Tag: UK

ONE FAT ENGLISHMAN by Kingsley Amis

I found Amis’ LUCKY JIM to be both hilarious and liberating. This story, like LUCKY JIM, is about an angry and selfish university professor, but this is where the similarity ends. LUCKY JIM was a cheerful and basically optimistic book about blowing up your miserable life. This is a bleak book about doing the same.

I did not enjoy it, but I admired it. Amis sticks doggedly to having a thoroughly unattractive protagonist. Self-involved, over-weight, anti-semetic, and those are just the headlines. He particularly dislikes women, despite spending most of the book trying to sleep with them. Here’s a sample:

A man’s sexual aim, he had often said to himself, is to convert a creature who is cool, dry, calm, articulate, independent, purposeful into a creature that is the opposite of these; to demonstrate to an animal which is pretending not to be an animal that it is an animal.

I struggled a bit with how it is that this unpleasant man managed to sleep with so many women over the course of the book. Perhaps standards were lower back in the day. Apparently Amis himself was a major philanderer, which occasioned the end of his first marriage. Interesting trivia, his second was to Elizabeth Jane Howard (whose Cazalet Chronicles I am so fond of, what was she thinkng ?!?), and when that ended he wound up living out his old age with his first wife and her third husband. These people GOT AROUND.

SWEET SORROW by David Nicholls

Here is an enjoyable book that made me wonder what is the difference between commercial and literary fiction. These are some first world problems, but what can I say. I did really spend quite some time trying to think how it was that this engaging, servicable story about first love so was utterly competent and so completely forgettable. I think it is on some level because the author is not actually fighting any battle with himself in writing it. There is no vulnerability. It is almost clinically well paced and emotionally balanced.

Perhaps though vulnerability is overrated. It was very funny. Try this, from the teenage boy who is our narrator:

As with people who had good teeth and confident smiles, I was instinctively suspicious of people who got on with their parents, imagining that they must have some secret binding them together. Cannibalism perhaps.

Or this, from him again when a new theatre troupe is introduced at a school assembly:

As we feared, it was another attempt to convince us that Shakespeare was the first rapper.

That ‘as we feared’ really made me laugh. These was one interesting insight in it though. It’s about how madly he fell in love with this girl:

I had never in my life, before or since, been more primed to fall in love. . . If I’d been busier that summer, or happier at home, then I might not have thought about her so much, but I was neither busy nor happy, so I fell.

I bet if we look into when we have most painfully fallen in love we might find that what drove it was less that the person was actually perfect and more that the circumstances of our lives made us need them to be perfect.

BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU by Sally Rooney

Regular readers know I love Rooney’s CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS, which is gnaw-you-own-arm-off wonderful.  I didn’t love BEAUTIFUL WORLD as much, but then there is not much I do love as much.

BEAUTIFUL WORLD is a book about romantic relationships, and seems to have a lot of anxiety about the fact that it is about romantic relationships.  It seems like there is a concern that this is a non-serious topic to write about.  I mean I have that concern myself, but this is just because I am trapped in patriarchy like everyone else, and what women choose to write about has long been dismissed as unserious, unlike, for example, the rape-and-murder that men like to write about in airport thrillers.

The story focuses on a pair of female friends, who are living some distance apart.  It chronicles each of their relationships with their boyfriends, as well as their own friendship, which is largely conducted by email.  The emails are every alternate chapter, and are full of self-pity and trite criticism of ‘capitalism.’   For example, one character says she was in the local shop when suddenly she:

thought of all the rest of the human population – most of whom live in what you and I would consider abject poverty – . . . And this, this, is what all their work sustains!

Leaving aside the high drama, it’s just not true that most of humanity works to sustain the Western way of life.  I can think of a good billion Chinese people who have a few other things going on. Or try this:

. . . we’re living in a time of historical crisis, and this idea seems to be generally accepted by most of the population. 

Anytime someone tells me we are living in a particularly seminal moment of history I always mark them down on the moron list.  This is the over-privileged view of someone who has not lived through a war/recession/genocide.

I won’t even get into how mystified I am why these thirty-somethings are writing emails to each other.  Is this supposed to be historical fiction? Does anyone other than one’s parents write emails? 

Actually I enjoyed this book more than this makes it sound. It still sharp and heartfelt, and powerfully reminded me of the power and importance of human connection. I am not sure why I have bashed on so much

OUR SPOONS CAME FROM WOOLWORTHS by Barbara Comyns

This is a strangely inspirational book about failed painting careers, poverty and abortion. It tells the story of a young female art student who marries another art student. She gets pregnant and they are both horrified. Bizarrely, because it is the 1930s, or because he does not understand biology, the husband blames her. He refuses to take any responsibility for the baby, insisting he must focus on his art. The wife understands, because she too wants to be an artist. But instead she gets to do menial jobs for money. Eventually they split up and she ends up on the street with her baby. She manages to pull herself out of the situation by leaving London and getting a job as a cook.

Reading this summary you might think this is a depressing book. What is strange is that it is written in a light, comic tone, and can only be described as uplifting. For example, right near the beginning, speaking of her husband’s aunt, we suddenly get onto:

She even like my newts, and sometimes when we went to dinner there I took Great Warty in my pocket; he didn’t mind being carried about, and while I had dinner I gave him a swim in the water jug. 

Her what? Her newts? Or try this:

The book does not seem to be growing very large although I have got to Chapter Nine.  I think this is partly because there isn’t any conversation. I could fill pages like this:

“I am sure it is true,” said Phyllida.

“I cannot agree with you,” answered Norman.

“Oh, but I know I am right,” she replied.

. . That is the kind of stuff that appears in real people’s books.  I know this will never be a real book that business men in trains will read. . . . I wish I knew more about words.  Also I wish so much I had learnt my lessons at school.  I never did, and have found this such a disadvantage ever since.  All the same, I am going on writing this book even if business men scorn it.  

I looked up the author afterwards and found the book was indeed quite autobiographical. What filled me with huge joy was to find that her husband does not even have a Wikipedia page. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH. All that selfishness (sacrifice?) and apparently for nothing.

I am also really inspired by Comyns biography. It said she “worked in an advertising agency, a typewriter bureau, dealt in old cars and antique furniture, bred poodles, converted and let flats, and exhibited pictures.” It makes other author bios, involving lists of novels/essays/teaching posts seem maybe more ‘successful’ but somehow rather narrow and sad.

MARIANA BY Monica Dickens

First of all let’s try to come to terms with the fact that Dickens was only twenty-four when she wrote this novel. And it wasn’t even her first, but her second, the first having been a BESTSELLER.

I can’t comfort you with the reflection that it is not good, because it is really rather good. It’s a coming-of-age story that mostly mirrors Dickens’ own. The section on her childhood is particularly impressive. I love this:

Mary climbed into the neat little cattle-pen and pretended she was a horse, which meant standing quite still and feeling like a horse inside, without any outward pantomime

Her early adulthood is interesting too, especially her unsuccessful stint at drama school. I suspect many can relate to her bleak summary of what happened to those who did not give up on that particular dream early enough:

(They) battered out their youth against the doors of agents, did crowd work for films or sacrificed their so-called innocence for a walking-on part or chance in Cabaret.

There is a particularly wrenching scene where she realizes the boy she has had a crush on for years is not seriously interesting in her, but has just been enjoying her devotion. The quality of the book takes an abrupt nosedive when, in her early twenties, she meets the man she will marry, Sam. Dickens has these two characters ludicrously simpatico. Allegedly even when apart they wake at the same time, eat the same food at the same time, speak the same words and even hear the same songs (?). Clearly this is drivel. Also imagine anyone you know getting a new boyfriend and having this view about a night out with friends:

Mary was longing to get away with Sam and discuss them all. That was the only point now for her, of going to any party.

I can only assume that the first part of the book was based on her actual experience, and this last part is what she hoped real love would be like. I googled it and indeed she did not get married till her late thirties. I can only imagine her views evolved. On my side I observe people in love can often hardly agree on the same way to load the dishwasher, never mind have the same sleeping/eating/ghostly song (?) hearing schedule.

FALSE COLOURS by Georgette Heyer

I’m starting to wonder if I’ve read all the good ones of these, because the last few have been pretty rope-y. In this one, a twin substitutes himself for his brother and ends up falling in love with his fiance. It feels like it’s going to be classic Heyer, everyone has grey eyes, the hero wears tight white breeches and etc. But it kind of gets derailed into strange ‘mystery’ plot twists. However it put me to sleep in many an overly air-conditioned motel room, which is what I asked of it.

THE PURSUIT OF LOVE by Nancy Mitford

The blog leads me to believe this is my sixth re-read, but I think it is more than that. I turn to this novel when I need something soothing, so it is often read late at night. I don’t very often recommend it to other people, though I love it, because I struggle to articulate what it is that I love about it so much. I think it’s partly that I find it funny; it’s partly that I can’t yet quite understand what it is about it that I find funny, so it’s mysterious; it’s partly a kind of robust pragmatism in the authorial voice that I find reassuring and that bucks me in when I feel like whining.

I did not especially like the recent TV version. I thought they softened it till it wasn’t funny any more, which was strange: a book from the 1940s is apparently too edge for the 2020s.

Let’s enjoy the first para together:

There is a photograph in existence of Aunt Sadie and her six children sitting round the tea-table at Alconleigh. The table is situated, as it was, is now, and ever shall be, in the hall, in front of a huge open fire of logs. Over the chimney-piece plainly visible in the photograph, hangs an entrenching tool, with which, in 1915, Uncle Matthew had whacked to death eight Germans one by one as they crawled out of a dug-out. It is still covered with blood and hairs, an object of fascination to us as children. In the photograph Aunt Sadie’s face, always beautiful, appears strangely round, her hair strangely fluffy, and her clothes strangely dowdy, but it is unmistakably she who sits there with Robin, in oceans of lace, lolling on her knee. She seems uncertain what to do with his head, and the presence of Nanny waiting to take him away is felt though not seen. The other children, ….. all of them gazing at the camera with large eyes opened wide by the flash… There they are, held like flies in the amber of that moment – click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from that happiness and promise of youth, from the hopes Aunt Sadie must have had for them, and from the dreams they dreamed for themselves. I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.

THE TRIALS OF RUMPOLE by John Mortimer

Here is a jolly and old-fashioned comic novel about a London barrister. It’s set in the early twentieth century, and we find not much has changed since then. An inter-city train is back then, as today, “a journey about as costly as a trip across the Atlantic,” while the summer sales on Oxford street are “a scene of carnage and rapine in which no amount of gold would have persuaded Rumpole to participate.”

The book covers a number of his cases, but it is not really the legal drama that is of interest, so much as the fun narrative voice. Here he is, for example, on his boarding school:

a wind-blasted penal colony on the Norfolk coast, where thirteen-year-olds fought for the radiators and tried to hide the lumpy porridge in letters from home

Perfect holiday reading. Do yourself a favour and google John Mortimer so you can enjoy his picture on Wikipedia. You can just smell the cigarette smoke coming off the screen. Impressively, he wrote all his novels while also having a long career at the bar. (Same for Trollope, and I often think of his comment: “All the success of my life I owe to the disciple of early hours”). In interesting trivia he married twice, both times to women named Penelope, and his father went blind after ‘hitting his head on the door frame of a London taxi’ (?).

LOVE LETTERS by Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West

This book, a collection of letters, gave me a lot of sympathy for people who fall in love with great writers. Poor Vita Sackville-West was an author herself, and her admiration for Virginia Woolf knows no bounds. Virginia, on the other hand, thinks Vita is kind of cute. Ouch.

Both these ladies were married, and both husbands were aware of this affair. I would like to say what I got from these letters was insights on art (there were these) or history of Tehran (there was that) but mostly I was interested by the gossip on how these intricate relationships worked. The love letters to each other are highly passionate, and then intercut with letters to their husbands. Here is one from Vita to her husband:

But darling Virginia is not the sort of person one thinks of in that way (of being in love). There is something incongruous and almost indecent in the idea. I have gone to bed with her (twice), but that’s all. Now you know all about it, and I hope I haven’t shocked you. . . Please make a comment of all this, and say you understand. But don’t say you understand unless you really do. My darling, you are the one and only person for me in the world; do take that in once and for all, you little dunderhead.

This would an impressively open relationship for the 2020s, and these letters were from the 1920s. Meanwhile Vita is also having side affairs with all sorts of others. No wonder she had no time for improving her writing. Meanwhile Virginia is continually writing, in part because unlike the wealthy Vita she needs the money (we learn that she spent much of the money from MRS DALLOWAY on a new toilet).

I stopped before the end, because I know Virginia killed herself, and I just didn’t want to go there. Letters carry the real life of someone, and it was just too sad to see it unravel.

THE DRIVER’S SEAT by Muriel Spark

Here is good writing put to little effect. It tells the story of a woman called Lise who goes on a mini-break, hoping to meet ‘the one.’ The author tells us from the beginning that Lise will end up murdered. The ‘one’ she is looking for is the one who will kill her, as she wants to die. Eventually, she lucks out and meets a man recently released from an asylum. Here they are shortly after meeting:

“Sex is normal,” he says. “I’m cured. Sex is all right.”

“It’s all right at the time and it’s all right before,” says Lise, “but the problem is afterwards. This is, if you aren’t just an animal. Most of the times, afterwards is pretty sad.”

Yes, it’s red flags galore.

She tells him she just wants to be murdered, not raped; he can do that ‘after.’ However, once they are alone in the dark park, he does his raping first. As to why, there I can’t help you. Men will need to be explaining their issues on that one.

Anyway, I found it kind of lame, despite objectively being unable to deny it was wonderfully written. Partly, not to be all woke about it, but all of this begging to die seemed a bit victim blame-y. You can die on your holidays without going looking for it. I think though my issues were less socio-political than artistic. The whole book was written at a sort of bizarre kind of remove. I think the introduction has it:

. . .the great flaw in post-modernism, however, has always been that the writer’s freedom to expose the fictionality of fiction tends to be precisely paralleled by the reader’s freedom not to care what happens in the book.

I mean, yup.