Atwood – Stuck in a Book

Five recent reads

StuckinaBook All July 14, 2022Atwood, Malcolm, Tey, Wong 6 Comments

I’m going to take a little break from blogging, as the next couple of weeks are quite hectic – but before I go, here are five books I’ve read recently (or, in one case, not that recently) to leave you with…

A Map of the Sky by Claire Wong
Claire and I are friends from church, so I was really excited when her first novel The Runaway was published. It took me a while to read her next, A Map of the Sky (2019) but I finally did back in February, and promptly forgot to write about it. But it’s really good! Kit is an 11-year-old boy who is taken with his family to a remote coastal village in the north of England. It’s not clear if it’s a holiday, a move, or a sort of exile – and why is his dad not with them?

Kit loves adventure stories, and decides to tackle the whole thing as an adventure. The other people living in the guesthouse offer clues, willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly – particularly Beth, who is confined to the guesthouse with a chronic illness that Kit doesn’t really understand. But he uses her memories of the area to try and put together a map, which might help unlock the secrets of the summer. I loved the portrait of Beth, sensitive and well-researched (and I know at least one mutual friend of ours helped ensure that there was realism, though Beth is a fictional character rather than a reflection of any one individual). And Kit is a compelling character – excited, unsure, hemmed in by adults making decisions and thinking children don’t need to be informed. It’s interesting that Claire Wong’s first two protagonists are children – I’d be interested to read her with an adult hero or heroine.

The Exquisite Halo by Josephine Tey
A novel Tey wrote under a pseudonym, and not a detective novel – it’s a curious sort of fable (‘a fable without a moral’ is the subtitle) filled with Wildean witticisms and, indeed, Wildean characters. I really enjoyed reading it, but it is featherweight and definitely a minor work. Curiously, the POD edition I read has some very curious and largely irrelevant images along the way. A horrible pie, a German kitchen, some mountains, a bus. It was fun waiting to see what anomaly would come along next.

A Sky Painted Gold by Laura Wood
I loved A Snowfall of Silver by Laura Wood, which I read towards the end of last year – and immediately went and bought another couple of Wood’s books. A Snowfall of Silver is actually a sequel to A Sky Painted Gold (2018), though it doesn’t really matter which you read first, as the focus is on a different sister. Louise (Lou) lives in the middle of nowhere in Cornwall in 1929, part of a large and artistic family, and is mourning the loss of her sister and best friend. Loss, that is, because Alice has just got married. Lou can’t see what Alice sees in her husband, who appears to be an ordinary, unexciting Cornishman.

She is much more interested in the Cardew House – a mansion on an island, to which she often swims, just to roam the rooms, steal the apples, and read the Agatha Christies. The family aren’t around, so nobody notices. Until… they are. Robert – the handsome, stern 20-something son of the house – discovers her mid-apple-steal. Soon Lou is caught up in a world of rich bohemian people, who are interested in her because she is different. Among them are Robert’s sister, Robert’s fiancée, and Robert’s fiancée’s handsome brother. (But if you think she won’t ultimately end up with Robert, then you’re new to books.)

I didn’t love it as much as A Snowfall of Silver, perhaps because the theatrical stuff in that one really appealed to me, but it was still a frothy delight from beginning to end. And gorgeous cover.

Sidesplitter by Phil Wang
Phil Wang is a comedian I know through his Taskmaster appearance (man, I love Taskmaster), and my friend Malie recommended I try his memoir. Well, he’s keen to say it’s not a memoir, while also acknowledging that it more or less is. Wang spent the first 16 years of his life in Malaysia and has lived since in the UK (where, to add to the tapestry, he was born). His dad is Malaysian; his mum is white British. And the book is about what it’s like to grow up with this mix of identities – never feeling, he says, quite at home in either country. He writes about race, food, romance, media etc etc. And it is also extremely funny, as well as making a lot of interesting and often moving points. I listened to him reading the audiobook, and he’s a hoot.

Iphigenia in Forest Hills by Janet Malcolm
What’s the opposite of a frothy delight? This! Malcolm is always searingly brilliant in anything she writes, and Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial (2011) is no different. I was a little stymied by not knowing who Iphigenia was or where Forest Hills are, but doubtless you’re better educated on these matters than I am. Essentially, Malcolm looks at all the ins and outs of a (real) murder trial, where a woman is charged with murdering her estranged husband. Along the way, it becomes much more complex – and a lot has to do with a biased judge in a previous court case about child custody, the fact that lawyers acting on behalf of the child don’t have to take the child’s wishes into account, and another judge who is very clearly dismissing evidence that is central to the case.

Malcolm’s interviews are always piercing, getting people to say far more than they might wish. She doesn’t claim to be writing objective non-fiction, and her voice is clear and present throughout – which is exactly how I like it. If you already love and admire Malcolm’s writing, this is another great example. If you want something kinder, less subjective, more reportage – maybe not for you. For me, she can do no wrong, but I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to be interviewed by her.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

StuckinaBook All July 22, 2019July 21, 20192000, 2000s, Atwood 24 Comments

My book group chose The Blind Assassin (2000) by Margaret Atwood for our read this month, and initially I wasn’t going to read it. That was partly because it was SIX HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SEVEN PAGES and partly because I once owned it, and gave it away unread. I didn’t want to buy another copy. But then I was at my friend Nana-Yaa’s house, and mentioned it – she revealed that it was her favourite book, and pressed a copy into my hands. I guess I had to read it. (But it was still SIX HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SEVEN PAGES.)

The main character is Iris Chase, looking back across her long life – though there are various other layers to it. The opening line is brilliant; one of the best I’ve read: “Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.”

Laura is the author of a modern classic, called ‘The Blind Assassin’. It was only published after her death, and has grown in reputation, and Atwood puts large portions of the novel into her novel. Some chapters are modern Iris; some retrace her childhood and adulthood; some are excerpts from ‘The Blind Assassin’. To add to the complexity, ‘The Blind Assassin’ is about somebody creating the novel ‘The Blind Assassin’. Confused yet? Don’t worry, Atwood was an excellent handle on it all, and the reader is never baffled. She manages three different tones/voices well too – so the three layers of the novel feel distinct and confident. (The actual story-within-story-within-story is about a world where boys are blinded by making intricate carpets and then train as stealthy assassins; one is hired to kill a young woman who is to be sacrificed as part of a custom in this world.)

As Iris looks back on her life, we see the alienating and loveless marriage she enters to save her father’s business. We see how her relationship with her sister grows more and more strained, and there is a whole mystery around that.

Positives first: it’s very well written. Atwood has an unforced elegance here that was entirely lacking in The Handmaid’s Tale, to my mind. Some of the characters are wonderfully drawn – particularly Laura’s unkind sister-in-law. And I loved the way that the plot of ‘The Blind Assassin’ (level 2 of 3) explored the creative process of someone trying to balance of art and commerce, often very amusingly. All in all, I did like the book a lot.

But… it was SIX HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SEVEN PAGES. I couldn’t get that out of my mind, every time I picked it up. It sort of soured the reading experience for me, being so allergic to long books. And, like every book I’ve read that is over 600 pages (which is admittedly not many), it would have been better if it were a great deal shorter. I think The Blind Assassin, with its multiple layers, could perhaps have justified 400 pages. But so much of the background of Iris’s life could have been cut without losing anything. There is a lot of padding. And that length puts a lot of pressure on the end of a novel – and the various revelations in this one didn’t feel strong enough to support the weight of SIX HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SEVEN PAGES.

But you have to admire the confidence of Atwood, to call ‘The Blind Assassin’ a modern masterpiece and then write the book herself. At one point it is called Modernist, and it is definitely not Modernist. That was irksome.

So, I liked this. There’s a brilliant 400-page novel hidden in it somewhere. I suppose I should be grateful it’s not a terrible 800-page novel?

The Penelopiad

StuckinaBook All October 25, 2010April 26, 20152000s, 2005, Atwood 7 Comments

(sorry that the formatting has played up on this post – I don’t seem able to change it!)

When my book group chose the category books-inspired-by-other-books, I thought it was a fantastic idea. As a group, we’d already read and loved (and watched and loved) The Hours by Michael Cunningham, and I was hoping we’d have something like Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones, or Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, something along those lines. When The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood (from Canongate’s The Myths series) was chosen, my heart did sink a little. And not just because my only previous experience with Ms. Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale, which so many people rave about – left me not only unenthusiastic, but downright irritated. My main problem was that my knowledge of The Odyssey is sketchy at best. I don’t know where The Odyssey, The Iliad (which I presumed had a hand in Atwood’s title) and The Aenied differ, and to be honest all I knew about Penelope was garnered from a Year 7 History video, where myths were retold by a man and his hyperactive dog puppet. And any scraps I could glean in James Joyce’s Ulysses. So, basically, I knew about the weaving-and-unweaving thing. But I was happy to learn, and hoped that I could enjoy The Penelopiad with very little knowledge of the original…

Which I did. There are probably lots of nuances I missed, but I thought Atwood’s re-telling was done well most of the time. Certainly the style was less annoying than in The Handmaid’s Tale (perhaps because she wasn’t trying so hard?) Penelope tells her life story from Hades, wandering through fields of asphodel, as you do. It is a very modern take on the whole story – Penelope’s relationship with her sister Mary was not unlike something from an American sitcom; Penelope all plain and clever, Mary all beautiful and wily.

No man will ever kill himself for love of me. And no man ever did. Not that I would have wanted to inspire those kinds of suicides. I was not a man-eater, I was not a Siren, I was not like cousin Helen who loved to make conquests just to show she could. As soon as the man was grovelling, and it never took long, she’d stroll away without a backwards glance, giving that careless laugh of hers, as if she’d just been watching the palace midget standing ridiculously on his head.

I was a kind girl – kinder than Helen, or so I thought. I knew I would have to have something to offer instead of beauty. I was clever, everyone said so – in fact they said it so much that I found it discouraging – but cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he’ll take kindness any day of the week, if there’s nothing more alluring to be had.

We’re on familiar Jane-Eyre territory here, aren’t we? But – and thanks must go to Bob, who alone at my book group table was familiar with the original, even teaching classics – in turns out that in Homer’s original Penelope isn’t plain. She’s not in Helen territory, but the sisterly resentment which drives much of the narrative isn’t actually in the original.

In fact, at first I thought Atwood had picked rather an easy target. Yes, The Odyssey-given-a-feminist-twist. It seemed a little obvious, even heavy-handed (which is not to say that I’m anti-feminist – in fact, I’d call myself a feminist, although of course people have different definitions of the word.) But (thanks again, Bob, who is in fact a woman) the Penelope of The Odyssey was apparently more feminist than Penelope of The Penelopiad. More together, more powerful, more respected, etc. etc. But since I haven’t read it, I’ll have to take Bob’s word for it – just adds another interesting perspective on Atwood’s retelling.
The ‘hook’ of Atwood’s narrative, though – a more original feminist viewpoint – is the death of Penelope’s twelve maids. Odysseus apparently had them hanged upon his return from his voyage. I suspect this is a footnote in Homer’s original, but Atwood plays it to its full potential, and it really is an ingenious angle: why were they killed, when they had aided Penelope? They figure as a ‘chorus’ throughout the novella, sometimes mature and sometimes very vulgar (which feels, in Atwood’s hands, a bit like hearing an elderly aunt make a rude joke) and still huddle together in their afterlife. Yet they are never given individual names, and remain simply ‘the maids.’

Although I haven’t read the original, I did enjoy some places where Atwood was clearly adapting aspects from Homer. Who knows how many I missed through ignorance, but a fair few were sign-posted for those not in-the-know, such as the following:
You’ve probably heard that my father ran after our departing chariot, begging me to stay with him, and that Odysseus asked me if I was going to Ithaca with him of my own free will or did I prefer to remain with my father? It’s said that in answer I pulled down my veil, being too modest to proclaim in words my desire for my husband, and that a statue was later erected of me in tribute to the virtue of Modesty. There’s some truth to this story. But I pulled down my veil to hide the fact that I was laughing. You have to admit there was something humorous about a father who’d once tossed his own child into the sea capering down the road after that very child and calling “Stay with me!”

The Penelopiad was one of those books I liked quite a lot when I read it, and liked less after a book group discussion on it. But I still admire many aspects of the narrative, especially subtle like bits like that quoted above – and would be keen to seek out more from the series The Myths. I didn’t even realise that I already had one on my shelves – Sally Vickers’ Where Three Roads Meet. The (ongoing?) series’ titles can be viewed here – have you read any of them?