Reading group: Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Clare suggested this 2024 Booker winner, and we were all very interested to read it for its unusual and extremely topical subject matter. Set on the International Space Station, it follows its sixteen orbits of the earth over a twenty-four hour period, each time moving a little more to its west. There is no plot beyond that orbital progression, but detailed descriptions of the conditions inside the craft and the day-to-day work and experience of the crew, and of the stunning views through the windows of the earth and of space, and meditations on the implications for the earth and for humanity.

There was much that impressed us - the descriptions of earth are beautiful, and the contemplations of its fate extremely moving, but several members of the group immediately questioned, as other commentators have done, if this is really a novel. There is no dramatic action. Astronauts are of course famously chosen for their coolness of mind and equable temperaments within a team. These astronauts know, for instance, that their bodies are atrophying in microgravity, and that the cells of their hearts are ageing fast, but they are sanguine about it; the Russian cosmonaut Roman picks up on his radio a woman on earth who asks him if he ever feels crestfallen or sad up there, and he finds the idea 'absurd'; within the first pages the Japanese astronaut Chie learns that her mother has died, but, neither she nor the others display any emotional reaction until, towards the end, when she speaks of her mother, the Russian Anton cries, but he and Chie have the presence of mind to catch his floating tears, since 'they're not allowed to let liquids loose in here'. The closest any of them comes to an emotion like existential fear is when one of them recalls the death of the astronauts on Challenger, and Shaun, the American, thinks 'for a split second', '...what the hell am I doing here, in a tin can in a vacuum? Four inches of titanium away from death'. But then: 'The thoughts run into a wall and expire.' John said that he'd at first decided that there was thus a lack of psychology, but had then realised that what was being portrayed was a group psychology. This was interesting, but led to a lack of conflict, which is of course the essence of dramatic action. As a result of this lack of affect and conflict, there is nothing to propel the kind of story arc we expect from a novel; instead, the book follows in shape the repetitive circular movement of the space station's orbit as the continents and seas appear again and the dawns and dusks follow fast on each others' heels. The question arises whether this is therefore a fit subject for a novel after all, and Ann said she thought it was more of a 'meditation' than a novel.

I did point out that the word 'novel' describes the adaptability and mutability of the form, so who were we to say what a novel should be? However, Ann said that even taking it just as a piece of writing she wasn't sure that she really admired the book, finding it pretentious. It hadn't struck me like that, and I found some of the passages both politically stunning and deeply moving. At one point the narrative charts the astronauts' changing attitudes to the view of the earth. Initially they are entranced by the view at night, when lights show up the evidence and pattern of human existence. But then they become taken by the daytime view, when all evidence of humanity seems bleached away, and the fundamental beauty of the 'blue marble' of the earth itself is revealed. Finally, however, they come to see the effect of human behaviour on the planet:

One day they look at the earth and they see the truth...they come to see that [politics] is a force so great that it has shaped every single thing on the surface of the earth that they had thought, from here, so human-proof.

Every swirling neon or red algal bloom in the polluted, warming, overfished Atlantic... Every retreating or retreated or disintegrating glacier...every scorched and blazing forest or bush, every shrinking ice sheet, every oil spill...the altered colour of a coastline where sea is reclaimed metre by metre and turned int land to house more and more people, or the altered contour a coastline where land is reclaimed metre by metre by the sea the doesn't car that there are more and more people in need of land...

...They come to see the politics of want. The politics of growing and getting, a billion extrapolations of the urge for more...

...The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.

(Meanwhile, they are tasked to photograph from their vantage point the biggest typhoon ever recorded, which is amassing over the Pacific and moving towards Malaysia and the Philippines.)

I was completely undone by the above passage and I said I thought that it alone was probably worth the book's Booker win. All of the group were impressed by the beauty of the descriptions of the earth and of the dawns and sunsets. 

As they reverse south the colours change, the browns lighter, the palette less sombre, a range of greens from the dark of mountainsides to the emerald of river plains to the teal of the sea.The rich purplish green of the vast Nile Delta. Brown becomes peach becomes plum. Africa beneath them in its abstract batik.The Nile is a spillage of royal-blue ink.

However, while appreciating them, Clare found them repetitive, I think, and on the whole she said she found the book boring and felt that, although it's short, it could have been half its length and she found it hard to read  - it was either Ann or Clare who said it had felt like wading through mud. One thing that really irritated Clare were the lists which the narrative frequently slips into, in particular the long list of things in a description of the development of life on earth, which culminates in this random way: 

...industrialisation, fascism...crowdfunding...FloJo...Einsten...Bob Dylan...pizza...flying...dark matter, jeans...

and so on for a whole page.

Doug really admired the descriptions of earth and space and some of the the meditations, but on the whole he agreed with all the criticisms.

Margaret said when she first read the book she had felt exactly the same as Clare  - bored - but then she read it again and liked it a lot. She had really enjoyed learning about space and the conditions on the space station, and she disagreed that there was no drama, feeling that the drama of the situation, and of earth itself was enough.

At which point we began to think about other Booker winners we had discussed and failed to appreciate as much as the judges...

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

Reading group: The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien

The recent death of Edna O'Brien prompted Ann to suggest this, O'Brien's first novel - and the first in a trilogy of novels about Caithleen Brady and her friend Baba (Bridget) Brennan - which caused a storm on its publication in 1960 and was banned in her native Ireland. (The trilogy, which charts their progress from their time as schoolgirls in rural Ireland to life as young women in London, is now published in one volume under the title of this first novel, The Country Girls). We spent much of our meeting discussing the reasons for the book's dramatic reception.

The book is the first-person narration of the introspective Caithleen, and begins when she is fourteen, on a summer day that will be turn out, although she doesn't yet know it, to be her last day at the village school, and 'the last day of her childhood'. She wakes to find that, once again, her feckless and violent father has failed to return home (from a no doubt drunken spree) to the farm he is letting go to ruin, and to his long-suffering wife and daughter. At school Caithleen discovers that she has won a scholarship to a convent boarding school - Baba, her close though self-centred (and sometimes even vindictive) friend will be going there too as a paying pupil. After school, when she and Baba are wandering in the village, the grocer informs Caithleen that her mother has gone on a trip, a clearly unusual event, and as a result she must go to stay with Baba's family. That evening, while she is attending a play in the village with them, news comes that Caithleen's mother (escaping with a lover, it will turn out) has drowned. After this, Caithleen lives with the Brennans for the rest of the summer, before the girls leave for the convent, and afterwards during the holidays until the two girls eventually leave for Dublin. It is during this first summer that the fourteen-year-old Caithleen first becomes involved with a married man who lives in the big house and whom the villagers call Mr Gentleman.

This last was of course scandalous enough for the Ireland of the time (indeed, even for England at the time), but as our member Ann said, the real offence of the book was its implicit critique of the Catholic Church and its hold over Irish society. The weight of its repressive dominance and the sense of stifled lives are evident in all of the vividly portrayed scenes: the oppression and dissatisfaction of the women; the repressed male sexuality that finds its escape in what we would now see as paedophilic behaviour towards young girls (Caithleen and Baba spend a great deal of time dodging kisses from older men); above all, the harsh atmosphere and treatment in the convent - against all of which the feisty Baba is compelled to rebel, with Caithleen on her coattails. Someone, I think Ann, commented that it is probably hard, from our present-day perspective, to appreciate quite the impact this book must have had at the time.

I said though that, having read the book many years ago, this time it struck me as more harrowing. I think perhaps when I was very young, closer to Caithleen's age and to the time it depicts, I took more for granted the social and religious mores it portrays. I had indeed found the book uplifting: the prose is lively - economical and witty - and the story moves along at a fast past (everyone agreed with that), and I simply rejoiced in the girls' rebellion (and was all behind Caithleen in her romantic love for Mr Gentleman). This time around however, I was deeply struck by the tragedy of it all, and, in the first part especially, moved to tears by the atmosphere of longing and loss, however shot through it is by Caithleen's moments of ecstasy and Baba's hijinks. Here's Caithleen leaving for school on that first morning and looking back at her mother for what will turn out to be the last time:

She was waving. In her brown dress she looked sad; the farther I went, the sadder she looked. Like a sparrow in the snow, brown and anxious and lonesome. It was hard to think that she got married one sunny morning in a lace dress and a floppy buttercup hat, and her eyes were moist with pleasure when now they were watery with tears.

John said he was really struck by the fact that nowadays the general behaviour of men in the book, which goes unremarked in the community, and in particular, Mr Gentleman's relationship with Caithleen, would be regarded as paedophilic, and that this, in one way, makes the book particularly shocking from a present-day perspective. 

We had gone a long way into the evening discussing the social significance of the book when I noted that we hadn't at all critiqued it as a novel. None of us three women, it turned out, had anything critical to say about this apart from the fact that we had loved the lively prose, the vividness and the way the story moves along at pace. The two men did have a slight criticism: John and Doug both felt that there was a gap in the middle of the novel. The beginning of the girls' stay at the convent is narrated in detail and told with the book's characteristic lively dramatic action. On the first night in the dormitory, Caithleen brings out a cake she has brought, but a nun enters:

"What is the meaning of this?"she asked...

"We were lonely, Sister," I said.

"You are not alone in your loneliness. Loneliness is not an excuse for disobedience"...

"What is this?" she asked, picking up one of the cups."

"A tea service, Sister. I brought it because my mother died."...

"Sentimental childish conduct," she said. She lifted the outside layer of her black habit and shaped it into a basket. Then she put the tea service in there and carried it off.

The rest of the time at school however is passed over, and, with only a fairly brief mention that in the holidays Caithleen takes secret boat trips with Mr Gentleman, the narrative fast-forwards to the day, three years later, that Baba engineers their expulsion in order to escape. Both John and Doug found this leap forward unsatisfying. The rest of us, four women, hadn't found it unsatisfying at all. Ann (who had been to boarding school) found it realistic - the first days at boarding school are seared on your mind, she said, but the rest of the time passes in a blur - and I protested that it's a perfectly acceptable novelistic convention - one of artistic selection - to pass over periods when not much happens that would be relevant to the theme or plot. But, countered Doug, he consequently found the change in Caithleen hard to take. We were taken aback by this, as we hadn't found Caithleen significantly changed beyond the kind of maturing you would expect in the three years of a girl's development. Margaret said that in fact she hadn't found her changed at all: she was still the tentative yet privately critical sidekick to Baba's exploits, and still as in thrall to Mr Gentleman.

John said that although the book has a very autobiographical feel (so that one is tempted to identify narrator Caithleen with the author), he didn't find it all that realistic that two such different girls would be such close friends. The rest of us had no problem with this - two girls of the same age in such a small place, their families connected, would be bound to gravitate together whatever their differences. However, it's true that I had read that O'Brien had once been questioned about this, and had replied that the two girls represented the two sides of herself, Baba being the side repressed by her Irish Catholic upbringing - which is itself a comment on the repressive power of the Catholic Church.

I think we all enjoyed this book and certainly appreciated the significance of its place in the canon. Ann said that having read it she could see its influence on Irish writers we had read previously, including Ann Enright and (perhaps especially, I thought: the grocery store scenes in Brooklyn seem like a development of those in The Country Girls) Colm Tobin. 

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

 

 

Reading group: Giovanni's Room

This book was the departing suggestion of Mark, who has been a member of the group since its inception twenty-two years ago but has now left to move abroad. In the event he left earlier than he had anticipated, so wasn't present at the discussion, but the email he sent implied that he hadn't liked the book too much, or at least that he had found it very gloomy.

The rest of us did find the book bleak, but our reactions were not entirely negative. Published in 1956 and set in late forties/early fifties Paris, it is the first person narration of David, a young white American. The book opens as he stands at the window looking out into the dark and blaming himself for being 'too various to be trusted', which has led to the situation in which his fiancee, Hella, is on her way back to America, the relationship over, and 'Giovanni ... about to perish, sometime between this night and this morning, on the guillotine'.

His thoughts then take us back through the events that led to this situation. They begin with an innocent childhood sexual encounter with another boy, over which David, stifled by the values of a macho heterosexual father, is later crippled with shame. What follows is the story of David's denial of his homosexuality, and the tragedy for those with whom he becomes involved. In Paris he asks Hella to marry him, yet, while vowing heterosexuality, in return for drinks and money he is providing company for an older homosexual, Jacques, in his visits to homosexual night clubs. It is here, while Hella is in Spain deciding whether or not to accept his offer of marriage, he meets Giovanni, a handsome young Italian barman; he is immediately attracted, and the two very quickly become involved. Short of money and kicked out of his lodgings, David goes to stay in Giovanni's room which is symbolically stifling - small and dark with the window whited out to keep out the stares of passers by, the bed overlooked by the Victorian heterosexual couple on the wallpaper, one wall half demolished by Giovanni's unfinished/unsuccessful attempts at reconstruction. Due to the jealousy of the proprietor, Guillaume, Giovanni is fired from the bar. He is devastated and it becomes clear that he is entirely emotionally dependent on David, who privately intends to leave him, as Hella is due back from Spain. This is precisely what David does, and tragedy ensues.

The main thing that struck us all was the searing self-disgust running through this book. David is disgusted by his own homosexuality, and both he and Giovanni are repelled by the 'disgusting old fairies', Jacques and Guillaume, to whom they are yet in thrall, depending on them as they do for money. They are horrified at the notion that one day they will turn into those older men, seeking the attentions of younger men who will view them with the same distaste and cynicism, and by the end of the book David is resigned to that fate. It was clear to us that though a book conveying these sentiments would now be considered politically incorrect, it is a searingly truthful depiction of how it must have been in an age when homosexuality was so underground, so unacceptable to mainstream society, and indeed against the law. David's disgust however extends to the transsexuals that frequent the bar, whom he clearly sees as 'other': '[the] grotesqueness made me uneasy; perhaps in the same way that the sight of monkeys eating their own excrement turns some people's stomachs.' This did shock some of us, and perhaps it was this, along with David's self-confessed inability ultimately to love either Hella or Giovanni, that made Ann say she didn't actually like David, finding him self-centred, and others agreed. However, new member Margaret (Mark's replacement) strongly said she totally felt for David all the way, and indeed she loved the book.

The book does feel extremely autobiographical, yet takes an objective view of David's failings, which is perhaps unusual (and maybe creates cognitive dissonance), but is searingly honest. One thing I noted was that, in spite of his inability to love or truly give himself to others, David is however very good - perhaps almost too novelistically good - at understanding the thought processes and emotions of others. I was in great admiration of this, though wondered how psychologically realistic it was, and as John and others said, it does give rise to a great deal of introspection which forms the chief substance of the book, and which some found wearing. John said he found the book suddenly perked up in the scene in which David gives up the keys to the landlady of the house he and Hella rented together and which he is now leaving: there is dialogue and true dramatic action.

Some people wondered at a black author, James Baldwin, making his protagonist white. Ann and I had both read that Baldwin said that he did not want to confuse the issue of homosexuality with race. Someone said they didn't think it mattered, since the whole stress was on homosexuality. However, Ann pointed out that in the fifties someone like Giovanni would have been considered black, and it is his exoticism for the homosexual men around him on which his tragedy pivots.

All agreed that the depiction of the fifties Paris underworld was wonderfully vivid, yet the overall effect was summed up in the one written word of Doug (who had been unable to attend): bleak.

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

Reading group: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Spoiler warning (for those who don't yet know the plot of this very famous book).

One day I caught a snippet of a Radio 4 programme in which Daphne du Maurier was being discussed, and the general thread of the discussion was that, although her books, in particular Rebecca, are thought of as romantic novels, they are in fact much more interesting and complex. I had read Rebecca as a teenager (and, though I have no real memory of it, I think I must have seen at least one of the many film adaptations), and I had indeed remembered it as a somewhat literary romance. So my interest was piqued, and when I mentioned it to the reading group theirs was too, and we decided to read it again.

The plot is of course well known: a young ingenue, unnamed in the narrative, marries the handsome but troubled and somewhat taciturn Max de Winter, the owner of Manderley, a Cornish ancestral home, whose previous wife was drowned while sailing in the bay next to which the house stands. Entering the house as its new mistress, she is a fish out of water, unable to command the servants, and easy prey for the housekeeper Mrs Danvers who is obsessively, if not pathologically, loyal to the memory of her beautiful previous mistress, Rebecca. That was as much as I had remembered. As for the outcome, all I remembered was that somehow all is well in the end, the evil influence of Mrs Danvers and the troubling ghost of Rebecca finally vanquished.

What I had somehow forgotten - or rather, overlooked, as on this second reading it started to come back to me, though vaguely enough to keep me reading to find out what happens - was that it will turn out in the course of events that Maxim, as our protagonist calls him, in fact shot Rebecca before sailing her body out in her boat and scuttling it. This is a startling thing to have forgotten, and I was interested to try and understand why I did.

The first thing I said in the meeting was that this time around I had found it a very strange book, with ambiguities and inconsistencies, and there were strong murmurs of agreement. The most obvious thing I had noted was that the book is pretty derivative in its basic tropes: the relationship between the protagonist and Maxim echoes that of Jane Eyre and Rochester, and both books conclude with a fire that destroys the ancestral home, started in the case of Jane Eyre by the first wife incarcerated in the attic, and in Rebecca by, it is suspected, the previous wife's proxy Mrs Danvers. In both books, there is a reversal in the central relationship, the female ingenue becoming the stronger and the carer of a physically or psychologically damaged man. There are also echoes of Henry James' Turn of the Screw in the sense of menace and haunting surrounding the housekeeper and the dead Rebecca, and of course of the Bluebeard story. What is distinctive about the book is its darkness - a darkness I had not remembered, and which certainly makes the book anything but a romance - and, as Ann pointed out, a kind of hysterical note that runs right through it.

I was also surprised to find the book quite morally dubious (and a bit shocked at my not having found it so before), and others in the group strongly agreed. Right from the start on this reading I found Maxim quite preposterous in his entitlement and sexism (in a way that I, as a teenager growing up in a culture where sexism was less questioned, presumably didn't), and his relationship with the protagonist ridiculous. (Everyone agreed, and I have to say that when John read the book I had to watch him laughing his way through it.) 'I'm asking you to marry me, you little fool,' Maxim says to the protagonist, and after indicating that she understands nothing about him (as she will eventually find out), goes on: 'You haven't answered my question. Are you going to marry me?' Ann couldn't see what he could see in her: she has nothing about her, her lack of a name seeming to underline the fact. People suggested that she was for him an antidote to the glamorous Rebecca, whom he will much later tell the protagonist was a secretly callous serial adulterer, in contrast to her public profile as a perfect wife. Someone in the group, Mark or John, cynically pointed out that when he proposes to the protagonist, suggesting she immediately leave her role as a companion and factotum to a wealthy American woman, he says, 'Your duties [to me] will be almost exactly the same'. The thing I found most deeply shocking was that when Maxim is forced (by events following a shipwreck in the bay) to confess to the protagonist that he shot Rebecca and sank her boat, her only reactions are terror that the truth will be uncovered and sheer relief that it turns out that he hadn't loved Rebecca:

[I] sat there on the carpet, unmoved and detached, thinking and caring for one thing only, repeating a phrase over and over again, 'He did not love Rebecca, he did not love Rebecca...' My heart, for all its anxiety and doubt, was light and free. I knew then that I was no longer afraid of Rebecca... Now that I knew her to be evil and vicious and rotten I did not hate her any more.

She will go on to be Maxim's willing accomplice in covering up the killing.

Later, Jack Favell, an old lover of Rebecca's who is onto the truth, tries to blackmail Maxim by threatening to expose him, and Maxim calls in the local magistrate, a colonel and dinner-party companion. The colonel is inclined to doubt Favell, who, though he has acknowledged good looks, the protagonist sees with revulsion in these moments as 'animal'-like ('I noticed how his neck bulged over the back of his collar and how low his ears were set on his head.') (She sees anyone standing in the way of her own comfort with contemptuous revulsion: Mrs Danvers' face is like a skull). On this reading the scenario struck me (as it does Favell) as nothing less than a bunch of prejudiced toffs closing ranks to subvert the law. And when it is discovered that in fact, just prior to her death, Rebecca had been diagnosed with terminal cancer (a fact she had told no one), Maxim decides that Rebecca wanted him to kill her, which of course gets him nicely off the moral hook. I guess as a teenager I swallowed this hook, line and sinker. As long as you are gunning for Maxim and the protagonist (and as a teenager I was), it diminishes the moral weight of the killing, which must be why it sank away in my consciousness.

Yet all of us in the group, even John, while agreeing about these things, found the book a compelling read, exerting a deep emotive pull.

The story is narrated by the protagonist herself some time after the final events of the novel, when the narrator and Maxim have 'come through' their 'crisis', and when she herself, she tells us, is now at last 'bold' and 'confident', with Maxim emotionally dependent on her. Since our discussion I have read feminist critical commentary pointing out that, as the narrator, the protagonist presents things as she wishes us to see them, and that the fact that she avoids revealing her name - something our reading group did find puzzling - means that she is in hiding from the reader: she is not intended as a reliable narrator. In the group discussion I mentioned the inconsistencies I had found in the book. After I had got to the end, I went back and re-read that first section with its later perspective. The narrator refers twice there to 'our Manderley' and to 'our drive', implying a past and lasting attachment to it, which surprised me, as during the whole of the retrospective narrative the protagonist never feels at home or at ease at Manderley. She also refers to her memories of 'the mists of autumn and the smell of the flood tide' at Manderely, yet in the retrospective narrative she is at Manderley only in the summer months: she arrives with the flowering of the rhododendrons (the menacing scarlet rhododendrons she associated with Rebecca) and in August Manderley is in flames and she and Max never return. Are these slips intended by du Maurier as signals that we are in the hands of an unreliable narrator? They are, though, hard to catch, and the inconsistency can only be detected by reading back after finishing the book. They felt to me, and the group, more like authorial errors. There is a greater inconsistency around the character of Rebecca. We learn that she ran the house beautifully, ensconced in the mornings in her beautifully curated morning room from where she would send back to Mrs Danvers the menu for the day, and was a famed hostess, holding memorable dinners and parties - all implying a hands-on approach that would require Rebecca's constant presence in the household. Yet when Maxim reveals the truth about her, it turns out that she has spent much time in a flat she keeps in London, and Jack Favell even refers to her having 'lived' with him for some of the time. And isn't it odd that she was able to keep so secret a life of such debauchery, with so many lovers? So is the narrator lying, painting a picture of Rebecca that suits her own ends? Rebecca was 'evil and vicious and rotten' she says, and the 'discovery' is her own liberation. 

It is known that du Maurier intended the novel as a study of jealousy (and wasn't happy with its reputation as a romance). It has been suggested therefore by feminist critics that the narrator's portrait of her own former self as a nervous and naive ingenue is a smoke-screen. In fact, states one critic, when she meets Maxim in Monte Carlo, she practises a fairly hard-headed deceit as she makes her clandestine meetings with him. In the light of this theory the narrator's explicit insistence about her former timidity does read suspiciously as over-insistence, but I can't say that I noticed this as I read, or that I detected any other authorial irony or distance between narrator and author that would make one read those early scenes in that way, and I think no one in our group did. As a nervous teenager myself reading the book I totally identified with the protagonist in those scenes, and it still seems to me a searingly truthful portrait of the kind of excruciating timidity that would indeed force one into deceit rather than self-assertion. Indeed, Doug said how truthful he found the portrayal of her nervousness and inadequacy when she arrives at a house full of servants. It is true that it is hard to see what the protagonist saw in Maxim, other than a safety net away from her lonely, boring life, and the fact that since childhood she had been in love with the idea of the famous Manderley - and of course there are Maxim's good looks. But her attitude to marrying him seems less that of a scheming or self-directed character than the result of superficiality (falling in love with his good looks) and the inevitable weakness of a woman trapped in a class-bound sexist society. Ann said that even as a teenager she had despised the protagonist as a wimp, and I don't think she felt that the older narrator was deliberately misrepresenting her former self. One thing the protagonist does all the time in the retrospective narrative is create scenarios in her head - about what other people might be saying to each other or doing, or might in the future - and goes over scenes again already narrated. This does indicate that she is a dreamer and a story-weaver, but none of us got the idea from it that she is actually a liar, one who would deliberately misrepresent, and most people were simply a little irritated by these musings, feeling they held up the action.

There is one early scene that does bear out du Maurier's stated intention, though I have seen this only in retrospect. Up to now we have seen the protagonist as a tentative girl, and afterwards, when she gets to Manderley her abiding state of mind will appear to be fear, fear of Rebecca's influence and the malign presence of Mrs Danvers. But waiting in her hotel room while Maxim goes to tell her employer that she is to leave to marry him, she opens a poetry book he has lent her, and finds on the title page the inscription 'Max from Rebecca.' She cuts out the page and tears it into fragments and then sets fire to them. This is at a time when she knows nothing of Rebecca, and long before she encounters Mrs Danvers and the house in which Danvers keeps Rebecca's memory alive. In other words, the protagonist's 'fear' of Rebecca arises from within herself rather than as a reaction to an external malign force, and is indeed the manifestation of jealousy - unfounded jealousy. However, at the time of our discussion our group found the scene puzzling, as the action seemed so uncharacteristic of the person portrayed both before and after the scene. And when, after Maxim's confession, the other side of her is finally revealed, it comes as a surprise, or even as inconsistency, rather than feeling inevitable. 'I knew I didn't hate her any more,' she says when she learns that, after all, Maxim didn't love Rebecca. So the shrinking violet has been capable of hatred (not just fear) all along, but in the moment of reading this, that 'hatred' felt more like an overstatement because of the way she had previously been presented, without any hint of authorial irony.

Right at the end of the book, asleep in the car as she and Maxim  drive back from the interview with the doctor which has confirmed that Rebecca was terminally ill (rather than pregnant by Jack Favell, taking the steam out of his blackmail threat and finally releasing them), the protagonist dreams this:

I was writing letters in the morning room [which Rebecca apparently did every day]. I was sending out invitations. I wrote them all myself with a thick black pen. But when I looked down to see what I had written it was not my small square handwriting at all, it was long and slanting, with curious pointed strokes [ie Rebecca's]... I got up and went to the looking-glass. A face stared back at me that was not my own. It was very pale, very lovely, framed in a cloud of dark hair. The eyes narrowed and smiled. The lips parted. The face in the glass stared back at me and laughed. And I saw then that she was sitting on a chair before the dressing-table in her bedroom, and Maxim was brushing her hair. He held her hair in his hands, and as he brushed it he wound it slowly into a thick rope. It twisted like a snake, and he took hold of it with both hands and smiled at Rebecca and put it round his neck.

During our meeting, Ann brought up the popular idea that Rebecca and the protagonist represent two sides of du Maurier herself.  Like Rebecca, du Maurier was a free spirit who sailed boats and rode horses and seduced several men (and as a girl wished she had been a boy), and like the protagonist she was ill at ease as a wife (of a Commanding Officer) and unable to run their household. The passage above is loaded with an ambiguity that supports this theory. 'Rebecca had not won. She had lost,'  the protagonist has said, on learning that Max did not love Rebecca after all. Yet the image in the mirror laughs with narrowed eyes, as if laughing in triumph at the protagonist. Has she won after all? The protagonist's reaction on waking seems to indicate so: she panics, saying that they must at once flee to Switzerland, as if feeling the need still to flee from Rebecca. Yet the image in the mirror, and the handwriting, are a replacement of the protagonist's own. Has the protagonist become Rebecca? Is there a merging of the two? Is this the way in which Rebecca has won? After all, the protagonist has come to be able to command the household - she has found she can even speak coldly and peremptorily to Mrs Danvers. She is capable, in becoming Maxim's accomplice, of even worse deceit: 'I would lie, and perjure, and swear. I would blaspheme and pray.' By the time she and Maxim have exiled themselves to Europe, Maxim will be as much in her control as he has said he was in Rebecca's - '...he will look lost and puzzled suddenly' - which seems symbolised in the rope of hair around his neck.

There is huge ambiguity too in the first section describing their after-life in Europe. They have come through their crisis, the narrator tells us, they are at peace now, 'I ride no more tormented, and both of us are free.' But there are constant qualifiers: '[we are] not unscathed, of course'; 'of course we have our moments of depression', 'we are sometimes bored - well, boredom is a pleasing antidote to fear.' And they seem truly exiled: they feel the need to avoid the hotels where people they know will be staying, and they appear to be living a difficult life, moving from one small hotel to another. 'Granted that our little hotel is dull, and the food indifferent, and that day after day dawns very much the same, yet we would not have it otherwise.' She talks of freedom yet she can only dream of the English landscape she longs for, and must not speak of it in case she upsets Maxim. She is, in other words, repressed. 

'Odd, that resentment of servants, and their obvious impatience,' she says in this first section, thinking back to how it was at Manderley. When I first read this sentence this time, it struck me as outrageous (and alienating), and it was one of the things John laughed at (how could you not understand the resentment of servants?). But it did seem an odd statement itself, unfounded and without context. Only once I had read the whole book and gone back to look at that beginning, did I understand that this is an indication of the protagonist's change, an outrageous one, yes, since she herself has been a servant, to the American woman she was working for when she met Maxim. Yet it still didn't feel quite right, because the change in her during the story never felt quite convincing to me, due to a lack of authorial irony or distance in the earlier presentation. It is as if in the presentation of the earlier scenes the author herself is identifying with the protagonist, which in turn leads the reader to identify too with her and her Cinderella rags-to-riches situation. This I think is perhaps why the book has been taken as a romance rather than the darker project du Maurier intended (and which it is). My overall feeling, I said to the group, was that the book was indeed very much an expression, through those two characters, of the author's own psyche, written primarily intuitively (rather than with entire objective control) - and that it is from this that comes that compelling (and even, as Ann said, hysterical) emotive pulse - and everyone pretty much agreed.

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

Reading group: Marzahn, Mon Amour by Katja Oskamp

Clare suggested this translation by Jo Heinrich of a short, episodic and autobiographical German novel set in the east Berlin suburb of Marzahn, a large prefabricated high-rise housing estate of the former GDR. Narrated by a woman who took up chiropody when her writing career was failing, it is chiefly an observation of her mainly elderly clients and her co-workers, and a re-telling of their various stories, and amounts to a tribute to the place and its community.

 Introducing the book, Clare commented on its light touch and atmosphere. The narrator is wryly tender and gently humorous in her attitude to her clients (and their feet), there is light and beauty in her descriptions of a neighbourhood traditionally associated with grimness, and there is nothing of the overt political criticism typical of fiction about the former GDR. Indeed, she counters those traditional associations explicitly: 

 

It’s hard to shift preconceptions about the prefab housing estates in eastern Berlin. They say Marzahn is a concrete wasteland, but in reality it is exceptionally green. There are wide streets, ample parking spaces, good pavements and dropped kerbs at crossings. If you’ve got wheels, you can get around just fine.

Many people think Marzahn is teeming with former GDR bigwigs and SED party officials. It’s not true; I’d stake my life on it, especially as I work here. I look after the feet of former bricklayers, butchers and nurses. There’s also a woman who worked in electronics, one who bred cattle and another who was a petrol pump attendant.

 

Mark however quickly pointed out that the book is indeed political, in a way that is subtle and nuanced. While most of the narrator’s clients now live seemingly aspirationally Western-bourgeois lives, preoccupied with their feet, their holidays, hairdressers, and pampered dogs, the past keeps rising to the surface. Although the historical and political tensions potentially underlying the incident are not mentioned, a Russian woman throws herself from the tower block next to the salon. And ‘There is one dyed-in-the-wool party functionary who visits me regularly,’ ‘a walking cliché’ with an imperious manner, who expects subservience and gives her orders, though the narrative makes fun of his pretensions and sees his pathetic humanity:

 

The six-foot-three pensioner creeps off, checked flat cap on his bald head, back bent. Oh, Everard, you old child of the workers and peasants. All your life you’ve mistaken your position for your personality. Give my regards to the cardiac rehab group.

 

The narrator tells: ‘One preconception does hold true: the platenbau tower blocks aren’t soundproofed’. She goes on to recount the recent adventure of her ‘high-spirited’ client Frau Blumeier, a woman in her mid-sixties disabled by polio when she was a small child, who has rekindled a relationship with a boy from her youth:

 

While they were having sex, the bed collapsed… The next day, the man who lived in the apartment under hers got into the lift with a stupid grin on his face and said, ‘You have a blast at yours at night, don’t you?’

 

The narrator leaves hanging unsaid the fact that this amusing incident is the result of former SED measures to facilitate political spying on the part of the population (allowing people to hear each other through thin walls).

 

However the political message is not partisan. Perhaps more strongly, if mostly in passing, it is made clear that many of the characters have suffered from reunification and westernisation, having lost the benefits and even the lifestyle endowed on them by the former Socialist state. Frau Blumeier lost her job, as ‘the company she worked for went into liquidation. She was told she wouldn’t stand much of a chance in the West with her disability.’ Another also lost her job through liquidation of the handbag company she worked for, and her husband’s furniture-making business suffered and finally died: ‘The easterners paid. But the westerners didn’t… And then of course the easterners followed suit.’  Eighty-year-old Gerlinde Bonkat, who fled East Prussia as a seven-year-old refugee and worked hard in Germany all her life, found herself redeployed to west Berlin: 

 

The bouquet of flowers that greeted every new colleague back in the old East seemed not to exist here… The ignorance and arrogance of her colleagues from the West made her hackles rise.

 

At which she gave up. ‘There was an exhaustion that went way beyond her feet.’

 

Yet what the chiropodist narrator sees as she tends the feet of these characters is their irrepressible spirit, and a picture emerges of the indomitable humanity of ordinary people in the face of any political regime. We all loved the book for this. 

 

My only caveat was that I felt there was something missing. Although it is clear that the narrator’s change of career is prompted by a personal (mid-life) crisis, and that by the end of the book her personal circumstances have changed, we hear nothing in the meantime of her personal life and the ways in which those circumstances changed. I had however read something implying that when the book was originally published in German, it was published as a collection of short stories, and if I had read it as such I believe I would not have had this problem; it is only taking it as a novel that makes me want to know the narrator’s personal trajectory. John then said that he felt a lengthy section involving a works outing taken by the narrator and her two salon colleagues seemed a little out of place in the general schema of the book, and he wondered now if it had been added for the sake of length in order to publish the book as a novel. (It’s a publishing article of faith that novels sell better than books of short stories, and many a collection of linked stories has been dressed up in this way.) This however did not detract from our overall opinion of the book, which, as far as we could tell from a translation was beautifully written and brilliantly translated.

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

Reading group: The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

Only four of us to discuss this book suggested by Doug (who couldn't be present), and all four of us found it a worthwhile, if not gripping read.

It begins with a Prologue relating the uncovering by university archeology students of a secret cemetery in the grounds of a Florida former boys' reformatory school, in which are buried the bodies of clearly mutilated boys. Not that the cemetery was secret to the boys once attending the school, nor the fact that behind the school's public profile as a place of education and rehabilitation, it was in fact a hell of cruelty, abuse and racism. The Prologue ends with a former back 'student', or more appropriately inmate, who 'goes by the name of Elwood Curtis', deciding to return from New York for the public inquiry.

The narrative now switches to 1962, when Elwood, a conscientious and studious boy being brought up by his grandmother, receives for Christmas a record album of speeches by Martin Luther King, which deeply affects him and colours his view of the world as he matures. We follow his maturing as he works in the local newsagents' (persuading the newsagent to stock anti-racist journals), studies hard (encouraged in his both his education and his idealism by his activist teacher) and dares to attend a protest. Until one day, on the way to attend the college in which he has enrolled for night-school, through no fault of his own he is picked up by the police and ends up in Nickel.

We then follow the horrors of life at Nickel through Elwood's perspective, a nightmare for all, but especially for the black boys who are segregated from the white boys in the school and treated even more harshly. Our member Ann said that a most remarkable thing about the book is the way in which Whitehead manages to lay completely bare the horror in an almost matter-of-fact way, never once being melodramatic or vying for the emotion strings of the reader - which keeps you reading, never needing to turn away from the horror, yet which somehow in the end makes it all the more horrifying. (It's also horrifying to read in the Author's Acknowledgements that the book is inspired by the story of a real Florida school.)

Whether or not the idealistic Elwood and the more cynical Turner, a fellow inmate who befriends him, will escape Nickel becomes a major plot point, and I think it would be wrong of me, for those who haven't read the book, to reveal what happens, and to discuss in specific detail what we made of it, since the outcome turns on a major (and quite stunning) revelation, knowing which would I think adversely affect how you read the whole book. Mark said he thought it was amazingly cleverly done. Ann and I both said that we had had inklings of it now and then throughout the book, but I simply wondered at those moments if these were narrative mistakes. My initial reaction when I came to the revelation was that it had been tricksy, though Ann and Mark argued for it convincingly on thematic grounds. I also commented that there was little psychological exploration of the fallout of this revelation for characters, but Ann and Mark felt that psychological exploration wasn't the purpose of this book, its purpose being more that of journalistic exposure. I always argue that the main political strength of novels is psychological and emotional, but I had to agree that this novel was compelling. However, John, who strongly agrees with me on this point about novels and psychology, said that he'd found it less compelling than did the rest of us, which may be because the material was very familiar to him from his work as an child psychologist, so that the exposure project didn't work so well on him. Mark did agree that the twist/revelation did actually smack of airport-type novels, but he thought that that was in fact another political strength, Ann corroborating this by saying that she felt far more people would read this novel than would read the more obviously literary Toni Morrison (books of whom we have discussed here, and here where we discuss Morrison's own view that novel readers need to be 'moved' rather than simply 'touched'). And the Nickel Boys is indeed beautifully written, in tough, clean prose.

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

Reading group: A Room with a View by E M Forster

Ann suggested this 1908 novel in which Lucy Honeychurch, travelling in Italy with her cousin and chaperone Charlotte Bartlett, struggles to accommodate Edwardian expectations of her as a young woman, but, due to an unsettling encounter in Florence, after her return home and an unsatisfactory engagement learns to thwart those expectations, to finally acknowledge her own feelings and think for herself. 

Ann said that, having had little time to read this month, she had that day listened to an audio version of the book, and - to her surprise, I think - had found that she hadn't enjoyed it - in fact she seemed to think it was pretty awful. She acknowledged the comic episodes, and did enjoy those, but didn't at all like what she called the philosophical and purple passages. Mark - who instantly said he had loved the book - said with surprise, and to the agreement of others, that he hadn't noticed those, and Doug said he had skimmed them, passages in which the author comments on human nature in general, though often wryly and always in relation to the action and characters. We mused briefly then on the different experiences that listening to a book and reading it present - the possibility of skipping or skimming when you read a book for yourself, and the different emphases and indeed tone that an audiobook reader and producer can impose on a text. Ann's experience had made her dissatisfied with the book more generally: she felt she didn't know what it was, or what it was about. Was it a comedy or not? Was it a comedy of social manners, was it about class, or was it meant as a love story? I said that I thought it was all of those things, though chiefly, as I have indicated above, it was about the awakening of Lucy's consciousness, taking place in the context of class at a time of social change and challenges to the conventional role of women.

At the beginning of the book Lucy and Charlotte are newly arrived at the Pension Bertolini in Florence, and encounter the other exclusively English residents. At the dinner table the snobbery of the middle-class guests is directed at a father and son, the Emersons, who have no such pretensions and hold with none of their conventions: they are clearly 'lower class', and are suspected of being 'socialists'. Lucy has complained of her room not having the promised view, and the Emersons offer to change rooms with Lucy and Charlotte - a hugely indelicate intrusion in the middle-class codes of the day:

The better class of tourists was shocked at this, and sympathised with the newcomers. Miss Bartlett, in reply, opened her mouth as little as possible, and said:

'Thank you very much indeed: that is out of the question.'

'Why?' said the old man, with both fists on the table.

He insists heatedly, and:

Miss Bartlett, though skilled in the delicacies of conversation, was powerless in the presence of brutality. It was impossible to snub anyone so gross... she looked around as if to say, 'Are you all like this?'. And two little old ladies [...] looked back, clearly indicating, 'We are not; we are genteel.'

I had read this book many years ago at university and loved it. I said now, though, that this time around I had found these episodes much funnier than I did then. As the daughter of an engineer who at the time would probably have been termed lower middle class, I had had similar snobberies directed at me by more upper-class acquaintances, and I felt uncomfortable reading it and less able to appreciate the humour. We discussed the changing impact that books can have at different times. Ann said she appreciated how challenging this book must have been at the time of its publication, but felt that since the things it was pushing at - class snobbery, the subordination of women - have since been largely addressed (if not solved), its impact was inevitably much less now. Everyone present except John and me had seen the film, and I got the impression from what they said that the film, presumably because of this, very much pushes the love story element. With reference to Ann's comment about purple passages,  I did have to say that on this reading I found one or two moments in the narration sentimental: describing the English village in which Lucy lives, the author comments on the 'tinkle' of church bells, which seemed utterly inaccurate - church bells don't 'tinkle' - so that however wry he is being about the tweeness of the environs, he ends up sound twee himself. Doug, who was nodding, said he didn't even think that there was any irony in the passage. It was interesting to me to note that none of this ever struck me when I read the book all those years ago, and it seemed like a mark of how the tenor of life has changed.

There was some talk about the characters. Ann said that none of the characters were likeable, not even Lucy, to, I think, general agreement - although I don't feel it's necessary to like characters to be interested in them, and unlikeable characters are of course a staple of satire. John commented, to more agreement, that the Emerson son George, the main love interest, is a mere cypher: we hardly get to know him at all. I said, to strong agreement from Clare, that the clergyman Mr Beebe had seemed the most sympathetic character, as he seems to see through Lucy and to have her interests at heart, especially in not wanting her to marry the dreadful Cecil who is compared by the author to a stiff medieval knight (Lucy's escape from him, along with her growing proto-feminist consciousness, is described as leaving the medieval world behind). But that when the elder Mr Emerson opens Lucy's eyes to her own truth, and she makes the choice of George, Mr Beebe is displeased. It turns out that he would rather Lucy didn't marry at all than follow her heart, which seems in the context mean-spirited. Some people in the group thought that Beebe was closest to the author, E M Forster, who was homosexual - necessarily closeted in that time - and that this explained it. However, it seems that the author is very much on the side of Lucy and George's union at the end: Mr Emerson, he says, had shown Lucy 'the holiness of direct desire' (which, as someone said, could be the author's veiled plea for homosexual love). The most obviously unlikeable character is the chaperone Charlotte, who is so restrictive with Lucy, so determined to make her conform to social expectations - and so falsely set-deprecating - and who quickly whisks her away from George when the spark first kindles between them. Some thought it seemed odd that right at the end it turns out that she had the chance to stop Lucy talking to Mr Emerson and changing her mind, yet didn't do so. Clare pointed out that this was in fact a significant change: Charlotte too had been repressing her true impulses in the need to conform to Edwardian society, and she too had rebelled, or been persuaded, in the end.

John particularly liked the ironic chapter headings - as did I - but he was perhaps the most dubious about the book beside Ann, unsure about the way that the tone becomes less comic as the book progresses and it concentrates more on Lucy's awakening - which perhaps links with Ann's feeling of not being able to work out what kind of book it was. This didn't trouble the rest of us, however, and I think most were pleased to have read it. 

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