History: This book was written in 1985. It is a work of fiction, but is set in the Spitalfields area of London, and features several churches in the area and adjacent, including: Christ Church, Spitalfields, St. Mary Woolnoth, St George in the East and St Anne's Limehouse.
Nicholas Dyer is a fictional reworking of the real seventeenth century architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, who bears the same name as the modern-day detective.
Plot: Set in the late seventeenth century, architect Nicholas Dyer is progressing work on several churches in London's East End. He is, however, involved in Satanic practices (something inculcated in him as an orphan), a fact which he must keep secret from all his associates, including his supervisor Sir Christopher Wren. This is all the more challenging since he indulges in human sacrifice as part of the construction of the buildings. Dyer's simmering contempt for Wren is brought closest to the surface in discussions they have concerning rationalism versus Dyer's own carefully disguised brand of mysticism.
In the twentieth century, DCS Nicholas Hawksmoor is called in to investigate a bizarre series of murders by strangulation which have occurred in and around the churches designed by Dyer. The murders are all the more mystifying since the murderer appeared to have left no identifying traces, not even fingerprints on the victims' necks.
However the area is stalked by mysterious shadows, and it becomes clear that not only the weight of the investigation, but unseen forces from the past come to bear on Hawksmoor in a powerful, destructive manner.
Review: Much of the novel is concerned with the disconnect between the twentieth-century London of DCS Hawksmoor and its past, with Dyer's churches being both banal and mysterious to Hawksmoor. Wren's rationalism has succeeded in Hawksmoor's world, but we see Dyer's mysticism reassert itself in the form of murder and mystery. One critic has argued that Dyer's churches come to stand for the persistence of popular history and culture, in opposition to Wren's devotion to a rational progress driven by power and money
Opening Line: “And so let us beginne; and, as the Fabrick takes its Shape in front of you, alwaies keep the Structure interely in Mind as you inscribe it.”
Closing Line: “And then in my dream I looked down at myself and saw in what rags I stood; and I am a child again, begging on the threshold of eternity.”
Quotes: ''I like to make Merry among the Fallen and there is pleasure to be had in the Observation of the Deformity of Things,''
Rating: Not good.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
445. Murder Must Advertise – Dorothy Sayers
History: This book was published in 1933.
Most of the action takes place in an advertising agency, a setting with which Sayers was very familiar. One of her advertising colleagues, Bobby Bevan, was the inspiration for the character Mr Ingleby.
Plot: Wimsey accepts an offer from the highly respectable management of Pym's Publicity, Ltd. (a light disguise for S. H. Bensons, where Sayers worked) to investigate a mystery and avert a scandal. Copywriter Victor Dean has died in a fall down the spiral iron office staircase (a real feature of the Bensons office), but he left a half-finished letter to the management hinting that something potentially scandalous is going on at Pym's.
Under the pseudonym of "Death Bredon" (actually his middle names), Wimsey goes to work at Pym's. He takes over Dean's office and learns his trade while investigating the office staff. He discovers a talent for copywriting and promotion, and produces a campaign which will become one of the firm's most successful.
He also investigates Dean's social life. Dean, for a short time, socialized with "the DeMomerie crowd": the cronies of dissolute socialite Dian de Momerie, most of them heavy cocaine users. He met De Momerie's companion, Major Milligan, who appears to be the cocaine supplier for the group. Milligan is linked to a big cocaine-selling ring which Wimsey's friend and brother-in-law Chief Inspector Parker is investigating. Milligan, hearing that Dean worked at Pym's, spoke to him assuming that Dean was the ring's man at Pym's. Dean was surprised, and Milligan shut up - but Dean guessed that someone else at Pym's was involved. Hence the letter to management.
Wimsey plays multiple roles. By day he is Bredon, a distant, impoverished Wimsey cousin who works for a living. Most evenings, he is himself. But on some evenings, "Bredon" dresses up as a masked harlequin, and by various wild stunts draws the attention and company of Dian de Momerie - annoying Major Milligan.
A bizarre incident adds to the confusion: junior newspaper reporter Hector Puncheon has a beer in a pub, and discovers later that someone put a bag of cocaine in his coat pocket. He must have blundered into a distribution operation, but there's no further sign of anything at that pub. Apparently the ring holds each week's distribution at a different location - but how do the underlings know where to go?
Wimsey continues his probing at Pym's, and learns that one of the senior copywriters, Tallboy, seems to have large amounts of cash.
Puncheon recognizes a man who was in the pub the night he was given the cocaine, and follows him. Puncheon gets knocked out, and the man "accidentally" falls in front of a moving train. The dead man (Mountjoy) had money but no job or assets, which fits a drug dealer. His effects include a telephone book with the names of many pubs ticked off. (Someone tried to retrieve the book after Mountjoy's death, but got a new copy. The police salvage the old one from the trash collection.) One of the marked pubs is the one where Puncheon was given the cocaine, so the pubs are where it is distributed - but which pubs of the dozens that are marked?
Other clues turn up: a scarab in Dean's desk, a large pebble in the stairwell, a "catapult" (slingshot) belonging to office boy Ginger Joe, who is recruited by "Bredon" to help in the investigation.
Finally Wimsey makes the connection. One of Pym's major clients runs a large newspaper advertisement every Friday morning. The text is approved a few days earlier. The first letter of the advertisement's text indicates the pub to be used that week. Tallboy supplies the letter to the ring as soon as the text is approved.
A final clue turns up during a company social outing, in the course of a cricket match between Pym's and Brotherhood's, a soft-drink company and Pym's client. Most of the players are middle-aged and flabby. But Wimsey, provoked by a ball which clips his elbow, shows off the form which made him a first-team star at Eton and Oxford. Tallboy too shows a surprising talent, when he knocks down a wicket with a perfect throw from deep in the field. Wimsey wins the match for Pym's, which is about to expose his cover when the police, led by Parker, arrest "Bredon" for the murder of Dian de Momerie.
Milligan is dead too - killed in yet another "accident" as the ring covers its tracks. But the ring is still operating, and the police want to nab the whole gang at their next distribution. With Mountjoy's phone book, all they need is the letter for the week - which is provided by Ginger Joe. While "Bredon" supposedly sits in jail, "Lord Peter" is much seen about town for the next few days.
The roundup comes off as planned. But the death of Victor Dean remains. That same night, Tallboy comes to Wimsey's flat and confesses everything. He was sucked into the scheme with a innocent-sounding story and the offer of money he needed. But soon he was trapped. Then Dean found out and blackmailed him. Tallboy shot him in the head with Ginger Joe's catapult on the staircase, so it would look like an accident. (Tallboy has dead aim, as Wimsey noticed in the cricket match.)
Now Tallboy is left facing ruin and disgrace. He knows he cannot escape, and suggests suicide, which would save his family from the shame of his trial and conviction for murder. Wimsey, after looking out of the window, has an alternative: Tallboy must go home, on foot, and never look behind him. Both know that the gang's killers are waiting in ambush.
Review: This is definitely one of the strongest entries in the Lord Peter Wimsey series, both for mystery and entertainment value. An interesting tactic used by Sayers is to point in the direction of the culprit about three-fourths of the way through the book and then lead the reader through the detection process that actually leads to his/her unmasking. We saw this used in "Unnatural Death", also in "Whose Body?" Surprisingly, the resulting lack of suspense at the end does not deter from the mystery at all as it is fascinating to see the patient unraveling of clues and pulling together of threads that lead to evidence against a killer. It is also a better reflection of what usually happens in reality, as opposed to a lot of detective fiction where the most unlikely person did it! While we all find whodunits interesting, the reality is that the police and private eyes are usually smart enough to figure out the most likely candidate fairly early and thus narrow their investigations. In this book, the fun is added to by the setting in an ad agency. Sayers had worked in an ad agency at some point in her career and you can see that she really knows her stuff.
Opening Line: “And by the way,” said Mr. Hankin, arresting Miss Rossiter as she rose to go, “there is a new copy-writer coming in today.”
Closing Line: “Advertise, or go under.”
Quotes: "He had always said that the younger generation of advertising writers were No Good. Feather-headedness. No solid business sense. No thought."
Rating: Okay.
Most of the action takes place in an advertising agency, a setting with which Sayers was very familiar. One of her advertising colleagues, Bobby Bevan, was the inspiration for the character Mr Ingleby.
Plot: Wimsey accepts an offer from the highly respectable management of Pym's Publicity, Ltd. (a light disguise for S. H. Bensons, where Sayers worked) to investigate a mystery and avert a scandal. Copywriter Victor Dean has died in a fall down the spiral iron office staircase (a real feature of the Bensons office), but he left a half-finished letter to the management hinting that something potentially scandalous is going on at Pym's.
Under the pseudonym of "Death Bredon" (actually his middle names), Wimsey goes to work at Pym's. He takes over Dean's office and learns his trade while investigating the office staff. He discovers a talent for copywriting and promotion, and produces a campaign which will become one of the firm's most successful.
He also investigates Dean's social life. Dean, for a short time, socialized with "the DeMomerie crowd": the cronies of dissolute socialite Dian de Momerie, most of them heavy cocaine users. He met De Momerie's companion, Major Milligan, who appears to be the cocaine supplier for the group. Milligan is linked to a big cocaine-selling ring which Wimsey's friend and brother-in-law Chief Inspector Parker is investigating. Milligan, hearing that Dean worked at Pym's, spoke to him assuming that Dean was the ring's man at Pym's. Dean was surprised, and Milligan shut up - but Dean guessed that someone else at Pym's was involved. Hence the letter to management.
Wimsey plays multiple roles. By day he is Bredon, a distant, impoverished Wimsey cousin who works for a living. Most evenings, he is himself. But on some evenings, "Bredon" dresses up as a masked harlequin, and by various wild stunts draws the attention and company of Dian de Momerie - annoying Major Milligan.
A bizarre incident adds to the confusion: junior newspaper reporter Hector Puncheon has a beer in a pub, and discovers later that someone put a bag of cocaine in his coat pocket. He must have blundered into a distribution operation, but there's no further sign of anything at that pub. Apparently the ring holds each week's distribution at a different location - but how do the underlings know where to go?
Wimsey continues his probing at Pym's, and learns that one of the senior copywriters, Tallboy, seems to have large amounts of cash.
Puncheon recognizes a man who was in the pub the night he was given the cocaine, and follows him. Puncheon gets knocked out, and the man "accidentally" falls in front of a moving train. The dead man (Mountjoy) had money but no job or assets, which fits a drug dealer. His effects include a telephone book with the names of many pubs ticked off. (Someone tried to retrieve the book after Mountjoy's death, but got a new copy. The police salvage the old one from the trash collection.) One of the marked pubs is the one where Puncheon was given the cocaine, so the pubs are where it is distributed - but which pubs of the dozens that are marked?
Other clues turn up: a scarab in Dean's desk, a large pebble in the stairwell, a "catapult" (slingshot) belonging to office boy Ginger Joe, who is recruited by "Bredon" to help in the investigation.
Finally Wimsey makes the connection. One of Pym's major clients runs a large newspaper advertisement every Friday morning. The text is approved a few days earlier. The first letter of the advertisement's text indicates the pub to be used that week. Tallboy supplies the letter to the ring as soon as the text is approved.
A final clue turns up during a company social outing, in the course of a cricket match between Pym's and Brotherhood's, a soft-drink company and Pym's client. Most of the players are middle-aged and flabby. But Wimsey, provoked by a ball which clips his elbow, shows off the form which made him a first-team star at Eton and Oxford. Tallboy too shows a surprising talent, when he knocks down a wicket with a perfect throw from deep in the field. Wimsey wins the match for Pym's, which is about to expose his cover when the police, led by Parker, arrest "Bredon" for the murder of Dian de Momerie.
Milligan is dead too - killed in yet another "accident" as the ring covers its tracks. But the ring is still operating, and the police want to nab the whole gang at their next distribution. With Mountjoy's phone book, all they need is the letter for the week - which is provided by Ginger Joe. While "Bredon" supposedly sits in jail, "Lord Peter" is much seen about town for the next few days.
The roundup comes off as planned. But the death of Victor Dean remains. That same night, Tallboy comes to Wimsey's flat and confesses everything. He was sucked into the scheme with a innocent-sounding story and the offer of money he needed. But soon he was trapped. Then Dean found out and blackmailed him. Tallboy shot him in the head with Ginger Joe's catapult on the staircase, so it would look like an accident. (Tallboy has dead aim, as Wimsey noticed in the cricket match.)
Now Tallboy is left facing ruin and disgrace. He knows he cannot escape, and suggests suicide, which would save his family from the shame of his trial and conviction for murder. Wimsey, after looking out of the window, has an alternative: Tallboy must go home, on foot, and never look behind him. Both know that the gang's killers are waiting in ambush.
Review: This is definitely one of the strongest entries in the Lord Peter Wimsey series, both for mystery and entertainment value. An interesting tactic used by Sayers is to point in the direction of the culprit about three-fourths of the way through the book and then lead the reader through the detection process that actually leads to his/her unmasking. We saw this used in "Unnatural Death", also in "Whose Body?" Surprisingly, the resulting lack of suspense at the end does not deter from the mystery at all as it is fascinating to see the patient unraveling of clues and pulling together of threads that lead to evidence against a killer. It is also a better reflection of what usually happens in reality, as opposed to a lot of detective fiction where the most unlikely person did it! While we all find whodunits interesting, the reality is that the police and private eyes are usually smart enough to figure out the most likely candidate fairly early and thus narrow their investigations. In this book, the fun is added to by the setting in an ad agency. Sayers had worked in an ad agency at some point in her career and you can see that she really knows her stuff.
Opening Line: “And by the way,” said Mr. Hankin, arresting Miss Rossiter as she rose to go, “there is a new copy-writer coming in today.”
Closing Line: “Advertise, or go under.”
Quotes: "He had always said that the younger generation of advertising writers were No Good. Feather-headedness. No solid business sense. No thought."
Rating: Okay.
444. Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
History: This book was published in 1952. The novel was assembled from several disparate stories first published inMademoiselle, Sewanee Review, and Partisan Review. The first chapter is an expanded version of her Master's thesis, "The Train," and other chapters are reworked versions of "The Peeler," "The Heart of the Park," and "Enoch and the Gorilla." The novel concerns a returning World War II veteran who, haunted by a lifelong crisis of faith, resolves to form an anti-religious ministry in an eccentric Southern town.
The novel received little critical attention when it first appeared, but has since come to be appreciated as a somewhat unique work of "low comedy and high seriousness" with enduring if disturbing religious themes.
Plot: Recently discharged from service in World War II and surviving on a government pension for unspecified war wounds, Hazel Motes returns to his family home in Georgia to find it abandoned. Leaving behind a note claiming a chifforobe as his private property, Motes boards a train for Taulkinham. The grandson of a traveling preacher, Motes grew up struggling with doubts regarding salvation and original sin; following his experiences at war, Motes has become an avowed atheist, and intends to spread a gospel ofantireligion. Despite his aversion to all trappings of Christianity, he constantly contemplates theological issues and finds himself compelled to purchase a suit and hat that cause others to mistake him for a minister.
In Taulkinham, Motes initially takes up residence with Leora Watts, a prostitute, and befriends Enoch Emery, a profane, manic, eighteen-year-old zookeeper forced to come to the city after his abusive father kicked him out of their house. Emery introduces Hazel to the concept of "wise blood," an idea that he has innate, worldly knowledge of what direction to take in life, and requires no spiritual or emotional guidance. Together, Emery and Motes witness a blind preacher and his teenage daughter crash a street vendor's potato peeler demonstration to advertise for their ministry. The preacher introduces himself as Asa Hawks and his daughter as Sabbath Lily; Motes finds himself drawn to the pair, which Hawks attributes to a repressed desire for religious salvation. Angry, Motes begins shouting blasphemies to the crowd and declares that he will found his own, anti-God street preaching ministry. Motes' declarations are lost on everyone except for Emery, who becomes infatuated with the idea.
After a bored Leora destroys his hat for her own amusement, Motes moves into the boarding house where Asa and Lily live. Motes becomes fixated on the eerie Lily and begins spending time with her, learning that Asa blinded himself with lye at a revival in order to detach himself from worldly pursuits. Initially intending to seduce Lily in order to corrupt her spiritual purity, Motes discovers that she is in fact a sexually experienced nymphomaniac, which puts him off of sleeping with her. Now skeptical of she and Asa's entire ministry, Motes slips into Hawks' room one night and finds him without his sunglasses on, with perfectly intact eyes: Hawks faltered at the last moment because he did not have strong enough faith, and ultimately left the ministry to become a con-artist. His secret found out, Asa flees town, Lily in Motes' care. The two begin a sexual relationship and Motes begins to more aggressively pursue his ministry, purchasing a dilapidated car to use as a mobile pulpit.
Meanwhile, Enoch Emery, believing that Motes' church needs a worldly "prophet," breaks into the museum attached to the zoo where he works and steals a mummified dwarf, which he begins keeping under his sink. He ultimately presents it to Lily to give to Motes on his behalf; when Lily appears to Motes cradling it in her arms in a parody of the Madonna and Child, Motes experiences a violent revulsion to the image and destroys the mummy, throwing its remnants out the window.
Inspired by Motes' fledgling street ministry, local con-artist Hoover Shoats renames himself Onnie Jay Holy and forms his own ministry, the "Holy Church of Christ Without Christ," which he encourages the disenfranchised to join for a donation of $1. The absurdity amuses passerby and they begin to join as a joke, angering Motes, who wants to legitimately-- and freely-- spread his message of antireligion. Despite Motes' protests, Holy moves to the next level in promoting his ministry, hiring a homeless, alcoholic man to dress up like Hazel and act as his "Prophet."
Enoch, during a rainstorm, seeks refuge under a theater marquee, and learns that as a promotion, a gorilla will be brought to the theater to promote a new jungle movie. An excited Enoch stands in line to shake the gorilla's hand, but is startled to find that the gorilla is actually a man in a costume who, unprovoked, tells Enoch to "go to hell." The incident causes Enoch's "wise blood" to give him some inarticulated revelation, and he seeks out a program of the man in the costume's future appearances. That night, Enoch stalks the man to another theater, stabs him with a sharpened umbrella handle, and steals his costume. Enoch takes the costume out to the woods, where he strips naked and buries his clothes in a shallow "grave" before dressing up as the gorilla. Satisfied with his new appearance, Enoch comes out of the woods and attempts to greet a couple on a date by shaking their hand. Enoch is disappointed when they flee in terror, and finds himself alone on a rock overlooking the night sky of Taukinham.
Back in town, Motes angrily watches as Holy begins to grow rich off of his new ministry. One night he follows Holy's "prophet" as he drives home (in a car resembling Hazel's), which he runs off the road; when the man exits the car, the stronger, more forceful Motes threatens him and orders him to strip. The man begins to comply, but Motes is overcome by a sudden rage and repeatedly runs the man over. Exiting the car to ensure he is dead, Motes is startled when the dying man begins confessing his sins to Motes.
The next day, Motes is pulled over by a strange policeman with unnaturally blue eyes, who claims to be citing him for driving without a permit. He orders Motes out of the car, then without explanation pushes it off of a nearby cliff, destroying it. The incident, coupled with the false prophet's death, causes Hazel to become sullen and withdrawn. He throws away all of the money people donated to his ministry, and after an extended period of living as an ascetic at the boarding house, blinds himself with lye and begins walking around with barbed wire wrapped around his torso and shards of glass in his shoes. Believing that Motes has gone insane, the landlady, Mrs. Flood, hatches a plot to marry him, collect on his government pension, and have him committed to an insane asylum. In attempting to seduce Motes, Mrs. Flood instead falls in love with him. After she suggests to Motes that they marry and she care for him, Motes wanders off into a thunderstorm. He is found three days later, lying in a ditch and suffering from exposure to the elements. Angry at being asked to return what they believe is a mentally-ill indigent, one of the police officers who finds him strikes him in the head with his baton while loading Motes into a police car, exacerbating Motes' rapidly deteriorating condition.
At the boarding house, a dying Motes is presented to Mrs. Flood. She has him placed in bed and cares for him during his final moments, telling him he can live with her for as long as he likes, free of charge. As Motes dies, Mrs. Flood thinks she sees a light twinkling in his empty eye sockets.
Review: Wise Blood is Flannery O'Connor's grotesque picaresque tale of Hazel Motes of Eastrod, Tennessee; a young man who has come to the city of Taulkinham bringing with him an enormous resentment of Christianity and the clergy. He is in an open state of rebellion against the rigidity of his itinerant preacher grandfather and his strict mother. So when one of the first people he encounters is the blind street preacher Asa Hawks and Motes finds himself both attracted and repelled by Hawks' bewitching fifteen year old daughter Lily Sabbath, he reacts by establishing his own street ministry. He founds the "Church without Christ".
As you can guess the church is singularly unsuccessful, although he does attract a couple of other crackpots: Enoch Emery a young man who works at the zoo and longs for a kind word from anybody; and Onnie Jay Holy, yet another rival preacher who believes Motes when he says he's found a "new jesus."
While at first this cast of bizarre characters, ranging from merely repugnant to truly evil, and the scenes of physical, moral and spiritual degradation through which they pass all seem to be just a little too much, the reader is carried along by O'Connor's sure hand for dark comedy. The book is very funny. But as the story draws to a close, O'Connor's true mission is revealed; Motes loses his fight against faith and he achieves a kind of grace, becoming something like a Christian martyr to atone for his sins. O'Connor has something serious and important to say about the modern human condition and the emptiness of a life without faith. That she is able to disguise this message in such a ribald comic package is quite an achievement.
Opening Line: “Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down theaisle at the other end of the car.”
Closing Line: “And she saw him moving farther away, farther and farther into the darkness until he was the pinpoint of light.”
Quotes: “Listen you people, I'm going to take the truth with me wherever I go. I'm going to preach it to whoever'll listen at whatever place. I'm going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there wasn't the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar.”
Rating: Very good.
The novel received little critical attention when it first appeared, but has since come to be appreciated as a somewhat unique work of "low comedy and high seriousness" with enduring if disturbing religious themes.
Plot: Recently discharged from service in World War II and surviving on a government pension for unspecified war wounds, Hazel Motes returns to his family home in Georgia to find it abandoned. Leaving behind a note claiming a chifforobe as his private property, Motes boards a train for Taulkinham. The grandson of a traveling preacher, Motes grew up struggling with doubts regarding salvation and original sin; following his experiences at war, Motes has become an avowed atheist, and intends to spread a gospel ofantireligion. Despite his aversion to all trappings of Christianity, he constantly contemplates theological issues and finds himself compelled to purchase a suit and hat that cause others to mistake him for a minister.
In Taulkinham, Motes initially takes up residence with Leora Watts, a prostitute, and befriends Enoch Emery, a profane, manic, eighteen-year-old zookeeper forced to come to the city after his abusive father kicked him out of their house. Emery introduces Hazel to the concept of "wise blood," an idea that he has innate, worldly knowledge of what direction to take in life, and requires no spiritual or emotional guidance. Together, Emery and Motes witness a blind preacher and his teenage daughter crash a street vendor's potato peeler demonstration to advertise for their ministry. The preacher introduces himself as Asa Hawks and his daughter as Sabbath Lily; Motes finds himself drawn to the pair, which Hawks attributes to a repressed desire for religious salvation. Angry, Motes begins shouting blasphemies to the crowd and declares that he will found his own, anti-God street preaching ministry. Motes' declarations are lost on everyone except for Emery, who becomes infatuated with the idea.
After a bored Leora destroys his hat for her own amusement, Motes moves into the boarding house where Asa and Lily live. Motes becomes fixated on the eerie Lily and begins spending time with her, learning that Asa blinded himself with lye at a revival in order to detach himself from worldly pursuits. Initially intending to seduce Lily in order to corrupt her spiritual purity, Motes discovers that she is in fact a sexually experienced nymphomaniac, which puts him off of sleeping with her. Now skeptical of she and Asa's entire ministry, Motes slips into Hawks' room one night and finds him without his sunglasses on, with perfectly intact eyes: Hawks faltered at the last moment because he did not have strong enough faith, and ultimately left the ministry to become a con-artist. His secret found out, Asa flees town, Lily in Motes' care. The two begin a sexual relationship and Motes begins to more aggressively pursue his ministry, purchasing a dilapidated car to use as a mobile pulpit.
Meanwhile, Enoch Emery, believing that Motes' church needs a worldly "prophet," breaks into the museum attached to the zoo where he works and steals a mummified dwarf, which he begins keeping under his sink. He ultimately presents it to Lily to give to Motes on his behalf; when Lily appears to Motes cradling it in her arms in a parody of the Madonna and Child, Motes experiences a violent revulsion to the image and destroys the mummy, throwing its remnants out the window.
Inspired by Motes' fledgling street ministry, local con-artist Hoover Shoats renames himself Onnie Jay Holy and forms his own ministry, the "Holy Church of Christ Without Christ," which he encourages the disenfranchised to join for a donation of $1. The absurdity amuses passerby and they begin to join as a joke, angering Motes, who wants to legitimately-- and freely-- spread his message of antireligion. Despite Motes' protests, Holy moves to the next level in promoting his ministry, hiring a homeless, alcoholic man to dress up like Hazel and act as his "Prophet."
Enoch, during a rainstorm, seeks refuge under a theater marquee, and learns that as a promotion, a gorilla will be brought to the theater to promote a new jungle movie. An excited Enoch stands in line to shake the gorilla's hand, but is startled to find that the gorilla is actually a man in a costume who, unprovoked, tells Enoch to "go to hell." The incident causes Enoch's "wise blood" to give him some inarticulated revelation, and he seeks out a program of the man in the costume's future appearances. That night, Enoch stalks the man to another theater, stabs him with a sharpened umbrella handle, and steals his costume. Enoch takes the costume out to the woods, where he strips naked and buries his clothes in a shallow "grave" before dressing up as the gorilla. Satisfied with his new appearance, Enoch comes out of the woods and attempts to greet a couple on a date by shaking their hand. Enoch is disappointed when they flee in terror, and finds himself alone on a rock overlooking the night sky of Taukinham.
Back in town, Motes angrily watches as Holy begins to grow rich off of his new ministry. One night he follows Holy's "prophet" as he drives home (in a car resembling Hazel's), which he runs off the road; when the man exits the car, the stronger, more forceful Motes threatens him and orders him to strip. The man begins to comply, but Motes is overcome by a sudden rage and repeatedly runs the man over. Exiting the car to ensure he is dead, Motes is startled when the dying man begins confessing his sins to Motes.
The next day, Motes is pulled over by a strange policeman with unnaturally blue eyes, who claims to be citing him for driving without a permit. He orders Motes out of the car, then without explanation pushes it off of a nearby cliff, destroying it. The incident, coupled with the false prophet's death, causes Hazel to become sullen and withdrawn. He throws away all of the money people donated to his ministry, and after an extended period of living as an ascetic at the boarding house, blinds himself with lye and begins walking around with barbed wire wrapped around his torso and shards of glass in his shoes. Believing that Motes has gone insane, the landlady, Mrs. Flood, hatches a plot to marry him, collect on his government pension, and have him committed to an insane asylum. In attempting to seduce Motes, Mrs. Flood instead falls in love with him. After she suggests to Motes that they marry and she care for him, Motes wanders off into a thunderstorm. He is found three days later, lying in a ditch and suffering from exposure to the elements. Angry at being asked to return what they believe is a mentally-ill indigent, one of the police officers who finds him strikes him in the head with his baton while loading Motes into a police car, exacerbating Motes' rapidly deteriorating condition.
At the boarding house, a dying Motes is presented to Mrs. Flood. She has him placed in bed and cares for him during his final moments, telling him he can live with her for as long as he likes, free of charge. As Motes dies, Mrs. Flood thinks she sees a light twinkling in his empty eye sockets.
Review: Wise Blood is Flannery O'Connor's grotesque picaresque tale of Hazel Motes of Eastrod, Tennessee; a young man who has come to the city of Taulkinham bringing with him an enormous resentment of Christianity and the clergy. He is in an open state of rebellion against the rigidity of his itinerant preacher grandfather and his strict mother. So when one of the first people he encounters is the blind street preacher Asa Hawks and Motes finds himself both attracted and repelled by Hawks' bewitching fifteen year old daughter Lily Sabbath, he reacts by establishing his own street ministry. He founds the "Church without Christ".
As you can guess the church is singularly unsuccessful, although he does attract a couple of other crackpots: Enoch Emery a young man who works at the zoo and longs for a kind word from anybody; and Onnie Jay Holy, yet another rival preacher who believes Motes when he says he's found a "new jesus."
While at first this cast of bizarre characters, ranging from merely repugnant to truly evil, and the scenes of physical, moral and spiritual degradation through which they pass all seem to be just a little too much, the reader is carried along by O'Connor's sure hand for dark comedy. The book is very funny. But as the story draws to a close, O'Connor's true mission is revealed; Motes loses his fight against faith and he achieves a kind of grace, becoming something like a Christian martyr to atone for his sins. O'Connor has something serious and important to say about the modern human condition and the emptiness of a life without faith. That she is able to disguise this message in such a ribald comic package is quite an achievement.
Opening Line: “Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down theaisle at the other end of the car.”
Closing Line: “And she saw him moving farther away, farther and farther into the darkness until he was the pinpoint of light.”
Quotes: “Listen you people, I'm going to take the truth with me wherever I go. I'm going to preach it to whoever'll listen at whatever place. I'm going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there wasn't the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar.”
Rating: Very good.
443. The Cement Garden – Ian McEwan
History: This book was written in 1978.
Plot: In The Cement Garden, the father of four children dies. His death is followed by the death of the children's mother. In order to avoid being taken into foster care, the children hide their mother's death from the outside world by encasing her corpse in cement in their basement. Two of the siblings, a teenage boy and girl, enter into an incestuous relationship, while the younger son, while being bullied at school, experiments with regression as a baby, and dressing up like a little girl..
The narrator is Jack (15), who has two sisters, Julie (17) and Sue (13), and one brother, Tom (6). When they were younger, Jack describes how he and Julie would play a 'game' with their sister Sue. This 'game' was similar to playing doctor, and involved stripping Sue of her clothes and inspecting her intimate body parts as if they were scientists observing a new life form. Jack then mentions how he longs to do the same to his older sister but it was not allowed. Jack is obsessed with masturbation.
When Julie begins to date a man called Derek and invites him round to their house, Jack feels jealous and shows hostility towards him. Derek becomes more and more interested in what is hidden in their cellar but the children attempt to hide it from him. When a smell begins to emanate from down there, he helps to reclose the trunk their mother is hidden in. Tom eventually tells Jack that Derek has told him that their mother is down in the cellar.
The story comes to a climax when Jack enters, apparently absent-mindedly, naked into Julie's bedroom. Only Tom is there and he begins to talk to him about their parents. They fall asleep together, in Tom's crib, naked because of the heat. Afterword, Julie enters and perhaps surprisingly, does not say much or show surprise on his nakedness, only to joke that 'It is big'. They sit on the bed and whilst talking, they become more and more intimate with each other. Julie encourages him to go on. Right at this point, Derek enters, remarks that he has seen it all and calls them 'sick'. When he is gone, they begin to have sex. A thudding noise can be heard and their sister, Sue, informs them that Derek is smashing up the concrete coffin. They begin to talk, remembering their mother, and after a while, they sleep, while police lights illuminate the room through the window.
Review: Ian McEwan freezes our attention on the grotesque, then renders grotesquerie plausible, even "normal." Indeed, what is "natural" assumes an expanded range of possibility in McEwan's writing, adding fresh dimension to psychological horror. The Cement Garden, his first novel (and better described as a novella), brings these observations graphically to life, in precise, crystalline prose.
The Cement Garden has been likened to Golding's Lord of the Flies for its careful evocation of a society of young people, suddenly relieved of adult oversight, that evolves rapidly, opportunistically, organically in response to specific challenges posed by an unusual environment. In McEwan's working of these materials, related in the flat, dispassionate voice of Jack, the 14-year-old narrator, the challenging environment is the solitary house in which Jack, his brother, and two sisters live, set in the midst of a desolate urban landscape cleared for a freeway that never gets built.
The book takes its name from the paved-over garden Jack's fussy, acerbic father, a heart patient, envisions as tidier as easier to maintain. The exertions of the project kill the father, to no one's apparent regret, in the first chapter, leaving a sizable inventory of cement behind. With the demise of their long ailing mother shortly thereafter, the orphaned children are forced to recreate the family unit. Fearful of the split-up of the family, foster care for little Tom, and other worrisome ministrations of an impersonal state, the children decide to tell no one of their mother's death and to entomb her in concrete in the basement.
Jack recounts these and other details, and the changes each child undergoes, in his matter-of-fact voice. McEwan charges his tale with an extraordinary measure of sexual tension, primarily between Jack - much more than the stereotypically acne-covered, pubescent, serially self-abusing "sullen teen" - and his beautiful, athletic older sister Julia, who assumes the maternal role of "Wendy" to the family's "lost children." The movement of the story is aided and abetted by Derek, Julia's "bloke," a professional snooker player, aking all the questions the nosey private eye in a Hitchcock picture usually asks. The dreaded resolution of the relentlessly rising tension, carefully withheld until the closing pages, relieves narrative pressure but raises disturbing perspectives on love, the family, the "ties that bind."
The Cement Garden renews the great question of what it is that prompts a lavishly gifted writer to explore so sensitively the wholly bizarre. Great writing generally works simultaneously at several levels and admits layers of meaning. McEwan writes about familiar characters who before our eyes become something very, very different. He begs us to inquire beneath the surface familiarity into worlds unseen by, or denied to, passing spectators. He compels us to ask ourselves "what is `normal'?" "What is `natural'?" His answers may unsettle, but they are are the product of a novelistic logic that, in its internal workings, is eminently reasonable.
Subversion in age and role is the main theme in The Cement Garden. Burying the dead and engaging in sexual activity are probably the type of work anybody least expects to have befallen children. It’s not so much that they are free of supervision that shocks me, it’s the the banality of evil. The book is shocking, morbid, and full of repellent imagery.
Opening Line: “I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way.”
Closing Line: “There!” she said, “Wasn’t that a lovely sleep?”
Quotes: ” We hardly spoke at all to each other about Mother. She was everyone’s secret. Even Tom rarely mentioned her and only occasionally cried for her now. I looked around the cellar for other signs, but there was nothing.”
Rating: Good, weird. The British are so kinky.
Plot: In The Cement Garden, the father of four children dies. His death is followed by the death of the children's mother. In order to avoid being taken into foster care, the children hide their mother's death from the outside world by encasing her corpse in cement in their basement. Two of the siblings, a teenage boy and girl, enter into an incestuous relationship, while the younger son, while being bullied at school, experiments with regression as a baby, and dressing up like a little girl..
The narrator is Jack (15), who has two sisters, Julie (17) and Sue (13), and one brother, Tom (6). When they were younger, Jack describes how he and Julie would play a 'game' with their sister Sue. This 'game' was similar to playing doctor, and involved stripping Sue of her clothes and inspecting her intimate body parts as if they were scientists observing a new life form. Jack then mentions how he longs to do the same to his older sister but it was not allowed. Jack is obsessed with masturbation.
When Julie begins to date a man called Derek and invites him round to their house, Jack feels jealous and shows hostility towards him. Derek becomes more and more interested in what is hidden in their cellar but the children attempt to hide it from him. When a smell begins to emanate from down there, he helps to reclose the trunk their mother is hidden in. Tom eventually tells Jack that Derek has told him that their mother is down in the cellar.
The story comes to a climax when Jack enters, apparently absent-mindedly, naked into Julie's bedroom. Only Tom is there and he begins to talk to him about their parents. They fall asleep together, in Tom's crib, naked because of the heat. Afterword, Julie enters and perhaps surprisingly, does not say much or show surprise on his nakedness, only to joke that 'It is big'. They sit on the bed and whilst talking, they become more and more intimate with each other. Julie encourages him to go on. Right at this point, Derek enters, remarks that he has seen it all and calls them 'sick'. When he is gone, they begin to have sex. A thudding noise can be heard and their sister, Sue, informs them that Derek is smashing up the concrete coffin. They begin to talk, remembering their mother, and after a while, they sleep, while police lights illuminate the room through the window.
Review: Ian McEwan freezes our attention on the grotesque, then renders grotesquerie plausible, even "normal." Indeed, what is "natural" assumes an expanded range of possibility in McEwan's writing, adding fresh dimension to psychological horror. The Cement Garden, his first novel (and better described as a novella), brings these observations graphically to life, in precise, crystalline prose.
The Cement Garden has been likened to Golding's Lord of the Flies for its careful evocation of a society of young people, suddenly relieved of adult oversight, that evolves rapidly, opportunistically, organically in response to specific challenges posed by an unusual environment. In McEwan's working of these materials, related in the flat, dispassionate voice of Jack, the 14-year-old narrator, the challenging environment is the solitary house in which Jack, his brother, and two sisters live, set in the midst of a desolate urban landscape cleared for a freeway that never gets built.
The book takes its name from the paved-over garden Jack's fussy, acerbic father, a heart patient, envisions as tidier as easier to maintain. The exertions of the project kill the father, to no one's apparent regret, in the first chapter, leaving a sizable inventory of cement behind. With the demise of their long ailing mother shortly thereafter, the orphaned children are forced to recreate the family unit. Fearful of the split-up of the family, foster care for little Tom, and other worrisome ministrations of an impersonal state, the children decide to tell no one of their mother's death and to entomb her in concrete in the basement.
Jack recounts these and other details, and the changes each child undergoes, in his matter-of-fact voice. McEwan charges his tale with an extraordinary measure of sexual tension, primarily between Jack - much more than the stereotypically acne-covered, pubescent, serially self-abusing "sullen teen" - and his beautiful, athletic older sister Julia, who assumes the maternal role of "Wendy" to the family's "lost children." The movement of the story is aided and abetted by Derek, Julia's "bloke," a professional snooker player, aking all the questions the nosey private eye in a Hitchcock picture usually asks. The dreaded resolution of the relentlessly rising tension, carefully withheld until the closing pages, relieves narrative pressure but raises disturbing perspectives on love, the family, the "ties that bind."
The Cement Garden renews the great question of what it is that prompts a lavishly gifted writer to explore so sensitively the wholly bizarre. Great writing generally works simultaneously at several levels and admits layers of meaning. McEwan writes about familiar characters who before our eyes become something very, very different. He begs us to inquire beneath the surface familiarity into worlds unseen by, or denied to, passing spectators. He compels us to ask ourselves "what is `normal'?" "What is `natural'?" His answers may unsettle, but they are are the product of a novelistic logic that, in its internal workings, is eminently reasonable.
Subversion in age and role is the main theme in The Cement Garden. Burying the dead and engaging in sexual activity are probably the type of work anybody least expects to have befallen children. It’s not so much that they are free of supervision that shocks me, it’s the the banality of evil. The book is shocking, morbid, and full of repellent imagery.
Opening Line: “I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way.”
Closing Line: “There!” she said, “Wasn’t that a lovely sleep?”
Quotes: ” We hardly spoke at all to each other about Mother. She was everyone’s secret. Even Tom rarely mentioned her and only occasionally cried for her now. I looked around the cellar for other signs, but there was nothing.”
Rating: Good, weird. The British are so kinky.
442. A Bend in the River – V.S. Naipal
History: This is 1979 novel by a Nobel laureate.
Plot: Set in an unnamed African country after independence, the book is narrated by Salim, an ethnically Indian Muslim and a shopkeeper in a small, growing city in the country's remote interior. Though born and raised in another country in a more cosmopolitan city on the coast during the colonial period, as neither European nor fully African, Salim observes the rapid changes in his homeland with an outsider's distance.
Salim's family is of Indian descent and has lived on the eastern coast of Africa for generations. Aware of the country's growing unrest, Salim becomes unsure of the future of his family in that area. He buys a store in the interior of the country. The town is a natural market point by a bend in the river. There he works and waits for the town to rebuild from the destruction of the revolution.
Other characters include an older Indian couple and Ferdinand, the son of a local African woman Zabeth who buys goods from the shop to sell in her village. At first, the story is gentle, following the lives of these people, seen through Salim’s eyes. Then an older white man, Raymond, appears, and with him his beautiful wife. At the same time, the presence of the dictator becomes noticeable.
Raymond, it transpires, is close to the Big Man and is an “Africanist”, an academic specialising in the then new Western study of the continent’s social and cultural history. But it is his wife, Yvette, who provides a key pivot on which the novel turns. Salim’s life grows more complicated as the world in which he lives becomes less secure, descending into darkness and terror.
A family servant Ali comes to stay with him, and tells Salim that his hometown was attacked and that his family has scattered. Salim slowly makes friends with other people, who are waiting for the town to re-emerge. He meets a woman who buys his merchandise and returns to a remote village. She is able to make this journey once a month. She brings her son Ferdinand to stay in the village, to introduce him to other men, lifestyles, and cultures. Ferdinand and Ali become close friends.
The uprising settles down, but the uncertainty is still there. Salim’s boyhood friend comes to visit; he is a lecturer who has schooled in London. He introduces Salim to Yvette and Raymond, a married couple that work for the president. Yvette and Salim enter into a relationship; Salim loves Yvette but realizes the relationship is doomed, so he beats her up.
In the end, Salim is jailed, but is rescued by Ferdinatnd.
Review: The post colonial future seen in A Bend in the River is bleak. The country seems stranded between a past it cannot return to and a future it cannot attain. There is no real leadership, and people seem incapable of creating something new. Salim says early on, "The political system we had knows it was coming to an end, and that what was going to replace it wasn't going to be pleasant."
For sheer abundance of talent there can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses V. S. Naipaul. Whatever we may want in a novelist is to be found in his books: an almost Conradian gift for tensing a story, a serious involvement with human issues, a supple English prose, a hard-edged wit, a personal vision of things. Best of all, he is a novelist unafraid of using his brains--he would surely jeer at the common American notion that the exercise of mind saps a writer's vital juices. His novels are packed with thought, not as lumps of abstraction but as one fictional element among others, fluid in the stream of narrative.
Born to Hindu parents in Trinidad in 1932, Naipaul has lived as an outsider, first by virtue of fate and then, apparently, by clear-minded decision. His knowledge of the India from which his family stems is not large, nor his feeling for it secure. He resides in England, but no one could take him for an Englishman. What, then, is he? I would say: the world's writer, a master of language and perception, our sardonic blessing.
"Every writer," Naipaul has remarked, "is, in the long run, on his own; but it helps, in the most practical way, to have a tradition. The English language was mine; the [English] tradition was not." Yet precisely from this deracination he has drawn novelistic strength. It enables a steely perspective, the scraped honesty of the margin. It spurs him to a cool precision, trusting his own eyes. In novels such as "In a Free state" (a dazzling tour de force), "Guerrillas" and now, perhaps best of all, "A Bend in the River," Naipaul struggles with the ordeals and absurdities of living in new "third world" countries. He is free of any romantic moonshine about the moral charms of primitives or the glories of blood-stained dictators. Nor does he show a trace of Western condescension or nostalgia for colonialism. He is a tough-spirited writer, undeluded about the sleaziness of much contemporary history and not especially hopeful about its consequences.
But since publishing that book in 1961, Naipaul has grown more astringent. In recent fictions set in the Caribbean and Africa, he is hardly even a "likable" writer, for he no longer performs and barely troubles to please. He is now in the grip of a complex entangling vision of what happens in those unfortunate countries that have just toppled out of a tribal past, or freed themselves from colonial rule, but cannot reach the uncertain blessings of modernity. He is obsessed with the shallowness of proclaimed liberations and the low cost of spilling blood. Reading his novels, one finds oneself driven to discomfiting reflections on how precarious is the very ideal of civilization--reflections that jolt intellectual biases and political preconceptions. But that is one of the things literature should do.
"A Bend in the River" is set in an unnamed East African country, a bit perhaps like Uganda, but finally Naipaul's own turf. Independence has been won, civil war concluded. "The Big Man," president for life, rules by rhetoric, guile, sorcery and a strong helping of terror. There is a new dispensation: "black men assuming the lies of white men."
At the novel's center is Salim, a Muslim of Indian family whose people have lived for several generations in a coastal town, trading quietly, rutted in traditionalism. Both the narrative voice and dominant consciousness, Salim is a decent fellow, impressionable, thoughtful, not at all intellectual. (This creates problems, since Naipaul has to force some decidedly complex observations through Salim's limited awareness.) "Our way of life," Salim tells himself about the Indian settlement in Africa, "was antiquated and almost at an end." He is an outsider, watching with the outsider's nervousness.
The country, presumably Salim's too, has now entered modern history, or at least a coarse parody of it. Impressive buildings go up, for no clear purpose; local toughs are bundled into the army; young people are sent off to schools and universities; the population listens to three-hour radio orations by the Big Man. For the blacks in the bush, for the Indians on the coast, even for the quavering elite supposed to run the country, everything is unsettled, dependent on the whim of the Big Man. It's a country perhaps, but hardly a coherent society. The fading of the tribes, the feebleness of all social classes in the towns, the absence of a self-assured intelligentsia: all lead to making the army the single source of power, and within and over the army, the Big Man.
I put this abstractly, as I must. Naipaul renders it in exact, vibrant detail. When Salim travels inland, to a town on the bend of the river, there to set up a little shop selling cloth and linoleum, he encounters the first wave of "African rage," as if in answer to decades of imperial humiliation. "The big lawns and gardens had returned to bush; the streets had disappeared; vines and creepers had grown over broken, bleached walls of concrete or hollow clay brick." It's a ghost town, but the ghosts soon come back. Rebuilding starts up, and Salim finds a modest niche.
The two main lines of event--meditation and narrative--form a shadowy parallel. Salim's consciousness occupies the foreground space, struggling conscientiously to understand the new Africa; just behind occur the often capricious and fearful political acts set in motion by the Big Man. These acts are not rendered in detail: Naipaul contents himself with a few mordant touches. An order to disinfect the town transforms every official into a "disinfector. . .playing hide and seek with taxis and trucks among the hills of rubbish." A local official has an ominous dream in which the Big Man summons his subordinates to an early-morning execution at which only one of them will die--but no one knows which it will be. On the surface, "A Bend in the River" emerges mostly as a web of caustic observation, less exciting than its predecessor, "Guerillas"; but it is a much better and deeper novel, for Naipaul has mastered the gift of creating an aura of psychic and moral tension even as, seemingly, very little happens.
Each of the surrounding characters contributes to this tension. Another Indian, Mahesh, tries willfully to make family life into a bulwark against the assaults of history. A Belgian priest keeps collecting tribal masks, though the masks are visibly decaying, like the world from which they came. A powerful woman from the bush comes to trade and begs Salim to look after her son, Ferdinand, now a student in town and starting to parrot the slogans of national pride.
Most spectacular of all is Raymond, a white intellectual who dresses up the Big Man's speeches with Parisian rhetoric. In capturing Raymond's high nonsense, which sounds as if it came straight from the pages of "Les Temps Modernes," Naipaul is wonderfully wicked. Lecturing his provincial admirers on the Big Man's greatness, Raymond asks them to listen in those interminable speeches for "that note. . .of the young man grieving for the humiliations of his mother, the hotel maid. . .I don't think many people know that earlier this year [the Big Man] and his entire government made a pilgrimage to the village of that woman of Africa. Has that been done before? Has any ruler attempted to give sanctity to the bush of Africa? This act of piety is something that brings tears to the eyes."
Parody is followed by pathos. Raymond is soon dumped by the Big Man, to become another used-up intellectual whose phrases are no longer handy.
The Big Man has a genius for destructive manipulation, cutting down his army (through a brilliantly evoked gang of white mercenaries, crew-cut killers) in order to quash potential rivals. The country's new elite--raw, fearful, greedy, but specked with idealism--is kept constantly on edge: it is a tool in the hands of the Big Man, but a tool he has reason to fear. To the disenchanted Indian, Mahesh, "It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right." To the more patient Salim, the moral obligation of "outsiders" is to wait, be patient, try to avoid passing judgment.
Inexorably he is pushed into a kind of despair, saddened by a growing persuasion that, at least in the Big Man's country, human effort must burn itself out into waste, while ideas and ideals shrink to mere covers for power. Civilized norms are all we have to defend ourselves against ourselves, and they form, at best, a thin shield.
At the end, the Big Man has "radicalized" the country and assigned Salim's little shop to Citizen Theotime, who "wanted me to acknowledge him as the boss. At the same time [Theotime] wanted me to make allowances for him as an uneducated man and an African. He wanted both my respect and my tolerance, even my compassion. He wanted me, almost, to act out my subordinate role as a favor to him."
Arrested, thrown into jail, Salim is finally saved by the town's new commissioner, Ferdinand, only yesterday a stumbling boy from the village. Something has happened to this Ferdinand, some partial but significant access to truth. Rescuing Salim, he makes a speech that comes as a climax to this splendid novel:
"We're all going to hell, and every man knows this in his bones. We're being killed. Nothing has any meaning. . . . Everyone wants to make his money and run away. But where? That is what is driving people mad. They feel they're losing the place they can run back to. I began to feel the same thing when I was a cadet in the capital. I felt I had given myself an education for nothing. . .I began to think I wanted to be a child again, to forget books. . .. The bush runs itself. But there is no place to go."
Beyond this, Naipaul offers no intimations of hope or signals of perspective. It may be that the reality he grapples with allows him nothing but grimness of voice. There is a complicated literary-moral problem here that cannot be solved in a few sentences, if solved at all. A novelist has to be faithful to what he sees, and few see as well as Naipaul; yet one may wonder whether, in some final reckoning, a serious writer can simply allow the wretchedness of his depicted scene to become the limit of his vision. Such novelists as Dostoyevsky, Conrad and Turgenev, also dealing with painful aspects of political life, struggled in some ways to "surmount" or "transcend" them. Naipaul seems right now to be a writer beleaguered by his own truths, unable to get past them. That is surely an honorable difficulty, far better than indulging in sentimental or ideological uplift; but it exacts a price.
I raise this question with much uneasiness, since the last thing I want to do is to badger Naipaul (a writer not easily badgered) with requests for facile tokens of "positive" belief or value. Perhaps, given the subject that grips him and the moment in which he lives, there is no choice. Perhaps we ought simply to be content that, in his austere and brilliant way, he holds fast to the bitterness before his eyes.
Opening Line: The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
Closing Line: “The search light, while it was on had shown thousands, white, in the white light.”
Quotes: “After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.”
Rating: Very Good.
Plot: Set in an unnamed African country after independence, the book is narrated by Salim, an ethnically Indian Muslim and a shopkeeper in a small, growing city in the country's remote interior. Though born and raised in another country in a more cosmopolitan city on the coast during the colonial period, as neither European nor fully African, Salim observes the rapid changes in his homeland with an outsider's distance.
Salim's family is of Indian descent and has lived on the eastern coast of Africa for generations. Aware of the country's growing unrest, Salim becomes unsure of the future of his family in that area. He buys a store in the interior of the country. The town is a natural market point by a bend in the river. There he works and waits for the town to rebuild from the destruction of the revolution.
Other characters include an older Indian couple and Ferdinand, the son of a local African woman Zabeth who buys goods from the shop to sell in her village. At first, the story is gentle, following the lives of these people, seen through Salim’s eyes. Then an older white man, Raymond, appears, and with him his beautiful wife. At the same time, the presence of the dictator becomes noticeable.
Raymond, it transpires, is close to the Big Man and is an “Africanist”, an academic specialising in the then new Western study of the continent’s social and cultural history. But it is his wife, Yvette, who provides a key pivot on which the novel turns. Salim’s life grows more complicated as the world in which he lives becomes less secure, descending into darkness and terror.
A family servant Ali comes to stay with him, and tells Salim that his hometown was attacked and that his family has scattered. Salim slowly makes friends with other people, who are waiting for the town to re-emerge. He meets a woman who buys his merchandise and returns to a remote village. She is able to make this journey once a month. She brings her son Ferdinand to stay in the village, to introduce him to other men, lifestyles, and cultures. Ferdinand and Ali become close friends.
The uprising settles down, but the uncertainty is still there. Salim’s boyhood friend comes to visit; he is a lecturer who has schooled in London. He introduces Salim to Yvette and Raymond, a married couple that work for the president. Yvette and Salim enter into a relationship; Salim loves Yvette but realizes the relationship is doomed, so he beats her up.
In the end, Salim is jailed, but is rescued by Ferdinatnd.
Review: The post colonial future seen in A Bend in the River is bleak. The country seems stranded between a past it cannot return to and a future it cannot attain. There is no real leadership, and people seem incapable of creating something new. Salim says early on, "The political system we had knows it was coming to an end, and that what was going to replace it wasn't going to be pleasant."
For sheer abundance of talent there can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses V. S. Naipaul. Whatever we may want in a novelist is to be found in his books: an almost Conradian gift for tensing a story, a serious involvement with human issues, a supple English prose, a hard-edged wit, a personal vision of things. Best of all, he is a novelist unafraid of using his brains--he would surely jeer at the common American notion that the exercise of mind saps a writer's vital juices. His novels are packed with thought, not as lumps of abstraction but as one fictional element among others, fluid in the stream of narrative.
Born to Hindu parents in Trinidad in 1932, Naipaul has lived as an outsider, first by virtue of fate and then, apparently, by clear-minded decision. His knowledge of the India from which his family stems is not large, nor his feeling for it secure. He resides in England, but no one could take him for an Englishman. What, then, is he? I would say: the world's writer, a master of language and perception, our sardonic blessing.
"Every writer," Naipaul has remarked, "is, in the long run, on his own; but it helps, in the most practical way, to have a tradition. The English language was mine; the [English] tradition was not." Yet precisely from this deracination he has drawn novelistic strength. It enables a steely perspective, the scraped honesty of the margin. It spurs him to a cool precision, trusting his own eyes. In novels such as "In a Free state" (a dazzling tour de force), "Guerrillas" and now, perhaps best of all, "A Bend in the River," Naipaul struggles with the ordeals and absurdities of living in new "third world" countries. He is free of any romantic moonshine about the moral charms of primitives or the glories of blood-stained dictators. Nor does he show a trace of Western condescension or nostalgia for colonialism. He is a tough-spirited writer, undeluded about the sleaziness of much contemporary history and not especially hopeful about its consequences.
But since publishing that book in 1961, Naipaul has grown more astringent. In recent fictions set in the Caribbean and Africa, he is hardly even a "likable" writer, for he no longer performs and barely troubles to please. He is now in the grip of a complex entangling vision of what happens in those unfortunate countries that have just toppled out of a tribal past, or freed themselves from colonial rule, but cannot reach the uncertain blessings of modernity. He is obsessed with the shallowness of proclaimed liberations and the low cost of spilling blood. Reading his novels, one finds oneself driven to discomfiting reflections on how precarious is the very ideal of civilization--reflections that jolt intellectual biases and political preconceptions. But that is one of the things literature should do.
"A Bend in the River" is set in an unnamed East African country, a bit perhaps like Uganda, but finally Naipaul's own turf. Independence has been won, civil war concluded. "The Big Man," president for life, rules by rhetoric, guile, sorcery and a strong helping of terror. There is a new dispensation: "black men assuming the lies of white men."
At the novel's center is Salim, a Muslim of Indian family whose people have lived for several generations in a coastal town, trading quietly, rutted in traditionalism. Both the narrative voice and dominant consciousness, Salim is a decent fellow, impressionable, thoughtful, not at all intellectual. (This creates problems, since Naipaul has to force some decidedly complex observations through Salim's limited awareness.) "Our way of life," Salim tells himself about the Indian settlement in Africa, "was antiquated and almost at an end." He is an outsider, watching with the outsider's nervousness.
The country, presumably Salim's too, has now entered modern history, or at least a coarse parody of it. Impressive buildings go up, for no clear purpose; local toughs are bundled into the army; young people are sent off to schools and universities; the population listens to three-hour radio orations by the Big Man. For the blacks in the bush, for the Indians on the coast, even for the quavering elite supposed to run the country, everything is unsettled, dependent on the whim of the Big Man. It's a country perhaps, but hardly a coherent society. The fading of the tribes, the feebleness of all social classes in the towns, the absence of a self-assured intelligentsia: all lead to making the army the single source of power, and within and over the army, the Big Man.
I put this abstractly, as I must. Naipaul renders it in exact, vibrant detail. When Salim travels inland, to a town on the bend of the river, there to set up a little shop selling cloth and linoleum, he encounters the first wave of "African rage," as if in answer to decades of imperial humiliation. "The big lawns and gardens had returned to bush; the streets had disappeared; vines and creepers had grown over broken, bleached walls of concrete or hollow clay brick." It's a ghost town, but the ghosts soon come back. Rebuilding starts up, and Salim finds a modest niche.
The two main lines of event--meditation and narrative--form a shadowy parallel. Salim's consciousness occupies the foreground space, struggling conscientiously to understand the new Africa; just behind occur the often capricious and fearful political acts set in motion by the Big Man. These acts are not rendered in detail: Naipaul contents himself with a few mordant touches. An order to disinfect the town transforms every official into a "disinfector. . .playing hide and seek with taxis and trucks among the hills of rubbish." A local official has an ominous dream in which the Big Man summons his subordinates to an early-morning execution at which only one of them will die--but no one knows which it will be. On the surface, "A Bend in the River" emerges mostly as a web of caustic observation, less exciting than its predecessor, "Guerillas"; but it is a much better and deeper novel, for Naipaul has mastered the gift of creating an aura of psychic and moral tension even as, seemingly, very little happens.
Each of the surrounding characters contributes to this tension. Another Indian, Mahesh, tries willfully to make family life into a bulwark against the assaults of history. A Belgian priest keeps collecting tribal masks, though the masks are visibly decaying, like the world from which they came. A powerful woman from the bush comes to trade and begs Salim to look after her son, Ferdinand, now a student in town and starting to parrot the slogans of national pride.
Most spectacular of all is Raymond, a white intellectual who dresses up the Big Man's speeches with Parisian rhetoric. In capturing Raymond's high nonsense, which sounds as if it came straight from the pages of "Les Temps Modernes," Naipaul is wonderfully wicked. Lecturing his provincial admirers on the Big Man's greatness, Raymond asks them to listen in those interminable speeches for "that note. . .of the young man grieving for the humiliations of his mother, the hotel maid. . .I don't think many people know that earlier this year [the Big Man] and his entire government made a pilgrimage to the village of that woman of Africa. Has that been done before? Has any ruler attempted to give sanctity to the bush of Africa? This act of piety is something that brings tears to the eyes."
Parody is followed by pathos. Raymond is soon dumped by the Big Man, to become another used-up intellectual whose phrases are no longer handy.
The Big Man has a genius for destructive manipulation, cutting down his army (through a brilliantly evoked gang of white mercenaries, crew-cut killers) in order to quash potential rivals. The country's new elite--raw, fearful, greedy, but specked with idealism--is kept constantly on edge: it is a tool in the hands of the Big Man, but a tool he has reason to fear. To the disenchanted Indian, Mahesh, "It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right." To the more patient Salim, the moral obligation of "outsiders" is to wait, be patient, try to avoid passing judgment.
Inexorably he is pushed into a kind of despair, saddened by a growing persuasion that, at least in the Big Man's country, human effort must burn itself out into waste, while ideas and ideals shrink to mere covers for power. Civilized norms are all we have to defend ourselves against ourselves, and they form, at best, a thin shield.
At the end, the Big Man has "radicalized" the country and assigned Salim's little shop to Citizen Theotime, who "wanted me to acknowledge him as the boss. At the same time [Theotime] wanted me to make allowances for him as an uneducated man and an African. He wanted both my respect and my tolerance, even my compassion. He wanted me, almost, to act out my subordinate role as a favor to him."
Arrested, thrown into jail, Salim is finally saved by the town's new commissioner, Ferdinand, only yesterday a stumbling boy from the village. Something has happened to this Ferdinand, some partial but significant access to truth. Rescuing Salim, he makes a speech that comes as a climax to this splendid novel:
"We're all going to hell, and every man knows this in his bones. We're being killed. Nothing has any meaning. . . . Everyone wants to make his money and run away. But where? That is what is driving people mad. They feel they're losing the place they can run back to. I began to feel the same thing when I was a cadet in the capital. I felt I had given myself an education for nothing. . .I began to think I wanted to be a child again, to forget books. . .. The bush runs itself. But there is no place to go."
Beyond this, Naipaul offers no intimations of hope or signals of perspective. It may be that the reality he grapples with allows him nothing but grimness of voice. There is a complicated literary-moral problem here that cannot be solved in a few sentences, if solved at all. A novelist has to be faithful to what he sees, and few see as well as Naipaul; yet one may wonder whether, in some final reckoning, a serious writer can simply allow the wretchedness of his depicted scene to become the limit of his vision. Such novelists as Dostoyevsky, Conrad and Turgenev, also dealing with painful aspects of political life, struggled in some ways to "surmount" or "transcend" them. Naipaul seems right now to be a writer beleaguered by his own truths, unable to get past them. That is surely an honorable difficulty, far better than indulging in sentimental or ideological uplift; but it exacts a price.
I raise this question with much uneasiness, since the last thing I want to do is to badger Naipaul (a writer not easily badgered) with requests for facile tokens of "positive" belief or value. Perhaps, given the subject that grips him and the moment in which he lives, there is no choice. Perhaps we ought simply to be content that, in his austere and brilliant way, he holds fast to the bitterness before his eyes.
Opening Line: The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
Closing Line: “The search light, while it was on had shown thousands, white, in the white light.”
Quotes: “After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.”
Rating: Very Good.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
441. Crash – J. G. Ballard
History: This book was first published in 1973. It was a highly controversial novel: famously one publisher's reader returned the verdict "This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do Not Publish!"
Plot: The story is told through the eyes of narrator James Ballard, named after the author himself, but it centers on the sinister figure of Dr. Robert Vaughan, a “former TV-scientist, turned nightmare angel of the expressways”. Ballard meets Vaughan after being involved in a car accident himself near London Airport. Gathering around Vaughan is a group of alienated people, all of them former crash-victims, who follow him in his pursuit to re-enact the crashes of celebrities, and experience what the narrator calls "a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology". Vaughan’s ultimate fantasy is to die in a head-on collision with movie star Elizabeth Taylor.
Review: The book explores themes such as the transformation of human psychology by modern technology, and consumer culture's fascination with celebrities and technological commodities. The human characters in the novel are cold and passionless, unable to become sexually excited unless some kind of technology is involved (typically architecture and cars). The gruesome damage inflicted on car-crash victims is not seen as shocking, but as the liberation of new sexual possibilities that have yet to be explored, such as in one scene where a man and a woman have sex in a car that was involved in an accident, but rather than have vaginal sex, he penetrates a wound on her thigh that she received in the crash.
Finally, the book asks why we, as an enlightened society, accept such a “perverse technology” – that kills a vast number of people yearly – as such an integral part of our culture.
Ballard writes in the foreword: “Do we see, in the car-crash, the portents of a nightmare marriage between technology, and our own sexuality? … Is there some deviant logic unfolding here, more powerful than that provided by reason?”
Opening Line: ”Vaughan died yesterday in his last car crash.”
Closing Line: “The aircraft rise from the runways of the airport, carrying the remnants of Vaughan’s semen to the instrument panels and radiator grilles of a thousand crashing cars, the leg stances of a million passengers. “
Quotes: “Trying to exhaust himself, Vaughan devised an endless almanac of terrifying wounds and insane collisions: The lungs of elderly men punctured by door-handles; the chests of young women impaled on steering-columns; the cheek of handsome youths torn on the chromium latches of quarter-lights. To Vaughan, these wounds formed the key to a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology. The images of these wounds hung in the gallery of his mind, like exhibits in the museum of a slaughterhouse.”
Rating: Awful.
Plot: The story is told through the eyes of narrator James Ballard, named after the author himself, but it centers on the sinister figure of Dr. Robert Vaughan, a “former TV-scientist, turned nightmare angel of the expressways”. Ballard meets Vaughan after being involved in a car accident himself near London Airport. Gathering around Vaughan is a group of alienated people, all of them former crash-victims, who follow him in his pursuit to re-enact the crashes of celebrities, and experience what the narrator calls "a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology". Vaughan’s ultimate fantasy is to die in a head-on collision with movie star Elizabeth Taylor.
Review: The book explores themes such as the transformation of human psychology by modern technology, and consumer culture's fascination with celebrities and technological commodities. The human characters in the novel are cold and passionless, unable to become sexually excited unless some kind of technology is involved (typically architecture and cars). The gruesome damage inflicted on car-crash victims is not seen as shocking, but as the liberation of new sexual possibilities that have yet to be explored, such as in one scene where a man and a woman have sex in a car that was involved in an accident, but rather than have vaginal sex, he penetrates a wound on her thigh that she received in the crash.
Finally, the book asks why we, as an enlightened society, accept such a “perverse technology” – that kills a vast number of people yearly – as such an integral part of our culture.
Ballard writes in the foreword: “Do we see, in the car-crash, the portents of a nightmare marriage between technology, and our own sexuality? … Is there some deviant logic unfolding here, more powerful than that provided by reason?”
Opening Line: ”Vaughan died yesterday in his last car crash.”
Closing Line: “The aircraft rise from the runways of the airport, carrying the remnants of Vaughan’s semen to the instrument panels and radiator grilles of a thousand crashing cars, the leg stances of a million passengers. “
Quotes: “Trying to exhaust himself, Vaughan devised an endless almanac of terrifying wounds and insane collisions: The lungs of elderly men punctured by door-handles; the chests of young women impaled on steering-columns; the cheek of handsome youths torn on the chromium latches of quarter-lights. To Vaughan, these wounds formed the key to a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology. The images of these wounds hung in the gallery of his mind, like exhibits in the museum of a slaughterhouse.”
Rating: Awful.
440. The Good Soldier – Ford Maddox Ford
History: This book was written in 1915. The novel is told using a series of flashbacks in non-chronological order, a literary technique that formed part of Ford's pioneering view of literary impressionism. Ford employs the device of the unreliable narrator, to great effect as the main character gradually reveals a version of events that is quite different from what the introduction leads you to believe. The novel was loosely based on two incidents of adultery and on Ford's messy personal life.
The novel’s original title was The Saddest Story, but after the onset of World War I, the publishers asked Ford for a new title. Ford suggested (sarcastically) The Good Soldier, and the name stuck.
Plot: The Good Soldier is narrated by the character John Dowell, half of one of the couples whose dissolving relationships form the subject of the novel. Dowell tells the stories of those dissolutions as well as the deaths of three characters and the madness of a fourth, in a rambling, non-chronological fashion that leaves gaps for the reader to fill.
The novel opens with the famous line, “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” Dowell explains that for nine years he, his wife Florence and their friends Captain Edward Ashburnham (the “good soldier” of the book’s title) and his wife Leonora had an ostensibly normal friendship while Edward and Florence sought treatment for their heart ailments at a spa in Nauheim,Germany.
As it turns out, nothing in the relationships or in the characters is as it first seems. Florence’s heart ailment is a fiction she perpetrated on John to force them to stay in Europe so that she could continue her affair with an American thug named Jimmy. Edward and Leonora have a loveless, imbalanced marriage broken by his constant infidelities (both of body and heart) and Leonora’s attempts to control Edward’s affairs (both financial and romantic). Dowell is a fool and is coming to realize how much of a fool he is, as Florence and Edward had an affair under his nose for nine years without John knowing until Florence was dead.
Florence’s affair with Edward leads her to commit suicide when she realizes that Edward is falling in love with his and Leonora’s young ward, Nancy Rufford, the daughter of Leonora's closest friend. Florence sees the two in an intimate conversation and rushes back into the resort, where she sees John talking to a man she knows (and who knows of her affair with Jimmy) but whom John doesn’t know. Assuming that her relationship with Edward and her marriage to John are over, Florence takes prussic acid – which she has carried for years in a vial that John thought held her heart medicine – and dies.
With that story told, Dowell moves on to tell the story of Edward and Leonora’s relationship, which appears normal but which is a power struggle that Leonora wins. Dowell runs through several of Edward’s affairs and peccadilloes, including his possibly innocent attempt to comfort a crying servant on a train; his affair with the married Maisie Maidan, the one character in the book whose heart problem was unquestionably real, and his bizarre tryst in Monte Carlo and Antibes with a kept woman known as La Dolciquita. Edward’s philandering ends up costing them a fortune in bribes, blackmail and gifts for his lovers, leading Leonora to take control of Edward’s financial affairs. She gradually gets him out of debt.
Edward’s last affair is his most scandalous, as he becomes infatuated with their young ward, Nancy. Nancy came to live with them after leaving a convent where her parents had sent her; her mother was a violent alcoholic, and her father (it is later suggested that this man may not be Nancy’s biological father) may have abused her. Edward, tearing himself apart because he does not want to spoil Nancy's innocence, arranges to have her sent to India to live with her father, even though this frightens her terribly. Once Leonora knows that Edward intends to keep his passion for Nancy chaste, but only wants Nancy to continue to love him from afar, Leonora torments him by making this wish impossible—she pretends to offer to divorce him so he can marry Nancy, but informs Nancy of his sordid sexual history, destroying Nancy’s innocent love for him. After Nancy's departure, Edward commits suicide, and when she reaches Aden and sees the obituary in the paper, she becomes catatonic.
The novel’s last section has Dowell writing from Edward’s old estate in England, where he takes care of Nancy, whom he cannot marry because of her mental illness. Nancy is only capable of repeating two things – a Latin phrase meaning “I believe in an omnipotent God” and the word “shuttlecocks.” Dowell states that the story is sad because no one got what he wanted: Leonora wanted Edward but lost him and marries the normal (but dull) Rodney Bayham; Edward wanted Nancy but lost her; Dowell wanted a wife but has twice ended up a nurse to a sick woman, one a fake.
As if in an afterthought, Dowell closes the novel by telling the story of Edward’s suicide. Edward receives a telegram from Nancy that reads, “Safe Brindisi. Having a rattling good time. Nancy.” He asks Dowell to take the telegram to his wife, pulls out his pen knife, says that it’s time he had some rest and slits his own throat.
Dowell ends up expressing sympathy for Edward, even though he casts both Edward and Florence as the villains.
Review: The Good Soldier is an odd and maybe even unique book. That it is a masterpiece, almost a perfect novel, comes as a repeated surprise even to readers who have read it before. In a dedicatory letter to the second edition written some 10 years after the publication of the novel, Ford depicts himself "taking down one of [his] ten-year-old books [and exclaiming] 'Great Heavens, did I write as well as that then?' ... And I will permit myself to say that I was astounded at the work I must have put into the construction of the book, at the intricate tangle of references and cross-references." Ford wrote other very good novels - his tetralogy Parade's End is moving and innovative - but he called The Good Soldier his "auk's egg" ("having reached the allotted, I had laid my one egg and might as well die"); it does have the quality of saying absolutely everything about both his story and his theme - not just everything he has to say, but everything there is to say.
This novel broke new ground when it was written, something in these jaded days that is almost impossible to do. Ford created an unreliable narrator and also wrote about the complex inner workings of relationships, an area of darkness that will always be immune from full enlightenment. His characters also deceive themselves as well as significant others, and yet are always in pursuit of the perfect appearance. The subtlety with which Ford has woven this tapestry makes you think twice and then three times about who his people are and what they want. Unbridled lust also rides through the book, but is forever reigned in by double standards and self-torturing conscience. Although the book requires a patient reader so that it can bloom, its payoff stays with you, and its sharp observations and lack of sentiment make you realize what a brilliant piece of art it is.
The story seems simple. Two wealthy couples, one American and one English, meet at a spa in Germany and spend several years in comfortable friendship until it is revealed that the American wife and the English husband are carrying on an affair that the English wife knows about but the American husband does not. After the deaths of the adulterers, more and more is uncovered about both the conduct and the emotional meaning of the affair. The story is narrated by the American husband and is in some sense a detective story, but he is no investigator. The facts come to him unwillingly, since he would have preferred from the beginning not to know; the suspense depends not on what has happened, as dramatic as it turns out to be, but on the narrator's unfolding interpretation of the passionate emotions manifested in very small gestures or brief remarks.
Ford's greatest gamble is in the naïveté of the narrator (Dowell), supposedly an idle but well-meaning wealthy man from an old Philadelphia family who readily accepts a sexless marriage with a woman (Florence) whose emotional life is a secret and a deception. Florence persuades Dowell at the commencement of their honeymoon that marital relations might so tax her weak heart that they are out of the question - she turns him into a servant who takes care of her every need while leaving her lots of free time to carry on with at least two lovers of her choosing. Dowell's idiom and mode of thinking are not perfectly American, and Ford's insights into American ways are slightly off, but America is not his subject, England is, and Dowell is convincing enough. His real virtue is that he is disarming, and he does not pretend to reliability. He freely offers his own self-doubts about his competence, both as an actor in the drama and as an interpreter, and he manages not to seem either untruthful or self-serving. He paints four portraits - Edward Ashburnham, the owner of a large estate in England; his wife, Leonora, daughter of impoverished Irish gentry; Florence, heiress to a New England fortune; and Nancy Rufford, Leonora's ward, who has lived with Edward and Leonora from the age of 13.
Edward and Leonora have every appearance of grace, character and respectability. Edward, too, is suffering from a bad heart, but he has been in the army in India, and has also been an excellent landlord and magistrate back in England. His failures are failures of self-knowledge and intelligence more than morality - he is upright, generous and responsible. But, fatally, he is "a sentimentalist", which makes him susceptible to the appearance of suffering or weakness, and also makes him immune to his wife (theirs is an arranged marriage), whose virtues are those of strength and reserve. She is repeatedly termed "cold" by Dowell, but her coldness seems more in the nature of untapped warmth (for example, she wants children, which she and Edward can't seem to produce). The first startling fact about them that the reader learns is that they haven't spoken in private for 13 years, though they are gracious to one another in public (surely this is possible only in an especially grand setting, with perfectly trained servants). Everything about Edward is plausible for, even typical of, a man of his position, but Ford takes a different approach from every previous English author to have contemplated the landed gentry, because he takes Edward's inner life, as empty as it is, seriously, anatomising and sympathising with its very emptiness.
It is clear as the novel proceeds that not only do Edward and Leonora have no idea what intimacy is, they also have no way of finding out: for one thing, they don't read novels, and for another, Leonora consults priests and nuns for marital advice, and what they have to offer are third-hand clichés such as "men are like that". Edward consults no one, and there seems to be no structure in his life that would permit such consultation. Other men of his social class tell dirty stories, perhaps as a form of sharing information, but these make Edward uncomfortable. Thus, when Edward begins to feel out of sympathy with Leonora some three or four years into their marriage, he is ripe for exploitation, and he ends up making a costly liaison and losing about 40 percent of the principal value of his estate. Over the next 10 years Leonora takes over management of the estate and brings it back to its original value, but the balance of their relationship is fatally undermined by her control and his untrustworthiness.
Both the American marriage and the English marriage suffer from the emasculation of the husbands, and Dowell criticises Leonora and Florence, but Ford depicts the husbands more complexly. They have fully colluded in their emasculation by not knowing how to be men - the reason for Dowell's failure (symbolised by the fact that unlike other Americans, he has no interest in earning money) is unclear, but the reason for Edward's failure is that he has received no instruction in anything but duties and forms. He is also slightly stupid. Dowell is content in his emasculation, but Edward has unfulfilled yearnings for companionship and support that he finds in a series of women, with Leonora's tacit acceptance. Leonora holds out the hope that once their financial imbalance is righted, he will get interested in her again, and things seem to be moving in that direction when Florence entangles Edward in her much colder and less sentimental designs - Dowell says that she "annexes him".
Dowell maintains that Florence is a woman of the most shallow possible motivations - she wants to look good, dress well, display herself to intellectual advantage, and be catered to. She is purely and discreetly a social climber. Until Florence comes along, Leonora has accepted Edward's liaisons as well-meaning and necessary, worthy of her respect and even her care, but when he links himself with Florence, whom Leonora despises, she loses all respect for and sympathy with him, though she still loves and desires him.
I do want to comment on Ford's style, which makes great use of paradox. At one point, for example, while giving the history of Edward's military career, he says, "It would have done him a great deal of good to get killed." There is something quite reckless about that sentence, and yet it is perfectly understandable in context - it comes late in the novel, when we know that not only is Edward's end to be tragic, but also that the downward path to it is painful and pathetic. How much better for the dumb animal to have died heroically, in accordance with the system by which he lived. There are those who believe that The Good Soldier is one of the few stylistically perfect novels in any language, and perhaps what Ford was alluding to in his remarks about references and cross-references is this sense that the contradictory and complementary meanings in every paradoxical sentence are entirely understandable because he has made sure a clear explication of his fictional situation - the psychologies of his characters, the interweaving of character and event, intention and chance.
Ford originally titled his novel The Saddest Story. After the outbreak of the first world war and his departure for the front, his editor changed the title to The Good Soldier, which Ford did not care for. But the editor was right - Ford's title is empty and meaningless. The Good Soldier subtly cues the reader to the larger social dimension of Ford's subject. Leonora and Edward, and to a lesser degree Dowell and Florence, are struggling with ignorance as much as moral failure. They are representatives of a system that fails them and fails in their failure. It is the subtler side of Dickens's Circumlocution Office, of Thackeray's Vanity Fair. In Dickens's and Thackeray's day, the landed gentry could still be attacked. By Ford's time, all the social and cultural arrangements of feudal Europe were imploding in the first world war. Ford was astute enough to depict both the inevitability of the implosion and its sadness - the world of Jane Austen a hundred years on, depopulated, lonely and dark.
Opening Line: “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.”
Closing Line: “She was quite pleased with it.”
Quotes: "But the real fierceness of desire, the real heat of a passion long continued and withering up the soul of a man is the craving for identity with the woman that he loves. He desires to see with the same eyes, to touch with the same sense of touch, to hear with the same ears, to lose his identity, to be enveloped, to be supported. For, whatever may be said of the relation of the sexes, there is no man who loves a woman that does not desire to come to her for the renewal of his courage, for the cutting asunder of his difficulties. And that will be the mainspring of his desire for her. We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist."
Rating: Excellent
The novel’s original title was The Saddest Story, but after the onset of World War I, the publishers asked Ford for a new title. Ford suggested (sarcastically) The Good Soldier, and the name stuck.
Plot: The Good Soldier is narrated by the character John Dowell, half of one of the couples whose dissolving relationships form the subject of the novel. Dowell tells the stories of those dissolutions as well as the deaths of three characters and the madness of a fourth, in a rambling, non-chronological fashion that leaves gaps for the reader to fill.
The novel opens with the famous line, “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” Dowell explains that for nine years he, his wife Florence and their friends Captain Edward Ashburnham (the “good soldier” of the book’s title) and his wife Leonora had an ostensibly normal friendship while Edward and Florence sought treatment for their heart ailments at a spa in Nauheim,Germany.
As it turns out, nothing in the relationships or in the characters is as it first seems. Florence’s heart ailment is a fiction she perpetrated on John to force them to stay in Europe so that she could continue her affair with an American thug named Jimmy. Edward and Leonora have a loveless, imbalanced marriage broken by his constant infidelities (both of body and heart) and Leonora’s attempts to control Edward’s affairs (both financial and romantic). Dowell is a fool and is coming to realize how much of a fool he is, as Florence and Edward had an affair under his nose for nine years without John knowing until Florence was dead.
Florence’s affair with Edward leads her to commit suicide when she realizes that Edward is falling in love with his and Leonora’s young ward, Nancy Rufford, the daughter of Leonora's closest friend. Florence sees the two in an intimate conversation and rushes back into the resort, where she sees John talking to a man she knows (and who knows of her affair with Jimmy) but whom John doesn’t know. Assuming that her relationship with Edward and her marriage to John are over, Florence takes prussic acid – which she has carried for years in a vial that John thought held her heart medicine – and dies.
With that story told, Dowell moves on to tell the story of Edward and Leonora’s relationship, which appears normal but which is a power struggle that Leonora wins. Dowell runs through several of Edward’s affairs and peccadilloes, including his possibly innocent attempt to comfort a crying servant on a train; his affair with the married Maisie Maidan, the one character in the book whose heart problem was unquestionably real, and his bizarre tryst in Monte Carlo and Antibes with a kept woman known as La Dolciquita. Edward’s philandering ends up costing them a fortune in bribes, blackmail and gifts for his lovers, leading Leonora to take control of Edward’s financial affairs. She gradually gets him out of debt.
Edward’s last affair is his most scandalous, as he becomes infatuated with their young ward, Nancy. Nancy came to live with them after leaving a convent where her parents had sent her; her mother was a violent alcoholic, and her father (it is later suggested that this man may not be Nancy’s biological father) may have abused her. Edward, tearing himself apart because he does not want to spoil Nancy's innocence, arranges to have her sent to India to live with her father, even though this frightens her terribly. Once Leonora knows that Edward intends to keep his passion for Nancy chaste, but only wants Nancy to continue to love him from afar, Leonora torments him by making this wish impossible—she pretends to offer to divorce him so he can marry Nancy, but informs Nancy of his sordid sexual history, destroying Nancy’s innocent love for him. After Nancy's departure, Edward commits suicide, and when she reaches Aden and sees the obituary in the paper, she becomes catatonic.
The novel’s last section has Dowell writing from Edward’s old estate in England, where he takes care of Nancy, whom he cannot marry because of her mental illness. Nancy is only capable of repeating two things – a Latin phrase meaning “I believe in an omnipotent God” and the word “shuttlecocks.” Dowell states that the story is sad because no one got what he wanted: Leonora wanted Edward but lost him and marries the normal (but dull) Rodney Bayham; Edward wanted Nancy but lost her; Dowell wanted a wife but has twice ended up a nurse to a sick woman, one a fake.
As if in an afterthought, Dowell closes the novel by telling the story of Edward’s suicide. Edward receives a telegram from Nancy that reads, “Safe Brindisi. Having a rattling good time. Nancy.” He asks Dowell to take the telegram to his wife, pulls out his pen knife, says that it’s time he had some rest and slits his own throat.
Dowell ends up expressing sympathy for Edward, even though he casts both Edward and Florence as the villains.
Review: The Good Soldier is an odd and maybe even unique book. That it is a masterpiece, almost a perfect novel, comes as a repeated surprise even to readers who have read it before. In a dedicatory letter to the second edition written some 10 years after the publication of the novel, Ford depicts himself "taking down one of [his] ten-year-old books [and exclaiming] 'Great Heavens, did I write as well as that then?' ... And I will permit myself to say that I was astounded at the work I must have put into the construction of the book, at the intricate tangle of references and cross-references." Ford wrote other very good novels - his tetralogy Parade's End is moving and innovative - but he called The Good Soldier his "auk's egg" ("having reached the allotted, I had laid my one egg and might as well die"); it does have the quality of saying absolutely everything about both his story and his theme - not just everything he has to say, but everything there is to say.
This novel broke new ground when it was written, something in these jaded days that is almost impossible to do. Ford created an unreliable narrator and also wrote about the complex inner workings of relationships, an area of darkness that will always be immune from full enlightenment. His characters also deceive themselves as well as significant others, and yet are always in pursuit of the perfect appearance. The subtlety with which Ford has woven this tapestry makes you think twice and then three times about who his people are and what they want. Unbridled lust also rides through the book, but is forever reigned in by double standards and self-torturing conscience. Although the book requires a patient reader so that it can bloom, its payoff stays with you, and its sharp observations and lack of sentiment make you realize what a brilliant piece of art it is.
The story seems simple. Two wealthy couples, one American and one English, meet at a spa in Germany and spend several years in comfortable friendship until it is revealed that the American wife and the English husband are carrying on an affair that the English wife knows about but the American husband does not. After the deaths of the adulterers, more and more is uncovered about both the conduct and the emotional meaning of the affair. The story is narrated by the American husband and is in some sense a detective story, but he is no investigator. The facts come to him unwillingly, since he would have preferred from the beginning not to know; the suspense depends not on what has happened, as dramatic as it turns out to be, but on the narrator's unfolding interpretation of the passionate emotions manifested in very small gestures or brief remarks.
Ford's greatest gamble is in the naïveté of the narrator (Dowell), supposedly an idle but well-meaning wealthy man from an old Philadelphia family who readily accepts a sexless marriage with a woman (Florence) whose emotional life is a secret and a deception. Florence persuades Dowell at the commencement of their honeymoon that marital relations might so tax her weak heart that they are out of the question - she turns him into a servant who takes care of her every need while leaving her lots of free time to carry on with at least two lovers of her choosing. Dowell's idiom and mode of thinking are not perfectly American, and Ford's insights into American ways are slightly off, but America is not his subject, England is, and Dowell is convincing enough. His real virtue is that he is disarming, and he does not pretend to reliability. He freely offers his own self-doubts about his competence, both as an actor in the drama and as an interpreter, and he manages not to seem either untruthful or self-serving. He paints four portraits - Edward Ashburnham, the owner of a large estate in England; his wife, Leonora, daughter of impoverished Irish gentry; Florence, heiress to a New England fortune; and Nancy Rufford, Leonora's ward, who has lived with Edward and Leonora from the age of 13.
Edward and Leonora have every appearance of grace, character and respectability. Edward, too, is suffering from a bad heart, but he has been in the army in India, and has also been an excellent landlord and magistrate back in England. His failures are failures of self-knowledge and intelligence more than morality - he is upright, generous and responsible. But, fatally, he is "a sentimentalist", which makes him susceptible to the appearance of suffering or weakness, and also makes him immune to his wife (theirs is an arranged marriage), whose virtues are those of strength and reserve. She is repeatedly termed "cold" by Dowell, but her coldness seems more in the nature of untapped warmth (for example, she wants children, which she and Edward can't seem to produce). The first startling fact about them that the reader learns is that they haven't spoken in private for 13 years, though they are gracious to one another in public (surely this is possible only in an especially grand setting, with perfectly trained servants). Everything about Edward is plausible for, even typical of, a man of his position, but Ford takes a different approach from every previous English author to have contemplated the landed gentry, because he takes Edward's inner life, as empty as it is, seriously, anatomising and sympathising with its very emptiness.
It is clear as the novel proceeds that not only do Edward and Leonora have no idea what intimacy is, they also have no way of finding out: for one thing, they don't read novels, and for another, Leonora consults priests and nuns for marital advice, and what they have to offer are third-hand clichés such as "men are like that". Edward consults no one, and there seems to be no structure in his life that would permit such consultation. Other men of his social class tell dirty stories, perhaps as a form of sharing information, but these make Edward uncomfortable. Thus, when Edward begins to feel out of sympathy with Leonora some three or four years into their marriage, he is ripe for exploitation, and he ends up making a costly liaison and losing about 40 percent of the principal value of his estate. Over the next 10 years Leonora takes over management of the estate and brings it back to its original value, but the balance of their relationship is fatally undermined by her control and his untrustworthiness.
Both the American marriage and the English marriage suffer from the emasculation of the husbands, and Dowell criticises Leonora and Florence, but Ford depicts the husbands more complexly. They have fully colluded in their emasculation by not knowing how to be men - the reason for Dowell's failure (symbolised by the fact that unlike other Americans, he has no interest in earning money) is unclear, but the reason for Edward's failure is that he has received no instruction in anything but duties and forms. He is also slightly stupid. Dowell is content in his emasculation, but Edward has unfulfilled yearnings for companionship and support that he finds in a series of women, with Leonora's tacit acceptance. Leonora holds out the hope that once their financial imbalance is righted, he will get interested in her again, and things seem to be moving in that direction when Florence entangles Edward in her much colder and less sentimental designs - Dowell says that she "annexes him".
Dowell maintains that Florence is a woman of the most shallow possible motivations - she wants to look good, dress well, display herself to intellectual advantage, and be catered to. She is purely and discreetly a social climber. Until Florence comes along, Leonora has accepted Edward's liaisons as well-meaning and necessary, worthy of her respect and even her care, but when he links himself with Florence, whom Leonora despises, she loses all respect for and sympathy with him, though she still loves and desires him.
I do want to comment on Ford's style, which makes great use of paradox. At one point, for example, while giving the history of Edward's military career, he says, "It would have done him a great deal of good to get killed." There is something quite reckless about that sentence, and yet it is perfectly understandable in context - it comes late in the novel, when we know that not only is Edward's end to be tragic, but also that the downward path to it is painful and pathetic. How much better for the dumb animal to have died heroically, in accordance with the system by which he lived. There are those who believe that The Good Soldier is one of the few stylistically perfect novels in any language, and perhaps what Ford was alluding to in his remarks about references and cross-references is this sense that the contradictory and complementary meanings in every paradoxical sentence are entirely understandable because he has made sure a clear explication of his fictional situation - the psychologies of his characters, the interweaving of character and event, intention and chance.
Ford originally titled his novel The Saddest Story. After the outbreak of the first world war and his departure for the front, his editor changed the title to The Good Soldier, which Ford did not care for. But the editor was right - Ford's title is empty and meaningless. The Good Soldier subtly cues the reader to the larger social dimension of Ford's subject. Leonora and Edward, and to a lesser degree Dowell and Florence, are struggling with ignorance as much as moral failure. They are representatives of a system that fails them and fails in their failure. It is the subtler side of Dickens's Circumlocution Office, of Thackeray's Vanity Fair. In Dickens's and Thackeray's day, the landed gentry could still be attacked. By Ford's time, all the social and cultural arrangements of feudal Europe were imploding in the first world war. Ford was astute enough to depict both the inevitability of the implosion and its sadness - the world of Jane Austen a hundred years on, depopulated, lonely and dark.
Opening Line: “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.”
Closing Line: “She was quite pleased with it.”
Quotes: "But the real fierceness of desire, the real heat of a passion long continued and withering up the soul of a man is the craving for identity with the woman that he loves. He desires to see with the same eyes, to touch with the same sense of touch, to hear with the same ears, to lose his identity, to be enveloped, to be supported. For, whatever may be said of the relation of the sexes, there is no man who loves a woman that does not desire to come to her for the renewal of his courage, for the cutting asunder of his difficulties. And that will be the mainspring of his desire for her. We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist."
Rating: Excellent
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