The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey

Robert Blair is a country solicitor who lives and works in the quiet Midlands town of Milford. His usual daily activities include nothing more exciting than updating the will of a client who believes to be dying for the nth time. But his life changes one day when he receives a phone call from Marion Sharpe, one of the ladies who live at The Franchise. The Franchise is a large and isolated country house that most people regard with some suspicion, and Marion lives there alone with her mother. The reason why she needs legal counsel (and, as it turns out, the services of an amateur sleuth) is because two inspectors from Scotland Yard are over – bringing with them a fifteen-year-old girl, Betty Kane.

Betty is a war-orphan, a good student, and a girl with no record of lying or misbehaving – and she says she was kidnapped, beaten, starved, and kept in the attic of a country house for a month. She identifies the house as The Franchise, and her kidnappers and abusers as Mrs and Miss Sharpe. And she can back up her statements with a detailed description of what the attic looks like from the inside. However, Marion Sharpe and her mother guarantee that they have never seen the girl before in their life.

The peculiar premise of The Franchise Affair grabbed me immediately: it seemed to me very odd that two seemingly harmless ladies would randomly kidnap and abuse a teenager, but it seemed at least equally odd that a teenager would make up a story as bizarre as this for no good reason at all. I thought that the question of who was telling the truth would be the mystery at the heart of The Franchise Affair, but in fact this is solved fairly early on. Or rather: the novel makes it clear from fairly early on where the reader’s sympathies are supposed to lie, and it doesn’t leave much room at all for alternative interpretations.

This brings me to the point I want to discuss at length: I won’t include any actual spoilers, but I’m going to have to discuss the plot in greater detail than you might want to know before going in. So if you’d rather stop reading here, know that I found The Franchise Affair absolutely gripping, and as startling and horrifying as it was fascinating. The story I read here was not the story Josephine Tey meant to tell, I don’t think – but that’s part of what made my experience with this book so interesting.

Some months ago, I wrote a post asking you whether or not you found that the existence of a big disconnect between a novel’s ethical world and your own set of values got in the way of your enjoyment of it. If I recall correctly, the majority of you said no, while I admitted that in my case it often did. By this I don’t mean that I’ll immediately reject or refuse to engage with any book that exposes views different from mine, of course. I just mean that it can be very difficult to connect with a story that implicitly assumes you to be believe things (e.g. that a woman’s place is the home and that if she dares leave it she deserves whatever she gets, that gay people should be punished or “cured”, that the poor are only poor because they don’t work hard enough, etc. etc.) that are very different from what you actually believe, and which doesn’t leave any room open for alternative voices. The stories that alienate me are normally ones whose narrative structure only works if I (temporarily at least) buy into some of those unspoken assumptions that I find so horrifying. I’m not at all convinced by the school of thought that maintains that to be a sophisticated reader is to never allow this to happen, but that’s perhaps a topic for another time.

I mention this because The Franchise Affair is actually an example of a book whose ideology (which is classist and fiercely conservative) completely clashes with my own – but this didn’t make me dislike the book. On the contrary: I thought it was a fascinating historical document, a riveting chronicle of a worldview that’s completely alien to me, and a novel peopled with characters I actually cared about, even if their thoughts and beliefs very often horrified me.

In many ways, The Franchise Affair is a harsh and unsympathetic novel. It’s hard for contemporary readers not to notice the fact that its allegiances are clearly class-based, for example. When the Franchise affair becomes public, the populace begins to terrorise the Sharpes with a fierceness and resentment that seem to have more to do with them being gentry than with the case at hand. And the fact that the story relies so heavily on the “obviousness” of the Sharpes’ innocence is difficult to dissociate from their own station in life. Likewise, Betty Kane’s working class origins are presented as a smudge on her character. This is a very neat and certain book; a book whose ethical scale is merely composed of black and white, leaving no room at all for greys. But what was interesting to me was the fact that there was a touch of desperation in its certitude: intentionally or not, it comes across as a frantic cry of protest against inevitable post-WW2 changes in class barriers, in gender roles, in how female sexuality was perceived, and so on.

The Franchise Affair is also a book that relies on the reader’s acceptance a conception of crime and of the nature of criminals that I personally find impossible to buy into. Betty Kane is greedy and “oversexed” and therefore evil; furthermore, she’s evil because her mother before her was evil – she was a loose woman who’d go out and dance with officers during the war. And that, my friends, quite simply settles that. Everything is neat and crystal-clear, and those who expose the view that crime might be a result of environmental factors are mercilessly mocked. There’s no room for ambiguity in the world of The Franchise Affair, and very little room for doubts of any kind.

This is yet another reason why I suspect (or hope) that a good share of contemporary readers will find the story as it’s told hard to swallow. There’s a silence at its core that speaks volumes; a gap that’s impossible to ignore. In this silence lies what Sarah Waters refers to as its “under-story,” which is another matter altogether. The wideness of this gap and the loudness of this silence are a testament of how much the world has changed¹—and yet not. Anyone who believes that evil is innate and criminal penalties should be harsher, or who laments the loss of a golden past in which women were modest and chaste and people knew their place and didn’t presume to act above their station, will likely feel right at home in Tey’s ideological world. Those who, like me, very much don’t, will probably be alarmed. But as I said above, the book’s alarming nature is part of what makes it so interesting.

The reason why I picked The Franchise Affair for the Golden Age of Detective Fiction Classics Tour was because I remembered reading that it had influenced Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger. I didn’t know how exactly, but I kept musing on this as I read on, and by the end I was convinced that the only way in which Tey could have influenced Waters was by making her want to answer all the questions she so pointedly ignores. And then I found this wonderful article, which I remember not reading at the time because I suspect it, correctly, of having spoilers. I’m going to share a quote that expressed my feelings on Tey’s novel better than I ever could, but it is completely spoilerific, so read it at your own peril:

It is this almost apocalyptic mixture of loss, rage and peril that underpins the conservative agenda of The Franchise Affair. For Tey, Betty Kane represents everything that’s wrong with postwar life: no wonder the passions she provokes in the novel are so vastly out of proportion to her actual narrative presence. And no wonder, perhaps, she continued to linger on in my mind, long after I had first put Tey’s book aside. I found myself returning to her yet again, in fact, when I had finished writing The Night Watch. Having looked at the war’s impact on sexuality and gender for that novel, I wanted to begin another 40s story exploring the decade’s transformation of class relations, and it seemed to me that Betty Kane might somehow provide me with a starting point. Her story, when looked at objectively, is a rather pitiful one. There’s the unloving mother, the orphaned childhood, the “extraordinarily good-looking” adopted brother, Leslie, whose engagement so dismays her; above all, there’s the disturbing precocity with which, at 15, she “picks up” a married man and passes herself off as his wife. Tey’s bilious, bigoted vision fails to recognise the poignancy of all this, but I’ve always wondered how Betty would speak to us if she were allowed a voice of her own, and for a while I thought seriously of trying to write a novel that would dovetail with The Franchise Affair, to give us its back- or under-story. Then I considered rewriting the book altogether. It was itself, after all, a rewriting, and one that had done a fair amount of narrative violence to its 18th-century model.

Dear Sarah Waters: could you possibly be more brilliant? I think not. I can’t help but wish she had written that retelling. But although I’ve seen some very mixed reviews of The Little Stranger, I’m now more excited than ever to read it.


Other opinions: A Work in Progress, Fleur Fish Reads

(Yours?)

¹ I sound like I’m saying these attitudes belong to the past and are over and done with now, but I certainly don’t mean that. I just mean that in the early twentieth-century, an author like Tey could assume that the majority of her middle-class readers would see eye-to-eye with her and share most of her biases and suspicious, whereas today that wouldn’t quite work.

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Roman Fair!

This is slightly off-topic, I know (unless we stretch the definition of historical fiction...) but I thought I'd share anyway: every year in late May, my town dresses up its children and willing adults for a weekend and goes out into the streets to pretend we're back in the days when we were part of the Roman Empire. The result is goofy, slightly chaotic, historically inaccurate, and immensely fun. There are market stalls, parades, mock gladiator fights, music, and lots of people dressed up all over the historical centre of the town. It looks like this:




















I'll quit ignoring my Google Reader and return to actually posting about books next Monday. Have a great weekend, everyone!

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Taking the Week Off

No, I'm not going to secretly fly to New York to hang out with all the book bloggers who are going to be there for Book Expo America next week. But I'll take advantage of the fact that so much of the blogging world is going to be busy to give myself a week off. I've been really exhausted and also a little unmotivated, so I think it's going to do me good. Maybe not blogging for a week will give me the chance to catch up on laundry or e-mail (yes, things have been that bad lately).

I regret that I'm missing Armchair BEA, which promises to be fun, but then again I only signed up to comment and I might be able to do that still. We'll see. I'll be back for sure at the end of the month with my review for the Golden Age of Detective Fiction Classics Circuit Tour. Have a great week, everyone!

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Middlemarch Summer* – Won’t you join me?

George Eliot’s Middlemarch is one of those books I’m sure I’m going to absolutely love, if only I can bring myself to read it. I don’t know what it is about long books that makes me hesitate to start them, as I do enjoy a good chunkster once I get into it, but there you go. This always happens, and so I thought that perhaps cajoling some of you into reading it with me would help keep me (and you, if you’re anything like me) motivated.

My idea is that we read Middlemarch this summer/winter and then post our thoughts on the week of the 2nd-7th of August 23rd to the 19th of August (by popular demand). I’d have a post up on the 2nd in which I’d collect all the links, so that we could easily visit each other and see what everyone else had to say about the book. Personally I prefer this method to weekly updates, as I worry about making participants read at a pace that might not suit them. But if you’d rather post about your progress as you read, that’s perfectly fine too, and I’d very much enjoy reading your updates.

Those of us who are on twitter could exchange comments/encouragement using the hashtag #MMReadalong, but the bulk of the discussion would take place via blog comments in early August. I want to keep this informal and relaxed, so no need to officially sign up or anything. Just let me know if you’re interested in joining in, and feel free to grab the button. What do you say?

*Or WINTER as my Southern hemisphere friends remind me.(Total #Anafail)

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Flush by Virginia Woolf

It is to poetry, alas, that we have to trust for our most detailed description of Flush himself as a young dog. He was of that particular shade of dark brown which in sunshine flashes “all over into gold.” His eyes were “startled eyes of hazel bland.” His ears were “tasselled”; his “slender feet” were “canopied in fringes” and his tail was broad. Making allowance for the exigencies of rhyme and the inaccuracies of poetic diction, there is nothing here but what would meet with the approval of the Spaniel Club. We cannot doubt that Flush was a pure-bred Cocker of the red variety marked by all the characteristic excellences of his kind.

Virginia Woolf’s Flush is a curious blend of fiction and non-fiction. It’s a biography of what is probably the most famous Cocker Spaniel in the history of English literature – Flush belonged to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and followed its mistress from her confinement in her father’s house in Wimpole Street to Italy, where she eloped with her lover and fellow poet Robert Browning. As she tells Flush’s story, Woolf also tells the story of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning’s romance, and of her progress from an invalid to a woman at the peek of her powers. She also uses the opportunity to comment on creativity, class, gender, and human and canine nature. Flush is by necessity somewhat fictionalised, but much to my delight Woolf makes use of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning’s own words whenever possible.

I suspect that even more so than Orlando, Flush is the perfect Virginia Woolf icebreaker – the ideal cure to Woolf intimidation, that common malady of which I myself was a sufferer until not very long ago. Those who have read Orlando will be familiar with this facet of hers: this is Woolf at her most humours; this is Woolf inviting us to laugh along with her, but all the while taking the novelist’s prerogative of illuminating hidden corners of human experience as seriously as ever. This is Woolf being lighthearted, which doesn’t necessarily mean she’s being light.

The fact that I recently read the first volume of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning’s letters increased my appreciation of Flush, but I wouldn’t say you need to have read them to enjoy this book. I’ve yet to read volume two, actually, and much of the ground Flush covers actually coincides with the second volume’s time frame: there’s the elopement itself, and there’s the incident in which Flush is kidnapped and Elizabeth Barrett is asked for a ransom, for example – not to mention the fact that the book also includes events that take place after the Brownings’ correspondence ceased because they had gotten married and were living together.

Flush’s abduction is probably the central even in this book – not only because it’s such an unexpected occurrence in a young well-bred Cocker Spaniel’s life, but also because the events that follow give Woolf ample room to comment on gender and on the class structure of the Victorian age. First and foremost, Elizabeth Barrett rebels against what was a Victorian woman’s sacred duty – to be guided and to acquiesce – and very firmly stands her ground:

How easy it would have been to sink back on her pillows and sigh, “I am a weak woman; I know nothing of law and justice; decide for me.” She had only to refuse to pay the ransom; she had only to defy Taylor and his society. And if Flush were killed, if the dreadful parcel came and she opened it and out dropped his head and paws, there was Robert Browning by her side to assure her that she had done right and earned his respect. But Miss Barrett was not to be intimidated. Miss Barrett took up her pen and refuted Robert Browning. It was all very well, she said, to quote Donne; to cite the case of Gregory; to invent spirited replies to Mr. Taylor—she would have done the same had Taylor struck her; had Gregory defamed her—would that they had! But what would Mr. Browning have done if the banditti had stolen her; had her in their power; threatened to cut off her ears and send them by post to New Cross? Whatever he would have done, her mind was made up. Flush was helpless. Her duty was to him. “But Flush, poor Flush, who has loved me so faithfully; have I a right to sacrifice him in his innocence, for the sake of any Mr. Taylor’s guilt in the world?” Whatever Mr. Browning might say, she was going to rescue Flush, even if she went down into the jaws of Whitechapel to fetch him, even if Robert Browning despised her for doing so.

Secondly, her contact with the world of Whitechapel allows her to gain awareness of the social contrasts that exist just beyond her doorstep—an awareness that was later to inform her work. Regarding class in general, Flush is a lot wiser and warmer than I’d tend to give Virginia Woolf credit for. I’m not going to suggest she was completely free of class consciousness, but things always tend to be a little more complicated than that. Take this passage, for instance:

Before they left Pisa—in the spring of 1847 they moved on to Florence—Flush had faced the curious and at first upsetting truth that the laws of the Kennel Club are not universal. He had brought himself to face the fact that light topknots are not necessarily fatal. He had revised his code accordingly. He had acted, at first with some hesitation, upon his new conception of canine society. He was becoming daily more and more democratic. Even in Pisa, Mrs. Browning noticed, “. . . he goes out every day and speaks Italian to the little dogs.” Now in Florence the last threads of his old fetters fell from him. The moment of liberation came one day in the Cascine. As he raced over the grass “like emeralds” with “the pheasants all alive and flying,” Flush suddenly bethought him of Regent’s Park and its proclamation: Dogs must be led on chains. Where was “must” now? Where were chains now? Where were park-keepers and truncheons? Gone, with the dog-stealers and Kennel Clubs and Spaniel Clubs of a corrupt aristocracy! Gone with four-wheelers and hansom cabs! with Whitechapel and Shoreditch! He ran, he raced; his coat flashed; his eyes blazed. He was the friend of all the world now. All dogs were his brothers. He had no need of a chain in this new world; he had no need of protection. If Mr. Browning was late in going for his walk—he and Flush were the best of friends now—Flush boldly summoned him.

See what I mean by wise and warm? And I’ll add another “w” – Flush is incredibly witty too. The book was a delight to read, and I especially loved the obvious fondness with which Woolf indirectly writes about a poet she clearly admired. I so wish she and Elizabeth Barrett could have met. I can see them enjoying each other’s company tremendously, and also learning a lot from each other. A few more bits I particularly liked:

“Oh, Flush!” said Miss Barrett. For the first time she looked him in the face. For the first time Flush looked at the lady lying on the sofa.
Each was surprised. Heavy curls hung down on either side of Miss Barrett’s face; large bright eyes shone out; a large mouth smiled. Heavy ears hung down on either side of Flush’s face; his eyes, too, were large and bright: his mouth was wide. There was a likeness between them. As they gazed at each other each felt: Here am I—and then each felt: But how different! Hers was the pale worn face of an invalid, cut off from air, light, freedom. His was the warm ruddy face of a young animal; instinct with health and energy. Broken asunder, yet made in the same mould, could it be that each completed what was dormant in the other? She might have been—all that; and he—But no. Between them lay the widest gulf that can separate one being from another. She spoke. He was dumb. She was woman; he was dog. Thus closely united, thus immensely divided, they gazed at each other. Then with one bound Flush sprang on to the sofa and laid himself where he was to lie for ever after—on the rug at Miss Barrett’s feet.

We cannot blame him if his sensibility was cultivated rather to the detriment of his sterner qualities. Naturally, lying with his head pillowed on a Greek lexicon, he came to dislike barking and biting; he came to prefer the silence of the cat to the robustness of the dog; and human sympathy to either. Miss Barrett, too, did her best to refine and educate his powers still further. Once she took a harp from the window and asked him, as she laid it by his side, whether he thought that the harp, which made music, was itself alive? He looked and listened; pondered, it seemed, for a moment in doubt and then decided that it was not. Then she would make him stand with her in front of the looking-glass and ask him why he barked and trembled. Was not the little brown dog opposite himself? But what is “oneself”? Is it the thing people see? Or is it the thing one is? So Flush pondered that question too, and, unable to solve the problem of reality, pressed closer to Miss Barrett and kissed her “expressively.” That was real at any rate.

He shook his ruff. He danced on his nude, attenuated legs. His spirits rose. So might a great beauty, rising from a bed of sickness and finding her face eternally disfigured, make a bonfire of clothes and cosmetics, and laugh with joy to think that she need never look in the glass again or dread a lover’s coolness or a rival’s beauty. So might a clergyman, cased for twenty years in starch and broadcloth, cast his collar into the dustbin and snatch the works of Voltaire from the cupboard. So Flush scampered off clipped all over into the likeness of a lion, but free from fleas. “Flush,” Mrs. Browning wrote to her sister, “is wise.” She was thinking perhaps of the Greek saying that happiness is only to be reached through suffering. The true philosopher is he who has lost his coat but is free from fleas.

Reviewed at:
Paperback Reader (Thank you, Claire, for yet another excellent recommendation.)

(As always, let me know if I missed yours.)

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Just in Case by Meg Rosoff

Fifteen-year-old David Case’s life is completely changed by an almost-tragedy: one day, when he’s looking after his one-year-old brother Charlie, he gets distracted for a moment, and when he looks up the child is on the windowsill, about to jump off after the birds he sees outside. David rescues Charlie just in time, but the incident shakes him deeply:

Suddenly, everywhere he looked he saw catastrophe, bloodshed, the demise of the planet, the ruin of the human race, not to mention (to pinpoint the exact source of some of his anxiety) possible pain and suffering to himself.
Who could have thought up a scenario this bleak?
Whoever (whatever) it was, he could feel the dark malevolence of it settling in, making itself at home like some vicious bird of prey, its shark claws sunk deep into the quivering grey jelly of his terrified brain. He pulled his brother close, tucking him in against his body, pressed his lips to the child’s face.
What if…?
He became enmired in what if. The weight of it wrapped itself around his ankles and dragged him under.

David’s new obsession with the “what ifs” of life takes the form of the belief that fate is out to get it. To trick it, he decides to completely change his identity: he changes his name to Justin, gets a new look, and takes up activities he used to hate before, like sports. But it’ll take more than a new skin to make Justin feel at ease at again. It’ll take a few very problematic months, some new friends, a very wise one-year-old, and an imaginary dog named Boy.

Ah, Meg Rosoff. And to think I believed I couldn’t possibly love you more. Somehow I was under the impression that Just in Case was everybody’s least favourite Meg Rosoff book (well, not quite everybody’s, as it did win the Carnegie Medal), so I expected not to enjoy it quite as much as her others. Furthermore, I wasn’t completely sold on the premise, as I imagined that my lack of belief in fate would affect my enjoyment of a book in which the concept seems to play such a prominent role. Which is missing the point quite spectacularly, I now see. Much to my surprise and delight, I fell head over hells in love with this book. Just in Case is unusual, brilliant, peculiarly funny, and very moving too.

What really made the book for me was the fact that the tone was absolutely perfect: on the one hand, it’s slightly humorous, which keeps it from ever becoming too dramatic. On the other hand, it’s full of nothing but respect for Justin’s vulnerability and for his penchant for teenage drama and overearnestness. Yes, his belief that fate is out to get him is slightly silly, but at the same time, it’s dead serious. We all realise these things for the first time at some point, don’t we? Nobody can escape the eventual realisation that life is unpredictable, that we’re incredibly vulnerable, and that bad things do in fact often happen to perfectly good people. Justin fails to take this newly-acquired knowledge in stride, but who can honestly call that silly? Living with this knowledge isn’t easy, even when you’re an adult.

Just in Case is a story about fear and how not to let it paralyse us, about existential anguish, and about accepting the precariousness of our lives and learning to enjoy each moment anyway. We can’t live on “what ifs”. As Justin’s wise little brother says, just in case what? The worst that can happen probably is quite bad, but that’s only one possibility among several less terrifying ones.

Justin’s existential crisis is what sets the story going, but Just in Case is actually about much more than just that. It’s also about relationships; about budding teenage sexuality; about growing up; about identity; about blind chance; about the ethics of art; about the space between people, and what ties us to one another, and how we’re all in this together. As usual, Meg Rosoff writes about all of this with perfect insight and perceptiveness. I couldn’t be more of a fangirl.

For all its pain and tragedy, Just in Case is ultimately quite a positive book. But it never makes light of our very human fears, it never treats them flippantly, and it never ever assumes a pseudo-inspirational tone. Therein lies its brilliance.

Favourite bits:

He was the only one with no mission, no plane to catch, no breakfast to serve, no children to entertain. All around milled anxious groups of travellers, all nationalities, all colours, all sizes and shapes and sexual persuasions. Sometimes they smiled at him, struck by his face, his coat, or even his dog, establishing the most fleeting of human connections, a millisecond of brotherhood.
We’re all in this together, they said to him, silently, in a hundred different languages.

Later that day Justin thought back on their conversation and wondered whether the things that kill you were not just the crashes and explosions from without, but the bombs buried deep inside, the bombs ticking quietly in your bowel or your liver or your heart, year after year, that you yourself had swallowed, or absorbed, or allowed to grow.

‘Bad science is always based on a convincing chain of logic. Faulty logic, that is. Once it’s in place, it’s harder to unravel than no science at all. In order to disprove it you have to take apart all the old evidence and try to figure out where the logic has gone wrong. With just one small deviation you get the sun revolving round the earth. Or influenza from breathing the night air.’

The child nodded. A piano might fall on your head, he said, but it also might not. And in the meantime you never know. Something nice might happen.

They read it too:
Bart’s Bookshelf
Jenny’s Books
Reading and Rooibos
Blue Archipelago
Stone Cold Books

(Have I missed yours?)

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Dancing in the Streets by Barbara Ehrenreich

Dancing in the Streets is a fascinating blend of social and cultural history, anthropology, mythology, sociology and informed speculation, in which Barbara Ehrenreich traces the history of what she calls “collective joy” from the ancient world to our age. By “collective joy”, Ehrenreich means the kind ecstatic group experience that is commonly associated with ancient mystery cults, with non-European religious traditions involving music and dancing, and, in the modern world, with rock and roll concerts or with sports events.

Ehrenreich begins with an overview of ancient mysteries (readers of The Secret History will be familiar with the kind of experience described here), followed by a history of early Christianity, of Carnival traditions in Medieval Europe, of their repression during the Reformation, and of Europe’s expansionism and its consequences for other cultures – all of which lead us to where we are now. Ehrenreich suggests that there were socioeconomic reasons for the culling of ecstatic traditions: as society became increasingly hierarchized and the modern market economy began to demand more competitiveness from its members, there ceased to be a place for the no-barriers experience of collective joy.

One of the reasons why I enjoyed Dancing in the Streets so much was because I really connected with Barbara Ehrenreich’s voice. I loved her sensibility and her outlook, and I grew to greatly admire her intellectual honesty: she never sounds forceful when making her points, she never fails to acknowledge potential weaknesses in her arguments, and she never ignores the questions her hypotheses raise in the hopes that nobody else will think to ask them either. This is especially important because this book is, as I said, somewhat speculative in nature, and nothing annoys me more than authors pressing forward untested (and often untestable) hypotheses as if they were facts. Fortunately, Dancing in the Streets completely avoids this pitfall.

Another one of my favourite things about Dancing in the Streets was the fact that it made me confront Western society’s deep distrust of communal experiences. This is very much a book about the dissolution of community, but not in the way we usually think of it: it’s about the loss of those moments in which we feel the full power of our common humanity. In our day and age, most of us are terrified of the idea of losing ourselves in a group or crowd. We’re very much attached to our individuality, and we tend to be quite suspicious of large groups. I loved the fact that Dancing in the Streets made me ask myself why. Why is getting lost in a crowd or identifying with a group such a bad thing? Why are collective experiences perceived as less genuine or desirable than solitary ones?

I often notice that to call something collective is to discredit it. This can be seen, for example, in expressions such as “hype” or “trend”. When we refer to something as a trend, we usually imply that it’s merely a trend. “You’re only wearing that outfit / listening to that band / reading that book because it’s trendy right now,” we usually say. And by this we mean to imply, “You’re only following the crowd, and your fondness for this particular thing is therefore not genuine.” Anything that involves a mass is somehow thought of as inferior to a solitary choice. This is also visible in the fact that people often use the term “mob mentality” to demean, ridicule or dismiss a group of people they happen to disagree with – the logic being that no right-thinking individual could possibly adopt such a position. Therefore, it must be the degrading effect of the mob clouding people’s wits.

But why can’t a large group of people affect or influence one another, follow one another to an emotional place, share a feeling or a fondness for something, and have that experience be as powerful and genuine as any solitary emotion or insight? Identifying with a group doesn’t necessarily mean we have been brainwashed or have lost our ability to reason for ourselves. Barbara Ehrenreich looks at what she calls collective joy as more than a force that shapes or manipulates behaviours or opinions, and as much more than a mere outlet for social discontent, which is how it’s traditionally thought of. She thinks of it as the kind of experience that gives us “the chance, which we need much more of on this crowded planet, to acknowledge the miracle of our simultaneous existence with some sort of celebration.”

Of course, there are historical reasons for our distrust of groups and of collective ecstasy: among them are racism and anthropocentrism and the association of this kind of rite with “primitive” peoples; the elites’ interest in maintaining class and other social barriers that benefit them, and which collective joy tends to dissolve; and, more recently, the example of the terrifying Nuremberg rallies in the 1930’s. One of the legacies of fascism, Ehrenreich says, is that it has led us to believe that “groups are inherently dangerous.” But as she also points out, fascist rallies were not truly collective experiences: the crowd were spectators, not participants. This missing active involvement is what modern carnivalised sports events and rock and roll concerts have tried to bring back, with varying degrees of success.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s theory is that the loss of opportunities for moments of collective joy has led to an “epidemic of melancholy” that first began in the seventeenth century, and coincided with the emergence of what we’ve come to think of as the private self. She’s the first to acknowledge that this is impossible to prove, of course, as we cannot travel back in time and conduct surveys to then compare the number of cases of depression before that time, then, and now. But speaking at a purely intuitive level, it does seem to make sense that a greater emphasis on individuality and competition would make us more prone to depression and anxiety. I’m not sure if I’m completely convinced by Ehrenreich’s hypothesis, but it’s something to think about.

I notice she has written another book, Blood Rites, which is a sort of dark companion to this one and traces “the history and origins of the passions of war”. I can’t wait to get my hands on it.

Interesting bits:

The notion if “personal space” and the horror of other people’s bodily processes that set limits on human physical interaction in our own time arose, originally, out of social anxiety and distrust.

So highly is the “inner self” honored within our own culture that its acquisition seems to be an unquestionable mark of progress—a requirement, as Trilling called it, for “the emergence of modern European and American man”. It was, no doubt, this sense of individuality and personal autonomy, “of an untrammelled freedom to ask questions and explore,” as the historian Yi-Fu Tan put it, that allowed men like Martin Luther and Galileo to risk their lives by defying Catholic doctrine. Which is preferable: a courageous, or even merely grasping and competitive, individualism versus a medieval (or, in the case of non-European cultures, “primitive”) personality so deeply mired in community and ritual that it can barely distinguish a “self”? From the perspective of our own time, the choice, so stated, is obvious. We have known nothing else.

This was rock and roll’s heritage: a participatory experience, rooted in an ecstatic religious tradition: black rock, or “rhythm and blues,” performers of the 1950s and ‘60s—including such stars as Little Richard, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and many others—acknowledged their obvious debt to black music, often moving effortlessly from religious to secular songs and back again. (…) The early rock audiences who stomped and jumped on their seats to dance were announcing, whether they knew it or not, the rebirth of an ecstatic tradition that had been repressed and marginalised by Europeans and Euro-Americans for centuries.

Unnoted at this time was the way antirock commentary almost precisely echoed the language that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europeans had used to denounce the “native” ecstatic rituals they encountered during their phase of imperialist expansion. Aware only of its black roots, the enemies of rock attacked it as “jungle music,” “tribal music,” and even, weirdly, “cannibalistic.”

(Have you posted about this book too? Let me know and I’ll be glad to add your link here.)

(PS: Dear Patrick Ness fans – did this post make you think of The Land by any chance? It did me too.)

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Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear

The year is 1929, and the Great War has been over for a decade. Following her mentor’s retirement, Maisie Dobbs sets up her own London office and begins an independent career as a private investigator. Her first case seems typical at first—a man who suspects his wife of being unfaithful wants her followed. But Maisie’s methods and work ethics are anything but conventional, and as she applies them to the case at hand she unravels a complex story: a story about wounds that go back a decade, about a society still recovering from the scars left by an unprecedentedly devastating war; and about Maisie’s own past, which she has no choice but to confront at last.

Maisie Dobbs isn’t only a mystery: it’s also a story about an Edwardian young woman growing up, moving from poverty to a world of comfort and education, and having her life irrevocably changed by the war. There’s a long flashback about a third of the way into the novel through which we learn Maisie’s own story: her working class origins, her life as a domestic servant, her time at Girton College, and her service as a nurse during the Great War.

There was quite a bit that I liked about Maisie Dobbs: the glimpses into the pre-World War I Edwardian world and into post-war society; the descriptions of the war period and of civilian life during it; the emphasis on how the war was experienced by people of different genders and different social backgrounds; the commentary on class; and most of all the sensitive analysis of the long-term consequences of an experience as devastating as WWI, both at an individual and at a social level.

Much of Maisie Dobbs is about the wounds, visible or not, that returned soldiers brought with them, and about the consequences that these had on their lives and on the lives of those who loved them. Jacqueline Winspear writes not only about psychological damage, but also about disfiguring scars or disabilities – and the reactions these caused in a society that didn’t necessarily want to be reminded of the war it had left behind. I also liked the focus on how the war was fought. For example, Billy Beale, who works at Maisie’s office, tells her about the fate that awaited those who dared show the fear that every soldier experienced:

“And when that ‘appened, when a boy was paralysed with fear, like, ‘e could be reported for cowardice. If ‘e’d been seen afterwards, not ‘aving gone off with the rest of his mates, the brass didn’t ask too many questions, did they? No, the poor dos’s on a charge and that’s it. So we ‘ad to look out for each other, didn’t we?”
Drawing the red cloth across his brow, the young man continued his story for Misie.
“Court-martialed, they were. And you know what ‘appened to a lot of them, don’t you? Shot. Even if some of ‘em weren’t quite so innocent, villains getting up to no goof when they should’ve been on the line, it ain’t the way to go, is it? Not shot by their own. Bloody marvellous, ain’t it? You pray your ‘ead off that the Kaiser’s boys won’t get you, then it’s your own that do.”

Also, this scene, a goodbye between a father and a son at a railway station, just about killed me:

“You mind and do your best, son. Your mother would have been proud of you.”
“I know, Dad,” said the son, moving his gaze to his father’s lapels.
“And you mind you keep your head out of the way of the Kaiser’s boys, lad. We don’t want you messing up that uniform, do we?”
The boy laughed, for he was a boy and not yet a man.
“All right, Dad, I’ll keep my boots shined, and you look after Patch.”
“Safe as houses, me and Patch. We’ll be waiting for you when you come home, son.”

Unfortunately, there was also a lot about Maisie Dobbs that I found off-putting, beginning with Maisie herself. At first glance, she seems the exact kind of heroine that I tend to love. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe in her – there was something about the characterisation that felt artificial to me. For example, as Maisie is working on her cases, she often remembers the words of her mentor, Maurice Blanche, and the reader is subjected to a little lecture taking place in Maisie’s mind. The unfortunate effect of this technique is that it removes Maisie’s agency and makes her feel a bit like a puppet with someone else holding the strings, rather than the highly intelligent and resourceful woman we’re supposed to believe her to be. Not that there’s anything wrong with recognising the influence of those who taught us what we know, of course - but Maisie often didn’t seem to have a single thought of her own.

Then there were her investigation methods, which felt a bit too Introduction to Psychotherapy for my liking. But perhaps that won’t be so much of a problem for those of you who didn’t sit through actual introduction to psychotherapy classes shifting uncomfortably in your chair and repeatedly thinking, “I have got to change my major.” Anyway, it wasn’t really the fact that she used psychotherapy techniques to solve her cases that bothered me: it was the fact that they were dubious techniques, with an almost new-agey vibe to them. For example, she’d often emulate someone’s pose, movements and body language, and as a result she’d immediately and magically gain perfect insight into what they were feeling. Those scenes always made me laugh out loud, and I suspect that comedy was very much not the intended effect. Needless to say, the fact that I was so sceptic about Maisie’s methods was yet another thing that undermined my belief in her as a character.

In addition to this, there was a lack of subtlety to the writing that bothered me a lot: Maisie Dobbs would have been a much better novel if not for the bright neon signs constantly drawing attention to The Point and making sure that no distracted reader could possibly miss it. Having said this, I do plan on reading the second volume in the series, Birds of a Feather – I already own it anyway, and the historical setting interests me enough to make this series a worthwhile read regardless of my qualms. Hopefully there will be fewer of these in the second book, and I’ll be able to get on with it better than I did with Maisie Dobbs.

Other opinions: Lakeside Musings, Aneca’s World, World Lily, Lesley’s Book Nook, A Chair, a Fireplace & a Tea Cozy, You Can Never Have Too Many Books, A Book a Week

(Have I missed yours?)

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Illyria by Elizabeth Hand

Maddy and Rogan are first cousins, and they’re the youngest members of a decayed large family who descends from a successful actress, Madeleine Armin Tierney. Madeleine, their great-grandmother, abandoned the stage after she got married, and later in life mostly dedicated herself to business. In Maddy’s time, the Tierney family doesn’t look too kindly on the theatre and on artistic endeavours in general—with the exception of mysterious Aunt Kate, who takes Maddy and Rogan to New York to see stage shows and encourages their acting and singing talent. But her support comes at a price. Illyria is a story about first love, about loss and regret, about art, and about two forms of life that seem to conflict with one another; all wrapped up in subtle magic, intense passion, and a memorable high school production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

Elizabeth Hand has done it again: She’s written a book so beautiful I both want to hug it (don't judge me! I know you do it too with books you really love) and lend it to all my friends, so that they too can experience the stunning writing, the delicate enchantment, and the passion and regret that permeate the whole story.

Illyria is a first-person narration told from Maddy’s point of view, and the bulk of the action takes place in the 1970’s. This means that the voice that is telling us the story is that of a middle-aged Maddy looking back on her teenage years. I thought this worked brilliantly—it absolutely doesn’t make the story feel removed, and it adds a faint shade of nostalgia and a heightened awareness of the preciousness of each moment and of each experience that Maddy wouldn’t have had at fifteen.

One of my favourite things about Illyria was how well it captured the intensity of first love. Yes, Maddy and Rogan are cousins, and no, that didn’t particularly bother me—though from what I gather, the taboo isn’t nearly as strong in my culture (marriages between first cousins are not common, but they’re legal and not unheard of) as it is in theirs. In any case, it doesn’t matter who they are; what matters is how well the prose conveys the frailty, the longing, the desire, the overwhelming intensity and the beauty of first sexual experiences. There aren’t many books that do this, are there? Especially not from the point of view of a girl. Maddy doesn’t once apologise for the desire she experiences. Illyria is one of the most passionate books I have ever read, and the funny thing is that it doesn’t actually have a single graphic scene. Instead we get glimpses of very specific moments between Maddy and Rogan, but they each tells us more than a whole sex scene ever could.

Another thing that I found interesting was the parallel Illyria makes between desire and art; between the longing you feel for someone you love and what a good theatre production, or a brilliant piece of writing, or a beautiful song can make you feel. It’s a very powerful feeling, and one that can add so much to one’s life. With the exception of Maddy and Rogan, the Tierney family seems to have forgotten this. They believe in practicalities, in business, in solid and concrete things, and they’re suspicious of anything they describe as “fey”.

This all ties with Illyria’s fantastic elements: with the haunting discovery Maddy and Rogan make in the attic of the house that belong to their great-grandmother; with the doubts about just what Rogan’s otherworldly beauty means; with the hints about who great-grandmother Madeleine really was, and of something not quite human in the family’s Irish past. These fantasy elements really are very subtle – they’re of the kind that people who dislike the term less than I do would probably describe as “magic realism” – but they’re there, and the lingering questions they raise add yet another layer to the story.

The ending of Illyria took me by surprise. I expected it to end in the past, but it goes all the way until the present, covering decades of a sort of puzzlement and vague disappointment that I suspect many people feel when they suddenly realise they’re middle-aged, or at least no longer young, and life hasn’t quite gone as they’d planned. How did this happen? How did we get here? What went wrong? But it’s not a bleak ending by any means. The final scene is breathtakingly beautiful, and it brings with it yet another realisation that often comes with age: life is not over until it’s over. The past will never come back, but there’s always the present to be made the most of.

I think that at this point it goes without saying that Young Adult novels are about more than experiences that are solely relevant to teenagers (whatever those may be). I suspect that anyone who adamantly maintains otherwise will be suspicious of me, as I’m someone who regularly and shamelessly finds emotional relevance and intellectual stimulation in novels for (horrors!) young people. But because I really wouldn’t want you to miss out on Illyria on account of the age group to which it’s being marketed, I’ll say it again: this is a beautiful, haunting story, and it’s about experiences that are absolutely ageless.

Favourite passages:

Endless longing; a face you’d known since childhood, since birth almost; a body that moved as though it were your own. These were things you never spoke of, things you never hoped for; things you could never admit to. Things you’d die for, and die of.
“Rogan,” I whispered.
“What?” He turned to me, and his eyes gleamed peacock-blue in the footlights. “Maddy? Why are you crying?”
“Nothing. Rogan.” He put his arms around me and I trembled. “Just you.”

It was my first full-bore exposure to the virus that is theatre, not just watching a show but becoming a part of its chemistry, the intricate helices of desire and ambition and love and unrelenting effort involved in producing even a bad play. And we all knew, almost from the very beginning, that our Twelfth Night was going to be remarkable.

“Come on,” I said. “It’d be so great, Rogan, we’d be up there together; it would be like—”
I wanted to say, It would be like when we’re alone. Like when Rogan murmured, You can’t breathe, and I couldn’t breathe, because desire and arousal choked me, because I breathed nothing but him; he was my air, my element; everything.
But being onstage together wouldn’t be like that. How could it? Nothing would ever be like that.

Reviewed at:
Chasing Ray
Tempting Persephone

Book Notes at Largehearted Boy (I always so enjoy reading these.)

(Have I missed yours? Let me know and I'll be glad to add your link.)

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Nonsense Novels by Stephen Leacock (NYRB Classics)

Nonsense Novels is a 1911 collection of humorous short stories that parody several well-known literary genres: the detective story, the ghost story, the medieval romance, the Victorian sensation novel, the historical romance in the tradition of Walter Scott, the sea adventure, the eighteenth century sentimental novel, early science fiction along the lines of H.G.Wells, and so on.

I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that I’m a completely unapologetic fan of so-called genre fiction, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy a good spoof as much as the next reader. In fact, I suspect that the more you know and appreciate a genre, the more rewarding it can be to see it gently (or not so gently) parodied. The best parodies seem to be written by people who know their source material very well, and who more often than not have more than a passing fondness for it. Such is the case with Terry Pratchett’s early Discworld novels, with Diana Wynne Jones’ The Tough Guide to Fantasy Land, and, perhaps arguably, with Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm.

And this brings me to the first problem I had with Nonsense Novels: I don’t think Stephen Leacock knew these genres more than very superficially, and this means that his satire is also no more than superficial – which is to say, it’s often quite obvious. There isn’t much variation in the type of humour he uses, possibly because he didn’t have all that much to work with. Don’t get me wrong; I did enjoy many of these stories, and all through the book there were some truly hilarious moments. But after a while, I began to feel that these were all variations of the same joke, which can be summed up as, “Ha-ha, aren’t these types of stories dumb?” And that brings me to problem number two: Leacock’s brand of humour completely lacks kindness and warmth. It’s entirely of the laughing-against-something variety. I’m a big believer that satire can be biting, intelligent and effective without necessarily being cruel, so that was a bit of a let-down.

Before I go any further, let me give you a few examples of things I did like. I quite liked the story “Guido the Gimlet of Ghent: A Romance of Chivalry”, which mocks the kind of great tragic love story in which the lovers happen to barely know each other at all. For example:

The love of Guido and Isolde was of that pure and almost divine type, found only in the Middle Ages. They had never seen one another. Guido had never seen Isolde, Isolde had never seen Guido. They had never heard one another speak. They had never been together. They did not know one another. Yet they loved. Their love had sprung into being suddenly and romantically, with all the mystic charm which is love’s greatest happiness. Years before, Guido had seen the name of Isolde the Slender painted on a fence. He had turned pale, fallen into a swoon and started at once for Jerusalem. On the very same day Isolde in passing through the streets of Ghent had seen the coat of arms of Guido hanging on a clothes line. She had fallen back into the arms of her tire-women more dead than alive. Since that day they had loved.
(...)
No sooner had love entered Guido’s heart than he had determined to do some great feat of emprise or adventure, some high achievement of deringdo which should make him worthy to woo her. He placed himself under a vow that he would eat nothing, save only food, and drink nothing, save only liquor, till such season as he should have performed his feat.

…And then there’s “Gertrude the Governess: or, Simply Seventeen”, a Victorian drama that includes passages such as this:

The two were destined to meet. Nearer and nearer they came. And then still nearer. Then for one brief moment they met. As they passed Gertrude raised her head and directed towards the young nobleman two eyes so eye-like in their expression as to be absolutely circular, while Lord Ronald directed towards the occupant of the dogcart a gaze so gaze-like that nothing but a gazelle, or a gas-pipe, could have emulated its intensity. Was this the dawn of love? Wait and see. Do not spoil the story.

But even in these stories, I felt that the humour was demanding that I take sides. I laughed because I happen to find the idea of love at first sight ridiculous, just like I laughed at “‘Q’: A Psychic Pstory of the Psupernatural” because I do find supernatural shenanigans and attempts to find esoteric meaning in simple everyday coincidences silly. But all along, I was aware of the fact that those who didn’t side with Leacock on these things would probably not be very amused at all. The stories’ unkindness bothered me, even when I was not its target.

...And then, of course, there were the cases in which I was. For example, “A Hero in Homespun: or, The Life Struggle of Hezekiah Haylo” is a political parody about how liberals will lead the world to ruin because we bend too far back for criminals and evildoers, all while letting the hard-working and the righteous of this world be CRUSHED. And also, philanthropists and those who sponsor the arts and letters are childish and completely empty-headed – why else would they waste their money like that? And in “The Man in Asbestos: an Allegory of the Future”, I was the butt of the joke simply because I believe in gender equality and refuse to be reduced to the decorative role that, as a female, I should be more than content to perform:

“Tell me,” I said, “are there no women now? Are they gone too?”
“Oh, no,” answered the Man in Asbestos, “they’re here just the same. Some of those are women. Only, you see, everything has been changed now. It all came as part of their great revolt, their desire to be like the men. Had that begun in your time?”
“Only a little.” I answered; “they were beginning to ask for votes and equality.”
“That’s it,” said my acquaintance, “I couldn’t think of the word. Your women, I believe, were something awful, were they not? Covered with feathers and skins and dazzling colours made of dead things all over them? And they laughed, did they not, and had foolish teeth, and at any moment they could inveigle you into one of those contracts! Ugh!”
He shuddered.
“Asbestos,” I said (I knew no other name to call him), as I turned on him in wrath, “Asbestos, do you think that those jelly-bag Equalities out on the street there, with their ash-barrel suits, can be compared for one moment with our unredeemed, unreformed, heaven-created, hobble-skirted women of the twentieth century?”

Don’t you think this sounds remarkably like the kind of story that a man who fervently opposed women’s suffrage would write? If so, that would be because that’s exactly what it is. And before anyone accused me of being biased, I knew nothing at all about Leacock when I began Nonsense Novels. But what I found out once I’d finished it didn’t surprise me in the least. I suppose that to fully enjoy these stories, you have to always belong to the “us” and have no qualms whatsoever about laughing at the “them”. Or perhaps you just need to be less sensitive than I am. Nevertheless, I can’t think of anyone but an upper-class early twentieth-century white man who’d fit the profile of the reader Leacock imagined he was nudging in the ribs.

I read this book, a NYRB Classic, for the Spotlight on Small Publishers Series. I was going to say that I was a little disappointed that my first experience with a NYBR Classic hadn’t been more of a success, but then I realised that I have in fact read some of their books before, albeit in different editions. And most of them (E.g. The Summer Book, The 13 Clocks or The Enchanted April) were absolutely wonderful. I look forward to reading more of their catalogue in the future.

(Have you posted about this book too? Let me know and I’ll be glad to add your link here.)

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Friday Book Coveting Post

The month of September, which is when I’ll be moving away to start library school, dangerously approaches, and my to be read pile remains at around 150 books (I can hear some of you saying, “Pah! that’s nothing!”). So over the next few months, I’ll have to remain stronger than ever in my resolution not to acquire more books. My book buying ban has been in place for over six months now, but in reality it has done little more than prevent my tbr pile from actually increasing – which I suppose is something, right?

The problem is that the urge to get new books simply won’t go away, and it’s been especially bad of late. I’m sure I’m not the only one who tends to use new book acquisitions as a form of therapy when I’m feeling down for whatever reason. Anyway, I thought that it might be slightly helpful to talk about the books I wish I could get instead of, you know, actually getting them. I’m not sure how effective this strategy is going to be, but it’s got to be worth as try, right? Here are a few books I’ve been especially coveting lately:

• Can Any Mother Help Me? by Jenna Bailey – I found this when I was looking for more social history books that focused on women’s lives in the early twentieth century. The title sounded a little familiar, so I did a search and realised that Jenny had reviewed it some months ago. The book is about the Cooperative Correspondence Club, a private magazine that was started by a lonely young British mother in 1935. The correspondence club was used by women who needed advice about personal aspects of their lives and had nowhere else to turn, or who simply wanted some support and companionship. It seems that many lifelong friendships were born out of it – like Jenny said in her review, sounds a bit like blogging, doesn’t it?

• Wild Romance by Chloë Schama – This isn’t an actual romance, but The True Story of a Victorian Scandal: it’s a biography of Theresa Longworth, whose affair with William Charles Yelverton shocked mid-Victorian society when it was brought to court. Theresa claimed they had been secretly married, while William maintained that no such thing had ever happened. This, of course, at a time when being married rather than having had an illicit affair was a life-or-death matter for a woman. I remember reading about this court case briefly in Victorian Sensation, and I’m sure I’d love a full account of it – especially as it sounds like Chloë Schama tackles all the gender questions Longworth’s story raises head on.
  
  
• Bachelor Girl: A Social History of Living Single by Betsy Israel – This book was brought to my attention when I noticed that Aarti had added it on Librarything. Based on private journals, newspapers, and other primary and secondary sources, it’s an account of the lives of single women from the nineteenth century to our days. What’s not to love?
  
  
• The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen – An indirect recommendation from Claire at Paperback Reader, who mentioned it in her review of To Bed With Grand Music. Set during the London Blitz, this is a novel about the effects of the tension of the war on the lives of those who stayed in the city at the time of the air raids.
  
  
• After the Armistice Ball by by Catriona McPherson – This book, the first in the Dandy Gilver mystery series, was recommended to me by GeraniumCat on Twitter after I mentioned that Maise Dobbs hadn’t quite lived up to my expectations (more on that next week). It’s set in the early 1920’s, and our sleuth is a woman caught between Victorian mores and the social changes that followed the end of WWI. How could that possibly go wrong?
  
  
• London War Notes by Mollie Panter-Downes – Good Evening, Mrs Craven left me craving more Mollie Painter-Downes, and Fleurfish confirms that this is as excellent as it sounds. It’s a collection of her journalism pieces about life in London during WWII, which were written at the same time as the fictional pieces collected in Good Evening. Mrs Craven. Sadly this book is now out of print, but hopefully used copies won’t be impossible to come by.
  

Have you read any of these? What did you think? And are there any books you’ve been particularly coveting lately?

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The Language of the Night by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Language of the Night is a (sadly now out of print) 1979 collection of essays on science fiction and fantasy, as the subtitle tells us – but also on reading and writing, on the role of literature, on race and gender in genre and in general fiction, on the imagination and creativity, and so on. As always, Ursula Le Guin writes with passion, insight and clarity, and occasionally also with biting humour. If I didn’t enjoy this quite as much as her most recent collection, Cheek by Jowl, it was simply because I like the current Le Guin better than the Le Guin of the past. The same goes for her novels, really, so there’s no surprise there. But I did enjoy watching the evolution of her thinking. I’ve always liked the fact that she’s not at all afraid of changing or of being wrong.

There are enough ideas in The Language of the Night that I feel I couldn’t possibly do the whole collection justice, so I thought I’d focus on a few of the essays that interested me the most and comment on those. I’ll start with “Myth and archetype in science fiction”, whose title is pretty self-explanatory. Le Guin writes,

In many college English courses the words “myth” and “symbol” are given a tremendous charge of significance. You just ain’t no good unless you can see a symbol hiding, like a scared gerbil, under every page. And in many creative writing course the little beasts multiply, the place swarms with them. What does this Mean? What does that Symbolize? What is the Underlying Mythos? Kids come lurching out of such courses with a brain full of gerbils. And they sit down and write a lot of empty pomposity, under the impression that that’s how Melville did it.
Even when they begin to realize that art is not something produced for critics, but for other human beings, some of them retain the overintellectualizing bent. They still do not realize that a symbol is not a sign of something known, but an indicator of something not known and not expressible otherwise than symbolically. They mistake symbol (living meaning) for allegory (dead equivalence). So they use mythology in an arrogant fashion, rationalizing it, condescending to it.

This isn’t to deny that symbols do exist, of course, or that writers make use of them, but this passage made me laugh because it reminded me of the first and last creative writing class I’ve ever taken. We did a unit on fairy tales, at the end of which we were asked to write an original one. The teacher wanted us to follow a specific method to do this: we were to go to the library, consult a dictionary of symbols, pick a few animals, plants, colours, etc. that stood for the “message” we wanted our fairy tale to convey, and then we were to make use of them in our writing. Supposedly this would make our fairy tale incredibly layered and profound.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I know nothing whatsoever about creative writing, but this advice completely horrified me. Surely that’s not how it works? Surely symbols and, er, “messages” (a word I shudder to ever see applied to literature, I must say) emerge from a writer’s work a little more organically than that? Same with themes, really – you don’t start out with one, do you? It’s more that it – or they – becomes visible as you tell the story you set out to tell. That’s how I’ve always imagined it, anyway. I know that some of you write, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. What Le Guin is arguing against, and what my creative writing teacher advocated, sounds to me more like an exercise in ciphering, in which we replace “B” with “A” and “C” with “D” to pass on a coded message, than a creative endeavour.

The title-essay “The Language of the Night” was another one that gave me pause. Le Guin refers to fantasy as “the language of the night”, in the sense that the genre tends to make use of imagery to convey things we don’t quite have the language to convey—a role similar to that played by mythology. This idea interests me because it touches on what I was talking about recently: my difficult in pinpointing what it is about fantasy that makes it distinctively appealing. My problem with the essay, however, is that I let my aversion to psychoanalysis blind me and get in the way of my engaging with the ideas presented here at all. This is something I regret. Nothing will ever make me stop being suspicious of psychoanalysis’ incredibly dubious methodology, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t ideas here that I could perhaps consider from a different, less pseudoscientific angle.

Finally, a few words on my absolute favourite piece in The Language of the Night: In “Science fiction and Mrs Brown”, Ursula Le Guin uses Virginia Woolf’s absolutely wonderful “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”, an essay on the role of character in the novel, as a point of departure to trace the evolution of characterisation in fantasy and science fiction. I’m first and foremost a character-oriented reader, so I very much agree with both Woolf and Le Guin on the importance of character. At the time when Woolf wrote her essay, science fiction was just beginning to gain shape through the works of Aldous Huxley, Verne or H.G. Wells. Woolf called these “Utopias”, and said there was no place in them for Mrs Brown. Le Guin agrees that at the time this was so, but she also says that Woolf would probably have been pleased to have been wrong in the long run. The thought made me smile, and I think she’s probably right. These days nobody but the most ignorant of snobs would argue that there’s no place for in-depth characterisation in speculative fiction, and I can’t imagine that displeasing Virginia Woolf.

A few more memorable passages:

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel—or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel—is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

The American boy and man is very commonly forced to define his maleness by rejecting certain traits, certain human gifts and potentialities, which our culture defines as “womanish” or “childish”. And one of these traits is, in cold sober fact, the absolutely essential human faculty of the imagination.

I hate allegories. A is “really” B, and a hawk is “really” a handsaw—bah. Humbug. Any creation, primary or secondary, with any vitality to it, can “really” be a dozen mutually exclusive things at once, before breakfast.

“You’re a juvenile writer, aren’t you?”
Yeth, Mummy.
“I love your books—the real ones, I mean. I haven’t read any of the ones for children, of course!”
Of courthe not, Daddy.
“It must be relaxing to write simple things for a change.”
Sure it’s simple, writing for kids. Just as simple as bringing them up.
All you do is take all the sex out, and use little short words, and little dumb ideas, and don’t be too scary, and be sure there’s a happy ending. Right? Nothing to it. Write down. Right on.
If you do all that, you might even write Jonathan Livingstone Seagull and make twenty billion dollars and have every adult in America reading your book!

(Bwahahaha. Le Guin is very rarely this snarky, but I have to confess I love it when she is.)

If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself—as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation—you may hate it, or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverish you own reality. You have, in fact, alienated yourself.

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Counting the Stars by Helen Dunmore

The Roman poet Catullus remains the main reason why I’m grateful that I took Latin in school: reading his poetry in the original was an absolute delight. Catullus is mostly famous for the passionate love poems he dedicated to Lesbia, a woman who has been identified as Clodia Metelli Celeris. Clodia was a married woman and the sister of an important Roman politician, which is why it was necessary to disguise her identity. But apparently her affair with Catullus was somewhat of an open secret. In Counting the Stars, Helen Dunmore retells the story of Catullus and Clodia’s affair from their first passionate encounter to its disillusioned ending – all against the backdrop of political intrigue in the late Roman republic.

I’d been dying to read Counting the Stars ever since I first heard of it – not only because I love Catullus’ poetry, but also because reading his poems to Lesbia left me with several questions, all of which I thought were avenues a retelling of their story could explore with very interesting results. This is what I always hope a retelling of a well-known story will do: tackle some of these lingering questions and attempt to fill some of the gaps. In this case, my questions were mostly about Lesbia herself: who was she? How did she experience this love affair? What was her side of the story? In Catullus’ poetry she has no voice, and she isn’t really portrayed as an actual person: she’s the receptacle of one man’s intense feelings. However, this isn’t something that bothers me, mostly because more than about Lesbia herself, the poems are about the feeling of being in love – about the longing, the passion, the anguish, the excruciating doubts and insecurities, and so on.

I had assumed that Counting the Stars would fill this particular gap and portray Lesbia/Clodia as a fully-developed human being, simply because that’s the kind of retelling I wanted to read. I suppose it’s not really fair to resent a book for not doing what I wanted it to do, but to me this novel was a complete and utter disappointment. The Clodia we see her is still not a real person: she’s an object of desire and occasionally a target of anger. She remains a cipher, just as voiceless and inscrutable as in the original poems, and just as seemingly moody, cruel, and even manipulative. What can be explained in Catullus’ poetry as the resentment of a lover who feels rejected is more difficult to make sense of in a full-length novel, where the characters are expected to be more fleshed out, and their motivations are supposed to be given fuller explanations. I couldn’t make sense of Clodia at all. I was left every bit as clueless about her feelings and motivations as I was after reading the poems.

To be fair, Catullus himself is quite fleshed out, and the novel moves beyond his love affair with Clodia to dwell on his past, his family life, and his relationship with the city of Rome and with the countryside where he grew up. There’s also quite a bit about life in ancient Rome, about the republic’s politics, and about power games and conspiracies. But I feel that I wasn’t able to appreciate this aspect of the novel properly because I was too busy being disappointed that Clodia herself hadn’t been given a past or a background.

Many of the episodes recounted in Counting the Stars are recognisable from Catullus’ poems – there’s the famous death of his mistress’ sparrow, for example – but sadly, for me this was another drawback. I felt that Helen Dunmore didn’t want to venture too far from what the poems tells us, but I think this defeats the purpose of retelling Catullus and Clodia’s story at all. Counting the Stars was a little too faithful to what the poems show us, especially when it comes to the time Catullus and Clodia spend together. There wasn’t much here beyond physical passion and longing, and jealousy and resentment. But surely a love affair is never quite as simple as that? Surely the poems only show us one of its angles? I wanted more – I wanted exactly what the poems don’t show us.

It’s not that Counting the Stars is a bad novel; it’s just that it absolutely failed to be the novel I wanted it to be. Ah well – onwards and forward to the next book. I’ll leave you with one of my favourites of Catullus’ poems:

Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love,
and let us judge all the rumours of the old men
to be worth just one penny!
The suns are able to fall and rise:
When that brief light has fallen for us,
we must sleep a never ending night.
Give me a thousand kisses, then another hundred,
then another thousand, then a second hundred,
then yet another thousand more, then another hundred.
Then, when we have made many thousands,
we will mix them all up so that we don't know,
and so that no one can be jealous of us when he finds out
how many kisses we have shared.

Has a book ever disappointed you simply by being completely different than you had imagined it would be?

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The Odd Women by George Gissing

George Gissing’s 1893 novel tells the story of the Madden sisters, Alicia, Virginia and Monica. Their father’s death leaves them in poverty and forces them to seek ways to support themselves – this at a time when career options for genteel women were close to nonexistent. The two elder sisters find work as governesses or lady’s companions and just barely manage to make ends meet, living lives of respectable poverty and quiet starvation. In addition to this, the fact that they have to work has of course social consequences, one of them being that it bars them from the career followed by most Victorian women: marriage. Monica, the youngest of the Misses Madden, works as a shopgirl, and her youth and beauty make Alicia and Virginia hope that she’ll escape becoming one of the odd women the title refers to – “odd” both because as single women they were regarded as strange, and because they remained unpaired.

The Odd Women is also the story of Rhoda Nunn, a childhood friend of the Misses Madden. Rhoda Nunn and her friend Mary Barfoot run an institution in Great Portland Street, and their lifework is to teach young women the skills they weren’t normally taught at the time: self-reliance, independence, and specific job qualifications such as typing and how to do clerical work; all so that marriage didn’t have to remain their only option. Rhoda Nunn reminded me of the women I read about in Singled Out, as it’s very much her belief that a single woman’s life doesn’t have to be one of emptiness and misery. There are actually many other characters and plotlines in The Odd Women, but as they’re introduced as the story progresses, I’ll end my synopsis here.

The Odd Women is a sensitive and insightful account of the plight of unmarried women in the Victorian age, as well as an interesting and serious account of the struggles of early feminists. Although what is ostensibly its main theme – the lack of career options for women – is an area in which we’ve fortunately made much progress, one of the things that hit me the most about theThe Odd Women is how absolutely modern it feels. This goes both for the topics its deals with and for how it reads: anyone who’s wary of the Victorians’ customary verbosity and old-fashioned syntax needs to give George Gissing a try.

The most contemporary thing about The Odd Women was its treatment of romantic relationships and of the role and meaning of marriage as an institution. It was fascinating to see these Victorian women and men ponder personal, social and political questions that still matter so much to us today – namely the impact that the socioeconomic roles we associate with traditional marriages can have even on private relationships, even for those who don’t necessarily care for the conventional arrangement of the man as the breadwinner and the woman as exclusively a homemaker. Rhoda Nunn’s story actually reminded me a little of Harriet Vane’s: it’s not that the two are necessarily similar, but both women struggle with the intrusion of gender politics on their personal relationships, and they both fear – with good reason – the costs that a romantic relationship could have for their intellectual, creative and professional lives.

The Odd Women is also extremely modern in its treatment of the consequences of jealousy and power games; in its portrayal of an unhappy marriage; in its dealing with the concept of “weakness” and its acknowledgement that even the most well-meaning feminists can pressure women to live up to unrealistic standards; in its treatment of the questions of whether “femininity” is a natural or a social construct (suffice to say that Gissing is a man after my own heart), and of why those who try to naturalise gender differences do so; and in its acknowledgement that even though it’s undeniable that men held the power and were infinitely privileged, ideals of “manhood” also limited, then as now, what individuals were allowed to do, feel, think or be.

George Gissing treats Rhoda Nunn and Mary Bradfoot’s feminist ideals with nothing but seriousness and respect, but he also denounced the harshness that they tended to slip into. Early (and sadly not so early) feminists were often guilty of being completely blind to other forms of privilege, and such is the case with these two when it comes to class:

‘But surely you don’t limit your humanity, Miss Barfoot, by the artificial divisions of society.’
‘I think those divisions are anything but artificial,’ replied the hostess good-humouredly. ‘In the uneducated classes I have no interest whatever. You have heard me say so.’
‘Yes, but I cannot think—isn’t that just a little narrow?’
‘Perhaps so. I choose my sphere, that’s all. Let those work for the lower classes (I must call them lower, for they are, in every sense), let those work for them who have a call to do so. I have none. I must keep to my own class.’
‘But surely, Miss Nunn,’ cried the widow, turning to Rhoda, ‘we work for the abolition of all unjust privilege? To us, is not a woman a woman?’
‘I am obliged to agree with Miss Barfoot. I think that as soon as we begin to meddle with uneducated people, all our schemes and views are unsettled. We have to learn a new language, for one thing. But your missionary enterprise is admirable.’

This blind spot is lamentable, but it was all too common. Another pitfall that Rhoda Nunn just barely manages to avoid is becoming so hardened as to be insensitive towards those who don’t live up to her own ideal of strength and independence. This was a particularly dangerous tendency when it came to judging other women’s romantic or sexual choices – Rhoda Nunn seems to feel that doing anything other than behaving absolutely above reproach and being continuously “respectable” will compromise everything that she fights for. But—well, I don’t want to give the whole story away, so I’ll just say that she’s too complex a character to be reducible to any sort of stereotype of the lonely, embittered single woman. Still, the ideas she expresses early in the novel are a good example of the differences between Victorian feminism and feminism as we know it today—and of the similarities too.

The Odd Woman is a thoughtful, provocative and extremely engaging novel. I wasn’t completely happy with how some of the subplots turned out (it seems that even Gissing can’t resist the urge to punish wayward women), but in the face of everything else this novel has to offer, this is only a minor complaint. I must read more of Gissing’s work as soon as possible

Interesting bits:

Never had it occurred to Widdowson that a wife remains an individual, with rights and obligations independent of her wifely condition. Everything he said presupposed his own supremacy; he took for granted that it was his to direct, hers to be guided. A display of energy, purpose, ambition, on Monica’s part, which had no reference to domestic pursuits, would have gravely troubled him; at once he would have set himself to subdue, with all gentleness, impulses so inimical to his idea of the married state. It rejoiced him that she spoke with so little sympathy of the principles supported by Miss Barfoot and Miss Nunn; these persons seemed to him well-meaning, but grievously mistaken. Miss Nunn he judged ‘unwomanly,’ and hoped in secret that Monica would not long remain on terms of friendship with her. Of course his wife’s former pursuits were an abomination to him; he could not bear to hear them referred to.
‘Woman’s sphere is the home, Monica. Unfortunately girls are often obliged to go out and earn their living, but this is unnatural, a necessity which advanced civilization will altogether abolish. You shall read John Ruskin; every word he says about women is good and precious. If a woman can neither have a home of her own, nor find occupation in any one else’s she is deeply to be pitied; her life is bound to be unhappy. I sincerely believe that an educated woman had better become a domestic servant than try to imitate the life of a man.’

Widdowson, before his marriage, had never suspected the difficulty of understanding a woman; had he spoken his serious belief on that subject, it would have been found to represent the most primitive male conception of the feminine being. Women were very like children; it was rather a task to amuse them and to keep them out of mischief. Therefore the blessedness of household toil, in especial the blessedness of child-bearing and all that followed. Intimacy with Monica had greatly affected his views, yet chiefly by disturbing them; no firmer ground offered itself to his threading when he perforce admitted that his former standpoint was every day assailed by some incontestable piece of evidence. Woman had individual characters; that discovery, though not a very profound one, impressed him with the force of something arrived at by independent observation. Monica often puzzled him gravely; he could not find the key to her satisfactions and discontents. To regard her simply as a human being was beyond the reach of his intelligence.

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From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell is a fascinating, complex and layered account of the story of Jack the Ripper, the famous serial killer who took the lives of five prostitutes in Whitechapel in the fall of 1888. The book takes its title from the opening line of one of the many letters sent to the police in the name of the killer – the “from hell” letter stands out because it’s one of the few believed to possibly have been real.

From Hell isn’t written as a mystery: Moore’s theory about the identity and motivation of the killer, which is largely based on the book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution by Stephen Knight, is made clear from the beginning. I won’t tell you everything, though I easily could without spoiling things for you. The theory involves a conspiracy to hide a royal birth, and like pretty much all attempts to “solve” the Jack the Ripper mystery, it has been disproved. But that isn’t really the point. The point is that it makes for a good story, and even more importantly, that it gives Moore the opportunity to make some interesting commentary on the Victorian age.

Alan Moore has said that From Hell was partially inspired by the concept used by Douglas Adams in his Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency series: according to Adams, to solve a crime one needs to solve the entire society in which it took place. From Hell, then, is focused as much on the context of the murders as on the murders themselves. This is a book about a society in which women with no work options whatsoever were forced into prostitution and lived a hand-to-mouth existence; in which, after the first body was discovered, the police interrogated Native Americans at Wild West shows in London because the crime seemed to them “too savage” to have been committed by a white man; in which the gap between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless, was ever-wide; in which only a few questioned what might be hiding behind the façade of respectability.

But of course, social inequality, poverty, racial profiling and prostitution are far from being confined to the Victorian age. From Hell is as much about the nineteenth century as it is about the twentieth – specifically, it’s about how the 1880’s foreshadow much of what would happen in the twentieth century.
As Moore says in the first appendix (yes, there are two appendixes),

In many ways, it seems to me that the 1880s contain the seeds of the twentieth century, not only in terms of politics and technology but also in the fields of art and philosophy as well. The suggestion that the 1880s embody the essence of the twentieth-century, along with the attendant notion that the Whitechapel murders embody the essence of the 1880s, is central to From Hell.

This is an idea I find very interesting, and I’ve actually written about how one of the things that I find so appealing about the Victorian age is exactly the fact that so much of what we struggle with today can be found there too. However, my own outlook is a bit more positive than what can be found in From Hell. This is a difficult idea to articulate, as I’d hate to sound like I’m dismissing or minimising the social horrors, wars and violence, or environmental disasters of the twentieth century. But despite all this, I’m one of the last few remaining believers in that much maligned concept, progress. This isn’t because I think things have gotten better necessarily, but because I believe that they can. If previous centuries weren’t as bloody as the twentieth, it was only because humankind lacked the technology to make them so, not because people had more scruples.


Lest it sound like I’m saying that From Hell offers a nostalgic or glorified vision of the past and vilifies the present, let me clarify that it absolutely doesn’t. It’s much too complex a book to offer any single simple idea. This was only one of the many directions in which my thoughts strayed as I read it – and thoughts, ideas, possibilities and most of all questions about the past, the present and the future are what this book is all about.

Another thing that I found interesting is the fact that misogyny is one of the major themes of From Hell. It’s not difficult to imagine that the murder and violent mutilation of five prostitutes was motivated by hostility towards women, but most accounts of the crimes seem to find this hostility too common a feature of the Victorian period to be worth acknowledging at all. Moore’s take, however, brings it to the forefront of the story. And before I discuss this any further, let me answer the question you might be asking yourselves – how violent is this book? I say this because I, too, tend to be wary of books or films that detailedly depict violence against women under the pretext of denouncing it.

From Hell does depict the murders themselves, but the clinical detachment with which the killer operates makes them easier to bear than they would have been otherwise. All five women are drugged with laudanum and then killed quickly before the mutilations begin, so there’s no voyeuristic dwelling on how much they may have suffered. Most of all, though, I think that what counters the exploitation of an act of violence that tends to surround Jack the Ripper stories is the humanity with which Moore portrays Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stide, Kate Eddowes and Mary Kelly.

We meet them long before the murders; we watch them struggle to earn enough for a meal and a place to spend the night; we see the threats of violence that constantly surround them; we are invited to recognize their full humanity. It’s no accident that From Hell is dedicated to these five women: this story is an acknowledgement that very often in these crimes, the victims themselves are forgotten. We look at the crimes as logical puzzles, and in the process we forget all about the real people who lost their lives at the hand of the killer. This is a problem that Kate Summerscale’s otherwise wonderful The Suspicions of Mr Whicher acknowledge, but only as an afterthought. I liked the fact that in From Hell the idea of returning the victims their humanity took centre stage.

Another aspect of the killings that Moore’s account emphasises is their ritualistic aspect – again, something that isn’t difficult to believe given the treatment of the bodies. This ties in with the misogyny, but unfortunately it was at this point that the book more or less lost me. There’s a lot of metaphysical and mystical speculation of the Jungian and The White Goddess variety, which I’m sure a lot of people will find more interesting than I did. Perhaps “interesting” is the wrong word, as I did find it that – but it worries me to speak of “masculine” and “feminine” principles, even if the terms are being used metaphorically. I’m very wary of anything that naturalises socially-acquired gender traits, so I tend to always be suspicious of this kind of discussion. To be fair on Moore, he does present these speculations are exactly that – speculations – and I never felt like the book was trying to sell me an idea. Again, From Hell is too complex for that, and it offers so much ideas-wise that not being interested in one of its theoretical aspect didn’t detract from my overall enjoyment.

As for the reading experience itself: I loved the art in From Hell, and I loved the book’s atmospheric noir, Gothic feel. But I have to say that this is quite an overwhelming book, in the same way that Bryan Talbot’s Alice in Sunderland is overwhelming: there’s just so much here. I recommend reading it slowly, and perhaps going through the annotations in the first appendix as you finish each chapter, which is what I started doing once I was a few chapters in. I think that anyone but a great expert in the Victorian age would benefit immensely from them. It’s not that the story is otherwise confusing, but the notes are meant to help readers make sense of the many historical references, some of which are quite obscure. And this, of course, makes the reading experience even richer.


I feel that I’ve only scratched the surface of what From Hell is about, but that’s Alan Moore from you. I’ll leave you with a quote from the second appendix (it’s a pity that I couldn’t find the panels that accompany it online) in which Moore speculates about why people are still so obsessed with a series of crimes that took place over a hundred years ago:

Truth is, this has never been about the murders, nor the killer, nor his victims. It’s about us. About our minds and how they dance. Jack mirrors our hysterias. Faceless, he is the receptacle for each new social panic. He’s a Jew, a Doctor, a Freemason or a Wayward Royal. Soon, somebody will notice the disturbing similarities between the Ripper crimes and recent cattle mutilations, from which they will draw the only sensible conclusion.

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