Mrs Palfrey first came to the Claremont Hotel on a Sunday afternoon in January. Rain had closed in over London, and her taxi sloshed along the almost deserted Cromwell Road, past one cavernous porch after another, the driver going slowly and poking his head out into the wet, for the hotel was not known to him. This discovery, that he did not know, had a little disconcerted Mrs Palfrey, for she did not know it either, and began to wonder what she was coming to.
A thoroughly charming and poignant read, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont concerns the loneliness and impotence of aging, and brave efforts to retain dignity and relevance as the brain and body fails. Released in 1971 and set in London, England, the novelist Elizabeth Taylor (how challenging to be the second most famous person of that name) captures the end days of the last of they who had known Britain as a true empire – Mrs Palfrey herself had been brought to Burma as a young bride, where she learned to deal with both natives and snakes, and now all around her she sees long-haired young people slinging Union Jack carrier bags as they attend their protest rallies – so while there is something (comfortingly) old-fashioned and proper about the setting, Taylor's insights into the human heart and mind feel as true today as they would have some fifty years gone. There are many wryly funny bits and bits to break one's heart; just a perfect little gem.
She was a tall woman with big bones and a noble face, dark eyebrows and a neatly folded jowl. She would have made a distinguished-looking man and, sometimes, wearing evening dress, looked like some famous general in drag.
Mrs Palfrey – recently widowed and pointedly not invited to come live with her only daughter in faraway Scotland – has decided to move into the Claremont Hotel; a respectable, if affordable, residence that houses a handful of other old folks and a small trickle of regular overnight guests. It's not exactly homey – the receptionist frowns at the permanent residents moving around the chairs in the lounge and the aging Italian waiter prissily corrects the French pronunciation of menu items – but Mrs Palfrey vows to make the best of it; what other choice does she have? It soon becomes clear to her that with the boring routine of endless days, and the petty jostling for social standing among this gaggle of aging old biddies (the only male resident keeps himself aloof from, but watchful of, the fray), prestige and admiration is afforded to those who have visitors; and visitors come so rarely. When she first arrived, Mrs Palfrey announced that she expected her only grandchild, Desmond, to be a frequent dinner guest of hers at the Claremont (as he was also resident in London), but as time went on without a visit and even her letters to him went unanswered, the lonely old woman was forced to acknowledge her embarrassment and her effective abandonment. But when she unexpectedly struck up a friendship with another young man, and when he was mistakenly taken for her grandson by the other residents, Mrs Palfrey embarked upon a course of deception that brought her much delight, and made for a tense reading experience: Just how devastating will it be if the ruse is discovered? The stakes literally felt like they couldn't be any higher (and especially as this young man was an aspiring novelist who was using their friendship to gather material, rushing home after each dinner to scribble notes about Mrs Palfrey's crepe-like skin and unpleasant violet-water scent).
It was hard work being old. It was like being a baby, in reverse. Every day for an infant means some new little thing learned; every day for the old means some little thing lost. Names slip away, dates mean nothing, sequences become muddled, and faces blurred. Both infancy and age are tiring times.
This narrative is bittersweet without being overly sentimental – if we should live so long, our minds and bodies will fail us, too – but Taylor keeps it entertaining with frequent humour and cutting observations; you might cringe but you oughtn't cry. And then it all ends just perfectly. Just what I needed.
This is the first time I've read Elizabeth Taylor, but as she seems to be a favourite (if obscure) author for some of my Goodreads friends, I thought I'd take the plunge - and as can been seen from my review, am glad I did. So, of further note: The introduction to my edition was written by Paul Bailey (another apparently respected author whose many books I have not read) and he tells the story of meeting Elizabeth Taylor at some literary cocktail party in the 60's. He had recently released (and been praised for) At the Jerusalem - a book about a bunch of old women at a nursing home - and it had gotten out that he had written the book while working at Harrods:
She told me how intrigued she had been that a man in his late twenties should have chosen a home for old women as a setting for a novel, and she had gone to Harrods to see what such a curious creature looked like. She went on to say that she had watched me at work for about an hour, from the vantage of a chair in the adjoining lounge. She smiled as she made this revelation. She had not expected to see someone with a youthful appearance: she had expected me to be just a trifle wizened.
So, how fascinating (to me and Bailey) that Taylor's next book was about old people, and also about a young man who worked at Harrods (like Bailey), who had also been an actor at one time (like Bailey), and who befriended the elderly in order to make a novel of what he learned from them (like Bailey). I looked up the Wikipedia page for this novel (I was trying to figure out just what Mr Palfrey did in Burma; couldn't find it), and under "Major Themes", it says:
A common theme in Taylor's work is the relation of an artist to others, which is often presented as exploitative. In this case the artist is Ludo, who uses his observations of Mrs. Palfrey to write his novel. (Kingsley) Amis describes Taylor's presentation of Ludo's motives as "scrupulously balanced" between affection, boredom, and delight in finding her "such marvellous material, and also unintentionally funny."
All that to say: I'm intrigued by the idea that Taylor likes to write about artists having an exploitative relationship with others, and particularly in this book where she exploits another author's lived experience to write about an author exploiting another's lived experience. Interesting. I hope to read more from Taylor.
And then, Steve said, then this policeman goes No. You do not go. There is nothing for you there. There, even the dogs are dead. Ant shuffled across the floor, rolled up Steve’s sleeve, and looped a belt around his arm. Steve watched him. Even the bloody dogs, he said, shaking his head.
Even the Dogs is kind of a perfect book to be reading in Covid-19 self-isolation: I've been thinking lately about those invisible people in the community – the unhoused, the drug addicts, the sex workers – and wondering how they're making out: Is social distancing even possible? Have the empty sidewalks eliminated the drop of a few coins in an outreached cup? Have the closed borders dried up the illegal drug supply? I feel so fortunate to be in Canada (today and always) because of our social safety nets, but I know that folks who didn't officially claim income last year don't qualify for relief payments, and with reductions in the workforce overall, I have no idea what face-to-face services are still available to our most vulnerable neighbours. Originally released in 2010 (for which it won 2012's International Dublin Literary Award) and about to be rereleased in May of 2020, Jon McGregor's Even the Dogs insists that we look directly at these invisible people, now and always; to recognise their humanity and afford them dignity. Told in an engagingly disjointed and surreal style, in language ugly-beautiful, this is the type of storytelling that always appeals to me; reading this particular narrative during self-isolation was perfectly satisfying. (Thank you to Catapult and Soft Skull Press for my review copy of #eventhedogs )
They break down the door at the end of December and carry the body away.
And thusly does Even the Dogs open with a bit of a mystery – there is a body, unnamed observers, a chaotic timeline in which the past and the present intermingle – and as tangled events start to unravel themselves, we realise that this story is being told by some sort of chorus; though whether they be a chorus of ghosts, shadows, or memory incarnate remains to be seen. We do understand that this chorus is omniscient and timeless, and as the narrative flits among a web of marginalised people, in the present and the past, we learn that whoever they are, the storytellers have a kind of love for the person that once inhabited the body.
They don’t speak. They wait. They look at the body. We all crowd into the room and look at the body. The swollen and softening skin, the sunken gaze, the oily pool of fluids spreading across the floor. The twitch and crawl of newly hatched life, feeding.
The scene expands and rewinds and the story introduces a host of invisible people – mostly homeless, mostly drug users – and in language gritty and unsentimental, we will eventually learn what brought these people to the city; what made them first turn to heroin (there are quite a few ex-soldiers, people who first self-medicated to stop physical and mental pain; there are also foster care survivors, and middle class dropouts); as well as descriptions of their daily grind:
Getting a bag and then finding somewhere to go to cook it up in a spoon and dig it into your arm or your leg or that mighty old femoral vein down in between your thighs. The water and the brown and the citric, waiting for it all to dissolve, holding up the flame while those tiny bubbles pop and then drawing it up through the filter and the needle into the syringe. And waiting again for the gear to cool down. Sitting with someone you’ve only just met, in a rib-roofed room with a gaping hole where the window should be, the floor littered with broken tiles and bricks, in a building you can’t remember the way out of. Tightening off the strap and waiting for the vein to come up. This bloke you’ve only just met passing you the loaded syringe. Smacking at your mottled skin and waiting for the vein to come up. Pinching and pulling and poking around and waiting for the vein to come up and then easing the needle in, drawing back a tiny bloom of blood before gently pushing the gear back home.
Without criticising the sincerity of the frontline outreach workers, McGregor tells a story in which drug addicts know how to game the system and don't want anything more from these workers than continued access to welfare payments and methadone. All of the characters in this story, even though working hard against their best interests, will say they are doing exactly as they like. But although they tend to congregate in groups – pooling resources to score, helping each other find viable veins, seeking shelter in the apartment of the man who will die – these are incredibly lonely people: trying to tell their story to anyone who'll listen; craving the touch of the volunteer hairdresser who visits the day program; the chorus watching greedily as the dead man's filthy body is scrubbed for his autopsy. And if you can't get the feelings that you crave, it would be better to feel nothing at all:
Do anything to get back to that. Keep getting back up to get back to that feeling well again. Feeling well, feeling sorted, feeling like all the, the worries have been taken away. The fears. All the emotions taken care of. That feeling of, what is it, just, like, absence, from the world. Like taking your own life away, just for a while. Like what the French call it la, the little death. And then getting up and doing it again, every time. We get up, and we do it all over again.
What else can we do.
There are several just incredible scenes where the jumbled timelines provide a bigger picture than a straight narrative would have done – in particular, we watch as a soldier in Afghanistan loses his foot to an IED, and as he is carried to safety and medical help via helicopter, we also see the entire low-tech process of how heroin is derived from poppies (and how it is then dispersed throughout the world, and even to this man's own eventual cohort) – and even these large chunks of prose that I've included in my review can't possibly give a sense of the storytelling magic that McGregor achieves with Even the Dogs. This is exactly the sort of thing I like, and coming as it did just at the right moment for me to connect with, I'm rounding up to full stars.
“When you presently meet her, all the same you’ll be meeting your mother’s representative – just as I shall. I feel like the outgoing ambassador,” said Strether, “doing honour to his appointed successor.”
Henry James writes notoriously impenetrable fiction, and with 1903's The Ambassadors, he upped the obtuse factor by conceiving a bit of a farce of manners: acting like ambassadors from distinct countries, characters rarely say what they mean to one another, sometimes contradicting themselves in subordinate clause after contrary subordinate clause, and after hundreds of pages of circumlocutious shenanigans, just as this reader's patience and eyestrain were reaching their limits, James makes a rather good point with it all, and it was worthwhile in the end. Ultimately, I more admired than liked this, but am happy I stuck it out.
Henry James wrote an Introduction to my edition, and states that his inspiration for The Ambassadors came from a conversation he had with a young friend, who reported that when he had recently been in Paris, an older gentleman made a speech during a garden party, which James recreates as this:
Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had? I’m too old – too old at any rate for what I see. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. Still, we have the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t, like me today, be without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it, and now I’m a case of reaction against the mistake. Do what you like so long as you don’t make it. For it was a mistake. Live, live!
James had been so struck by this speech – and by the friend's description of the speaker and the setting within a Parisian garden – that The Ambassadors became his imagined narrative for what led this man to make this speech, and what happened after. And so, James' imagined reconstruction of events:
The book begins with Lewis Lambert Strether – a fifty-five-year-old widower, from the small town of Woollett, Massachusetts – arriving in Europe, where he had been sent by his presumptive fiancée (the rich widow, Mrs. Newsome) in order to retrieve her playboy son who was destined to take over the family business, and who had stopped answering his mother's letters. Strether eventually made his way to Paris in the company of friends new and old, and before he ever found the son, Strether was forcefully struck by the beauty of the city and the first real feelings of freedom he had ever known in his life. When he does encounter the son, Chad, Strether is struck anew by how mature and composed the twenty-eight-year-old had become in his three years abroad, and if it turned out that a woman was behind this transformation – as Mrs. Newsome suspected and decried – Strether failed to see the harm in any relationship that produced such results. Hundreds of pages follow, in which Strether neither directly states nor receives clear information about anyone's actions or intentions, but his extraordinary experiences prompt him to deliver the inspirational speech. When it becomes apparent back in Woollett that Strether was failing in his diplomatic duties, Mrs. Newsome sends her daughter – the formidable Mrs. Sarah Pocock – to take over as ambassador, which comes as a threat to the stability of (the decidedly not wealthy) Strether's future. “Our hero” will then go through several transformations of his own before deciding on his ultimate course of action.
I appreciate that the word games and obfuscation between the characters was rather the point, but I was still often impatient with the dialogue in The Ambassadors. (I also suspected that there was a lot of hanky-panky going on between all of these couples until the proof of one physical relationship sent everyone into a tailspin; am I really to believe that all of this flirty double-talk and intimate dining and men visiting women alone in their rooms after nine p.m. was all talk? The corruptibility of Paris was also one of James' points, according to the Introduction, but how corrupt is talk?) What made this worse was just how wishy-washy Strether himself was – even with an omniscient narrator giving us the benefit of his thoughts, I rarely knew what was going on with this character; which is also apparently the point (to my consternation):
• He was burdened, poor Strether – it had better be confessed at the outset – with the oddity of a double consciousness. There was detachment in his zeal and curiosity in his indifference.
• Thanks to his constant habit of shaking the bottle in which life handed him the wine of experience, he presently found the taste of the lees rising as usual into his draught.
• “There were moments,” she explained, “when you struck me as grandly cynical; there were others when you struck me as grandly vague.”
• He was like one of the figures of the old clock at Berne. They came out, on one side, at their hour, jigged along their little course in the public eye, and went in on the other side. He too had jigged his little course – him too a modest retreat awaited.
Henry James wrote many such intriguing sentences in this book and made many perceptive comments on human behaviour; wrapping everything in a layer of obscurity to satisfy his own literary sensibilities. Reading The Ambassadors is work. But it all leads to Strether's transformations, which was ultimately satisfying for me; the payoff was worth the effort.
I read The Ambassadors as a followup to The Fifth Heart - an imaginative pairing of Sherlock Holmes and Henry James - mostly because characters in The Fifth Heart kept telling James that his books were garbage (far too hard to read) and because I happened to have The Ambassadors, unread, on my bookshelf during self-isolation. I do think it's pretty hilarious for The Fifth Heart's author, Dan Simmons, to have chosen Henry James as a character if his intention was to mock his work (I liked the scene where James confronts Mark Twain with having once said from a podium at a banquet that he'd "rather be damned to John Bunyan's heaven than read The Bostonians"), but it's probably fair for Simmons to have done so; and especially since his book was set a decade before James' final three, and most celebrated, works were released (The Ambassador, The Golden Bowl, The Wings of the Dove).
I'll reiterate that while I did find The Ambassadors to be a slog to get through, it paid off in the end. However, I don't know if I need to read any more Henry James; not quite my cuppa tea and I feel like Simmons has given me permission to accuse James of being too hard to read by design. And after reading The Ambassadors, and particularly its Introduction in James' hand, this fact seems undeniable. From the Intro:
Nowhere is it more of an artful expedient for mere consistency of form, to mention a case, than in the last “scene” of the book, where its function is to give or to add nothing whatever, but only to express as vividly as possible certain things quite other than itself and that are of the already fixed and appointed measure. Since, however, all art is expression, and is thereby vividness, one was to find the door open here to any amount of delightful dissimulation. These verily are the refinements and ecstasies of method—amid which, or certainly under the influence of any exhilarated demonstration of which, one must keep one’s head and not lose one’s way. To cultivate an adequate intelligence for them and to make that sense operative is positively to find a charm in any produced ambiguity of appearance that is not by the same stroke, and all helplessly, an ambiguity of sense. To project imaginatively, for my hero, a relation that has nothing to do with the matter (the matter of my subject) but has everything to do with the manner (the manner of my presentation of the same) and yet to treat it, at close quarters and for fully economic expression’s possible sake, as if it were important and essential—to do that sort of thing and yet muddle nothing may easily become, as one goes, a signally attaching proposition; even though it all remains but part and parcel, I hasten to recognise, of the merely general and related question of expressional curiosity and expressional decency.
Ah, that makes everything clear.
When I finally came out about my years of trauma, that pain was dismissed by people who refused to accept how someone who was traumatized could be in pain and still get shit done. My resilience was used to erase my pain.
Julie Lalonde is an award-winning Ottawa-based advocate for women's rights: a support worker for survivors of sexual assault, an acknowledged expert on women's issues frequently featured in print and television news, and a public educator who travels Canada to lecture on topics such as consent and bystander intervention. She is also the survivor of a decade-long abusive relationship – a teenaged love story that degenerated into threats, assault, and years of stalking by her abuser – and Resilience is Futile is her candid account of all of the influences (good and bad) that made her the strong voice she is today. It always feels somehow inappropriate to give a star rating to someone's memoir – I'm certainly not here to rate someone's life – but I can say that Lalonde's voice and storytelling skills are thoroughly engaging, and if it's not obvious from what I've written so far, I admire and respect what she has accomplished and think that this memoir ought to be widely read.
We were a group of traumatized survivors working long hours with no pay and little validation for our efforts. We were toxic, mean, and petty. But we had no tools to cope with our own trauma, let alone the pain and suffering we took on from the survivors we were supporting. So we turned on each other. The universe was throwing up countless red flags for me to slow down and get help, but I ignored them all. Every day, I bargained. If I help one more person, maybe then I’ll feel better. I never made the connection between the work I was doing and my life with Xavier. After all, it was examining myself through the lens of white privilege that had pushed me to start this work, not my own experience of abuse. And even though I was spending thousands of dollars on tuition to write a thesis on the complexities of resilience, it never occurred to me that my deep awareness of the issue came from my own lived experience. It was just what the data told me. I was just being a good listener.
I don't want to go over the details of Lalonde's relationship with “Xavier” (I assume that's a pseudonym since his name is blacked out in the notes and emails reproduced in this book), but I will note that wherever Lalonde sought help (whether from the Mental Health Department at Carleton University, the police, or the justice system while seeking a peace bond), her outward “resilience” was used as proof against the seriousness of her situation. And as her story takes place just before the Jian Ghomeshi scandal, #MeToo, and Harvey Weinstein, I'm hoping that a young woman in Ottawa today would have better access to support and justice? (Thanks to Lalonde herself, this young woman – or man – would have access to sexual assault support on the Carleton campus.) I was also thoroughly intrigued (and disturbed) by Lalonde's story of her experience trying to teach her bystander intervention content to the cadets at Kingston's Royal Military College – and further intrigued by that day's aftermath (the internet threats of her rape and murder, denials and gaslighting by the academy's officials, the debate brought to Parliament). It is incredible to me that Lalonde has been able to rise above so many seriously challenging situations – all while suffering the debilitating effects of unacknowledged trauma – and has channeled her energy into helping others. She's pretty much my hero now.
Like a true millennial, I took my pain to the internet, launching into a Twitter tirade about the big, fat decade-long secret I no longer had to carry. I wanted people to understand that if this could happen to someone like me, someone with the privilege and platform to take on the Canadian Armed Forces, then you truly have no idea what people are going through unless you ask.
Resilience is Futile is a quick read – less than two hundred pages – and if I had any complaint, it would be that I would have liked more (while acknowledging that Lalonde has no duty to share more than she wants to). I think this is an important book and should be of interest to everyone; I hope to see it nominated during the literary award season so it finds more readers.
At the top of the card within the plain border, there were five hearts embossed. Four of the hearts had been colored in, in blue, with what looked to have been hasty strokes of a colored pencil or crayon. The fifth heart was left uncolored – blank.
Henry James knew immediately the more general meaning of what the hearts signified. He had no clue as to what the empty heart or the single line of print below the letters – a single sentence that looked to have been added by a typewriting machine – might mean.
She was murdered.
What a great premise Dan Simmons devised for The Fifth Heart: Pairing up the unlikely duo of Henry James and Sherlock Holmes, the two travel to America, after a chance meeting in Paris, in order to solve a mystery; and after leisurely hobnobbing for a few weeks with the elite in Washington D.C., the action moves to a propulsive conclusion at Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1893. The premise is amazing – and Simmons makes wonderful use of his setting and characters to provide both a compelling detective story and an in-depth exploration of the time and place – but there was something kind of off in this overall experience for me. Simmons dangles some metaphysical questions that are never properly resolved to my satisfaction, and he does quite a bit of ironic breaking of the fourth wall by the book's narrator that, if it has a point, went over my head. Overall though, despite feeling a bit too long (six hundred pages is a lot for a Holmesian whodunit), this was consistently entertaining and very often funny.
In the rainy March of 1893, for reasons that no one understands (primarily because no one besides us is aware of this story), the London-based American author Henry James decided to spend his April 15 birthday in Paris and there, on or before his birthday, commit suicide by throwing himself into the Seine at night.
So the book opens, and just as Henry James is about to fling himself into the Seine, he notices another man in the shadows – a form he recognises as the great Consulting Detective Sherlock Holmes – and although James attempts to slink away quietly, Holmes catches him up, confessing that self-murder had been on his own mind. It would seem that Holmes had recently come to the conclusion that he must be a fictional character (that blasted Dr. Watson and his narrative inconsistencies), but running into Henry James – who happens to be a very good friend of all of the principles in Holmes' only open case – prompts the detective to book a crossing to America and insist that the writer accompany him. And despite blustery protest and an insistence on distaste for Holmes and his line of work, James accompanies Holmes to America, participating in the detective's deceitful cover story in introducing him to his own oldest and dearest friends. Read as a straight Sherlock Holmes mystery, there is a satisfying amount of Meerschaum pipes, deerstalker caps, and a crying out of, “The game is afoot!”
But it's not by whim that Simmons sets this Sherlock Holmes mystery in the United States – the author uses the setting to make a lot of unflattering commentary on his home country. The Washington elite who host James and Holmes throw dinner parties at which the conversation features chauvinism, antisemitism, and white supremacy (particularly skewering the image of a young Theodore Roosevelt). Even Sherlock Holmes himself exposes the menace of mass German immigration to America as they were known to harbour socialist beliefs and embraced anarchic methods. Actual (and fictional) characters abound in these pages, and I wondered at the treatment that Simmons gave to everyone from Clover Adams (whose actual suicide in 1885 is reframed as a homicide case for Holmes here; the she was murdered of the calling card seems pretty tasteless in light of her actual existence) to Mark Twain (who is shown both lamenting his weakness in giving Huckleberry Finn a happy ending and casually using the “n-word”). The streets of America are filled with lowerclass white thugs, corrupt policemen, or sometimes, despite a narrator who professes to despise the coincidences in H. Ryder Haggard-type adventure tales, one might encounter old friends or allies who arrive in the nick of time to rescue one from a spot of trouble.
Clemens laughed until he began coughing again. “Don’t you see, James?” he said at last. “You and I are only minor characters in this story about the Great Detective. Our little lives and endings mean nothing to the God-Writer, whoever the sonofabitch might be.”
And as for the narrator: I didn't get this intermittent breaking of the fourth wall (from his first explanation that he doesn't like it, either, when POV shifts between two characters, to beginning the epilogue with, “Henry James hated epilogues...I feel much the same way – as you may also – but this one is here and we have to deal with it”). If it was meant to be clever or significant, I didn't get it. Also, this narrative is broken into four parts, and in a way, it seems like each part is being told by a different narrator. Maybe the first and fourth were meant to be by the same person – these parts are separated into chapters which are simply numbered – but the second part has chapters which are numbered and then titled with a phrase from the chapter that follows, and the third part has chapters that are numbered and then titled with the chapter's date and time. And what is a little weird is that small details can be revealed in each part that repeat something revealed earlier, but stated as though we are learning it for the first time (it's always small and inconsequential things, but done often enough to make me think I'm meant to notice). And in the third part, the narrative is filled with errors: I first noticed a spelling mistake (which I didn't mark because, whatever, it happens), and then I noticed that, curiously (and again, I didn't mark the specifics, but it was something like this), a word was written like “heavy-handed” in one line of dialogue and then repeated back immediately as “heavyhanded”. Small things, but weird. But then Sherlock Holmes – whom we are told a couple of times earlier likes to punctuate his dramatic statements by flipping his black scarf over his shoulder – now throws his red scarf over his shoulder, and later someone mentions the assassination attempt that was made on Queen Elizabeth in 1888. I reckon these mistakes were put in to flag that this is obviously a different (inferior?) writer from the other parts, but for what purpose, I can't fathom.
As for the writing, it was sometimes funny:
There were only the three of them in the canvas-walled blacksmith shop – Holmes, the tall man with the big knife, and the tall man's body odor. Holmes stayed silent, the man with the knife stared at him without speaking, and the stench spoke for itself.
And sometimes it revealed Simmons' need for commentary:
“Forcing school children to recite a national pledge doesn’t sound very American to me,” said James. “No,” agreed Holmes. “It sounds German. Very German.”
And what was the most disappointing is that the metaphysical thread – Sherlock Holmes trying to discover whether or not he actually exists – didn't resolve to my satisfaction. I liked the part where Mark Twain explains to Holmes what Henry James' older brother, William, wrote about identity and consciousness and the difference between “I” and “me” – and I further admired Simmons' decision to put Henry and Sherlock together as they both, as successful as they were, lived under the shadows of their older brothers, William and Mycroft – and I wanted more of that.
I don't think that The Fifth Heart needed to be six hundred pages, but despite what may read as a long list of complaints here, I did enjoy the mystery and respect the amount of research Simmons must have engaged in – not only to bring to life nineteenth century America, but to believably bring to life both Sherlock Holmes and Henry James. And it's not like I don't have the time right now for long books...
This is the story of a jinnia, a great princess of the jinn, known as the Lightning Princess on account of her mastery over the thunderbolt, who loved a mortal man long ago, in the twelfth century, as we would say, and of her many descendants, and of her return to the world, after a long absence, to fall in love again, at least for a moment, and then to go to war. It is also the tale of many other jinn, male and female, flying and slithering, good, bad, and uninterested in morality; and of the time of crisis, the time-out-of-joint which we call the time of the strangenesses, which lasted for two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights, which is to say, one thousand nights and one night more. And yes, we have lived another thousand years since those days, but we are all forever changed by that time. Whether for better or for worse, that is for our future to decide.
So there it is, the title of Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is just another way of writing “One Thousand and One (Arabian) Nights”, and like Scheherazade before him, Sir Salman Rushdie understands what it is to live under a death order; to spin out stories that might prolong or end one's life. And because Rushdie wrote this novel immediately after finishing Joseph Anton (a quite bitter recounting of his time in hiding while living under the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa), I can't quite fault him for implying here that religion is the root of all evil, but I would have liked this book better if it had been better. For a fantastical account filled with all-powerful genies, feuding-beyond-the-grave philosophers, and an apocalyptic war between two usually unconnected worlds, I found this narrative a bit dull – not to mention repetitive, cartoonish, and pushy. Still: I didn't hate this – I think that Rushdie has a rare gift for words – but this wasn't my favourite Rushdie by a long shot.
This is a story from our past, from a time so remote we argue, sometimes, about whether we should call it history or mythology. Some of us call it a fairy tale. But on this we agree: that to tell a story about the past is to tell a story about the present. To recount a fantasy, a story of the imaginary, is also a way of recounting a tale about the actual. If this were not true then the deed would be pointless, and we try in our daily lives to eschew pointlessness whenever possible.
For some reason, this story is being told a thousand years in our future by an idealised hi-tech race of humans who are living in a post-faith, post-gender, post-racial world. And they begin this story with an incident a thousand years in our own past: In Andalusian Spain, the great rationalist philosopher Ibn Rushd (the secular thinker after whom Salman Rushdie's father changed their own family name) is visited by a beautiful jinnia in the form of a nonpractising (because outlawed) Jew, and because she is so attracted to his mind, this “Dunia” seduces the old man and magically has several dozen of his babies before he walks out on her to resume his public debates about the nature of God with the pious Muslim thinker, Ghazali. A thousand years later, in our own near future, some of the descendants of this union begin to display magical abilities – levitation, love spells, throwing lightning bolts – at the same time that the Earth is experiencing unprecedented storms, and the seams between our own reality and the “fairy world”, Peristan, are opened enough to bring forth god-like destroyers. Cue the War of the Worlds, with Dunia and her descendants fighting against four Grand Ifrits and their minions for the right to occupy Earth. This should have been exciting but the narrative switches too often to Scheherazadean stories-within-stories-without-resolution and then goes up in so much genie smoke.
Our position is that god is a creation of human beings, who only exists because of the clap-hands-if-you-believe-in-fairies principle. If enough people were sensible enough not to clap hands, then this Tinker Bell god would die. However, unfortunately, billions of human beings are still prepared to defend their belief in some sort of god-fairy, and, as a result, god exists. What’s worse is that he is now running amok.
I guess there's some interesting irony in the fact that we have a group of people, a thousand years in our future, telling a story about imaginary beings coming to Earth and ushering in the age of reason; marking this magic-filled time as the moment in which we humans collectively stop believing in God. (Although with our smart phones and videos and social media logged eyewitness accounts, I don't know how in a hi-tech future a thousand years hence the experiences of our present can ever be reduced to “myth”.) But in trying to make his pro-rationalist point, Rushdie needlessly overcomplicates things – just like with this book's clunky title, which is in no way an improvement over the elegantly simple “One Thousand and One Nights", Rushdie kept losing me on this one.
Antarctic exploration is seldom as bad as you imagine, seldom as bad as it sounds. But this journey had beggared our language: no words could express its horror.
Originally released in 1922, The Worst Journey in the World is a contemporaneous account of Captain Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated Antarctic Expedition of 1910-13, as written by Apsley Cherry-Garrard: Scott's second youngest team member (twenty-four at the time of sailing) who would go on to serve England admirably in the First World War and spend the rest of his life suffering trauma, depression, and PTSD. Because this book was written during the peak days of polar exploration, Cherry-Garrard includes both thrilling adventure tales (in wry, evocative prose) and scientific data points (latitudes reached over how many miles, wind speeds, minimum temps and maximum drift), and while I much preferred the former to the latter, I appreciate that the author was writing for both the armchair adventurer and they who might be planning polar treks of their own; he could have written this no other way. I loved every minute of this long, dense read. (I should also note: My edition has a hundred pages of introductory information about Cherry-Garrard's life, not counted in the volume's 600 pages, and while I thoroughly appreciated the context this gave to me, it felt a bit frustrating to read for hours and not feel like I had started the actual book.)
I have seen Fuji, the most dainty and graceful of all mountains; and also Kinchinjunga: only Michael Angelo among men could have conceived such grandeur. But give me Erebus for my friend. Whoever made Erebus knew all the charm of horizontal lines, and the lines of Erebus are for the most part nearer the horizontal then the vertical. And so he is the most restful mountain in the world, and I was glad when I knew that our hut would lie at his feet. And always there floated from his crater the lazy banner of his cloud of steam.
There's so much I could recount about the details of this expedition (even the last leg of the sailing out from New Zealand – with ponies and dogs tied up on deck in harsh, high seas; the dogs washed overboard to the end of their chains and then swept back on the next wave – seems incredible before they ever set foot on the Antarctic continent), but the details are too numerous for a summary to do this tale justice; it must be read in whole. I will note that one of Cherry-Garrard's primary objectives seems to have been to humanize the five expedition members who lost their lives on the Polar Journey itself, and especially to confront and correct any criticism that Captain Scott had publicly suffered in the decade since he had lost his life. Describing the daily labours in camp or on sledge runs, Cherry-Garrard describes each man around him as a “brick”; hard-working and cheerful; every man capable of good humour and selflessness in the darkest times, open to friendly debates and singsongs and general bonhomie. Of Scott he writes:
He will go down to history as the Englishman who conquered the South Pole and who died as fine a death as any man has had the honour to die. His triumphs are many – but the Pole was not by any means the greatest of them. Surely the greatest was that by which he conquered his weaker self, and became the strong leader whom we went to follow and came to love.
And of the two men, Edward Wilson and Henry Bowers, who accompanied Cherry-Garrard on the Winter Journey (the actual “worst journey in the world” of the title), he writes:
In civilization men are taken at their own valuation because there are so many ways of concealment, and there is so little time, perhaps even so little understanding. Not so down South. These two men went through the Winter Journey and lived; later they went through the Polar Journey and died. They were gold, pure, shining, unalloyed. Words cannot express how good their companionship was.
And so to the Winter Journey: Wilson – the chief scientific officer of the expedition, who had accompanied Scott on his earlier quest for the South Pole (1901-04) – had discovered the Emperor Penguins' remote breeding grounds on that earlier expedition and believed that if they could secure some unhatched eggs (which are laid in the dead of winter), much could be learned about the evolution of early birds from reptiles. And so these three men, in the total darkness of a polar winter, in the unprecedentedly cold temperatures of −40 to −77.5 °F, pulled their sledge over unlevel ground and unseen crevasses, for a hundred kilometres in each direction. The cold, the wet, the frozen solid fur sleeping bags that would take an hour to squirm into each night (and which were so cold that one's back felt like it would break from night-long convulsive shivering), the exhausting march, the winds, the dangers – the entire tale is harrowing. In the end, they were able to make one brief trip to the rookery and brought back three unbroken eggs.
The horror of the nineteen days it took us to travel from Cape Evans to Cape Crozier would have to be re-experienced to be appreciated; and any one would be a fool who went again: it is not possible to describe it. The weeks which followed them were comparative bliss, not because later our conditions were better – they were far worse – but because we were callous. I for one had come to that point of suffering at which I did not really care if only I could die without much pain. They talk of the heroism of dying – they little know – it would be so easy to die, a dose of morphia, a friendly crevasse, and blissful sleep. The trouble is to go on...
There is then a brief humourous interlude (made more pitiable and ironic by the knowledge that Wilson and Bowers eventually die on the Polar Journey) in which Cherry-Garrard describes the indifference with which the Chief Custodian of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington will accept his offering of Emperor Penguin eggs. (Indeed, Cherry-Garrard would return some time later with Captain Scott's sister to see these eggs and they were told that there was no record of their existence!) The eggs would eventually be recovered and studied, and according to Professor Cossar Ewart of Edinburgh University's report:
If the conclusions arrived at with the help of the Emperor Penguin embryos about the origin of feathers are justified, the worst journey in the world in the interest of science was not made in vain.
So, there's that. Near the end, Cherry-Garrard has some comments about the fact that Roald Amundsen's team beat Scott to the South Pole by five weeks. There's a hint of criticism about Amundsen's show of poor sportsmanship (apparently Amundsen had announced he was embarking on a trip to the North Pole but turned his ship at sea and sneakily reached Antarctica just ahead of Scott), and Cherry-Garrard stresses repeatedly that making a journey to the Pole was secondary to the scientific survey Scott's team was doing for the advancement of global knowledge, but still, it must have been galling for Scott to fight his way, man-hauling sledges, to reach the Pole and find Amundsen's and Norway's flags planted there. (There was also found there a letter written to the King of Norway with a note from Amundsen asking Scott to mail it for him: was this an ungentlemanly way of demanding that Scott prove he made it to the Pole while also publicly proving that Amundsen made it there first?) On the other hand, Cherry-Garrard writes that if one's sole objective is to make it to the Pole, all credit should be given to the new route that Amundsen discovered, and he also backhandedly praises Amundsen's use of some 250 dogs – surplus dogs brought along to feed the working dog teams – that meant Amundsen could swiftly and comfortably ride on a sled in each direction, never once doing the back-breaking sledge-hauling that Scott et al. engaged in (hard labour which, coupled with an inadequate diet, eventually killed them).
I was fascinated by this narrative and Cherry-Garrard's writing was consistently evocative and well-phrased. The tone was also often wry and gently humourous:
Dog-driving is the devil! Before I started, my language would not have shamed a Sunday School, and now – if it was not Sunday I would tell you more about it!
I loved the whole of it.
When Dave and I were in Israel back in January (recounted here), we were really impressed by the amount of travelling the others in our tour group had engaged in. It seems that most everyone there had been to Egypt and India, Paris and Tokyo, on African safaris and Mediterranean cruises. One couple - Sonja and Klaus - however, really seemed to have been everywhere. And during our first dinner together, Sonja told us the story of their trip to Antarctica.
Apparently, because Klaus only wanted to go if they could travel on a working tall ship (!), the couple had to wait four years for a private cabin to be available (this ship only had a handful of cabins and most people slept in a common bunkroom). Having a bit of privacy definitely sounds worth it, but the accommodations were hardly luxurious: the floor space was mostly taken up by the smallish double bed, and although they had a private washroom, Sonja said that the journey was so rocky that every time she sat on the toilet, her head would repeatedly bounce off the tank behind it, giving her a huge and tender goose egg, and although they did have a tiny shower, it wasn't used that much: they were always cold and wet, their clothes never dried, and trying to remain standing (while swaying dramatically back and forth) under a thin stream of warmish water was rarely worth the effort.
Because it was a working tall ship, everyone on board needed to take turns as watch on deck and learn to raise and lower sails in high winds and rocky seas. Sonja said that she was always cold, her hands were always pruny with wet, and because she was banged back and forth against the walls in the narrow gangways belowdecks, every one of her fingernails turned black before the end of her trip.
Of course she said that arriving at Antarctica was breathtaking and "so worth it", and one of the highlights was when they were told they would be landing on shore for a "spa day". Everyone was told to put on a bathing suit with appropriate layers on top, and after a thrilling ride from the ship aboard inflatable Zodiacs, they were deposited on a black pebble beach. As they looked around the deserted stretch of land, someone asked, "Where's the spa?" And the tour guide pointed down to the pebbles and said, "Dig."
Now, you are apparently not permitted to bring anything like shovels onto the continent, so these tourists needed to dig down through the pebbles with their hands, but as Sonja soon discovered, there was a hot spring under the beach and she needn't dig down too far to have created a body-sized basin of deliciously warm water. She then showed us pictures of herself and others, wearing nothing but swimsuits, laying on the Antarctic beach with icebergs off the shore and white glaciers behind for as far as the eye could see. How cool is that?
After telling us her story and showing off the pictures, someone asked Sonja if she would ever do it again. Without a pause she said, "I would definitely go again, but not like that."
I have long said that I would love to go to Antarctica, but I have neither the interest or the ability to haul a sledge towards the South Pole like Scott; and after hearing the story of Sonja's own worst journey on earth, I wouldn't be lining up to pay twelve grand (each!) to take a working tall ship there either. And now, in my days of self-isolation - entering my fourth week of only leaving the house for groceries - I marvel at the idea that I ever took world travel so for granted. Perhaps when things go back to normal - if they ever go back to "normal" - I should be more bold in pursuit of adventure.
He feels the press of his own thoughts, the swell of the dark space at the back of the head from where the images start to spill. He's lost: the broken boots, the stiffening limbs, the sun sinking, a country road, a tree. This is a waterfall that he is falling with, these are dream-thoughts on the edge of sleep; they slip away and turn to mist when he looks at them directly.
I knew that the title of A Country Road, A Tree came from the opening stage directions for Waiting for Godot, but it wasn't until I finished reading this novel, and then started reading Goodreads reviews, that I learned there had ever been any mystery that the unnamed protagonist in the book was meant to be Samuel Beckett (that can't be a spoiler at this point, right?) I also didn't realise – having never actually read any Beckett, and certainly no biographies of his life – was that this would be, essentially, a WWII novel, and that's a good thing; I've come to realise that I don't much care for fiction set in the world wars – they seem a lazy way for a modern day author to evoke unearned emotion (I'm looking at you, nightingales and potato peel societies) – and I may not have read this if I had known. But I have to admit that this book is an exception to my peevish rule – that a biographical novel that explores an author's influences, which happens to have involved a setting in Occupied France and Beckett's efforts with the Resistance, makes for a dramatic, informative, and wholly satisfying read. I also hadn't read Jo Baker before, and right from the dreamy prologue, I admired her voice and craft; I will definitely read her again. Bottom line is: I liked this far more than I expected to, and as I was then prompted to read Waiting for Godot and Google around for a few hours exploring the play and its reception and Beckett himself, I was drawn into a pleasurable interdisciplinary bubble of learning that leaves me richer for the experience. And it all started with a country road, a tree.
What alarms him is the time that it implies. The waiting. That the seasons will have slid along from winter through spring and summer and back to autumn once more, and they'll be stuck here, eating garden peas and tomatoes and cooking their own onions in a stew. That by then the worst will not have happened, but then neither will anything else.
I learned that Samuel Beckett was a part of the famed Paris literary scene in the 1930s – he even served as secretary for James Joyce and helped him to edit Finnegan's Wake, reading out every comma and period as Joyce's vision grew ever dimmer – and although Beckett could have waited out WWII in his comfortably safe Irish home country, when France declared war on Germany in 1939, Beckett hurried back to Paris from visiting his mother's house to continue his writing and to be with his friends (and especially his lover, Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil). The narrative that follows – the danger and deprivations during the Occupation, working with the Resistance, narrow escapes, strained love, and moral quandaries – is the kind of story that might normally bounce off my jaded heart, but I did find it fascinating because it actually all happened to Beckett, and because Jo Baker uses a light hand to draw connections between what the man experienced and how he would later use those experiences in his art. With really lovely writing, I thought that Baker did a fantastic job of turning obviously deep research into a satisfying novel.
His handwriting shrinks too and becomes more careful. Everything is reduced, condensed. He commits just the essence of the thing to paper. Anything more than that would be a waste. And when he surfaces to a cramped hand, a crick in the neck, the sunlight shifted across the floor, a sore blink, he knows that even to have written this little is an excess, it is an overflowing, an excretion. Too many words. There are just too many words. Nobody wants them; nobody needs them. And still they keep on, keep on, keep on coming.
Although I had thoroughly enjoyed the reading of this novel on its own merits, I recommend following up A Country Road, A Tree with a reading of Waiting for Godot: Baker salts her novel with plenty of small details from the play (making for a fun Easter Egg hunt in either direction), and if her broad biographical information is all to be trusted, it makes sense of the play's Absurdist philosophy. Taken together, I feel gratifyingly enriched by the entire experience.
“Emma!”
“Sir,” she said, drawing back a little.
“Ah! You see,” replied he in a melancholy voice, “that I was right not to come back; for this name, this name that fills my whole soul, and that escaped me, you forbid me to use! Madame Bovary! why, all the world calls you thus! Besides, it is not your name; it is the name of another!” He repeated, “of another!” And he hid his face in his hands.
Ah, pity the poor bourgeoisie: Those unfortunate souls who come from some reasonable degree of comfort – neither lounging aristocracy, nor striving bootstrappers they – and who, by adulthood, are blinded to their comfortable circumstances; either not recognising what they have, or worse, not realising how easily it can be all be lost. In Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert lays bare this bourgeois folly, and with endlessly quotable prose, realistic and amusing depictions of nineteenth century French country life, and a cast of characters one loves to hate (before recognising their fragile humanity and growing to accept them), it's no wonder that this book has been celebrated for all of its 170 years of existence (except, I guess, for that immediate obscenity charge brought against Flaubert, which he beat). This is another classic that I read as a teenager without really understanding its social commentary (or remembering the finer details of the plot), so I am delighted to have enjoyed it so much as a reread.
The lessons that Flaubert provides with this story are relatable even today: Emma Bovary – raised on a prosperous farm and given a good convent education – has never had to work hard for anything, but having read so many romantic novels, and having subscribed to fashionable Parisian women's magazines, she is easily able to convince herself that what she has as a married woman just isn't enough: not enough passion in her marriage; not enough luxuries in her surroundings; not enough life in her easy days. Meanwhile, her husband, Charles, hasn't worked all that hard either: sent mostly unprepared to school as a gangly teenager, he followed his mother's instructions to pursue a medical career, and although he failed certifying as a full-fledged doctor, he is able to eventually take over a rural medical practise and somehow win the cloistered Emma's hand. Thinking that he has at that point achieved all that he desired, Charles spends the rest of the novel bumbling around at medicine without really advancing his career, refusing to constrain his wife's spending despite warnings from others, and not having enough curiosity about his wife's feelings to wonder if she's actually happy. Anyone who thinks that soul-crushing “affluenza”, running up the credit cards for shopping therapy, or bed-hopping in search of self-worth was invented by some modern generation ought to meet Emma Bovary. (Just imagine how much worse off Emma would have been had she access to the internet and all the lies it spews about what a happy life looks like.)
By comparison, the other characters in Madame Bovary are either very rich (like the mysterious Viscount, the merchant Lheureux, or the philandering Rodolphe Boulanger) and they can do as they please, or they are from a striving underclass and their work gives them satisfaction and social stability: Léon Dupuis goes from shy admirer to confident seducer as his career advances; Emma's fall can be mocked by wetnurses and housekeepers; the snake-oil-selling pharmacist Homais – through constant striving, acting above his station, and hobnobbing – ends the novel with the most success and happiness of anyone. I especially liked the scene, late in the book, where Homais' wife of many long years is turned on by a ridiculous necklace that he is wearing under his shirt; this is everything that poor Charles could have hoped for from life – but he simply never worked for it. Ah, pity the poor bourgeoisie. I'll end there and leave the rest to Flaubert:
• Human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.
• Every morning when she awoke she hoped that today would be the day; she listened for every sound, gave sudden starts, was surprised when nothing happened; and then, sadder with each succeeding sunset, she longed for tomorrow.
• The next day was a dreary one for Emma. Everything seemed to her enveloped in a black atmosphere floating confusedly over the exterior of things, and sorrow was engulfed within her soul with soft shrieks such as the winter wind makes in ruined castles. It was that reverie which we give to things that will not return, the lassitude that seizes you after everything was done; that pain, in fine, that the interruption of every wonted movement, the sudden cessation of any prolonged vibration, brings on.
• Nothing was worth the trouble of seeking it; everything was a lie. Every smile hid a yawn of boredom, every joy a curse, all pleasure satiety, and the sweetest kisses left upon your lips only the unattainable desire for a greater delight.
• She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.
• For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.
• The denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers
• Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.
• A man, at least, is free; he can explore every passion, every land, overcome obstacles, taste the most distant pleasures. But a woman is continually thwarted. Inert and pliant at the same time, she must struggle against both the softness of her flesh and subjection to the law. Her will, like the veil tied to her hat by a string, flutters with every breeze; there is always some desire luring her on, some convention holding her back.
Independence is the most important thing of all in life. I say for my part that a man lives in vain until he is independent. People who aren’t independent aren’t people. A man who isn’t his own master is as bad as a man without a dog.
Independent People is certainly an epic of Icelandic history and culture as advertised, but what I hadn't expected was for it to be so tragicomic: In addition to many scenes that are played out with laughworthy dialogue and interactions, so much – from the title to the misguided thoughts that run through the head of our sheep-farming protagonist Guðbjartur Jónsson (commonly known as Bjartur of Summerhouses) – are overladen with an amusing irony by author Halldór Laxness. And yet, this is certainly a tragedy as well: This is no tribute to the idylls of a preindustrial civilisation – Bjartur suffers in the same way his ancestors had for a thousand years of Icelandic colonisation – but rather in the way of The Grapes of Wrath or Les Misérables, Laxness uses a tale of common folk to indict the prevailing socio-political systems that keep those commoners at starvation levels of survival (first released as two volumes in 1934 and 1935, it is manifest in this book that Laxness was a known supporter of Communism). There is, naturally, an old-fashioned sensibility in this book (which might not be to everyone's tastes), and as with any political fiction, Laxness walks a murky line between having characters naturally discuss current events and having them act as mouthpieces for his own arguments, but to my tastes, it holds up really well; at the very least as a valuable snapshot of its time. I felt for these characters, I thought that the nature writing was gorgeous, and I learned plenty about Iceland – who am I to give this Nobel Laureate less than five stars on his most famous work? (Some spoilers ahead.)
Century after century the lone worker leaves the settlements to tempt fortune on this knoll between the lake and the cleft in the mountain, determined to challenge the evil powers that hold his land in thrall and thirst for his blood and the marrow in his bones. Generation after generation the crofter raises his chant, contemptuous of the powers that lay claim to his limbs and seek to rule his fate to his dying day. The history of the centuries in this valley is the history of an independent man who grapples barehanded with the spectre which bears a new and ever a newer name. Sometimes the spectre is some half-divine fiend who lays a curse on his land. Sometimes it breaks his bones in the guise of a norn. Sometimes it destroys his croft in the form of a monster. And yet, always, to all eternity, it is the same spectre assailing the same man century after century.
Independent People begins with a centuries-old tale of witches and devilry and a curse put on the land; the same boggy acres that freeholder Bjartur of Summerhouses commits to buying from his former master, and avowed enemy, the Bailiff of Myri. Bjartur doesn't believe in curses – indeed, he will refuse to permit his new bride, Rósa, to offer a stone to the dead witch Gunnvör's cairn; perhaps to their future doom – but Bjartur will allow for the possibility of elves and trolls and the absolute truth of the history of the Epics and Rimes that recount Iceland's great heroes; Bjartur can quote the epics at length and even spends his solitary hours composing rimes of his own. To Bjartur, being “independent” is everything, and to achieve that blessed state, he commits to following exactly in the footsteps of those sheep-farming peasants who came before him: Help the ewes with their lambs in spring, work fourteen-to-sixteen hours days throughout the summer and fall to grow and harvest the hay that will sustain the sheep through the winter, hope that there is enough wool and mutton annually to trade for the salt fish, flour, and coffee that feeds his own family throughout all seasons. And yet, because Bjartur must engage in trade – because all his hours of farming don't directly sustain him; he rarely even partakes of mutton himself – he will never be independent; beholden to “middlemen” and “capitalists” who turn his and his neighbours' labour into their own profits, following unquestioningly in the footsteps of previous generations of sheepfarmers seems the least independent course he could choose. Over the years, sometimes rich men from town come to Bjartur's land to hunt ducks and fish for trout, and even when they leave some meat behind in payment, Bjartur turns up his nose – that's “famine food”, not fit for eating by his provisioned-for family (pale and rickety but not quite starving) – and it's plain to see that following the traditions of barely surviving ancestors leads to barely surviving. And for a man who lauds his own independence, Bjartur is forever allowing his betters to place demands on him: The first wife given to him was already pregnant with the issue of a rich man's son; when she dies in childbirth, Bjartur is given responsibility for another woman (whom he eventually marries) and her aged mother because they were a “drain on the parish”; a cow is “gifted” to his family (a burden he never wanted, his ingratitude being justified when a harsh winter diverts hay to the cow to the loss of his sheep), and to help with the cow, a nasty old woman is assigned to Bjartur's farm as a hired labourer; and just when WWI proves a boon for wool and mutton prices, the local Farmers Co-Operative induces Bjartur to build a proper stone and concrete house (in place of a timber and turf croft) that puts this man of independent means into terrible debt.
The lone worker will never escape from his life of poverty for ever and ever; he will go on existing in affliction as long as man is not man's protector, but his worst enemy. The life of the lone worker, the life of the independent man, is in its nature a flight from other men, who seek to kill him. From one night-lodging into another even worse. A peasant family flits, four generations of the thirty that have maintained life and death in this country for a thousand years – for whom? Not for themselves anyway, nor for anyone of theirs. They resembled nothing so much as fugitives in a land devastated by year after year of furious warfare; hunted outlaws – in whose land? Not in their own at least.
Despite feeling like an epic, interesting writing made this a fairly quick read. I could have flagged passages on nearly every page, but here are a few examples of bits I admired:
• The mornings were never commonplace, each morning was a new morning, but as day advanced the birds would sing less and the Blue Mountains would gradually lose the beauty of their colours. The days were like grown-up people, the mornings always young.
• Shortly afterwards it started raining, very innocently at first, but the sky was packed tight with cloud and gradually the drops grew bigger and heavier, until it was autumn’s dismal rain that was falling—rain that seemed to fill the entire world with its leaden beat, rain suggestive in its dreariness of everlasting waterfalls between the planets, rain that thatched the heavens with drabness and brooded oppressively over the whole countryside, like a disease, strong in the power of its flat, unvarying monotony, its smothering heaviness, its cold, unrelenting cruelty. Smoothly, smoothly it fell, over the whole shire, over the fallen marsh grass, over the troubled lake, the iron-grey gravel flats, the sombre mountain above the croft, smudging out every prospect. And the heavy, hopeless, interminable beat wormed its way into every crevice in the house, lay like a pad of cotton wool over the ears, and embraced everything, both near and far, in its compass, like an unromantic story from life itself that has no rhythm and no crescendo, no climax, but which is nevertheless overwhelming in its scope, terrifying in its significance.
• The life of man is so short that ordinary people simply cannot afford to be born.
I also want to comment on the irony of Bjartur's apparent misogyny. He's so single-minded in his goals, so incurious about the needs of others, that he honestly doesn't seem to understand how his actions will affect anyone around him; and especially how his actions will affect womenfolk, an apparently unfathomably different species from his own. He will leave a woman alone on a lonely acreage when she's scared out of her wits (indeed, he'll later leave that same woman alone as childbirth approaches); he will unflinchingly slaughter the one creature that gives a sick woman a reason to leave her bed; he will banish the one person he loves if she threatens the social norms; he will banish the one person he needs if she threatens his independence. Bjartur makes such unthinking comments as “women are more to be pitied than ordinary mortals”; when he thinks a housekeeper is overstepping her bounds, he muses that he might “marry the bitch so he could have full leave to tell her to shut up”; and when some farmers are discussing the rash of illegitimate children running around the community – and one tries to make a distinction between those women who are taken by force and those by guile – Bjartur declares, “I see very little difference between guile and force as long as the object is the same”. This could all be very offputting if it wasn't of a piece with the infernal sheep-raising: Bjartur is the least independent of men, more to be pitied than reviled, when he walks these pathways of accepted custom, even to the breaking of his own heart. Laxness plays it all out with a deftly tragicomic touch.
And yet, the times, they are a changin'. Set right at the turn of the twentieth century, Bjartur and his Icelandic brethren have tended their sheep for a thousand years, and when he put his first payment down on Summerhouses, he expected that his line would be freeholders on this land for a thousand years more. How could he know that global markets, world wars, emigration to America, universal education, industrialisation and general strikes would disrupt literally everything? Laxness can be forgiven for jumping on the Communism train before the true horrors of its excesses were revealed (imagine Stalin's or Mao's subjects as the very models of “independent people”), but he wasn't wrong in what he saw as the failings and abuses of capitalism in his day. Plus ça change.
Interesting and entertaining, literary and enduring; what's not to like? To love?
