Category: Books

Classics Challenge: May Prompt – Literary Movement

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

This month’s topic in the Classics Challenge is about literary movement and where the book you’re reading fits within the movement.

the end of the affair

I’ve recently read Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, published by Penguin as one of the Twentieth Century Classics. It was originally published in 1951.

It’s very difficult, or at least I think it is, to place this book within a ‘literary movement’. I’m not the only one because William Golding wrote:

Graham Greene was in a class by himself  – He will be read and remembered as the ultimate twentieth-century chronicler of consciousness and anxiety.’ 

So maybe he fits into the ‘stream of conciousness’ movement, because The End of the Affair is full of Maurice Bendrix’s thoughts and feelings, but I don’t think it’s quite that. It moves backwards in time recollecting past events, but it certainly reveals what is going on in Maurice’s mind.

Maurice’s love affair with his friend’s wife, Sarah, had begun in 1944 during the London Blitz. They had met at a party held by Sarah’s husband, Henry. The affair had ended suddenly after his house had been bombed by a V1 and Sarah had not explained why. Two years later Maurice, still obsessed by Sarah employed Parkis, a private detective to find out the truth. So it’s maybe a romantic novel, inspired by Greene’s affair with a married woman ‘C’ (Lady Catherine Walston), but then again, maybe not. The story is narrated by Maurice but includes his reading of Sarah’s diary, which reveals her increasing fascination with religion, specifically with Catholicism. Some describe The End of the Affair as the last of Greene’s Catholic Novels (the others being Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory and The Heart of the Matter), but Greene didn’t like that label. Nevertheless, The End of the Affair is a study of love and hate, of desire, of jealousy, of pain, of faithfulness, and of the interaction between God and people.

At the beginning Maurice states that: ‘this is a record of hate, far more than of love’. He struggles to believe in God and is full of desperation and anger. He is tormented by his efforts to understand:

But I don’t want Your peace and I don’t want Your love. I wanted something very simple and very easy: I wanted Sarah for a lifetime and You took her away. With Your great schemes You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse’s nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed. (page 191)

It’s a powerful novel that, for me, defies being categorised. Emotional, passionate and intense it’s a  dark and compelling book, with more emphasis on character than on plot. God, whether the characters believe in ‘him’ or not, has a major part. I knew before I read this book that Greene was a convert to Roman Catholicism, but the doubts about belief and the depth of criticism of Christianity both surprised and interested me, more than the question of the affair.

Here’s a selection of passages that I noted as I read:

  • Maurice is in Henry’s study, a room Maurice feels Henry never uses: ‘I doubted whether the set of Gibbon had once been opened, and the set of Scott was only there because it had – probably – belonged to his father, like the bronze copy of the Discus Thrower. And yet he was happier in his unused room simply because it was his: his possession. I thought with bitterness and envy: if one possesses a thing securely, one need never use it.’ (page 13) How true is that I wondered? – to me the unread books on my shelves are less my own than the read books.
  • Maurice is a novelist. Throughout the book he ponders on the nature of writing, characterisation and so on. In this passage he considers his habits of working and he effects outside events have on his ability to write, listing all the obstacles that had never affected him before, concluding that: ‘So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.‘  (pages 34-5)
  • I wondered how much of this novel is autobiographical – not just the affair, but Maurice’s own character and beliefs seem to be based on Greene’s own life and personality. Maybe that’s an unfair assumption, but I do think it’s true for his passages on writing. Another passage reveals: ‘So much of a novelist’s writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.’ (page 35)
  • And on the existence of God/Devil: ‘I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil. I have known so intimately the way that demon works in my imagination.’ (page 59)

I can’t say that I enjoyed this novel, but it is well written, full of ideas and questions packed within its pages – a tragedy about conflict and doubt.

Crime Fiction Alphabet 2012: Letter A

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet begins this week with the letter A.Letter A

Here are the rules:

By Friday of each week participants try to write a blog post about crime fiction related to the letter of the week.

Your post MUST be related to either the first letter of a book’s title, the first letter of an author’s first name, or the first letter of the author’s surname, or even maybe a crime fiction “topic”. But above all, it has to be crime fiction.
So you see you have lots of choice.
You could write a review, or a bio of an author, so long as it fits the rules somehow.
(It is ok too to skip a week.)

My choice for the letter A is Arthur Conan Doyle and The Sign of Four, sometimes called The Sign of the Four. Set in 1888 this is the second Sherlock Holmes book written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, published in 1890.

Description from Goodreads:

Yellow fog is swirling through the streets of London, and Sherlock Holmes himself is sitting in a cocaine-induced haze until the arrival of a distressed and beautiful young lady forces the great detective into action. Each year following the strange disappearance of her father, Miss Morstan has received a present of a rare and lustrous pearl. Now, on the day she is summoned to meet her anonymous benefactor, she consults Holmes and Watson.

My thoughts:

Although I have a copy of this book on my Kindle, I listened to an audiobook of the novel, narrated by Derek Jacobi. Holmes is bored, hence the cocaine and Dr Watson is concerned about the effect on his health, although he hesitates to protest at his use of the drug because:

Again and again I had registered a vow that I should deliver my soul upon the subject, but there was that cool, nonchalant air of my companion which made him the last man with whom one could care to take anything approaching to a liberty. His great powers, his masterly manner, and the experience of his many extraordinary qualities, all made me diffident and backward in crossing him.

So they are both keen to investigate the mystery Mary Morstan presents to them. Holmes is intrigued by the mystery, involving the murder of Bartholomew Sholto, the Agra treasure stolen during the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and a secret pact between the four thieves – the ‘Four’ of the title, resulting in a chase down the River Thames in a super-fast steam launch.

It’s narrated by Dr Watson, who falls in love with Mary during the course of the investigation, but it is only at the end of the novel that he plucks up his courage to propose to her. Derek Jacobi does an admirable job, with easily distinguishable voices and reasonable versions of the women’s voices. The story is complex and fast-paced, with Holmes seemingly solving the mystery from clues which he then explains to Watson. But I thought the last chapter was too long, explaining Jonathan Small’s involvement in the theft of the treasure and his attempts to retrieve it, but as Dr Watson is the narrator and he didn’t know any of this I suppose it was the only way of including it.

There are a number of minor characters that stand out, even though they have minimal involvement and are only sketched in. I’m thinking of the Scotland Yard Inspector, Athelney Jones, who Holmes describes as ‘not a bad fellow’. He arrests the whole of Sholto’s household, even his brother. There is also Toby, the dog, described as an ‘ugly long haired, lop-eared creature, half spaniel and half lurcher, brown and white in colour, with a very clumsy waddling gait.’ Also notable are the Baker Street Irregulars, a gang of ‘dirty and little street-Arabs‘ Holmes employs to chase down the criminals. He pays them a shilling a day, with a guinea prize for the first boy to find the vital clue.

All in all, an enjoyable ‘read’ and as I was listening I could visualise the scenes. It begins and ends with Holmes reaching for his cocaine.

Book Beginnings: Run by Ann Patchett

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

Way back in 2008 I read The Magician’s Assistant by Ann Patchett and because I enjoyed it I wanted to read more of her books. The Magician’s Assistant is about families with strongly drawn characters and from the opening of Run it looks as though it too has family as its theme.

Bernadette had been dead two weeks when her sisters showed up in Doyle’s living room asking for the statue back. They had no legal claim to it, of course, she would never have thought of leaving it to them, but the statue had been in their family for four generations, passing down the maternal line from mother to daughter, and it was their intention to hold with tradition. Bernadette had no daughters.

Further down the opening page it seems that Bernadette had an uncanny resemblance to the statue, which looked like her, ‘as if she had modeled in a blue robe with a halo stuck to the back of her head.’ The opening leads me into the story, making me want to read on.

Ann Patchett’s latest novel State of Wonder is shortlisted for this year’s Orange Prize for Fiction – the winner will be announced on 30 May. Her novel Bel Canto was the 2002 Orange Prize winner.

For more Book Beginnings on Friday see Gilion’s blog Rose City Reader.

 

Sunday Selection

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

It’s not often that I buy a book and start reading it straight away, mainly because I’ll be already reading one or more and also because I have a huge stack of unread books. But Bring Up the Bodies arrived in the post at just the right time, as I’d just finished reading one book and was ready for the next.

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel is the sequel to Wolf Hall, which I read and loved in 2010.  I’ve been looking forward to reading it ever since I finished reading Wolf Hall. So, even with a large backlog of books to be read, I just had to start Bring Up the Bodies straight away. It’s like catching up with friends you haven’t seen for a while – it begins in September 1535, just a few days after Wolf Hall finished. Thomas More was executed and now Henry VIII and his retinue are staying at Wolf Hall, the home of the Seymour family. And so, the story continues. This book covers the fall of Anne Boleyn, but like Wolf Hall, it’s about the career of Thomas Cromwell, Secretary to the king, Master of the Rolls, Chancellor of Cambridge University, and deputy to the king as head of the church in England.

I’m now on page 101, a quarter of the book read, and am trying to read it as slowly as possible, soaking up the atmosphere and Hilary Mantel’s richly descriptive words. Interestingly, I’ve noticed that every now and then, she qualifies who ‘he‘ is: ‘he, Cromwell‘, removing the ambiguity found in Wolf Hall. I hadn’t realised until I read the Author’s Note that this is not the end of Thomas Cromwell or the end of Hilary Mantel’s efforts to write about him:

This book is of course not about Anne Boleyn or about Henry VIII, but about the career of Thomas Cromwell, who is still in need of attention from biographers. Meanwhile, Mr Secretary remains sleek, plump and densely inaccessible, like a choice plum in a Christmas pie; but I hope to continue my efforts to dig him out. (page 410)

But I’ve also realised that I need to read Fatherland by Robert Harris, because this is the book we’ll be discussing at my face-to-face book group at the end of May and I hadn’t started it yet. So this morning I began to read it.

Whilst Bring Up the Bodies is most definitely historical fiction, Fatherland is more difficult to categorise. It’s set in Germany in 1964, but not the historical Germany of that date, because Hitler is approaching his 75th birthday, and Germany had won the Second World War – it’s historical fiction that never was – an alternative history. And yet many of the characters actually existed, their biographies are correct up to 1942 and Harris quotes from authentic documents in the book. The Berlin of the book is the Berlin that Albert Speer planned to build. What is definite is that this is a murder mystery, beginning with the discovery of the naked body of an old man, lying half in a lake on the outskirts of Berlin. The homicide investigator is Xavier March of the Kriminalpolizei and the victim is a member of the Nazi Party. It promises to be a thrilling page-turner.

I don’t think I’ll have any trouble reading the two books in tandem, as there’s no chance that I’ll mix up the characters or plots. :)

A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel: a Book Review

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

Given a choice of reading one long book or several shorter books, in the past I’ve always gone for the long book, as I like to got lost in a book, but more recently I’ve preferred shorter books. So this is the reason that Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety has sat on my bookshelves unread for a few years. It took me over a month to read it and I did pause for a while to read other shorter books in between. And this book is certainly a book that takes you to another time and place.

It is a remarkable book about the French Revolution concentrating on three of the revolutionaries – Georges-Jacques Danton, Camille Desmoulins and Maximilian Robespierre, from their childhoods to their deaths. Along with these three main characters there is a whole host of characters and without the cast list at the beginning of the book I would have struggled to keep track of them. In fact, some of the lesser characters were just names to me and I never saw them clearly, but that didn’t surprise or deter me, given the enormity of the task of chronicling the events of the French Revolution.

But the main characters stand out and there are also vivid portraits of such people as Mirabeau (a renegade aristocrat), Lafayette (a general in the American Revolutionary War and a Commander of the French National Guard), Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. I was also fascinated to read about Jean-Paul Marat  (he who was murdered in his bath), the Marquis de Sade and Pierre de Laclos (Les Liaisons Dangereuse) – I didn’t know anything about de Sade’s and de Laclos’s involvement in the Revolution.

My European History at school stopped at 1789, so although I remembered listing the causes of the Revolution and the events that led up to it, my knowledge of the main event, as it were, is patchy and incomplete, mainly gathered from books such as A Tale of Two Cities and TV programmes over the years. I found the first part of A Place of Greater Safety covered much of the ground that I was familiar with, but seen through the eyes of the three main characters as they grew up.

Despite Mantel’s insight into the personal lives and characters of the three main protagonists I never really sympathised with any of them – after all they were responsible for the deaths of many people, including their own friends and played a major part in the Reign of Terror. But at times I was drawn into hoping that they would escape their fate – they were all guillotined. They were all lawyers who grew up in the provinces, knew each from their youth and moved to Paris.

Camille Desmoulins is perhaps the star of the book. It was he who instigated the storming of the Bastille. He was by all accounts a charismatic character, despite his stutter. He and Danton lived close to each other, and Danton, a large, loud and ugly man who had the power of captivating his audiences, had a liaison with Lucille, Camille’s wife. Robespierre was a much cooler character and his involvement in the Terror (in which many people lost their heads) was chilling. But even he came over under Mantel’s pen as almost a likeable human being, revealing his weaknesses as well as his power. As long as he could he shielded Danton and Camille as opposition to them grew.

Unlike Wolf Hall, this book isn’t written in the first person, but it moves between the first and third person points of view, giving an almost panoramic view of the characters and their attitudes to the Revolution. It really is written in a most diverse style, moving between locations, characters and even tense. There are also passages written as script-style dialogue, passages from recorded speeches and pamphlets, ‘woven’ into Mantel’s own dialogue. She writes in her Author’s Note that this is not an impartial account and she has tried to see the world as her characters saw it, so where she could she used their own words.

The events of this book are complicated, so the need to dramatize and the need to explain must be set against each other. …

I am very conscious that a novel is a co-operative effort, a joint venture between writer and reader. I purvey my own version of events, but facts change according to your viewpoint. …

I have tried to write a novel that gives the reader scope to change opinions, change sympathies: a book that one can think and live inside. The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true. (pages ix-x)

I think, for me, that Hilary Mantel succeeded with this book. I have struggled reading other books written in the present tense, but either I’m getting more used to it, or Hilary Mantel’s style has won me over. Either way, reading this book and Wolf Hall has been a pleasure – ‘real journeys’ into other times and places.

  • Paperback: 880 pages
  • Publisher: Fourth Estate; (Reissue) edition (4 Mar 2010)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 000725055X
  • ISBN-13: 978-0007250554
  • Source: my own copy
  • My Rating: 4/5

Today I’m eagerly waiting for the follow up to Wolf Hall to be delivered to my letter box: Bring Up the Bodies is published today and I’ve had an email saying it’s on its way to me.

Why I haven’t been writing many book reviews

Published on by Margaret31 Comments

I’ve not been writing many book posts these last few weeks, I’ve now read four books and not written about them, although I have nearly finished a post about Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety.

Here’s the reason.

This is something I’ve been thinking about writing about for a while now, but now seems the right time. Last August I was diagnosed with a breast cancer. I couldn’t feel a lump, but my breast didn’t look right and I thought it might be a cancer. My GP couldn’t feel a lump either but thought it best to check it out at the local hospital’s breast clinic. It was still a shock to have it confirmed- even more so when the consultant said he thought I needed a mastectomy and he could do it very soon. But when they examined the biopsy it turned out that the type of cancer I had was oestrogen receptive and it was possible it would shrink by taking hormone therapy tablets. I was amazed to say the least. Apparently if you have to have a breast cancer, this type is the best one to have!!!

And so, from August to February I faithfully took the tablets, with practically no side effects – and they worked, shrinking the cancer by about a third. Still, I did need an operation, but a wide local excision, or lumpectomy in everyday language, and not a mastectomy. I had the operation at the beginning of March. It was just day surgery and went well. It was a strange experience, having surgery to correct something that wasn’t causing me any pain or discomfort and coming round from the operation with scars and discomfort – and that was all it was discomfort, soreness, massive bruising and swelling.

But all the cancer has been removed, the bruising has disappeared. It’s still tender and I get darting pains every now and then. Currently I’m having 20 sessions of radiotherapy as a precautionary measure. It’s every weekday, but the sessions are only 10 minutes long, with the actual radiation only taking about two/three minutes. There was a planning appointment where they pinpointed the area to target, and I mean pinpoint as I have at least four (I lost count) minute tattoos that outline the area. For someone who hates the idea of having tattoos, this was quite daunting, but they are such small dots I can hardly see them and it didn’t hurt (much) when they did them.

So far, I’ve had 8 treatments and it has all been painless. I’m told that tiredness kicks in after about a fortnight’s treatment and by the end of the sessions my skin may get red and sore, as though I’d got sunburn. I hope that is as bad as it gets. The most difficult thing so far has been the travelling to Edinburgh for the treatment. It takes 1 hour 20 minutes each way, which is tiring enough on its own. D is driving me and we’re listening to Blue Lightning by Ann Cleeves, the fourth in her Shetland series with Detective Jimmy Perez investigating murders on Fair Isle, which is keeping us both guessing who the murderer could be.

I’ve always had a dread of cancer, made more personal when my mother had a mastectomy, when I was in my twenties. She died five years later, after it had spread. My father died of bronchial cancer, after smoking since he was ten years old and four years ago this August my sister died of lung cancer – she’d smoked since she was 15. But, I have to say, that so far it’s not been too bad. I’m a terrible wimp regarding needles and injections and that has been the worst thing for me – the most painful was the injection before the doctor took the ultrasound core biopsies, but it wasn’t much worse than injections I’ve had at the dentist. It’s the fear of the unknown that has been more terrible than the treatment itself.

I am so grateful for the NHS – speedy appointments, kind and caring medical staff, and practically pain free treatment (I won’t mention the nurse who had great difficulty taking blood from me). I’ve had so many tests and scans and thankfully the cancer hadn’t spread anywhere else. Even so, the surgeon took a biopsy of my lymph nodes when he did the lumpectomy just to make sure, which confirmed the cancer hasn’t spread .

I like to know as much as possible about what’s happening to me and I asked the breast care nurse if there was anything I could read about breast cancer. She warned me off reading statistics online as these are often out of date and gave me a pack produced by Breast Cancer Care, which is an excellent introduction. What I have found most helpful are the Macmillan Cancer support publications, particularly Understanding Breast Cancer and Understanding Radiotherapy. Books on cancer are rather more problematic, as so many are out of date, or are aimed at the medical profession. There are some written by patients, but I’m a bit wary about them as symptoms and treatments differ from person to person. Treatment in the future looks promising as I’ve seen on the news about progress that’s being made in diagnosing cancers and less invasive ways of treating them.

This may have slowed me down, writing about the books I’ve read, but it certainly hasn’t slowed down my reading. It has brought home to me just how many books there are and that it really is true – ‘so many books, so little time‘. It’s not just books, of course, because no matter how young or old you are, how well or ill you are, life is unpredictable and we should make the most of it whilst we can.

I am optimistic, because as my breast care nurse said ‘the cancer’s away and the prognosis is good.’