Tag: UK

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

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.

TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY by John Le Carre

I loved Le Carre’s most famous novel, THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, and so expected to enjoy this, his second-most-famous. Instead I was just confused. It just seemed like there were a lot of names and a lot of middle-aged men talking to each other sweatily. I think this is not the author’s fault, but mine, for reading it in tiny snippets while falling asleep over a long period.

I learnt later that the book is based on the real story of how Kim Philby, one of the most important people in MI5, was eventually unmasked as a Soviet spy in 1963. I was required to dive deep into the Wikipedia, where I was most enthralled to learn that he was turned to the Soviets while at Cambridge, and spent his whole early career attempting to get into MI5, solely for the purposes of being a traitor. Once he had fled to Moscow, he said his ‘purpose in life was to defeat imperialism.’ What a baller, bizarre statement! Can you imagine being so entranced by something in university that you would stick to it single-mindedly for the rest of your life, lying to every single person you know for decades? Can you imagine spending years sending people to their deaths for a ‘concept’? I can barely commit to a haircut!

A WREATH FOR THE ENEMY by Pamela Frankau

Here is a highly mysterious book told with four different voices. What it is about is hard to say: it’s I guess partly about losing your virginity, about about betraying your parents, and about a cow that is saved from drowning. In short, it all goes on. The best voice is the first one, where a thirteen year old girl is working on her book, the Anthology of Hates, which is all about all the people and things she hates. Brilliant.

Best of all was that this was an old library book, which has not been checked out since 1985. These kinds of old smelly books that have passed through many hands are my favourite.

WHO WAS CHANGED AND WHO WAS DEAD by Barbara Comyns

Here is another book by wonderful Barbara Comyns, whose biography is a total inspiration.  It is all selling puppies and moving to Spain and renting flats and being a painter, and being a novelist is just by-the-by.  

WHO WAS CHANGED AND WHO WAS DEAD is quirky even by the standards of her other books, which are pretty damn quirky.  It begins mid-flood, with ducks paddling around the living room, “quacking their approval.”  Then one by one the townspeople start to go mad.  It is all down to some poisoned flour, but this is not the point. The point is the madness, and especially the freedom that is found in it.  It was deeply and weirdly enjoyable. 

AKENFIELD by Ronald Blythe

A  brilliantly weird effort to capture the entire life, top to bottom, of an English village.  Written from interviews made in the twentieth century, and lightly fictionalized, it focuses on their memory of life in the nineteenth, and captures the collapse of a certain rural way of being.

That collapse was no bad thing, because let me tell you, these people WORKED. Here we learn that it was not the Industrial Revolution that created exploitation.  Agricultural laborers had four hours off a week, 10-2 on Sunday (i.e., just enough time to go to church).  As one man, the grandson of a laborer puts it:

They bought their life’s strength for as little as they could.  They wore use out without a thought because, with the big families, there was a continuous supply of labour

There is a kind of tragic over-emphasis on the quality of work, with people taking what seems to us now a really bizarre amount of pride in their work, because as another worker says:

A straight furrow was all that a man was left with

Apparently it was a very silent world, though  “Television is now breaking down their silences.  They are getting accustomed to the idea of dialogue”

It is perhaps no surprise that given half a chance, lots of people fled. I was stunned to learn that from from 1871, 700,000 British left for the colonies, and  “It was the not the idlest and wastrels who sailed,” leaving lots of land effectively empty.  As a child of the former colonies I am very familiar   with what it was like for those who left, but I never thought about what it was for those who stayed.

It captures a world so small it can only boggle the mind:

Pub men stayed loyal to one pub for maybe the whole of their lives. . . now they will drive down to Southend or Clacton and let off steam

I also learnt more than I ever wanted to about agriculture in Suffolk. For example, East Anglia had 17 different types of apples (WHY?), all harvested at different times.  And that sheep used to be managed by  having their tails cut off with a hot iron and “the balls nicked out with the shepherd’s teeth.  He ate well that day.” 

I enjoyed all this interesting-slash-disgusting agricultural information, but even more I enjoyed a window into many individuals lives.  One guy goes to London briefly and works in the railway:

There is a place in Broad Street Station where you can stare through the arches and see the stars, an and they were the only things I can remember seeing in London.  That is the truth. 

Ronald Blythe left school at 14 and taught himself from public libraries and it shows. It’s a wildly ambitious, beautiful book. I could go on and on, and be grateful you were not with me while I was reading it, because I did go on and on. I’d love to read it for lots of different communities.  I can only imagine how interesting it would be if you took a single street of vendors in Harare, for example, or a Convent in HoChiMinh City. 

I’M A FAN by Sheena Patel

Here’s hair-rising story of a romantic obsession that includes such hilarious chapter headings as:

first of all i didn’t miss the red flags i looked at them and thought yeah that’s sexy

Here she is stalking someone:

(The woman) doesn’t pull her phone out of her pocket as she’s probably one of those technologically ethical mothers, but I bet she’s dying to scroll.

And when she visits a wealthy person’s home:

The scene is lit from one of the large windows opposite me, which lends the table this romantic Modern-meets-seventeenth century Dutch still life vibe and I think how the fuck do you know how to do this

But really it is mostly very sad. The obsession is so strong, and the object of it so undeserving, that it is basically self-harm. It then leads to a further, even worse obsession with one of his other girlfriends, and especially with her online persona. Eventually, it becomes a story that asks the question: what would it be like if Instagram finally did manage to totally take over your life? What if you actually did lose the battle against social media? It’s kind of hair-raising, because it seems all too possible

THE CITY AND THE STARS by Arthur C Clarke

Here is a book set in the incredibly far future. I was not too sure on the plot, but the vision was interesting. It shows a city governed by a huge Central Computer that generates all their needs and keeps them all eternally young. This is what humans think is the only place left that humans live, but then the protagonist finds another settlement of humans, who have decided to accept mortality. This sounds like it is going to be an interesting discussion of the question of : would you like to live forever if you could? To me the answer is OF COURSE.

Anyway, that is not where the book goes, it goes into robot worms and stuff. But I still enjoyed it. And I loved learning about the life of Arthur C Clarke, who peaced out of the UK at forty to go live in Sri Lanka and scuba and be gay and write books.

FOR THY GREAT PAIN HAVE MERCY ON MY LITTLE PAIN by Victoria Mackenzie

Here is a novel where the backstory is better than the story. It weaves together the stories of two real women from the 14th century. One is an anchoress, Julian of Norwich. She lost her siblings and father to the plague, and then her husband and child. She decided to become an anchoress, which involves you going into a room in the church, and then them BRICKING YOU INSIDE. There is a window to the outside world, through which she gets food and can see people who come to ask her advice, but that’s it. CAN YOU IMAGINE YOUR ISSUES.

The other woman, Margery Kempe is arguably even stranger. She is the wife of a wealthy businesswoman. She has the number of children you have when you don’t have bodily autonomy, and she is suddenly overwhelmed with weeping at Christ’s suffering. She cries a lot, she preaches a lot, all the while being threatened with being burned alive for the revolutionary idea that she can have a personal relationship with Christ (ie., the basis for all contemporary Christianity). She ends up travelling the world doing all sorts.

What makes the book dull is that we have to hear a lot about their religious visions, which is as boring as hearing about people’s dreams. Actually probably more boring, because at least dreams can be new (an octopus ate my pasta) whereas Christian religious visions are not (man gives out fish, etc).

What I did find interesting was how we come to know about these women. For example, the housewife Margery Kempe is the first person to write an autobiography in English – a pretty major deal. And her wild and improbable story would have been totally lost to us, were it not for a houseguest, who in 1934 was searching in a closet for a pingpong ball, and dislodged a pile of papers which turns out to be the only surviving manuscript! It’s just wild to think how many lives are completely lost to us. Thank god we now have social media so every minute of important lives are minutely documented!