Reading group: The Waves by Virginia Woolf

This was the one book by Virginia Woolf that Margeret, who loved her work, had not read. Introducing it to the group, she joked that having now read it, she wondered what she had done in suggesting it, and everyone else - including former member Mark on a return visit - immediately said yes, they had found it extremely difficult to read. John had read only a few pages before giving up altogether and Mark hadn't read very much of the book at all. (It is recorded that on reading the newly completed manuscript, Leonard Woolf, Virginia's husband, said that it was the best thing she had written, but that he doubted that many people would be able to read it.)

Famous as a key Modernist text, the whole book consists of a series of soliloquies by six people (apparently loosely based on members of the literary-artistic Bloomsbury Group to which Woolf belonged), made first when they are children, three girls and three boys playing in the garden of a boarding prep school by the sea, and then throughout their lives as they go their separate ways into late middle age, meeting up periodically. The sequential phases of these lives are prefaced by italicised descriptions of the phases of the sun from sunrise to sunset, light and shadow falling variously upon the garden and house in which the children first play. There is no plot apart from this progression: the major events of the characters' lives happen offstage; the substance of the book is their contemplations about themselves, each other and life, and indeed their own psyches, and the narrative development is the evolution of those psyches. The most significant offstage event, ie the most consequential for the group, is the death in India of the apparently charismatic Percival, a friend who was important to all six, and with whom the character Neville has always been  in love. The key theme is identity, and the difficulty for most of the characters of retaining a sense of a single identity. As Bernard says towards the end of the book:

I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am - Jimmy, Susan, Neville, Rhoda or Louis; or how to distinguish my life from theirs.

For this is not one life; nor do I always know that I am man or woman, Bernard or Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny, or Rhoda...

Bernard (apparently loosely based on the novelist E M Forster) is the storyteller of the group, the 'phrase maker'. Here at the end of the book he tries to tell the story of his life to someone he has met by chance, but ends up pondering the difficulty of representing reality, the uncertainty of language, and indeed the uncertainty of reality itself:

But how to describe the world seen without a self? There are no words. Blue, red - even they distract, even they hide with thickness instead of letting the light through. How describe anything in articulate words again?

Life is not susceptible perhaps to the treatment we give it when we try to tell it.

I begin to doubt the fixity of tables, the reality here and now.

Doug said that there were beautiful sentences, but he couldn't get to grips with the book at all, and found it sentimental. Ann, a social historian, said that the one thing she liked about the book was the insight into the daily lives of that artistic upper-class set of people in the early twentieth century, but she said it as if in amelioration, and in fact she had failed to finish the book. Everyone agreed with her about this, but felt it was little consolation. The most critical, even damning, was Clare, who found the attitudes unforgivably snobbish, even prejudiced. She pointed to the moment when one of the male characters complains about the irritation, the disruption to his peace of mind, of the existence of the shop girls in the street, and there are other less negative but certainly patronising references to the 'little shopkeepers'. I had very much the same reaction to this as did Clare. Margeret, who was staunchly defending the book against the rest of us, said, 'But the book was of its time!', an argument that has been used before in the group but can usually be demolished by reference to other, contemporary authors.

When Neville and Louis are at public school their soliloquies are objectionable in their (educated) developing sense of importance and social status, and the prose is very inflated. However, I pointed out that when the novel then moves on to the girls at their finishing school, the characters are more sympathetic and the prose less overblown, which contrast makes for criticism of patriarchy on the part of Woolf. In addition, although there is a certain contempt among the other characters for Louis, whose father is 'only' a banker, Woolf allows us, through Louis' soliloquies, to see the damaging effect on him. Percival, the person who has been so significant for all six of the characters, is a supreme example of the patriarchal male of Empire, admired by the boys when they are at school for his obvious militaristic and ruling future. We noted that there is no criticism of Percival, or of what he stands for, in any of the soliloquies; however, the author serves him an ironically ignominious death in the India he has been sent to help rule: he dies 'in the dirt' falling from his horse, rather than on any glorious battlefield as envisaged by the boys when they are young.

Margeret jumped on the difference in authorial treatment of the two sets of children/adults, and said, 'Yes, of course, Woolf was a feminist, she wrote A Room of One's Own!' Clare replied that it's very possible, even common, to hold radical views in one area (in this case sexual politics) and to have a blind spot in another area (in this case class prejudice). Some of the characters consciously struggle with their own prejudice, most notably Bernard with his novelistic interest in other people and things going on around him, but there is indeed an overall sense of other people as somehow threatening or contaminant to the sensitive souls of these six people. After Percival's death, as she walks along Oxford Street, Rhoda, the character closest to Woolf herself (and who commits suicide, prefiguring Woolf's own) is plunged into a sense of humanity as ugly and alien, a sense she embraces but which however reveals a certain prejudice:

...faces and faces, served out like soup-plates by scullions [note that word 'scullions']; coarse, greedy, casual, looking in at shop-windows with pendent parcels; ogling, brushing, destroying everything, leaving even our love impure, touched by their dirty fingers. [Note the 'our', with its Us and Them implication.]

I said that I would always make a point of not judging upper-class characters in novels simply for being upper class, but this novel was solipsistic - in the characters' obsession with themselves and their own psyches - to an extent that only the privileged can afford to be, so that it seemed like an upper-class indulgence. Ann pointed out that (unlike Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway) this novel makes no reference to the First World War, which ought to have affected the characters' lives, and this increases the novel's solipsism. (In fact, the First World War was a great catalyst for the Modernist movement of which the experimental form of this novel is an example.)

A big complaint right from the beginning of our discussion was that for a long time - indeed for most of the novel - you could not tell the characters apart, as they all speak in the same voice. Everyone said that they'd had to keep looking back to remember which character was supposed to be speaking. Even when the characters are children they speak in the same adult voice - abstract, Latinate and metaphorical. (Prep-schoolboy Neville decides to make a 'survey of the purlieus of the house' and declares 'the ripple of my life was unavailing'.) John said that this was one reason he gave up on the book so soon, and he could see that the rest of the book was the same. Ann said that she thought the novel would be improved by being read aloud by actors - this would distinguish the voices; but as Clare said, I think rightly, that would completely belie the nature of the novel: the whole point, as Bernard spells out, is that the characters are 'fuzzy', their identities in question and blending one into the other.

Unlike Doug, I didn't find the novel 'sentimental', more overinflated in its prose, and I found some of the sentences tortuous rather than beautiful. There is a tendency to pile one metaphor on top of another, and for the metaphors to be over-literal or over-elaborate to the point of clumsiness or distraction from the situation:

The waves drummed on the shore, like turbaned warriors, like turbaned men with poisoned assegais who, whirling their arms on high, advance upon the feeding flocks, the white sheep.

What exactly are the turbans meant to represent (the crests of the waves, I suppose, though it's a bit of a stretch), or the poisoned assegais, or, especially, the white sheep? This slippage from reality through and out of metaphor and into fanciful imagination and away from the original focus, seemed to me a little unhinged. John now commented that the early single-sentence soliloquies of the children had reminded him of nothing more than the patients he had observed as a psychologist, stressed professional men who sat around a table making things from cardboard boxes and speaking in the same kind of disjointed sentences without referring to each other. Ann then wondered if this whole novel was indeed an expression of Woolf's problems with mental health. Margeret said strongly that that hardly mattered, she liked the result. And it is certainly true that whatever mental state powered this book, it resulted in a strikingly original form and in striking insights into the existential problems of identity and reality. 

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

Reading group: Wildlife by Richard Ford

Some time ago we read Richard Ford's The Sportswriter and I was surprised to find it, along with most of our group, fairly tedious and even in some ways objectionable. My surprise stemmed from the fact that I had previously read Ford's Wildlife and had liked it very much, so much that it had inspired one of my short stories.*

Wildlife is the story of an autumn in Great Falls, Montana when sixteen-year-old Joe Brinson's life with his parents is turned upside down. Wildfires rage in the mountains around the town; Joe's father, a golf pro who has lost his job, decides on impulse and without apparent consultation with his wife, to go off and help fight the fires, and while he is gone Joe's mother falls in love with another man. The story is told by Joe himself, a first person retrospective narration.

This time around (many years after my first reading) I found myself altogether less satisfied with the book, though some in the group who were new to it - notably Margeret and Clare - had the same reaction as my earlier one. They loved the depiction of sixteen-year-old Joe's confusion about what was happening, which is indeed psychologically very real - largely due, I think, to Joe's authentic, somewhat demotic voice (which is what inspired me) (and which may indicate that the stuffy, sexist voice of The Sportswriter we all disliked was after all a similar, if dubiously successful, act of ventriloquism on the part of the author).

However, quite a lot of the discussion circled around interpretations of the characters. People asked: what exactly was Joe's father's motive in taking off for the hills and the fires? Towards the end he appears to indicate a midlife crisis, but was that all? What had been going on in the parents' marriage? And what exactly was Joe's mother's motivation in involving Joe in her affair, sometimes in what seems a bullying way, sometimes pathetically? And what did she see in her lover, Warren Miller, who seems an especially unattractive man? It was hard to get a grip on those things. Margeret and Clare said, Well, we can't know because Joe doesn't know, that's exactly the point: we are inside his confused head. The fact is, however, that people were left wanting to know. Clare pointed to the film of the book, which makes things clearer, but others countered that such interpolations by a scriptwriter and/or director would of course be necessary for a film, and the fact remains that they are interpolations of things absent from the book. 

I pointed out, to strong agreement from Anne and John, that, taking account of the overall structure of the novel, it's not exactly true that we are simply inside the teenage Joe's head. The book opens (and ends) with a much later, retrospective, adult viewpoint:

In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him. This was in Great Falls, Montana, at the time of the Gypsy Basin oil boom...

This sets one up to expect a more adult insight into the story and the characters - and maybe a more ironic or detached view of Joe's confusion - than is provided by the shift, as the story gets going properly, to his contemporary unknowing perspective.

At the end, the adult Joe states in a final sentence: 'God knows there is still much to it that I myself, their only son, cannot fully claim to understand.' It seems to me that this is an acceptable statement for a memoir, but not for a conventional fiction (which this is), where we require a certain insight and resolution of meaning or significance - unless the narrator is being ironised by the author, but that is not the case here: there's a close identification of narrator and author.

John commented that one result of this lack of authorial detachment is that we never see Joe from the outside or through the eyes of any of the other characters, so in fact it's quite hard to get a grip on him as a rounded character. He also seems strangely to have no friends, or much life beyond the hermetic setting of the family, though of course he was at school. Such elisions and omissions are more suitable to short stories, and John thought that this general lack of roundedness made the book an inflated short story rather than a novel. Wildlife is indeed a short book, and in fact Ford had previously written a short story, 'Optimists', about a similar situation also set in Great Falls and also featuring a family called Brinson.

Anne also pointed to what seems like a mismanagement of time. We get the impression that Joe's father is away at the fire for some time, indeed weeks, but after he returns we discover that he's only been away a day or so. We are also given the impression, through Joe's teenage perspective, that after the denouement, his mother goes away and leaves him with his father for a long time - the impression created is for years. It comes as a surprise when, as the prose moves back to the retrospective viewpoint, we are told that 'at the end of March, in 1961' - ie, only six months later - 'my mother came back from wherever she had been.'  It's perhaps acceptable, as Clare I think said, that the troubled boy should have experienced the period in this distorted way, but the shift from the contemporary teenage viewpoint back to the retrospective adult one, occurs, like the shift at the beginning, subtly, so subtly that this seemed like an inconsistency. But perhaps it is this subtlety that made Clare and Margeret declare that they had hardly noticed that narrative frame, and were simply happy to share Joe's teenage experience. 

* The story I wrote after first reading Wildlife is 'Holding Hands' which is included in my collection Balancing on the Edge of the World.

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

Reading group: Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin

This very short Argentinian novel, suggested by Doug, was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. We were all immediately attracted to its compellingly intriguing style. It is narrated by a woman, Amanda, partly as internal monologue but chiefly, and ostensibly, to a young boy, David, sitting beside her as she lies in a hospital bed and urging her to remember and understand how she got into this position. She is physically uncomfortable, she can't see, and in fact we will soon discover that she is dying.

The tale that unfolds is one of the fatal combination of toxic pollution and traditional superstition, and of maternal anxiety. Holidaying with her young daughter Nina in a rural farming area, Amanda becomes friendly with the local Carla, David's mother. Carla immediately confides in Amanda her alienation from her own nine-year-old son David, on whom she doted when he was a baby and toddler. The change dates from an incident six years before, when she was meant to be keeping an eye on a stallion on loan to her horse-breeder husband. The stallion gets free, and she finds it drinking from a stream. The toddler David has followed, and she turns to see him sucking the hands he has dipped in the water. By next morning the horse is dead and David is very ill, clearly dying. In desperation Carla takes him to the local traditional medicine woman. He is saved, but the medicine woman tells her that the only thing making that possible is what she calls a 'migration' - an exchange of David's soul with an unknown other in which the poison would be 'split' and therefore weakened and 'lose the battle'. The body that is saved no longer houses David. From this point on Carla has been unable to think of David as anything but a 'monster'. Although Amanda expresses scepticism, she is also spooked. As soon as Carla has finished her story, she feels the need to check on Nina who is playing with David. With respect to Nina she has always had a sense of what she calls 'the rescue distance' - the distance she knows she can let her stray while still being confident of keeping her safe. But now that sense is disrupted. David comes to seem like a potential threat to Nina, and this comes to overshadow the real, environmental threat to both Nina and Amanda herself. It is only through the apparent present-time prompting of David that Amanda will come to clearly understand everything that has happened.

We were all very struck by this book, but some of us liked it more than others. Its structure is complex, and, despite having found its style so compelling, people in the group generally found the beginning disorientating or difficult. The book begins with a somewhat cryptic dialogue between Amanda and David: 'They're like worms./What kind of worms?/Like worms, all over./ It's the boy who's talking, murmuring into my ear. I am the one asking the questions.' (I'm not sure I ever resolved what the worms were exactly: a sensation in the poisoned body, the connections that make everything clear about what happened, or both?). And the present-time situation is only just established when we are launched into a narration-within-a-narration, as Carla relates to Amanda what happened to the toddler David. Margeret said she never got to grips with the book at all, and, if I remember correctly, Ann said she felt the same until she read it a second time, after which I think she was impressed. Its greatest admirer was Clare, who had also seen the film and was very clear about its message of traditional superstition clouding the simpler and in fact more horrifying reality of toxic pollution. This book, written by an author who was growing up just as there was an explosion of pesticide use in her native Argentina, has been described as 'uncanny', but we were clear that its intention was in fact to undermine the tendency to see things as uncanny and to show how that can divert one's attention from the dangers of reality, and so can be in itself dangerous. 

There was some discussion about whether David is in fact really there at the hospital bed, especially as he  seems more mature than a nine-year-old boy. In fact, all of David's speeches are qualified by being italicised, and it's clear that Amanda is in fact hallucinating him as a way of working things out in her dying moments, as indeed she finally hallucinates what will happen after she dies. I said I thought that if there was one flaw, it was that it's so clear to the reader early on that Amanda has been poisoned, that some of the tension around her own route towards the understanding of it is reduced. 

All in all (apart from Margeret), the group found the book very clever and very moving. 

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

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 four 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