Reading group: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Ann suggested this short novel, which takes the character of Rochester's mad wife Bertha, incarcerated in the attic in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and tells the story of her life, chiefly in her own words but also with sections related by Rochester. As Ann said, she is a gap in the Bronte novel, and this novel fills the gap. Ann had previously read the book on the recommendation of her English teacher when she was a teenager struggling with Jane Eyre, and then she had enjoyed it as an interesting prequel, but this time around she had found a lot more in it. This time she found it a very dense book, in which every word and sentence matter - at which several people nodded in agreement - and was afraid that as she had had to read it quickly at the last minute this time she hadn't given it the careful reading she felt it needed.

The book takes as its cue the short section from Jane Eyre in which Rochester relates to Jane how he was tricked into an arranged marriage in Jamaica with his Creole wife who then turned out to be mad, and recreates those circumstances from a different perspective. Here Bertha is Antoinette, the name by which she went before Rochester insisted on calling her Bertha - and we are presented with her vivid and evocative memories of a lonely and emotionally deprived childhood as the daughter of a deceased slave owner and his grieving and fearful widow. Descendants of the original English colonials, ostracised and indeed threatened by the ex-slave community in post-Emancipation Jamaica, Antoinette, her congenitally disabled younger brother and her distracted and grieving mother live in isolation and increasing poverty. When her mother remarries wealthy Mr Mason, a new colonial, they seem 'saved', but he is incapable of understanding the social situation. His failure to heed his wife's warnings about the resentment of the ex-slaves leads to a tragedy which impels her towards complete emotional breakdown and loss of control, resulting in her incarceration in a 'safe' house where she eventually dies. It is this 'madness', along with the infirmity of Antoinette's (also now dead) brother, which a jealous and disowned half-brother of Antoinette's, her father's son by one of his former slaves, uses to poison Rochester against Antoinette, convincing him of her incipient madness. Antoinette has been at first unhappy to be trapped in a forced union to a man who needed her wealth and now, according to English law, owns it (in reality she is in love with a second cousin, Sandi, who is also the descendant of slaves, but she must be married off to someone of pure English descent), but subsequently ecstatically sexually seduced by her new husband Rochester, only to have him then turn cold and even hostile towards her. She reacts in a deeply emotional (and non-English) way that only confirms the warnings about her. It is now that Rochester begins to call her Bertha, the second name that she shared with the mother whom everyone now takes for granted was mad. By the end of their short honeymoon in her old family house on Dominica, he has categorised her as lunatic, and plans already to incarcerate her:

White faces, dazed eyes, aimless gestures, high-pitched laughter... She's one of them. I too can wait - for the day when she is only a memory to be avoided, locked away, and like all memories a legend. Or  lie...

The final short and harrowing section is related by Antoinette from the attic room in Thornfield Hall, where she is now truly deranged by the isolation and the lack of knowledge of where she is, why she is kept there and why her husband doesn't come to her.

This precis of mine makes the thrust of the novel, in terms of plot, seem much clearer than it does on a first reading. The prose is highly economical, as Ann pointed out, and there is a focus on the emotional rather than the factual dimensions of the story. Information about the factual circumstances is often slipped in only subtly and even indirectly - a perhaps inevitable and even calculated effect in a story of cultural confusion and increasing psychological derangement. I found that on a first reading, concentrating on the emotional element, which is indeed complex and subtle, I missed some of these points of fact and I wasn't absolutely clear about the sequence of events and therefore of some of the causes and effects, and it was only on a second reading that the whole thing fell beautifully into shape for me as above. Not only did Ann feel she had read the book too quickly, but Jenny hadn't yet reached the final section, and Doug, who had read it years ago but is moving house and has all of his books packed away, hadn't managed to find it to read it again, and as a result there was a fair bit of doubt and discussion about fairly radical aspects of the book.

Ann considered that it was a book about people in new places and/or situations they don't understand and in which they don't know how to cope - the ex-slaves and both the old and new colonials in the post-Emancipation West Indies, and the two young people forced by their families into their cross-cultural marriage. (Rochester is especially hurtled into it: arriving in Jamaica only three weeks before the marriage his family have arranged to  a woman unknown to him, he is immediately struck down by illness and spends a large part of that time in a fever - which he will later look back on as a way in which he was cheated of finding out about Antoinette in time.) And indeed, when Ann looked up the book on the internet, she found it called 'the original post-colonial novel'.

This led to quite a lot of sharing by group members of factual information about colonialism, slavery, multiculturalism and the history of the West Indies. Taking the focus back to the book, Jenny said she felt sorry for most of the characters, including Rochester, who is also a victim of a social system (expected to maintain his social status but impoverished by primogeniture and consequently manipulated by his family into this marriage, and of course entirely innocent of the West Indies social situation into which he is plummeted). Along with most others, I agreed with this last, though up to a point. By allocating sections of the book to Rochester's first-person narrative, Rhys does give an insight into Rochester's predicament. However, I felt that the book had a more feminist message than had  been noted so far in our discussion. Victim of a patriarchal society though Rochester may be, nevertheless he undoubtedly ends up with the patriarchy-sanctioned power to save himself by destroying and negating Antoinette. I felt that this book was taking up a point made on more than one occasion by Jane Eyre (who narrates the Bronte novel) that women and children are not the sweet, angelic creatures they are thought to be and meant to be and that women can have tumultuous emotions and the same ambitions as men. Rhys seems to me specifically to develop this point and the notion that is thus implicit, if not actually tackled, in the Bronte novel, that behaviour in women not sanctioned by a patriarchal society is merely called madness, a repression which ironically however can induce true derangement. John agreed (and recalled our discussion of Tender is the Night and its so-called mad character Nicole, a novel in which the author seems less aware of such a notion). (People seemed initially a little taken aback by the idea that Jane Eyre could be considered feminist, with its heroine in love with a distant, brooding and even cruel man, but no one apart from John had read it recently - he went back to it after reading the Rhys book - and Trevor hadn't read it at all, although he had seen a film adaptation. We reminded everyone that although Jane 'gets her man' in the end, she does so on her own terms, as, finally, a rich and thus independent woman, and when, as Trevor put it, Rochester has been emasculated, blinded and having lost his right hand - indeed 'punished' by the backfiring of his own action in incarcerating Bertha/Antoinette.)

Doug however, not having read the Rhys book recently either, was unconvinced that Antoinette was not congenitally mad - after all, wasn't her mother mad before her? This led to some general discussion about what constitutes madness, but pinning it back to the book, those of us who had read it more recently insisted that there were circumstances which had driven Antoinette's mother to  distraction - although I think we omitted to mention the crucial and precipitating one, the tragic death of Antoinette's brother. Explaining Antoinette's own 'madness', Clare pointed to her emotionally deprived and fearful childhood, and her consequent emotional vulnerability in the situation into which she is forced with Rochester. Still Doug worried about it all: but to have been in such a state that she was incarcerated? Once again, as in our discussion of Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture, he was met with a chorus of protest that throughout history women have been incarcerated as mad simply for unacceptable or emotional behaviour, and once again Jenny said that it happened to an aunt of her own.

I said that I thought the theme of obeah (or voodoo) in the novel was not simply a function of cultural difference but was put to specifically feminist use. In fact, the implication is that it is not a point of difference: Rochester's insistence on calling Antoinette Bertha, the name of her 'mad mother', is indeed a kind of voodoo, and Antoinette recognises this: ' "That's obeah, too." '  A patriarchal system which calls women submissive, and mad when they fail to be so, allows them no other way to be and locks them into one or other of those states. Rochester himself is half-conscious of his own voodoo-type power: having decided to hate Antoinette and destroy her hatred for him, he says, 'I did it too. I saw the hate go out of her eyes. I forced it out... Say die and I will die.'

In a similarly ironic way, it is at this point that the prose of Rochester's first-person narrative changes and adopts rhythms, images and conceits similar to those of Antoinette's, implying similar mental breakdown: 'I thought I saw that tree strike its roots deeper, making ready to fight the wind.' In a further twist of irony, this is when he finally decides that he is sane: 'All the mad conflicting emotions had gone and left me wearied and empty. Sane.'

People commented on the descriptions of nature, its beauty and yet its sinister character to both Antoinette as a child and the adult Rochester, and the jungle that threatens to encroach on Antoinette's ancestral and honeymoon home, another very real way in which the characters are  overpowered by an alien environment. I said I thought that the weather was also used in a symbolic way: at the point when Rochester finally hardens against Antoinette and asserts his English patriarchal values over her, the weather changes and becomes, in his words, 'cool, calm and cloudy as an English summer.'

John now read out a passage from the section in Jane Eyre where Rochester explains and justifies himself to Jane, saying that, actually, reading Wide Sargasso Sea had rather spoilt Jane Eyre for him. As John was indicating, in the light of Wide Sargasso Sea Rochester comes over here as utterly self-centred, indeed selfish, lacking in empathy and cruel: in fact, the passage almost reads as satirical, yet one is aware that Bronte, while not dealing with him uncritically, is not intending satire. Interestingly and ironically, as Clare pointed out, because Rhys provides some insight into his predicament, he comes over less badly in her novel of cultural and feminist redress. Trevor, however, didn't agree. In his view the Rochester of Wide Sargasso Sea was 'a bloody plonker, a Grade One.'

There was now some discussion as to whether it was necessary to know Jane Eyre in order to appreciate Wide Sargasso Sea, and opinion was divided, or at any rate uncertain. I said that surely it was necessary (ie to truly appreciate it), since it was a work of redress and the original was so explicitly flagged. (It truly is harrowing to have one's previous perceptions of the ghostly threat in the attic overturned by the final section of Wide Sargasso Sea, an experience that would not be available to you if you did not know Jane Eyre.) But then Doug said that once again we come up against the impotence of authors in the face of the way that readers read.

At any rate, everyone agreed that, short as it is, it had been a difficult book to read, and whether this was because none of us had recently read Jane Eyre beforehand it wasn't really possible to know. Trevor seemed to have found it the hardest (and he was the one who had never read Jane Eyre, though of course he had seen a film adaptation): he said he really had to struggle with it and force himself to go on reading, and although he is the one in the group who enjoys most books, as a result he hadn't enjoyed this.


Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

How do you identify as a writer?

At Easter I was at a conference at Salford University on writing and the small presses, and Professor of English Lucie Armitt, who'd invited me to speak, asked me if I identified as a Welsh writer. For a moment I felt stumped. Did I or didn't I?  It's one of those questions that have me floundering, and feeling that there aren't enough words, or the right words, to tackle this whole issue in a single conversation. I answered that no, I didn't identify as a 'Welsh writer': my Welsh background does of course strongly influence my outlook, and therefore of course how I write, but there are other strong influences - not least my education in English Literature and the many long years I've lived in England, as well as my father's Irishness, and the fact that some of my ancestors were quite probably from Eastern Europe and that others may have been black slaves. I've therefore never really identified strongly with any particular nationality - I always refuse to fill in those sections on questionnaires, and national pride usually gives me the creeps - and of course all of this affects who I feel I am as a writer. Writing to me is a state without boundaries: and realising this makes me realise also that this is why I write.

And then the other day on her blog the writer Nuala Ni Chonchuir called me 'the English writer Elizabeth Baines.' It's fair enough: I live in England and have done so for many years, I've mainly been published by English publishers, and, perhaps because writing to me is this universal place beyond geographic boundaries, I tend not to name locations in my writing, and they're probably taken as consistently English although some are Welsh. But, I tell you, the phrase really shocked me. I found myself thinking: Me? English? But I'm Welsh by birth; by parentage I'm  half-Welsh, half-Irish! And don't I write against the English canon? English? Me? That, I discovered, is how I feel after all these years of Anglicisation - my Welsh grandmother's punishment in school for speaking Welsh, my own inability to cope in a Welsh-speaking school, the way that, by the time I was a ten-year-old in England no one would have guessed from my accent that I hadn't been born there, the way I felt English - indeed, identified as English - at a Welsh university. No, I was far more shocked, in the end, to be called an English writer than to be asked if I identified as a Welsh one. Maybe I'm not as impartial as I've thought...

An interview with Nuala Ní Chonchúir about her new collection of short stories

Today this blog is honoured by a visit from the wonderful writer Nuala Ní Chonchúir, who's on a tour to promote her latest book, Mother America (New Island). This stunning collection of short stories deals chiefly though not exclusively with aspects of motherhood - the experience of it, its effects and consequences - taking in not only the viewpoints and voices of mothers but of men and children too. There's also an achingly moving reworking of the Mary Magdelene story, and a recurring scenario of betrayal in which an affair occurs between a woman's husband and her sister, this last vividly conveyed in a second-person portrayal of the pain of the artist Frieda Kahlo - a theme of painting and drawing works its way through the collection, too. There's a cosmopolitan feel, with stories set in America, Paris and Rome, yet the spirit of Ireland hovers over it all, as in the story in which an Irish mother, brought to Brooklyn by her son and then abandoned by her there, sits in a cafe with the letter he's sent her but which she is unable to read. In another story, the very same cafe plays host to a different character, and similar connections trace their way across several of the stories. Short-story writer, novelist and poet, Nuala seems a complete mistress of all three forms. I find her work breathtaking in its insight and command of language - her touch is light, yet her sentences, both poetic yet muscular, burn themselves on your brain, and her vision is both warmly human yet searing. This book had me enthralled, at times in tears, now and then laughing out loud with delight at the connections, and I was eager to talk to Nuala about it.

 

EB: Nuala, there's a strong theme of exile running through the book, centred on the mother figure. So many of the mothers are Irish, and I wonder if you are making a link between a mother's relationship with her children, and the people of Ireland with their homeland?

NNC: Ireland is personified as a woman – Róisín Dubh, meaning Dark Rosaleen – in song and myth. We also have the mother goddess Danu, and Ériu who gave her name to the country, so the symbol and importance of woman/mother is a strong one in Ireland.

There is also the old cliché about the Irish mother and her sons – she loves her sons and they can do no wrong, but she lambasts her daughters. There’s the ring of truth in that of course. I’m a mother (of two boys and one girl) and I’m a daughter, and that influences what I write about. Ireland is also a country of emigrants and, lately, immigrants. Historically, there is a good deal of sentimentality about Irish emigration (that continues to this day) and I am interested in that.

When it comes to writing stories, I have no agenda – I just write about whatever is interesting to me at that time. For the last three years that has been mothers, especially ones who are separated from their children, by force or by will.

EB: The connections between some of the stories are stunning and very moving, and it's a wonderful way of carrying your themes of exile and also redemption. Would you talk about that?

NNC: When I write stories, one after the other, inevitably there are linking themes, because my synapses are sparking off a few riffs (if that is not too mixed a metaphor!) over a period of time. I only realised, after a few stories, that I was writing about mothers. The fear and separation/exile motifs emerged later. Two of the stories are very deliberately linked: ‘Scullion’ sees a young maid become pregnant by her master. ‘My Name is William Clongallen’ sees the son of that union return to Ireland from America to seek out his mother.

I like links in short fiction collections but I also like diversity. Nam Le, Caitlin Horrocks, Sarah Hall and Anthony Doerr all do a great line in diversity in their collections, though there may be a linking tone or theme, of melancholy or loss or whatever, in their books.

As long as a book hangs together cohesively in some way, I see no absolute need for linked collections. I would be disturbed if it became the norm – it would smack of publishers attempting to make novels of short fiction collections, which I object to.

EB: You are brilliant at voice and point of view, and the contrasts in both once again promote your themes brilliantly. How do you do it? Was it a deliberate choice or instinctive here?

NNC: I am most comfortable writing in the first or second person, so that’s where I will usually begin. Third person is more difficult for me but some stories, like ‘Queen of Tattoo’ beg for that bit of distance.

It’s instinctive in the sense that I don’t plan anything when I write – I go from the gut and the thing either works or it doesn’t. Having a distinctive voice to work from always makes a story flow much easier for me, so I like when a voice whispers in my ear early on.

EB: In some ways this book reminded me of one of my favourite short story writers, the American Grace Paley, although you have your own distinct tone. It's not just in the melting-pot Brooklyn settings, the cleverness with voice and the concern with motherhood: there's always a sense of homeland underpinning everything, perhaps best summed up in the title story. How do you manage to conjure up these places (the stories set in Paris conjure up its atmosphere, beautifully, too)?

NNB: As an Irish person, I am pretty much obsessed with place. It may be to do with Colonialism and occupation, but we Irish are very regional, very place-addicted. Most of us want to own our bit of home.

But, as someone born in 1970, I am also very Europe orientated and I value Ireland’s connection to the European Union. So my fiction happily looks to Europe and America, while also keeping one foot firmly in the homeplace.

Travel has been the big boon of being a writer for me. I’ve always enjoyed travel and now I get to do it a lot. That fires me up as a writer; I love it. I am an ardent notebook keeper and, when I travel, even more so. I keep a journal, I take photos, and all that helps if I feel like setting a story in Paris, for example, where I have set many stories.

Thanks for having me by, Elizabeth. Next Monday my virtual tour takes me to writer Ethel Rohan’s blog in San Francisco. http://ethelrohan.com/blog/. I hope some of your readers will join me there.

Thanks so much, Nuala. I urge you all to buy the book - it's wonderful!

See my earlier interview with Nuala about her witty and moving novel, You. 

It's such a strange experience...

...when you come across people discussing your work:

New literary festival

I've been alerted by novelist Charlie Hill to a new literary festival he's started up with Andy Killeen. Looks well worth a visit.

Reading at Oren in Caernarfon

Every so often you do a reading that's really different and off beat. John and I are in Wales at the moment, and the week before last I did a reading in the tiny Oren restaurant in Caernarfon which Gert Vos runs, providing a different, and always exciting, set menu each week. Occasionally on a Thursday, Gert will put on some kind of entertainment for diners, and he had invited me on this particular Thursday to read between courses.

With a necessarily small and select audience mellowed by wine and the most delicious food, it was probably one of the nicest, cosiest readings I've ever done, rather like reading round the dinner-table at home to a group of friends - not that I've ever done that! Gert had decided to do a Welsh menu for the evening, and there was a choice of starters, but then the way we all ordered made him suggest that we all sample some of each, and everyone agreed with delight. So before I began reading I was already almost too full to do so with mackerel salad, battered courgettes (with flowers intact) and Welsh vegetable spring soup. When everyone had finished the first course, those on the ground floor swung their chairs around to face me and those upstairs came down, and I read. I had decided to read food- and restaurant-related pieces, and at this point I read 'Condensed Metaphysics' from Balancing on the Edge of the World, which though set in a very different kind of restaurant from Gert's - a pizza takeway on Manchester's Oxford Road - features a set of customers relating and chatting in just the way we were already doing. And indeed, as Gert served up the next course - Anglesey lamb for carnivores and delicious Welsh goat's cheese with broadbeans and homemade oatcakes for us veggies - there was chat about some of the issues in the story, and about writing. People also asked me about 'Compass and Torch' (because it's on the AQA GCSE syllabus), which I had in fact considered reading, as it was the area above Caernarfon at the start of the Nantlle ridge that had inspired it. After the main course I read a section from The Birth Machine with its strong theme of cooking and witches' brews and spells, and then finally we all went quite quiet as we tucked into one of the most delicious puddings I've ever tasted (I think maybe puddings are Gert's specialty): summer fruit crumble with Caerphilly cheese.

It was an evening I'll remember for a long time: such a friendly, interested audience - in spite of the distraction of the food! - and they even asked to buy books, which I hadn't really expected!

Here's a photo of an earlier meal I had at Gert's: the starter for the Danish summer menu:

Salt author on Booker longlist

Many congratulations to Salt author Alison Moore for her Booker longlisting with her debut novel The Lighthouse, which I'm dying to read. It's wonderful that the Booker judges this year have avowedly backed innovation and the off-beat, and looked at 'novels not novelists, texts not reputations', and as another Salt author, I'm naturally thrilled at the endorsement this gives to our tiny, inspired and hardworking publisher. Congratulations also therefore to Jen and Chris Hamilton-Emery, who have steered Salt through some pretty hard times, quite often single- (no, I mean, double-) handedly - quite frankly, I don't really know how they've done it. And also to writer Nick Royle who recently joined Salt as an editor to begin his own list, of which Alison Moore's book is a first triumphant fruit.

What's in a name? Guest post by psychological thriller writer Niki Valentine.

Today I'm delighted to host a very interesting guest post from psychological thriller writer Niki Valentine on the occasion of the ebook publication of her latest novel, Possessed, in advance of the October print publication.

Possessed sounds really exciting:
 

Who do you trust when you can no longer trust your own mind?

Emma's life has always been a struggle, and now she's been accepted at a prestigious music school, she is determined to excel. But when the impossibly chic twins, confident Sophie and quieter Matilde, come crashing into her life - surrounding her with champagne and parties - they demand Emma's full attention.

Then shy Matilde commits suicide and shockingly, her identical twin Sophie flourishes. Now odd things are happening to Emma: blackouts, waking up in strange places, bizarre dreams. Something, or someone, is consuming Emma's mind. Terrified, Emma begins to doubt everything and everyone around her, especially the beautiful Sophie...

Powerful, twisted, atmospheric and disturbing, Possessed is a terrifying psychological thriller.

This is the second Niki Valentine book - the first, Haunted, was acclaimed by the Irish Sunday Independent as 'quite terrifying'. But their author is also Nicola Monaghan, the prizewinning writer of equally tension-filled 'literary fiction' who also teaches Creative Writing at Nottingham University. Her first, The Killing Jar, deservedly won a Betty Trask Award and the Author's Club Best First Novel Award, among others - like all of her writing, it had me gripped from start to finish!

 In today's post, Niki  talks about this 'dual identity' as a writer - and admits that it's maybe not so dual an identity after all:

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

In 2006, after I published my debut novel, I got married. I’d always planned to keep my maiden name, as I liked it very much, and also have some feminist principles about these things. But my writing career gave me a third option: I could change my name and keep it at the same time. My feminist principles intact, both my husband and I changed our surnames to one with resonance and family connections for both of us and I became Mrs Valentine.

Even as I sent off my passport and my deed of name change, I couldn’t help thinking what a great name this would be for a writer. Other people mentioned it too and the idea took hold that I might find a way to use it. I didn’t want to lose my maiden name, though, and the identity that went with that. My first novel did pretty well and won a couple of prizes, so I had built a reputation that I didn’t want to lose.

I’ve always read widely and through a number of genres. I do love literary fiction, but I love books from many genres. I was aware of Iain Banks and his alter ego with the extra initial, having read books by ‘both’ and enjoyed them. Literary fiction wasn’t even my first choice of genre; all the books I’d planned and started before writing my first novel had fantasy elements to them. I was a big fan of magic realism and gritty, urban fantasy, as well as stories about ghosts, possession and reincarnation. And my literary fiction had criminal and thrillerish elements, so that crime was a genre I considered too.

I didn’t need to use another name to write a different genre. I’m a strong believer that, as a writer, I should be able turn my hand to any genre I want, as long as I am prepared to read and get to know it intimately. I also think that it’s preferable to love the genre I’m writing and feel passionate about it. There’s a lot talk around writing and publishing and this idea of the author as a ‘brand’. I’ve never seen myself that way; nor have I been encouraged to by any publisher I’ve worked with. I refuse to be a commodity, or to see art in such deeply capitalist terms. It doesn’t scan for me.
That said, I am also a reader. I know how it works to go up to shelf in a bookshop or library and find a writer you love. The warm feeling of the familiar and the new at the same time. I know that I come to books by writers I know with certain expectations. That’s not to say that I think every book should be the same. I’m probably the most disappointed when I find it’s more or less the same book I’ve read before, or written to some kind of formula the writer or publisher has come to believe in. At the same time, if it was a wildly different genre, I think there is a risk I’d be disappointed, not because the book isn’t good, but because it isn’t what I wanted from a book right then and there.

Like most of my choices as a writer, the decision to use a different name was about the reader. I thought it made more sense to define myself as two different entities. Niki Valentine, who writes thrillers with psychological and supernatural elements to them, and Nicola Monaghan, whose thrillers are more literary in nature. In fact, the deeper I get involved in my new genre, the less it feels different from what I write in the other name. It broaches similar themes; broken psychologies, disturbed individuals, dysfunctional relationships. These seem to be the things I am interested in, no matter which name I use, or which genre I wrap it up in.

Many thanks to Niki, and I urge you to read her gripping books. The ebook of Possessed can be bought here.

Reading group: The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark

Warning: plot-spoiler (though whether it matters with this book is a moot point, as our discussion will reveal).

There was radical division in the group over this very short novel (Mark's suggestion) of 1970 in which thirty-four-year-old protagonist Lise sets out on holiday with a firm purpose which appears initially to be to experience a holiday romance or sexual encounter, and in which we are told from fairly near the beginning that 'she will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab wounds.'

Mark pointed out in his introduction that it's a departure in style for Muriel Spark and for this reason when he read it about three years ago he didn't like it, but having thought about it for our meeting he now liked it very much indeed. He felt it's a book that's better for rereading; indeed - as I put in - it both invites and requires rereading, because it's only in the light of the gradual revelation that Lise's purpose is precisely to be murdered, that the true project of the book can be appreciated. However, it was the question of the project of the book over which we were divided, and our conflicting views raised once again the questions of authorial intention and the competing authorities of writer and reader.

Mark, John, Doug and I saw the book as a metafiction, a comment on traditional narrative with its assumption of omniscient authorial authority and confidence in the revelation of psychological truth, and on crime fiction in particular, which, with its careful plotting and complacency about the solubility of mystery, takes the mode to the extreme. The prose here is mannered in a way that, as Mark had indicated, is unlike Spark's usual fluent high satirical English style, and geared I would say to defamiliarise and disrupt conventional expectations, with insistent repetition and surprising, sometimes discordant imagery - a laughing woman in a brown overall, for instance, is 'emitting noise like a brown container of laughing-gas'. By making the protagonist the 'victim' (rather than a detective) and temporally leading up to the crime rather than away from it, and indeed by questioning or even denying her status as a victim, Spark effects a subversion of crime fiction, but thwarts any move towards traditional literary fiction by overturning the conventional literary narrative trajectory and beginning with the revelation of the end of the story, the murder. As Mark said, Spark called the book a 'whydunnit' rather than a whodunnit, but one wonders if this is another of her sly jokes, since, in the psychological terms of traditional novels, we never do find out why Lise wants to be murdered (apart from suggestions throughout that she is mad) - a gap we considered highly intentional on Spark's part - and the book might more accurately be called a howdunnit.

Someone said that Lise herself is a gap, and Spark does indeed withhold significant information about her, and does so in a signalled way via the mannered prose. We do not know Lise's nationality or, in consequence, that of some of the other characters; she never volunteers this information when people she meets tell her, seemingly pointedly, where they are from. We are told, with significant repetition, that she 'speaks four languages'; occasionally we are told she is speaking in one of those languages, which can come as a surprise to disrupt our assumptions and make us realise that on most occasions we do not know which language she is using; we do not know which country she lives in and flies from, we are only told, in Lise's notably stilted dialogue, that she lives in 'the North'; we do not know which city in which country she flies to, only that it is in 'the South' and that from there it is possible to drive to Naples. The narration eschews omniscient knowledge of Lise's feelings or motives but watches her from outside like a camera and, carefully, only surmises - she 'does not appear to listen' - or refuses even to surmise: 'whether she has failed to leave [the envelope] at the doorkeeper's desk by intention, or whether through the distraction of the woman's laughter, one could not tell from her serene face with lips slightly parted'; 'Lisa is lifting the corners of her carefully packed things, as if in absent-minded accompaniment to some thought, who knows what?' - a wry comment, I'd say, on both the fictive detective who takes the reader through a process of deduction via clues and the novelist who presumes possession of the truth about characters and drops clues for the reader. All in all, I said, I took the book as a spoof and a postmodern joke.

Now there were objections. Trevor didn't like my use of the words spoof and joke but he did agree when I said, Well it's a comment on crime fiction. I'm not sure exactly why he wanted this distinction: I think he felt the actual story and character should be taken more seriously than our reading did, and that he himself had felt at less of a distance from them than we had (and thought we were meant to be) (and he did say he had very much enjoyed it).  Jenny also didn't like my use of those terms, and went further: she didn't at all agree with our interpretation. She said she simply took the book as being about Lise's death wish. She said you could tell things about Lise's personality and feelings: she's old-fashioned and she's very controlling, her flat is sparse and over-neat, and we can deduce from the plot that she has spent time in a mental hospital and is deranged. Most of these things are true: it is stated that Lise wears old-fashioned lipstick, and the clothes she wears for her trip are of an old-fashioned length. However, her clothes are purposefully chosen as a chief aspect of the 'trail' that the narration tells us she is laying for detectives later investigating her murder: 'Lise in her knee-covering clothes at this moment looks curiously of the street-prostitute class beside the mini-skirted girls and their mothers whose knees at least can be seen./So she lays the trail'  (my italics). She is certainly very controlling, and her main characteristic betraying this is her firmly closed mouth, but it seems to me that in the context of the withholding of so many other facts about Lise, the constant over-repetition of this authorial observation, linked with the equally frequent observation of her parting her lips slightly 'as if in a trance', amounts to a send-up of this kind of authorial clue-dropping. I'd say the same could be said for the description of her flat, which went on at rather ridiculous but self-conscious length, and I said that I felt that that description had a more metafictive purpose: the way that everything in the flat folds away from view symbolises the way that Lise's inner life is folded away from both narrator or reader. Jenny didn't agree: she saw it as more straightforwardly implying things about Lise's character. Lise's control itself is to me in any case a satirical vehicle rather than a realistic psychological characteristic: by leaving clues for others to find and piece together Lise is acting like an author: she is in effect writing the story, in the narrative driver's seat. Jenny clearly didn't accept this either. She said she took the title 'The Driver's Seat' to mean, more simply, that by choosing to be murdered and setting out to find her murderer, Lise had taken control of events in her life.

Jenny said, in any case there is a plot and clues you can piece together, and it is a whodunnit in that you are kept guessing until the end who is going to be the man - which is true. John had previously noted that there was a conventional laying of red herrings in the form of the other, threatening-seeming men she meets who however turn out to be 'not her type'. Trevor said, mind you, I did think some of the coincidences were ridiculous, in particular the fantastic one of the bloke that Lise had once known and whom she wanted to murder her being on the same flight. I said that I thought that was part of the spoof (hesitating to use the word, but unable to think of a better). In fact the coincidence is developed: he turns out to have been booked into the same tiny hotel at their destination, and one begins to wonder if, rather than its being a coincidence, Lise has plotted even this, but since there is no evidence that we could pick up of such prior plotting we can't know - another send-up in my opinion, or calculated disruption of the conventional techniques of crime fiction. Doug now said that if the novel is the kind of novel Jenny suggested - a crime novel, albeit an inverted one - then it is a really terrible novel, but if it's the postmodern interrogation of such novels that we others thought it, then it's brilliant, and of course we others agreed. Jenny didn't agree with that either; she said she thought it was a good novel on her terms.

There was now some discussion which I'm afraid degenerated quickly into heated argument, as it foundered on our differing understandings of terminology as a result of our differing disciplines. I repeated my belief that you weren't intended to give the novel a psychological reading, and Jenny, a sociologist, strongly objected to my describing her reading of the novel in this way. The heated nature of the exchanges meant that I couldn't ask her why, or explain what I meant (the inference of characters' motives and feelings - their psychology - from descriptions of their behaviour). She and Trevor also objected to the term 'postmodern', and Mark and I did manage to explain what we meant by postmodernism in literary terms: a questioning of traditional narrative modes. Jenny told us what postmodernism was in sociological terms, but I'm afraid I've forgotten it, and Jenny seemed to stick to it in judging the book as not postmodern, so we were equally dismissive of each other's uses of the term. There was a spat about whether the book was realist or surreal. Jenny insisted it was surreal but John objected that the Surrealists were interested above all in the role of the subconscious in the writing process whereas here Spark is utterly, cerebrally in control. Mark now hotly objected that the book isn't surreal at all: the whole thing is couched in the careful realist observationist mode of the detective novel. Doug however pointed out that some of the incidents do have an improbable surreal nature - which is a different use of the term from that of John's, and I think what Jenny meant. I wanted to say that the book is neither of those things, realist or surreal, but playing with both modes to make a specific literary point, but didn't manage to do so. There was a calmer moment as we considered the crucial matter of Lise's wanting to be murdered and engineering her own murder. Some thought that it was so psychologically unrealistic as to be necessarily a kind of send-up, but Trevor and Mark pointed out that, actually, there are known cases of people agreeing to be murdered. I said that I thought it was a satirical comment on the theory, very current at the time of this novel's writing, that the victim is an agent in his or her own murder - Martin Amis's 'murderee', as Mark and Trevor reminded us - but no one seemed particularly interested in pursuing this idea. Finally Trevor made the point that the author may have intended the reading most of us were saying she had, but if people gave it a more conventional reading the author had no control over that, which is a point you can't argue with, and one that writers need to keep in mind.

Afterwards, thinking more about this, I pondered the ending. The policemen who will arrest the murderer are dressed in uniforms and trappings that 'protect them from the indecent exposure of fear and pity, pity and fear.' This, the final line of the novel, is of course a reference to Artistotle's dictum that the arousal of fear and pity in an audience is essential to good drama - an idea that has underpinned Western literature and deeply imbues conventional fiction with its insistence on allowing the reader to identify with and feel for (and believe in) characters, but which has been challenged by twentieth-century literary theory. What does Spark mean by the 'indecent exposure' of those emotions, and whose emotions are the policemen being protected from as they interrogate the murderer? Lise's? Or the murderer's? Because in fact towards the end of the novel I did at last find myself moved and identifying, and, in a reversal of convention, on behalf of and with the murderer. It is quite clear from his behaviour that he is frightened as Lise pushes him towards his crime - 'He is trembling'; ' "Stop trembling," '  she tells him; in a perverse way he becomes her victim - and in fact I found that this passage prompted me to read in the conventional psychological way, ie to know his emotions from his behaviour and that of Lise, and identify with him. It is hard, therefore, not to see this, like the conventional whodunnit embedded in the 'whydunnit' and pointed to by Jenny, as Spark's sly sleight of hand and an acknowledgement of the power of conventional emotion-based fiction.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Edge Hill Awards

Great night last night at the Edge Hill Award ceremony in London's Free Word Centre. I couldn't possibly have been rooting for any book in particular: the fabulous all-women shortlist included three books I've already been championing: A (Andrea) J Ashworth's Somewhere Else, or Even Here (Salt) which had already won the Scott Prize, Zoe Lambert's The War Tour (Comma) - both of which I nominated for the Readers' section of last year's Guardian First Book Award - and Sarah Hall's The Beautiful Indifference which I recently reviewed enthusiastically. The other two shortlisted books, which I hadn't read, were Tessa Hadley's Married Love (Cape) and Rowena MacDonald's Smoked Meat (Flambard). In the event, Sarah Hall won both the overall prize and the Readers' prize (judged by Edge Hill Creative Writing students). Congratulations to her, and to all the shortlistees. A truly lovely evening - a real hub of the short-story world, with a chance to catch up with short-story writers such as Adam Marek, Carys Bray,  judge and last year's winner Graham Mort, with mine and Andrea's publisher, Jen Hamilton-Emery, and with Ailsa Cox, my former co-editor on metropolitan magazine, who founded the prize. Here are some of them listening as judges Graham, Suzi Feay and Professor Rhiannon Evans talked about their difficulties in choosing from such a strong list. (Sarah Hall second from left, Jen Hamilton-Emery fourth from left, next to her Andrea Ashworth and Andrea's partner writer James Wall, Adam Marek in the check shirt and on his left and third from right Tessa Hadley.)

Here are Zoe and Andrea:

And here's a photo Jen took in the pub afterwards of Andrea, me and James:

Literary blackouts and lights

I've been in internet blackout, almost, for over a week: on the mountain in Wales and inside a cloud for most of the time. It's strange, a kind of literary purdah, but not quite. Every so often, briefly, there's a signal, and a message comes through. First there's one from the BBC who want permission to use my publicity photo for their website and their Revision Bite for my  story 'Compass and Torch', and they would like a contact for Tom Wright the photographer. Then there's a message from Deborah Grace, one of the innovative organisers of an Oxfam Community Book Festival to be held at Alderley Edge Oxfam Bookshop on the 15th and 16th September, sending me the programme which I ought to acknowledge, and asking what we readers will be reading. (I'll be reading on Sunday 16th, other readers will include Melvyn Burgess, Nick Royle, Conrad Williams and Livi Michael.) And a delightful request from Elaine Glover, editor of Stand magazine, asking if, as a long-term contributor, I'll read at an event in Leeds on 14th and 15th September to celebrate the magazine's sixtieth year. And with each email I kind of panic about getting a reply back before the connection goes again.

On the other hand, once we drive to Caernarfon, there's not only great internet connection but a literary community. There's the lovely bookshop, Palas Print, and once a month a book club meets in Gert Vos's Oren restaurant. Every so often Gert holds musical and cultural events in the restaurant, and I'm thrilled that he's asked me read at one of these - provisionally on Thursday 19th July. It's a great restaurant: every week there's a different set menu, always adventurous - the dishes often sprinkled with flowers - beautifully cooked and generous. Last week John and I had the Danish summer menu, and this, believe it or not, was our starter!

Reading group: A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro

Warning: plot spoiler (maybe).

Trevor suggested this book in which widowed and middle-aged Japanese narrator Etsuko, now living in England, is visited by her younger daughter Niki after the suicide of her elder daughter Keiko, and is prompted to remember a short friendship she had  in Nagasaki just after the war as a young married woman pregnant for the first time, with another young woman, Sachiko, whom the war had left single with a disturbed and sometimes sinister-seeming child, Mariko.

This was a very interesting discussion which became focused in part on the issue of whether, in reading a novel, one should ever take into account known authorial intention.

Firstly, Trevor introduced the book appreciatively by saying that he liked its portrayal of the two different women, Etsuko and Sachiko, and their radically different reactions to the aftermath of the war, Etsuko still accepting the subservient role of the traditional Japanese wife, and Sachiko rebelling against it all, leaving her uncle's traditional house to live alone with her child, and hoping to depart for America with a lover Frank. Trevor commented that the book was very oblique in its treatment of the atomic bomb: the characters never refer to it directly. The book, he said, seemed a conscious portrayal of Japanese reticence and formality - the characters constantly bow to one another and their conversation is characterised by formal repetition - but he was troubled by a sense of being unable to judge how authentic that was. He didn't know if this was just because he knew that the author, though born in Japan, was brought up in England, but he felt that there was also something very English about the book. One or two people in the group murmured that they too had felt that the tone of the book was somehow hybrid.

Jenny now said that she agreed about the characters, and that what she really liked about this book and Ishiguro's work in general is the way that he never tells you what characters are feeling but you always know exactly what they're feeling.

I said, But what did people think of the idea that Etsuko and Sachiko are in fact the same person (which rather puts paid to the notion that their, or rather her, motives and feelings at any one time are clear)? There is a passage towards the end where Etsuko, talking to the child Mariko about Mariko's imminent departure for America with Sachiko, switches from second person plural to first person plural, from 'you' to 'we', which gave me this distinct impression - and, it turned out, others in the group too. This had sent me off on the internet to the Paris Review interview with Ishiguro (Trevor made his usual cynical comment about appeals to the internet), and here Ishiguro explains that through working with homeless people he had come to realize that people often tell their own painful stories via another character. He says he had expected readers to be caught up short by the fact that Etsuko almost immediately starts talking about her involvement with someone else in the past (rather than her daughter Keiko's recent suicide, which is shrouded for the reader in mystery, or her own story that led up to it), and the implication seems to be that he expected readers to be jolted into guessing fairly soon that Etsuko is making Sachiko stand in for herself (in which case, to reveal it here is not, after all, to plot-spoil). I said that I didn't feel it worked, and others, in particular Ann, agreed. Pretending to talk about someone else, usually an invented character, when really talking about oneself, is a technique employed specifically to avoid referring to oneself, but here Etsuko inserts herself into the story as a large-as-life character minutely involved (for the short period they know each other) with Sachiko and her daughter Mariko, and very different from the more mysterious Sachiko not only in character but in concrete circumstance. There are too many internal inconsistencies to fulfil the notion that they are the same person. On the more trivial level, but nevertheless sending a strong diversionary signal, Sachiko runs off with an American to America while Etsuko has clearly come to England with an English serviceman. More problematically, it's difficult to see the parallels between Etsuko's meticulously-portrayed home situation, living with her husband and father-in-law, and the rather mysterious yet significant-seeming setup with an uncle and ancient female cousin that Sachiko has left behind; more glaringly, if Sachiko is really Etsuko, then Sachiko's daughter Mariko must be Etsuko's elder daughter Keiko (and indeed if Keiko is this disturbed child, then her suicide is explained) but at the time when the two women are friends, Etsuko, significantly for her emotional state at the time, is pregnant with her first child. These things are, clearly, enough to put many readers right off the scent. Although Ann and I had wondered at times as we read if Sachiko and Etsuko were one, the inconsistencies had made us discount the notion until we reached that final pronoun shift. Then, instead of having the desired Of course! reaction, we racked our brains to try and see how it had all fitted, and couldn't. I told the group that in the Paris Review interview Ishiguro acknowledges that the book is baffling, that he failed to handle 'the texture of memory' and resorted to 'gimmickry' at the end, leaving the ending 'like a puzzle.'

Like many readers of this book, Jenny and Trevor hadn't picked up on the intended conflation of the two characters, and Jenny now said that this proved the mistake of reading about authors' intentions, as it was a better book if you saw the two characters more simply as separate. John endorsed this by putting in that some writers, such as Beckett, famously refused to explain their work. I said that I agreed absolutely that an author's intentions are irrelevant in any critical appreciation of a book: authors can fail to achieve what they intend, and they can also achieve things they didn't intend or envisage, and what matters is the words on the page, and everyone in the group strongly agreed.

However, we were somewhat at odds about the effect of the words on the page. Clare now said that she didn't read things as pinned down in such a concrete way, ie that Etsuko and Sachiko were actually the same person: she saw the parallel as looser, Sachiko and Mariko being characters in their own right but their experiences and desires and fears echoing those of Etsuko and Keiko at another time in their lives. Disregarding Jenny's injunction and looking now more closely at Ishiguro's remarks about this book in The Paris Review, I see that this is closer to his aims: he says, (erroneously, I think) that people often use the experience of a friend (rather than an invented character) to talk about about their own. Nevertheless, Clare's was a seductive argument, which seemed to make sense of the book and its inconsistencies. Its inconsistencies and conflations, she suggested, echoed the fragmentation and fusions of the bomb and its aftermath in Nagasaki society and the psychology of its citizens. What, someone had asked earlier, was the puzzling business about the mysterious (possibly threatening) woman that Mariko kept seeing, and her connection with the woman Mariko had seen drowning her baby? And Sachiko drowning Mariko's kittens, and Etsuko keeping dragging a rope on her foot when she looks for Mariko in the dark by the river? Seen in the light of Clare's interpretation, these are dreamlike connections rooted in Etsuko's concerns during her first pregnancy for her competence as a mother, and illuminating the hints at the start of the novel that she might blame herself for Keiko's death. In addition, this reading accommodates the differences in the attitudes and psychology of the two women as the opposing aspects of one woman's psychology, suppressed or released by circumstances.

Jenny said that she felt that that was the clever interpretation of the novel, but it didn't satisfy her, it left her with too many things unresolved, and she likes to have things resolved in novels and ultimately to know what really happened when. I felt (though didn't say) that, attractive as Clare's take was, it didn't play out on the page: there simply weren't enough pointers while reading to make me read in this highly non-naturalistic way. Trevor said that he still preferred to read the book on the more simplistic, realistic level, ie that Etsuko and Sachiko were simply two contrasted characters. Clare's interpretation, and Ishiguro's stated intention, however still posit separate identities for Etsuko and Sachiko, and this poses a problem that Doug now homed in on, and which creates, in both Clare's and Trevor's interpretations, a huge gap in the novel: mysterious as Sachiko is, we know much about how she came to leave Japan, especially the flavour of her leaving, yet we know nothing about how Etsuko, our very different narrator whom we feel we know much better, negotiated her similar situation. I said, Yes, it is only if we take Etsuko as Sachiko that we can know this about Etsuko (and then of course we come up against the inconsistencies). Then Mark, focusing on the words on the page in the way that we had agreed was the only useful way to approach a novel, drew our attention to another passage near the end. A key section in the novel is the outing taken by Sachiko, Etsuko and Mariko to the hills outside Nagasaki that Etsuko can see from her window, the pale hills referred to (and thus made significant) in the title. (It's also interesting that the title is A Pale View of Hills, rather than A View of Pale Hills, implying distortion in perception.) In the passage pinpointed by Mark, Etsuko, talking in the present time to her second adult daughter Niki, seems to refer to that outing and says, 'Keiko was happy that day.' This may be, in Ishiguro's view, a mere 'gimmick', cutting across his subtler intentions, but the fact remains that the words are there on the page, and it's very hard not to interpret them as meaning that Keiko and Mariko, Sachiko's daughter, are the same, and that therefore Etsuko and Sachiko too are one and the same.


Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Manchester Book Market

 Of course you can bank on bad weather if you plan an outdoor event. The Manchester Book Market, run by Comma Press's Ra Page, was held on Friday and Saturday, an annual event showcasing independent publishers. As well as market stalls there were over 60 authors - mainly poets, but a few, including me, with very short fictions - reading from noon onwards each day. And yes, the weather was dreadful, but spirits weren't dampened in the least - well we're used to it by now, aren't we? (I have to say, though, that stupidly I wasn't as warmly dressed as some my fellow writers - if I'd gone out in the morning beforehand I'd have known how cold it was, but I didn't). Above is Zoe Lambert whose story collection The War Tour is shortlisted for the Edge Hill Award, and below are Adrian Slatcher and Claire Massey. Thank you so much to Ra for organising the event, and to all the independent presses who keep literature alive.

'Used to Be' review

I've recently been moaning about the lottery of competitions, but of course I'm thrilled whenever I get anywhere in one. Mind you, when I do I tend to find it's with stories I feel less satisfied with: stories in which the 'message' is too obvious, or simple, or the form too conventional, for my own purposes. It's no surprise, I suppose: there's always going to be a danger that when you're trawling through hundreds or thousands of stories, the more obvious things are going to rise to the surface. So I was staggered and delighted when 'Used to Be', which I consider one of my more ambitious stories, won third prize in the 2008 Raymond Carver competition, and I'm now pretty chuffed to have found this review of it by Rio Liang in the Carve blog's Spotlight series.

Avian distractions

I'm in Wales at the moment. I've been working on a short story and trying to write a review but I've been very distracted - not just by the beautiful weather but by this nest of baby crows right outside the house and above my writing window (you can see two in the pic, but there were four altogether). We first noticed them on Thursday, the morning after we got here, and it soon became clear that the parents were keeping away because of our sudden presence. As the day progressed, the babies became ever more noisy calling out for food, and when John and I sat outside in the hot sun to eat our lunch, three of them were leaning over in a row and calling to us! Worried that they'd starve, we decided to try and keep a low profile but by late afternoon there was still no sign of the parents, and the babies were getting frantic and beginning to climb up onto the sides of the nest. I was afraid both that they'd fall out and that the parents had abandoned them altogether, but after we went off out in the car for the evening the parents clearly returned. They kept away for much of the next day, Friday, but did sneak back now and then and the babies were calmer. At one point the cuckoo that's calling in the valley all day long descended into the tree with a clear eye on the nest, and a black shape appeared and made an arc around the area, and the cuckoo flew off: the parent crows were obviously keeping watch all the time.

In the late evening a huge wind came up and lasted all night, and it brought home what the nursery rhyme Rock-a-Bye Baby really refers to. The tree, an ash, was whipping and swaying, and the nest with it, bits of it falling away. When the wind woke me in the the early hours yesterday I could see that the mother bird was more or less sitting on top of the brood to stop them falling out. However, although the wind continued all day the babies were left alone again and we began to realise that the parents' absence may no longer be motivated by fear, and that the babies were ready to fly. No longer focused on the house doorway as they had been, the babies were calling towards a tree further up the field, where the parents were obviously stationed. They kept standing and flexing their wings and once again climbing up onto the edge of the nest, and now and then one would climb out on to the branch before dropping back in again. There came a point when we realised that there were fewer in the nest than there had been. As the day wore on the numbers dropped, and finally, half-way through the afternoon, there was only one left, calling and calling and not seeming to dare even to climb out. It took a long time, but in the end, at five o'clock, as I was sitting at my desk, a black rag-shape dropped down across my window, and the last fledgling landed on the slates in front of the house. It stood, wobbled, fell, righted itself and looked around with seeming huge interest. It set off wonkily up the grass in front of a low wall, found it was going nowhere, looked puzzled, then perkily set off in the opposite direction, stumbling and righting itself, and in a miraculously short space of time found the strength of its surprisingly long legs and was gone at speed up the side of the house in the direction of the tree from which the mother was calling.

So the nest is empty, and I find I'm missing them. Still, I've finished my review...

Carys Bray reviews The Birth Machine

Having just discussed Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night with the reading group (yesterday's post) and considered the reasons that the revised edition has fallen out of favour, I was beginning to feel a little edgy about the revised edition of The Birth Machine, since, as blogger and writer Adrian Slatcher commented at the Manchester launch, by bringing Chapter 4 of the originally published version to the beginning, the new edition makes a very similar change to the one made to Fitzgerald's novel.

However, Carys Bray has now written an in-depth review of The Birth Machine showing how the current structure conveys the themes, and so I feel entirely vindicated. After all, it is how I wrote the book in the first place (see my Author's Note on the Salt website)...

Carys concurs with Lisa Glass's recent review in finding 'the masterful examination of "polite cowardice" compelling', and calls it 'a disturbing and thought-provoking meditation on power, control and the uncertain language of logic'.

Reading group: Tender is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald

When John first suggested this book, the story of the disintegration of brilliant psychiatrist Dick Diver, married to wealthy psychiatric patient Nicole, he hadn't realised that there were two versions with radically differing beginnings - the first published in 1934, and a revised edition in 1948. On realising this, John quickly contacted everyone to suggest that we read the revised version. However, some people had already obtained and begun reading the original, which turned out to be more readily available, since - as it also turned out - the revised version has now fallen out of favour. The net result was that when the group convened, people had read different versions.

The first edition begins with the arrival of movie starlet Rosemary on the Riviera where Dick and Nicole Diver preside from their expensive villa over a seasonable fashionable community of expatriate pleasure-seeking Americans. The overall viewpoint is that of Rosemary who becomes infatuated with the Divers, falling immediately in love with Dick - and, encouraged by her mother, setting out to seduce him - and fascinated by Nicole's beauty and a mystery that surrounds her. At a party held by the Divers, another guest, Mrs McKiscoe, sees Nicole in some unspecified compromising situation, compromising enough for Mrs McKiscoe's lack of discretion to occasion a duel. Later, when Rosemary accompanies the Divers to Paris - her affair with Dick gathering apace - the mystery of what Mrs McKiscoe saw is uncovered for her. After this, Rosemary drops from the story and the narrative explains the background to the mystery by flashing back to Dick's early years in Zurich as a brilliant young up-and-coming psychiatrist and his first meeting with psychiatric patient Nicole. The events in their lives up to their present-day reign on the Riviera are then filled in, and having brought their story back up to date, the novel follows Dick's subsequent slow disintegration.

It seems that Fitzgerald worked on the book for many years, beginning at the height of the roaring twenties and initially intending a kind of post-war Vanity Fair type social-observation novel in which the American Dream turns to nightmare, conveyed via the downfall of the main protagonist. By the time the book was published, in 1934, the Depression had set in, and the book, seeming to be a depiction of a selfish moneyed class and a bygone era, was less well received than Fitzgerald's previous novels. Having already worked many versions of it - up to seventeen - he recorded in his journal suggestions for revisions to a future edition, and after his death his friend Malcolm Cowley carried these out in the revised edition of 1948. In this edition the section dealing with the early years in Zurich is moved to the beginning and the novel follows a strict chronological sequence. In his Introduction to that edition, Cowley outlines the improvements this makes. The first edition, as had been generally noted, lacked focus and fell into two disparate parts, the first seeming to be striving to be the social-realist novel that Fitzgerald originally intended, and the second, after the disappearance of Rosemary from the story, the more modernist psychological study of the disintegration of one man. In addition, as has often been pointed out, Rosemary is both too complicit with the values of the Riviera society and too excluded from the mystery at its heart to be its successful observer. The editorial change unifies the novel by structurally making Dick the focus from the beginning, and the novel becomes more properly psychological. As Henry Claridge points out, too, beginning the novel with Dick's early brilliance and professional success highlights more powerfully the irony of his downfall.

However, in his Introduction to the 1995 Worsdworth Classics reprint of the first edition, Claridge, while careful not to dismiss the arguments for Cowley's version, sets out arguments for the earlier version. Once we know the truth about Nicole and Dick, as we do from the start in the revised version, there is not the same mystery for the reader, and the narrative tension of the first part of the first edition is lost. When Rosemary appears well into the revised version, her mystified perspective is not shared by the more knowledgeable reader and can seem, with the attention given to it, like 'an intrusion and an irrelevance'. In addition, Claridge says, 'Nicole's mental illness is the more touching when refracted [as it is in the first edition] through Rosemary's perspective on the indulgent lifestyle of the American expatriate community'.

I was very interested to see if the two different versions had created correspondingly different opinions of the book among the group. Doug, who sent a message to say that he wasn't going to be able to make the meeting after all, must have been reading the early edition, as he said in the message that he didn't think the time-shift structure quite worked. He also felt that 'the whole thing feels like you're viewing it through the bottom of a glass - making some of the points I think Fitzgerald is trying to make on class, Americans / the Old World, war etc. just a bit fuzzy and imprecise', but in spite of that he was finding it 'hugely captivating and there's something pretty magical in the writing.'

I'm afraid, however, that although we had read different versions, not one of us present found it captivating or agreed with him about the magical quality of the writing, although we all agreed with his vivid description of seeming to view it all through the bottom of a glass. Every one of us found the prose contorted and imprecise, a shock to us after The Great Gatsby which we had loved and admired, and a reflection, presumably, of the contortions and changes of direction Fitzgerald had gone through in the writing.

Referring to this ridiculously overblown and illogical metaphor: 'Dick got up to Zurich on fewer Achilles' heels than would be required to equip a centipede, but with plenty', John kicked off his introduction by saying that he had as many good things to say about the prose style as a centipede has Achilles tendons, ie none. Ann immediately said, laughing, that she had noticed that metaphor too. It occurs in the first few pages of the early-years Zurich section, a section which is particularly clogged with overconscious, imprecise or laughably over-concrete metaphors, such as in this description of the face of a professor: 'beautiful under straight whiskers, like a vine-overgrown veranda of some old house.' Elsewhere there are other hilarious examples, such as the women in a car 'small and buoyed up by the power of a hundred superfluous horses', Nicole's 'brown back hanging from her pearls' and the travellers 'tracing down the hot sinister shin of the Italian boot.' Dick arrives among a group of women and 'brought with him a fine glowing surface on which the three women sprang like monkeys with cries of relief, perching on his shoulders, on the beautiful crown of his hat or the gold head of his cane.' The novel is scattered with other imprecisions: Nicole's sister crossing and recrossing her knees 'frequently in the manner of tall restless virgins' is not only hard to get your head around but doesn't in fact bear too much thinking about, especially as her sexuality or virginity is not exactly at issue in the context; there are the 'white mirrors of teeth', and people's nerves 'crackle suddenly like wicker chairs.' There is laugh-aloud clumsiness such as when Dick dives 'literally' into bed (at a moment intended as tense), and when, in another moment meant to be serious, Nicole kisses Dick several times, 'her face getting big every time she came close.' There are ugly adverbial locutions: 'conciliatingly' (at least twice), 'exteriorly' and 'muscularly' (this last within dialogue!). Worst of all, though, are the overblown, abstract and convoluted sentences which seem hardly to make sense, and which John in his introduction said he thought were an attempt to imitate D H Lawrence at his worst - and Lawrence is indeed name-checked in the book. Everyone said they'd had problems with them; most said they had frequently had to go back and re-read them, though Trevor said he often ended up skipping and reading on. In the first edition there are even malapropisms (corrected in the revised edition but replicated in subsequent reprintings of the first edition): palpable for palatable and cervical for cortex (of the brain), slippages which reinforce the notion that, as Ann pointed out, Fitzgerald was befuddled and distracted at the time of writing by alcoholism and his wife Zelda's madness. The worst section in these ways is the early-years Zurich section, which gives the revised version an impenetrable beginning. This was the version which John, Chris, Ann and I had read (Trevor and Jo had read the first published version), and both Chris and I had had several times to go back and start reading the book again before we had got very far. Ann and I thought it highly likely that this was one reason that the revised edition had fallen out of favour. Ann said that if it hadn't been for her admiration of The Great Gatsby she wouldn't have gone on reading this, and several people agreed.

John noted that the point of view was very dodgy. This is particularly noticeable in the Rosemary section, I'd say, since it doesn't consistently take Rosemary's perspective but shifts in seemingly random ways between characters (and sometimes within the same paragraph), creating the lack of focus that has been generally noted. (It also seems to me that moving from Rosemary's mystification about Nicole to Dick's perspective, and at least once to Nicole's, without revealing the mystery must make the whole seem somewhat tricksy in the first edition, and reduce the dramatic power in that edition for which Claridge argues.) There is also a lot of telling and not showing with regard to characters' personalities and feelings, without any indication of why they are as they are and feel as they do, leading to the sensation for the reader that Doug described of being at a distance from everything. We are several times told that characters are wearing strange expressions without those expressions being described. John said it was a great irony that in a book about a psychiatrist there is so little psychological insight, in particular on the part of the psychiatrist Dick, whom in fact one can view as a paedophile: he has affairs with two seventeen-year-old girls (Nicole then Rosemary) and is later involved in a sexual situation with a fifteen-year-old patient, and, in keeping with a typical paedophile's attitude, he is chased by them, it's never his fault - and there appears to be no authorial irony about this.

In fact, John said, the whole idea of Dick being a psychiatrist is risible. He arrives in Zurich with a scintillating reputation as a practitioner and having already written a widely admired and adopted textbook, but more or less newly qualified and without any of the necessary training and experience (and also having served time in the army during the war as an administrator rather a practising doctor). In reality, to have reached that stage he'd have had to have followed a general medical degree with further study of neurology, further study of psychiatry, about five years of personal analysis (as did Freud's pupils) and many years of clinical practice. And as Jo and Trevor said, how has he got time to go on writing his books, as, according to the narrative, he is doing, when he spends most of his days bumming about on the beach and partying with the fast set. It's clear that, due to the obvious autobiographical nature of the novel - like Dick, Fitzgerald achieved sudden fame and then married a much younger and wealthy woman with psychiatric problems - Fitzgerald was really painting a portrait of himself. This would also account for the fact that, although there are moments of sharp irony, not enough of it appears to be directed towards Dick's fatal complicity with the wealthy and decadent society his marriage introduces him to.

This last is clearly what gave rise to objections to the book on its first publication, objections which our group couldn't help sharing, Jo especially. We were unanimously alienated by the casual cruel snobberies and selfish and high-handed behaviour of the characters, which often went seemingly unremarked by the narrative: the constant reference to 'types', both 'higher' and 'lower', that the characters would or would not want to associate with, the fact that servants are worthy of notice only when they are 'shiftless' or found drinking the wine, the casual witty dinner conversation about what would be inside a waiter if you dissected him ('Old menus ... pieces of broken china and tips and pencils stubs'), the easy and taken-for-granted way that on two occasions Dick pays off the police to protect reputations.  And as for Nicole: as John pointed out, it seems that her 'madness' consists merely of being upset when she realises that her husband is involved with another woman and in being the only person to get upset when a man, who happens to be black, is found dead on Rosemary's hotel bed! (Dick, as someone in the group pointed out, seems to find Nicole's reaction to this last far more remarkable and a far greater matter for concern than the discovery of the body, which he characterises as 'only some nigger scrap'.) After Nicole receives a letter informing her that Dick has seduced a fifteen-year-old patient and confronts Dick with it, his behaviour seems astonishingly reprehensible. The narrative informs us, without any irony that we could pick up, that Dick was not at all to blame, the girl had tried to seduce him, and all he had done was kiss her! In front of their children, Dick orders Nicole to pull herself together and initiates an immediate family outing. Nicole's distraught behaviour during the outing, which from our perspective seemed natural reaction, is then proof to Dick that she must be institutionalised once more in a psychiatric hospital. In this episode the narrative seems to share Dick's view of himself as hard-done-to and of Nicole as his unfair burden. Nicole's final recovery at the end of the novel involves her rejection of Dick (marriage to whom had originally been seen as her cure) and this is seen, quite straightforwardly it seemed to us, as his tragedy.

John did say, however, that awful as he thought the book was, he found it fascinating, and several of us agreed. Ann said she found it extremely interesting as a depiction of the way those moneyed classes behaved as they travelled around Europe in that era, and I strongly concurred. Finally Trevor said that although he shared all the criticisms, he nevertheless enjoyed reading the book.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here