675. Orlando - Virginia Woolf

I had thought (this was a while ago) that I would read Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, to compare it with Ulysses and Saturday, since they are all novels which trace a single day in the life of their main character. While searching for my copy, however, I rediscovered Orlando and I was unresistingly hooked once more. If you never read anything else by Virginia Woolf, read this - it won't take long and if you're anything like me, as soon as you reach the end you will be tempted to start again.

Orlando sparkles. It is a love letter to a dear friend that laughs at itself from beginning to end. It brings history to life in a way that makes you wish you were there. It makes the impossible seem not only possible, but as natural as breathing. It is one of those rare texts that prompts me to slow down and read every word, simply to prolong the enjoyment. If the modernist's credo was to 'make it fresh', Orlando is the wheatgrass juice, still growing in a little box on the juice-bar.

What is Orlando about? Orlando is about... Orlando! When the story starts, Orlando is a 16 year old boy, in the Elizabethan age, swinging his sword at a shrunken head in the attic of his ancestral home. By the end of the novel, Orlando is a young woman who has given birth to a son. It is now 1928, but despite the passing of time and alteration in gender, it is essentially the same Orlando. Don't ask me to explain how or why - read the book to see how Woolf achieves it.

From a thematic point of view, Orlando examines (but only in the most entertaining way) the difference between masculinity and femininity, and changes in those definitions over time. It is dedicated to Vita Sackville-West, with whom Woolf had a lesbian affair (though both were 'happily' married at the time). The Wikipedia article shows how Orlando is closely modelled on Vita, using the conventions of fiction and fantasy "to write a well-documented biography of a person living in her own age." I find, however, that these details of 'reality' actually detract from the story. It is not necessary to know who Vita was or what was her relationship with Virginia. The story stands perfectly well by itself as a magnificent, humorous fantasy. To try to tie it to history is to deny its imaginative power.

As an example, here is a passage where Orlando lies thinking about the meaning of life. I love the way we can hear the echo of Woolf wrestling with her own thoughts in Orlando's frustration!

Every single thing, once he tried to dislodge it from its place in his mind, he found thus cumbered with other matter like the lump of glass which, after a year at the bottom of the sea, is grown about with bones and dragon-flies, and coins and the tresses of drowned women.

'Another metaphor, by Jupiter!' he would exclaim as he said this (which will show the disorderly and circuitous way in which his mind worked and explain why the oak tree flowered and faded so often before he came to any conclusion about Love). 'And what's the point of it?' he would ask himself. 'Why not say simply in so many words - ' and then he would try to think for half an hour - or was it two years and a half? - how to say simply in so many words what love is. 'A figure like that is manifestly untruthful,' he argued, 'for no dragon-fly, unless under very exceptional circumstances, could live at the bottom of the sea. And if literature is not the Bride and Bedfellow of Truth, what is she? Counfound it all,' he cried, 'why say Bedfellow when one's already said Bride? Why not simply say what one means and leave it?'

So then he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue and so to propitiate the austere spirit of poetry whom still, though at a great distance, he could not help reverencing. 'The sky is blue,' he said, 'the grass is green.' Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. 'Upon my word,' he said (for he had fallen into the bad habit of speaking aloud), 'I don't see that one's more true than another. Both are utterly false.' And he despaired of being able to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is and fell into a deep dejection.'

It is rare for me to appreciate a movie adaptation of a book that I love, but in this case, I heartily recommend the film of Orlando made in 1992, starring Tilda Swinton as Orlando, for the sheer beauty of the costume design and settings. This movie is an inspired adaptation and its visualisation of the book's magic has meshed seamlessly into my love of Orlando, so that when I am reading or thinking about this book, these are the images that I see.

You can download Orlando as a free ebook from Project Gutenberg Australia.

I'm giving Orlando my first PERFECT score!

38. Gabriel's Gift - Hanif Kureishi

This was a quite a sweet, enjoyable story, short and quick to read. The novel starts as Gabriel's father, an aging has-been rock-and-roll bass player, is thrown out of the family home. Gabriel's mother goes out to find a job in a local bar, bringing home strange men and entrusting Gabriel to the care of a fat and ugly Eastern European refugee named Hannah. While confused and upset by the changes happening in his family, Gabriel also feels slightly comforted by the fact that he now more 'normal' - almost everyone he knows comes from a broken home.

Gabriel is an artist, and much of the story focusses on his preoccupation with creating - sketching, writing, photographing, and planning the film he wants to shoot. My favourite expression of this artistic talent occurs in passing as Gabriel and his father are invited to visit the lead singer of his dad's old band. Where Gabriel's father faded into obscurity, Lester went on to find David Bowie-style fame and fortune.

There was a deep hush in the hotel; the place was so stylish that there appeared to be nothing to disfigure the austerity of nothing piled on nothing, apart from - on an invisible shelf - a white vase containing a single white flower.
...
On reaching the lobby, Gabriel extracted an apple from his pocket, which he had taken from Lester's fruit bowl. He placed it on the floor in the middle of a ring of drab stones. The little patch of colour would cheer people up. He and his father passed into the crowd of photographers and fans stamping their feet in the cold. Gabriel turned to see several colourless figures scampering towards the anarchic apple.

Colour plays a big part in Gabriel's world, often used in startling ways to illustrate a point, such as in this description of the men Gabriel's father hangs out with at the local pub - a far cry from the glitz and glamour of the life he so nostalgically clings to.

The place was full of childish men from the post office and the local bus garage gazing up at the big TV screen. Dad's grey-faced mates were playing pool. They all looked the same to Gabriel with their roll-ups, pints and musty clothes. They rarely went out into the light, unless they stood outside the pub on a sunny day, and they were as likely to eat anything green, as they were to drink anything blue or wear anything pink.

When he is most troubled, Gabriel talks to his twin brother Archie, a twin who died of meningitis when he was two, but who has never been forgotten in the family. This upsets Gabriel's mum, but his dad is more understanding.

"By the way, what's this about you and Archie talking and stuff?"
Gabriel hesitated but said, "He's with me, Dad."
"Of course he is. He's with me too. That's where the kid should be, with his family."
"You talk to him?"
"Every day." Gabriel was relieved. Dad went on, "Don't tell Mum. It upsets her.

Despite their problems, Gabriel's parents are doing their best. However, in many ways, fifteen year old Gabriel is more adult than they are. He is a nice lad, and the story told from his point-of-view is entertaining. I particularly appreciated the happy ending!

43. The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen

The most endearing feature of the characters in this novel is how utterly pathetic they are. As an example, here is a description of failed academic, Chip Lambert, attempting to shoplift a package of hideously expensive salmon.

"Ha, ha!" he said, palming the seventy-eight-dollar fillet like a catcher's mitt. He dropped to one knee and touched his bootlaces and took the salmon right up inside his leather jacket and underneath his sweater and tucked the sweater into his pants and stood up again.
"Daddy, I want swordfish," a little voice behind him said.
Chip took two steps, and the salmon, which was quite heavy, escaped from his sweater and covered his groin, for one unstable moment, like a codpiece.
"Daddy! Swordfish!"
Chip put his hand to his crotch. The dangling fillet felt like a cool, loaded diaper. He repositioned it against his abs and tucked in the sweater more securely, zipped his jacket to the neck, and strode purposefully toward the whatever. Toward the dairy wall.[p94-95]

This same salmon is later unknowingly served to his parents, Enid and Alfred, by his chef sister, Denise. Alfred has Parkinson's disease, and (like the father in Lambs of London) this gives him an endearing eccentricity which makes him probably the most attractive character in the novel. Even so, his triumphs are overloaded with pathos.

The tone of relationships in the novel is either one of bewildered, half-submerged affection, or aggressive, as in this conversation between the oldest brother, Gary and his wife Caroline.

"Did you tell the boys that I'm depressed?" Gary asked her in the darkness from the far margin of their quarter-acre bed. "Caroline? Did you lie to them about my mental state? Is that why everybody's suddenly being so agreeable?"
...
"You know, you are getting seriously paranoid."
"Fuck, fuck, fuck!"
"Gary, this is frightening."
"You're fucking with my head! And there is no lower trick than that. There's no meaner trick in the book."
"Please, please, listen to yourself."
"Answer my question," he said. "Did you tell them I'm 'depressed'? "Having a hard time'?"
"Well - aren't you?"
[p202]

It is questionable how much of the children's later dysfunctionality is a result of Alfred and Enid's parenting style. Although we gather from Alfred's later thoughts that he is most fond of Chip, the middle brother, that is not how Chip remembers it. And while Enid is obsessed with bringing the family together for one last Christmas, it is an ideal of 'family life' that she longs for, not the reality of her husband and children. One of the most telling episodes is a flashback in which 7 year old Chip refuses to eat his mother's cooking. (It is worth quoting at length to show how this novel seems to cast a distasteful flavour over everything it touches on.)

There was something almost tasty and almost sexy in letting the annoying boy be punished by her husband. In standing blamelessly aside while the boy suffered for having hurt her.
What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.
...
The dogshit-yellow field of rutubaga; the liver warped by frying and so unable to lie flush with the plate; the ball of woody beet leaves collapsed and contorted but still entire, like a wetly compressed bird in an eggshell, or an ancient corpse folded over in a bog: the spatial relations among these foods no longer seemed to Chipper haphazard but were approaching permanence, finality.[p 263]

It is Alfred, emerging from his basement laboratory five hours later after everyone else is asleep, who finally tucks Chip into bed and kisses him goodnight, finding the boy had fallen asleep at the table.

Returning to the dining room, he noticed the change in the food on Chipper's plate. The well-browned margins of the liver had been carefully pared off and eaten, as had every scrap of crust. There was evidence as well that rutubaga had been swallowed; the small speck that remained was scored with tiny tine marks. And several beet greens had been dissected, the softer leaves removed and eaten, the woody reddish stems laid aside. It appeared that Chipper had taken the contractual one bite of each food after all, presumably at great personal cost, and had been put to bed without being given the dessert he'd earned.
On a November morning thirty-five years earlier Alfred had found a coyote's bloody foreleg in the teeth of a steel trap, evidence of certain desperate hours in the previous night.
There came an upwelling of pain so intense that he had to clench his jaw and refer to his philosophy to prevent its turning into tears.[p 275-6]

In his old age, Alfred suffers night-time hallucinations induced by his medication. These become particularly bad when he and Enid go on a holiday cruise together.

The turd had an attitude, a tone of voice, that Alfred found eerily familiar but couldn't quite place. It began to roll and tumble on his pillow, spreading a shiny greenish-brown film with little lumps and fibers in it, leaving white creases and hollows where the fabric was bunched. Alfred, on the floor by the bed, covered his nose and mouth with his hands to mitigate the stench and horror.
Then the turd ran up the leg of his pyjamas. He felt its tickling mouselike feet. [p 286]

It would almost be funny - this image of a once proud old man struggling alone with the tabs of his adult diaper in a tiny cruise-ship bathroom, while being taunted by figments of his imagination - if it didn't make you want to cry.

The New York Times Book Review said, ""If you don't end up liking each one of Franzen's people, you probably just don't like people." I didn't like these people. I felt sad and sorry for them, and I was glad that when I closed the book, I could also close them out of my life. This was a big book - nearly 600 pages. It is not badly written, but I think the quote which comes closest to summing up my reaction is this one:

The Corrections is a lumpy, strange, singular work, very much of this moment even as it harks back to a kind of American novel long deemed extinct. Its portrayal of American family life sometimes seems cruel and unforgiving, yet the sheer amplitude of its vision implies a kind of sympathy, or at least understanding. (...) It's a vivid reading experience of tremendous texture and dimension, a masterwork of observed detail. It's not always likable, but it's real. - Andrew O'Hehir, Salon

I just can't help being glad that it's not MY reality!

46. Fury - Salman Rushdie

Wow! This book blew me away from the first page to the last!

It was funny, sweet, unpredictable and endlessly surprising. All the characters were so lovingly drawn that even the most minor passerby was instantly imaginable. Take, for example, this image of the 'hero' attempting to lose himself in New York's varied culture:

Professor Solanka, who thought of himself as egalitarian by nature and a born-and-bred metropolitan of the countryside-is-for-cows persuasion, on parade days strolled sweatily cheek by jowl among his fellow citizens. One Sunday he rubbed shoulders with slim-hipped gay-pride prancers, the next weekend he got jiggy beside a big-assed Puerto Rican girl wearing her national flag as a bra. He didn't feel intruded upon amid the multitudes; to the contrary. There was a satisfying anonymity in the crowds, an absence of intrusion. Nobody here was interested in his mysteries. Everyone was here to lose themselves. Such was the unarticulated magic of the masses, and these days losing himself was just about Professor Solanka's only purpose in life. (6-7)

Professor Malik Solanka was born in Bombay, educated at Cambridge, happily married, father to a young son... With his wife's support, he gives up his work as an academic professor in order to follow his fascination with making dolls. His figurines are a great success, particularly 'Little Brain', who starts out by having her own tv show where she interviews various historical philosophers, but is gradually taken over by the marketing gurus and becomes bigger than Barbie. Malik is raking in the money, so he can't protest at the transformation of his beloved creation. Then one night he finds himself standing over his sleeping wife & toddler, testing the sharpness of the carving knife in his hand. Horrified by his unexplained fits of rage and the possibility that he poses a danger to his family, he jumps on a plane and flies to America, sure that there he will either be killed or cured. His family are bewildered, as is Malik himself, who reads about a mystery killer in the paper, targeting beautiful young socialites, and worries that the killings coincide with periods for which he has no memory.

As the story continues, we learn more of Little Brain, and how her commercialization is a major factor in the development of Malik's fury.

This creature of his own imagining, born of his best self and purest endeavour, was turning before his eyes into the kind of monster of tawdry celebrity he most profoundly abhorred. His original and now obliterated Little Brain had been genuinely smart, able to hold her own with Erasmus or Schopenhauer. She had been beautiful and sharp tongued, but she had swum in the sea of ideas, living the life of the mind. This revised edition, over which he had long ago lost creative control, had the intellect of a slightly over-average chimpanzee. Day by day she became a creature of the entertainment microverse, her music videos - yes, she was a recording artist now! - out-raunching Madonna's, her appearances at premiers out-Hurleying every starlet who ever trod the red carpet in a dangerous frock. She was a video game and a cover girl, and this, remember, in her personal appearance mode at least, was essentially a woman whose own head was completely concealed inside the iconic doll's. ... Professor Solanka remained aloof, refusing all invitations to discuss his out-of-control creation. The money, however, he was unable to refuse. Royalties continued to pour into his bank account. He was compromised by greed, and the compromise sealed his lips. Contractually bound not to attack the goose that laid the golden eggs, he had to bottle up his thoughts and, in keeping his own counsel, filled up with the bitter bile of his many discontents. With every new media initiative spearheaded by the character he had once delineated with such sprightliness and care, his impotent fury grew. ... Fury stood above him like a cresting Hokusai wave. Little Brain was his deliquent child grown into a rampaging giantess, who now stood for everything he despised and trampled beneath her giant feet all the high principles he had brought her into being to extol; including, evidently, his own. ... Malik Solanka was forced to admit a terrible truth. He hated Little Brain. (98-100)

He meets Mila Milo, intelligent daughter of Yugoslavian poet, playing at being a street teen-queen, and one of Little Brain's biggest fans. She even looks like her. Mila 'adopts' Malik and gets him to take another look at the world. I laughed out loud at her response to Malik's confession, quoted above. She told him about her father, having a great time drinking, smoking, loving and working himself to death, until he decided he was needed in the war between the Serbs and Croats:

That's what I started out to say, Professor, don't talk to me about fury, I know what it can do. America, because of its omnipotence, is full of fear; it fears the fury of the world and renames it envy, or so my dad used to say. They think we want to be them, he'd say after a few hits of hooch, but really we're just mad as hell and don't want to take it any more. See, he knew about fury. But then he set aside what he knew and behaved like a damn fool. Because about five minutes after he landed in Belgrade - or maybe it was five hours or five days or five weeks, who, like, cares? - the fury blew him to pieces and there wasn't enough of him found to collect up and put in a box. So, yeah, Professor, and you're mad about a doll. Well, excuse me. (114)

Mila turns out to be an extremely interesting character, one who kept me reading late into many early mornings.

Mila's special thing turned out to be the collection and repair of damaged people... (117-8)

I will leave you to discover her for yourself, and the ways in which she, herself, is a damaged person... and Neela, another brilliantly depicted, amazing character... and the new generation of puppets that Solanka creates... as I am finding myself being tempted to type out something from almost every page! At the start of this review, I referred to Malik Solanka as the hero, but in inverted commas. This is because he is not (until the very last moment) really very heroic. It is the women who shine in this novel, and the three women in Solanka's lovelife - his wife, Eleanor, Mila and Neela - who are really the heroines. (This feminine triumvirate echoes the three Furies, who are also major factors in the novel). I think I have said enough now to justify the high score I am going to give this one - and my heartiest recommendation so far!

If you have not studied English lierature, or are not American, there are going to be places where you feel a little lost among the names being dropped. However, the novel is so well-written and entertaining that you can easily let your eyes glaze over and skim these sections without losing anything of the story. Sure, at times, elements of the story are too way-out to be believable. The constant slapstick caused by Neela's head-turning beauty, for example, or the overly-simplistic responses of those involved in the civil war in Lilliput-Blefescue... but I did not find these elements out of place in a satirical comedy. If I had to choose something to dislike about this novel, it would be the dismissal of God and religion as a force in the society - but in a way, this works more powerfully than if religion were explicitly referred to, as in a novel so densely packed with cultural references, it is made more conspicuous by its absence. Where there were dismissive comments, I found myself internally arguing with the narrator, and after a while I began to wonder if this was Rushdie's intention. It is, on the whole, a very intelligent, active work that is larger not only than life - it is larger than fiction! The ending, by the way, was perfect - a joyful, hopeful image that I loved. Then there was a page headed "About the Author". The rest of the page, and the following pages were blank. I thought this was a nice touch, too - the book speaks for itself!

On finishing the novel, I have no hesitation in confirming my initial reaction - WOW! What an incredible story! The personal narrative of the characters is interwoven with social commentary so skilfully that it never really becomes intrusive or extraneous... just when you start to even think about getting bored, the plot takes a twist and you are right back in the middle of the action. It was also educational as well as being entertaining! For the first time in ages I found myself needing to look up a word (oenophile - one who appreciates and enjoys wine). There are stories within stories in this novel, and it would easily repay serious study, while remaining a fascinating experience for the casual reader. I really recommend this one! (Sorry about the over-effusive use of exclamation marks in this review. For once I wholeheartedly agree with the advertising hyperbole on the cover of 'Fury' - "A wickedly dark comedy from one of the world's truly great writers.")

45. The Body Artist - Don DeLillo

I raced through most of this slim novel with a slightly superior sneer on my face. It was weird, incomprehensible, boring. I would give it a 1/10, or even a zero, because there was no chance I was going to read it again. It started with the last, unremarkable breakfast between a man and his wife (Lauren) - he smoking a cigarette, she sniffing the foot-odour of her cereal, reading the paper, watching the birds. Then he drives into town and shoots himself in his first wife's apartment and Lauren is left alone.

Or is she? The center of the novel contains her obsession with the retarded man she finds living in her house, and her obsession with reshaping (torturing?) her own body. It feels repetitive, circular, uneventful. The reader feels somewhat embarrassed for her, pestering this poor unfortunate to repeat snippets of past conversations in her husband's voice, desperately trying to make him make sense. Then suddenly this child-man is gone and she is alone again.

It was at this point, almost at the very end of the novel, that I found myself pulled in and willingly riding "the wind-swayed web."(7) Nothing really happened, except that somehow, I began to understand - and to care. I want to quote the passage that marked my turning point:

She wanted to create her future, not enter a state already shaped to her outline.

Something is happening. It has happened. It will happen. This is what she believed. There is a story. A flow of consciousness and a possibility. The future comes into being.

But not for him.

He hasn't learned the language. There has to be an imaginary point, a nonplace where language intersects with our perceptions of time and space, and he is a stranger at this crossing, without words or bearings.
...

This is a man who remembers the future.

...
If you examine the matter methodically, you realize that he is a retarded man sadly gifted in certain specialized areas, such as memory retention and mimicry, a man who'd been concealed in a large house, listening.

Nothing else makes sense.

It is a thing no one understands. But it makes and shapes you. And in these nights since he'd left she sometimes sat with a book in her lap, eyes closed, and felt him living somewhere in the dark, and it is colder where he is, it is wintrier there, and she wanted to take him in, try to know him in the spaces where his chaos lurks, in all the soft-cornered rooms and unravelling verbs, the parts of speech where he is meant to locate his existence, and in the material place where Rey lives in him, alive again, word for word, touch for touch, and she opened and closed her eyes and thought in a blink the world had changed.

He violates the limits of the human. (99-100)

This question of what it means to be human, which had been so easy to dismiss and distance myself from, suddenly had me in its grasp. The author is masterful in his choice of when and how to reveal what it means to be a 'body artist'. Everything you have read so far in the novel seems altered when you realise what she, Lauren, had been preparing for. What she is and what she does as a performance artist. I won't spoil the surprise.

As the novel draws to a close, I began to suspect more and more that everything had not been as simple and straightforward as it seemed. Did the retarded man exist at all, or was he part of her creation, a rehearsal, a coping mechanism, or a madness?

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the ones you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take. ... Sink lower, she thought. Let it bring you down. Go where it takes you. (116)

So, with my sneer replaced by an expression of wonder, I reached the last page, regretting only that it was 3am and I couldn't immediately turn back to the first page and start again. This is one of those novels that I suspect will change and alter the reader's perceptions with every reading: "A flow of consciousness and a possibility." Externally, nothing really happens - nature and time move on, it is colder, the birds come to the feeders or they do not - but internally? The possibilities are endless.

Chances I will read it again? 6/10 For a while there it was a definite 10, but then I thought about the other 995 books on the list still waiting to be reviewed... this one was intriguing, but not fascinating enough to guarantee it an instant place among my all time favourites. Certainly one to remember, though.

11. The Lambs of London - Peter Ackroyd

When I first realised this book concerned fictionalised versions of Charles and Mary Lamb, writers of 'Shakespeare for Children' in the late eighteenth / early nineteenth century, I was intrigued. Other reviewers have attempted to unravel historical fact from the invented narrative, so I will focus mainly on the novel's effect on me as a work of fiction. I must admit I was disappointed.

This is a novel of fakes and false appearances. However, this theme appears to have pervaded every aspect of the writing. The characters felt very much like cardboard cutouts being moved around an artfully decorated stage.

Charles and Mary Lamb live with their parents - their father senile with alzheimer's, and their mildly annoying mother, whose chief sin seems to be that she nags her children and treats her husband as an infant. Mary is in delicate physical and mental health following her recovery from smallpox, yet since her mother refuses to hire another servant, the brunt of domestic life falls on her shoulders (though we never see her cooking, cleaning, shopping or anything else in this line). She is sensitive and intellectual and longs for the companionship and esteem of her brother. He, in turn, dreams of a shining future as a writer, drowning his disenchantment with his mundane job in alcohol while discussing literature with his workmates at various local drinking establishments. When he returns home 'sozzled', it is Mary who removes his boots and tucks him into bed. Mary is in fact the better scholar of the two, but Charles makes light of her achievements: "He laughed again, and ruffled her hair. She tried to smile but then lowered her head; she felt vain and foolish."

There is a strong feminist subtext in Mary's story, beginning with the association between her and the moon (symbolic of her slide into lunacy) which is drawn in the first paragraph:

"There was no one in the drawing-room with her, so she put her face upwards, towards the sun. Her skin was marked by the scars of smallpox, suffered by her six years before; so she held her face to the light, and imagined it to be the pitted moon."

However, this much more interesting story exists in potential only, for Ackroyd conjures it only superficially as part of the larger narrative. Mary herself is constantly pushed into the background whenever she tries to emerge - by the author as much as by the other characters.

Along comes William Ireland, who excites Mary with his discovery of lost Shakespearean texts and artifacts. She is flattered by his attention and confidences, and cherishes romantic feelings towards him, but is ultimately destroyed (we assume) by his lukewarm dalliance and betrayal of her trust. When Mary overhears him confessing to his father that he forged the Shakespearean texts she so ardently supported on his behalf, Mary's heart is broken. She goes home and stabs her mother to death. There is a court case, Mary is committed to a private asylum for the insane, and Charles cares for her until she dies suddenly (while watching him perform a snippet of A Midsummer Night's Dream for her amusement).

Ireland, apparently, created the forgeries 'because he could' and to impress his father, who is obsessed with all things Shakespearean. His 'art for art's sake' motivation comes into conflict with his father's profit motive. He appears to have bothered with Mary purely in order to enlist her brother's help in authenticating the fakes, having been an eager eavesdropper on Charles' drunken literary conversations.

Ackroyd's recreation of Shakespearean poetry is quite well done and believable, as is the Georgian setting. There are lots of little historical details which give a nice background to the story. Overall, however, I found it unsatisfying. The idolatry of Shakespeare feels overdone and unjustified - perhaps more 'readings' from the bard himself might have helped?

One reviewer has called the novel: "an irreverent romp, a somewhat bawdy journey through 1790s London, thrusting the reader into the stuffy world of antiquarian literature and the people who think so highly of it." (Michael Leonard, The Lambs of London, Curledup.com) As far as I am concerned, the 'bawdy' details were thrown in for purely gratuitous effect and stuck out like sore thumbs. There were only two such scenes - in the first, 17 year old William Ireland loses his virginity to a prostitute while riding on the roof of a public carriage, with his father seated inside. This was mildly amusing, but I looked in vain for the comedic aspects of this scene to appear elsewhere in the novel! The other involves an authorial aside giving details of the pederastic abuse of a young Carribean boy by two intellectual doctors. Neither of these two scenes (or characters) are ever referred to again and they seem to exist as vignettes, simply to give a 'flavour' to the age.

My favourite character in the novel was Mr Lamb, whose non-sequiter ramblings seemed more warmly human than almost anything else that was going on:

When her mother had left the room, Mary sat down beside him on the faded green divan. ‘Did you sing at the service, Pa?’

‘The minister was mistaken.’

‘On what matter?’

‘There are no rabbits in Worcestershire.’

‘Are there not?’

‘No, nor muffins neither.’

Mrs Lamb professed to believe that there was some wisdom in her husband’s ramblings, but Mary knew that there was none. Yet he interested her more now than he had ever done; she was intrigued by the strange and random phrases that issued from him. It was as if language was talking to itself.

‘Are you cold, Pa?’

‘Just an error in the accounts.’

‘Do you suppose?’

‘A red letter day.’

My overall impression was that the novel skipped around from scene to scene without really stopping to explore its themes in detail. I would agree wholeheartedly with the reviewer from The Age, who said:

"The character of Mrs Lamb is even more sketchily drawn. We only really glimpse the inexplicable contempt of her children towards her, their desire to keep her at arm's length. As a consequence Mary appears highly strung and Charles charmless.

Ackroyd opens with his standard disclaimer. "This is not a biography but a work of fiction. I have invented characters and changed the life of the Lamb family for the sake of the larger narrative." Given Mary Lamb's historical notoriety the larger narrative might have benefited from a little more attention to the life of the Lambs and a little less to the well-chewed mutton of the literary fake." (Micheal Williams, The Lambs of London, The Age)

I must say that I think a historically accurate biography of the Lambs would be more interesting. After all, Mary did actually murder her mother with the carving knife, and Charles did look after her, but she survived him by many many years - and neither of them ever knew William Ireland... (Murder by carving knife, Telegraph.co.uk)

1. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

This is a strange, sad novel and I'm really at a loss to describe how I feel about it. To quote another reviewer, it is: "an intriguing, chilling and ultimately desolate fable." (Caroline Moore, Meanings Behind Masks; Telegraph.co.uk) The genre is most easily described as science fiction, but so restrained that the plot seems well within the bounds of possibility. It is like reading about an alternative reality which would take very little to mesh seamlessly with our own. The thirty-one year old narrator, Kathy H, is reliable and her reminiscences are told in a confiding, conversational tone that assumes the reader shares a similar background. Key terms are left undefined and the reader must piece together the clues as the novel progresses. The disorientation this creates is an integral part of the novel's strategy - the reader is constantly kept off balance and so does not ask for or expect the nitty-gritty details of how these things could actually happen. Here is an excerpt from the novel's beginning which shows how ordinary words seem to take on unexplained, extraordinary meanings, and also how Kathy includes the reader in the narrative, constructing you as a student, a carer, and eventually a donor.

I won't be a carer any more come the end of the year, and though I've got a lot out of it, I have to admit I'll welcome the chance to rest - to stop and think and remember. I'm sure it's at least partly to do with that, to do with preparing for the change of pace, that I've been getting this urge to reorder all these old memories. What I really wanted, I suppose, was to get straight all the things that happened between me and Tommy and Ruth after we grew up and left Hailsham. But I realise now just how much of what occurred later came out of our time at Hailsham, and that's why I want first to go over these earlier memories quite carefully. ... I don't know if you had 'collections' where you were. When you come across old students from Hailsham, you always find them, sooner or later, getting nostalgic about their collections. At the time, of course, we took it all for granted.

This technique seems harmlessly inclusive at the start, but by cleverly insinuating the reader into the narrative, the novel's concerns become our own, preparing the way for some frightening questions at the end. I found it easy to 'take it all for granted' while I was reading, but the real impact of this novel occurs after you have read the final page and put it away!

Most of Kathy's memories are centered on her days at Hailsham, which at first appears to be a privileged boarding school with a slightly strange over-emphasis on the children's health and creativity. The narrative revolves around the love triangle that develops between Kathy and her friends, Ruth and Tommy. The student's lives seem relatively normal, but there is a sinister, over protective atmosphere at the school which grows as they, and the reader, gradually learn the truth about their purpose in life. Even then, nothing is grasped with certainty - the language is pervaded with qualifiers: "maybe", "somehow", "perhaps", and Kathy matter-of-factly accepts her own inability to grasp any certainty about her existence: "Of course, I'll never know for sure," and "I don't really understand it."

When they 'graduate' from the school, they are released into a society which seems alien to them - a world of relationships and economics in which they exist as observors, playing no real part, waiting for the next, mysterious phase of their life to begin. I am struck by a butterfly metaphor here - at Hailsham, the students are caterpillars, voraciously devouring the education that is fed to them, and when they are released, as they cling to each other and try to adjust to their new life, they seem to cocoon themselves in their memories of the life they have left. One by one they 'hatch' and move on to start their new futures - but here the metaphor fails - no glorious flight of freedom awaits them. In a way, the students' upbringing at Hailsham (and similar establishments across Britain) seems to have instilled in them a kind of mechanical detachment, so while in one sense they are learning to live and love as typical emotional adolescents, there is always that awareness of external complications and expectations that we can't quite see or understand. This is best illustrated by the intricate mechanical animals which Tommy begins to draw:

I was taken aback at how densely detailed each one was. in fact it took a moment to see they were animals at all. The first impression was like one you’d get if you took the back off a radio set: tiny canals, weaving tendons, miniature screws and wheels were all drawn with obsessive precision, and only when you held the page away could you see it was some kind of armadillo, say, or a bird. . . . For all their busy, metallic features, there was something sweet, even vulnerable about each of them.

The reality, which the reader has suspected from the start, is that Kathy and her friends are clones, created for the sole purpose of becoming organ donors. The real mystery of the novel is ostensibly why Hailsham placed such an emphasis on their personal development, seeing as they were destined never to have any real future. The reader is not the only one who finds this bewildering.

"Why train us, encourage us, make us produce all of that? If we're just going to give donations anyway, then die, why all of those lessons?"

However, a stronger underlying mystery which has kept me thinking and rethinking about this novel, is why, as adults, the students are so accepting of their fate. There is one scene where Kathy and Tommy are driving at night through a lonely countryside, returning from a meeting where all their hopes of - not escaping - but delaying their inevitable final donations have been destroyed. In a way, they are driving back to certain death. I found myself screaming at them to stop. To turn down some quiet side road and spend the rest of their lives together, instead of docilely submitting themselves to be used and thrown away - not in ignorance, but fully aware and willingly sacrificing themselves, because that is what they were born to do.

My feelings about this novel are brilliantly summed up in the following quote from The Guardian:

"It's about the steady erosion of hope. It's about repressing what you know, which is that in this life people fail one another, grow old and fall to pieces. It's about knowing that while you must keep calm, keeping calm won't change a thing. Beneath Kathy's flattened and lukewarm emotional landscape lies the pure volcanic turmoil, the unexpressed yet perfectly articulated, perfectly molten rage of the orphan. ... This extraordinary and, in the end, rather frighteningly clever novel isn't about cloning, or being a clone, at all. It's about why we don't explode, why we don't just wake up one day and go sobbing and crying down the street, kicking everything to pieces out of the raw, infuriating, completely personal sense of our lives never having been what they could have been." (M John Harrison, Clone Alone; Guardian Unlimited)

We are left wondering - but the temptation to dismiss the characters as not fully human, as somehow emotionally deficient, cannot stand against the caring relationships and creative expression that the reader has shared through Kathy's eyes. The worrying conclusion then becomes would we, too, with sufficient indoctrination, willingly acquiesce in such a fate?

2. Saturday - Ian McEwan

This novel continues in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and James Joyce's Ulysses by encapsulating a single day in the life of its main character - in this case, a British neurosurgeon named Henry Perowne.

The edition I picked up from the library had 4 pages of "international praise" at the start of the book - quotes from many reviewers lauding the brilliance of McEwan's writing. It is certainly an achievement which any aspiring writer may envy and desire to emulate. A quick and easy read, it kept me turning the pages quite contentendly, but it somehow lacked that dazzling quality which would inspire me to want to read it again.

Perowne is generally an attractive and likeable, though somewhat apologetic character, and the action centres around him preparing for a small family reunion on a day when London is brought to a standstill by an immense peace demonstration against the war in Iraq.

Most of the novel's themes are summed up in the following passage, which takes place as Perowne chooses fish for the stew he plans to make that evening.

"He turns the corner into Paddington Street and stoops in front of the open-air display of fish on a steeply raked slab of white marble. He sees at a glance that everything he needs is here. Such abundance from the emptying seas. On the tiled floor by the open doorway, piled in two wooden crates like rusting industrial rejects, are the crabs and lobsters, and in the tangle of warlike body parts there is discernible movement. On their pincers they're wearing funereal black bands. It's fortunate for the fishmonger and his customers that sea creatures are not adapted to make use of sound waves and have no voice. Otherwise there'd be howling from those crates. Even the silence among the softly stirring crowd is troubling. He turns his gaze away, towards the bloodless white flesh, and eviscerated silver forms with their unaccusing stare, and the deep-sea fish arranged in handy overlapping steaks of innocent pink, like cardboard pages of a baby's first book. Naturally, Perowne the fly-fisherman has seen the recent literature: scores of polymodal nociceptor sites just like ours in the head and neck of rainbow trout. It was once convenient to think biblically, to believe we're surrounded for our benefit by edible automata on land and sea. Now it turns out that even fish feel pain. This is the growing complication of the modern condition, the expanding circle of moral sympathy. Not only distant people are our brothers and sisters, but foxes too, and laboratory mice, and now the fish. Perowne goes on catching and eating them, and though he'd never drop a live lobster into boiling water, he's prepared to order one in a restaurant. The trick, as always, the key to human success and domination, is to be selective in your mercies. For all the discerning talk, it's the close at hand, the visible that exerts the overpowering force. And what you don't see... That's why in gentle Marylebone the world seems so entirely at peace." (p 127)

This is not an environmental novel - and from memory, these fish are the only animals mentioned - but the ways in which human perceptions of our place in the universe have changed, the way in which world events and moral reactions to them are viewed broadly, ambiguously and with only partial understanding, and then narrowed to the realm of immediate individual decisions on how to act and think, how decisions are coloured by personality how they change and develop as events impact upon the characters - these concerns are typical of the novel as a whole.

Perowne is most human in his interactions with his family - his busy lawyer wife Rosalind, his poet daughter Daisy, and blues-singing son Theo. Poetry actually plays a major role in the novel - though Perowne has limited literary tastes, his cantankerous father-in-law is a published poet and his daughter has just had her first volume published. Perowne struggles to understand the fascination and is more interested in what Daisy's poems seem to reveal about her life away from the family. He forces himself to try and understand the art, both for her sake and because he worries he might have missed something worthwhile in his single-minded focus on a medical career.

"Novels and movies, being restlessly modern, propel you forwards or backwards through time, through days, years or even generations. But to do its noticing and judging, poetry balances itself on the pinprick of a moment. Slowing down, stopping yourself completely, to read and understand a poem is like trying to acquire an old-fashioned skill like drystone walling or trout tickling." (p129)

Poetry and literature and music are another element, just as the water was for Perowne's mother (a champion swimmer), or the physical structure of the human brain is for Perowne himself. There is a kind of escapist challenge in being able to immerse yourself in this 'other', abandoning your personality and temporarily forgetting the wash of events going on around you.

The only real action in the novel centers around a street thug named Baxter. Perowne narrowly escapes a violent confrontation with him by accurately diagnosing his medical condition, and the encounter leaves him physically and mentally uncomfortable for the rest of the day. That evening, when the family is finally gathered together, Baxter invades their home. There is potential for disaster, for Perowne's comfortable, luxurious world to be ripped apart, but in the end it is only Baxter who really gets hurt. Perowne assuages his guilt (feeling he should have handled the original altercation better) by operating to save Baxter's life, in the process deciding to forgive him and ensure he lives the rest of his short life expectancy with proper institutionalised care.

The turning point in the home invasion comes when Daisy, naked and vulnerable, quotes Mathew Arnold's poem 'Dover Beach' to Baxter (he had demanded she read something of her own from her book). I found this the most unconvincing moment of the story, perhaps because that poem has never been one that spoke to me.

"Daisy recited a poem that cast a spell on one man. Perhaps any poem would have done the trick, and thrown the switch on a sudden mood change. Still, Baxter fell for the magic, he was transfixed by it, and he was reminded how much he wanted to live. No one can forgive him the use of the knife. But Baxter heard what Henry never has, and probably never will, despite all Daisy's attempts to educate him." (p278)

Poetry, music, good food and wine - a comfortable existence transposed on a world of turmoil, of vaguely troubling thoughts and doubts about terrorism, war and genocide. At the end of the novel, Perowne stands at his window looking out at the pre-dawn, just as he did at the beginning, only now he thinks about what a doctor standing there a hundred years ago might have thought, about how lifestyles and expectations have changed over time. The novel was first published in 2005, but already it feels rather dated. I would be surprised if it endured to be a classic read in the next century.

723. Ulysses - James Joyce

When I first downloaded Ulysses from Gutenberg and started reading it, I was very much inclined to agree with Michelle from Scribbit's assessment of it as spam. Then I noticed that Alkeda the Gleeful (Saints and Spinners) counted it among her favourite books, and figured if a children's storyteller likes it, it must be worth another chance. There is also my renowned literary masochism. If I start reading something, I will finish it, no matter how bad it is (well, almost).After all, if I could wade my way through Something Happened (in which nothing happened except my increasing desire to throttle the narrator... and then hit him over the head with a sledgehammer... and maybe run him over with a garbage truck for good measure) then I ought to persist in finishing a classic text like Ulysses. I do want to read all 1001 on the "Books you must read before you die" list... and Ulysses is there at number 723.

Despite all this, the Gutenberg text was just not managing to attract my attention during my rare moments of computer time. Then my father's graduation present arrived. For some strange reason, knowing my love of literature, Dad carried an attractively boxed set of Joyce's complete works back to Australia from Amsterdam of all places. As Yeti said, of all the works in English literature, Dad managed to pick the one author whose works I had almost totally avoided studying (except for Dubliners, Joyce's collection of short stories, which I quite enjoyed). If it had been the complete works of Dickens, or Woolf, or any number of other authors, I would have been veraciously devouring it... but now, faced with a gorgeous green and gold copy of Ulysses in three tiny volumes, I had no excuse not to dive in.

To a large extent, I am still in agreement with Scribbit. I don't mind works being intellectually difficult, but I object when the lexicon needed to appreciate (or even begin to understand) a novel threatens to be three times the size of the actual novel! Not having such an aid to comprehension at hand, I found myself skimming pages with only a very very dim idea of what was being said (forget the Latin and French - half the time I can't figure out the English - even with a dictionary!).

However, in a way I can appreciate Joyce's experiment as a continuation of Virginia Woolf's view that "identity, rather than depending on the concrete circumstances of a person's life, is primarily constructed from within, through an individual's deployment of language." (Kate Flint, 'The Waves', in Julia Briggs (ed) Virginia Woolf - Introduction to the Major Works)

This is directly connected with one of my favourite Woolf quotes:

Supposing the looking-glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people - what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror; that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness in our eyes. And the novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories, taking knowledge of it for granted. (Virginia Woolf, Mark on the Wall)

Despite my longstanding fascination with this quote, and my vague desire to one day put it into practice, I am finding myself reading Joyce purely for those momentary depictions of reality and avoiding (as much as possible) engaging with the characters musings in the 'mirror'. I must applaud Joyce's mastery, for each time I grow bored and my attention starts to drift, he tucks in a little gem of lovely poetic description which wins me back to his cause. I find some of these are too real for my taste. I will spare you the graphic picture of a dog investigating the decomposing corpse of another dog which is now indelibly fixed in my memory. Instead, here is a beautiful image of the sea:

It flows, purling, widely flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling.
Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing arms lift languidly and sway reluctant arms, hissing up their petticoats, in whispering water swaying and upturning coy silver fronds. Day by day: night by night: lifted, flooded and let fall. Lord, they are weary; and, whispered to, they sigh.

The success of Joyce's experiment in Woolf's theory also shines through the contrast between the inner worlds of Dedalus and Mr Bloom. We are catapulted from Stephen's shoreside symphony to the mundane musak of Leopold's thoughts, while making breakfast for his wife and feeding his cat.

As I read on... and on... and on... I became less enamoured with the experiment. Stephen Dedalus's long narrative in which he discourses on Shakespeare seemed interminable, and even Leopold Bloom's narrative became tedious over time, particularly when I realised he was engaging in what must be one of the longest descriptions of a fart in English literature.

There were moments of brilliance. I enjoyed the voyeurism of the scene with the three girls on the beach in the chapter called Nausicca, but then we were back to Bloom's musings on the event, which were less than inspiring. Once again, however, Joyce managed to tuck in that little poetic description that kept me reading for more - Bloom sees a bat in the evening air: "Like a little man in a cloak he is with tiny hands. Weeny bones. Almost see them shimmering, kind of a bluey white."

With most 'adult' books, when my one year old gets bored with Mummy reading, I can read a bit aloud to him and he is happy. My major grudge against Ulysses is that it is absolutely impossible to read aloud - even some of the bits that look like real words!!! Honestly, I thought lawyers were guilty of writing the most convoluted english, until I came upon this sentence (which is just one example among many):

Universally that person's acumen is esteemed very little perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitable by mortals with sapience endowed to be studied who is ignorant of that which the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that in them high mind's ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain when by general consent they affirm that other circumstances being equal by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation more efficaciously asserted than by the measure of how far forward may have progressed the tribute of its solicitude for that proliferant continuance which of evils the original if it be absent when fortunately present constitutes the certain sign of omnipollent benefaction.

This little snippet is followed, so far as I can gather, by a number of men (some of them doctors, but also including Bloom & Stephen Dedalus) holding a drunken feast in the dining room of a maternity hospital - an episode told in the language of medieval epic. Throughout Ulysses, Joyce borrows from various kinds of 'high-flown' discourse, covering almost every genre you can think of since the english novel began - but there's so much of it, it really gets incredibly tedious.

At the end of the chapter entitled Eumaeus, Joyce makes his clearest reference to the modernist thinking that I believe underlies this novel. Bloom and Dedalus are staggering back to Bloom's house when they see a sweeper horse. What follows is another of Joyce's classic moments of epiphany.

Bloom looked at the head of the horse ... suddenly in evidence in the dark quite near, so that it seemed new, a different grouping of bones and even flesh, because palpably it was a fourwalker, a hipshaker, a blackbuttocker, a taildangler, a headhanger, putting his hind foot foremost the while the lord of his creation sat on the perch, busy with his thoughts. But such a good poor brute, he was sorry he hadn't a lump of sugar, but as he wisely reflected, you could scarcely be prepared for every emergency that might crop up. He was just a big foolish nervous noodly kind of a horse, without a second care in the world. (my emphasis)

In addition to these moments of epiphany - the clear-seeing and clear-saying - my other reason for persevering with Ulysses right to the end is for the feel and flow of Dublin life at the start of the twentieth century.

I did regret my decision a number of times during the Circe chapter. There were several scenes in that which I would rather not have fed into my imagination. Uggghhh. In contrast, Molly Bloom's rambling amorous musings in the final chapter, Penelope, were at least slightly amusing and generally inoffensive so I was able to put the novel down having somewhat assuaged my general distaste.

The major flaw with Ulysses, in my opinion, is that it is too long - although the narrative covers only a single day, it also incorporates the entirety of english literature! If it were condensed into just one of these volumes, it would be a highly enjoyable novel! The great catch cry of the modernists was "make it new". This Joyce has certainly done. However, in my opinion, he has not managed to make it readable - and it is definitely not in the language of the common man!!!