World War II | this nerding life

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.

Tagged 1930s, A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell, England, non-protagonists, Time 100, World War II

Dec 08 2011

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The Resolution Project Book Fifty: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)

“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

Tagged 1940s, C.S. Lewis, Christianity, Chronicles of Narnia, England, review, Time 100, World War II

Dec 02 2011

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The Resolution Project Book Forty-Two: The Heart of the Matter (1948)

“They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.” (p. 45)

Elevator Pitch: Major Henry Scobie is the closest thing to an honest cop left in an unnamed town in British West Africa during the Second World War. While his compatriots routinely take bribes and abuse the local populace, Scobie adheres to a strict moral compass, driven by his Catholic upbringing and the intense pity in his heart for the wife he no longer feels anything for but pity. When a young woman comes into Scobie’s life after a traumatic accident, he had to deal with new feelings that grow inside of him, and see whether or not he can reconcile what he wants with what his faith would dictate of him.

This was a pretty solid book. The only real exposure I’d had to Graham Greene before reading it was mostly through movies he was involved in, ie. The Third Man (one of my favorite films noir) and the funny Our Man in Havana. I’d also read The Destructors in high school, I guess, but I don’t really remember too much about it now. So I didn’t really have any preconceptions upon going in to The Heart of the Matter other than he seems to enjoy setting stories in far off locales, which I learned later kind of comes from his having served in MI6 during the Second World War. He was stationed in Sierra Leone for much of it, which was supposedly the inspiration for the area Scobie polices.

While Heart does descend into lots of philosophical meandering and religious guilt in a matter almost reminiscent of Go Tell It on the Mountain and Call It Sleep it also has the decency to attach an interesting story to all the moaning about God and what he thinks of the protagonist, which I appreciated unlike those other two books. To me, the main message behind Heart is that we can never fully understand or empathize completely with another person. Everyone in the book is an island of sadness, nostalgia, emptiness and pain, and everyone wants desperately for someone else to get what led them to become this way. Scobie feels he’s done his wife wrong by making her spend 15 years in a foreign hellhole, and hates the people at the club who disdain her love of reading and literature for whatever reason. Wilson, a new transplant to the colony, falls in love with Scobie’s wife, and attempts to reach her through that love of literature and poetry, but to no avail. Yusef, a Syrian crime kingpin, just wants to be Scobie’s friend, and to have meaningful discussions with him about life, which is something he cannot get from the mostly local boys he uses as informants and assassins.

As a side note, the more I read about the English sort of clubs and the culture contained therein, the more they seem absolutely abhorrent. Granted, most of the books I’ve read with these kinds of organizations have them as representations of colonial/patriarchal power, although perhaps not intentionally in every instance. It is certainly the case here in Heart, and also in A Passage to India; whereas in A Handful of Dust, and to a lesser extent the American equivalent in Appointment in Samarra, the club is more a symbol of wealth, conspicuous consumption and prestige. I wonder if these organizations still exist nowadays, I mean here in Canada we’ve got things like the Elks and the Rotary Club, but those seem to be more “fraternal” than the classical English-style? Maybe I’ll look into it more, my grandfather was apparently a Mason, so maybe I have an in there. I’ve seen the instructional video on how to shake hands.

Greene’s writing style is not exactly florid, which I really appreciate. He’s able to distill complicated concepts like what it must feel like to be an average, run of the mill Catholic person down with incredible ease:

“When he thought about it at all, he regarded himself as a man in the ranks, a member of an awkward squad, who had no opportunity to break the more serious military rules. ‘I misses Mass yesterday for insufficient reason. I neglected my evening prayers.’ This was no more than admitting what every soldier did – that he had avoided a fatigue when the occasion offered.” (p. 103)

He’s also great at the police procedural type stuff. Scobie eventually does something really bad, and has to cover it up, and we the reader are privy to his inner monologue as the policeman’s brain thinks through every avenue of investigation and makes up evidence to cover holes. It’s interesting in that we start to see this happen even before Scobie has made a conscious effort to do so, like the back of his mind is working faster than he even realizes.

Overall, this is an excellent book. It delves into the psyche of a deeply conflicted man, takes place in an exotic and interesting locale, has the paranoid backdrop of World War II spy-catching and smuggling, and has some essential truths to impart about the frailty of the human condition, and our relative inability to ever understand one another.

“‘When we say to someone, “I can’t live without you,” what we really mean is, “I can’t live feeling you may be in pain, unhappy, in want.” That’s all it is. When they are dead our responsibility ends. There’s nothing more we can do about it. We can rest in peace.”" (p. 143)

Who would I recommend this book to?: People who are fans of Graham Greene’s work in film. People who are interested in life in the British African colonies during the war, and have a high tolerance for moaning about the “white man’s burden.” People who are interested in the precepts of Catholicism, and wish to see them pushed to the absolute limit by desire and shame.

Total pages read since January 1st: 14054 pp.

Total books on the Time 100 list read: 49/113, or 44% complete.

Next up on the Resolution Project: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), by C.S. Lewis

Tagged 1940s, Catholicism, Christianity, Graham Greene, review, The Heart of the Matter, Time 100, West Africa, World War II

Jun 16 2011

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The Resolution Project Book Thirty-Four: The Golden Notebook (1962)

“The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone groups in other countries. Inside this country, Britain, the middle-class have no knowledge of the lives of the working-people, and vice-versa; and reports and articles and novels are sold across the frontiers, are read as if savage tribes were being investigated.” (p. 75)

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.

Phew, was this book ever a doozy. I actually finished it a few days ago, but I’ve been mulling over what to say ever since. In the story that forms the backbone of the novel, “Free Women 1-5″, Anna Wulf is a writer in 1950s London who survives primarily off the proceeds of her first novel. She is divorced after a wartime marriage, and lives with her young daughter Janet. Her best friend and “fellow traveler” Molly is a big part of her life (they used to live together), as is Molly’s son Tommy, along with his captain of industry-type father Richard.

Anna Wulf is struggling with writer’s block after the great success that was her first book, Frontiers of War. What writing she does do these days is into four notebooks, which form the sections in between “Free Women” segments: Black, in which she examines her history (especially that of living in an African colony for the duration of the Second World War); Red, which details her involvement with the English Communist Party and her commitments to the Socialist cause in general; Yellow, which is used as a creative space for short fiction, most of which is autobiographical; and Blue, which is her personal diary. The titular Golden Notebook represents Anna’s attempt to bring together of all the strands of her personality into a coherent whole, before time runs out.

As you probably gathered from my attempt at synopsis in the last paragraph, there is a lot going on in this book. It, along with At Swim-Two-Birds, the Thomas Pynchon selections and The French Lieutenant’s Woman must be among the most experimental works on the Time 100 list. Here the use of form is especially interesting. The way Anna tells us her story with the different notebooks is an amazing way of getting us to know her better, much more than you could do with a standard linear narrative without a much higher page count. While it does get a little confusing at times, especially with Anna’s habit of using different names for the same characters when they’re being “fictional” and “not fictional”, the end result is an excellent and robust character study of a woman teetering almost at the edge of madness. We are able to learn who Anna is, where she has been, what she believes in, and what she’d like to be, all of these things, orbiting around the straightforward narrative of “Free Women”. Even more interesting to me were the editorial tone of the brief asides introducing each section of a notebook, as it is very detached, telling us what was scratched out, pasted in, etc. It gives the book a sort of “found document” feel, like if her biographer or someone was going through her papers, or if Lessing herself is taking a hand in the story.

The Golden Notebook presents us with a world in which the institution of marriage is worth next to nothing. Pretty much every single man that Anna (or her fictional surrogate Ella) meets wants to cheat on his wife with her, almost as a matter of form. Anna’s own marriage, to a German expatriate with whom she hung out with in Africa during the war, was pretty much a marriage of convenience, dissolving almost as quickly as the political groups the pair find themselves participating in. While this marriage is only barely alluded to (the events that occurred before and after receive much more screen time), Anna’s daughter from the marriage is an incredibly important part of her life, indeed, probably the thing that keeps her close to stability. One of the many topics the novel examines is the idea that while a parent is taking care of a child, the child provides structure and meaning to the parent as well, and when the child is removed from the parent, madness is soon to follow, as it does when Anna’s daughter begins to crave the discipline and formality of a boarding school and ends up getting to go to one.

The political aspects revealed in the Red notebook were also quite interesting. Anna is a member of the English Communist party during the end of the Stalinist era in Russia, and much of the notebook is devoted to her and the Party itself having to reconcile their views against what they’d previously been told to believe by Party HQ. I only knew a little bit about this time in history, mostly after reading about the H.U.A.C. trials presided over by McCarthy in the U.S. at the time, for Film Studies and History courses, so it was extremely interesting to have a glimpse at what would have went down in the more permissive atmosphere of ’50s England during this shakedown period. Lessing also has a lot to say about the way some people use the sweeping rhetoric and ideals of radical political movements as a way to escape the futility of their everyday lives. It’s all very well and good to theorize about how you should go and fight in a revolution somewhere (as at the time the book takes place in, that seemed to be an option worth exploring), much less terrifying than staying home and having to accept the political realities there. This is referred to as “paralysis of the will”, as after the great upheavals of communism in Europe and Asia: ”Because everyone’s gotten used to the idea of countries changing completely in about three years … if they can’t see a complete change ahead, they can’t be bothered.” (p. 237) I thought this rang especially true.

There’s so much more in this book: the insights into the practice of psychiatry are fascinating, as well as how we deal with the subject of mental illness. Near the end of the book, Anna takes in a boarder (once her daughter leaves for school), an American writer who appears to suffer from multiple personality disorder. His affliction mirrors Anna’s need to separate and editorialize her life by use of the notebooks, and their brief affair is covered in amazing detail in the Blue notebook, which at this point descends into a miasma of shared misery and treachery (later, once we’ve returned to the “Free Women” section, the entire thing is blown through really quickly). I could go on and on. If you’ve got the stomach to attempt this book, I’d really recommend it. While it might seem a little off-putting early on, give it a chance, there’s a lot going on in this book.

The List:

1. ~~The Adventures of Augie March~~

2. ~~All the King’s Men~~

3. ~~American Pastoral~~

4. ~~An American Tragedy~~

5. ~~Animal Farm~~ (read before 2011)

6. ~~Appointment in Samarra~~

7. ~~Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret~~

8. ~~The Assistant~~

9. ~~At Swim-Two-Birds~~

10. ~~Atonement~~ (read before 2011)

11. ~~Beloved~~

12. ~~The Berlin Stories~~

13. ~~The Big Sleep~~ (read before 2011)

14. ~~The Blind Assassin~~

15. Blood Meridian

16. ~~Brideshead Revisited~~

17. ~~The Bridge of San Luis Rey~~

18. Call It Sleep

19. ~~Catch-22~~ (read before 2011)

20. ~~The Catcher in the Rye~~ (read before 2011)

21. ~~A Clockwork Orange~~

22. ~~The Confessions of Nat Turner~~

23. ~~The Corrections~~

24. ~~The Crying of Lot 49~~ (read before 2011)

25. A Dance to the Music of Time (1st Movement)

26. ~~The Day of the Locust~~

27. ~~Death Comes for the Archbishop~~

28. ~~A Death in the Family~~

29. The Death of the Heart

30. ~~Deliverance~~

31. Dog Soldiers

32. ~~Falconer~~

33. ~~The French Lieutenant’s Woman~~

34. ~~The Golden Notebook~~

Total pages read since January 1st: 8259 pp.

Next up on the Resolution Project: Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (1st Movement) (1951)

Tagged 1950s, Anna Wulf, books within books, Communists, Doris Lessing, England, experimental fiction, feminism, Freud, Marxism, post-modernism, proto-feminism, review, South Africa, The Golden Notebook, Time 100, World War II

Mar 26 2011

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The Resolution Project Book Fourteen: The Blind Assassin (2000)

“The average working man wouldn’t read that kind of thing, though – the working man the comrades think is so inherently noble. What those guys want is his stuff. Cheap to buy, value for a dime, fast-paced action, with lots of tits and ass. Not that you can print the words tits and ass: the pulps are surprisingly prudish. Breasts and bottom are as far as they’ll go. Gore and bullets, guts and screams and writhing, but no full frontal nudity. No language. Or maybe it’s not prudishness, maybe they just don’t want to be closed down.” (p. 280)

As I am myself a purveyor of pulp fiction’s closest children, comic books, I have a lot of respect for what has come to be termed the pulp style, even if I don’t have much first-hand knowledge of it. I know it’s like a cinephile who claims to love movies and yet doesn’t like black and white, or worse, silent movies, but you have to admit, pulp was made for its era, an era that we no longer live in. Pulp was a cheap, disposable sort of entertainment which has become irrelevant now, as we are continually bombarded with cheaper, even more disposable fun. Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin is a brilliant book, which uses pulp tropes and style marvelously in an attempt to ingratiate the reader into the world of Canada in the 1930s and 1940s. The pulp-ish sections of the book are where we can find the eponymous blind assassin, who is himself the fictional creation of a fictional author found in a scandal-making novel. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

The Blind Assassin is told to us by Iris Chase Griffen, a woman who was an heiress to her father’s button and underwear factories in 1930s Ontario. She relates to us the story of her life from then until the present day, showing how her family’s factories went under during the Great Depression and how she’s now become a somewhat decrepit and penniless old lady just playing out the string in her hometown of Port Ticonderoga. She also wants to tell us about her sister, Laura, who committed suicide at the close of the Second World War by crashing her car into a river. The fictional tale “The Blind Assassin” is also imparted to the reader in the book, through passages that comment on Iris’ main narrative, as well as the social mores and taboos of the time, showing us the illicit rendezvous of a hacky pulp writer and a wealthy young woman. These two narratives mix together into a lovely stew by giving us Iris’ version of events as they unfolded, as well as the lives of the book’s doomed lovers, who create the world of Zycron where an assassin blinded from birth and a sacrificial maiden with her tongue cut out attempt to flee their decaying city of Sakiel-Norn.

What I really liked about this book, in addition to the lovely writing style and attention to period details, is how it treats the matter of pulp fiction. Most modern-day treatments of pulp’s heady mix of jingoism, titillation and violence just present themselves to us fully formed, with no attempt to place the reader in the headspace of the genre’s intended audience of eighty years ago. True, pulp was pretty trashy, but in some ways it was also kind of quaint, as the above quote discusses. What Atwood does is to give us an epic generational saga to make us understand the way one lived at that time (with Iris’ story), then gives us a small rebellion against that stifling world (in the story of the nameless lovers who tell us the pulp stories as pillow talk), and only then introducing the spaceships, temple priestesses and lizard-men that we would characterize as being “pulp” fiction (in the story of the Blind Assassin’s mission in Sakiel-Norn). With the addition of these three layers of context, we are able to see why people were driven to read this sort of book, why they wanted an escape from the Depression that surrounded them every day.

A tangent: It doesn’t really irk me when people say comic books are for kids. While for the most part they aren’t anymore (which is a damn shame, as kids could potentially be missing out on a whole art form they’d be able to enjoy for the rest of their lives, with current market trends), the bright colours and over-the-top storylines of many books could easily lead the ignorant into believing as such, as they have no way of knowing better. What really bothers me is when people who should know better, ie. the middle-intelligentsia who dictate the critical discourse on film and literature, use the word “comic book” to describe instances when other, “better” art forms discard character development for fight scenes and exciting visuals. Anyway, this is all in describing how I felt a connection here to how Atwood here redeems the idea of pulp fiction, by proving it can be just as nuanced and layered as the “higher” art forms, if done well enough. And yes, I do realize that the “Blind Assassin” sequences are just one facet of this great book, but they were one that I really identified with, so there. The rest of the book is even better, but I’m sure many people have gone on at length about that in greater spheres than my humble blog.

“Back at home, they drew the curtains and read, with disapproval, with relish, with avidity and glee – even the ones who’d never thought of opening a novel before. There’s nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy.” (p, 39)

The List:

1. ~~The Adventures of Augie March~~

2. ~~All the King’s Men~~

3. ~~American Pastoral~~

4. ~~An American Tragedy~~

5. ~~Animal Farm~~ (read before 2011)

6. ~~Appointment in Samarra~~

7. ~~Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret~~

8. ~~The Assistant~~

9. ~~At Swim-Two-Birds~~

10. ~~Atonement~~ (read before 2011)

11. ~~Beloved~~

12. ~~The Berlin Stories~~

13. ~~The Big Sleep~~ (read before 2011)

14. ~~The Blind Assassin~~

15. Blood Meridian

16. ~~Brideshead Revisited~~

Total pages read since January 1st: 4823 pp

Next up on the Resolution Project: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1986)

Tagged 1930s, 1940s, books within books, Canada, Communists, Great Depression, Margaret Atwood, Ontario, post-modernism, pulp fiction, Reds, review, The Blind Assassin, Time 100, witch hunt, World War II, WWII

Mar 21 2011

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the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Sixteen: Brideshead Revisited (1946)

“Just the place to bury a crock of gold,” said Sebastian. “I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember” (p. 20)

In comparison to the stilted language and melodrama that permeated the last book I read on the Time Magazine list, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh was a refreshing stroll down memory lane, a look at the way a geographical location can mean so much to so many people. Charles Ryder is an undergraduate at Oxford in the early 1920s when he meets the flamboyant and extravagant Lord Sebastian Flyte, with whom he begins a friendship that change both of their lives. Flyte introduces Ryder to his eccentric English Catholic aristocratic family at their estate Brideshead, a location Ryder returns to much later during the Second World War as a member of the armed services, at which he embarks backwards through his own history with the family.

I really loved this book, so much so that I read it a lot slower than I could have, in order to remain in its thrall as long as I possibly could. It is probably closest in form to Ian MacEwan’s Atonement, to name a more recent (and Time magazine-approved) work, as it deals with the lives and loves of English aristocrats in the dimming light between the two World Wars. Like Atonement, the protagonist is not a member of that esteemed group, and as such is not ruled by the dogma and feudal obligations the Flyte family are bound by. “Dogma” is definitely the appropriate word to use in relation to this wonderful book. The Flytes are, for the most part, members of the Catholic minority in England, and as such, live their lives in relation to the Church, whether it is the rebellion against it as personified by Sebastian and his expatriate father Lord Marchmain, or the devout worship of Lady Marchmain and her young daughter Cordelia. Indeed, Waugh was an actual convert to Catholicism, and much of the book is devoted to the idea of “divine grace”, which I took to mean the way in which belief in God as prescribed by Catholic rites pulls characters towards it. I don’t want to say much more about this concept, for fear of spoiling it for people who haven’t read it yet, but the allure of religion works upon each of the characters in their own special, and often surprising way.

The actual house called Brideshead is a singular location in my experience. While exact geographical details are never explicitly laid out, it is implied to be absolutely massive, containing multitudes of rooms with decorating styles spanning centuries. The closest I suppose I’ve gotten to seeing such a place in my life would have to be Warwick Castle in the Midlands of England, but the different eras shown in its decorating scheme were absolutely essential as they showed how life operated in the building over the years. Brideshead, though, is almost described as being more of a mausoleum at times, a place where the weight of centuries imposes itself on the current occupants, who are only beginning to sense the oncoming darkness and the end of their way of life. It also brought me to mind of the film La règle du jeu ( The Rules of the Game), by director Jean Renoir. That film also shows the end of the aristocratic era, in France of course, but with more of an “upstairs/downstairs” point of view, with the hired help also playing a big role.

I also really enjoyed the first big sequence of the book, Ryder and Sebastian’s days at Oxford, which seemed to consist primarily of drinking, going to boring parties, and etc. It reminded me a lot of my time in residence, complete with the old before your years feeling you get after second year. Many theorists believe that Waugh was subtly hinting at a homosexual relationship between Ryder and Flyte during this sequence, which could very easily be true, but it could also just be one of those English “romantic friendships”, sort of like between Samwise Gamgee and Frodo Baggins. I liked that it was ambiguous.

There have been quite a few adaptations of Brideshead Revisited into other media, most recently a 2008 film adaptation, which apparently paled in comparison somewhat to the release of the aforementioned Atonement. I’d very much like to see it, or the ’80s TV adaptation when I get a chance, but as ever, duty calls.

“These men must die to make a world for Hooper; they were the aborigines, vermin by right of law, to be shot off at leisure so that things might be safe for the travelling salesman, with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat wet hand-shake, his grinning dentures.” Charles Ryder, on the decline of the aristocracy in England (p. 125)

The List

1. ~~The Adventures of Augie March~~

2. ~~All the King’s Men~~

3. ~~American Pastoral~~

4. ~~An American Tragedy~~

5. ~~Animal Farm~~ (read before 2011)

6. ~~Appointment in Samarra~~

7. ~~Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret~~

8. ~~The Assistant~~

9. ~~At Swim-Two-Birds~~

10. ~~Atonement~~ (read before 2011)

11. ~~Beloved~~

12. ~~The Berlin Stories~~

13. ~~The Big Sleep~~ (read before 2011)

14. The Blind Assassin

15. Blood Meridian

16. ~~Brideshead Revisited~~

Total pages read since January 1st: 4302 pp

Next up on the Resolution Project: Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin (2000)

Tagged 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, aristocracy, Brideshead Revisited, Catholicism, England, Evelyn Waugh, non-protagonists, Oxford, review, Time 100, World War II, WWII

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Tag Archives: World War II

The Resolution Project Season Two: A Dance to the Music of Time Book Six – The Kindly Ones (1962)

The Resolution Project Book Fifty: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)

The Resolution Project Book Forty-Two: The Heart of the Matter (1948)

The Resolution Project Book Thirty-Four: The Golden Notebook (1962)

The Resolution Project Book Fourteen: The Blind Assassin (2000)

The Resolution Project Book Sixteen: Brideshead Revisited (1946)

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Tag Archives: World War II

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