John Galsworthy – The Forsyte Saga

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Book Review, Family Saga, John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga

“An intimate incarnation of the disturbance that Beauty effects in the lives of men”

I had never seen either the landmark 1967 adaptation of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, starring Eric Porter, Nyree Dawn Porter and Kenneth More as the three points of the major love story triangle, nor the 2002 remake with Damien Lewis, Gina McKee and Rupert Graves, but I did, I thought, know the story, despite not having read Galsworthy’s 3 volume epic, with two interludes.

Though originally published as a complete set as ‘The Forsyte Saga’ in 1922, Galsworthy had been writing his saga of an upper middle class family for over 15 years as the first volume The Man of Property had been published in 1906. In fact, he continued to follow the generations of Forsytes in the writing of a second trilogy The Modern Comedy between 1924 and 1928, and then a third three volume set, End of the Chapter, between 1931 and 1933.

Eric Porter, Nyree Dawn Porter, Kenneth More

And I must say, that though some aspects (for example the laying out of details of matters financial and legal in terms of entails, wills, investments, death duties and the like) had me reading without due focus and attention, I found this a fascinating, absorbing, moving read. Characters are wonderfully drawn, shown in complexity, and the rifts, risings and fallings of society itself, as followed through the generations of one particular family, which in this first trilogy of Galsworthy’s three trilogies, spans the period 1886 to 1920, works brilliantly

Damien Lewis, Gina McKee, Rupert Graves

We start in the high stability and certainty, with this family, in the Victorian era. Two generations earlier the Forsytes had been settled in Dorset, farmers. Now they are men of property, solicitors, financiers, investors, doing very well for themselves. The ‘old generation’ whose fortunes are first followed, are the ten, very wealthy, sons and daughters of “Superior Dosset” Forsyte, who became a builder, and amassed the family wealth through property

The first book, The Man of Property, begins with an engagement party gathering, of the great-grand daughter of Superior Dosset (long deceased) The family fortunes, togetherness and standing are at their height.  It is 1886 The last volume of this first trilogy is the marriage of a much younger great-grand daughter of Superior Dosset, one who is part of that giddy generation of flappers, young men and women fortunate enough to have been born a little too late to have engaged in the 1914-18 war

The main protagonists and driving forces in the novel are two cousins, very different from each other, ‘Young’ Jolyon Forsyte, an artist, son of Old Jolyon, a tea merchant and chairman of various companies, and Soames, the son of solicitor James. Old Jolyon and James, now elderly men are 2 of the 10 children of Superior Dosset. Soames, The Man Of Property believes in ownership – whether of artefacts – he is a successful speculator in art collection – or of people. Soames is married to the much younger Irene, an unwilling kind of femme fatale, purely because she is an eternal kind of beauty – of soul, as much as of body.

Could a man own anything prettier than this dining-table with its deep tints, the starry, soft-petalled roses, the ruby coloured glass, and quaint silver furnishing; could a man own anything prettier than the woman who sat at it?

The artist Young Jolyon has a different kind of worship of beauty – whether of people, or of art, nature, or any other manifestation of beauty – that it cannot be owned

it had been forgotten that Love is no hot-house flower, but a wild plant, born of a wet night, born of an hour of sunshine, sprung from wild seed, blown along the road by a wild wind. A wild plant that, when it blooms by chance, within the hedge of our gardens, we call a flower; and when it blooms outside we call a weed; but, flower or weed, whose scent and colour are always wild!

A struggle goes on between what Galsworthy terms ‘the Forsyte nature’ as typified by Soames – those aspects of society which seek to own, confine, regulate, and are cautious, rational, and repress or are uncomfortable with mystery, and what art seeks, meaning beyond the tangible.

the sanctity of the marriage tie is dependent on the sanctity of the family, and the sanctity of the family is dependent on the sanctity of property. And yet I imagine all these people are followers of One who never owned anything. It is curious!

I can’t and won’t say more about the strong narrative, the complexities and contradictions of character, and how the author is able to look at changes in culture, thinking, the progress of science and industry, politics, and much more through his complex family saga. He writes crisply and prosaically when needed, but, my how he also soars with metaphor, as appropriate

Suffice it to say, I have pages and pages of underlinings – Galsworthy’s truly epic piece of work is one of those which, as much as the reader would like to read on, read on, in order to discover ‘what happens next’, they are bound, if they really want to get the richness of the books, to stop, reflect, and absorb everything which the author is exploring

The Forsyte Saga UK
The Forsyte Saga USA

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Anne Brontë – The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

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Anne Brontë, Book Review, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Victorian Realism

The cold clear eye of the youngest Brontë: Marriage can seriously damage your health

I’m slightly shame-faced to say that until this year I had never read either of the two books written by the youngest Brontë sister, Anne, despite being an Eng Lit graduate, with a fairly sound lifetime reading of classics habit.

I had accepted, without exploring for myself, the generally expressed opinion that she was a lesser writer than her two more celebrated sisters.

And then I read Samantha Ellis’s wonderful biography Take Courage : Anne Brontë and the Art of Life. I very much admire Ellis’ writing, so the fact she was so warmly championing Anne meant I was going to rectify my ignorance of her writing. I had also been aware that she has very much been taken up by feminist readers and writers, as having a far less ‘romantic’ viewpoint, and engaging with far more realism, and, indeed, one could say political (left leaning) concerns.

Brontë sisters, by Patrick Branwell Brontë, with himself, originally between Emily and Charlotte, painted out by him

At the time, her writing, particularly The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, was, on its first printing both popular and horrifyingly shocking, unmasking as it did, alcoholism, sexual abuse within marriage, adultery – and having a strong female character who takes the choice to break free of the despotism of her husband. This was Victorian upper middle class society, and marriage as commercial transaction, laid bare. Much of the filthy linen in society given a very thorough public washing.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was published in 1848. It wasn’t until 1870 that the Married Womens’ Property Act gave women the right to own any property of their own – whether through the wages from their own work, or from inheritance. Before that time (and therefore at the time of this novel) marriage conferred ownership of the woman herself, and all her material assets, to her husband. Make a bad marriage, and there was little chance of escape, or to live independently. If a woman chose to leave an abusive marriage, without the right to take back control of any property which she had inherited, or to her own wages, if she could work, there was no way to support her children. Single women and widows had rights which married women had forfeited

The central character in the book, Helen Graham, makes an imprudent marriage, and has to find a way to disappear for her own safety and the moral safety of her son. More than this, Helen is strong, intelligent, and is able to make her own way as an artist, and support herself and her son through her art. In many ways, she is a kind of forerunner and beacon, in fiction, for the women Virginia Woolf was writing about and making clarion calls for in A Room of One’s Own

I found Wildfell Hall, in terms of its subject matter, marvellous, and yes, in many ways Anne’s creation seemed to speak in a far more profoundly and tellingly modern way than Emily or Charlotte’s. But – though the subject matter itself makes me completely understand why she has been rediscovered by feminists, I did find myself in agreement, still, with that judgement of her being a lesser writer than her sisters. She is far more polemical, and Helen at times is remarkably priggish, spouting page after page of extremely fine philosophical diatribe. The structure of the novel is also, perhaps, a less happy one. A large part of the book is a recounting, several years after the events of the novel, by one of the central characters in the book, Gilbert Markham.  This is done in the form of letters written by Markham to a close friend. The letters never, to me, seemed the kind of thing a man would write to another man, as there was far too much detail about upholstery, clothing, and the like. It would have been a far better decision to have told the story in the third person. Markham also assiduously copies out vast tracts of Helen’s journals in his letters to his friend. Which not only seems rather unethical, but, again, is not quite credible. Without wanting to reveal spoilers, there is also a rather incredible decision taken by the author, to keep information hidden from Gilbert Markham which leads to incidents of high dramatic misunderstanding. A simple revelation would have been what reality should have demanded.

So……….for the importance of Anne’s book, what she is writing about, and when, I absolutely admired it. She is, I think a writer of social realism, and also, despite the shock felt by some contemporaries that what she was writing about was degraded and horrible – an intensely moral one. The degradation and horror were that what she wrote about was real. She was assuredly not a romantic novelist.

Here is Anne, with Helen as her mouthpiece, talking about a disparity she regards as flawed, between the moral education of daughters and the moral education of sons:

You would have us encourage our sons to prove all things by their own experience, while our daughters must not even profit by the experience of others. Now I would have both so to benefit by the experience of others, and the precepts of a higher authority, that they should know beforehand to refuse the evil and choose the good, and require no experimental proofs to teach them the evil of transgression. I would not send a poor girl into the world, unarmed against her foes, and ignorant of the snares that beset her path; nor would I watch and guard her, till, deprived of self-respect and self-reliance, she lost the power or the will to watch and guard herself

Although on publication the book was popular with readers, the establishment view was not so favourable, with some contemporary literary critics bemoaning the ‘coarseness’ of the writing and subject matter. For example, Charles Kingsley author of The Water Babies, criticised the book thus:

It is, taken altogether, a powerful and an interesting book. Not that it is a pleasant book to read, nor, as we fancy, has it been a pleasant book to write; still less has it been a pleasant training which could teach an author such awful facts, or give courage to write them. The fault of the book is coarseness–not merely that coarseness of subject which will be the stumbling-block of most readers, and which makes it utterly unfit to be put into the hands of girls…

As contrast, here is what Anne herself wrote, in the preface to the second edition, as a rebuttal to criticisms

When we have to do with vice and vicious characters, I maintain it is better to depict them as they really are than as they would wish to appear. To represent a bad thing in its least offensive light, is doubtless the most agreeable course for a writer of fiction to pursue; but is it the most honest, or the safest? Is it better to reveal the snares and pitfalls of life to the young and thoughtless traveller, or to cover them with branches and flowers?

Anne by Charlotte

 

A powerful read, even though, in my opinion, it is not quite so satisfying purely in its literary merits.

The BBC TV production starred Tara Fitzgerald as Helen,  Rupert Graves as the handsome Byronic reprobate Arthur Huntingdon  and Toby Stephens as Gilbert Markham, the assiduous letter writer!

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall UK
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall USA

Gustave Flaubert – A Simple Heart

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A Simple Heart, Book Review, French Author, Gustave Flaubert

Kindness, pathos, simplicity and despair

Gustave Flaubert’s A Simple Heart, published in 1877 as part of a collection ‘Three Tales’, and currently re-issued as a stand-alone, part of Penguin’s ‘Little Black Classics’, must have been quite revolutionary in its subject, at the time.

The central character, possessor of that simple heart, is Félicité, a servant. This was not, is not, the class generally forming major literary focus, especially at that time. Félicité, as would have been common for her class and gender, cannot read. Secondary education was anyway not available to girls until the 1880s in France, and did not become free until the 1920s. The main readers of literary fiction would have been the bourgeoisie, who would also be the more usual subjects of it.

This is a portrait, childhood to death in old age of a humble, loving, loyal and emotionally lion-hearted woman. And the author’s attitude towards her is without sentimental bombast, rhetoric or patronising caricature. There is no attempt to ‘do funny dialogue’ or make a more sophisticated readership feel superior in their social position, wealth or intelligence. Instead, Flaubert accords her with the serious, dispassionate and depth filled observation usually accorded to those higher up within society.

Flaubert does not comment, or obviously use devices to wring our withers or excite out own (presumably) more sophisticated hearts. Instead, his dispassionate observations on the behaviour or others, within Félicité’s story, are left very factual, a recounting of events. Flaubert is a master of showing, not telling his readers, what to feel. In many ways, we are left to examine our own responses, our own moral judgements – was this fair, just, kindly? Who occupies the moral high ground, who should be our role model here?

Félicité, as a young girl, almost starving, repeatedly beaten is grateful to find a position as a servant to a widow with two children, Madame Aubain. A position she keeps for more than 50 years, loyally:

For just one hundred francs a year, she did all the cooking and the housework, she saw to the darning, the washing and the ironing. She could bridle a horse, keep the chickens well fed and churn the butter. What is more she remained faithful to her mistress, who, it must be said, was not the easiest of people to get on with

Madame Aubain is not cruel, but lacks the ability to see outside humanity clearly outside her own class, although, as the inevitable tragedies of life – loss, infirmity, affect her too, she does grow more affectionate towards her ‘servant’, less indifferent to the sufferings of another.

A Parrot,  Loulou,  plays an important part in this tenderly told story

This is, in the end, an immeasurably sad book. Félicité, in the generosity of her ability to care for others and value them is shown to be made of far finer, more heroic qualities than any of her betters. She is vulnerable, tender-hearted, loyal, and also has great resilience. In a sense, she does not have the indulgence of doing other than getting on with life. She lives by being the best she can be – the clarity and simplicity of her heart, truly ‘loving thy neighbour’:

She wept at the story of Christ’s passion. Why had they crucified a man who was so kind to children, fed the hungry, gave sight to the blind, and who had chosen, out of his own gentle nature, to be born amongst the poor and the rough straw of a stable…..all those familiar things mentioned in the gospels had their place in her life too….. Félicité loved lambs all the more because of her love for the Lamb of God, and doves now reminded her of the Holy Spirit….Of church dogma she understood not a word and did not even attempt to understand it

This is a beautiful, un-flamboyant piece of writing, a tale of a life which superficially might seem to be of no account, no importance in the eyes of the wider world. Flaubert’s craft makes the reader reflect on a tale which is rather more than just an account of ‘a good and humble servant’

A Simple Heart Amazon UK
A Simple Heart Amazon USA

John le Carré – Call for the Dead

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Book Review, Call for the Dead, Espionage, John le Carré, Spy thriller, The Cold War

The Freezing Fog of the Cold War : George Smiley 1

Despite being fascinated by espionage – the hidden stuff of it, and the psychology of those who do it, rather than the glitzy Bond aspects – I have somehow never read le Carré, nor seen or heard the TV or radio adaptations of his books.

This, then his first book, is my first outing too with George Smiley, loner, a quiet man, with a private life full of some sorrow, as his rather glamorous, society wife, an unlikely match, has done the more expected thing and run off with a glamour playboy.

Set in the late 50’s/early 60’s, as the Cold War was getting close to freeze point, this is as much a murder mystery as a spy thriller. Smiley recently interrogated a Foreign Office official who had come under the radar of possibly passing information to East Germany. He had been pretty certain that the man, Fennan, was in the clear, and had given him understanding that this would be his conclusion. The interview, an informal one, ended amicably on both sides. Except that Fennan then killed himself, and, even more curiously, posted a letter to Smiley on the same evening requesting a meeting.

The familiar face of George Smiley: Sir Alec Guinness in dry and wintry mode

I found this an interesting and atmospheric read, melancholy, cerebral and with nice and understated humour and a good evocation of time and place, as the following section shows. Smiley has gone to the dead man’s Surrey home, there to try and make sense of events, which do not quite seem to add up :

Merridale Lane is one of those corners of Surrey where the inhabitants wage a remorseless battle against the stigma of suburbia. Trees, fertilized and cajoled into being in every front garden half obscure the poky ‘Character dwellings’ which crouch behind them. The rusticity of the environment is enhanced by the wooden owls that keep guard over the names of houses, and by crumbling dwarves indefatigably posed over goldfish ponds. The inhabitants of Merridale Lane do not paint their dwarves, suspecting this to be a suburban vice

There are some interesting relationships which are clearly quite strong ones, but hidden behind an understated English reserve. Aiding Smiley in his investigations are a couple of professional colleagues, Mendel and Guillam, both of whom go the distance in what is after all, a dangerous pursuit – the hunting down of those who are prepared to kill in the service of a theory and philosophy. There is a subtext of masculine friendships, strong, clearly, but the emotional connections are not spoken about: this is stiff upper lip land, in time and in place. ‘Feeling’ language belongs to Fennan’s widow, Elsa, a German refugee, survivor of the war :

it’s an old illness you suffer from, Mr Smiley………..and I have seen many victims of it. The mind becomes separated from the body; it thinks without reality, rules a paper kingdom and devises without emotion the ruin of its paper victims. But sometimes the division between your world and ours is incomplete; the files grow heads and arms and legs, and that’s a terrible moment, isn’t it. The names have families as well as records, and human motives to explain the sad little dossiers and their make-believe sins….The State is a dream too, a symbol of nothing at all, an emptiness, a mind without a body, a game played with clouds in the sky

There are obviously a lot of wheels within wheels plots to be unravelled, and the reader is in that rather enjoyable place where almost everyone might come under some kind of suspicion. Histories – both personal and the history of conflicts between states and ideologies are under investigation.

James Mason in Sidney Lumet’s The Deadly Affair

This was filmed as ‘The Deadly Affair, directed by Sidney Lumet, and starring James Mason, Simone Signoret and Maximilian Schell, it presumably takes some liberties, not least of which is the renaming of George Smiley as Dobbs

Call for the Dead Amazon UK
Call for the Dead Amazon UK

E.M.Forster – The Machine Stops

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Book Review, E.M.Forster, SF, Short Story, The Machine Stops

Considering the time of writing, astonishingly and horribly prophetic

E.M.Forster wrote this ‘Science Fiction story’ in 1909. Pre-computer, pre-world wide web, pre-smart talking to itself technology.

Just over 100 years later this seems not like science fiction at all, more, something which might be a mere handful of years away, and in many ways, already here.

Set sometime in the future (at the time of writing) human beings have gratefully done away with all the challenging, messy stuff of having to communicate with each other, and skilfully negotiate co-operation with another face to face human being, in real time and place.

Instead, each lives softly cocooned like a babe inside a personal pod, where all wants are regulated by sentient technology. The technology ‘The Machine’ was once created and conceived of by humans, but now it does things so much more efficiently than any one human can do. All needs, be they of ambient temperature, health and well being, education, entertainment, furniture, are seamlessly provided by the machine, and the human being in its pod never has to rub up against the messy flesh of another. Communication happens by seeing (and hearing) each other on some kind of screen. You in your small pod, me in mine

Everything that can be controlled, is, and everything that can’t, in the material world, is regarded as unpleasant and dangerous.

Living happens in the personal pod, deep below the earth, where the air supply is regulated, and purified. The surface of the earth is deemed dangerous, the air not fit to breathe. The Machine has told us so, so it must be true.

Vashti, the central character is happy in her pod. Her son is a difficult and challenging embarrassment to her and their ‘meetings’ on screen do not go well. He also has disturbing things to say about The Machine, and appears to harbour dangerously subversive ideas about a better, earlier time, when people communicated directly with each other. And then………well, the title of the story shows where this will lead.

Twenty-first century readers can’t help but look around at a world where we are all clutching our little screens,facetwitting, Instachatting, occupying the same space as each other in cafes, on buses, colliding on the street, but rarely connecting with each other, in real. Terminals in shops instruct us that we have placed an unrecognised item in the bagging area. Doctor’s surgeries require us to register our arrival on a screen, whilst the receptionist communicates only with her own terminal. And children, so we are told, no longer realise that potatoes grow in the earth, milk comes from cows, and, from early years are plonked in front of screens with brightly coloured moving shapes, emoticons and squawking sounds, so their harassed parents can get on with the important stuff of staring at their own little screens, busy with brightly coloured moving shapes, emoticons and squawks of their own

Whilst I certainly prefer Forster’s more ‘traditional’, literary novels of relationship this is a horribly possible vision, and it is tempting to categorise it as contemporary fiction, not Sci-Fi at all

A short piece, it punches the gut and leaves the reader gasping for breath

And, the inevitable link to my virtual bloggy buddy FictionFan, who once again brought something to my attention I would otherwise not have known about. You can read her review here. We have never met, in real, and I realise the whole wonderful book blogging community is a ‘virtual’ like Forster is warning us about. There are many good things about our virtual connections, but I sincerely hope to live out my days on the surface of this planet, not beneath it (that can come later!) and welcome the real faces of real people as we meet each other, bump against each other, and even talk, face to face, in real time and space

A version a little more alarming than the better known one by Simon and Garfunkel

The Machine Stops Amazon UK
The Machine Stops Amazon USA

Julian Maclaren-Ross – Of Love and Hunger

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#1947 Club, Book Review, Julian Maclaren-Ross, Of Love and Hunger

“Adventurers though, must take things as they find them.
And look for pickings where the pickings are”

I have come to my posting as part of a co-host of The 1947 Club by Karen of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon of Stuck In A Book and I am late (by a day) submitting my homework!

It took a little while for me to fully surrender to Julian Maclaren-Ross’s 1947 published novel, Of Love And Hunger, set primarily in the months leading up to the Second World War. The reason for my hold-back is that Of Love and Hunger, both because of subject matter and its setting, not to mention what I knew of Maclaren-Ross within his literary ‘set’, reminded me forcefully of earlier books by writers who are favourites of mine.

Firstly, Patrick Hamilton whose Hangover Square, written in 1941, and also set in the 1939 build-up to war, inhabits a similar achingly sad territory of a weak man, undone by a hopeless love, and yet with something loveable about him

The second is George Orwell’s 1936 Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Like the central character of Aspidistra, Gordon Comstock, Maclaren-Ross’s Richard Fanshawe is a man from the middle classes with some kind of literary pretentions, and a wearily cynical view of his times. Which are those of economic depression.

Fanshawe has had a prior life of some more influence in ‘Empire’ in Madras, but his nature has led to various failures, both professional and personal, and there are hints that he has handled relationships, romantic, and with his parents, badly, and that thinking about his past is a terrible pain and torment, to be avoided. Like Comstock, Fanshawe lacks a certain grittiness about himself, and is prone to melancholy, and a cynical despair.

Whilst I found both the Hamilton and Orwell much more immediately powerful reads, Maclaren-Ross, Fanshawe and his world began to grow on me. Something in the style of writing, the tension between the short, choppy sentences of Fanshawe’s observations, and the ‘left brain’ dialogue he has with himself, and the ‘unbidden’ recollections (stylised in italic text) which rise from his unwilling memories, and which he attempts to stuff down and silence, felt quite alluring and revealing.

Yes. I’d lost Angela all right. Perhaps if I’d married her when I was home on leave that time, when she’d wanted me to, everything would have been different. I certainly wouldn’t have lost my job

That clippedness, that kind of stiff upper lipped buttoned up emotion is set against the unwanted feelings which threaten to rise up and overwhelm Fanshawe

…we drove along the path that was thick with fallen leaves and up into the wood itself, the tree trunks standing out all around us in the headlamps glare. We bumped to a standstill in the clearing and I cut the engine and the headlamps and there was only the light from the dashboard to see her by: the curly black hair and the high cheek-bones and the eyes set deep that gave her a Russian look and her mouth, her kiss

Maclaren-Ross’s writing began to work on me, and bruised, lost, corrupt, innocent, dishonest, honourable Fanshawe stirred my compassion.

It wasn’t much of a job. Two quid a week less insurance, and commission – if you could get it. After the first fortnight I gave up all hope of getting it, myself. For one thing it was the wrong time of year: Easter just over and the summer not begun: all the big boarding houses down by the seafront closed until the season started. Then again all this talk of war put prospects off. You’d think women’d jump at the chance of having their carpets cleaned buckshee, but no: even demonstrations were hard to get those days. We’d start out canvassing at nine in the morning and be lucky if we finished teatime with four or five apiece. You were supposed to get fourteen. A hundred calls, fourteen dems, three sales. That’s what they taught you at the school. But you didn’t have to be in the game long before you found out that was all a lot of cock

The narrative – heart-breaking, in its quiet way, and also at times very funny indeed follows Fanshawe through a rather hand-to-mouth existence on the edges of poverty as he runs up ‘tick’ with landladies and shopkeepers, trying to earn a living selling vacuum cleaners for a couple of rival firms who are themselves dealing shabbily with their workforce of casual salesmen. Hunger, and the avoidance of it, is a major theme. Love comes stalking Fanshawe, in the guise of Sukie, the wife of a colleague away at sea. Sukie is an equally complex individual, far stronger and more intelligent than Fanshawe – indeed she educates him, both in terms of making him think about politics and class, and about literature.

Maclaren-Ross’s women – Sukie herself, Jacqueline Mowbray, who is one of Fanshawe’s prospective customers, and even Miss Purvis, a fabulous canvasser of customer leads for the rather ineffectual salesmen – are seen as much stronger and more capable personalities.

This short book, just tipping over 200 pages is a deserved re-issue in Penguin’s Classics collection, conjuring up a world a heart-beat away from war, whilst the ‘little people’ lead their daily lives almost unaware of the larger forces of history which are impacting them.

Of Love and Hunger Amazon UK
Of Love and Hunger Amazon USA

Eric Ambler – Cause for Alarm

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1930s setting, Book Review, Cause for Alarm, Eric Ambler, Espionage, Italy

Espionage and armament sales in the slow build up to the Second World War

Eric Ambler’s spy novels do follow a set formula, which sometimes works magnificently, and sometimes leaves a little dissatisfaction. Had I never read any Ambler before, I might have liked this one, one of his great five earlier novels written in the build-up to the Second World War and its early days, with less of a slight niggle. Hugely enjoyable, and in the main tightly written, as always, but lacking the brilliance of my personal favourite, The Mask Of Dimitrios.

Ambler’s politics were of the left, and he was someone who saw the dangers of fascist politics quite early. His espionage novels do not involve sophisticated lantern-jawed heroes , imbued with glamour and steely masculinity, saving the State. Instead, his heroes almost invariably are quite ordinary men who are not professional spies or spy killers, but who unwittingly, unwillingly find themselves in dangerous situations as politics and history unfold around them. He is interested in the ‘little man’ caught up in something he doesn’t understand – someone almost an innocent abroad – and, at times, a fool because he fails to understand that innocence is often dangerous ignorance.

So it is here. Nicholas Marlow is an engineer, recently engaged, and recently made redundant – we are in the pre-war thirties, and jobs not easy to find. Marlow is getting a little desperate as he wants a job in order to marry. And then he discovers one for which he is almost a perfect fit. A British firm, Spartacus, is supplying shell-cases to Italian companies. It is late 1936, and Germany and Italy, two countries with Fascist leaders, have already formed the Berlin-Rome Axis. The British company had a British man in Milan who had been creating and managing the business opportunities for trade with Italian armaments firms, but this man had recently died in a hit-and-run accident.

They are looking for an Italian speaker (tick) who is also an engineer who can talk the tech specs (tick) and if possible, someone who is a salesman. Marlowe is not the latter, but otherwise is perfect, and, as no one applying for the job carries the triple kill, he gets it by virtue of the more important first two requirements. And off he goes to Milan, where things appear to be, almost immediately, shady. There are a couple of dodgy or incompetent personnel working in the Milan office. His predecessor had been living in a palatial accommodation he should not have been able to afford on his salary, and, almost immediately Marlowe is schmoozed by a couple of very different characters, each of whom warns him against the other. There are signposts for the reader, and for Marlow himself, which immediately render one more trustworthy than the other. An oleaginous General, a Yugoslav, and a bluff, stocky man with a prize-fighter’s nose, unruly hair, blue eyes, an energetic manner, an American accent and a Russian name.

              La Scala, Milan in 1932. A scene happens here!

And then Marlow’s is summoned by the police to present his documents. His passport is taken away for inspection, and promptly lost. His mail is also being steamed open and read by person or person’s unknown. A lot of people seem to be interested in an innocent salesman selling armaments

Ambler does not labour the clearly ambiguous situation Marlow finds himself in, or that Spartacus itself is engaged in, but here is where ‘innocence’ and dangerous ignorance begin to come together, and the reader, not to mention Marlow himself, have to think that most actions come with agendas, and we need to consider some kind of morality :

If Spartacus were willing to sell shell-production machinery and someone else were willing to buy it, it was not for me to discuss the rights and wrongs of the business. I was merely an employee. It was not my responsibility. Hallett would probably have had something to say about it, but Hallett was a socialist. Business was business. The thing to do was to mind one’s own

Quite quickly, the innocent abroad is in a position of danger, without any real understanding of why and how

This is a terrific, intelligent page-turner. There are a couple of coincidences and deviations too far : I was not quite sure why the encounter with a mathematician was placed in the mix, it seemed a bit of an unnecessary diversion., though in the foreword, which, as is my won’t, I read afterwards, John Preston (foreword writer in my Penguin Modern Classics edition) argues for it. It’s no spoiler to have mentioned it here, though, I promise!.

Ambler is always worth reading. There are thrills, and, in the main, plausible adventures, not to mention great characters. He is always free from jingoism and there is little endemic anti-Semitism in his writing, something which was regrettably common in many books penned at this time, before later events showed what a bed-rock of racial or group prejudice could lead to.

Cause For Alarm Amazon UK
Cause For Alarm Amazon USA

a 1951 noir film with the same title is unrelated to Ambler’s novel

Jean Rhys – Wide Sargasso Sea

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#ReadingRhys, Book Review, Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys, Jean Rhys Reading Week, Wide Sargasso Sea

Giving a voice to the madwoman in the attic

Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, a kind of imaginative ‘prequel’ to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, takes as its focus not Jane, not Rochester – though he certainly figures, as one of the narrators – but Rochester’s ‘Mad Wife’ Bertha.

In Rhys’ 1966 novel, which took her 20 years in writing, one of the keynote problems for ‘Bertha’ is that of identity, and being accepted for who she is. As Rhys imagines her, she is not even called Bertha at all, but Antoinette, and is a Creole heiress, married to the unnamed (in the book) Rochester. And married by him, coldly, for money, not for love, though he does develop a physical obsession for her, as well as self-disgust for that obsession,.

There is a kind of sensual languor, a seductive eroticism as well as a dark and powerful sense of almost dangerous magic, which Rhys evokes in the Jamaican setting. There is lush fecundity, and a wild sexuality in the landscape and its vegetation, almost a sense that this might be another Eden, but one unchaste, devouring, snaky. Both Antoinette and ‘Rochester’ marrying for – not thirty pieces of silver, but thirty thousand pounds ‘paid to me without question or condition’ feel the spell and danger in the land itself, and will find they have been betrayed, in some fashion, by each other, though in a society where women were almost always dependent on men for a position and means of survival, the property of fathers and husbands. the stakes were never equal

Our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible – the tree of life grew there. But it had gone wild. The paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green. Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched. One was snaky looking, another like an octopus with long thin brown tentacles bare of leaves hanging from a twisted root. Twice a year the octopus orchid flowered – then not an inch of tentacle showed. It was a bell-shaped mass of white, mauve, deep purples, wonderful to see. The scent was very sweet and strong. I never went into it

I found that description quite extraordinary in its uneasy oppositions – a sense of something of huge vitality, and yet danger, of growth and overgrowth, a surface of beauty hiding something strangulating. This occurs in the first section – narrated by Antoinette, and yet in some ways it encapsulates some contradictions in her own nature, whilst also reflecting some of what ‘Rochester’ sees her sexuality to be.

The book is structured in three sections. The first is Antoinette’s, recounting her complex family history, from child to young woman. It is full of unsettling imagery, told by a young girl who has little sense of home or belonging, whether within Jamaica – her mother came from Martinique to marry her first husband, Cosway, who had been a slave-owner – or within her family. Antoinette’s beautiful, unstable mother fell on hard times following her first husband’s death, and Antoinette suffers from her mother’s indifference towards her

The second section is primarily from the Englishman, ‘Rochester’s’ point of view, and follows the initially cold, condescending view he has towards his intended bride, and the changes which the place, its people and indeed Antoinette create in him – changes resisted and feared.

The third section shifts back to Antoinette, removed from her home, bought back to England. Forced into the straitjacket mould of a conventional middle-class womanhood by her husband, Antoinette has reached the place the reader meets her in Jane Eyre –Bertha, the madwoman wife in the attic, guarded by Grace Poole.

Part of the straitjacket which the controlling ‘Rochester’ imposes even includes the talking away of the identity of name – Antoinette is regarded as an unsuitable name. Not only does she lose her second name through marriage, taking her husband’s name – but even her own birth name, the name by which she knows herself; exotic, foreign, French derived Antoinette replaced by the harder, plainer name of Bertha. There is even, perhaps the subtext of the attempted role of Rochester as ‘birther’ of a different, lesser, swaddled person out of the hapless Antoinette.

One of the most admirable aspects of Wide Sargasso Sea, unlike the often seemingly trivial, fashion and market driven modern ‘spins’ on reworking classics, which seem, literally, like charades, is that Rhys’ book springs from as fertile and authentic seeming source as the original. It is clear how deeply Jane Eyre worked its way into Rhys’ thoughts, feelings and imagination. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys does not subvert or untruthfully change anything in Jane Eyre. She creates a prior story for that disastrous marriage Rochester made, and gives voice, story, history and credence to the dismissed ‘madwoman in the attic’’ Within Brontë’s book there is much evidence of a battle between control and surrender to sexual passion in Rochester’s nature, and also a sometimes wilful, cavalier playing with female affection, even a certain cruelty. Rhys merely allows, far from the confinement of an English home, those aspects to be seen more clearly in his nature.

Wide Sargasso Sea stands in its own right as a classic of the English literature canon. Rhys is a crafted writer, creating complex, rounded psychology and subtext in her characters, and exploring many themes, truthfully and imaginatively.
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In her earlier writings, Rhys often took aspects from her own life and nature, weaving them into fictions which explore women living outside the moral norms of convention, women who ‘love not wisely but too well’ Although in many ways this book, with another book, and another time and place serving as its inspiration, differs from her present day  (at the time of their writing) settings in Paris and London, Antoinette is only different in degree, not in kind, from the central characters of earlier novels

The Sargasso Sea, as described on Wiki is a region in the gyre in the middle of the North Atlantic. It is the only sea on Earth which has no coastline and is  a distinctive body of water with brown Sargassum seaweed and calm blue water. The unboundaried, flowingness of water and the drifting mass of seaweed is a wonderful image, both of the fluidity and depth of Rhys writing in this book, and the nature of her central character, clarity of the turquoise water, and the unsettling, scummy, seaweed tentacles – suggestions of slimy monsters from the deep – hinting at the dark, subconscious strangles of psychological shadows which rear up and overwhelm, in different ways, Antoinette, ‘Rochester’ and others in this book

It has been a real pleasure to re-new acquaintance with this book, through the Jean Rhys blogging week, and I shall be dusting off the rest of my Rhys collection, and trust those re-reads will prove equally absorbing

Thank you to Jacqui from JacquiWine and Eric from The Lonesome Reader, for this week’s joint hosted Jean Rhys event. And fortuitously, I see my link to Eric’s blog takes you directly to his review of this book!

Wide Sargasso Sea Amazon UK
Wide Sargasso Sea Amazon USA

E. Nesbit – The Railway Children

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Book Review, Children's Book Review, Children's Classics, E. Nesbit, The Railway Children

 

A beautifully written, heart-warming and exciting ‘real’ adventure story for pre-teens

I neither remember reading this as a child, nor do I remember seeing the TV or film adaptations, though the story was extremely familiar – and, as I have a clear image of Jenny Agutter seeing her missing father, and wringing the withers of the viewer with a line which is in the book, causing the image to surface, as I read, I can only assume I did read, did see, or both

(the 1968 BBC TV adaptation – regrettably wooden and a little ponderous, lacking the charm of the book on this showing!)

I came to this reading belatedly on the back of a marvellous book for adults, covering a similar territory – Helen Dunmore’s Exposure. That book clearly references this one – 3 children, 2 girls and a boy, a father working within Government, a secret disgrace, manipulated, innocence wronged, and trains an integral background, Dunmore’s book was set in the early 60’s, and this one by Nesbit in 1905. Obviously Nesbit was writing for children, and it is the three children in this one who occupy centre stage – they are the calalysts for all events – whereas Dunmore was most focused on the husband and wife, but, still, what struck me was an optimistic innocence in the Nesbit. This is, in the end a feel-good book. There isn’t an unpleasant character within it – and even ones which might seem, on first meeting them, to be aggressive and unpleasant – like a bargee, are only waiting to have events transpire which reveal their humanity.

Still from 1970 film. Agutter, now 15 as the 12 year old Bobbie has put on a bit of a growth spurt!

Though this does not have the goody goody children of much ‘improving’ fare for Victorian children – Nesbit had, after all, a rather complex, progressive character – she was a co-founder of the Fabian Society, did not marry her first husband till she was seven months pregnant, and ended up adopting the two children he had with his mistress – Nesbit’s good friend – there is a strong moral sense that everyone can be, and wants to be, ethical.

The three children argue and fight, and struggle to swallow their pride and apologise. They sometimes do wrong things – steal coal, because they are cold and poor, but are lucky enough to find that acknowledging their wrongdoing leads to kindly forgiveness. Lots of opportunities for heroics present themselves, and the children prevent a railway crash, rescue someone with a broken leg in a train tunnel, save a baby from burning, and unite a community. The book is a remarkably uplifting and moral one – but it is not the morality of ‘know your place’ or pious god-fearing, but can clearly be connected to Nesbit’s political consciousness.

2000 remake – and here is Agutter again – but this time as Mum!

I was also struck by the ‘reality’ of the book – this was not a book set in a fantasy world, but one set ‘in reality’. The children are children of a middle-class family but for reasons which we learn as the book progresses (I suspect adults would immediately leap to the correct conclusions) the family have fallen on hard times, and it is the mother who has to earn money to put food on the table. The children and their mother struggle over their ‘hard times’ – but they get through by supporting each other. Even the youngest child contributes. If there is ‘unreality’ it is only because (or is that just my cynicism) not everyone so clearly chooses to be progressive, enlightened and morally working for the common good as Nesbit’s characters all do.

I think everyone in the world is friends if you can only get them to see you don’t want to be UN-friends”

“Perhaps you’re right,” said Mother, and she sighed

It is, of course ‘only’ a book : one I enjoyed immensely, one with a lot of engaging humour, one very well constructed, one full of hope and positivity – but I kept thinking that Peter, the young boy, brave and sometimes impetuous, ‘in real’ would have no doubt become trench fodder in 1914 : I was very aware, reading this, that it came out of a sense of progressive hopefulness that events of 1914-1918 rather destroyed, and I suspect this book could not have been written 10 years later

The Railway Children Amazon UK
The Railway Children Amazon USA

Virginia Woolf – Orlando

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Book Review, Orlando, Virginia Woolf, Woolfalong hosted by Heaven Ali

Woolf at her fizziest, dizziest, most glittering and playful

Because we know how Woolf met her end, and because we know that she suffered several breakdowns, it is easy to backward read her writing to find evidence of the intensity of her suffering, and forget that she also lived with an intense awareness of joy – and, perhaps more easily ignored, wit, playfulness and ordinary moments of satisfaction , gaiety and pleasure

All these – including suffering, ennui and so-so are to be found rolled up in Orlando – as well as evidence of her intellect, her research and her always questioning mind

Written as a kind of love-letter, game and amusement both for her own creative pleasure and as the same for her lover and friend Vita-Sackville West, Orlando is both a highly readable, accessible introduction to Woolf’s writing, easily enjoyed by a teenager – I was 14, 15 or 16 when I first devoured this – and repaying later, more nuanced and reflective study, after surrendering to her more complex ‘difficult’ work

                   Vita Sackville-West 1916

Why this is such a pleasurable read for a thoughtful teenager is that one of its major themes is the trying on of identity and the discovering both its fluidity and dizzying possibilities, and its kernel of ‘this is my true core’, inviolate from the influence of time, place, culture – and gender.

What a very surprising and modern book this must have been on its publication, in 1928, for those who looked behind its playful inventions and fantasies

For if it is rash to walk into a lion’s den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand with one foot on the top of St. Paul’s, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet. A poet is lion and Atlantic in one. While one drowns us the other gnaws us. If we survive the teeth, we succumb to the waves. A man who can destroy illusions is both beast and flood. Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies, the colour fades. The earth we walk on is a parched cinder. It is marl we tread and fiery cobbles scorch our fett, By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. ‘Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life – (and so on for six pages if you will, but the style is tedious and may well be dropped).

Orlando is a beautiful young man, son of an aristocratic family, aged 16, with spectacularly attractive legs, shown to perfection in the costume of the times – the latter years of the sixteenth century. He is a moody, sullen and open-hearted, candid young man. Lest that sound contradictory, people are, and Woolf always reminds us of that. The elderly Queen Elizabeth, who always took a shine to comely young men, makes him an Order of the Garter.

However, there is something strangely androgyne about Orlando and this is not the full extent of his strangeness. He has something, which Woolf does not waste time on trying to explain, which makes him able to jump time as easily as space. She is not interested, as an SF writer might be, in explaining this : her interest is in identity in time, in history, in geography, so we follow Orlando, who not only jumps time – and various of his acquaintances similarly do so – but jumps gender.

Falling into a deep sleep and melancholy following the failure of a love affair with a similarly androgynous young woman in 1608, and after making one of his seamless time jumps to the Restoration, and becoming an Ambassador in Turkey, another sleep follows, and he wakens as a woman. The Lady Orlando is no different in many ways to Lord Orlando – his/her core nature is the same, though gender allows, encourages, forbids – in time and in place, certain manifestations of nature. Woolf has great fun with this, but also, she is offering delicious possibilities to readers who come to her in that time where they are exploring identity, discovering who they are, who they might be, who they won’t be

Certain susceptibilities were asserting themselves, and others were diminishing. The change of clothes had, some philosophers will say, much to do with it. Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us. For example, when Captain Bartolus saw Orlando’s skirt, he had an awning stretched for her immediately, pressed her to take another slice of beef, and invited her to go ashore with him in the long-boat. These compliments would certainly not have been paid her had her skirts, instead of flowing, been cut tight to her legs in the fashion of breeches. And when we are paid compliments, it behoves us to make some return

Woolf of course was the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, himself an author, a critic, an historian and biographer – and all of these strands are woven into this book, which is an once a history and a ‘biography’ of Orlando, and a meditation upon writing, reading and literary criticism. In fact, the final joke is Woolf’s presentation of this as a non-fiction by the inclusion of an index. Within which we will find Shakespeare, Pope, Dryden and others referenced, alongside such marvellous inventions as Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, and the Archduchess Harriet of Finster-Aarhorn (see Archduke Harry) – who, with a physiognomy remarkably like a startled hare must surely be a little dig at Lady Ottoline Morrell.

Though I did find the final section of the book, bringing it to the ‘now’ of her writing in 1928, dragged a little, this was such a pleasure to read again. And was spurred to this by HeavenAli’s year long Woolfalong, just squeaking into August’s Biography section.

Orlando was of course filmed, with the magnificent Tilda Swinton, intelligent, spirited, mercurial and very much a person out of her own mould, as the central character. The film was directed by Sally Potter.

Orlando Amazon UK
Orlando Amazon USA