Well, my weekend of novella (and ‘novella’, and just plain ‘shortish novel’) reading is just about to start. I’m afraid *another* nasty cold has hit me, so we’ll see how long my eyes hold up for, but my plan is to write a quick post after each book I finish – or perhaps somewhere in between, if it’s all going slowly.
Do comment if you’re novella-reading today, and pop any links to relevant posts in the comments.
I have clearly gone up in the world, for I am now a recipient of advance notice for the Wikio literary blog monthly listings! Here’s their latest findings, thanks Wikio – lovely to see some familiar faces as usual.
I don’t love films in the way that I love books – I enjoy seeing them, but find my short attention span is usually a bit bored by the end, and it’s only the odd one or two that have give me the feelings I get from my favourite books. Usually these are adaptations of novels (I Capture the Castle) or films about authors (Finding Neverland) or both (The Hours). Occasionally a 1930s film will do it, but yesterday I watched a film that moved me and amused me and enthralled me in the way that my favourite novels do. And that film is Another Year, directed by Mike Leigh. The only other Mike Leigh films I’ve seen are Vera Drake, which I thought brilliant, and Abigail’s Party, which works better on stage. I know he uses the same actors many times, and picks those who excel at improvisation – whatever he’s doing, it works.
I saw the trailer a while ago, and thought it looked poignant and well-observed, and it is definitely both those things – but trailers rarely do justice to a film, and the one posted below is no exception. Having not seen it in November, when it was released, I was pleased to spot that it was showing at my favourite cinema in the world – the Ultimate Picture Palace. It’s a one-screen cinema from the 1960s or 1970s, and still very much has that feel. But it’s also incredibly friendly and quirky – they were selling mulled wine and mince pies last night, which were lovely – and shows interesting films, including older ones. Last year I saw Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes there, for example.
Another Year, like so many of the novels I love, is difficult to describe because not much happens. It shows a couple nearing retirement – Tom and Gerri (ho ho) played by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen – going through a year of their life, and the lives of their friends. Gerri and Tom are a quietly contented married couple, happy and comfortable with each other, and I have never seen a more realistic portrayal of a normal marriage in film. Their lives are centred around work (Gerri is a counsellor [thanks David!]; Tom is a engineering geologist), the allotment, their son visiting at the weekends, their friends, and being together. There may be a rug waiting to be pulled from under my feet, and perhaps in many films they’d be shown up as smug or too middle class, but Mike Leigh seemed to have the sense simply to show them as they are.
In and out of their lives wander several friends, each slightly dysfunctional, but only in the way that people can be. Nothing unduly zany or far-fetched. Of these characters, although the film is indisputably an ensemble piece, one does stand out – in fact, she is in some ways the heart of the film. That is Mary, played brilliantly by Lesley Manville. She is a 40-something divorcee, lonely and clingy, only just self-aware enough to realise how unself-aware she is. Another Year is clever, though – at first Mary seems simply a chatty, flirty, slightly uncontrolled woman. Only as the film develops does her pain unravel, and manifest itself in bitterness or trying too hard to be the life and soul of a gathering. And yet she is a warm woman, and it is impossible to dislike her – but entirely possible to see how Gerri and Tom could grow weary of her.
Writing about Another Year is as difficult as writing about a finely-written novel, because every statement feels like a broad sweep, missing the subtlety of Mike Leigh’s writing and direction, or the acting of an astonishingly good cast. It felt so ‘real’ – not a euphemism for gritty or unpleasant, as the word ‘real’ is so often used, but naturalistic and vital. The relationships were all believable, sometimes painfully so. Only Mary occasionally went a little too far, a little too ‘drama’ rather than ‘life’, but this was so occasionally that it couldn’t mar a superb performance.
All this makes Another Year sound gloomy – and it is true that the lingering feeling is sadness. But whilst it was showing there were many moments where the cinema rang to the sound of audience laughter – some exceptional observational comedy – and some beautifully warm and touching moments. Like life, I suppose.
Oh, and you know when Judi Dench won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for a few minutes of screentime in Shakespeare in Love? Well, if there is any justice in the world, Imelda Staunton will win one for her part as a depressed insomniac patient of Gerri’s. Sadly, she only appears for a few minutes, in the first handful of scenes – but my friend and I both spent the rest of the film longing for her to reappear. Every tiny movement of her face was transfixing. Any aspiring actor should have to sit and watch her performance – so restrained, but so informative.
All in all, as you can see, I was very impressed! Do go and see it if you have the chance, although it’s probably not on in many places now. If you live near Oxford, you’ll be able to go to the Ultimate Picture Palace – otherwise pre-order the DVD!
Which other Mike Leigh films would you recommend? I’ve gone and ordered All or Nothing and Happy-Go-Lucky, which are now winging their way from Amazon…
I saw a brilliant film tonight, more on’t tomorrow – but for tonight, before I hit the hay, I will share another bit of my research from today. You may question quite what I’m researching, but here is a fun poem, anonymous, from Punch, March 1920 :
[A reviewer in a recent issue of The Times Literary Supplement asks, “Why should the characters in the psychological novel be invariably horrid?” and is inclined to explain this state of affairs by the undiscriminating study of “the theories of two very estimable gentlemen, the sound of whose names one is beginning to dislike – Messrs. Freud and Jung.”] – [this is from the article too]
In QUEEN VICTORIA’S placid reign, the novelists of note
In one respect, at any rate, were all in the same boat;
Alike in Richard Feverel and in Aurora Floyd
You’ll seek in vain for any trace of Messrs. JUNG and FREUD.
They did not fail in colour, for they had their PEACOCK’S tails:
Their heroines, I must admit, ran seldom off the rails;
They had their apes and angels, but they never once employed
The psycho-analytic rules devised by JUNG and FREUD.
They ran a tilt at fraud and guilt, at snobbery and shams;
They had no lack of Meredithyrambic epigrams;
The types that most appealed to them were not neurasthenoid.
They lived, you see, before the day of Messrs. JUNG and FREUD.
(I’ve searched the last edition of the famous Ency. Brit.
And neither of this noble pair is even named in it;
Only the men since Nineteen-Ten have properly enjoyed
The privilege of studying the works of JUNG and FREUD.)
Their characters, I grieve to say, were never more unclean
Than those of ordinary life, in morals or in mien;
They had not slummed or fully plumbed with rapture unalloyed
The unconscious mind as now defined by Messrs. JUNG and FREUD.
The spiritual shell-shock which these scientists impart
Had not enlarged or cleared the dim horizons of their art;
They had not learned that mutual love by wedlock is destroyed,
As proved by the disciples of the school of JUNG and FREUD.
The hierophants of pure romance, ev’n in its recent mood,
From STEVENSON to CONRAD, such excesses have eschewed;
But the psycho-pathologic route was neither mapped nor buoyed
Until the new discoveries of Messrs. JUNG and FREUD.
That fiction should be tonic all may readily agree;
That its function is emetic I, for one, could never see;
And so I’m glad to find The Times Lit. Supp. has grown annoyed
At the undiscriminating cult of Messrs. JUNG and FREUD.
Let earnest ‘educationists’ assiduously preach
The value of psychology in training those who teach;
Let publicists who speak of Mr. GEORGE , without the LLOYD,
Confound him with quotations from the works of JUNG and FREUD –
But I, were I a despot, quite benevolent, of course,
Armed with the last developments of high explosive force,
I’d build a bigger “Bertha,” and discharge it in the void
Crammed with the novelists who brood on Messrs. JUNG and FREUD.
First of all – a cry out for Janells – you’ve won a DVD of The Pillars of the Earth, please get in touch to simondavidthomas[at]yahoo.co.uk! Now on with the show…
Quite a while ago I posted a contemporary review of E.M. Delafield’s (brilliant) The Provincial Lady Goes Further, from Time and Tide. When I did, I promised I’d post anything similar I encountered – which sadly I haven’t done for some time, but today I was reading more reviews of various books, and thought you might be interested in one of the following. Here are reviews of two Stuck-in-a-Book favourites, both on my 50 Books… list: Edith Olivier’s The Love-Child and David Garnett’s Lady Into Fox:
The Love-Child by Edith Olivier
The Saturday Review (28th May 1927)
T. Earl Welby
‘Miss Olivier, whom I take to be a new writer, has made a hopeful beginning. Indeed, on the strength of this first book, if it really is her first, a brilliant future might be predicted for her if it were not for the consideration that the thing is a tour de force, and that it has yet to be discovered what she can do when dealing with lives lived out soberly under the light of the sun and not with a world of fantasy. Here is the matter of her story. Agatha Boddington, no longer young, and subdued to the routine of a life in which nothing happens, is bereaved of her mother. Her father she lost years earlier. There seems to be an utter emptiness in the years that stretch before her, but in her solitude she begins to remember the secret imagined playmate of her now remote childhood, such a playmate as very many children have invented for themselves. Mused upon, Clarissa, that daughter of imagination, gradually, uncertainly, takes flesh. The situation, should any but Agatha see Clarissa in her intermittent bodily manifestations, would demand more explanation than Agatha can offer. In a state of extreme excitement and anxiety, Agatha goes away from her house, from her bewildered servants, to an hotel at the seaside, where she can have accommodation for her “niece” and herself without arousing curiosity.
‘There Clarissa develops, and there is a period during which Agatha and she, in their flawless intimacy, know perfect happiness. But the visit must end, and having warned her servants that she is returning with a little niece, she and the love child born of her imagination go back to the old house. But, through imagery for which Miss Olivier may conceivably have had a hint from a wonderful passage in Gérard de Nerval, the frailty of the relations between Agatha and Clarissa is now suggested. Reading out of an antiquated pseudo-scientific book, they learn how attraction holds the stars in their courses; but Clarissa now lamentably apt to have ideas independently of Agatha’s promptings, raises the question whether a star might not pass out of reach of that attraction. Clarissa, certainly, is destined to pass out of the range of Agatha’s. Becoming so human, she responds at long last to the love-making of a young neighbour, David, from whom Agatha seeks vainly to keep her. And at the moment when she begins to love a human being other than Agatha, she ceases to be, dissolves into the world of dreams out of which the yearnings of Agatha materialized her. Agatha herself subsides into a fortunate madness, in which she can play games with the invisible Clarissa.
‘Miss Olivier has imagination and the method required by her material. She is careful to provide a matter-of-fact setting, and makes intelligent use of the stolid servants, the blundering policeman, the uncomprehending neighbours. She is also able to insinuate into her fantasy a sense of the pathos of a life so starved of actualities that it must be nourished on dreams. Agatha is not, as with the average writer of fantastic tales she would have been, merely an agent for the production of Clarissa: she is human, and her exultations and sufferings matter.’
Lady Into Fox by David Garnett
The Saturday Review (27th January 1923)
Gerald Gould
‘Every English country gentleman has, of course, pondered long and seriously what he would do if his wife turned into a fox. Few, however, have been called upon to put their conclusions into practice. To Mr. Tebrick, whose story Mr. David Garnett has told with admirable reticence, the shock came unexpectedly. “The sudden changing of Mrs. Tebrick into a vixen,” says Mrs. Garnet, “is an established fact.” He is not to be drawn aside into speculation on the possible explanations. He has a horror of second-hand or ill-supported embroideries upon the bare and certain story. What, then, are we to say about convincingness? To some narrow folk, Mr. Garnett’s story, despite its sober veracity, will seem as improbable as the elaborate inventions of Mr. Vivian; but not to those susceptible to the charms of style. From beginning to end of ‘Lady Into Fox,’ there is not one false-note. The coherence and harmony are absolute. To apply the vulgar and impertinent test of probability is unthinkable. Mrs. Tebrick was changed into a vixen: at first she preserved many of her human characteristics, desiring out of modesty to wear clothes, and continuing to play cards: but gradually the animal nature asserted itself, and poor Mr. Tebrick’s novel was ever more severely strained, but never gave way, and at the end his wife died tragically in his arms. We have Mr. Garnett’s word for it, in a prose as pure as Addison’s; and I am sorry for those who find it difficult to credit. Mr. Garnett’s woodcuts are corroborative evidence, being wholly in the spirit of the tale. The evidence is welcome, but the corroboration is unnecessary.’
I was quite pleased when my book group decided to read The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas (could someone tell me how to pronounce this, by the way?) because I’d got a copy through Amazon Vine a while ago, and knew I needed an incentive to make my way through all 483 pages of it. That wasn’t going to happen off my own bat. Or my own back. I can never remember which it is…
The idea seemed really interesting: at a barbecue, somebody slaps somebody else’s child. We see the event and its aftermath from various different perspectives, and an interesting and complex moral question is woven into the fabric of life for a group of Australian young parents.
Or that was the idea.
What Tsiolkas has actually done is so much less subtle that I wanted to shake him. The ingredients for a fascinating novel are in place, and – I’ll say it now, because this review might wander into negative territory – Tsiolkas is potentially a really good writer, but it is all wasted. Tsiolkas has gathered together the most loathsome characters imaginable, the most loathsome of the lot indisputably Harry, who is the one to slap Hugo. He is also a wife-beater, a druggie, and someone who despises everybody who is not himself. The chapter we see from his perspective left me feeling nauseous, he was so disgusting a human being. Which Tsiolkas recognises, I think, so it didn’t worry me from that point of view – what ruined The Slap was that the slapper in question offered no sort of moral grey area. He enjoys being violent to others, and enjoyed hurting Hugo. Hugo was, at the time, threatening Harry’s child – which could have been an interesting angle, especially if Harry were normally a mild-mannered man – but Tsiolkas sweeps this ambivalence away.
It’s not just Harry that is horrible. His wife Sandi is; Hugo’s parents Rosie and Gary are; the host of the party, Hector, is. In amongst an enormous cast of characters, only two of the central ones seemed at all likeable, especially Richie – more on him later. And – have I lived a terribly sheltered life? – EVERY single character takes drugs. I hate reading books with drug-taking, as it makes me feel ill. I know this is my own faint-heartedness, and I don’t expect every modern writer to steer clear of it, but Tsiolkas takes it to ridiculous lengths. Every character, from 14 to 60 odd, dabbles in recreational drug taking. Perhaps Tsiolkas thinks it spices up the book? And don’t get me started on the amount of swearing in The Slap. When I raved about Ned Beauman’s novel Boxer, Beetle, Lynne asked me what I thought about the swearing – well, I didn’t really notice it there. Maybe because it seemed fit for the characters, or was used intelligently. Tsiolkas is under the impression that a sentence isn’t complete without some really horrible expletives in it.
The structure of the novel isn’t what I expected. I thought we’d see the same incident from various perspectives, which would have been tricky to pull off, but potentially brilliant. Instead, we move between different characters, each chapter giving the viewpoint of a different person – from the party where the slap occurs, through the resultant court case, and then meandering onto some quite well observed chapters (the reminiscences of an old man, and a young man coming to terms with being gay and having a messed-up best friend) which had almost nothing to do with the rest of the plot. The last 200 pages should have been removed, or instead used as the starting point for other novels, as they were the best written sections, but entirely irrelevant. Richie – the young guy – is easily the most affecting character in The Slap, and has the final chapter, which is quite moving. I warmed to him with this sentence:
Richie had a dawning sense that the fact that men loved kicking a leather ball to one another boded ill for the sanity of the human race.
You tell ’em, Richie.
As I said at the beginning, Christos Tsiolkas is a good writer, which is what makes The Slap so annoying. If he’d been a bad writer treating his topic badly, that would have been fine – I’d have thrown the book to one side, and moved on. As it is, he has a brilliant way of capturing a character’s voice. Although the sheer number of characters, all arriving in a couple of paragraphs in the first chapter, meant I had to write out a sheet telling me who was married to whom, with which children etc. etc., after a dozen or so pages they all became sharply outlined, and very well drawn. The writing was compelling, and I read all 483 pages more quickly than I read many novels half that length.
But – the flaws in structure and the waste of a potentially interesting topic, not to mention the incessant drug-taking and swearing for effect, made The Slap ultimately fail in my eyes – and (for these and other reasons) in the eyes of those I discussed it with at book group. I can’t think of many bad books which yet reveal good writers, but with The Slap Tsiolkas has convinced me to consider reading him again, even when I couldn’t appreciate the novel itself.
This seems appropriate because it is *so* cold here… I was typing away in the freezing computer room at Magdalen, wearing gloves when I was reading, and taking them off to do the typing… anyway, this song’s title is appropriate. And it’s beautiful, and sometimes makes me cry… I can only find live versions (this one is synced to the original video) but… it’ll have to do! Step forward Tori Amos, with ‘Winter’.
For all other Sunday Songs, click here.
December approaches, and perhaps you have snow in your part of the world… none here in Oxford, but maybe before next week… I’m heading off for a nice early night, but will type this out to appear early on Saturday morning.
1.) The link – is courtesy of The Dabbler, where you can win a copy of the Christmas edition of Slightly Foxed – click here to enter, if you know your Christmas literary trivia.
2.) The blog post – is Harriet Devine’s, because this amused me…
3.) The book – is the Persephone Ninety Diary, which Nicola Beauman very kindly gave me as a birthday present. It’s beautiful – like the Persephone books, but with a more flexible spine, and has pages with the endpapers from all the Persephone books, alongside the diary pages. The question is, of course… is it too beautiful to use? I haven’t made my mind up on that just yet…
I’m glad that a lot of you are thinking of joining in the novella weekend – turns out I will most likely be going to the musical, so my time will be cut a bit, but should still be plenty of reading time left. I don’t seem to have much reading time at the moment, and there i one book in particular that I’m adoring, but have still spent two months reading…
So this is another not-very-time-consuming post: the following list (not in any particular order) has been doing the rounds of blogs and Facebook, and I thought I’d join in. Thanks for everyone who sent it to me. I saw it a few years ago, and it is a bizarre list (including some duplications). It’s not the same as the list they came up with during the Big Read – a series I adored, especially the run-down of the top 100; must try and find that video somewhere… ANYWAY, here is the list, with the ones I’ve read in bold. Do comment on that which I have left unread which I ought to have read…
1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (well, I’ve read over half…)
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (I’m leaving in Nancy’s comment on this, as I wholeheartedly agree: ‘being it’s part of the Chronicles, it’s stupid this is on the list again’)
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79 .Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazu Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare (as opposed to the complete works… hmm…)
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
I was thinking about my previous weekend of reading novellas, and what fun it was, and musing about what I’d read were I to repeat the experiment… and toying with doing so on the weekend 4th-5th December. So I went around my bookshelves, pulling things off that I wanted to read, and that were around 200pp. or less. And now I have a pile of 13 books… I’m not going to reveal them just yet, because I think that last time it rather spoilt the surprise of what I’d read, and maybe led to book-mention-fatigue (just be grateful Miss Hargreaves isn’t under 200pp.! As the bloggers who met Thomas the other day discovered, I can work Miss H. into more or less any conversation.) But the beady-eyed amongst you may be able to deduce one or two…
If I did provisionally put aside that weekend for novella reading, would anyone be interested in joining me?
Obviously I wouldn’t be able to read all thirteen, but I daresay I’d make something of a dent, and it would be fun to know that other people were engaging in the activity elsewhere in the country. 
It might be shortened by a potential trip to Cheltenham to see a musical, but… well, we’ll see. December seems somehow appropriate for novellas. Although it also seems appropriate for enormous novels, which is why I have Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch earmarked for a dark post-Christmas evening.
Do let me know if you’d be interested, and spread the word. You don’t have to give up the whole weekend, of course – maybe just try to read one or two novellas at some point? It certainly demolishes the reading pile a little!