Niger, but returning to a hero’s welcome all the same.  On his return, impoverished journey, it is pretty sad to see how who mostly helped him are the poor.  He is grateful to tears when an old slave woman gives him a handful of mush. 

I expected quite a lot of old school racism, but more got this:

“Whatever difference there is between Negro and the European in the conformation of the nose and the colour of the skin, there is none in the genuine sympathies and characteristic feelings of our common nature.”

THE PUMPKIN EATER by Penelope Mortimer

There are many novels about unhappy marriages. This is a particularly good one. I had never heard of THE PUMPKIN EATER before, but I am informed by the Introduction that is among the first and most important of the twentieth century. I don’t know about that, but I thought it was banging.

Try this description: “His eyes twinkled as though hung in his head to frighten the birds away”

The book tells the story of a woman on her third marriage, with a large number of children. She gets pregnant again and her husband is not happy, so she agrees to an abortion and sterilization. The day she gets back from the hospital, she finds out he is having an affair. This is back in the day when cheating was more acceptable, but she does not find it to be very okay. To be fair to him, she herself admits she is unhealthily obsessed with children, and especially babies. She makes this interesting summary:

Now I realized how completely I had been absorbed by Jake. I needed the outside world, but had no idea where to find it. For the first time, I needed friends; there were none.  Over-indulgence in sexual and family life had left us, as far as other relationships were concerned, virginal; we said we had friends much as schoolchildren, busy with notes and hearts and keepsakes, say they have lovers.

I found this so interesting! It’s rare you see this idea expressed, but I think it is in fact very common for married people to be extraordinarily lonely and friend-less, and not even know that they are.

CHARLOTTE GRAY by Sebastian Faulks

Here is a novel about a female spy. It starts as a straight-forward love story, then becomes an espionage novel, and then loses its way for a bit, struggling to connect the plotlines while getting deep into French politics in WWII.

It’s engaging throughout, which is a feat at 500 + pages, and is remarkable for deep research and believable characters, even when the plot is a little shaky. I was especially struck by the presentation of how ordinary French people reacted when their neighbours were collected into railway cars and sent ‘east’. How did they react? Apparently they were not just fine with it, they actively applauded. It is pretty chilling.

Also of interest was the worldview of those who signed up to the ideas of Vichy France: that is, that German was clearly going to win the war, so it made sense to accept this early and get France the best seat possible in the ‘new Europe.’ One can see the pragmatism of this view. It is darkly funny how completely wrong they were. What I learnt from this is that when you are being ‘pragmatic’ (i.e., dividing up your neighbours clothes between yourselves) you better make sure you are making the right bet, because if you are not, you are truly left with nothing, not even your dignity.

SOUTH RIDING by Winifred Holtby

To show there has been a book written about everything, here is one on local government.  It is a touching story of a Yorkshire community in the 1930s, covering the rich, the poor, and everything in between. 

It’s shockingly contemporary in many ways.  Most affecting is the story of a very bright teenage girl whose mother dies giving birth to an eighth child, and who thus has to drop out of school at 15 to look after the other kids  Note, the doctor had told the mother she should not have another child, and she did not want one, but I guess she could not refuse her husband, who got a bit drunk and after all it wasn’t his death sentence and THANK GOD FOR BIRTH CONTROL.

Also THANK GOD FOR VACCINATION.  The author, Winifred Holtby, died at 36, of kidney issues from the Scarlet Fever she had as a child.  She knew she had only about two years to live and dedicated it to finishing this book.  It was her fifth, and she was disappointed none had been very warmly received.  This one, published posthumously, was a huge hit and is now considered a twentieth century classic.   

Side bar, this Winifred Holtby was a dear friend of Vera Brittain (whose TESTAMOUNT OF YOUTH I read a couple of years ago).  They lived together when they moved to London after university, and then, touchingly/weirdly, carried on doing so even after Vera got married.  To answer your question, the husband did not like it, no. 

How much do you love this line from the introduction, about how Winifred was in 1935 “staying in Hornsea on the Yorkshire coast in order to escape the distractions and fatigue of life in London  . . .”  The distractions and fatigue of a life in London!  I hear you Winifred, I hear you. 

AT FREDDIE’S by Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald is such an extraordinary writer that I really did not care this novel did not have a plot.  It is about a childrens’ theatre school in the 1960s, run by a woman call Freddie, who is an institution, and knows it. She gets away with a lot :

. . . only because Freddie cared so much, and so relentlessly, for the theatre, where, beyond all other worlds, love given is love returned.  Insane directors, perverted columnists cold as a fish, bankrupt promoters, players incapable from drink, have all forgiven each other and been forgiven, and will be, until the last theatre goes dark, because they loved the profession.  And of Freddie – making a large assumption – they said: her heart is in it.

The story, which does not matter much, is about a new young teacher in whom Freddie discerns: “that attraction to the theatre, and indeed to everything theatrical, which can persist in the most hard-headed, opening the way to poetry and disaster.”

This made me laugh, as did her first flat in London where:

The interior smelled powerfully of feet.  Still she hadn’t come to London for the fresh air there, there was enough and to spare of that at home. 

What a writer!

THE WRONG KNICKERS by Bryony Gordon

Here is a memoir that I thought would be a fun canter through someone’s twenties in London. In fact I found it rather triggering. Will sound dumb, but I guess I had never really thought about what it would be like to come up in this city and not be an immigrant. And let me tell you: it’s very different.

It’s wild to imagine what it would be like to feel free to live in your overdraft. The author was of course not happy about struggling to pay her bills, but she kept doing it, because she enjoyed booze and clothes and cigarettes more. I mean: don’t we all? But I guess if you know full well you have a Plan B, in terms of a family home in Fulham to return to, you have that freedom.

If she is in a flat she doesn’t like, she just leaves. Because she has somewhere to go to. Imagine! One time she gets mugged, and she regards that as a good enough reason to go. And so, wildly, does everyone she knows! I can’t even imagine a London with so much mercy in it.