Posting more frequently

I have decided to attempt to post more frequently on this blog; while I still want to post detailed reviews, I'll probably be interspersing them with a lot more short comments, links and random ranting. So today's thought is... I think Ursula Le Guin has been rather hard on Mark, one of the lead characters of Belinda McKeon's Solace, which I reviewed here, and rather generous to his father Tom, in her review of the novel in today's Guardian Review. I suppose as I thought one of the strengths of the novel was the author's even-handedness in depicting the conflict of those two characters, this undermines one of my reasons for liking it. Or perhaps I'm just biased towards dissolute PhD students...

Thomas Hardy backwards: escaping one's fate

Thomas Hardy wrote fifteen novels in his lifetime, but he singled out eight as his 'Novels of Character and Environment,' which is the group that includes his better-known works, such as Tess and Jude, and also the group which includes the only novels of his I've read. This wasn't deliberate. I was unfortunate enough to read Tess initially as a set text for A-Level; whatever you may think of the book, it comes awkwardly out of an examination essay when gutted for too-obvious themes such as 'fate' and 'journeying'. Something possessed me to read Jude next. Not sure why; after that I was ready to give up on Hardy. I started saying that I liked his poetry, but couldn't cope with his novels. But then I read The Mayor of Casterbridge. And The Return of the Native. And then Far from the Madding Crowd. And I realised that I was reading (at least this set) of his novels backwards (although Tess and Jude swapped places):

• The Poor Man and the Lady (1867, unpublished and lost)
• Under the Greenwood Tree (1872)
• Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
• The Return of the Native (1878)
• The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)
• The Woodlanders (1887)
• Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891)
• Jude the Obscure (1895)

and more importantly, that I felt they were getting better.

This isn’t what’s happ

ened when I’ve assessed the works of other nineteenth-century writers in sequence, but the interesting thing was it seemed almost schematic; Far from the Madding Crowd and Return of the Native sharing beautifully-realised rural settings but with the grimness of the plot amping up a notch in the latter; The Mayor of Casterbridge much heavier on plot and tragedy, rather than locality, but not quite as fate-ridden as Tess; Jude, unlike even Tess, unremittingly bleak. The key point, for me, was that from book to book the characters gradually lose their ability to affect their own li

ves and their ultimate destinies.

The main features of this schema that stood out to me were [spoilers for these five novels]:

1. Fate. As mentioned above. Far from the Madding Crowd is almost entirely free of this theme, with the heroine, Bathsheba’s, choice between three different suitors placed at the centre of the narrative, although there are still ironic twists that foreshadow the interventions of the hand of fate in the later novels, such as Fanny turning up at the wrong church to marry Sergeant Troy – if this marriage had taken place, one of Bathsheba’s options would have been removed and Fanny’s tragedy averted. The Return of the Native forces its characters further into a pre-determined pattern, but they still seem to have some freedom of will. However, The Mayor of Casterbridge allows the eponymous mayor, Michael Henchard, exactly one choice – selling his wife at the beginning of the novel – and the rest of his fate follows from there, whereas Tess and Jude are simply accounts of individuals being unable to escape their destiny, and that's that.

2. Landscape. One of my favourite things about Hardy’s writing is his evocation of locality and rural custom. This is particularly striking in Far From the Madding Crowd and Return of the Native; in the former, he dwells lovingly on the pattern of the farming year, as in the well-known sheep-shearing scene, whereas the latter brings the power and beauty of its setting, Egdon Heath, to life; for example, when Clym meets Eustacia on the heath before their marriage in a hollow of ferns: ‘He was in a nest of vivid green. The ferny vegetation round him, though so abundant, was quite uniform: it was a grove of machine-made foliage, a world of green triangles with saw-edges, and not a single flower… The scene seemed to belong to the ancient world of the carboniferous period.’ By letting this description stand alone, the beautiful but alien nature of the heath is fully conveyed. In contrast, the description of Egdon in Tess is weighted down with the momentum of the plot, a sense of what is to come. Tess is walking across the heath to her new job as a dairy-maid, hoping to leave her old life behind her after the death of her baby, but ‘in every bird’s note seemed to lurk a joy’, and she stands ‘like a fly on a billiard-table of indefinite length, and of no more consequence to the surroundings than that fly.'

Hardy keeps drawing our attention back to Tess’s ultimate fate, and the descriptions also have a habit of focusing back towards Tess herself, who is pictured innumerable times in the novel; there is never a change for the reader, or Tess, to make up their own mind as to how to view her or her future. As for Jude and Mayor, they burn through plot so fast that they leave less space for setting.

3. Heroines. I’m tempted simply to type ‘They get more annoying’, but I feel the novels deserve a bit more analysis than that. Sue Bridehead, however, is simply one of the most irritating characters I have ever encountered, and I have nothing more to say about her. Unfortunately, Tess is almost as bad. Although Hardy implicitly criticises Angel and Alec for their idealised and incorrect versions of her, he only manages to substitute his own idealised picture for theirs, as noted above. She is frustratingly passive, and ultimately her own victim as much as a victim of fate, by deciding that her lot has to be grim and refusing to accept Angel’s help when she is poverty-stricken. Although I’ve read critics who claim that she is the only fully-rounded character in the novel, I found Angel’s internal conflicts far more interesting. The Mayor of Casterbridge lacks a real heroine, juxtaposing the weak, compromised Lucetta against the perfect Elizabeth- Jane. Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native is almost interesting, but feels like a sketch – although the novel was written later – for Bathsheba in Far from the Madding Crowd, by far the best-drawn and strongest female character I’ve seen in Hardy’s work, despite her vacillations. Hardy seems to fully engage with her mindset, fleshing her out as a person in her own right, and although she makes some poor choices, they do make sense. For me, her original and realistic character crystallised after reading a statement she makes late in the novel, a truth that could also help to explain Tess, Eustacia and Sue: ‘it is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.'

4. Tragedy or tragi-comedy? It is impossible to find more than a glimmer of humour in Jude, Tess, or Mayor, but an aspect of the earlier novels I really appreciated, intentional or not, was how the tragic fates of the characters often have a humorous element to them. For example, I can’t think of almost all the remaining cast drowning in

the weir at the end of The Return of the Native without smiling, even though this is hardly a happy ending. Far from the Madding Crowd is even better, beginning with the memorable image of all Gabriel Oak’s flock of sheep running over a cliff in the dark – although disastrous for him personally, it struck me as a wonderful way to lose your business. A later scene involving Troy mourning at Fanny’s grave is my favourite – although false to her in life, he decorates her grave with expensive flowers to show how much he minds now she is dead. Unfortunately, heavy rain that night means that the water from the church roof is all directed in a single stream through the mouth of one ‘gurgoyle’ (gargoyle), and this floods the grave. I think the humour here, at least, is intentional, mocking Troy’s pretentions, especially as Hardy chooses to title that particular chapter ‘The Gurgoyle: Its Doings.’ Perhaps the fact that I’m laughing at misfortune is a weakness in the earlier novels, but I appreciated these jumps into melodrama; it makes the plots distinctively Hardy-esque, without being utterly hopeless.

So in conclusion… Under The Greenwood Tree must be fabulous, and The Woodlanders poor, and I need to read them to prove my thesis! I have doubts about the former, which sounds good, but sketchy, but as Claire Tomalin, in her biography of Hardy, describes The Woodlanders as ‘a black version of Far from the Madding Crowd’, I may be right after all.

Recent acquisitions: the verdict!

I thought I would write a brief post concerning what I thought of my exciting new purchases. In (roughly) rank order, with a one-line plot summary:

1. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett: Marina travels to the Brazilian Amazon to find out why her fellow scientist Anders died while investigating a secretive research project that concerns a drug that might allow women to extend their fertility indefinitely. Thanks to a rave review in the Independent and Elaine's recommendation over at Random Jottings, I overcame my previous Bel Canto-induced aversion to Ann Patchett and gave this a go. I'm so glad I did. It's a wonderful book that I can imagine having a very wide appeal - beautifully-delinated characterisation, but also a strong plotline with a bit of action and scientific investigation thrown in. Very highly recommended.

2. A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan: Follows the stories of various characters who are loosely linked to each other over a fifty-year period in the USA; very difficult to summarise in a sentence! This novel seems to be everywhere at the moment, but it's not surprising, as it did win the Pulitzer Prize and it's also a fantastic read. My only criticism would be that Egan's changes of style between the various voices, which on the whole, worked perfectly, occasionally felt a little gimmicky; I loved the Powerpoint chapter but was annoyed by the one with extensive footnotes. But this is a minor quibble.

3. There But For The by Ali Smith: Miles, a guest at a dinner party, unexpectedly locks himself in the host's spare room and won't come out; the four narrators, connected to him in various ways, tell their own stories while trying to work out what makes him tick. This is Ali Smith, so the games with language are wonderfully inventive and her characters fascinating. However, I didn't feel it was quite up to par with her previous novels, although this certainly doesn't make it bad. Interestingly, I heard her read a section from this novel in Cambridge and when I reached that excerpt here, the text suddenly seemed to come to life; I'd love to have an audiobook version with her reading the whole thing!

4. After the Fire, A Still Small Voice by Evie Wyld: Frank and Leon, from two different generations in east Australia, are both facing up to their parents' legacy; Frank is trying to carve out a new life for himself in his family's old shack, while Leon, a baker, becomes a conscript in Vietnam. What a brilliant title, but it's a shame the book doesn't live up to it. This has been well-reviewed elsewhere - I enjoyed reading Vulpes Libris's interview with the author - but it fell a little flat for me. Wyld writes well, but I felt I had read this story many times before, and I'm not a massive fan of 'parallel lives' set-ups. Frank's story in particular was oddly paced, with what I had taken to be a major part of the plot happening very quickly at the end. (Although, to be fair, this was really the fault of whoever wrote the blurb for the back cover, not Wyld). I would like to see what she writes next, however, as this is her first novel and perhaps the second will be better.

Conditional absolution and the last fifty pages

As the title of this review indicates, I thought this was a fantastic novel up until the last fifty pages, and then – abruptly, and to my own frustration and disappointment – I began to change my mind. I still think it is a good piece of work, but unfortunately the way Aminatta Forna handled the crucial closing section consolidated doubts that I’d had about the book before, doubts that I would have been willing to overlook if it hadn’t all come crashing down around me. As this is impossible to discuss without full spoilers for the plot of the novel, spoilers lie ahead – read at your own risk if you haven’t read The Memory of Love.

The book is set in 2001 in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and delicately and vividly charts the aftermath of the recent civil war. The central character is ostensibly Adrian Lockheart, an English psychatrist who has come to help the survivors work through their trauma and grief, but he is rather colourless, and I found myself far more involved in the stories of the two other major characters: Kai, an orthopedic surgeon, and Elias, a dying man who tells Adrian the events that unfolded thirty years ago when he fell in love with the wife of a colleague just before the country was swept up in a military coup.

As is probably clear from my previous reviews, characterisation is immensely important to me in a novel, as is a lack of preaching. I don’t believe fiction should come with a moral tacked on the end, although it can certainly deal with moral questions. And for the vast majority of this novel, Forna seems at no risk of straying into either of these pitfalls, although I would have to admit I was disappointed with her portrayal of the female characters. Elias’s lover, Saffia, and their daughter Nenebah, nicknamed Mamakay, are essentially the same person thirty years apart, and that person isn’t very interesting; in fact, she’s the stereotypical strong female, not allowed to have flaws, make jokes, or even speak all that much, unlike the men. Of course, Saffia and Mamakay suffer from being seen largely from the outside, idealised by their respective lovers – Elias, and Adrian and Kai – but this is a question that could have been addressed, and isn’t.

The reason the relative weakness of the female cast struck me so strongly in the last fifty pages of this novel, when it hadn’t before, was the part Adrian plays in its denoument. Mamakay is now pregnant, and he is planning to abandon – I don’t think the word is too strong – his wife and child in England in order to start a new life with her in Sierra Leone. He has also started to suspect that some of what the dying Elias has been telling him about his imprisonment during the military coup is not true, and confronts him about it. To be brief, it turns out that Elias is a bit of a coward, something that was foreshadowed earlier in his narrative. His friend Julius, Saffia’s husband, was imprisoned in the cell alongside him and he could hear that he was suffering an asthma attack, but didn’t dare protest to his guard, Johnson, in case he was never released, as he knows that Julius has been involved in protests. He hopes that Julius has his medication with him, but it turns out that he dies of the attack. Later, Elias rises in the university hierarchy through appeasing men like Johnson, and reports student political activity to the authorities after ensuring that his daughter is safe. His actions are unpleasant and show him to be a seriously flawed man, but he kept my sympathy under the full force of Adrian’s – and the author’s – judgement that he now suffers.

Adrian, who has never lived through a war or under military rule, feels that he can despise Elias, while not giving a thought to his abdication of responsibilities towards his own family. While his relationship with Mamakay fuels his judgement of her father, he scarcely seems to know her – and her death during childbirth handily saves him from having to make any difficult decisions. If this self-righteousness was portrayed as a failing of Adrian’s, it would be interesting – but my impression was that Forna was entirely behind Adrian’s viewpoint here, especially as we hear no more of Elias after this pivotal scene, and there are no more sections from his point of view that might qualify his actions. Disturbingly, in an earlier scene Adrian is fully able to forgive a war criminal who tossed a baby into a burning building, and even compares him favourably to Elias because he is honestly repentant, while Elias is still trying to justify himself. It jars horribly, because my impression from Elias’s narration was that he has not forgiven himself, and that he is suffering; although he marries Saffia after Julius’s death, he knows that she will never love him. Again, there remains the possibility that Forna was intentionally setting up this conflict, but my instinct is that she wasn’t. The narrative, as I’ve already noted, handles Adrian with soft gloves, making his moral decisions for him, whereas Elias is forced into the most difficult dilemmas; not only imprisoned at the same time as Julius, but imprisoned literally next to him; not only imprisoned next to him, but able to hear his coughs through the wall.

And this leads me back to the question of the female characters, who become idealised pawns largely because we are meant to come down on Adrian’s ‘side’. If Adrian (and Kai and Julius, to an extent) were presented more as human beings, rather than the paragons of virtue they become (despite Julius and Adrian’s more nuanced presentation earlier in the book), Adrian and Mamakay’s relationship would be further problematised than it is. Saffia’s random death in a car crash after her marriage to Elias also ties up loose ends rather too neatly; the reader is left wondering what her version of the story would be, were she around to tell it.

And so, instead of writing a largely positive review about a book I enjoyed, I’ve written a rant about those last fifty pages. It’s a shame, because Forna is a fine writer and her depictions of the aftermath of the conflict in Sierra Leone are utterly chilling. I just wish that she had ended her story in a different way, or, I suppose, made the ending rather less like a brick wall. It deserved its place on the Orange Prize shortlist, but I’m glad that it didn’t ultimately win.

No longer quite at home

In this outstanding debut novel, Belinda McKeon tells the very simple story of half-hearted PhD student Mark, divided between his life in Dublin and his father Tom's wish for him to work on the family farm near Edgesworthtown in Longford, and his love affair with trainee solicitor Joanne, who shares the same roots. However basic this subject matter may seem, I found it absolutely gripping. It is McKeon's sure command of language that makes these characters and their choices real; her style is also simple, but surprisingly assured for a first novel, even a good first novel, and I knew from the first few sentences that I was going to enjoy it. Her voice puts me in mind of a younger Marilynne Robinson or - unsurprisingly given his praise on the cover - Colm Toibin.

McKeon places the importance of `home' front and centre in this story, but rather than just rehearsing the familiar theme of the importance of where we come from and what we were, she raises the more problematic possibility that we may need to both break away from home and retain it in equal measure. This is most clearly shown in the conflict between Mark and Tom, as neither man can be said to be fully in the right. Tom cannot understand - as is obvious when he and Mark discuss the career of a friend's son, a software engineer, who also lives in Dublin - why anyone would need to move away from his immediate locality, and he believes that Mark need only spend a few days a month in Dublin to teach. Meanwhile, Mark fails in both worlds as he tries to keep a foot in each, managing to write only two chapters of his thesis - which, ironically, is on local celebrity Maria Edgeworth - in three years, and disappointing his father by only coming to the farm on weekends.

However, other characters also struggle with, and try to solve, this question in differing ways; Joanne breaks completely with her crooked lawyer father, despite his pride that she is the only child to follow in his footsteps, which contrasts interestingly with Mark's closer relationship with his father despite a very different choice of career. A subplot concerning one of Joanne's court cases, between a mother, Elizabeth, and her son, also highlights this theme. It is Elizabeth's daughter, Antonia, who now lives in New York, who fully recognises the tension between one person's concept of home and family and another's; she tells Joanne that her mother considers her to be `estranged', despite the fact that they are in regular contact, because she no longer lives with her. Mark's older sister, Nuala, seems to have achieved the perfect balance, as Tom sorrowfully describes: she moves to London, `coming home to see them only once or twice a year,' although she phones often, and `when she visited, he seemed never to have a conversation with her that lasted longer than their conversations on the phone. Always, she seemed only in the door with her suitcase... before she was heading off with the cases again'. Yet, later in the novel, Nuala's decision to limit her contact with her parents is one she regrets.

McKeon gently reveals these shifts, misunderstandings and unmet expectations in our dealings with other people through her use of switching third-person points of view, juxtaposing one character's inner monologue with another's. On an early date, Joanne anticipates the way Mark will react when she tells him a story about her annoying colleague, how he will take her side, but in the event he is too busy watching her hand gestures to listen to what she is saying. Mark continually anticipates the way Tom will react to certain statements and even plans comments that he thinks will please him, but his father stubbornly refuses to behave in the way that he expects. When they have one of their most serious arguments, McKeon takes it off-page and reveals what was said only in both characters' inner thoughts later; the importance of what passed is only magnified by its absence. Her avoidance of contemporary brand names or TV programmes also gives the novel a timeless quality, despite its obviously modern setting on the brink of the Irish recession, which lends it weight; Tom is puzzled by a miserable English soap, rather than Eastenders, and Joanne's aforementioned annoying colleague shows off the red soles on her shoes, rather than boasting about having a pair of Louboutins. In their own ways, both Tom and Mark are trapped in the past; Mark goes round in endless circles with Maria Edgeworth, while Tom still can't quite believe that Mark is no longer the little boy who was so keen to ride in his tractor, and eventually tries to appeal to that little boy, rather than the adult Mark has become.

While this novel has its tragic moments, it is ultimately well-titled; like Robinson's Gilead, there is balm to be found in Solace for the failures and misunderstandings of everyday life. I very much recommend this, and I can't wait to see what McKeon writes next.