Recent Reading - Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt

One of my children is a teacher and at the end of term she often gets enchanting letters of thanks from those she teaches. In one she showed me the other day, the writer recommended a book, saying "I cried throughout the whole book but it was worth it." I had the same experience with Loved and Missed. I have seldom enjoyed a book so wholeheartedly.

The book tells the story of Ruth, her largely estranged daughter, Eleanor, and her daughter's child, Lily. Ruth is, like the daughter I mention above, a teacher of English literature in a girls' school. She tells her pupils: 

"There is so much in life that doesn't matter, so many things that hold you back, hem you in and throw you off the scent of what's important. Don't get too bogged down in things that don't count or things you cannot influence, and specifically don't worry too much about making sure others know you're in the right, because it so easily gets in the way of what you want and need. Become an expert at shrugging most of life off and free yourself for what interests you. Hone your focus. Don't bother with cleaning or tidiness beyond basic hygiene. Don't make your appearance your primary concern. It will zap all your creativity. Be as self-sufficient as you dare. Sometimes you hold more strength when people don't know what you think or feel, so be very careful whom you confide in. People can run with your difficulties when you least expect it, distort them, relish them even, and before you know it they're not yours any more. Respect your privacy. And earn your own money or you'll lack power. Take good care of your friendships, nurture them and they'll strengthen you. Don't turn frowning at the defects of other people into a hobby, delicious though it may be; it poisons you. Read every day - it is a practice that dignifies humans. Become a great reader of books and it will help you with reality, you'll more easily grasp the truth of things and that will set you up for life."  

Among her favourite books is Russell Hoban's Bread and Jam for Frances, which instantly made me love her, as it is also one of mine. Even without that detail, she is an extremely endearing character, brave, perceptive, (she describes a friend's family has having "those brittle English manners that always seemed to me more like bullying."), full of love and very aware of her own shortcomings. Her life has been difficult - her father disappeared from the family home when she was about six: "Slipping out to the shops, he said, overdressed for the weather, big coat, hat even; hours passed...he had gone" - and after that, Ruth took care of her mother, "a lovely person but even as a child I saw she was young for her age".  Despite the child Ruth's best efforts, her mother tries to kill herself. Ruth makes no complaint - if anything she feels remorse for not having done better - but she does admit that "my childhood required a lot of ingenuity." 

Eleanor, Ruth's daughter, is the product of a short relationship with a man "for whom everyday life involved a series of evasions; secrets and hiding were second nature to him, subtle vanishing acts. He valued his privacy so much he didn't even like being asked how he was." She was born when Ruth was thirty. Ruth's mother died around the same time. Ruth blames herself for the difficult relationship she has with her daughter, feeling that she relied on her too much.  At first all was well between mother and daughter, but "a few weeks after she hit thirteen...she swung her love away from me" Ruth explains, adding "She started staying out all night when she wasn't quite fourteen." Eleanor tells her mother.  'It's impossible for me to breathe when I'm with you".  "Neglect your children and they will be obsessed with you for life", Ruth remembers reading, and then wonders "what about when they neglected you?" 

Although Eleanor reserves an "ice voice" for Ruth, her eyes sending "out flares of contempt", I doubt Ruth is to blame for anything. Eleanor once told her she "had a genius for disappointment" but when the reader gets to know Eleanor this seems extremely unfair. In fact, as a priest who appears a couple of times in the story recognises, Ruth has a genius for kindness - and as the priest observes kindness is "faith in a pure form." 

Ruth becomes the surrogate mother to Eleanor's child, Lily, and she brings her up miraculously, beautifully. The final pages are told by Lily herself and she is a credit to Ruth. Perhaps my favourite line from Lily is this one:

"The people we love are always famous in our heads."

I have deliberately given very little away about the story, as I think it is important to come to the book quite fresh for it to retain all its beauty. The important thing I want to convey is my love for this novel. It is full of wisdom and understanding and I found it enchanting. It is so far my favourite book of the year.

Hydrangeas

I have a number of hydrangeas on my conscience, having tried and failed to grow them in a Canberra garden more often than was sensible. The dry heat of summer got them every time. My admiration for the hydrangeas I've been seeing on walks in Bristol is therefore tinged with envy - not to mention mild remorse.

Hydrangeas are often considered unglamorous. They are usually grown in suburban gardens, and suburban gardens tend to be looked down on by the arbiters of taste. While I would be happy if I never smelt a privet hedge in flower again, (even though one of them did inspire Michael Frayn to write a novel), I love well-tended suburban gardens. 

I find them very reassuring. They suggest that there are people around who want to create beauty - or at least prettiness - and have the patience and discipline to pursue that goal over months and years. In other words, at least for me, suburban gardens - and burgeoning hydrangeas - far from being dull and dreary, (“suburban” as an adjective is too often used to encompass “dull” and “dreary”), are small markers of civilisation.

Recent Reading - The Thanatos Syndrome by Walker Percy

While Walker Percy is a good and perceptive writer, The Thanatos Syndrome contains a lot of sexual detail, including pedophilia, and as a result I wince slightly when I recall the book - and, while reading it, for large sections of time I could feel my face puckering up in involuntary disgust.

The main character is a psychiatrist, who was raised as a Catholic:

"My mother was a thin, hypertensive woman, perpetually worried by my father’s airy improvidence, by his playing at la vie de bohème...She was both pious and hostile. She had it both ways. If someone offended her, she sent them holy cards, notices of Masses for their ‘intentions’. What she was really saying was: ‘Even though you’ve done this rotten thing, I’m having a Mass said for you.’”

The psychiatrist believes in "the psyche", explaining:

"I became a psyche-iatrist...a doctor of the soul...I discovered that it is not sex that terrifies people. It is that they are stuck with themselves. It is not knowing who they are or what to do with themselves. They are frightened out of their wits that they are not doing what, according to experts, books, films, TV, they are supposed to be doing. They, the experts, know, don’t they?"

As the book is a sequel and I haven't read the initial book, I am unable to tell you why, at the novel’s beginning, the protagonist has just finished a prison term. It seems odd, as he is one of the few characters in the book who does nothing appalling - possibly this is testament to the efficacy of penal detention, but I don’t think so.

The story is set in Lousiana and concerns an attempt by a charlatan colleague of the psychiatrist to manipulate the population's cerebral cortex by adding something to the water. The charlatan refers to fluoridation and AIDS, in attempts to justify his actions, but there is no justification for what he tries to do.

There are some beautiful descriptive passages:

"Nothing could look less sinister than the gentle golden light of Louisiana autumn, which is both sociable and sad, casting shadows from humpy oaks across a peopled park, boys and girls in running suits gold and green, a bus loading up with day students, and the playing fields beyond, youth in all the rinsing sadness of its happiness, bare-legged pep-squad girls flourishing in sync banners as big as Camelot, boys in a pickup game of touch coming close to the girls both heedless and mindful.”

and Percy writes perceptively and with good observation, (his proxy, the narrator explains: "Living a small life gave me leave to notice small things.”) When Percy describes someone thus: “There is a space between what he is and what he is doing. He is graceful and conscious of his gracefulness, like an actor”, I feel he has really captured a certain kind of person, one who is preoccupied above all with themselves and the effect they have on others.

Similarly, when he has his main character buy a bartender a drink, this observational passage strikes me as spot on:

“He drinks like a bartender: as one item in the motion of tending bar,wiping, arrangig glasses, pouring the drink from the measuring spout as if it were for a customer, the actual drinking occurring almost invisibly, as if he had rubbed his nose, a magician’s pass."

The narrator tells us at one point:

"I was reading a new history of the Battle of the Somme, a battle which, with the concurrent Battle of Verdun, seemed to me to be events marking the beginning of a new age, an age not yet named. In the course of these two battles, two million young men were killed, toward no discernible end”

This signals fairly obviously the author’s preoccupation with the First World War. This preoccupation is made explicit again when an alcoholic priest character called Simeon declares that: “the world really ended in 1916 and we’ve been living in a dream ever since”.

Simeon, it turns out, was present at the liberation of a World War Two concentration camp. His insight from that experience is that:"We’ve got it wrong about horror: it doesn’t come naturally but takes some effort.” Simeon also declares that it is tenderness that leads to the gas chambers and claims that his: “is the secret of all alcoholics: that the bottle enabled me to enjoy my spite.”

As may be obvious from my rather cursory approach to it, I did not enjoy this book. As I’ve already explained there are some fairly graphic descriptions of sexual activity with children and I am too squeamish to take any pleasure from a text containing those.

As I am always interested in food in fiction, I should note that I was cheered by the one Southern meal that is described in the novel. Here it is, for what it’s worth:

"Breakfast in the old dining room is a meal of quail, grits, beaten biscuits, fried apple rings, and the same bowl-size cups of chicoried coffee."

I should also perhaps highlight this disquisition on death from Simeon:

"Do you know the one thing dying people can’t stand? It’s not the fact they’re going to die. It’s other people, the undying, so-called healthy people. Their loved ones. And after a while of course their loved ones can’t stand the sight of them, haven’t a word to say to them, and they can’t stand the sight of their loved ones. They liked me, because I liked them, and they knew it. You can’t fool children and you can’t fool dying people. We were in the same boat. They knew I was a drunk, a failed priest. Dying people, suffering people, don’t lie. They tell the truth. Death makes honest men of all of us. Everyone else lies. Everyone else is dying too and spending their entire lives lying to themselves. I’ll tell you a peculiar thing: It makes people happy to tell the truth after a lifetime of lying."

I bought the book for 30p from the shop where I used to buy books for 20p (an example of the rise in the cost of living, for those in the market for such things). I have never done such a thing with a book but on this occasion, as I’d only spent such a small amount of money on it, I threw it in the dustbin when I’d finished it. I suppose that’s a bit Fahrenheit 451, but I did not want it on my shelves, knowing some of the things it contained. I wish I could now get them out of my memory.

Recent Reading - Candia McWilliam, A Little Stranger

Little Stranger is told by Daisy and begins with the departure of a much-loved nanny and the arrival of a new one, Margaret Pride.

Daisy is part-Dutch, a work-from-home editor (a job she isn't sure is worthwhile), the mother of a small boy called John and the wife of a frequently absent but very wealthy husband called Solomon, who remains shadowy and with whom she has what might be described most charitably as an old-fashioned relationship. The family live in a house in the country, looked after by a cook plus indoor servants and outside staff, (plus the nanny). 

The family's cook is called Lizzie. In Daisy's description of Lizzie, we see some of Candia McWilliam's talent as a writer. Lizzie, we learn, "was sensible and knew children, having had several, She was not discontented with repetition, but comforted by it, so that her cooking and her conversation had a soothing constancy. She was free of any urban compulsion to entertain, so she was always interesting". Daisy explains that John liked to sit beside Lizzie "as she made stew". 

"She was free of any urban compulsion to entertain, so she was always interesting" - I loved this sentence.

McWilliam also gives us pen portraits of two very long-serving maids. Edie "looked like someone who might have a singular, solitary talent - marquetry or the violin". Bet, on the other hand "in private was unimaginable; she was entirely public...a tub with tiny hands and feet; she always wore high heels...she loved pretty things and was violently maternal. 'Oh John' she shouted, 'Oh look at you, I could eat you on toast.' From most people he flinched, but he loved Bet. She bought him presents she could not afford, and often asked to take him home with her. To John too this was an unspeakably glamorous prospect...Her husband bred fancy guinea-pigs with whorls in their fur; sometimes she brought one for John to look at, in a box, in the back of her car."  The boxes are "as a rule from the supermarket, having contained slightly substandard crisps, or imperfect pizzas. Bet knew where to get seconds of the already most inedible foods; her best connection in this way was the friend who got her unlabelled cans." "Could be giblets, could be niblets, they're not fussy, but I must say I would not eat those dirty pheasants", Bet declares.

Food is everywhere in the novel and appetite is its central preoccupation. While Bet is not judged for eating rubbish, at the very start Margaret's suitability is questioned by the much-loved departing nanny, who disapproves of giving a child sweets, as Margaret has done. Daisy also does not find sweet things appealing. She tells us that she loves, "fresh, clean food, pickled and salted to an alerting brackishness", adding that "for lunch, I had eaten approximately seventy black olives, of the type which is wrinkled and black as tar on a summer road...accompanied...with a jug of black coffee" (as her husband does not share her taste, she explains that she eats the things he likes in the evening while "most days I ate a plateful of something he disliked for lunch ... smoked roes or raw steak or the vinegar of capers. Sometimes I even managed to find the gelatinous pinkish herring, 'haring", of my Dutch childhood").  

Margaret's food, as described by Daisy, stands in stark contrast to these things:

"Margaret loved sweet things and her shopping bags were full of those strange foods made for consumers addicted to bulk and sweetness but desirous of no nourishment. She bought those strange costly foods whose colours are of an unconvincing brightness. She drank chocolate milk so thick it resembled a bodily secretion, cheesecake which sighed to the knife. At the end of each day she calculated the value in calories of all she had eaten. The refrigerator in the nursery kitchen was full of bright drinks in clear vessels like aqualungs, and bread the colour of snow. For butter she had grease which reeked faintly of town water and her jam contained neither fruit nor sugar but was red as ric-rac. She did not seem to be aware that a lettuce and an omelette made from our own eggs would taste better and do her less harm than these weightless hefty meals of cloud and promise. In brown bags, John's food had its own place in the refrigerator, unseductive and plain. "

Again McWilliam's phrasemaking impresses me - I will never look at flavoured milk in the same way, since reading "chocolate milk so thick it resembled a bodily secretion."

Daisy points out that: "Our farm produced meat, the garden vegetables, we had milk and eggs and the cook made bread. I wondered sometimes whether these things were too physical for Margaret to bear."

Daisy describes herself as an "ex-beauty" and at one point tells us that she is "quirky" - (and as a narrator she definitely is - at one point, she suddenly breaks whatever the equivalent of the fourth wall is in fiction and, after stating, "I read much too quickly and want really only to read long simple stories with happy endings", asks the reader, "Can you think of any?"). Her job is solitary and as a result of this and being surrounded by staff:

"Sometimes I talked too much, not having spoken to anyone for a time. When I did talk to people, they were frequently the wrong ones...I was not often alone but I was never precisely more than accompanied."

Having done similar solitary work while living in diplomatic households with an Edwardian number of staff, I empathise with Daisy when she describes how she feels in her unusual role (especially the three words "useless but essential"):

"Inside our house women worked; in the garden men were employed. There were two women who cleaned, and one who cooked; there was Margaret and there was me. No two of us were equal, though I felt that it was not I who established the hierarchy. There was me, useless but essential, with the others below, each at her allotted, or, it may have been, chosen, level."

McWilliam's writing is full of insight, but what keeps one reading this novel is a dread that builds as it progresses, a dread centred on Margaret, with her apron that reads "Have you hugged someone today" and her twee way of speaking: "To listen to her was to hear language strangled at birth." The sense of mounting unease and vague menace is similar to that felt while reading Turn of the Screw by Henry James.

Daisy becomes pregnant - "Once you are pregnant, you have an unbreakable appointment to meet a stranger", she tells us, which is a rather a good perception, I think. Be that as it may, Margaret gains a more dominant position in John's life as the pregnancy progresses, even taking him to London without Daisy, where Daisy tells us snobbishly (Daisy is nothing if not a snob) that they spend there time there doing "everything that a middle American with a good job and no idea of Europe would have done."  

In the end, the unease is not maintained with the skill of Henry James. Things come to a head and appear to be resolved satisfactorily. Daisy tells us that the tale is a story of two madnesses and admits that the strangest thing of all was that she agreed to employ Margaret Pride "because I hated her on sight, and was ashamed of myself for doing so." Pride, the nanny, seems to have been seen off and life apparently returns to normal, if Daisy is a reliable narrator. I think the book might be a better one, if she isn't. Each reader will have to decide for themselves

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Quotations that struck me from the book

(1) While on the whole Candia McWilliam's writing is rather beautiful, she overdoes it on occasion, as when describing a dish of butterscotch instant whip as "a dish of quivering brown dancer's belly, its jewel a pitiless carmine cherry" or declaring that, "Like women, the Low Countries are used to invasion"

(2) I wasn't sure what the function of Daisy's Dutchness was, but possibly it was to allow McWilliam to make these two statements through her:

"The British, even the rich ones, drink envy with ice and a slice"

"In all flat lands, the sky is bigger."

(3) The story is partly an examination of how females interact. As Daisy remarks:

"Women all together could affect each other like small moons."

(4) On a practical level, if you read this novel, you will come away having learned (a) how to skin an eel and (b) how to eat a smoked eel, as well as (c) what to use to preserve wedding dresses: 

(a) and (b): "To skin an eel, imagine taking down the socks of a soaked child, swiftly and mercifully. To eat a smoked eel as the Dutch did in my childhood, lift your head and swallow like a cormorant" 

(c) "black, acid-free tissue paper".

(4) I cannot decide if this statement, made by Daisy, is profound or just the bleeding obvious:

"Fear is a very big thing, and there's a great variety of kinds."

Recent Reading - The Children of Men by PD James

Many people will already know The Children of Men from its film version, which I enjoyed, while feeling it didn't completely resolve the story it told. A friend insisted that the novel was better than the film so I decided to give it a read. 

In the novel, PD James persuades her readers to imagine a world in which no babies have been born for an extremely long time. Sadly, given today's plunging birth rates, this is no longer particularly difficult to do.  It is a world where "Only on tape and records do we now hear the voices of children, only on film or on television programmes do we see the bright, moving images of the young", a world where everyone suffers in the way that at present only those who wish to have children and cannot do so suffer, a world where not just individual unlucky families but human life collectively has no future, leaving only "the grey company of the old who seemed to shuffle through Europe like a moving fog." 

James's idea is a fascinating one. However, in the book there is no more resolution of the situation she imagines than there is in the film. The narrative collapses into a spell of English Gothic, followed by a glimpse of what might have happened to Britain if a vaguely Oswald Mosleyesque figure had come to power. No explanation of what has made things go wrong is given, nor any real indication of whether things will return to normal. A ring and the power it bestows appear in the final pages, but whether its wearer will be able to resist its temptations is also left unclear.

The novel is richly imagined and tells the story of a terrible but far from impossible situation. It is the idea above all that makes the book intriguing, but too much is left unresolved and unexplained to make it a really satisfying read.

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Quotations of interest from the book:

1. As well as being prescient about the collapse of human fertility, James seems to have predicted the current unrest in Europe about rising immigration when she puts the following passage into the mouth of an authority figure questioned about the way migrants are treated:

"You're not suggesting we should have unrestricted immigration? Remember what happened in Europe in the 1990s. People became tired of invading hordes from countries with just as many natural advantages as this, who had allowed themselves to be misgoverned for decades through their own cowardice, indolence and stupidity and who expected to take over and exploit the benefits which had been won over centuries by intelligence, industry and courage, coincidentally perverting and destroying the civilisation of which they were so anxious to become part."

2. On the subject of the youngest members of this new childless society a statement is made that is true of all children, not just the final generation:

"If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils."

3. An interesting point is made about history in a world where there is no future for humanity:

"History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future, is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species."

4. I think PD James is wrong about charm, when she makes the following observation in the text, but I am always interested in any attempt to understand the phenomenon:

"Charm is often despised but I can never see why. No one has it who isn't capable of genuinely liking others, at least at the actual moment of meeting and speaking. Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn't false." 

I think James (or her narrator) does not understand that charmers are not "genuinely liking others" when they charm, but merely liking the response they get back from others.

5. There is a dissatisfied cook in the novel whose attitude reminds me very much of that of a dissatisfied cook I used to have to deal with - although my cook never made a picnic half as nice as the one described:

"Our midday meal was picnic set out for us in the kitchen, a thermos of homemade soup, bread, cheese and pate, slabs of rich home made fruit cake prepared by a lugubrious cook who managed illogically to grumble simultaneously at the small extra trouble we caused and at the lack of prestigious dinner parties at which she could display her skill."

6. James makes various observations about children that I am unsure are correct (is any generalisation about a class of people ever correct?):

"Children are always ready to believe that adult catastrophes are their fault." 

"Children are unjust and judgemental to their parents."

Additionally, surely the two statements contradict each other?

7. James's observation on the dying probably is accurate though:

"The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead."

8. James has an important female character express her views about the central character of Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. There is no need for this plot-wise, so possibly James herself wanted to get the opinion off her own chest: 

"I don't see why you should particularly pity someone who was given so much and made such poor use of it. She could have married Lord Warburton and done a great deal of good to his tenants, to the poor. All right, she didn't love him, so there was an excuse, and she had higher ambitions for herself than marriage to Lord Warburton. But what? She had no creative talent,  no job, no training. When her cousin made her rich, what did she do? Gad round the world with Madame Merle, of all people. And then she marries that conceited hypocrite and goes in for Thursday salons gorgeously dressed. What happened to all the idealism?" 

"Isabel Archer and Dorothea (in Middlemarch) both discard eligible suitors to marry self-important fools, but one sympathises more with Dorothea. Perhaps this is because George Eliot respects her heroine and, at heart, Henry James despises his."

To me this entirely misses the point: surely the novel is the story of a person's slow realisation of her deep misguidedness. It is precisely because she has been a fool and realises it that the reader feels sorry for her. It seems to me that the position of the reader of Portrait of a Lady is the position of God observing his misguided creations.

9. James, (PD, not Henry) also has her narrator say:

"Ageing is inevitable but it is not consistent. There are plateaux of time stretching over years when the faces of friends and acquaintances look virtually unchanged. Then time accelerates and within a week the metamorphosis takes place."

Is this true? I haven't particularly noticed it to be so, but perhaps it is. It is interesting to ponder.

10. Thanks to James, I felt renewed interest last time I crossed the bridge in Green Park, having just read these remarks in Children of Men:

"Crossing the bridge which spanned the lake, they paused to gaze towards Whitehall. Here, unchanged, was one of the most exciting views that London had to offer, English and yet exotic, the elegant and splendid bastions of Empire seen across shimmering water and framed in trees."

I had always liked the view from that bridge towards Horseguards (presuming it is in that direction she imagines her characters pausing and gazing), but James's insight made me see the thing with fresh eyes, for which I am grateful 

Prescience

Elizabeth Jennings died in 2001 but her poem called Euthanasia is the one that resonates with me following the recent vote in the UK parliament on “assisted dying”: