Distractions – 2011

Yes, yes, it’s been a while since I posted.   I took a detour on my way to 1916 and read a couple of non ’100 year’ books.  

First up on my Kindle was Barbara Arnold’s novel ‘He Called Me Son’ about a young boy, Tony, living a tough life in post war London.  His unfortunate circumstances lead to him being sent to New Zealand as part of the British government’s Child Migration Programme.  The mind boggles really, this was only 60 or so years ago, who on earth would think that sending unaccompanied children to the other side of the world was a good idea?  Politicians, they’re all nuts.  But anyway, this was a great read and I hold it entirely responsible for dragging me away from my 100 years reading project. 

Arnold carries you back to a grim world in postwar London.  Tony’s mother is ineffectual and plagued with illness, his father a womanising drunk.  They live a life of mostly grinding poverty over which they seem to have little control, hufrtling from misfortune to misfortune.  Tony and his sister then end up in an orphanage where they are horribly powerless and their lives are at the whim of a cold and heartless state.  Tony is soon whisked away to New Zealand where sadly, his life doesn’t get any better.  Yes, I know, it all sounds rather depressing.  But Tony is an engaging character who draws on small joys that keep him going and Arnold’s characters and places are convincingly observed.   In a way, it’s quite an uplifting book.  It certainly is a gripping read,  it kept me up way past my bedtime. 

From there I skipped straight onto Sebastian Faulk’s ‘A Week In December’ in old fashioned paper form.  It’s been sitting by my bed for months since I picked it up in a bookshop splurge last year.  The title pretty much says it all.  It’s a week in December, in London, in the lives of some diverse characters.  It starts off with the wife of an MP planning a dinner party, she makes her guest list and it proves a handy way to give us a quick background on the characters we’re going to be meeting.  The trouble is it’s a bit too much too soon.  I found my attention wondering a little at this quick introduction of so many people.  But I carried on reading and a couple more chapters in it had become one of those books that makes you want to go to bed early just so you can get to read.

It feels like a real London novel, with characters that cover the full range of the capital’s melting pot and situations that reflect contemporary issues such as the financial crisis and terrorism.  The characters include an absurdly wealthy hedge fund manager, John Veals, whose only real joy in life is beating the system to make more money.  Meanwhile his teenage son hangs out in his  bedroom smoking drugs and watching ‘It’s Madness’ a reality TV programme that features those with serious mental health issues.  There’s a female tube driver who spends her off duty hours living in a virtual world.  There’s a lime pickle king with an aspiring terrorist son.  You get the picture  - all human life seems to be here.   The characters jostle slightly for your attention in this packed novel, but they are skillfully drawn and never lost my interest after an initial slow start.  Definitely one I’d recommend.

Now I’m getting back on track with my 100 years reading. 

 

Tags: A week in December, Barbara Arnold, book review, books, He Called Me Son, reading, Sebastian Faulks

1915 – 39 Steps – John Buchan

I didn’t so much choose this book as circumstances conspired to make me read it.  I was scrabbling round for something to read for 1915 and had become befuddled with choice online.  I picked this up by chance at the local library because it’s pretty, yes, my reasoning was that shallow.  Anyway, seeing it was published in 1915 I did a little dance of happiness down to the front desk and signed it out.

I’m not going to lie to you, I read this in a couple of days because it’s an incredibly easy read.   A pacy story with lots of action and not too much stuff you have to think about.  Although you do have to suspend belief a little. 

The hero, Richard Hannay, is an ex-mining engineer who, having made some money in Buluwayo, has returned to London to live the high life.  Except he’s finding it decidedly dull, “the weather made me liverish, the talk of the ordinary Englishman  made me sick, I couldn’t get enough exercise, and the amusements of London seemed as flat as soda-water that has been standing in the sun”.   But a chance encounter with a resident in the top floor flat suddenly finds Hannay in the frame for murder and on the run whilst also trying to uncover a political conspiracy.  From then on there’s a lot of running about the country, nearly getting caught and not knowing who to trust.  

Hannay  is a stiff upper lip Englishman with a strong sense of right and wrong and duty to his country.  He also seems extraordinarily resourceful and skilled in dodging enemies.  Personally I found him a bit of a stereotype, almost like an early style James Bond and, as with Bond, he seems to have no friends or family or background life.  But I suppose whilst this type of character may seem a little cliched to us now, in 1915 it hadn’t been done so much. 

Anyway, it’s classic thriller stuff and has been revived in several film versions since its publication in 1915.  Not bad considering Buchan wrote the whole thing whilst he was laid up in bed with a stomach ulcer.   It was also popular at the time apparently amongst those in the trenches during WWI, I guess it provided a dose of escapism.  

For me, it was a good quick read, but not one I’ll be keeping on my bookshelf.

1914 – Once A Week by AA Milne

Say AA Milne (1882 – 1956) and most of us think of Winnie The Pooh and his sidekicks gambolling round that Hundred Acre Wood.   However, he was a prolific writer and turned out a lot of adult fiction as well in the forms of short stories, plays and a couple of novels. 

‘Once A Week’ is a collection of nine short stories written during his time as editorial assistant at the humorous Punch magazine, just prior to World War I.   But there’s no hint of the dark days to come in these stories.  They’re light and fluffy.  Nothing nasty happens.  People get married, go ski-ing, become godfathers.  They’re all jolly decent sorts and have names like Celia and Archie.  It’s a lovely world.

But the stories are never boring, they’re funny and well-crafted.  It takes some real skill to make trivial events interesting and Milne does it superbly.  His characters are likeable and amusing.  The dialogue might sound a little formal to us in 2011, but it was probably authentic at the time. 

Here’s the narrator of one of the stories,  ‘Getting Married’, talking about the estimate of wedding costs from a local church: “It was a formidable document.  Starting with ‘full choir and organ’ which came to a million pounds, and working down through ‘boys’ voices only’ and ‘red carpet’ to ‘policemen for controlling traffic – per policemen, 5s’, it included altogether some two dozen ways of disposing of my savings”.  It’s a gentle humour, but it made me smile.

I really enjoyed this book it  made a great bedtime read that sent me off into happy dreams.  Definitely worth a look.  I got hold of my copy via Project Gutenberg, where they have over 36,000 books available free for Kindle and other devices.

And if you’re wondering as I was,  AA – stands for Alan Alexander.

Unfinished Book Business

So far, as part of my 100 years 100 books reading, I’ve just not been able to get into:

Under Western Eyes – Joseph Conrad

Death In Venice – Thomas Mann

The Dubliners – James Joyce

I just ditched ‘The Dubliners’ last night.  It was going to be my 1914 read.  And every time I bail on a book like this, I feel a little pang of guilt.  This is a much lauded work, Joyce is a superb writer, why can’t I get on with it?  It joins those other ‘must read one day’ books on my shelf.

So I was trying to identify what stops me getting on with books.  Slow beginnings lose my attention as do too many characters and names in the first few pages.  Another bail out point is sentences that are so long you need to read them twice to make sure you’ve understood them correctly.   Take this from the opening paragraph of ‘Death In Venice’ :

 “Overexcited by the dangerous and difficult work of that morning that demanded a maximum of caution, discretion, of forcefulness and exactitude of will, the writer had been unable, even after lunch, to stop the continued revolution of that innermost productive drive of his, that motus animi continuus, which after Cicero is the heart of eloquence, and had been thwarted trying to find that soothing slumber which he, in view of his declining resistance, needed so dearly.”

 This is simply asking too much of me too soon.  If this sort of sentence came up 20 pages in, when I’ve perhaps invested a bit of time already and I’m interested in the character and story, I’d stick with it.  But on the first page…I just can’t push through it.

They linger with me these books I ditch.  They collect dust on my bookshelf or under the bed.  I always mean to go back to them one day.  In the meantime I’m pricked by guilt at my own fickle reading habits.

What books have you ditched without finishing?

1913 – Olivia in India by O.Douglas

“Such funny things live behind my tent!  What should I find the other day but a little native baby…He is the oddest little figure…He squats beside me all day and eagerly eats anything I give him, like a little puppy dog”.  This is how Olivia describes one of the Indian children she sees during her travels.  My jaw, quite literally, dropped when I read it. 

But ‘Olivia in India’ is full of this kind of stuff.  ‘Natives’ are all ‘little’ and ‘funny’.  They appear solely as servants and silly officials.  It’s shocking to think that this was how things were.  But you can’t use 2011 attitudes to judge 1913 views.  So let’s put the colonialism to one side.

O. Douglas is the pen name of Anna Masteron Buchan (1877 – 1948).  She chose to write under this name as she felt the name ‘Buchan’ would be associated with her brother, John Buchan who wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps.  ‘Olivia in India’ draws on her own experiences of visiting her brother, William, in Calcutta in 1907.  So we can assume this is a pretty accurate representation of how things were, as opposed to vivid imagination.

The result is an easy and engaging read.  The narrator, Olivia, is visiting her brother, Boggley who works for the government in India.  She recounts her adventures through letters to a romantic interest in Europe.  She does this with a nice turn of phrase and a mild, mocking tone.  But she’s also quite capable of a bit of self-deprecation and so you warm to her as a narrator.

The English in India seemed to spend a disproportionate amount of time socialising and ordering servants around.  The rather decadent lifestyle is not lost on Olivia who describes it, not with tedious moral outrage but, amusement.  “It seems to me that I go about asking ‘why’ all day and no one gives me a satisfactory answer to anything.  Why, for example, should we require a troop of servants living, as we do, in a kind of hotel?”.  I suspect the real answer of the day might well have been ‘why not?’.

But Olivia is not merely bemused, she’s also a smart social observer and probably hits the nail on the head when she notes, “Everybody in India is, more or less, somebody.  It must be a very sad change to go home to England and be (comparatively) poor and shabby, and certainly obscure, to have people remark vaguely they suppose you are ‘something in India’”.   

This is a fascinating and colourful depiction of interesting times.  Well worth the read.  And I got it for $0 on my Kindle.

1912 – Riders of The Purple Sage by Zane Grey

I got hold of this book from my local library.  It had to be ordered from another library in the district and cost me $4 because of this.  When it arrived it was in massive print, which I think is the only edition they had.  On the plus side it made me feel like a really quick reader.

I’d never read a Western in my life.  But I had ideas about what to expect: cowboys, cattle rustlers, horses, dusty towns and saloon bars with an ominous looking clientele. 

“Riders of The Purple Sage” just about ticked all those boxes.  Take this dialogue from a group of men watching, Lassiter, the main hero approach:

“He’s come from far”.

“Thet’s a fine hoss”

“A strange rider”

“Huh! He wears black leather”.

Can you get any more western than that? 

But that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it. 

The novel is set in Utah around the early 1900s and opens with the main character, Jane Withersteen, pleading with a group of Mormon elders to spare the life of Bern Ventners, a Gentile.  The Mormons are annoyed that Jane has been spending too much time with Bern, and want her to marry one of the elders, a thoroughly dislikeable character called Tull.  Unfortunately, although Tull is clearly morally bankrupt, Jane, a Mormon herself, is unable to break free from his mental hold as she is blinded by her faith.  And much of the story hinges on that.

Throw into the mix the mysterious, black-leather clad Lassiter on the trail of his long lost sister, some cattle rustlers and a whole lot of Mormon plotting against Jane…and that’s pretty much the plot.

I was surprised at the strong anti-Mormon sentiment of this book.  Grey depicts the Mormons as reprehensible characters blinded by faith and misplaced loyalty to their elders and representatives.  The women are subjugated, the men are brutal and all powerful and get to have as many wives as they like.  Hmm, it does sound a bit unfair.  As Lassiter puts it “Mormons ain’t just right in their minds”.  Well, the ones in the purple sage certainly aren’t. 

But, putting this aside.  I really enjoyed this book.  It was an easy read, that kept me turning the pages.  Grey was clearly a consummate story-teller.  He was certainly a prolific writer, born in 1875 in Ohio, he published over 85 books before his death in 1939.  That’s pretty good going.

I read somewhere that a good story should make you ask ‘what happens next?’ and that’s certainly the case with “Riders of The Purple Sage”.

1911 – Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

I’d never heard of this book before I stumbled across it at the gorgeous independent bookshop,  Scorpio Books,  a few weeks ago.  Say Edith Wharton and I think of “The Age of Innocence” or “The House of Mirth”.  But, apparently, “Ethan Frome” is one of Wharton’s most widely read novels.  I couldn’t help wondering if this was because people like me are attracted to it because it’s nice and slim, like an entry level Wharton reading task. 

 Anyway, it was published in 1911 when Wharton was 50 years old.  And it seemed a good starting place for my 100 year reading.  I bought the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition and it cost me $29.99 NZ.  Yes, if you’re reading this blog from overseas, those are the kind of prices we pay for books here in New Zealand. 

Set in the fictional New England village of Starkfield, the book unravels the life of poor farmer Ethan Frome in the early 1900s.  We’re taken into the story by a narrator, a visitor to the village who is struck by the sight of Frome, “he was the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but a ruin of a man.  It was not so much his great height that marked him…it was the careless powerful look he had, in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain”.  As narrators of this kind always are, he’s struck with curiosity and wants to find out more about Frome.  So he noses round asking people in the village and starts to piece together a story.

And what a depressing story it is.  Isolated in the rural village with a hypochondriac wife complaining of ‘shooting pains’, Frome’s life is grim.  He works hard on a farm that returns little, “that Frome farm was always ‘bout as bare’s a milkpan when the cat’s been round” says one of the villagers.   When his wife’s cousin, Mattie, comes to stay with them to help out around the house, Frome’s life starts to look up.  He finds someone that he can share his wonder of nature with, who will look at the night sky and marvel at the stars.   But, happiness isn’t the theme here so don’t expect everyone to live happily ever after.

I struggled with the start of this book, it was all a bit bleak and depressing.  But as I read on, I became gripped by the story.  Wharton also sketches superb characters always showing rather than telling.  Take this description of Frome’s wife preparing for bed, “She had measured out some drops from a medicine-bottle on a chair by the bed and, after swallowing them, and wrapping her head in a piece of yellow flannel, had lain down with her face turned away”.   

When I’d read the story, I read the introduction in this Penguin Classics edition of the book.  It gave an interesting perspective on the history and cultural changes that were taking place in the US at the time.  But one sentence in particular, brought back the tedium of the worst English lectures at university.  Here it is “Set in an icy, ultrawhite landscape filled with death and dying, Ethan Frome narrates dominant-culture white racist anxiety about declining white Anglo-Saxon hegemony in the United States, an exclusionary perspective overtly embraced by many whites of the time and one that continues to undergird anti-immigrant racism today”. 

Here’s the thing, maybe Ethan Frome does raise these issues.  But it’s this kind of over analysis that can take all the joy out of reading.  Above all Ethan Frome is a great story, full of timeless human emotions and skilfully written.   Read it and enjoy it.