Month: January 2012

Adrian Mole

StuckinaBook All , 18 Comments

It’s the 30th anniversary of Adrian Mole today – can you believe it? – and the good people of Penguin offered me their new editions of all the books.  Knowing that my brother Colin is an Adrian fan, I thought I’d suggest him as a more suited recipient.  They sent off a set, and he wrote me a fab review.  Whenever I feature other people’s posts I want to say COMMENT, COMMENT, MAKE THEM FEEL WELCOME!  The new comment system may scupper this, but if it does, go and say hello on Facebook(!)  Over to you, Col.

It is 30 years since Adrian Mole leapt into the national consciousness from the pen of Sue Townsend, and to mark the occasion Penguin are re-issuing all eight volumes of the Mole saga.

Eight volumes? Really? The first surprise to many readers who loved Adrian in the seminal The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 ¾ – even the title is funny – and perhaps Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years, which was televised for the BBC, is that Townsend has been quite so prolific in writing about her best-loved creation. If for nothing else, then, this re-issue is a fine reminder that there was life after high school for the poet of Ashby-de-la-Zouch.

Adrian Mole is, to my mind, one of the finest comic creations in English literature. The diary format is perfect for exposing his lack of self-awareness, utterly delusional nature and inability to understand the world around him (a trick played many years before in The Diary of a Nobody) but, like many of the finest comic characters, we cannot help but empathise with him and hope that maybe, this time, he’ll get it right. Maybe Pandora, the woman Adrian is pathetically in love with for the majority of the series, will return his affections; maybe one of his literary efforts (Longing for Wolverhampton; Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland; Plague!) will get the respect it so richly doesn’t deserve; maybe his parents will cease to be a constant source of embarrassment and anguish. But then again, of course, maybe not.

As a teenager, Adrian Mole has a few themes that he returns to with unabated zeal: how much he loves Pandora (“Pandora’s father is a milkman! I have gone off her a bit”); his manifold sufferings (“I will be a latchkey kid, whatever that is”) and, unfailingly, the fact that he is an intellectual (“I have written to Malcolm Muggeridge, c/o the BBC, asking him what to do about being an intellectual”; “I am an intellectual but at the same time I am not very clever”). Then, of course, there is the Norwegian Leather Industry, knowledge of which – based on his score in a single school test – Adrian carries around with him like Bertie Wooster with his Scripture Knowledge prize. Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction begins with a reference to meeting Tony Blair at a 1999 conference on the topic.

When the series begins, Mole is – of course – 13 ¾, and by the final volume (so far; Townsend’s only comment about the future is her hope that Adrian go “onward, ever onward”) he is 40 and a grandfather, and it is a great tribute to the series that the child is still recognisable in the adult. From the first few pages of book one you could tell that he is the kind of person who would engage in a lengthy correspondence about the existence of WMDs, simply in order to get a refund on his travel expenses. Some of his traits are diminished a little by time: Mole no longer has such a heightened view of his importance in the world, and is not so blithely unaware of his surroundings as he once was. This is all to the good; a teenager whose reaction to Animal Farm is to ponder becoming a vet (later amended to boycotting bacon) is amusing; a grown man – and father to children from various different mothers – showing such vapidity would just be sad. Townsend is obviously fond of her hero, and he is not designed to be simply a figure of fun; it is genuinely touching when, in Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years, ‘The Top Secret Diary of Glenn Mole (13)’ begins “When I grow up I want to be my dad.”

As well as being an excellent character study over thirty years, the Adrian Mole series always has its finger on the political pulse, starting under Margaret Thatcher (“I was looking at our world map. I couldn’t find the Falkland Islands anywhere. My mother found them; they were hidden under a crumb of fruitcake”) and self-evident in The Weapons of Mass Destruction. Just the unlikely fact that Adrian’s only published work (actually ghost-written by his mother) is ‘Offally Good! – The Book!’, the companion to his TV cooking show, is an indictment of celebrity culture in Tony Blair’s Britain. Of course, the most overtly political entry in the Mole canon is The Secret Diary of Margaret Hilda Roberts Aged 14 ¼, which forms part of True Confessions of Adrian Mole.

As the series develops, so do the cast of characters in Adrian’s life (helpfully detailed in the back of these editions). Pandora becomes a prominent MP; school bully Barry Kent becomes a successful poet; Adrian’s best friend Nigel becomes a blind, gay, Buddhist van driver (though not necessarily all at the same time). Townsend also introduces a host of new characters, including the excellently-drawn Flowers family, one of whom becomes Mrs Daisy Mole in Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction. It is at this point that Adrian Mole lays down his pen, saying that “Happy people don’t keep a diary”, only to pick it up again in Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (the title taken from the fact that Adrian has problems with his prostate and, true to his nature, is chiefly annoyed by people pronouncing the word with an extraneous ‘r’) to record the fact that “it is two months and nineteen days since I made love to my wife, Daisy”. In the Q&A accompanying this new edition of the books, Townsend says that her favourite book in the series is The Prostrate Years, because she herself had suffered serious health problems and wanted to tackle the subject in a comic manner. I applaud the sentiment, but I must confess that I wish she hadn’t gone down the path she chose; while Adrian’s pursuit of Pandora was always amusing for its hopelessness, his relationship with Daisy appeared to be the true romance of the series, and its collapse was unfortunate. I would rank the first two and the penultimate books as the highlights of the series, but the central character is so strong that I re-read them all with enjoyment.

So that’s the books themselves: what about this re-issue in particular? I feel sorry for Roderick Mills, who was tasked with designing the new covers, because the original cover (the bathroom mirror with a shaving kit and Noddy toothbrush, beautifully demonstrating the dichotomies inherent within a youth becoming a man) is rightly iconic – something that is tacitly admitted by including it on the inside cover of the new Secret Diary. The designer opted for pastel shades for each book in the series, which strikes me as a little odd given that I would normally associate the colour scheme (though not the overall effect, I admit) with chick-lit. Perhaps it is an attempt to emphasise that Adrian Mole can be read and enjoyed by men and women of all ages, and is not the preserve of teenage boys, even given that David Walliams’ foreword to The Secret Diary (in which he finds space to name-check his own book for children) says “boys who were proud to say they had never read a book in their life read this one”.

The new editions also include a Q&A with Sue Townsend, Adrian Mole’s CV and literary CV, the Mole story, a roll call of principal characters and the first chapter of Townsend’s new book (this last I must confess I haven’t read, but having read The Queen and I and Rebuilding Coventry, I can assert that her skill with her pen isn’t limited to residents of Leicestershire). This is a generous set of add-ons, many of which help to give a sense of continuity to the chronicles of Adrian’s surprisingly eventful life and the array of characters who enter and exit it.

When asked if she regards Adrian Mole as a millstone round her neck, Townsend was emphatic in her response: “authors who complain about the success of their most well-known characters are fools”. If she chooses to continue his run, I won’t be complaining either.

Oh frabjous day!

StuckinaBook All 21 Comments

Over my blogging years (nearly five!) I have spent hours trying to add features that Blogger didn’t offer.  It took me an age to add a third column (now available as standard); I spent a long time adding a search box (now available as standard), but the area I’ve spent the most fruitless hours is in trying to add inline comments.  And it never worked properly.

Until now!  Blogger have FINALLY done something about it, after years and years of blogspot-users begging them to do so.  I spotted on Lyn’s blog that she could reply to comments, and she kindly pointed out where I could do it.  Hurrah!  Hurray!  (The page wouldn’t load, naturally, but I looked at a cached version through Google.)

Now, of course, this is Blogger… so it might not work.  (If it doesn’t, tell me via Facebook or email…)  I had to move comments down to be imbedded, rather than a separate window, which has caused all manner of drama before… but this time I’m hoping it’ll be fine.  No longer will I have to reply to your lovely comments in lengthy boxes far below the initial comment.

Thanks, Blogger.  All is forgiven.

Firefox… Schmirefox, more like.

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I don’t know about you, but my Firefox is being awful.  It crashes every five minutes, which would be really bad in a car, and is also pretty bad (though not as bad) in a whatever-you-call-internetty-things.  Umm… wow.  Sometimes I pretend to be more Luddite than I am, in the curious belief that it makes me seem endearing, but right now I can’t remember what you call IE, Firefox, etc.  Hmm.  This must be how computer geeks feel when they can’t remember if it’s ‘Jane Austen’ or ‘Jane Austin’.  That’s the sort of question which keeps Bill Gates awake at night, I imagine.

So, anyway, I’ve switched to Google Chrome, and I’m desperately trying to remember all the passwords that Firefox had kindly (and probably unsecurely) been memorising for me.  Nymeth helped me over Twitter to put in a bookmarks toolbar and, in lieu of anything else bookish to say tonight, I thought I’d show you a screenshot of my bookmarks.  You might well have to enlarge it somehow…  If your blog isn’t there, it’s not because I don’t love you… it’s because I love these guys more (heehee!)

Actually, I’ve already added someone since I took this screenshot.  So… it’s probably you ;)

Oh, I did have one book-related thing to say.  I’ve got hold of an Australian novel!  I’ll be joining in Australian Literature Month!  Are you?

Time Importuned – Sylvia Townsend Warner; or, Why Do Poetry and I Not Get Along, Wherein our Reader Struggles With Verse

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Well, I can tick off 1928 on A Century of Books, because on Saturday I read Time Importuned by Sylvia Townsend Warner.  This volume of poetry was published two years after Lolly Willowes, an excellent novel about which I’ll soon be writing a chapter of my thesis – but which I only wrote about very briefly on SiaB.  I intended to write another post last year, when I reread it.  I worry that, if I tried, I would end up writing ten thousand words… well, perhaps I’ll give it a go one day, since the review I wrote doesn’t do it justice.

Anyway, I read Time Importuned hoping that there would be something useful to include in that chapter (which, incidentally, there was) but I can’t say I’ve converted to a poetry lover.  This isn’t going to be a proper review, because I don’t really know how to write blog posts about poetry.  I can analyse them in a doing-an-English-degree sort of way, and I used to quite enjoy doing that, but blogs are chiefly about reading for pleasure.  The activities of the student are not those of the ardent reader – I enjoy both aspects, but they are distinct in my head.  You don’t want to know what I think of Warner’s use of syntax.  You might want to know whether or not I enjoyed reading Time Importuned – and the truth is, I don’t know.

Some poetry I hate.  If it doesn’t make sense to me on three readings, I’m not interested.  If the poet name-drops all manner of classical mythology, I raise my eyebrows; if they name-drop 21st century technology, I raise them still more (these were both frequent crimes in the Magdalen poetry society I occasionally visited.)

Some poetry I enjoy.  But mostly comic verse, or things which are probably considered doggerel by those in the know (does Longfellow fall into this category?  Does Walter de la Mare?)

Oddly enough, I enjoy writing poetry – but I’m under no illusion that it’s very good, and I do it entirely for my own amusement or catharsis, as case may be.  Since I rarely read poetry, I feel wholly unqualified to write it, and a little ashamed that I have the audacity to put pen to paper…

Something like Time Importuned… I just don’t know.  The topics covered tend towards hopeless love and countryside matters, often combined, and with an atmosphere almost as though they are old wives’ tales, passed down in small villages for many years.  Which was nice, but I did end up reading the poems mostly as though they were paragraphs of prose laid out in an unorthodox manner.  Perhaps that is a valid way of reading poetry… but perhaps it also misses a lot?  I don’t know how else to benefit from verse.  I deliberately slow myself down, by mouthing the words (I’m quite a fast reader of prose, in a manner which loses poems completely) but I still can’t imagine reading a volume of poetry for pleasure.  It’s not that I need prose, because often I read plays for pleasure – and that’s more or less as unusual a trait as poetry-adoration, so I’m led to understand.

Well, I’m going to type out a couple of the poems which I did quite enjoy, although I am far from the ideal reader for them.  Poetry washes by me, enchanting others who dip in their toes, and merely splashing me slightly.  So, before I get to some excerpts, I have a question… which poet/poetry would you recommend to the prose lover?  How would you go about converting me to the possibilities of poetry?

Over to Warner…

The Tree Unleaved

Day after day melts by, so hushed is the season,
So crystal the mornings are, the evenings so wrapped in haze,
That we do not notice the passage of the days ;
But coming in at the gate to-night I looked up for some reason,
      And saw overhead Time’s theft ;
For behold, not a leaf was left on the tree near by.

So it may chance, the passage of days abetting
My heedless assumption of life, my hands so careless to hold,
That glancing round I shall find myself grown old,
Forgotten my hopes and schemes, my friends forgotten and forgetting ;
      But all I can think of now
Is the pattern of leafless boughs on the windless sky.

Walking and Singing at Night

Darkened the hedge, and dimmed the wold,
We sang then as we trudged along.
The heart grown hot, the heart grown cold,
Are simple things in a song.

The lover comes, the lover goes,
On the same drooping interval,
Easy as from the ripened rose
The loosened petals fall.

Between one stanza and the next
A heart’s unprospered hopes are sighed
To death as lovely and unvexed
As ’twere a swan that died.

Alas, my dear, Farewell’s a word
Pleasant to sing but ill to say,
And Hope a vermin that dies hard ;
As you will find, one day.

Song for a Sunday

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Happy Sunday, everyone.  The cake was nice, thanks, although we had run out of icing sugar – so I couldn’t have it at work.  Instead, I had it whilst watching Miranda on DVD.  Chocolate cake with orange butter cream filling mmmmmmm….

Anyway, almost as nice as cake is this song from Rebecca Ferguson, ‘Nothing’s Real But Love’.  If you live in the UK you might have heard of Lovely Rebecca (as she’s known in my head) from the X Factor – a lot of people judge singers from these sorts of shows without hearing them.  So… have a listen!  She has a lovely, soulful voice.  Over to you, Lovely Rebecca…

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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I started a new part-time job this week (still as a librarian, but this time in a Special Collections reading room, so the materials are suddenly much more fragile and valuable!) and I’m pretty tired.  Back to work today (Saturday) but with the not-very-valuable books instead… and mostly reshelving.  Such is the ignominy of being a library dogsbody!  Still, I made a chocolate cake this evening, so at least I’ll have something delicious in my lunch, though I says it as shouldn’t.

I seem to have wandered away from the book/blog post/link format of my Weekend Miscellanies of late, but that’s because each week seems to be bursting at the seams with goodies.  But I’ll try to remember to keep all three in somewhere…

1.) For those of you who can’t get enough of me here (ahem) you can read some of my writing somewhere else this week!  My review of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, The Hogarth Press, and the Networks of Modernism (phew) ed. Helen Southworth is in the CILIP Rare Books Newsletter.  Have a gander here (it’s in Issue 91) if you fancy it.  In summary, it’s a good book!  And my review starts by quoting E.M. Delafield.

2.) Linda Gillard’s A Lifetime Burning is a very good, strange, wonderful book.  I said that, in a few more words, back in a rather speedy review here.  It’s now available on Kindle here at the ridiculously cheap price of 88p.  It’s not the most comfortable read ever, but it is Linda’s masterpiece. Twenty-six reviews on Amazon; all five-star – that’s got to mean something.

3.) Peirene’s Short Story Month competition (PeiShoStoMo), which I mentioned here, is done and dusted.  Lots of congrats to Rose Rankin-Gee and her great story ‘London’, which you can read here.

4.) Some other lovely bloggers are joining in A Century of Books: see what Fleur Fisher, Read the Book, Geranium Cat and Harriet Devine have planned, and let me know if you post your own plans on your blog.  (Sorry if you’ve already told me and I forgot!)

5.) I keep linking to Claire’s reviews, but she keeps reviewing wonderful books wonderfully well!  I can’t believe another blogger has read Miss Elizabeth Bennet by A.A. Milne – read Claire’s lovely review here.  My plan for people to read and love AAM’s obscure adult plays/sketches/novels/essays is finally coming to fruition!  He wrote so, so much, I could fill up a third of A Century of Books with Milne alone…

6.) Finally, I was delighted with Slightly Foxed sent me the latest of their Slightly Foxed Editions: it’s Dodie Smith’s autobiography Look Back With Love.  One of her autobiographies, I should say, since I think she penned a fair few.  I’ve been wanting to read this for a while, since I love I Capture the Castle, and this beautiful edition is perfect.  I hope to get onto it soon, but for now – more info is here.

“Books are like people…”

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Last quotation from Stop What You’re Doing And Read This!, promise.  Well, there definitely won’t be more than one after this, anyway.  Probably.  Back to Mark Haddon’s wonderful essay, definitely the jewel in this crown, and more book thoughts which both strike a chord and make me think more deeply about my reading.  I seem to have run out of bookish paintings very quickly, so instead here is a musical painting by one of my favourite artists: it’s Raoul Dufy’s Tribute to Mozart.

“What I didn’t yet understand was the importance of taste and timing.  Books are like people.  Some look deceptively attractive from a distance, some deceptively unappealing; some are easy company, some demand hard work that isn’t guaranteed to pay off.  Some become friends and stay friends for life.  Some change in our absence – or perhaps it’s we who change in theirs – and we meet up again only to find that we don’t get along any more, an experience that I had when I returned to both Gravity’s Rainbow and Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City.  Unlike people, one can at least dump them or hand them to a friend without causing offence or feeling guilt.  Indeed, we forget sometimes that a vital part of loving literature is hating certain books and certain writers, just as hating Spurs is an important part of supporting Arsenal; and the embarrassing truth is that I have probably got far more satisfaction out of trying to persuade friends that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a tawdry piece of misogynistic torture porn than I have out of discussing the reasons why Wolf Hall is a masterpiece.”

–Mark Haddon, ‘The Right Words in the Right Order’
Stop What You’re Doing And Read This!

The Poisonwood Bible: other views

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I meant to include links to other bloggers’ views yesterday, but I was too tired by the time I finished exploring my own!  So today’s post is a little addendum to yesterday’s…


The world, it seems, is filled with bloggers who have written about The Poisonwood Bible.  I’ve just picked some of the bloggers I already know and love.  If you have an insatiable appetite for reviews, I recommend you check out Fyrefly’s wonderful blog search engine.  It’s invaluable!

“The writing was exquisitely well balanced, the story was absorbing and the Congo was portrayed as though it were another character rather than merely a place.” – Old English Rose

“It’s a story about religious beliefs, a story of the disintegration of a family, and a story about forgiveness.” – Bibliophile by the Sea

“Recommended to anyone with the patience to read a long, slow novel.” – Jackie, Farm Lane Books

“The Poisonwood Bible is a brilliant, heartfelt and passionate love letter to Africa and the problems it faces. Kingsolver manages to combine a family saga, a political treatise and a love story into a wonderful book.” – Sakura, Chasing Bawa

“The setting is all-important in The Poisonwood Bible. The Congo is as much as character as any of the Prices.” – Curious Book Fans

“But then, after all of that emotion, everything petered out and the book just kept going.” – Eva, A Striped Armchair

“It’s a book that has stuck long in my memory, maybe because it paints such a remarkable picture based on reality and truth.” – Margaret, Books Please

The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver

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Well, I finished The Poisonwood Bible (1998) with a couple of hours to spare before book group… and, having worked out what I think about it, I am ready to write my review.  It’s quite difficult to formulate my thoughts on this novel, because these thoughts do not all lean in the same direction.  Reviews feel like they should be unified, and that’s rather tricky when I have both positive and negative responses to a book.  So… bear with me.  I’ll bear with you bearing with me.  Hopefully by the end of the page we’ll understand one another, no?

First things first, The Poisonwood Bible ought to be about 200 pages shorter.  I don’t mean that careful and judicious editing throughout is needed, to compress the narrative (although this wouldn’t be a bad idea) – I mean that it should have ended on p.427.  There are 616 pages in the edition I read (rather more than the supposed 350 page upper-limit of book group choices) and there shouldn’t be.  I am astonished that any editor let Kingsolver keep going for those final 189 pages.  It was self-indulgent and unnecessary.  But, now I’ve got that off my chest, I can return to the review proper.  It gets more positive soon, promise.
The Poisonwood Bible follows the Price family from 1959 to the 1990s – Nathan is a Baptist minister from Georgia (the US state, not the country), and has brought his wife Orleanna and daughters Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May to the Congo.  They are there as missionaries, but all is not going to go entirely to plan… to say the least.  This is the basic premise of Kingsolver’s novel – and from such a simple idea, she weaves a long and complex novel.  Complex in terms of emotions, interactions, and gradual self-discovery, that is.  Not a lot really happens.  (Another reason why The Poisonwood Bible is difficult to write about.  Honestly, Barb!)
Five voices make up the narrative, each in the first person.  Orleanna Price speaks briefly at the beginning of each section  – which are named after Biblical (and Apocryphal) books – Genesis, The Revelation, The Judges, Bel and the Serpent, Exodus.  She speaks wearily, always in retrospect, and keeps her cards close to her chest.  Doubtless this is partly so plot points aren’t revealed too early, and her melancholy ambiguity includes one momentous hint which kept me gripped and guessing for hundreds of pages.
But it is the four daughters who are the mainstay of the novel.  The narrative is passed between them, and Kingsolver constructs their four voices brilliantly, distinctly, and consistently.  Her fellow American novelist, Marilynne Robinson, hugely impressed me with Gilead because of her ability to ‘capture’ a voice – and while Kingsolver has a rather different slant on a minister, she certainly writes beautifully for his daughters.  Since they are so thoroughly depicted, it’s difficult to summarise their characters – but, broadly speaking, I’ll try.
Rachel is the eldest, a white-blonde ingenue whose Malapropisms (‘never the train shall meet’) and simple, unimaginative nature are initially endearing, but eventually rather concerning.  She never loses the all-American slang expressions she brings with her to Congo, and I rather liked her indefatigable sassiness, even if it is accompanied with a lack of cultural awareness.  
Leah and Adah are twins – Leah desperately seeks the approval of her father, and carries with her the guilt that, in the womb, she ’caused’ Adah’s disability.  Adah limps badly, and almost never speaks.  She also has a fascination with seeing things backgrounds, and especially palindromes.  Silent to others, her narration reveals her cynicism and bitterness, but also her humour.
Ruth May, finally, is the youngest – and the simplest.  Not in terms of intelligence, but in the simple, contented way she adapts to her surroundings, making friends amongst the neighbours, and doing her best to understand her father’s teaching in their new environment.
For Kingsolver is not subtle about the clash of cultures.  Here, the welcome party for the Prices is interrupted by Nathan:
“Reverend and Mrs. Price and your children!” cried the younger man in the yellow shirt.  “You are welcome to our feast.  Today we have killed a goat to celebrate your coming.  Soon your bellies will be full with our fufu pili-pili.”At that, why, the half-naked women behind him just burst out clapping and cheering, as if they could no longer confine their enthusiasm for a dead goat.[…]”Nakedness,” Father repeated, “and darkness of the soul!  For we shall destroy this place where the loud clamour of the sinners is waxen great before the face of the Lord!” No one sang or cheered anymore.  Whether or not they understood the meaning of ‘loud clamour,’ they didn’t dare be making one now.  They did not even breathe, or so it seemed.  Father can get a good deal across with just his tone of voice, believe you me. 
This is, firstly, a great example of Kingsolver’s exceptional ability to convey individuals’ voices through minor verbal tics.  Perhaps it isn’t clear from just this excerpt, but only Rachel’s narrative would have that ‘why’ in the second paragraph; only Rachel would finish ‘believe you me’.  If Adah’s sections have the most obvious stylistic identifications, the others are subtly tied to their narratives too.  That is the greatest strength of The Poisonwood Bible, and the strength that encourages me to read more by Barbara Kingsolver – the ability to create a character’s voice.

Which makes it all the more frustrating that, in Nathan Price, she has done nothing of the kind.  The women of The Poisonwood Bible are drawn so well, so cleverly.  And, in the midst of them all, is Nathan.  He never comes alive, he is scarcely more than a Bad Man Who Does Bad Things.  His motivations aren’t addressed, he has no depth whatsoever – it is a shambolic waste of an opportunity.  I don’t think it’s simply my Christianity (and the fact that I know a lovely, hard-working, deeply loving missionary in D.R. Congo) that makes me feel this – others at book group certainly agreed.  Nathan is angry, selfish, insensitive, violent… it was when he started hitting his children that my eyes rolled so much that I felt a little dizzy. Doubtless there are other novels where one meets ogres – Barbara Comyns’ The Vet’s Daughter, for example, or any novel by Dickens – but in those books they are in the midst of the surreal and exaggerated.  Nathan Price is not, and, though all his attributes are individually believable, as a composite, without any redeeming features, they are not.  It is such a pity that Kingsolver allowed herself this laziness.  Had she made Nathan a character, rather than a two-dimensional face of Wicked Colonialism, The Poisonwood Bible would have been more interesting.  Then again, perhaps she just wanted Nathan as a catalyst to explore the reactions of the female characters?  That’s the most charitable conclusion I can draw.

As I said before, very little happens.  We see the daughters try to adjust to their situation – their interactions with neighbours, who are variously kind or antagonistic and endlessly curious – and the gradually altering politics of Congo.  Pages and pages go by without anything particularly occurring, but they are somehow engaging.  Ruth May introduces ‘Mother May I’ to local infants; Rachel’s hair is a spectacle to all; Adah is presumed eaten by a lion (but is not); Leah grows more and more interested in the teacher Anatole… mostly Kingsolver attempts the miracle of winding a narrative through emotions and thoughts without hanging them on events – and she succeeds.  It is beautiful writing.  It is also nigh-on impossible to review.  There is one odd thing… usually I jot down resonant or stand-out quotations whilst I read, or excerpts I think will help structure a blog post.  For The Poisonwood Bible, I wrote down nothing.  Kingsolver’s writing is all even and constant – it all weaves into one.

But, as I noted at the top, something very weird happens.  The Prices’ time in the Congo comes to an abrupt, tragic end.  And then, p.427, they leave.  After that it is as though it were another novel.   We follow the various daughters at occasional intervals for another couple of decades.  It is tedious and politically heavy-handed.  The points Kingsolver had previously shown through her story are now told through dialogue.  Show, don’t tell, Barb.  All the unsubtlety in her portrayal of Nathan sweeps across the others.  I still can’t believe that a novel can peter out quite like this one did.

So, there you are.  A confusing review, I daresay, but also a confusing read.  At its best, The Poisonwood Bible is phenomenally good.  Barbara Kingsolver is obviously an exceptionally talented writer.  The Bean Trees, which I read years ago, is also testament to this.  But at its best, The Poisonwood Bible is lazy, clumsy, unsubtle and poorly edited.  Overall I will say that Kingsolver’s talents outweigh her occasional mismanagement of them, but it is always a shame when a novel could have been great (and, to be fair, a lot of people do consider it great) but, to my mind, failed to reach its potential.

“Memory is talismanic.”

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I’m on the home straight with The Poisonwood Bible, so expect a report on that later in the week.  For today, as the publishing date of Stop What You’re Doing And Read This! draws ever nearer, I shall tantalise you with another excerpt – this time from Jeanette Winterson.  Today’s painting is Carl Larsson’s ‘Woman Reading’.  [EDIT: Pat, thanks for reminding me that the book is Radio 4’s Book of the Week this week!]

“A medium other than the book could not achieve the effect of this book [The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd] nearly so well.  A book lets you follow a writer’s mind.  Reading does not move in linear time in the way that a movie or even a radio piece does.  Of course there is a beginning, a middle and an end, but in ‘good’ books that is irrelevant.  We don’t remember the books that have mattered to us by the chronology of their story-telling, but by the impression and effect of the story and of the language used to tell it.  Memory is talismanic.  We hold on to what we need and let the rest go.  Just as in our lives events separated in time sit side by side in memory, so the effect of a book is to let us live nearer to total time than linear time allows.”

— Jeanette Winterson, ‘A Bed. A Book. A Mountain.’
Stop What You’re Doing And Read This!