Brief hiatus

My schedule has been somewhat knocked off course by a crazy first couple of weeks in Oxford. I do still intend to write about all those books this month, so will be back soon (and I also need to dig out the Playmobil and the backdrops to create an Oxford-appropriate profile picture before I am sent back to Cambridge in disgrace…)

October schedule

Friday October 3rd: The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

Friday October 10th: Mr B's Reading Year, Five: The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

Friday October 17th: The Booker Prize 2014: J by Howard Jacobson

Friday October 24th: The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

Friday October 31st: No post - day of my PhD viva!

Mr B's Reading Year, Four: 'it was prophesied I would live to see one hundred'

Having tried and failed to read Michel Deon's The Foundling Boy (sorry, Mr B's, I think it's the books-in-translation thing again…) I struck gold - or more appropriately, oil - with Philipp Meyer's The Son. This is by far my favourite of the Reading Year books I've read so far, and it genuinely is a novel that I might not have discovered on my own. I've been falling badly behind with my Reading Year books due to writing up my thesis, and so I now have a stack waiting to be read, but I'm trying to read them in order, rather than cherry-picking the ones that look most inviting. I'm glad I did this, because otherwise I might not have got round to The Son for a long time - while I did like the look of it when it arrived, it's a hefty undertaking, with almost six hundred closely-printed pages chronicling five generations of a Texan family, from the early nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. However, it's absolutely worth the investment.

Eli McCullough, known as 'the Colonel' by his descendants, is at the centre of this story; after being kidnapped by Comanches at the age of thirteen in 1849, he builds up enormous landholdings after being returned to 'civilisation'. In their turn, his descendants oppress the local Mexican landowners who also hold plantations on what was once Native American land. His son, Peter, expresses moral qualms about the savagery of his family, but seems incapable of acting upon them; his narrative, related in diary format, reads like one long line of excuses for his inaction. Eventually, he comes face to face with a victim of the McCulloughs; Maria Garcia, one of the few survivors of a massacre at her family's casa mayor, instigated by Peter's family. Maria tells him a story about her great-uncle, Arturo, who met a Coahuiltecan in 1836, the year of Eli's birth. This man claimed to be the last of his people, who were 'older than the Greeks and Romans… The Spanish appeared and then the Apaches, who continued the work of the Spanish, and then the Comanches, who continued the work of the Apaches.' Eli McCullough, born the year this story was told, will continue this sequence by wiping out the Comanches in this turn to establish a white empire. Arturo's story illustrates one of the central themes of The Son, made almost too obvious by its epigraph from Gibbon and its final image of the chief of a Lipan tribe: 'in his shield, stuffed between the layers, was Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.' Brutality is dealt out by all the succeeding conquerors, as they fight over the same acres of land.

The Son, however, is more than a convincing and sobering historical reflection. It's also a great piece of storytelling. In this context, I have to admit that Eli's chapters were the highlight of the book. Eli is in many ways a thoroughly deplorable character, but he's a marvellous narrator. While a cliched novel would have chosen a more reflective man to place at the centre of this horrific story, Eli's brother, Martin, who might have filled that role - Eli tells us that 'he had a weakness for books and poetry' - meets a grisly end early in the story. Martin's pronouncements as he is dying - 'It is the fate of a man like myself to be misunderstood. That's Goethe, in case you were wondering' - are totally alien in the world that Meyer presents. Eli is the natural survivor, able to adapt to the Comanche way of life, and he is focused solely on fighting and sex. This refreshing turn from the cerebral persists throughout the novel - Eli's great-granddaughter, Jeannie, is single-minded about losing her virginity, and it is only after losing her husband that she forces herself to engage with the data of oil drilling. Peter's narrative, placed alongside these two others, is not as strong, in my opinion; Peter seems both morally and literally weak, compared to his father and granddaughter, and I'm not convinced that the diary format helps matters. I felt distanced from Peter in a way I did not from our other two narrators; and Eli, remarkably long-lived, persists into his great-granddaughter's story, drinking mint juleps in the sun.

Despite the horror that this novel contains, it somehow remains an enjoyable, and not merely a worthwhile read. The reality of the events it describes is never lost - Meyer notes in his foreword that 'the Comanche people suffered a 98 percent population loss during the middle period of the nineteenth century' - but it is somehow readable, rather than too terrible to engage with. To explain this, I think I'd have to return to Eli. His character becomes a literal relic of the Comanche ascendancy as he witnesses his adopted tribe die around him, and he also symbolises the forces that destroyed them when he becomes a Ranger. Yet, his idiosyncratic narration and foolhardy attitude to life puts a human face to these atrocities. It's the creation of such a convincing pivot for the novel as a whole that makes The Son succeed. Thanks, Mr B's, for such an excellent Reading Year selection.

'It was a familiar piece of music'

Whatever else it is, Philip Hensher's latest novel is an immensely enjoyable read; and that's no little achievement for one of these patchwork creations, like David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas or Nicole Krauss's Great House, that flit between characters, settings and times, leaving the reader to do a lot of puzzling as he or she tries to fit the pieces together. I'm not very good at these sort of puzzles, and I'm sure I've missed many of the subtle connections that Hensher weaves between his three major stories: Christian persecution in a third-century settlement at the edge of the Roman empire, avant-garde artists at the Bauhaus in Weimar in the 1920s, and the network of customers at London's first gay bookshop in the 1980s. However, even defining these three as the key plot threads is a bit of a misrepresentation. The Christians, especially, don't get any more page-time than a manipulative hospital patient who analyses the subculture of the ward he's on, or a group of pre-teens and teenagers getting high on 'poppers' and booze at some unspecified time in the twenty-first century (the mention of Facebook gives it away, although Hensher confusingly titles this section 'Next Year').

Despite the disconnection of the chapters, The Emperor Waltz is certainly more than a collection of short stories. Firstly, the effect of fragmenting each narrative into sections and interweaving it with other stories forces the reader, at the most basic level, to think more closely about the themes of each story, and how they are reflected in other disparate times and places. Secondly, the narratives are thematically similar in a number of different ways. The blurb on the back of the book wants to tell us that 'In each story, the larger world regards the small coterie and its passionately-held beliefs with suspicion and hostility' and that the novel is 'a magnificent story of eccentricity'. While you could fit all of Hensher's stories into this mould, I'm not sure this is what the novel is trying to tell us. It seems a bit of a stretch to treat a ward of patients and a group of disaffected youth in the same way as gay men in the 1980s or Jews in inter-war Germany. 

More interestingly, I think, Hensher is exploring the way that groups work, and how they define who is 'in' and 'out'. Rather than focusing solely on radical subcultures, he seems to be suggesting that every group has its own arcane rules and customs, and while some groups are figured as 'normal' and others as 'eccentric', that depends on where you are standing. He also depicts how the definition of a certain group as 'not like us' affects our perceptions of them; in Weimar in the 1920s, an young woman, Adele, sees Julius, a Jew, struggling to pick up a small amount of money after being the victim of anti-semitic abuse. Although Adele has not previously been depicted as bigoted, she can only interpret the scene in one way: '[she] looked for a moment at the sight of a Jew scrabbling around in the snow for money… The Jew had had his pockets stuffed full… she had seen the Jew's money scattered all about, and him wanting to do nothing but count it up'.

However, for me, the most original elements of Hensher's mediation on group behaviour were not these morally charged observations, but his consideration of how groups form in certain situations where there is no overarching conflict. Because of this, the section of the book set in a hospital, which seems unrelated to the rest of the text, was one of the most interesting for me. Our unnamed narrator (I suspect a careful re-read would enable me to work out who he is, as he clearly has interconnections to the London group) is a sharp observer, and uses that skill to win himself a private room. The entreaties of the other long-stay patients are catalogued as 'how not to do it'.  He reflects that the nurses 'existed between an onstage and an offstage set of indicators' and that the patients fell into these modes as well, referring to them as 'Nurse' when onstage and assuming 'a facial expression of terrible sweetness' when staff were nearby. The key to getting what one wants, he realises, is to find a way to connect to the nurse in 'offstage' mood, which is difficult, because trying to adopt an informal 'offstage' persona to encourage this 'only created a responding chilly formality'. He eventually connects with the Nigerian ward sister, Desdemona, by pretending he is interested in religious conversion. Hensher's attention to 'in-group' and 'out-group' language is also displayed in a very different setting; the twenty-first century teenagers hanging out, each with their own particular and 'trendy' diction - except Basil, who is hopelessly posh. Their language styles continually clash; Nick has no idea what Basil's 'pie-crust promise' is, Basil can't understand why white Nick has adopted Jamaican slang, and Nathan makes fun of Anita for inserting 'like' into all her sentences. It's a brilliantly observed and surprisingly convincing scene.

This is the first of Hensher's novels I've read, and I got the sense that he is really playing to his strengths; he is obviously an excellent observer of social detail, and has the ability to depict any coterie as if he were an insider. The novel is also very funny. As a prose writer, he's less impressive - his descriptions are workable, rather than memorable - but that's less important when the characterisation and situations are as interesting as these are. I'm looking forward to reading more from his back catalogue.

End of blog hiatus!

The thesis is finally handed in and I'm hoping to be back to a normal blogging schedule. The next month or so is very busy as I'm also getting married and moving to Oxford, but I'm hoping to stack up a few reviews to post anyway, although the schedule is still a little skeletal:



Friday August 29th: The Emperor Waltz by Philip Hensher

Friday September 5th: Mr B's Reading Year, Four: The Son by Philipp Meyer

Friday September 12th: No post - this is the day before my wedding!

Friday September 19th: J by Howard Jacobson

Friday September 26th: No post - on honeymoon!