809. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

“The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.”

So opens Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. What really captured my attention in this novel was the exquisite descriptions of external settings in what is essentially a novel of internal focus. Handsome young Dorian thinks it such a pity that the portrait which his friend has painted of him will remain young and fresh forever, while he is doomed to age and change. He vainly wishes for the opposite and his vanity is rewarded when his wish comes true. Encouraged by the worldly Henry Wotton, Dorian indulges every passion and vice, searching always for new sensations and sinking into ever greater depravity. He remains superficially beautiful, while the picture locked in the attic displays every mark of his growing perversion.

I often grew frustrated with Dorian's lack of depth, the scorn he and Lord Henry express for anything that fails to accord with and support their cynical quest for superficial pleasure:

“Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.”

Humph. By the end I was quite fed up with Dorian's determination to sacrifice his own real potential for a good life to Lord Henry's insistence that any experience is better than boredom. Faced with a choice between living well and aging gracefully, or giving in to every passing desire, Dorian chooses desire – on the condition that he can hide it successfully. For me, Dorian is a coward who lacks the conviction to stand up and admit to his own choices. Lord Henry is perhaps the main character in the novel – Dorian is his pawn, a challenge for him to corrupt, the evil genius who encourages Dorian to go further and further astray.

“Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly -- that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to oneself. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion -- these are the two things that govern us.”

This is not a story with a moral of redemption. There is no saving Dorian. He kills everything that loves him and comes to hate himself – both the perfect self that he sees in the mirror, and the imperfect, internal damnation embodied by the portrait. He finally decides to destroy the portrait, blaming it for all that is wrong with his life, the wrong for which he refuses, right to the end, to accept responsibility for. When he stabs and slashes at the portrait, he does end the spell, but not in the way he intends. The novel ends with Dorian's body, ugly and debauched, lying at the foot of the once more pristine and youthful portrait.

Much as I like happy endings, I was not disappointed by this one. The climax is perfectly timed and justly deserved, while the complete lack of authorial moralising lets the reader draw their own conclusions about the ambiguities so cleverly presented. Why must youth and beauty be ephemeral? What are the wages of sin? Why is living to excess a bad thing? It is a quick read with questions that linger long after the last page is turned.

68. Blonde - Joyce Carol Oates

Catching up with a review on a book read previously (I finally found my pack of notes)...


This novel is a fictionalised biography of Marilyn Monroe. I don't know much about the real person, so I won't comment on the accuracy or otherwise of its portrayal. I did however find it quite readable and very interesting as a work of fiction.

Although it tries to pay tribute to her intelligence and endurance, overall, the emphasis is on Marilyn's vulnerability. Emotionally scarred by her psychopathic mother, institutionalised and then forced to marry at the age of 16 because her foster father was starting to look at her the wrong way, Blonde is largely the story of a delicate, creature – a hummingbird heart is the recurring imagery used – who is exploited as a physical object by just about every male who crosses her path.

Struggling to construct and retain some sense of self-worth and self-identity, Norma Jean is portrayed (no matter what her age) as a small scared child, hiding behind the glamour mask of Marilyn, at first sheltered by it, then increasingly consumed by it as she loses herself in a whirlpool of addiction and depression. The need to feed Marilyn's ego, and the barely submerged fears of Norma Jean's past combine to ruin every relationship which might give her the chance to feel normal.

Far from being a nymphomaniac, Norma Jean is portrayed as being a passive partner in all her sexual encounters, allowing herself to be used almost like an unresisting doll. As she gets older, she emphasises this passive role by calling all her husbands and lovers “Daddy”, trying to satisfy her sense of loss for the father she never met, preserving a fairytale belief that one day he would ride into her life and rescue her by providing the unconditional affection she desires.

The novel is LONG - over 700 pages, which the omniscient narrator never fails to remind us is going to end in tragedy. There is a constant tension between the impersonal legend – the Fair Princess, the Dark Prince, the Ex-Athlete, the Playwright and the President – and the personal story, told in Marilyn's own breathless, sweet, naivety.

"I saw that I must be sold. For there I would be desired, and I would be loved."

By the end, the lingering sense of a beautiful fairy tale possibility has been lost beneath all the gory details of the little girl's destruction. The universal myth recedes and the sordid reality takes over. The writing was powerful, or I wouldn't have made it to the end. She almost lost me a few times, but by the end I was crouching by torchlight, desperate for it to finish. In a way this struck me a betrayal of Marilyn (meaning Marilyn the character in the novel, and possibly also Marilyn the real person and Marilyn the symbol). While seemingly promising to set her free from the glittering cage of legend, the novel actually confines her as an impotent songbird with the focus of the story really being a condemnation of the forces surrounding her – instead of an investigation of feminism mystique, it came across as a scathing and unforgiving condemnation of masculine insensitivity. It left me feeling that Norma Jean had been exploited just one more unnecessary time.

I am glad I found my notes on this one - I really don't want to ever read it again.

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.

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?