Tag: UK

BURMESE DAYS by George Orwell

Here is a novel about the British Raj in Burma in the 1920s. You would think if you are going to go to the trouble of colonizing a place you would at least enjoy yourself. Here, they do nothing but bitch. It’s too hot, we don’t like the food, there aren’t enough sidewalks and etc. I just finished THE GREAT FIRE, where they did some similar whining, but about Australia. I don’t think this happened as much in Southern Africa (e.g., ‘Happy’ Valley), possibly because it’s just a better place. SHOUTOUT TO THE SUBCONTINENT!

The story is around a man named John Flory, who particularly suffers with the narrow-mindedness and (though he does not call it this) racism of his colleagues. He falls madly in love with a young woman who is as narrow-minded and racist as any of them, but he is frankly desperate. Meanwhile, his only real friend, an Indian doctor, is at risk from a corrupt Burmese official. Unsurprisingly, it all ends badly.

It’s in that ‘unsurprisingly’ that my issue with this book sits. The whole thing drips with doom from the beginning. It’s like a morality story, in which the good die young, told very slowly. I don’t know too much about the British in Burma, but it also strongly has the vibe of being written by someone who wasn’t there for very long but still has a lot of opinions. And yet, I still enjoyed it. Orwell’s a good writer, and this was an interesting window into a certain kind of (thankfully) lost life.

SMALL THINGS LIKE THIS by Claire Keegan

I read this 110 page novel in almost a single sitting. It has featured on a lot of BOOK OF THE YEAR lists, and I can see why. It’s remarkably densely packed, creating a whole world of snowy working-class Ireland. I read it on Christmas Eve, and luckily it was also set on Christmas, which added to the charm. However the story is not very Christmas-y. It’s about guilt and what you should sacrifice for people you’ve never met. Okay, maybe it is kind of Christmas-y.

It tells about a man who while making a delivery of coal to a Convent gets some sense of what is actually happening to woman in it’s Magdalen laundry. This deserves a googling, if you’ve never heard of these institutions. Essentially they began as places for sex workers to be ‘saved.’ They were saved by working for free fifteen hours a day as laundry workers. This worked so well (for the church’s bottom line) that soon all sorts of women were interned, including orphans, the flirtatious (?), and in general any woman who it was convenient to get rid of.

This poor coal delivery guy is then faced with a very specific moral problem, as it is made very clear to him how little he can do to help, and what the consequences will be for him if he tries. It’s gripping, I recommend it.

THE GRASS ARENA by John Healy

Sometimes it feels as if every addict has written a memoir, like it’s one of the twelve steps or something.

I was recently noting how very many there were, and how similar. Here’s the book that shows I was wrong (first time for everything). It also shows something we often forget: how incredibly stitched up the book world is by people who were able to graduate high school.

THE GRASS ARENA is by a man who had an exceedingly tough childhood, became an alcoholic, and spent fifteen years homeless. It makes all sorts of more famous books on alcoholism look like a holiday camp, because they are all written by people who, at the end of the day, had parents in the suburbs to go back to. I have never read an account of what it is to be an addict without a safety net.

The grass arena is public parks, mostly round Camden. This is very much a book of north London. He tells about his daily life. He wakes up blacked out most days, and begins again from scratch to find enough money to drink. Let me give you a sample:

George and Ernie came back with a bag full of chicken bones. They’ve been down the dustbins again, back of the restaurants. Everybody welcome to lunch. Yeah, we’re all going to catch some horrible unspeakable disease. Not today perhaps. But time is on the dustbins’ side

He also tells us about his fellow drunks (not his friends, as he emphasizes: there are no friends in that community):

Alfie used to drink with a guy called Fingers Knox but Fingers got himself killed when he fell from the top to the bottom of the escalator in the tube. Poor old Fingers, that was some drop – he was a good beggar – lost most of the tops of the fingers of his right hand to the frost, a few winters back. He was a middle-aged Jock, used to travel out on the last tube to Edgeware every night to a skipper. He’d beg all the way on the tube going out, get a bottle next morning and beg his way back to the park. He was never without a drink. He used to take fits and get mugged often. He got nicked one time and the computer or something showed he was a deserter from the army in 1939! . . He used to say it was sad to have to creep and crouch and slink next morning after drink and that was why he always done a bit of late night begging. . . He had style. He would not keep jumping up at everyone that went past. He would wait. Then when he sensed the best beg, he’d put on his begging smile, beam in. Nine times out of ten it would be a fiver touch.

I find this very touching somehow, that this is what is left to posterity of Fingers Knox. The author eventually goes to jail for a long period, gets clean, and is eventually rescued from alcoholism by chess. Yes, you read that right. Someone teaches him chess and it transforms his life. He becomes a professional chess player. And then a yogi. What a man! What a life!

MY PHANTOMS by Gwendoline Riley

This one is COMPLETELY SEARING and I can’t recommend it strongly enough. Steel yourself though. I read that the author is surprised people continually assume the book is autobiographical, and I can tell you right now it is because it is so specific and accurate one can only think it comes from someone’s real life.

It is about a woman’s relationship with her mother. She only sees her once a year, so the book is mostly a series of conversations, and it is the dialogue that is so achingly perfect. Here the mother is, welcoming a man she hopes to date:

“And would you like a drink?” my mother said, as Dave handed her his coat and smiled at us. “Or a … radish, or … You want it, we got it,” she said, in her Italian restaurant owner voice. “We gotta the radishes, we gotta the nuts!” she said.

The mother is horrifyingly closely observed, the kind of observation of someone else most people never do, and if they do it is only of close family members. Try this:

My mother loved rules. She loved rules and codes and fixed expectations. I want to say – as a dog loves an airborne sick. Here was unleashed purpose. Freedom, of a sort. Here too was the comfort of the crowd, and of joining in. Of not feeling alone and in the wrong.

I see that I somehow can’t describe this book. But take it from me: it’s chilling

FLUDD by Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel is a magical writer. I mean, try this:

There were draughts, it was true, which followed each worshipper like a bad reputation, which dabbed at their ankles and climbed into their clothes, as cats do with people who do not like them

Bam! Two amazing ideas in a row, and about draughts. Then try this one, about the view of Catholics towards Protestants in a small town:

The Protestants were damned, of course, by reason of this culpable ignorance. They would roast in hell. A span of seventy years, to ride bicycles in the steep streets, to get married, to eat bread and dripping: then bronchitis, pneumonia, a broken hip: then the minister calls, and the florist does a wreath: then devils will tear their flesh with pincers.

What an accurate summary of a life. And then this:

But then again, taking the long view, and barring flood, fire, brain damage, the usual run of back luck, people do get what they want in life. The frightening thing is that life is fair; but what we need, as someone has already observed, is not justice but mercy

And yet, in a an abrupt left turn, let me say that I did not really like this book. It was about a new curate coming to a parish church who turns out to be the devil. The plot really fell apart, and the book sort of petered out. But the beginning was so strong it was worth it. “What we need is not justice but mercy” GAR!

ORIGINAL SINS by Matt Rowland Hill

The field of memoirs on drug addiction is a crowded one. Well done to this guy for getting his book written and published, but I’ve got to be honest and say it’s a story that’s been told before. Not that that makes his suffering any the less real: the stealing, the betraying, the bulging veins, but it’s hard going when it’s been done before. Like I am always impressed by people who sit down and decide they are going to write about the first world war. Check it out: ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT already exists. Best to retreat from that field in good order.

SISTERS BY A RIVER by Barbara Comyns

I am really getting into this writer big time.  This book is apparently semi-autobiographical and if so: wow.  It tells about a family of sisters growing up in a crumbling mansion who are left pretty much to their own devices.  Try this story of how their parents got together:

. . .  he thought she looked very nice so he said ‘When you grow up I will marry you ask your Mother to teach you how to cook’ He bought her a goat and a white kitten to remember him by, but the goat burst and the kitten was run over by a train . .

The book is full of strange, fanciful stuff, a weird evocation of childhood, where you don’t know quite what is real and what is not.  And when you accept what is happening around you is normal:

Once when Beatrix was a baby he (their father) got so furious because of her crying her threw her down the stairs, fortunately a cook called Harriat caught her . . after that Harriat kept her in her bedroom at night so that he couldn’t hear her crying which was a good thing in case there hadn’t been anyone to catch her the next time, but Harriat had to leave soon after because her feet smelt.

I mean: ?!?  Comyns went on to have an inspirationally varied life: lived everywhere, worked multiple jobs (many of them bizarre), struggled with the rent, failed as a painter, succeeded as a writer.  What a woman, what an example to us all. 

THE KRAKEN AWAKES by John Wyndham

I usually like the author John Wyndham, but here it’s like he was over-tired being his worst self. It’s super wordy, and kind of fakey, and people keep calling each other ‘darling.’ The premise is great, being about aliens hatching out of the deep sea, rather than deep space, a creepy and horrifyingly believable idea, but told so incredibly slowly that I can’t recommend it.

QUARTET IN AUTUMN by Barbara Pym

Here is a novel about how you ought to love your co-workers. It tells the story of four older people, two men and two women, working in an office together. None have any close family, and all live alone. They spend all day together, do not have much use for holidays, and yet do not make much effort to get to know each other. They begin to retire, and are at a loss without work and each other. Okay, that’s not really true: it’s far more subtle and sad than that sentence suggests; but it’s more or less what happens.

It’s a remarkably good novel about many things, among them lost opportunities and what your life amounts to. Pym is an amazing writer, and it’s mind-blowing that this novel, written in 1977, just before her death, was her first to be published in 16 years. Her agent had rejected her last, and this had apparently silenced her for a couple of decades. She got her own back, getting a Booker nomination, so BOOM.