Bloody Foreigners by Robert Winder

Robert Winder’s Bloody Foreigners is a fascinating and detailed history of immigration to Britain and of its historical, cultural and social impact, starting with the migrations of tribes towards the end of the Bronze Age and going up to the present day. As Winder explains, his intention was “to produce a book that would present immigration not as a subject or issue (let alone a ‘problem’)”, but rather as “a narrative, a story, an adventure.”

Of course, facts being what they are he only succeeds to a certain extent – the perception of immigrants as problems or issues, after all, does have an impact on the narratives and adventures people experience and cannot really be left out. Nevertheless, his political stance is clear from the very beginning: this will not be an addition to the canon of moral panic about swarming immigrants, but rather a celebratory account of all the ways in which British history and culture have been enriched by cosmopolitanism.

Winder also explains in the introduction why he means to shift the perspective from immigration to emigration:

There is a built-in tendency to present immigrants as passive or problematic second-tier characters, as guests or mere visitors with certain obligations of deference and gratitude towards their ‘host’. Emigrants are much more dashing – adventurous, eager, intrepid, fun. This simple conception drove most of my research. Migrants ceased to be the feeble, dependent figures of so much carton mythmaking, and became plucky explorers on the sharp, often painful edge of social progress.

His account, then, is unapologetically from the perspective of the Roman, Huguenot, Jewish, Irish, Polish, Indian, Caribbean and Chinese people (just to name a few) who made their way to an unknown country over the centuries, for reasons as diverse as there are individuals. My favourite thing about Bloody Foreigners was perhaps this refusal to squeeze all this human richness into the same narrow box. Winder freely acknowledges that there is no such thing as a “typical” immigrant experience and that the only way to do people justice is to acknowledge their diversity. He says:

These are happy stories and sad stories, hard-luck stories and success stories, love stories and murder mysteries. It requires a good deal of fabrication and a hearty lack of curiosity to lump the dizzying varieties of immigration – from Huguenot weavers and Indian shopkeepers to South African dentists, from Polish fighter pilots to Jamaican fishermen, from refugee orphans to Russian aristocrats – under a single heading. Some came on steamers from the Caribbean, some trekked overland in the back of lorries, as stowaways or penniless refugees (though a rarely acknowledged fact about refugees is that a high proportion of them are middle class: it takes both means and aspirations to cross half the world, however uncomfortably). Some have come on lilos, in wheel wells of aircraft, in airless trucks or beneath cross-Channel trains. Others encountered England at Eton, or Sandhurst, or through investment banks, or the first-class lounge.

I picked up Bloody Foreigners as a follow-up to Enslaved by Rahila Gupta, which I unfortunately had to return to the library before having the chance to review. Enslaved is an eye-opening account of modern-day slavery, and towards the end of the book Gupta argues that contemporary border controls and immigration laws are actually responsible for putting people in the disenfranchised situations that facilitate and perpetuate slavery. I thought it would be interesting to look at this argument from a historical perspective, and Robert Winder did not disappoint: Bloody Foreigners does cover the historical emergence of the concepts of nation and nationality (both of which are far more recent than people tend to assume), as well as the factors that might have contributed to this emergence. As with so many of the main guiding points of our social world, there’s nothing inevitable about the way we organised ourselves in fortress-like nations. Cosmopolitanism (if we may call it that at a time when the concept did not exist) was once upon a time taken for granted, and this could still be the world in which we live.

I was also very interested in Winder’s account of historical shifts in the way certain nationalities and groups of people are perceived – the most staggering examples being perhaps the Irish and the Jewish. Despite the fact that we’re all first and foremost individuals, the groups we belong to do affect how others perceive us – and this may or may not bear a relationship with the groups we ourselves identify with the most strongly. What history shows us is that some foreigners are more foreign than others. This seems to have little to do with similarities between cultures, and rather a lot to do with the momentary prestigiousness (or lack thereof) of a certain backgrounds.

Another reason why I decided to read Bloody Foreigners was the fact that I wanted to take comfort in history (always a dangerous and unwise aspiration, I know). I’m just reaching the end of a very difficult year in which I experienced the full vulnerability of living in a country other than the one in which you were born for the first time (without the bubble of protection offered by Erasmus communities, that is, which makes it an entirely different sort of experience). This isn’t something that is easy to articulate, but there’s something very unsettling about the very real possibility that anyone you meet at any time may be predisposed to be hostile to your for no personal reason other than the accent you reveal when you speak. You know this will not turn out to be the case with the great majority of people, but still, every minute of the day the possibility is there. And sometimes there’s no hostility but a slightly impatience or annoyance, assumptions about your level of literacy or your intelligence, a constant othering that puts you ill at ease. You find yourself scrutinising people’s manner to discern a cause, but the fact is, you’ll never really know. Of course, as a white, educated and middle class person I’m still very much enshrined in privilege, but nevertheless the vulnerability is there. And day after day it unsettles you and wears you down.

But did history prove comforting, you ask? Bloody Foreigners was at the very least a reminder of how very human my recent experiences actually are. This may seem to contradict my previous point about the lack of a one-size-fits-all immigrant experience, but I don’t think it does, actually. Reading these stories reminded me that everywhere you go there will be kind people and people who are not so kind; that throughout history there are countless people whose life stories have points of contact with my own, but there is no set pattern, no fixed narrative that my life is bond to follow. Something as simple as this can return you a heightened awareness of your own humanity at the time when you need it the most.

But enough with the personal asides: Bloody Foreigners is a brilliantly researched, vivid and highly readable book that most lovers of social history are likely to enjoy. At times I wanted Winder to have included even more detail, but in a book that’s almost six hundred pages long, that’s probably very telling.

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Caddy’s World by Hilary McKay

Disclaimer: this is the first time I’ve ever considered simply not including a book cover in a post because I dislike it so intensely. I know I complained about the Casson Family books’ previous cartoonish covers in the past, but you know what, I kind of take it all back. Those covers were at least a bit quirky and eye-catching and different from the current trend of actual-photos-of-people-from-the-shoulders-up. But this? This is just so samey – not to mention that it misrepresents the tone of the series to an unprecedented extent. As we all know, books are judged by their covers all the time, and sadly I can imagine many potential fans not being drawn to this cover at all.

Anyway. Caddy’s World is a new addition to Hilary McKay’s delightful and very funny Casson family series, which focuses on four siblings who are part of an artistic, eccentric family and on their circle of friends. I didn’t even know there was going to be a new book in the series, let alone that it was out now – and then one day last week I walked into my local library and lo and behold, there it was, on the “new books” table display. Needless to say, finding it absolutely made my day. It felt like one big gift from the universe wrapped up in a bright shiny bow, and just when I desperately needed one. Don’t you love it when that happens?

I reviewed books one and two in this series last year after first hearing about them on Jenny’s blog, and then I read the following three without reviewing them because I’d kind of run out of things to say. This isn’t to say that each book in the series isn’t unique; it’s just that I love them all for mostly the same reasons and there are only so many ways in which I can express that. But now enough time has gone by that I a) can overlook the fact that I’m repeating myself and b) can use this as an opportunity to remind you all that you need to read this series now.

Caddy’s World is actually a prequel to the series: it focuses on twelve-year-old Caddy and on her three best friends, and it takes place many years before Saffy’s Angel, at around the time when Rose Casson is born. As readers will know from previous books, Rose is born prematurely, and for some time the family isn’t sure whether she will survive. The inclusion of the first chapter of Saffy’s Angel at the end of the book kind of implies that Caddy’s World can be read first, but I don’t think it can – not to the same emotional effect. You need to know who that fragile premature baby is going to become; you need to know why everything that’s happening matters so much for the book to be as moving as it has the potential to be.

Twelve-year-old Caddy is already the animal lover we know her to be from her university days, and at one point in the book she rescues a baby pigeon that fell from its nest and takes it home. Inevitably the helpless little bird dies, and Eve, her mother, confesses she always knew it would. To which Caddy replies:

‘Why didn’t you tell me then?’
‘What would you have done if I had?’
‘I wouldn’t have bothered,’ said Caddy. ‘I wouldn’t have made it a nest. I wouldn’t have fed it. I wouldn’t have let it have a name. I wouldn’t have loved it.’

This exchange is at the very heart of what Caddy’s World is about: you can’t really hold back from loving things; not without losing something precious in the process. Caddy cries so much she “spoils the funeral”, but still she doesn’t become the sort of person who refuses to love things because they’re going to die, or be otherwise lost when the “genie of change” shakes the world. And this is why she’s Caddy Casson, bravest of the brave: she loves, loses, and she loves again. And again. And again.

Like all previous Casson family books, Caddy’s World is humorous, warm, heartfelt, moving, sensitive, and wonderfully ironic. It’s full of little moments that just might go over the heads of some young readers (though by no means all), but you know what, that’s perfectly okay: I imagine they will return to the books one day and pick up more and more of the adult nuances they missed before. Take, for example, a passage such as this:

Caddy could still remember very clearly the world before Indigo and Saffron had arrived. In those days her father had been home nearly all the time. Whole weeks would pass in which no tears were shed, no heads were clutched, no vases were stuffed with apologising roses, no hard sums were done to prove the cheapness of renting a place to work in London compared to the enormous cost of building a soundproof, childproof studio at home.
In those days nobody ever wore dark glasses and explained they had hay fever.

As always, Hilary McKay uses Bill and Eve Casson’s relationship for some deliciously satiric commentary on the different expectations placed on men and women in terms of parenthood and domestic freedoms and obligations. There’s also a wonderfully funny yet moving scene in which Bill expresses amazement at the fact that his children, haters of salad, omelettes, or any of the healthy food he tries to feed them while Eve is in hospital with Rose, will eat Eve’s “starry eggs and tomato moons” with much gusto. He also asks them why he’d never heard of this dish before, to which his children reply that Eve often cooks it to cheer them up when he goes back to London.

Eve’s intense practicality and her knack with the children is contrasted with Bill’s well-meaning but ultimately inexperienced efforts. He loves his children and knows all the theoretical rules of how to raise them, but ultimately he’s just not around that much. Eve’s real role in the family may be unappreciated – as it often is in real life – but it’s by no means unacknowledged by the text.

Oh Hilary McKay. Please never stop writing.

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The Sunday Salon: The Dead (reading) Days of Summer

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Good morning, everyone. First of all, if anyone else has been trying to secure Edinburgh Book Festival tickets since 8am, my commiserations. I gave up after three hours of struggling with their constantly crashing website with tickets to four of my six desired events – and judging by what I’ve been seeing on Twitter, that’s actually an incredibly lucky outcome.

The other day it dawned on me that I’ve been in a sort of reading slump for the past two or three months, if not the whole year. Looking at other bloggers’s mid-year best books lists, I realised that unlike what happened in the past few years, I really don’t have that many clear favourites. I suspect that the fact that I’ve been exhausted and dealing with so much anxiety and stress has affected my reading. It’s difficult to find books that truly grab me, and I read so much more slowly than I used to before. I actually need to push myself to pick up a book even if I’m enjoying it, whereas before I’d eagerly spend every free minute reading.

Lately I’ve been devoting most of my time to either non-fiction or children’s literature, and while you wouldn’t catch me dead saying that this kind of reading “doesn’t really count”, I do miss reading more diversely. I miss getting lost in a long, meaty, sweeping nineteenth century novel, for example – or even a contemporary one. Don’t get me wrong; there have been novels I absolutely loved this year – most notably Naomi Novik’s series, A Monster Calls and The 10PM Question. More recently I had the perfect reading experience with Hilary McKay’s Caddy’s World, a brand new addition to the Casson family series. Reading this book was the highlight of my week – I only wish it hadn’t been over so quickly. I’ve also been delighting in the new Virginia Nicholson, Millions Like Us, a social history of women’s lives during WW2. But as brilliant as it is, it’s making me miss being wowed by Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch. It’s making me miss being wowed by a novel, period. Even the best novels I’ve read this month (Ship Breaker and The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making) were novels I appreciated intellectually rather than emotionally. They’re extraordinarily well crafted, but I wanted to be swept off my feet and get truly involved in the narrative.

So I thought I’d turn to you for help. I do of course realise that what makes a book have that wow factor depends as much on the reader as it does on the book itself, but tell me anyway: what was the last book that really swept you off your feet? And to those of you who have got to know my reading taste over the months or years, what do you think might break this current dry spell? If you were feeling generous, you could pursue my tbr list for ideas, but feel free to hit me with whatever.

Have a great Sunday, everyone!

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The Equality Illusion by Kat Banyard

There is just too much at stake for us to continue denying that gender inequality is a problem and ridiculing efforts to draw attention to it. This book has been written as a wake-up call: feminism is one of the most important movements for social justice of our age – and we need it now more than ever.

The Equality Illusion: The Truth About Women and Men Today is both an introduction to feminism and a powerful and unapologetic debunking of the myth that the movement’s work is done and we’re all equal now, thank you very much. The book is divided into several different sections, covering topics such as body image, ideals of beauty and eating disorders; sexism in education; sexism in the workplace; domestic violence; the sex industry; and reproductive rights. Each chapter begins with the story of a real girl or woman affected by these issues, which gives the book a more human and immediate feel. Banyard concludes The Equality Illusion with a chapter titled “What To Do”, in which she gives readers several suggestions for involvement and grassroots activism.

I’m not sure if Kat Banyard’s intention was to specifically aim the book at young readers, but The Equality Illusion certainly seems to have a lot of YA appeal (by which I of course don’t mean it’s dumbed down). In any case, I do hope it finds an audience among young people, as this is the kind of book that could have changed my life for the better at the age of fourteen or fifteen, simply by making the several ways in which sexism affects all our lives click together and fall into place. The Equality Illusion is very much a Feminism 101 sort of book, so it’s likely that readers more experienced in gender issues won’t find much that is new here. But nevertheless we need books like this: current, accessible, well-written, passionately argued, solidly researched, and, despite the grimness of the facts described, far from bleak.

“Hands up for a gendered education”, a chapter which covers sexual harassment in schools and the institutional indifference it’s often met with, was one of the most striking, and it provides a good example of how The Equality Illusion could have deeply impacted my younger self’s life. When I was in eight grade my best friend and I wrote a letter of complaint against an education auxiliary who was in the habit of groping female students. This was something pretty much every girl of our acquaintance had experienced and was every bit as tired of as we were, and as such we had no trouble at all getting some thirty or so students to sign the letter along with us. However, the result of handing it in was not quite what we had anticipated. The headmaster’s instant assumption was that we were making it up, and, along with our maths teacher, he endeavoured to give us a Good Talking To. To make matters worse this was done publicly, and as an inevitable result the backlash quickly spread through the school. Faced with this pressure, most others girls withdrew their support and claimed that we had tricked them into signing the letter by pretending it was about something else.

My friend and I were left isolated, and the attitude we met with could be summed up as, “sexual harassment is a compliment, and you’re nowhere near pretty enough to merit it”. In more than one occasion we overheard the guy in question telling a group of male students, “If I was going to grope something I certainly wouldn’t settle for groping that” as we walked past, to loud and general mirth. We faced weeks of mockery, bullying, and open threats of physical violence, until my friend couldn’t handle it anymore and transferred to a private school where I could not afford to follow her. As you can probably imagine, the rest of eight grade wasn’t exactly a lot of fun for me.

What a book like The Equality Illusion could have done was reveal that something like this is in no way an isolated incident – it’s part of a pattern, and it’s far more common than many would care to admit. That knowledge alone can make a world of difference to a struggling and isolated teen. While I would like to think that some progress has been made in this regard since the late 1990’s, I’m not entirely sure whether that is the case. Still, young people in these situations today do have resources at their disposal – the crucial thing is that, unlike me, they be made aware that these exist.

As I said above, The Equality Illusion is an excellent introduction to all sorts of gender issues, complete with references and statistics that make the facts plains to see. However, my one complaint is that Banyard sometimes oversimplifies the research she’s reporting, which makes her arguments far less solid than they could and should be. This is especially the case when it comes to neurological research, and I’m to cheer on Cordelia Fine as she deconstructs oversimplified studies in support of neurosexism, I have to hold research that actually supports feminist arguments to the exact same standards. I’d feel deeply intellectually dishonest if I didn’t. The thing is, I actually agree with Caroline, who made the point that the fact that The Equality Illusion does not read like an academic book is part of its appeal. But accessibility and rigour don’t have to be mutually exclusive, so perhaps there’s a better way of balancing the two.

If I had another issue with the book, it was the fact that it came a little too close to The Patriarchy Made You Do It territory sometimes. Feminism is of course no monolith, so you can easily find diverging opinions on several issues within the movement. One of the most divisive topics of all is perhaps pornography. Banyard takes a firm stance that I generally agree with: the majority of mainstream porn is violent and rabidly misogynistic, and it’s extremely troubling to see it co-opt the language of feminism in the name of supposed “empowerment” and “liberation”, only to perpetuate what are actually millennia-old sexist notions. However, not finding that feminist porn/erotica is necessarily a logical impossibility or a contradiction in terms doesn’t make me brainwashed, and I kind of resent the implication that it does.

But these two points don’t really detract from my overall enthusiasm for The Equality Illusion: this is an honest, accessible, inspiring and hugely important book. I hope it finds a large audience, for the sake of people like the teen I was.

Favourite bits:

‘Gender’, and all that word implies today, is the net result of the decisions, debates, accidents, and battles played out amongst our 100 billion forbearers. (…) In fact, gender itself pivots on a power relation: the height of masculinity – a ‘real man’ – is when it is furthest away from the ‘depths’ of femininity. While the level and forms vary, women and girls in every society on earth have less access to opportunities, resources, and political power than men and boys – not because of sex, but because of gender – something we create.

The daily trip to school is uncertain, frightening, and dangerous for millions of girls across the world. Those fortunate enough to make it to the school gates spend their day exposed to a hidden curriculum of gender inequality. Although not written into their timetables, the learning takes place every time they enter the classroom, go out to the playground, or walk on the sports field. The gender trenches of masculinity and femininity produce segregation and violence. Yet the equality illusion persists under the guise that what we are witnessing are natural, biological differences.

Another cause of the pay gap – but one which is rarely discussed – is the fact that workers in female-dominated roles and professions are paid and valued less than workers in male-dominated roles and professions – even when the jobs demand the same level of skill, training, physical and mental effort and decision-making. When this takes place within the same organisation it is deemed illegal in the UK under the Sex Discrimination Act – violating the right to equal pay for equal value – but across the economy as a whole this takes place daily. The five Cs which make up the sticky floor of women’s work – cleaning, caring, clerical work, cashiering and catering – are jobs which generally have traditionally been done by women at home for free, and the skills they require are seen as “natural” for women and thus not deserving of much financial remuneration.

While in the UK government is able to predict that 100,000 women will be raped each year in Britain – equivalent to 2,000 women a week – only 6.5 per cent of those that are reported to the police end in conviction of a perpetrator, and there is little public discussion of the aspects of our culture that encourage so many men to choose to rape women. Rape, as with most violence against women, is widely seen as a causeless problem.

Culture is not a static, ahistorical, inflexible entity. Quite the contrary. It is a series of social practices that not everyone has an equal hand in forming, which can privilege certain groups, and which are constantly being contested. However, there is a problem in recognising these forms of violence as uniquely culture. As I’ll argue later in this chapter, culture plays a crucial role in all forms of violence against women – including Western mainstream culture. Feminist author and activist Rahila Gupta suggests that ‘culture is not a prism through which we view only the actions of minorities In 1994, Roy Greech, a white man, stabbed his wife twenty-three times and left the knife in her throat because she was having an affair. Crime of passion? Jealousy? Honour? Different labels, but they are all about the control of a woman’s body and mind.’ Yet there is often a tendency to notice the role of culture only if it is outside the mainstream/majority or if it is occurring abroad.

Other Points of View:
Still Life With Books
Beauty is a Sleeping Cat

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Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian

Goodnight Mister Tom is a historical children’s novel set during WW2. It tells the story of William Beech, a London boy who along with thousands of other children is evacuated to a country village when the war begins. William stays with an unlikely host, a 60-year-old grumpy and solitary man by the name of Mr Thomas Oakley. But Will is a bit of misfit himself: he’s a very lonely child who grew up with an abusive mother and no friends at all, and as such the last thing he expects from those around him is kindness. Will and Mr Tom make an unlikely pair, but the two develop a strong connection that enriches both their lives. However, as Will is an evacuee his situation is temporary. Both he and Mr Tom know that sooner or later he’ll have to return to his mother.

I really wanted to love Goodnight Mister Tom - and one level I did. Reading it reminded me of looking at letters from child evacuees at the Imperial War Museum in London. I particularly remember one of them, whose author wrote: “It’s called Spring, mum, and they have one of these around here every year!” Will had a deprived childhood, both materially and emotionally, so his new life in the country is full of similar wonders and discoveries. It’s lovely and very moving to watch Will flourish, to see Mr Tom himself be drawn out of his isolation, to watch the community of Little Weirwold do their best to welcome this child.

Yet one another level, I found Goodnight Mister Tom a very unsatisfying book. First of all, there’s the fact that it almost reinforces the Demon Single Mother stereotype. The plot comes worryingly close to opposing a traditional country upbringing – one that is right and proper and healthy and wholesome – to impoverished single mothers in the city who are inevitably bound to fail. The reason why I say “almost” is because I’m aware that reading this as a story that demonises non-traditional families is deeply unfair. Mr Tom, after all, is a widower in his sixties – not a traditional family by any means – and he does a splendid job with Will. Still, there were far too many echoes here of all the scare stories I’ve read over the years about a working woman’s inability to bring up a child on her own. Obviously there is a real issue here, in the sense that we live in a world that does not by any means makes it easy for single working mothers to raise children on their own. But there was a sense of inevitability to what happened in Will’s case that put me off.

What adds to this problem is the fact that Will’s mother is portrayed more as a cartoonish bogeyman than as a real person. I have no trouble at all believing that there are abusive, mentally ill parents out there who mistreat their children to this extent, but nevertheless I wish the story had made more of an effort to acknowledge her humanity; had given us at least a glimpse of what was behind her appalling parenting. Why was she the way she was? Why the abuse? Why the need for absolutely authority over her child? What turned her into this? I felt that Goodnight Mister Tom did the opposite of what The 10PM Question does in this sense: we see and sympathise with the very real consequences of her behaviour on Will, but we never get a glimpses of who she might be beyond that.

As I read Goodnight Mister Tom, I could not help but keep mentally comparing to Barbara Noble’s Doreen, which I read last year and absolutely loved. What made Doreen such a moving and satisfying book was exactly the fact that it showed both sides of the story. Doreen’s mother could never give her the same kind of privileged environment as her host family, and in her fear of losing her daughter she did cruel, selfish things. Yet readers are never allowed to lose sight of her humanity. Goodnight Mister Tom is a children’s book while Doreen is not, but the day has yet to come when I’ll be persuaded that I ought to expect a different degree of nuance and emotional complexity from children’s fiction than I do from fiction for adults (this is of course quite separate from the accessibility of the writing). Fortunately there are authors out there like Sharon Creech, Michael Morpurgo, David Almond, Philip Pullman, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman or Diana Wynne Jones who constantly remind me that I’m not wrong to refuse to lower my standards.

Spoilers warning for the next few paragraphs: To make matters worse, Will’s mother is very conveniently got rid of towards the end of the story with a suicide, and this isn’t explored at all beyond the following conversation:

“She killed herself.”
Will gazed at her in stunned disbelief.
“Killed herself? But ... but why?”
“I don’t know. I suppose she just didn’t want to live anymore.”
How could anyone not want to live, thought Will, when there were so many things to live for? There were rainy nights and wind and the slap of the sea and the moon. There were books to read and pictures to paint and music.

There are the thoughts of a nine-year-old boy, so it wouldn’t be fair to expect a full understanding of the complexities of depression and suicide. But this paragraph still rubbed me the wrong way, because it felt so dismissive of the circumstances that can lead someone to such a radical decision. People can be fully aware of how much there is to love in the world and still feel, for one reason or other, than they can’t bear to live anymore. Magorian did not, of course, need to make the book about suicide, but this is one of those things that I think should be handled sensitively and thoughtfully if you’re going to include them in a story at all. [/spoilers]

There are some very interesting secondary characters and subplots in Goodnight Mister Tom: there’s Zach, a Jewish evacuee and Will’s first real friend; there’s Carrie, a Little Weirwold girl who wants to go to highschool, and once her wish is granted finds herself stuck between two worlds; there’s another subplot dealing with grief and loss and the costs of the War. But for the most part, I felt that these were only explored superficially. While they were never meant to be at the heart of the book, I still wish they had been a little more detailed.

Don’t get me wrong, though: there’s still plenty to love here. Goodnight Mister Tom is a good book, and it does a wonderful job of evoking the wartime period. But I felt that it could easily have been great, if only it had handled things with a little bit more depth.

Other opinions:
Another Cookie Crumbles
Tea Mouse
Cardigan Girl Verity

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Dickens on Stage: The Library Theatre’s Hard Times

Last week I went to see the Library Theatre’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. Given my previous experiences with their productions, my expectations were quite high, but I was not in the least disappointed. Coincidentally, all the productions I’ve seen so far were Victorian; while I’m sure they do contemporary theatre just as well, I could seriously watch them bring the 19th century to life forever. The tone and atmosphere are always absolutely spot on (not to mention the setting and costumes and props and all that). The Library Theatre Company has quickly become one of my favourite things about Manchester – and certainly one of the things I’m going to miss the most.

Hard Times was a promenade production that took place at Murray’s Mill, a disused Victorian cotton mill in the outskirts of the city centre (talk about a perfect setting). What this means is that the audience follows the story as it unfolds through several locations within the mill. Before the actual play begins, we are invited to walk through the mill’s basement and be immersed in a reconstruction of Coketown. Then, on the upper floor, we follow the actors as they move from Mr. Gradgrind’s school to his home; from Josiah Bounderby’s mansion to the bank; from Stephen Blackpool’s house to the streets of Coketown; and finally to Mr. Sleary’s circus for the final scenes.


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The cast were all extremely impressive, but I was particularly taken by Alice O’Connell who played Louisa Gradgrind. As I said when I posted about the novel, Dickens is no Wilkie Collins when it comes to writing female characters, and the women in Hard Times felt rather more like types than human beings. However, O’Connell played the troubled but mostly restrained and collected Louisa with extreme expressiveness: her rare displays of emotion were perfectly visible but never over the top, and she made the character seem more human, more complex, and more nuanced. The differences in demeanour between her and Sissy Jupe, for example, were always so telling. I feel that I understand Louisa Gradgrind better after having watched this play, which I suspect is one of the best things that can be said about a performance.

I should also mention David Crellin, who plays both Stephen Blackpool and Mr Leary – his performances were so convincing that I didn’t realise at all both characters were played by the same actor until I read the program at home!


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When it comes to the story itself, the stage version did a great job of capturing the essence of Hard Times: the crucial scenes were all there, and the story flows very well. Though I was glad to have read the novel beforehand, my boyfriend, who had not, generally had no trouble at all following the plot. The only exception to this was – spoiler alert – Stephen Blackpool’s death. The story moves directly from Rachel asking Louisa and Sissy for help finding him to someone yelling that he has been found and bringing him over in a stretcher. It all happens so fast that it’s very easy to lose track of what’s going on if you haven’t read the novel – and a stage adaptation should never assume the audience has. I overheard someone asking their partner if Stephen had been lynched by the angry trade union members, and I can certainly see how someone new to the story would get that impression from the way the scene unfolds. But this is really just a minor point about an otherwise excellent adaptation.


Photo Credit

When we moved to Mr Leary’s circus for the play’s finale, I briefly wondered how the production would handle the fact that in the original, Tom Gradgrind is disguised by wearing rags and blackface. Generally I’m not at all in favour of historical revisions or of attempts to “clean up” the past according to modern sensibilities rather than acknowledging the historical roots of racism. However, it seemed very difficult to make this particular scene work without turning an element that is very incidental to the story into something much bigger than it actually is in the novel. Obviously the casual racism of wearing blackface can and should be contextualised, but how do you do that in a performance where every minute counts? What happened in this case was that Tom was disguised as a harlequin instead, which seemed to me a sensitive way for a modern performance to handle that scene.

The Library Theatre’s production of Hard Times has perhaps a little less bite and is generally friendlier than Dickens’ cynical and disenchanted novel. This isn’t to say that the social critique is not still very much there (the facts of the story, after all, speak for themselves), only that the irony felt somewhat gentler, and the humour a little less dark. Perhaps much of this simply has to do with the absence of Dickens’ narrative voice, which is something a stage adaptation can do nothing about. In any case, there’s nothing wrong with a play having its own tone. Hard Times the play exists side by side with the novel, and they’re both wonderful things.

You can watch a video of some of the cast speaking about the production below:

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See you in Edinburgh?

The program for this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival was announced today; I’ve wanted to go for pretty much as long as I’ve known it existed, and as I currently live a mere three hour train ride away I decided this year had to be the year. However, limited free time (plus a graduate student’s very modest finances) means I can only go for a small part of the festival’s seventeen days duration. I’m unfortunately arriving too late for Meg Rosoff, Cory Doctorow, Kelly Link, Audrey Niffenegger and Neil Gaiman, and leaving too early for A.S. Byatt (though at least I found out that Byatt’s event is for her upcoming contribution to the Canongate Myth Series, Ragnarok: The End of the Gods, to be published in September. Yes, that sound you just heard was my happy tap-dancing.)


As I’m sure you can imagine, I’m particularly disappointed to be missing Neil Gaiman, but part of me hopes he’ll be around for a few days longer and I’ll serendipitously run into him (whether I’d be brave enough to say hi is a whole other matter, though). Plus there have been hints of more UK events in early September, so I’m clinging to that hope.

But enough about what I’m not seeing: I’m planning to attend events by Patrick Ness (!), China Miéville, Shaun Tan (also deserving of a !, methinks), Kate de Goldi (author of my beloved The 10PM Question) and Morris Gleitzman (whose Two Weeks With the Queen is a masterpiece). Plus I’m catching music shows by Amanda Palmer and The National (my favourite band) - I can’t really complain, can I?

Edinburgh in August also means the Fringe Festival, whose extremely diverse program has me completely overwhelmed. So many performances, so little money and time! So far I’ve picked a stage adaptation of The Secret of Monkey Island (a classic of my childhood – I couldn’t not go) and The Girl with the Iron Claws, a puppetry show based on a Norse myth, “The White Bear King”.


I could also go see Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, or The Tempest, or Macbeth, but a) I’m trying not to overcommit myself and leave free time for signings, book browsing, soaking up the festival atmosphere and sightseeing and b) I’m trying to stick to shows that sound a little different and that I’d probably not have the chance to see anywhere else. I’m lucky enough to be going to two Shakespeare’s Globe performances this summer (Halmet near me and Much Ado About Nothing at the actual Globe - insert squeeing here), so there’s that to consider. Anyway, my relative ignorance of theatrical matters plus the incredibly diversity of performances on offer are making me slightly anxious, so if anyone has any tips they’d be very much appreciated.

I’ve been to Edinburgh before, but I’m sure there was plenty that I missed: any city-related tips would be welcomed as well. I was also wondering if anyone else is planning to attend – if so, it would be lovely to say hi. The only downside of all of this is that now I have to work extra hard on my dissertation to make sure I can take those days off in August. But hey, a booklover’s dream holiday is certainly an excellent motivator.

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Rebel Girls by Jill Liddington

The Edwardian Votes for Women campaign was everywhere. It spread out into every town; it walked down every street; it entered every home; it was discussed – and argued over – across kitchen and dining room up and down the land. It encompassed the courageous suffragettes, whose militant action often landed them in prison to endure hunger strikes and even forcible feedings. And it embraced those self-effacing suffragists who so dreaded public speaking; their constitutional campaign had them mounting soap-boxes in market squares and even taking their suffrage caravan out into the remotest dale, the most sea-swept fishing harbour. It included those whose own brave rebellions went quietly unrecorded: arguments with fathers, whose political loyalties or patriarchal certainties blinded them to their daughters’ undemocratic lack of vote. This book is written to honour all those Edwardian campaigners whose small acts of enormous courage so often went uncelebrated.

Rebel Girls is a group biography of several suffrage activists who have mostly been left out of the spotlight before: Adela Pankhurst, far less well known than her mother Emmeline or her sisters Sylvia and Christabel; Dora Thewlis, referred to by the contemporary press as “baby suffragette” following her imprisonment at the age of sixteen (portrayed in the cover) – a pet name which, then as now, was used to infantilise her and deny her agency; Lilian Lenton, who swore to burn down two buildings a week until women were given the vote; Lavena Saltonstall, whose excellent writing is only just being rediscovered; Florence Lockwood, Bloomsbury bohemian painter turned Yorkshire woman; and also Mary Gawthorpe, Mary Murdoch, Edith Key, Isabella Ford, Leonora Cohen and Molly Morris.

The subjects chosen by Jill Liddington were women from Yorkshire rather than from the most well-known centres of the suffrage campaign. Furthermore, many of them were working class women – factory workers, weavers, millers, and tailoresses – whose stories challenge the myth that first wave feminism was exclusively an upper middle class affair. Obviously this isn’t to say that class-based critiques of early feminism are misplaced, but as is often the case, these critiques don’t tell the whole story. There were working woman involved in the suffrage movement too, and their role was as crucial as that of their more celebrated peers. Of course, the fact that their contributions were forgotten is worth noting in itself, but thankfully modern historians such as Liddington have attempted to redress the balance.

The women portrayed in Rebel Girls are an excellent illustration of the close links between the personal and the political. It is easy for readers to see how the women’s movement made sense in the context of their lives, and Liddington devotes a lot of time to exploring how they arrived at the decision to get involved in it. One of my favourite things about the book was how often primary sources were cited. Between letters, diaries, newspaper articles and opinion pieces, we can truly hear these women’s voices and see the coming to life. For example, in 1907 Lavena Saltonstall (a tailoress from Hebden Bridge whose circumstances forced her to leave formal education at the age of ten) wrote the following:

Should any girl show a tendency to politics, or to ideas of her own, she is looked upon by the majority of women as a person who neglects doorsteps and home matters, and is therefore not fit to associate with their respectable daughters and sisters. If girls develop any craving for a different life or wider ideas, their mothers fear that they are going to become Socialists or Suffragettes – a Socialist being a person with lax views about other people’s watches and purses, and other people’s husbands or wives, and a Sufraggette a person whose house is always untidy. If their daughters show any signs of a craving for higher things than cleaning brass fenders or bath taps, they put a stop to what they call “high notions”.
Who is going to tell these mothers that daughters were not given to them merely to dress and domesticate? Who is going to tell them that they have a higher duty to perform to them than merely teaching them housework? Who is going to tell them that it is as cruel to discourage a child from making use of its own talent or individuality as it would be to discourage a child from using its limbs?

Saltonstall’s writing reminded me of a point Aarti once made about how awareness of the limitations of gender roles and resentment of these injustices were really not that exceptional in the past. At any given time there were women very well aware of the inequality and unfairness that surrounded them. Unfortunately, there are all sorts of issues surrounding how historical fiction portrays this, which often come down to what we perceive as accurate. Novels whose protagonists are excepto-girls (the only character in the book to show any sort of awareness at all) are reductive of the complexities of history, irritating to read, and problematic in all sorts of ways; yet historical novels where a large number of women express proto-feminist sentiments are often dismissed by readers as anachronistic. This is why books like Rebel Girls matter so much – they add depth and nuance to our concept of an era.

Another interesting excerpt was a letter written by sixteen year old Dora Thewlis’ parents to the judge that arrested her. The judge pronounced himself scandalised that a girl her age was out protesting for the vote and not at school, to which the Thewlises replied:

We find ourselves in agreement with his Honour when he says that girls of seventeen [sixteen] ought to be at school. But we respectfully remind his Honour that girls of Dora’s age in her station of life are in this part of Christian England compelled [in their] thousands to spend ten hours per day in health-destroying factories, and the conditions and regulations under which they toil for others’ gain are sanctioned by law in the making of which women have no voice.

Go Mr and Mrs Thewlis! How awesome do they sound?

At the end of Rebel Girls, Jill Liddington included an appendix about her research, which she calls her “suffragette sleuthing”. She describes how she used unpublished or out of print diaries and memoirs; personal papers and correspondence often found in attics by the subjects’ grandchildren and dutifully donated to local archives; period newspapers; and the results of the 1901 census, which were only made publicly available in 2001. All of these sources allowed her to pierce together the stories of a group of women who had been mostly written of history.

All of this was very exciting to read for someone like me, who has worked as an archivist and would happily do so again. What interested me the most, though, were Liddington’s reflections on how what we currently know of the history of the suffrage movement was (re)written and crystallized in its current shape. Sylvia Pankhurst’s The Suffragette Movement, for example, is only one side of the story, and yet it became canonical and is frequently perceived as an all-encompassing account. This is a fascinating if slightly troubling process, and it put me in mind of what Lucasta Miller describes in The Brontë Myth. Mythmaking and history are often if not always indissociable processes - we can only be glad of the glimpses we get of the unwritten side of the story.

Many thanks to Violet for recommending this book to me.

(Have you reviewed Rebel Girls too? Let me know and I’ll be happy to link to you.)

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Anya’s Ghost by Vera Brosgol

Everyone’s life seems so much easier… But that’s all you know! (…) You don’t know what’s going on inside anyone else’s head.

Anya’s Ghost tells the story of Anya Borzakovskaya, a Russian-born high school student living in America and struggling to fit in. Anya has a complicated relationship with her best (and only) friend, Siobhan; she feels horribly embarrassed by Dima, the only other Russian student at her school; she struggles with her weight, her now-suppressed accent and her clothes; and she envies the seemingly perfect life of the girl who’s dating the boy she has a crush on. Anya is not exactly an outcast, but she could use a new friend. So when she finds herself tumbling into a well after school one day, she ends up befriending the ghost of Emily Reilly, a girl who died ninety years before. Having a ghost for a friend proves extremely useful at first, but things eventually take a dark turn: it turns out that there’s far more to Emily’s story than meets the eye.

It’s difficult to pick the most impressive thing about Anya’s Ghost, but if I had to go with one it might be the expressiveness of Brosgol’s art. There are entirely wordless panels where a silence, a look or the expression on one of the character’s faces speaks volumes. These quiet moments work together with the dialogue and storytelling to convey Anya’s complex and tumultuous inner world. Anya is in a place where she constantly has to negotiate the borders between different spheres: her native Russian culture and her adopted American one, her home and her school, the worlds of childhood and of adulthood, and perhaps most notably of all, the person she is and the person she thinks she’s going to become.


The title Anya’s Ghost alludes to Emily, but if we take a closer look at the story a second meaning emerges. Emily is her own person, but her presence in Anya’s life also symbolises the impulses she constantly battles, with varying degrees of success: to give in to careless teenage cruelty; to avoid any contact with those beneath her on the social ladder, lest she be tainted by association; to emulate the lives of those who seem to have it better than she does, regardless of the cost; to dehumanise those who surround her by perceiving their troubles or their needs as not as real as her own.


Anya’s experience with Emily changes her exactly because she can see so much of herself in the story of the troubled ghost girl. As a result, she learns about thoughtfulness and empathy and the reality of everyone else’s inner world. Like the teenager that she is, she remains stranding the border between childhood and adulthood, but she takes a crucial step towards growing into the adult she’ll one day become.


They read it too:
Stacked
YA Books Central Blog
Stainless Steel Droppings

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Two Weeks in Photos

Over the past two weeks I have done the following: gone home for the first time since Christmas, returned, fell ill, used said illness as an excuse to catch up on book reviews, felt better, gone to see some bands, and felt guilty over all the time spent not working. Things I notably failed to do include finishing more than a single non-work book, and a short one at that (the excellent graphic novel Anya’s Ghost, on which more soon). But because all of this sounds a lot more interesting with photographic evidence, here are a few snapshots from the past few weeks:


The Mountain Goats


Porto, Portugal




Lisbon


Sintra












Braga




Cats were cuddled and spoilt.








Dogs were played with.


Emmy the Great


Bands were stalked seen.


Much fun was had.


...and a single book was read.

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Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson

Set in 1910, Journey to the River Sea is the story of Maia, an orphan girl who’s sent from the Mayfair Academy for Young Ladies in England to Manaus, Brazil, where the Carters, her deceased parents’ only living relatives, reside. Maia is accompanied by her new governess, Miss Minton, an intelligent woman with a mysterious past. Life with the Carters turns out to be very different from what Maia had imagined: the family insist on pretending they’re still in England, and refuse to let Maia meet any of “the natives” or spend any time at all outdoors. But with the help of Miss Minton – and of her friends Clovis King and Finn Taverner, who have plenty of have troubles and secrets of their own – Maia does have the chance to get to know the surrounding Amazon, and completely falls in love with the place in the process.

Journey to the River Sea was my first Eva Ibbotson, but it will certainly not be my last. In fact, I strongly suspect this may well be the start of a long and happy love story. I loved the Edwardian setting of Journey to the River Sea – turn of the century Manaus is captured wonderfully, and comes across as a vibrant city with a rich and diverse population; I loved Ibbotson’s sharp observations and her gentle humour; I loved the characterisation; and most of all I loved the sensibility behind the story. This is a generous, kind book, slightly reminiscent of Diana Wynne Jones (which I obviously mean as the highest form of praise).

Some time ago, when I asked my lovely readers to ask me questions about the huge backlog of reviews I had to write, Christy asked:

Regarding the Eva Ibbotson book, the one Ibbotson book I read, I thought the main character was insufferably ‘good’. So, for the book that you read of hers, how was the characterization?

Fortunately this wasn’t the case with Maia at all, though it does make me sad to think it might be a problem in some of her other books. Maia is smart, kind, and unarguably sympathetic, but she’s also assertive, brave, and willing to question authority. She comes across as a realistic thirteen-year-old from Edwardian England who finds herself in very usual circumstances. I loved the fact that both Maia and Miss Minton defy stereotypes of femininity of their time without ever recurring to anachronisms to do so – the early twentieth century, after all, was a time of women travellers and explorers and real life Amelia Peabodys, so their rambles through the jungle and their love of the natural world fit right in.

Another interesting thing about Journey to the River Sea is the fact that its plot strongly echoes Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy. This is a classic I haven’t read yet, but I know enough about it to have been able to recognise the allusions. Plus these works at two levels, with Maia’s friend Clovis King starring in a stage adaptation of the book at the renowned Amazon Theatre midway through the book, and later on the plot mirroring Frances Hodgson Burnett’s – which I thought was very cleverly done.

Journey to the River Sea is quite sharp in its critique of colonialism, racism, and the us-versus-them mentality embodied by the arrogant and isolated Carters. Still, I found that Ibboston came dangerously close to Magical Native territory in the character of Finn. There are moments when he seems to represent an idealisation of native peoples that can be every bit as dehumanising as denigration. This is an aspect of the novel that feels all the more at odds because one of its major overarching themes is very obviously a rejection of the idea that The Blood (nationality, or ethnicity, or skin colour, or class) makes people who they are. But there were a few statements about Finn’s “Indian side” and his “English side” that were hard not to read in essentialising terms, and they made me uncomfortable. Other than this, though, Ibboston wrote with great sensitivity, and clearly took care to portray all characters as real human beings regardless of their background.

My other qualm is a qualm I have with all books set in Lusophone countries: I was inevitably playing a mental game of spot-the-language-mistake, a game that unfortunately writers and editors make far too rewarding. The reason why this bothers me is because not taking the trouble to get the language right inevitably comes across as a dismissal of those who do know the difference. Sure, the majority of the book’s readers won’t know one way or the other, but are they really the only ones worth taking trouble over? I will say that the Portuguese mistakes could have been much worse, though - this was by no means another Speaker for the Dead, possibly because Ibboston wisely refrained from constantly using a language she does not speak. (But still: “teatra” is not a word, my friends. Just...no.)

But this is a minor point, really: Journey to the River Sea is a smart, wise, charming and heart-warming book, complete with a lightly unlikely but very smile-inducing ending. I can’t wait to read more of Eva Ibbotson’s work.

Other points of view:
Bird Brained(ed) Blog
Libri Touches
Rhinoa’s Ramblings
My Favourite Books

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Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugrešić

Baba Yaga is a text that is read, studied, told, adapted, interpreted and reinterpreted differently at different times.

Dubravka Ugrešić’s Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is another addition to the Canongate Myth Series, which is devoted to “bold retellings of legendary tales”. I’ve been following the series for some years now, and so I wanted to read this book for that reason alone. But my interested in Ugrešić was rekindled a few months ago when the book won the James Tiptree, Jr Award, “an annual literary prize for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender”.

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is only a retelling of a myth if we use “retelling” in the broadest possible sense of the word. The book is divided into three sections: the first (my favourite) tells the story of the narrator’s relationship with her ageing mother, who has been diagnosed with dementia and doesn’t have long to live. The much more bizarre section two is about three women, all of whom would be considered older (but who are in fact of very different ages), spending a holiday at a spa abroad. Finally, section three is not a story at all but a long essay, written by a folklorist we meet in section one, about the myth of Baba Yaga and its relationship with sections one and two of the book.

If that sounds unusual, it’s because it is. Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is a daring book – it’s the kind of book that doesn’t so much break as bulldozers the fourth wall; the kind of book for which the terms “metafiction” and “post-modern” were invented. Although highly experimental fiction of this sort can go either way for me (see my reaction to The Helmet of Horror, also part of the Canongate Myths series), Ugrešić’s take on Baba Yaga really worked. Her playfulness was what did it – I can’t imagine a novel like this grabbing me if it came across as taking itself too seriously. Fortunately, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is full of irony and humorous asides.

In addition to the playful tone, I really liked Ugrešić’s thematic approach to the myth of Baba Yaga. Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is first and foremost about older women – about their vilification and their invisibility, both in the present day and throughout history. The preface immediately sets the tone. Take this passage, for example:

You don’t see them at first. Then suddenly a random detail snags your attention like a stray mouse: an old lady’s handbag, a stocking slipping down a leg, bunching up on a bulging ankle, crocheted gloves on the hands, a little old-fashioned hat perched on the head, sparse grey hair with a blue sheen. The owner of the blued hair moves her head like a mechanical dog and smiles wanly…

This passage put me in mind of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, whose male protagonists say at one point that they’re not used to noticing older women at all, though they suppose they must also exist outside of Herland. But as they don’t want anything from them, their existence fails to register at all.

Throughout the book, Ugrešić makes this invisibility obvious by exploring the “variants in the typology of old women”. Her characters all face the same powerlessness and invisibility even though they have little in common other than the fact that they’re over a certain age. In part two in particular, she begins to differentiate her three protagonists as characters as the story progresses, leaving the reader to consider why we initially saw them as belonging to the same type.

As for the essay section, I enjoyed it for what it says about stories and ideology, even if it’s not clear how much is to be taken at face value. It was also an interesting reflection on the role, ambitions and shortcomings of literary criticism. Despite the very playful tone, I thought it achieved an interesting balance between an appreciation of the storytelling tradition being described and thoughtful criticism of what the fact that we tell these stories (and the way we tell them) reveals about the roles we see as permissible for women over a certain age. I’m not quite sure if this is what Ugrešić was going for, but in any case that interests me less than what the book communicated to me.

Here’s another bit I found particularly interesting:

The chief reason for Baba Yaga’s heresy is her great age. Her dissidence only takes place within the system of life-values that we ourselves have made; in other words, we forced her into heresy. Baba Yaga does not live her life; she undergoes it. She is an old maid or virgin, who serves as a screen for the projection of (castrating) male and (self-punishing) female fantasies. We have stripped away the mere possibility of accomplishment on any level and left her with nothing but a few tricks to scare little children with. We have pushed her to the very edge, in the forest, deep in our subconscious; we have made a symbolical doll and assigned her a symbolical lapot. Baba Yaga is a surrogate-woman, she is here to get old instead of us, to be old instead of us, to be punished instead of us. Hers is the drama of old age, hers is the story of excommunication, forced expulsion, invisibility, brutal marginalisation

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg may not be for everyone, but it certainly did expand my understanding of gender roles, age, and the intersection between the two. If that’s something you’re interested in, by all means do pick it up.

They read it too:
She Reads Novels
Amy Reads
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The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal

Edmund de Waal’s multiple award winning The Hare With Amber Eyes is an enthralling combination of memoir, family biography, history and art history. The title of the book comes from one of his collection of netsuke – two hundred miniature Japanese figures which have been in his family’s possession since the nineteenth century. Using the netsuke as a point of departure, de Waal traces his family’s journey from Odessa to Paris, to Vienna, to London and to Tokyo, across two world wars, a Europe increasingly fraught with anti-Semitism, and a quickly changing world.

In fin de siècle Paris we meet De Waal’s great great uncle Charlie, a salonist, patron of the arts, and friend of Proust, Renoir and Degas; in early twentieth-century Vienna we accompany his great grandparents Viktor and Emmy as they are forced from a life of luxury to the cruelties of prejudice and war; in England we get to know de Waal’s grandmother, correspondent of Rainer Maria Rilke; in post-war Japan we follow his great-uncle Iggie, the last owner of the netsuke before de Waal himself.

De Waal’s family is unarguably one of countless artistic and literary connections, as well as a family whose privilege allowed it to experience all the splendours of the Belle Époque at its best. However, there is a lot more to The Hare With Amber Eyes than glamour or nostalgia. Edmund de Waal is no Juliet Nicolson – if there’s regret in this book, it’s for what these real human beings lost and what these losses meant to them; not for the social structures that the wars changed or for mythical “simpler times”.


The hare with amber eyes
Pre-war nostalgia has been known to rub me the wrong way, but de Waal is too sensitive a writer not to get it right. Time and again he rescues his narrative from any potential pitfalls. He brings his ancestors to life with extraordinary skill, but making them sympathetic doesn’t preclude acknowledging the dark underbelly of their glamorous pre-war lives. This sensitivity also shows in how de Waal writers about the netsuke themselves – he’s always aware of the dangers of romanticising the survival of these objects when so many human beings didn’t survive. He says:

I know too much about the traces of my gilded family, but I cannot find out anymore about Anna.
She is not written about, refracted into stories. She is not left money in Emmy’s will: there is no will. She does not leave traces in the ledgers of dealers or of dress-makers.
(…)
Here, in this house, I am wrong-footed. The survival of the netsuke in Anna’s pocket, in her mattress, is an affront. I cannot bear for it to slip into symbolism. Why should they have got through this war into a hiding-place, when so many hidden people did not? I can’t make people and places and things fit together any more. These stories unravel me.

Anna is the servant who rescues the netsuke from the family’s Nazi-occupied Viennese palace by taking them away one by one in the pockets of her apron. De Waal doesn’t hesitate to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that this is the kind of anecdote that, while memorable, should be given a second and closer look. Likewise, he freely acknowledges that detailed family histories are a luxury closely tied in with money, class and literacy; a luxury which the majority of us don’t have.

The world of The Hare With Amber Eyes evokes the world of A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book (I was not surprised to see Byatt thanked in the acknowledgements), which to me was an immediate reason to love it. In addition to that, I loved that this book takes such a personal look at history. I’d never read any non-fiction that achieved quite what de Waal achieves here. To say that his approach is novelistic would be somewhat misleading, but nevertheless he captures that close sense of involvement with subject and setting that the best historical fiction is all about.


More netsuke
The Hare With Amber Eyes is a gripping and occasionally very moving analysis of history, nationality, identity, belonging, and the role of art and aesthetics in our lives. It may sound like an unlikely bestseller, but it’s certainly very deserving of all the accolades it has received.

A few mote interesting bits:

Does assimilation mean they never came up against naked prejudice? Does it mean that you understand where the limits of your social world were and you stuck to them? There is a Jockey Club in Vienna, as in Paris, and Viktor was a member, but Jews weren’t allowed to hold office. Did this matter to him in the slightest? It was understood that married Gentile woman never visited Jewish households, never came to leave a card, never visited on one of the interminable afternoons. Vienna meant that only Gentile bachelors, Count Mendsorf, Count Lubienski, the young Prince Montenuovo, left cards and were invited. Once married they never came, no mater how good the dinners were, or how pretty the hostesses. Did this matter at all? These seem such gossamer threads of rudeness.

Together, they would take down the heavy picture books with their rich maroon covers: Edmund Dulac’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, Sleeping Beauty, and, best of all, Beauty and the Beast with its figures of horror. Each Christmas brought the new Fairy Book of Andrew Lang, ordered from London by the children’s English grandmother: Grey, Violet, Crimson, Brown, Orange, Olive and Rose. A book could last a year. Each child would choose a favourite story: “The White Wolf”, “The Queen of the Flowery Isles”, “The Boy Who Found Fear At Last”, “What Came of Picking Flowers”, “The Limping Fox”, “The Street Musician”.

Other points of view:
Page 147
Winstondad’s Blog
Desperate Reader
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Vulpe Libris

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