What I Have Been Reading Lately: The Weekend by Charlotte Wood

The Weekend by Charlotte Wood is a narrative centred on a weekend during which three elderly women clear out the beach house of a friend who has died. The friend is called Sylvie and she seems to have left the beach house to a person called Gail, who never appears and about whom we are told almost nothing. 

The three women are called Wendy, Jude and Adele. Wendy is an academic, very slightly in the Germaine Greer mode, except she has - or had - a husband and children. Her children don’t like her because she was too absorbed in her work to pay them much attention when they were little. Her husband is dead. She has an incontinent half-blind extremely old dog, a present, as a puppy, from Sylvie at the time of Wendy’s husband’s death. Jude has made a career as a manager of very expensive restaurants and is very keen on order and keeping a tight control on everything she can. She is short-tempered and intolerant of mess. She has been mistress to a wealthy married man for decades and that relationship is the one joy of her life. Adele was once a successful actress but is no longer. She is fairly self-indulgent and has just discovered that she is being kicked out by her lover. She has no money, no prospects and nowhere to go, but she isn’t enormously troubled by any of this. These women have all been friends for a very long time, but their friendships have been thrown out of balance by the death of Sylvie, who, in a way that is never explained, made everything work smoothly.

Who Sylvie was remains a mystery throughout the book, and the reason the women feel they need to do this chore for Gael is never made clear. The house is built on a slope and has a peculiar outdoor lift arrangement on which the characters spend a lot of time travelling up and down. I suspect the author had some real place in mind as this is such an odd and unusual detail and required such a lot of explaining to help the reader imagine it. I think it would have been better left out as each time it was mentioned one was distracted by questions of why one had never seen one anywhere and whether such a thing would actually be permitted given the prevalent concerns about safety one encounters in Australia generally. So far as I could tell it didn’t serve any point or further the plot in any way. 

Inasmuch as there is a plot: I got mildly excited when Wendy takes an object described as unusually heavy out of a cupboard that she is clearing. The object, we are told, is contained within a black cover. Wendy finds she cannot open the black cover and hesitates. Then, after a moment, she chucks the mysterious thing into a black bin bag, along with the rest of the rubbish. Having had my attention drawn to this object so emphatically, I assumed it might turn out to be something important that would need recovering later in the book. However, it is never mentioned again - and no other line of plot comes up to create any kind of concern on the part of the reader about what happens next. 

Wood is excellent at creating a world on a page and extremely unusual in taking elderly women as her subjects. I imagine her intention in this novel is to meditate on friendship. Unfortunately, there was not one single line of it that leapt out at me and made me thing, “Oh what an insight”. It is vivid and well-written, but it is, I suspect unintentionally, very unsettling in its portrayal of three entirely self-absorbed, spiritually empty lives. Although the theme is friendship, there was little that could be called comforting or generous in these friendships - more a clinging to each other, faut de mieux, than anything involving love and care. Perhaps that is often the truth of human relationships, but it is a bleak one all the same. Perhaps this is realism and I ought not to object. Perhaps my Catholicism is getting in the way

Small Miracles

 I came across this observation from GK Chesterton recently: 

“The world will never starve for want of wonders, but for want of wonder. We should always endeavour to wonder at the permanent thing, not at the mere exception. We should be startled by the sun, and not by the eclipse. We should wonder less at the earthquake and wonder more at the earth. What was wonderful about childhood is that any thing in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world.”

Shortly afterwards, I found that one of the small pots of unidentified bulbs I had bought some weeks earlier had burst into flower:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen glossier examples of crocus. I was amazed. 

But, while they could hardly be classified as the permanent thing Chesterton urges us to wonder at, they could not really be called the exception either, given crocus are ubiquitous in late winter and early spring, (one proof of this is the fact that James Marriott also mentioned crocus this week: he spotted one flowering in the wild - and the incident reminded him that Geoffrey Hill wrote a poem about crocus). 

Whichever category Chesterton would have put crocus in - permanent or exception - I think he would have agreed that mine at least - so richly purple, so radiant - are miracles in his “world full of miracles”.

For a time, the other pot I’d bought remained harder to feel any wonder at - while its companion offered a storm of shining flowers, all it could manage was this unpromising set of stalks:

But then one morning I discovered those stalks had transformed themselves into these exquisite flowers:

Can Bad People Do Good Work

Today at a second-hand bookstall I found a collection of articles by Clement Freud. I bought it and began to read it and so far have found it hilarious. 

The book was published in 2009. In 2016, after Freud's death, two women revealed Freud had molested them when they were in their early teens. One was raped by him. 

Is it wrong to continue to find someone's work hilarious, once they have been revealed to be wicked? It was easy to forego the creative output of Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris as neither of them ever created anything I was interested in. I think most of Wagner sounds like the score for Ben-Hur so his association with Nazism has never meant I've had to think about depriving myself of his music, as I wouldn't choose to listen to it anyway.

The dilemma comes when one likes the work, but not the person who created it. Caravaggio was a murderer but his Taking of Christ is still marvellous. Bill Cosby's monologues would probably still make me laugh - and Kramer in Seinfeld certainly does.

Does it achieve anything to refuse to be amused by Clement Freud's anecdotes? Is laughing along with what he writes a way of being complicit in his actions?

I suppose there's the whole performance of reading someone's work in the light of ghastly posthumous revelations. That seems to be a tactic for Alice Munro fans. In both instances - Munro and Freud - I rather wish that particular light thrown on their work had remained dimmed

Unintended Consequences

There are many consequences of being asked to accept that men who believe themselves to be women are women. The one that is little discussed is the difficulty now faced by women who are women but look a little bit like men - or at least like men who believe themselves to be women and dress up as if they were.

Once upon a time this suspicion wasn't really likely to come up because there wasn't an identity game being played with the public where, if a man says he's a woman, he is recorded across all forms of media as a woman, with no trace remaining of any transition being made. As a result of this new practice, if a woman's bone structure is somewhat masculine, many people these days start to wonder whether she might in fact be a man passing himself off as a sex into which he was not born. 

It was an article in The Times recently that started me thinking about this. Apparently there is a successful writer who has the pen name Freida McFadden but is actually called something else. These are pictures of Freida McFadden. Judging by McFadden's advice to other writers, gender is a complicated issue in this writer's mind. The killer apparently can be a he and be a mother and a daughter. 

More Food

A Syrian Antioch Christian family (that is members of the Orthodox Church of Antioch), living for the moment in Istanbul, invited someone we know who lives there too to a lunch to celebrate Donald Trump’s inauguration today. This is our friend's description of the meal; I'm jealous: “They live in the most modest rented backstreet flat imaginable, yet they prepared a feast fit for a king. We started with perfect sesame bread dipped in pomegranate sauce, olive oil, and powdered cumin. Baby olives were served with fresh tomatoes, and yoghurt was served with beetroot and capers. Then came succulent lamb chops on pide bread and fresh rocket. Even the mineral water had been carried from Antioch and was raised to the health of President Trump. There was a dessert of crystallised pumpkin dressed with sesame sauce and walnuts."

Food in Fiction - The Siege of Krishnapur by JG Farrell

Described in The Siege of Krishnapur, there is a meal more delicious than I would have expected in British India. Here it is:

"The fried fish in batter that glowed like barley sugar, the curried fowl seasoned with lime juice, coriander, cumin and garlic, the tender roast kid and mint sauce."

Perhaps it's less a meal than a mere list of dishes. But delicious all the same.

Recent Reading - The Siege of Krishnapur by JG Farrell

I read JG Farrell’s Troubles a dozen years ago and enjoyed it, particularly Farrell’s descriptions of food. All that I remember now, aside from the food bits, is something disgusting in a chamber pot and the main character, in a state of mild and indecisive unhappiness, mixed with confusion - either mine or his - wandering about a lot in the gardens of a hotel, in or just outside a small town in Ireland. 

In The Siege of Krishnapur, Farrell abandons the damp decay of rural Ireland in favour of an imaginary outpost of Empire during the Indian Mutiny. Farrell, I think, viewed most human behaviour as folly and, perhaps to ensure the reader understands that the enterprise that is the brief presence of the British in Krishnapur is part of that folly, he begins the book by showing the reader Krishnapur as it is now, long after the Indian Mutiny. His opening pages provide a wonderfully evocative description of what travellers would see when approaching what is left of Krishnapur from a plain to its east. By the time he brings the reader close to the settlement, it becomes clear that Krishnapur is now totally deserted. It “has the air of a place you might see in a melancholy dream”. 

Skilfully Farrell moves from this introduction back into a past where Krishnapur is a hub of British activity. He assembles a cast of vivid characters, about whom he seems to feel no particular affection - the two doctors who are opposed in their approaches to treating cholera and one of whom is described much later as “the best of us all. The only one who knew what he was doing”; the phrenology-obsessed Magistrate; Fleury, the semi-intellectual, who is useless and, in his attitudes to women, reminded me of the men in Women Know Your Limits; Harry, the less well-educated soldier, who Fleury “always condescended to think rather dull”, but who turns out to be an infinitely more useful person to have around than Fleury himself; the Padre, who I suspect Farrell intended should be laughable but I found admirable in the circumstances; and, above all, the Collector, a true Victorian, a man who has never forgotten the several “ecstatic summer days” he spent at the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace, marvelling at the engineering feats and models of possible inventions on display. Among the things he admired were a model of a train that would lay down its own track as it progressed; and drinking glasses with separate compartments inside them so that somehow a drink becomes more fizzy for the person drinking it. 

The Collector’s walls are “thickly armoured with paintings” and among his favourite possessions are a marble bas-relief called The Spirit of Science Conquers Ignorance and Prejudice and a small sculpture called Innocence Protected by Fidelity, “a scantily clothed young girl, asleep with a garland of flowers in her lap; beside her a dog had its paw on the neck of a gagging snake which had been about to bite her.” At the start of the book the Collector compares himself to the Magistrate and feels satisfaction that, unlike the Magistrate, he, the Collector, is a whole man. “For science and reason is not enough”, he thinks, “A man must also have a heart and be capable of understanding the beauties of art and literature.” 

For a time, all is well in the little island of Victorian civilisation that is Krishnapur. Not even the faintest glimmer of doubt has entered the mind of any of the enclave’s inhabitants about their mission in India. The Collector, at the pinnacle of Krishnapur society, is the only one who seems concerned by certain small but strange incidents involving chapatis, but not enough to have his faith shaken. He remains in love with statistics - “At the thought of statistics, The Collector …felt his heart quicken with joy…Nothing was able to resist statistics, not even Death itself” - and strong in the conviction that anything and anywhere, including the entire Indian nation, can and should be wrangled into leading a Victorian life. 

The story of the book is the story of the destruction of Krishnapur and of its inhabitants’ illusions, most particularly those of the Collector. The Collector is forced to recognise “that there was a whole way of life of the people in India which he would never get to know and which was totally indifferent to him and his concerns.” His beloved sculptures and models from the Great Exhibition - and, indeed, everything material he holds dear - are swept away, some used as reinforcements to crumbling battlements, some simply smashed in weeks of fighting. The accoutrements of civilisation - fine clothing, cleanliness, decent burial - all vanish so quickly it is impossible not to recognise the flimsiness of the edifice in which the faith of the Collector and his companions has been placed. 

However, at the end of the book, for most of them, the effect of the experience is more or less fleeting. “It is surprising how quickly the survivors returned to the civilised life they had been living before”, Farrell tells us, “Only sometimes in dreams the terrible days of the siege, which were like the dark foundation of the civilised life they had returned to, would return years later to visit them: then they would awake, terrified and sweating, to find themselves in white starched linen, in a comfortable bed, in peaceful England”. 

But the Collector absorbs the meaning of what he has experienced and consequently he does not adjust so easily after the experience he has been through in India. He sees things with new eyes: 

“Crossing for the last time that stretch of dusty plain which lay between Krishnapur and the railhead, the Collector experienced more strongly than ever before the vastness of India; he realised then, because of the widening perspective, what a small affair the siege of Krishnapur had been, how unimportant, how devoid of significance.” 

Back at home he takes “to pacing the streets of London, very often in the poorer areas, in all weathers, alone, seldom speaking to anyone but staring, staring as if he has never seen a poor person in his life before.”

Meeting Fleury by chance one day, he stops and they chat. 

“Culture is a sham”, the Collector tells Fleury, “It’s a cosmetic painted on life by rich people to conceal its ugliness.” 

Fleury tries to argue and to persuade the Collector of the importance of ideas. 

“Oh, ideas … said the Collector dismissively”. 

Farrell ends with speculation about the Collector, speculation that highlights the mystery, even absurdity, of most human endeavour and of life itself, (Farrell's central theme):

“The years go by and the Collector undoubtedly felt, as many of us feel, that one uses up so many options, so much energy, simply in trying to find out what life is all about. And as for being able to do anything about it well … Perhaps by the very end of his life, in 1880, he had come to believe that a people, a nation, does not create itself according to its own best ideas, but is shaped by other forces, of which it has little knowledge.”

Reading these words, I had assumed that Farrell was elderly when he wrote his novels and they were the result of years of experience. In fact, he died after falling while fishing on a cliff in Ireland at the age of only 43. The admirable richness of his imagination is everywhere on display in The Siege of Krishnapur, together with a wonderful skill at telling an interesting story and weaving it with wit and intelligence. I find it hard to discover that he was so young and a missed footing robbed us of more work by him.