“Spectacle, dear boy. Never mind the mirror held to nature. If they want nature they’ll look at a tree. Bangs and whizzes — startling effects — characters who shriek and stab and get on with it. That’s what they want, and so naturally that’s what we give them.” (p. 72)
It’s probably a cliche at this point to point to a novel preoccupied with physical violence and call it “muscularly” written. I’m pretty sure if I looked, I’d definitely find that distinction given to this book by other reviewers, not that they’d be wrong of course. Daniel O’Thunder is indeed a muscular read, and, more than that, it is possessed of a pugnacious predisposition towards me liking it. If I had to narrow down my favourite genre of literary fiction, I’d probably have to go with historical narratives, and this is an excellent one indeed.
The eponymous Mr. Thunder is a former illegal prize-fighter who by 1851 has become a preacher in London’s slums. When humanity’s most fiendish, ageless foe begins to stalk the city streets and prey upon unfortunates, Thunder comes out of retirement and challenges the Devil himself to a boxing match. He gathers in his wake a cast of characters that includes a teenage prostitute whose knowledge of swearing is a delight to all that come in contact with her, a charming yet disturbed young preacher-turned-actor, a boxing promoter who knew Thunder long ago, and a newspaperman who continually reminds the reader what his editors would like to prune out of his narrative.
So yeah, as noted above, I really enjoyed this book. In fact, so much did I enjoy reading it that I actually finished the whole thing in about two sittings today. There’s just so many things Weir does right here. He’s got multiple narrators, all of whom have interesting points of view and character arcs. He’s got an amazing vocabulary being put on display here; there must have been about forty or so synonyms for the word “punch”, and I essentially devoured them all. It recalls the language of Deadwood, vulgarity mixed with poetry and with a sense of English jingoism for their true national sport of standing in front of someone and punching them until they don’t get up. It made me recall some of my favourite books of all time, Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, with its similar attitude towards telling a historical story in a way that does not recall the worst of actual period writing.
The author is perhaps a bit too fond of a few turns of phrase, repeated use of “the coin of the realm” being the worst offender, but I can’t really blame the guy for getting caught up in language as deep and satisfying as this. Definitely check this one out.
Video Accompaniment: Linda Ronstadt, “What’ll I Do?”
The Resolution Project Season Two: For my New Year’s resolution last year (2011), I decided to try and read all one hundred of the novels picked by Time Magazine as the best since their inception in 1923 to the list’s publication in 2005. I got almost halfway through. I’ve decided to bull-headedly push on through and try and finish the challenge, continuing with the same caveat as before: I’ve exempted myself from reading books I’ve already read, leaving eighty-six or so left to go. Some spoilers may lie ahead, so be warned if you’re the type to be bothered by that. It’s not really worth getting that angry about though.
“I’m not saying we necessarily went around the whole time at that age worrying about the woods. I for one could go weeks hardly thinking about them, and there were even days when a defiant surge of courage would make me think ‘How could we believe rubbish like that?’ But then all it took would be one little thing — someone retelling one of those stories, a scary passage in a book, even just a chance remark reminding you of the woods — and that would mean another period of being under that shadow.” (p.51)
The Elevator Pitch: In the late 1990s, a woman named Kathy is a “carer”, a person whose job it is to drive all over England and help people out in convalescent homes. When she was young, Kath lived at a special school in the countryside called Hailsham, which I don’t want to tell you too much about right here. Suffice it to say, Kath and her young friends, who we meet over the course of her reminiscings, are very special children who were educated at Hailsham for a very interesting purpose… (Hint: bring a tissue while reading this one)
What I knew about this book, its subject and its author going in: While I was being coy about the big secret that surrounds this book up in the Pitch, I knew about it going in due to the fact that this book had a pretty well-regarded film adaptation two years ago. I think I’m going to try and check it out soon, potentially once I cheer up some. I’d heard of Kazuo Ishigiro before, with regards to The Remains of the Day, but I hadn’t read anything by him before this one.
Thoughts: Hi there. It’s been a while, now hasn’t it? As you will no doubt remember, being rabid fans of The Spoiler Show as you no doubt are, I’ve mentioned once or twice the fact that I’ve changed jobs. I’m not using this to excuse myself from my sacred duty of reading these books (so you don’t have to in many cases), but as a matter of fact I’ve been busier now than in the past. Doing a weekly podcast is potentially one of the factors in this. Sure, I’ve read a bunch of books since finishing The Kindly Ones back in summertime, but I haven’t really thought about the less entertaining ones on the Time 100 list. I’m trying to get back in the swing of things though.
Anyway, Never Let Me Go. This is a pretty excellent read, and one that I wish I hadn’t been spoiled on early on. Yes, I do realize the irony in that statement considering the blurb above this review, as well as the name of my podcast, etc. I do wish, though, that I could have been in on the ground floor seven years ago when this book came out. The real emotional power Ishigiro wields throughout this narrative comes from the amazing, frail, gormless, beautiful innocence of his protagonists. When I first started reading, the fact that Kath’s job allows her to traverse the countryside almost at will, without, say, gene-police or something out of Cloud Atlas hunting her clone ass down was kind of confusing. Why wouldn’t you try to escape the spectacularly shitty hand that “life” has dealt you? This is of course the plot of both The Island and the far superior Parts: The Clonus Horror, which are all basically the same story as this one.
It dawned on me pretty quick though that the Hailsham School is basically one giant pot of classical and operant conditioning, with a dash of isolation. The quote above, about the woods, is a marvelous example of form and theme and plot all rolled into one deliciously depressing burrito. As much as you’d want to empathize with the kids in the book, on a certain level their upbringing is so alien to most that you just have to accept the fatalism and fear that they operate under at all times. I guess the basic premise of the book is sci-fi, but it’s pretty lo-fi and awful to have to care for and raise all of these poor children rather than using bacta tanks or something. It’s heartbreaking. Add to the fact that the Hailsham School has as its sole emphasis development of artistic creativity in its charges, and you basically had a one-way ticket to Sadnesstown for this reviewer.
I’d be interested to know just how Ishigiro researched this novel. The interactions he describes between the children at various stages in their upbringing felt incredibly real to me. The children were not little Cuckoos or anything like that, they got into the same little spats and crushes that I remember from that time. It’s absolutely marvelous, and makes me want to seek out The Remains of the Day.
“None of you will go to America, none of you will be film stars. And none of you will be working in supermarkets as I heard some of you planning the other day. Your lives are set out for you.” (p. 81)
Similar books on the Time 100 list: The cynical jerk half of me wants to recommend Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret for fans of Never Let Me Go because it’s kind of a funny comparison, but I do honestly feel that the voices of Margaret and Kath have the same ring of authenticity about them. Aspiring grad students could potentially base a thesis on the suffocating feel of the nightmare England present in both Never and The Golden Notebook?
Total pages read since January 1st 2011: 16530 pp. (2071 this year)
Total books on the Time 100 list read: 58/113, or 51% complete.
Next up on the Resolution Project: Money (1984) by Martin Amis. Maybe.
This episode of the Spoiler Show, Marcus and I had started out with the intention of talking about the difference between British and American television, specifically police procedurals, but we ended up talking more about gun culture at home and abroad. Check it out here: http://spoilershow.podomatic.com/entry/2012-08-17T07_01_49-07_00
I think that there’s probably some really minor spoilers for the BBC’s SHERLOCK, the UK and American versions of LIFE ON MARS, and for Idris Elba’s badassedness on LUTHER, but that’s about it for spoilers.
The title of this episode, by the way, comes from a great Clash song. You should check it out.
Here’s a promo piece for Marcus’ SELL ME ON IT, BBC’s SHERLOCK!
And here’s the short film Marcus brings up early on, “Feminism and the Disposable Male”. Food for thought:
The Creative Commons attribution link for our theme song can be found here:
The Resolution Project Season Two: For my New Year’s resolution last year (2011), I decided to try and read all one hundred of the novels picked by Time Magazine as the best since their inception in 1923 to the list’s publication in 2005. I got almost halfway through. I’ve decided to bull-headedly push on through and try and finish the challenge, continuing with the same caveat as before: I’ve exempted myself from reading books I’ve already read, leaving eighty-six or so left to go. Some spoilers may lie ahead, so be warned if you’re the type to be bothered by that. It’s not really worth getting that angry about though.
“My mother – together with her sisters in their unmarried days – had always indulged a taste for investigation in the Unseen World, which even the threatened inconveniences of the Stonehurst ‘ghosts’ could not entirely quench. My father, not equally on terms with such hidden forces, was at the same time no less imbued with belief. In short, the ‘ghosts’ were an integral, an essential part of the house; indeed, its salient feature.” (p. 5)
The Elevator Pitch and What I knew going in: Second (sixth, actually) verse, same as the first. If you’ve been following along with my missives from the land of Widmerpool, Jenkins, et al., you’ll know what you’re getting into here. If not, Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time is a twelve-volume novel about various middle- and upper-class English people, with a time frame spanning from the 1920s all the way up to the beginning of the Second World War (so far). Nick Jenkins, a writer of … something, is ostensibly the main character, and each book chronicles his interactions with various sets of friends and acquaintances, usually with some overarching theme.
Thoughts: Where the last book, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, dealt a lot with the world of feuding musicians and composers, this volume had the feeling of clearing the decks somewhat before WWII kicks off. The Kindly Ones, aka. the Furies of Roman mythology, were cthonic vengeance goddesses, who would pursue oathbreakers and the like. A few characters reach the end of their mortal coil in this volume, but the relatively light-hearted world of the Dance does not allow for sinners to suffer too much. I have a feeling that as the war progresses, this’ll change a lot. There’s definitely a feeling of the old guard getting tossed out in favour of the new this time out.
It was interesting to see Jenkins kind of take some initiative this time out, but as far as I can tell it’s only to save his own skin; he spends most of the book trying to secure a commission in the Army, which I feel is probably his way of avoiding the draft and attempting to get posted somewhere less dangerous? I don’t feel a lot of patriotic fervour coming from Jenkins, so I’m assuming he doesn’t want to haul ass and fight the Hun face to face. I guess I’ll find out next book what position he finds for himself.
While reading this latest entry, I began to long for a chart, or a set of family trees, something like that, to keep straight the sheer volume of characters in the saga. I don’t really know why it took me so long to break down and admit I need help keeping everyone straight, but a chart in the style of the ones you find while reading Love and Rockets would be really handy.
Love and Rockets Issue 31 cover, by Jaime Hernandez
Actually, working my way through the L+R I had available to me when I worked at a comic store is probably one of the closest experiences I’ve had to reading A Dance to the Music of Time, except for the fact that I liked it much better. Its scope is as far-reaching, if not more so, and the characters found within are sketched out much better. I guess if I go with this hypothesis, this makes Widmerpool the Penny Century of the Dance world? Wealthy London industrialist Sir Magnus Donners is obviously H.R. Costigan in this scenario, and… No. This way lies madness.
“‘Why should we wish to ruminate on your most secret orgies?’ said Dr. Trelawney. ‘What profit for us to muse on your nights in the lupanar, your diabolical couplings with the brides of debauch, more culpable than those phantasms of the incubi that rack the dreams of young girls, or the libidinous gymnastics of the goat-god whose ice-cold sperm fathers monsters on writhing witches in coven?’” (p.194)
I liked the introduction of Doc Trelawney, a self-styled hedge wizard and cult leader in the style of an Aleister Crawley. There’s always been a bit of flirting around with mysticism in these books, but it was kind of nice to see someone go balls-out in its pursuance this time. There was a big section I skimmed over, though, where Jenkins reads his and his Uncle Giles’ horoscopes and then is amazed by how much they coincide with his own self-image. Dude, they’re written in a vague, yet reassuring, way for that very reason.
Anyway, this marks the halfway point in my reading of the Dance saga, and so far my rating is meh? It is a pretty impressive project, and it’s pretty amazing how Powell’s writing style evolves over the course of the books, but remains similar enough to the others that it’s never too jarring. Over all, I can’t really recommend this book on its own, but wouldn’t exactly warn you off attempting to read the series if it sounds like something you’re into.
“Just as most of the world find it on the whole unusual that anyone should be professionally occupied with the arts, Moreland could never get used to the fact that most people – in this particular case, Templer – lead lives in which the arts play no part whatsoever.” (p.103)
Similar books on the Time 100 list: Well, the other five books, A Question of Upbringing, A Buyer’s Market, The Acceptance World (combined review of the first three here), At Lady Molly’s and Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant are pretty similar considering they’re all the same book. This volume reminded me a little bit of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, with a similar setting at the seaside for some of it, and similar attitude towards women in love.
Total pages read since January 1st 2011: 16964 pp. (2505 this year)
Total books on the Time 100 list read: 60/113, or 53% complete.
Next up on the Resolution Project: A House for Mr. Biswas, (1961) by V.S. Naipaul. Maybe even more for real this time.
The Resolution Project Season Two: For my New Year’s resolution last year (2011), I decided to try and read all one hundred of the novels picked by Time Magazine as the best since their inception in 1923 to the list’s publication in 2005. I got almost halfway through. I’ve decided to bull-headedly push on through and try and finish the challenge, continuing with the same caveat as before: I’ve exempted myself from reading books I’ve already read, leaving eighty-six or so left to go. Some spoilers may lie ahead, so be warned if you’re the type to be bothered by that. It’s not really worth getting that angry about though.
“To hold a friend in the background at a certain stage of a love affair is a technique some men like to employ; a method which spreads, as it were, the emotional load, ameliorating risks of dual conflict between the lovers themselves, although at the same time posing a certain hazard in the undue proximity of a third party unencumbered with emotional responsibilty – and therefore almost always seen to better advantage than the lover himself. (p. 41)
The Elevator Pitch: Here we go again. When we last left our “hero” Nick Jenkins, he’d wondered about potentially getting married, found a girl, and then got married within the span of two hundred words or so of the last novel, At Lady Molly’s. In this volume, Nick tells us the tale of another group of his friends, this time a feuding bunch of composers, music critics and actors who spend their nights drinking at Mortimer’s, and eating and lusting after waitresses at the improbably named Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant. The plot is similar to the four novels that proceeded it in the Dance series; people fall in love with each other, get married, get divorced, and the incomparable Widmerpool puts in an obligatory appearance.
What I knew about this book, its subject and its author going in: See my last post on the subject.
Thoughts: For the most part, this fifth volume in the Dance series was pretty similar to the rest. I do feel, however, that this one introduced a bit more darkness into the world of 1930s London, as the spectre of the Spanish Civil War begins to loom large over the proceedings. I chose The Clash’s “Spanish Bombs” as the musical accompaniment, not only because it’s one of my favorite songs of all time, but also because the lyrics blend a sort of intellectual, writerly group of allusions with the horrible conflict, in much the same way as Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant does. When Joe Strummer mentions that he’s “hearing music from another time”, it’s hard for me not to reconcile that feeling with this volume, which is all about musicians attempting to interact with their surroundings, blithely unaware for the most part of the mechanized horrors that are to come for the entire world.
Powell kicks this one off with a move right out of the Brideshead Revisited playbook: at an indeterminate time in the future (sometime either during or after the London Blitz), Jenkins is exploring the ruins of one of his old haunts, the Mortimer, where he and yet another group of his cronies used to while away the hours. Right from the get go we realize that this set of friends are only going to exist as they are for a brief period of time. The state of play at the end of the book, which includes an illicit affair, a suicide, and the breaking of a few friendships, shouldn’t be too much for the reader to comprehend considering all is literally in ashes in the book’s opening pages.
As per usual, the big picture events of the period are backgrounded in favour of checking in on Jenkins’ old friends and new ones, in this case Charles Stringham, the alcoholic aristocrat fallen from grace, and, for a brief moment, Widmerpool, who literally runs onset and off again. The Spanish Civil War is related to us through Erridge, Lord Warminster, a progressive thinker who is continually busying himself with left-wing politics and projects. He is of course treated with a little bit of derision by his more traditional family, who see his action (which to be fair is somewhat ridiculous considering his being a pacifist and all) as just another phase:
“‘Like big-game hunting in Edwardian days’ said Robert, ‘or going to the Crusades a few years earlier … I hope he doesn’t go and get killed. I shouldn’t think he would, would you?” (p. 66)
I’m hoping that more and more the people in Jenkins’ world are going to realize that history is coming for them, in a big damn way. I’m sure they will, but for now the darkness is still pretty far off.
I’m starting to realize that Jenkins’ non-protagonist status is just how things are going to go in these books. It’s almost a running joke at this point. This time we find out that his wife is very sick, and staying at a nursing home. We find out a little later it’s because she’s had a miscarriage, but for the most part this scene serves instead to characterize his friend Moreland, whose wife is coincidentally also having a tough pregnancy too! And Widmerpool is here as well (because he is contractually obligated to perhaps), getting treated for boils!
So for what could have been a situation rife with drama for the Jenkins household, it really isn’t. His wife Isobel makes a brief appearance, then is relegated to convalescence and get ready for whatever she gets up to in the background of the next book. While I’m normally not really in favour of those sorts of “expand the world of a book by elaborating on what a secondary character was up to” sort of books, but I do feel as if a compelling story could be told about the life of Dance‘s essentially invisible narrator and his wife. As ridiculous as it sounds, you probably could just tell his story, which so far involves multiple love affairs, a marriage, and a miscarriage, and have a decent story come out of it. The main character of this book series could maybe serve to have a book about him and his life specifically. Or maybe you could write a book about Isobel, and how her husband is always out watching important events happen to other people, and she’s got a string of adulterous relationships or she’s depressed or something, I don’t know.
Powell kind of lets us in on his approach to writing about marriages in this volume though, and why it’s so hands-off:
“A future marriage, or a past one, may be investigated and explained in terms of writing about one of its parties, but it is doubtful whether an existing marriage can ever be described directly in the first person and convey a sense of reality. Even those writers who suggest some of the substance of married life best, stylise heavily, losing the subtlety of the relationship at the price of a few accurately recorded, but isolated, aspects.” (p. 97)
Seeing as how I’ve never been married I can’t really say, but this seems legit. He also gives us a brief glimpse into what goes on in Jenkins’ head while he hears everyone else’s sordid details, giving us perhaps some of the only characterization we’re going to get for this guy, and why he does what he does.
“That odd feeling of excitement began to stir within me always provoked by news of other peoples’ adventures in love; accompanied as ever by a sense of sadness, of regret, almost jealousy, inward emotions that express, like nothing else in life, life’s irrational dissatisfactions.” (p. 155)
Similar books on the Time 100 list: Again the previous Dance books (1-3, and 4) would be likely suspects, and as I mentioned before Brideshead Revisited deals with the sort of wartime reminiscence thing pretty well too.
Total pages read since January 1st 2011: 16710 pp. (2251 this year)
Total books on the Time 100 list read: 59/113, or 52% complete.
Next up on the Resolution Project: A House for Mr. Biswas, (1961) by V.S. Naipaul. Maybe for real this time.
“There is something overpowering, even a trifle sinister about very large families, the individual members of which often possess in excess the characteristics commonly attributed to ‘only’ children: misanthropy: neurasthenia: an ability to adapt themselves: all the traits held to be the result of a lonely upbringing. The corporate life of large families can be lived with severity, even barbarity, of a kind unknown in smaller related communities: these savageries and distillations of egoism often rendered even less tolerable if sentimentalised outside the family circle.” (p. 31)
The Resolution Project Season Two: For my New Year’s resolution last year (2011), I decided to try and read all one hundred of the novels picked by Time Magazine as the best since their inception in 1923 to the list’s publication in 2005. I got almost halfway through. I’ve decided to bull-headedly push on through and try and finish the challenge, continuing with the same caveat as before: I’ve exempted myself from reading books I’ve already read, leaving eighty-six or so left to go. Some spoilers may lie ahead, so be warned if you’re the type to be bothered by that. It’s not really worth getting that angry about though.
The Elevator Pitch: Hooboy, here’s another one that’s simultaneously really easy and really difficult to summarize. A Dance to the Music of Time is a twelve-volume megabook by Anthony Powell that looks at the way the lives of four men and their respective worlds revolve around one another over the course of the first few decades of the Twentieth Century. The main character, Nick Jenkins, is a bit of a cypher, in the grandEnglishtradition of non-protagonist protagonists; he’s more of the lens by which we view the world than any real sort of character (I’ll discuss this more below). In this episode, Nick makes friends with Lady Molly Jeavons, a minor aristocrat who is known for having elaborate and strange dinner parties at her house. Also, the perennial font of ridiculousness Kenneth Widmerpool gets engaged and also contracts jaundice.
What I knew about this book, its subject and its author going in: This isn’t my first time at the Dance rodeo. I read the first three novels of the cycle last year, so I was fairly well acquainted with the subject matter. The book’s in the running for one of the longest ever to be written, giving this list project an added masochistic thrill of conquering it in addition to 99 other books. Based on my experience with the first three, I expected this one would have lots of aristocratic types in it, a frisson of 1930s Socialism, a hint of Hitler’s rise in Germany, and a lot of people falling in and out of love with each other. I was not disappointed.
Thoughts: There’s only so much you can say about these books, it’s basically the same thing as reviewing a big book like Infinite Jest chapter by chapter except with less formal experimentalism and tennis jargon. So far, 1/3 of the way done the book, I think it’s … pretty good? At Lady Molly’s is definitely better than the second book, A Buyer’s Market, but not by much.
This one did continue the annoying (to me) trend of having large events happen in Jenkins’ life basically get backgrounded into irrelevance. Seriously, the main character of the book cycle decides to get married, to Isobel Tolland. While you’d think that this is a pretty important character development, it isn’t really, it doesn’t even get a full page of recognition! Here’s one of the two (!) real mentions of this turn of events, wherein a line makes Jenkins irrelevant again!:
“A background of other events largely obscured the steps leading up to my engagement to Isobel Tolland. Of this crisis in my life, I remember chiefly a sense of tremendous inevitability, a feeling that fate was settling its own problems, and too much reflection would be out of place.” (p.203)
Too much reflection? You’re getting married, man! You’re allowed to reflect on your life for more than one paragraph here, it’s perfectly alright!
For those of you who remember my review of Kinglsey Amis’ Lucky Jim, you’ll recall that I compared Dixon, the hero of the piece, to the Canadian comics slacker icon Scott Pilgrim. If I were to pick a character from that universe that would recall Dance‘s Nick Jenkins, it’d be Joey Comeau, the guy who knows everybody and tells Scott about Ramona Flowers. I’m sure he’s a great guy, he certainly knows a lot of cool people, but he’s not the main character of the book. It’s really frustrating for Jenkins to throw you a little bit of info about himself, then go right back into hearing about how other peoples’ lives are dramatic.
This book continues the apparent English tradition of not being able to deal with veterans of the Great War. Just like in The Death of the Heart, At Lady Molly’s features a WWI vet who articulates the huge differences between the generation who fought in the war and those who came after, Lady Molly’s husband Jeavons:
“‘People don’t think the same way any longer,’ he bawled across the table. ‘The war blew the whole bloody thing up, like tossing a Mills bomb into a dug-out. Everything’s changed about all that. Always rather feel sorry for your generation as a matter of fact, not but what we haven’t all lost our- what do you call ‘em- you know- somebody used the word in our house the other night-saying much what I’m saying now? Struck me very forcibly. You know- when you’re soft enough to think things are going to be a damned sight better than they turn out to be. What’s the word?’
‘Illusions?’
“Illusions! That’s the one.’” (p. 178)
So in short, I can’t recommend this book unless you’ve read the three before it, as you’ll be incredibly lost. If you want to read the prior books, this one’s pretty solid though. Here’s a bit I thought was funny about monkeys and people who don’t like them.
“He spoke in a preoccupied, confidential tone, as if Miss Weedon’s reply might make all the difference by its orientation to plans on foot for Maisky’s education (he’s a monkey named after the Soviet Ambassador to England).
‘I don’t care for monkeys,’ said Miss Weedon.
‘Oh, don’t you?’ said Jeavons.
He stood pondering this flat, forthright declaration of anti-simianism on Miss Weedon’s part. The notion that some people might not like monkeys was evidently entirely new to him; surprising, perhaps a trifle displeasing, but at the same time one of those general ideas of which one can easily grasp the general import without being necessarily in agreement. It was a theory that startled by its stark simplicity.’ (p. 168)
Similar books on the Time 100 list: Well obviously the three Dance books that came before this one have some similarities, but I feel as well that The Death of the Heart portrays the same time, social sphere and place in a similarly interesting fashion.
Total pages read since January 1st 2011: 16481 pp. (2022 this year)
Total books on the Time 100 list read: 58/113, or 51% complete.
Next up on the Resolution Project: A House for Mr. Biswas, (1961) by V.S. Naipaul.
“Dixon felt that, on the contrary, he had a good idea of what his article was worth from several points of view. From one of these, the thing’s worth could be expressed in one short hyphenated indecency; from another, it was worth the amount of frenzied fact-grubbing and fanatical boredom that had gone into it; from yet another, it was worthy of its aim, the removal of the ‘bad impression’ he’d so far made in the college and in his Department.” (pp. 10)
The Resolution Project Season Two: For my New Year’s resolution last year (2011), I decided to try and read all one hundred of the novels picked by Time Magazine as the best since their inception in 1923 to the list’s publication in 2005. I got almost halfway through. I’ve decided to bull-headedly push on through and try and finish the challenge, continuing with the same caveat as before: I’ve exempted myself from reading books I’ve already read, leaving some eighty-six or so left to go. Some spoilers may lie ahead, so be warned if you’re the type to be bothered by that. It’s not really worth getting that angry about though.
The Elevator Pitch: Jim Dixon is a young lecturer on the subject of Medieval History at a small college somewhere in the English Midlands. He’s not the best at his job, but keep in mind he also has to deal with a pedantic supervisor, students who are either sycophants or completely disinterested, a woman who engages in emotional terrorism against him and the creeping suspicion that he’s squandered his whole life away. When his supervisor’s artiste-wannabe son comes to town with his girlfriend in tow, Dixon finds himself rebelling against him and the social order of the school, as well as all the assholes that inhabit it.
What I knew about this book, its subject and its author going in: Next to nothing. I’d heard it was pretty funny, and was pleased to find out this was the case. I also had a dim memory in my mind that Kingsley Amis was related to Martin Amis.
Thoughts: Sorry again about not posting very much lately. I could continue to trot out the excuses of work and life being busy, which continue to be the case, but the real culprit here is actually a woman named Christina Stead. To my infinite misfortune, the public library in my home town was not able to get Invisible Man to me when I needed it, and I was forced to grab the next book available on my holds list, Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children. Let me tell you, this book is a slog. It is incredibly dull, lethally written and the name on the cover gets you strange looks if you read it in public places. By the point I’ve reached so far (around 100 pages in, or 1/5 of the way through), I definitely wish that it was indeed about a child molestor, as that would actually constitute a story worth maintaining any interest in whatsoever, as opposed to the warmed-over After School Special piece of crap that it actually is.
As I noted before in my vacation-shortened review of The Great Gatsby, Lev Grossman, half of the team who chose the books on the Time 100 list, specifically told me that he would never read this book again if he had his druthers. I’m beginning to understand why.
Anyway, I ended up ditching Stead’s crap opus as soon as my library came through on another hold. Lucky Jim was that book, and I ended up really enjoying it in the end. I’m going to space out reading The Man Who Loved Children between other, more palatable volumes, because I am one stubborn son of a bitch who’s not going to let a terrible author like CHRISTINA STEAD beat me. Bore me silly? Yes. But win? Not on your fucking life. She doesn’t deserve the pleasure. If I can make it through Blood Meridian, Infinite Jest and Gravity’s Rainbow relatively unscathed, no inexplicably lauded piece of crap like Children is going to stop me.
Lucky Jim reminded me of my student days, and reminded me that I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed continuing on to grad school quite as much as I feel I would have sometimes. Say what you will about my current employment at the comic shop, it rarely sends me into paroxysms of doubt and self-loathing the way having to deal with academics and their individual peccadilloes would have most likely done. Dixon’s dread at delivering a lecture on “Merrie England” brought me back to things I had to do back then that I absolutely hated, like learn a language, or go to my Early Modern English History class, an interesting subject which was ruined by a prof who had an incredibly irritating way of speaking and gave us twice as many papers to write than he had any right to.
Kingsley Amis does a great job of getting you into Dixon’s head, possibly to a fault. We really understand him and his struggles, but learn less about his contemporaries. They’re not super important in the grand scheme of things though. What is important is Amis’ spot on descriptions of being apocalpytically, impossibly drunk, and the aftermath thereof:
“His face was heavy, as if little bags of sand had been painlessly sewn into various parts of it, dragging the features away from the bones, if he still had bones in his face. Suddenly feeling worse, he heaved a shuddering sigh. Someone seemed to have leapt nimbly up behind him and encased him in a kind of diving-suit made of invisible cotton-wool. He gave a quiet groan; he didn’t want to feel any worse than this.” (pp. 58)
I also really liked how Amis phrased Dixon’s competition with his supervisor’s son for the girl as a sort of war. Jim, being a not super attractive man with little in the way of finances or social standing, would essentially have gotten used to fighting tooth and nail for anything he could get, and a war of attrition for a woman’s love seems perfectly in character, and very flavorful.
Dixon by the end of it really reminded me of a literary hero from my own homeland, that man being of course Scott Pilgrim. Both are young guys who are in desperate need of a little growing up; both have a disconnected view of the real world and its trials, Scott escaping into video game metaphor while Dixon being in the 1950s has to settle on making faces behind peoples’ backs and drinking copiously. By the end, though, Scott actually grows up more than Dixon, who lives up to the title’s promise and basically gets out unscathed. I thought that was interesting, that an angry young man back then was essentially allowed to run riot, whereas by now he has to change or die.
All in all, I enjoyed this book quite a bit. I will say though that it’s probably a “men’s” book, in that I don’t know how interesting a woman would find reading it. None of the women are important characters in their own right, and as mentioned above, the main romantic interest of the story is treated as spoils of war on one hand, and as an impossibly beautiful demi-goddess or something on the other. Still, if a sort of mean-spirited post graduation lark is something you’re interested in, it’s worth a try. Here’s a bit about a bus that I liked:
“As the traffic thickened slightly towards the town, the driver added to his hypertrophied caution a psychopathic devotion to the interests of other raod-users; the sight of anything between a removal-van and a junior bicycle halved his speed to four miles an hour and sent his hand, Dixon guessed, flapping in a slow-motion St Vitus’ dance of beckonings and wavings-on. Learners practised reversing across his path; gossiping knots of loungers parted leisurely at the touch of his reluctant bonnet; toddlers reeled to retrieve toys from under his just-revolving wheels.” (pp. 258)
Similar books on the Time 100 list: Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time series eventually wheels its way around to this point in English history, while the schoolboy reminiscences of Brideshead Revisited look at university life from a gentler (student) point of view. The sense of humor on display in Lucky Jim also reminded me of A Handful of Dust to a certain extent, but your mileage may vary on that one.
Total pages read since January 1st 2011: 15925 pp. (1466 this year)
Total books on the Time 100 list read: 55/113, or 49% complete.
Next up on the Resolution Project: TBA, I’m going on vacation soon, so I might read “fun” books while I’m there. Haven’t quite decided all that yet.
First off, I feel like this is in order, because this book was a chore to get through, and as such delayed my reading project even worse than Skyrim did:
“She had watched life, since she came to London, with a sort of despair – motivated and busy always, always progressing: even people pausing on bridges seemed to pause with a purpose; no bird seemed to pursue a quite aimless flight. The spring of the works seemed unfound only by her: she could not doubt people knew what they were doing – everywhere she met alert cognisant eyes. She could not believe there was not a plan of the whole set-up in every head but her own” (p.72)
The Resolution Project Season Two: For my New Year’s resolution last year (2011), I decided to try and read all one hundred of the novels picked by Time Magazine as the best since their inception in 1923 to the list’s publication in 2005. I got almost halfway through. I’ve decided to bull-headedly push on through and try and finish the challenge, with a caveat: I exempted myself from reading ones I’ve already read, leaving some eighty-six or so left to read. Some spoilers may lie ahead, so be warned if you’re the type to be bothered by that. It’s not really worth getting that angry about though.
The Elevator Pitch: Portia Quayne is an orphan. After flitting about in hotels and shabby flats on the Continent with her mother before her death, Portia has come to London to live with her brother Thomas and his wife Anne. No one really knows what to make of the quiet young girl, whose gormlessness and eager-to-please nature seem to lay bare the veneer of civilization in the 1930s. Portia falls in love with an old friend of Anna’s, Eddie, who works at Thomas’ advertising concern. This adolescent crush sets in motion a series of events that makes everyone feel really bad.
What I knew about this book and its author going in: Absolutely fuck-all. It is apparently a defect in my character and education that not once in working towards my degree in English Literature that the name Elizabeth Bowen and this, her supposed masterpiece ever came up. Now that I’ve rectified the situation, I cannot say that I feel like I was missing out in the slightest.
As I noted above, this book was an absolute beast to work through, and this is solely due to the style it was written in. The back cover calls this a “psychological novel”, which I take to mean it purports to explore the psychological makeup of characters as they move through the world of the book. Which it does. To a fault, I’d say.
Bowen proves herself capable of really beautiful turns of phrase, and really good at examining how people tick, especially when it comes to the female characters in the book, Portia, Anna and Matchett the housekeeper. What I found, in my opinion anyway, fault in, was that the book was narratively not as strong. It shares this distinction with the last book I read on the Time 100 list, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, which I also had a hell of a time pushing through.
Where Bowen shines is in depicting thumbnail sketches of characters right at the exact moment she turns her eyes towards them. One in particular I found well done was the character of Major Brutt, a military man who vaguely knew Anna before mustering into the service. He’s sort of a boring guy to encounter, as he’s been out of circulation for so long that he has forgotten how to get along in London society, assuming of course he ever really fit in to begin with. One sequence I enjoyed was when Brutt, who has sort of accidentally ingratiated himself into life at 2 Windsor Terrace, mistakenly drops in at the wrong time and has a drink with Thomas instead of Anna. Thomas, who’s not exactly a social butterfly himself, feels like Brutt wants something from him, something like a job or a connection, rather than the basic human company he actually craves. It leads to this excellent summation of men of Brutt’s type:
“All he seemed to have put on the market was (query) experience, that stolid alertness, that pebble-grey direct look that Thomas was finding morally hypnotic. There was, of course, his courage – something now with no context, no function, no outlet, fumbled over, rejected, likely to fetch nothing. Makes of men date, like makes of cars; Major Brutt was a 1914-1918 model: there was now no market for that make. In fact, only his steadfast persistence in living made it a pity he could not be scrapped.” (p.113)
This makes concrete a really unfortunate facet of the world of the 1930s, as well as the world of today. It is especially poignant considering the death of the last known participant in the Great War, Briton Claude Choules, died last year, while the last serviceperson, Florence Green, died only a few days ago (source). Some people unfortunately find their purpose in a specific time and place, and cannot cope with the world after that time and place are no more.
Portia’s kind of in the same boat. While living with her mother, she was itinerant, moving around Europe in a sort of fairy tale of funny people met in hotels and different vistas seen out of the window, a counterpoint to, again, the homeless girls in Housekeeping. When this state of affairs is no longer applicable, she cannot fit in with the upper-middle class London society that Thomas and Anna aspire to. She gets along better with the staff of the house, taking tea with Matchett everyday. So, like Brutt, Portia has a tendency to put people on edge; where he makes younger folks feel a little ashamed at their lack of service, or forces them to imagine the hell he’s been put through in their defence, Portia reminds them of their own innocence long forgotten, and makes them feel ashamed of what they’ve become.
When she meets Eddie, it seems good on paper (joke). Eddie’s a misfit too, he didn’t set the world on fire with his writing (unlike fellow houseguest St. Quentin, who appears to do all right for himself, and is also the catalyst for the climax of the book), nor does he do a great job in advertising. It doesn’t work out between them though. Eddie’s a bit of a man-whore, catting about with Anna at the same time as his so-called romance with her half-sister in law Portia, and holding hands with women he meets in Seale, which I gather is the 1930s equivalent to a dirty bathroom hookup? Anyway, he’s a mess, and he takes Portia’s 16-year old heart and fucks it up, seemingly irrevocably.
So while I can appreciate the amount of detail Bowen is able to put into character study, in my mind anyway, a little of that goes a long way. When that’s the main “driving” force of your novel, though, it starts to wear on me. Narrative-wise, there’s maybe 5 or 6 actual events that happen throughout the year or so the novel takes place in. I can only imagine how long this book would have been in the hands of another writer. Raymond Chandler probably could have told this story in a page or two, and would have had enough room for shots to ring out and a couple of one liners. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that The Death of the Heart, while probably a great novel based on sheer technical brilliance alone, was not for me, in the exact opposite way the something like Blood Meridian wasn’t for me. Give it a try, though, if the subject matter and time period sound interesting to you. Personally, it reaffirmed my enjoyment of historical novels written long after the period has come and gone. I like the insight into London at this time that Bowen brings to the table, but I’d rather it was filtered through the little bit of artifice that “historical” writing brings.
“We all create situations each other can’t live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don’t. One doesn’t have to be in love to be silly, because then one makes a thing about everything.” (p. 315)
Similar books on the Time 100 list: American Pastoral and Are You There God?It’s Me Margaret also examine the state of mind of a preteen/teenage girl, but in radically different ways. If you’re interested in the time period, the Dance to the Music of Time cycle is a look at London right around then. Appointment in Samarra, while it takes place in America, examines the same sort of set I believe that Anna and Thomas would feel a part of, at around the same period in time as well. Finally, I feel like The French Lieutenant’s Woman also explores the psyche of Victorians in the same way this looks at that of the Interwar Period, but in a way I found much more enjoyable to read. It’s something about the distance between author and subject that I enjoy.
Total pages read since January 1st 2011: 14877 pp. (418 this year)
Total books on the Time 100 list read: 52/113, or 46% complete.
Next up on the Resolution Project: I, Claudius, by Robert Graves (1934)
“Everyone agreed to this and that was how the adventures began. It was the sort of house that you never seem to come to the end of, and it was full of unexpected places.” (p. 4)
The Resolution Project: For my New Year’s resolution this year (that being 2011), I decided to try and read all one hundred of the novels picked by Time Magazine as the best since their inception in 1923 to the list’s publication in 2005. I exempted myself from reading ones I’ve already read, leaving some eighty-six or so to read before the end of this year. Some spoilers may lie ahead, so be warned if you’re the type to be bothered by that.
The Elevator Pitch: Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy are four children who have been evacuated to the English countryside during World War II. They live with an old Professor, who lets them spend their days idly exploring the strange house. When Lucy happens upon a magic wardrobe that escorts her to the land of Narnia, the children will be forced to fight for what is right against an ancient evil.
Okay, confession time: before this year, I was a complete Narnia neophyte, a noob, a Neanderthal even, with regards to this book series and associated media property. I work in a comic store, so I’ve seen some of the merchandise prepared for each of the films I guess, but until now I’ve never actually experienced the world first-hand. And you know what? I really liked it.
To be honest, it was a little tough going for me early on in the two hours or so of straight reading it took to finish, though. The subtitle of the book is “A Story for Children”, and as such the writing style is very simple and direct, which takes a little getting used to as opposed to the other stuff I’ve subjected myself to this year. Lewis continually reminds the reader who’s talking and when, which got on my nerves a little at first, but this simple storytelling technique soon faded away once I got into the engaging narrative. And, to be fair, I much prefer being explicitly told who is speaking at all times to something like Blood Meridian (now there’s a wildly disparate set of books if I’ve ever seen one), which never feels the need to inform you as to any of these facts, much less why anyone would be talking as opposed to constantly raping and murdering. Score one for Lewis.
The characters are all quite plain and simple, easy for a child to insert their own personalities or those of their friends into and experience the story vicariously through in that way. I’m still not absolutely clear as to what Susan’s role was, other than to be more interesting in future volumes I guess? Edmund, that little douchebag, was characterized pretty well, once I realized that the “Turkish Delight” he was continually asking for from the White Witch was actually DRUGS (joke). I thought at first that the main thrust of the story was very similar to Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions, but upon looking it up, I actually found out that Wardrobe predates that book a number of years. Maybe Anderson was a fan too?
Actually speaking of drugs, another hurdle I had when initially getting into this book, and I know he’d probably hate to hear it, was Time 100 list curator Lev Grossman’s awesome reimagining of the fantasy narrative The Magicians.
I’m sure Mr. Grossman would be a little sad to hear this, but having read his Bret Easton Ellis-influenced and brilliant inversions of Wardrobe‘s tropes first made it a little more difficult to accept the original at face value. As such, though, I can say now I enjoyed both of them a lot, but probably should have read Lewis first. Moving on.
I was struck early on by the Professor’s insistence that the Wardrobe was, once admitting of all the available data with regards to the character of the child that first found it, a real dimensional portal. The Professor, who’s got to be an avatar of Lewis, if I’m reading this correctly, kind of posits this assumption in terms of quantum mechanics:
“‘I mean, there was nothing there when we looked; even Lucy didn’t pretend there was.’
“What has that to do with it?’ said the Professor.
‘Well, Sir, if things are real, they’re there all the time.”
‘Are they?’ said the Professor; and Peter did not know quite what to say.” (p. 45-46)
It’s almost like they’re living in Professor Schrödinger’s house or something. I love that. It’s too easy for children’s authors to score cheap points from their intended audience by having authority figures
a.be an obstacle to the child protagonists and
b.never listen to anything they say, even though they’re obviously correct.
The Professor can easily accept the existence of alternate realities and travel between such, and his ownership of the house the kids are fostered in never in any way hinders them from having sweet-ass adventures. I hope that it never really gets confirmed later on in the series whether or not the Professor knows of Narnia, is from there, etc, because it’s so much better for him to be from the real world and yet accommodating of others. in my mind anyway.
Lewis’s writing style is also quite conversational at times, in addition to the aforementioned easiness of reading. I really enjoyed his casual asides about the culture of giants, and how he related magical events to things kids would understand, for example how paper sets on fire, or the colour of fresh strawberries. You really get the feeling that this book was tested out on real children before getting printed, as that’s exactly the sort of great stuff you’d tell a kid while reading them a bedtime story. This reminded me a lot of William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, actually, minus all the postmodern talk about “editing” the original text and all that. The more I think about this, the more I wish I’d read this book when I was little.
The big elephant in the room, or rather the lion in the room, when speaking critically about Wardrobe is the obvious Christ metaphors. That was one of the few things I’d obviously known about going in, and in my dual ignorance of both Narnia and Christianity, I thought it was going to be a lot more explicit than it turned out to be. Sure you get the whole death and rebirth thing, but what really interested me was how the kids found it really difficult to look the lion square in the face. Sure, it would be somewhat disconcerting to stare down a magical talking lion, but his inherent goodness being awe-inspiring enough to make you have to look away? That’s a little different. That’s almost like losing SAN points by reading the Pnakotic Manuscripts or something to me, I figured everyone would just love Aslan right off the hop! This is obviously something for readers far more versed in theology and/or felinology to talk about.
“Once a King in Narnia, always a King in Narnia.” (p. 186)
Who would I recommend this book to?: Kids, definitely kids. Fans of fantasy worlds that lurk just on the outer edges of our comprehension. People who enjoy the more jovial fantasy stuff, and also talking animals.
Total pages read since January 1st: 14240 pp.
Total books on the Time 100 list read: 50/113, or (still) 44% complete.
Next up on the Resolution Project: Housekeeping (1981), by Marilynne Robinson
“But with the exception of her sister’s, opinion was greatly in favour of Brenda’s adventure … It had been an autumn of very sparse and meagre romance; only the most obvious people had parted or come together, and Brenda was filling a want long felt by those whose simple, vicarious pleasure it was to discuss the subject in bed over the telephone.” (p. 54)
The Resolution Project: For my New Year’s resolution this year (that being 2011), I decided to try and read all one hundred of the novels picked by Time Magazine as the best since their inception in 1923 to the list’s publication in 2005. I exempted myself from reading ones I’ve already read, leaving some eighty-six or so to read before the end of this year. Some spoilers may lie ahead, so be warned if you’re the type to be bothered by that.
Tony and Brenda Last are members of the increasingly irrelevant landed aristocracy in 1930s England. Tony is somewhat obsessed with the upkeep of his estate, Hetton House, which he insists must keep its Gothic architecture even in the face of fashion and his own wife’s desires. When John Beaver (a worthless layabout who lives with his mother) is mistakenly invited over for a weekend, events are set into motion that will destroy the marriage of the Lasts and pretty much wreck Tony’s entire existence as he knows it.
First off, sorry about the late post here. In addition to the birthdays of four or five people, -30 degree temperatures making it a pain in the ass to go to the library, Christmas ramping-up at the store and getting ready for Graphic Content’s third outing (also the subject of my next post wouldn’t you know?), I also thought it would be a good idea to buy Skyrim. After all, I made it through Arkham City without missing too much reading time, so what could be the problem?
Frost Trolls. Frost Trolls are very much a problem.
Anyway, I powered through all of these temptations/complications and finished. My technique for Skyrim, by the way, was to not go into the room my Xbox is in, just to entirely disregard its existence for a couple of days. Success! It’s not even like A Handful of Dust is a long book, or tiresome to get through, it’s actually a fantastic read, which made this situation even more unpleasant for me. In fact, I’d be willing to say that I enjoyed it almost as much as I enjoyed the previous entry by Waugh in the list, Brideshead Revisited.
Dust presents us an interpretation of the sanctity of marriage that is only matched on the list so far by Doris Lessing’s apocalyptic The Golden Notebook. When Brenda Last begins her affair with the non-entity known as John Beaver, as the above quote indicates, the situation becomes one of great fun and enjoyment for everyone in civilized society, and no one care a whit about the feelings of her husband, or the well being of their child. Brenda even attempts to set Tony up with a mistress to give him something to do, resulting in hilarious scenes where “Princess” Abdul Akbar attempts to seduce a man who has no idea why she’s even there, much less any interest in her.
This all ends up in Tony having to do the gentlemanly thing and give Brenda a divorce. The only way this can be accomplished, however, is for Tony to be the adulterer, which results in him taking a dance-hall girl (and her eight-year old daughter) to Brighton for scandalous photos to be taken (with the dance-hall girl, I mean, not the kid). I will admit to being a little confused as to why Tony had to be seen as the bad guy for the divorce proceedings, it must have something to do with keeping Brenda’s reputation intact so that she can marry Beaver? The scenes where Tony mingles with the detectives he’s hired to follow himself are pretty funny though.
There were a lot of great pieces to this novel. I really liked the parish priest in Hetton who recites sermons he wrote while stationed off in India and Afghanistan, hoping that no one calls him on this fact. I also liked how everyone knew about this, but didn’t have the heart to tell him, and how the mention of exotic flora and fauna in the priest’s sermons presage Tony’s ultimate retreat from the civilized world. Dust also reaffirms my belief that horses in works of great literature are evil, and will kill children at almost a moment’s notice (see: Gone With the Wind, and I’m sure there’s more coming). I loved the last names everyone had, and I liked John Beaver’s mother a lot. She had the hustle and ambition of a Scarlett O’Hara, and was one of the few characters in the novel who weren’t completely ridiculous. I liked Jock Grant-Menzies, and the brief look at English politics he gives us (it’s completely ineffectual, dull and boring, not to mention incomprehensible).
While I don’t think Dust is quite as good as Brideshead Revisited, it does have a better title, for one, and it feels real with regards to the betrayal of a loved one. I’m continuing my tradition here of not really researching the novels much more than a quick wiki search while reading (apparently there’s a movie of this book?), but you can definitely tell from reading this book that someone hurt Evelyn Waugh very deeply, and he decided to immortalize them in the characters of Brenda Last and John Beaver, possibly as a revenge that would far outlast any of the participants.
Who would I recommend this book to?: People who like seeing the foibles and frailties of the upper crust laid bare. People who liked other entertainments featuring large manor houses, like Gosford Park, and Downton Abbey. People who won’t be crushed by the unflinchingly harsh portrayals of love, marriage and women found in the book.
Total pages read since January 1st: 13829 pp.
Total books on the Time 100 list read: 49/113, or 43% complete.
Next up on the Resolution Project: The Heart of the Matter (1948), by Graham Greene.
