Constance by Patrick McGrath

To say that I looked forward to reading Constance, Patrick McGrath’s latest novel would be putting it mildly. His novel Dr. Haggard’s Disease makes my favourite books list, so I approached Constance with some high expectations. McGrath’s father was the superintendent of Broadmoor Hospital, and I don’t think I’m making a leap when I say that you can see this influence in his work.  I’m specifically thinking of Asylum and Spider which were both made into excellent films in case anyone is interested. Since Patrick McGrath uses the unreliable narrator in his novels, I expected more of the same creepy insanity. Was I disappointed? Well yes and no.

SO … imagine that you are a middle-aged professor, an expert on Romantic poetry with a couple of failed marriages under your belt. You don’t think you’ll ever love again at your age and with your soured attitude towards love and relationships. And then, one night, while attending a  book party, you spot a beautiful young woman alone and out of place in the room full of people. You go and talk to her, take her from the party and go to a restaurant to talk. The young woman, whose name is Constance, is obviously damaged goods. Brittle and … yes … on the mentally fragile side. She hates her father (long story) but also has a daddy fixation. Not a good combination. And to top it off, you become the father figure in her life. How unhealthy and potentially hazardous is that?

And here’s how the novel begins:

My name is Constance Schuyler Klein. The story of my life begins the day I married an Englishman called Sidney Klein and said goodbye forever to Ravenswood and Daddy and all that went  before. I have a husband now, I thought, a new daddy. I intended to become my own woman. I intended, oh I intended everything. I saw myself reborn. Gone forever the voice of scorn and disapproval, the needling querulous voice so unshakeable in its conviction that I was worthless, worse than worthless, unnecessary.

Constance is married to her new “daddy,” and things, hardly surprisingly, are not going well. While I understand why one partner in a relationship may seek a new parent, I’ve always found the other partner facilitating that role cringeworthy. Perhaps it can work if both people in the relationship accept the parent-child dynamic but how can it be healthy and isn’t it guaranteed to be fraught with problems and tension? Naturally, it follows that this parent-child relationship is going down the toilet. Sidney is, of course, old enough to be Constance’s father (that’s why she’s attracted to him) and so according to Constance, he likes to lecture his girl-bride and ‘teach’ her how to think. Shades of Pygmalion here so often found in relationships between much older men and young women: she offers youth and he offers experience, stability and financial security.

Told in dual narratives from Constance and Sidney, narratives that are possibly unreliable from their very defensiveness, we learn how these two people met. We already know that Constance has a daddy-complex, and while Sidney seems happy enough, at least initially to accept that role, he’s attracted to Constance’s damaged self. Sidney, a lover of Romantic poetry, is working on a  book called The Conservative Heart and is at an all-time low when he first spots Constance at the book party that changed the direction of his life. Attracted by her “air of angry untouchability,” he approaches her. On Constance’s part, she sees Sidney in a far from flattering light. We’re told he’s tall and “heavy,“

It was a warm evening. I was in my light seersucker and apparently there were beads of sweat on my forehead. The effect she said later, was that of an obscure consular official going quietly mad in a far-flung outpost of empire.

Constance’s daddy complex is more than matched by Sidney’s doomed Romanticism:

I asked her about her childhood, and she told me she’d grown up with her sister, Iris, in a falling-down house in the Hudson Valley complete with a framed verandah and a tower. It had been in her family for generations, she said, but when I asked her how many generations she was vague. Oh, two at least, she said. Daddy grew up there. It stood high on a fissured bluff, and on the south side of the property a steep wooded slope descended to a wetland meadow by the railroad tracks and the river. This was the view she’d had from her bedroom window, she said, the sweep of the mighty Hudson far below her, with the Catskills in the distance. It was called Ravenswood.

It was all too good to be true. The old house with its tower on a bluff above the river, and this beautiful girl, clearly in flight from who knows what horrors she’d suffered there, it was a Romantic cliché, the whole thing. But for that I liked it all the more.

While Constance ostensibly seeks a new father figure who is everything her real father isn’t, Sidney soon, in common with Constance’s father, becomes the villain–the villain to be rebelled against. And while Sidney was initially attracted to Constance as a damsel-in-distress, that old cliché becomes wearisome when he realises that he is now the source of her distress. Sidney discovers that being the caretaker of a mentally damaged, fragile person is both draining and thankless, so when Constance’s sister, Iris, moves to New York and finds an apartment “over a noodle shop in Chinatown,” Sidney is pleased.  Sidney rather approves of Iris who intends to become a doctor like her father, and this really doesn’t help the child-parent dynamic between Constance and Sidney as this effectively recreates the toxic competition between the two sisters for attention. Sidney’s approval of the freshly relocated Iris,  “a messy beatnik floozy,” very effectively signals trouble for Constance’s marriage.

McGrath novels often include a lurid, pathological past, and there are hints of that from Constance, and those hints blow wide open into a lingering malignancy as the book progresses. All the past secrets, of course, reside at Ravenswood, a house that is slipping into decay–symbolic of course of the pathological secrets buried deep in the past. Why is Constance’s father (who reminds Sidney of the “pitchfork man in Grant Wood’s American Gothic”) so emotionally distant from his daughter? There are shades of du Maurier’s Rebecca here in the very unhealthy atmosphere at the family home at Ravenswood. There’s a creepy dried, up, “sour,” housekeeper, Mildred Knapp, who takes over after the lonely death of Constance and Iris’s mother Harriet. What’s the dark secret involving Mildred’s husband, and why are certain topics strictly off limits at Ravenswood? The book has an underlying trademark McGrath creepiness, with its emphasis on death and decay. Buildings and people fall apart. While one character is slowly dying, New York’s Penn Station is being stripped and noisily demolished–both incidents depress Sidney who sees the pointless destruction of the station as evidence of the decay of civilization.

Constance is a problematic character in this beautifully written novel in which the characters never quite seem comfortable together as they drift through the story rather like disinterested dance partners. While Constance is the less-favoured daughter, there’s something of the spoiled brat about her damaged air, and for this reader, there were a couple of story threads which were never fully explored–one involving oily lounge lizard, pianist Eddie Castrol, thrown into the mix but underexploited for the plot.  Dr. Haggard’s Disease remains my favourite McGrath novel, and it’s a book that set an impossibly high standard to beat, and unfortunately Constance doesn’t come close. The madness and obsession found in Asylum, Spider and Dr Haggard’s Disease appear in Constance but in a much lighter dose. There were occasions when the novel seemed about to take the reader down the dark labyrinth of total insanity, but instead the story lands on neuroticism. Does Gothic not translate effectively to Manhattan in the 60s? Or is Gothic simply replaced by its more modern counterpart, Neuroticism?

But she had such a tricky psyche, all turned in on itself like a convoluted seashell, like a nautilus, and at times I caught her talking to herself as though in response to what she heard in that seashell. When I asked her who she was talking to she’d all at once startle and wouldn’t tell me. It was disquieting.

Review copy.

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

“There were doorways between this world and the next.”

In 2012, one of my books-of-the-year was J. Robert Lennon’s remarkable novel,  Familiar–the story of an ordinary woman who finds herself in a parallel universe in which her troubled son didn’t die. Should she be happy about this instant, inexplicable transplant? Well yes, but just because one bad thing didn’t happen doesn’t mean that her ‘new’ life is altogether better….Anyway Familiar is a novel that deserves a lot of readers and a lot more attention than it received. And now on to another novel that also deals with the very difficult idea of alternate lives–an intriguing novel that has received an avalanche of positive criticism: Kate Atkinson’s  rich, imaginative Life After Life.

I’d read a few of Kate Atkinson’s earlier novels, and from the plot description, I was intrigued but also just a little skeptical. This is the story of Ursula Todd who initially is born and dies on a bitterly cold, snow-filled night in the year 1910. Birth and death. It’s a short chapter. But then subsequent chapters offer alternate scenarios with Ursula surviving by some miracle of timing. Given the date of her birth, of course she lives through WWI and WWII–although once again different scenarios in chapters covering specific dated blocks of time follow Ursula’s life as she reaches certain crossroads, makes certain choices, sometimes dying by some fluke accident or swept up as a statistic of history.

Ursula grows up to be a very unusual child and an equally unusual young woman. Ursula is taken to see Dr. Kellet, a psychiatrist at one point after a particular strange incident, and he suggests to Ursula that “perhaps the part of your brain responsible for memory has a little flaw, a neurological problem that leads you to think you are repeating experiences.” Ursula, much later in the novel, in another version of her life tells Dr Kellet that “time isn’t circular… it’s like a palimpsest.”

Life After Life, to be honest, isn’t the easiest book to review. Normally one can tread through a certain amount of plot, but in this case, too much plot detail will reveal too much. There were several occasions, I felt tempted to trace out a timeline of Ursula’s various lives, choices and deaths, but I was wrapped up in the story, I didn’t want to analyze it too much, and there is a sort of magic to this sort of highly imaginative narration. Is this science fiction? Is this a story of parallel universes? Or is this one giant ‘what-if’? Laced with intriguing ideas including déjà-vu, destiny & fate, reincarnation, and Nietzsche’s amor fati, this is a novel that embraces all possibilities. I don’t think there’s any point in trying to nail down exactly what happens with time and fate in the novel. As a reader, you either accept it or not. Sort of reminds me of Terminator– logic doesn’t apply; it’s the story that counts. Author Kate Atkinson grants Ursula just an inkling that she’s somehow ’different,’ and those parallel lives, created by alternate choices, are sensed, rather than known, as they whisper, close in the shadows “through a glass darkly”:

Everything familiar somehow. “It’s called déjà vu,” Sylvie said. “It’s trick of the mind. The mind is a fathomless mystery.” Ursula was sure that she could recall lying in a baby carriage beneath the tree. “No,” Sylvie said, “no one can remember being so small,” yet Ursula remembered the leaves, like great green hands, waving in the breeze and the silver hare that hung from the carriage hood, tuning and twisting in front of her face. Sylvie sighed. “You do have a very vivid imagination, Ursula.” Ursula didn’t know if this was a compliment or not but it was certainly true that she often felt confused between what was real and what was not. And the terrible fear–fearful terror–that she carried around inside her. The dark landscape within. “Don’t dwell on such things, ” Sylvie said sharply when Ursula tried to explain. “Think sunny thoughts.”

And sometimes, too, she knew what someone was about to say before they said it or what mundane incident was about to occur–if a dish was about to be dropped or an apple thrown through a glasshouse, as if these things had happened many times before. Words and phrases echoed themselves, strangers seemed like old acquaintances.

While this is a very clever novel that presents some intriguing possibilities about alternate lives, for this reader, the novel’s strength is rooted in its incredibly good characterisations. Ursula is the third of five children whose parents are Sylvie and Hugh Todd–a golden family whose permanent, idyllic country home at Fox Corner, replete with relatives, friends, dogs and servants, is the sort of loving, supportive environment that breeds individuality and contentment.  The novel covers over 50 years of history with various scenarios, various choices made played out against the two world wars, and although fate and history may be changed by a moment’s decision, Fox Corner remains a stable presence in the midst of global madness and upheaval. Ursula is, of course, the central character, and the choices she makes–some crucial and some deceptively simple, directly influence her various lives and lovers, but the fates of various characters in the Todd family circle also change with each of Ursula’s lives. The family’s irrepressible black sheep of the family, Isobel, Izzie, “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” is by far my favourite character.

One of the great appeals of this ultimately optimistic novel can be explained in its call to our collective subconscious. For who among us has not, upon occasion experienced a sense of déjà vu–a feeling that we’ve been in a certain place or met a certain person before, and who has not wondered about the paths our lives would have taken if we’d turned a corner just a few seconds later? How often have you thought of an alternate self, a self that might have been if you’d made a different decision?

She had obscure memories of elation, of falling into darkness, but they belonged to that world of shadows and dreams that was ever present and yet almost impossible to pin down.

I’m not the only one who finds Atkinson’s latest phenomenal. Here’s Kevin’s review and also one from a long-time friend.

Hunters and Gatherers by Geoff Nicholson

“As he made love to the girl last night he kept feeling that something was missing. Actually, several things were missing–passion, affection, mutual respect–but he could easily live without those.”

Back to my celebration of the works of Geoff Nicholson with his next novel, Hunters and Gatherers, and it’s with this novel that, IMO, the author really begins to hit his stride. Hunters and Gatherers is seriously good Nicholson, and I loved it.

The characters in Nicholson’s novels are often obsessives of one sort or another, and in Hunters and Gatherers, we find an author, Steve Geddes after a failed marriage and a move to Sheffield, who’s trying to write a book about collectors. There’s an inherent problem with this: while the book is supposed to be a “serious but good-humoured, off-beat, non-fiction work about people who collect things,” Steve has little respect for his subject. He intends to fill the pages with details of “dubious but entertaining eccentrics who had unlikely, bizarre or exceptionally useless collections.” Rather oddly, Steve thinks he’s the “right person” to be writing this book, but the truth is that he’s fundamentally “baffled” by the idea that anyone would want to collect anything:

At bottom I was somehow opposed to the activity. I thought it was a ‘bad thing’. I thought the collecting instinct was a form of grasping covetousness. People owned collections in order to experience the dubious pleasures of ownership. What were these pleasures? What pleasure came from owning, say, ten Fabergé eggs, as opposed to only owning five? Only the pleasure of partially satisfied greed, and it is in the nature of greed that it can never be wholly satisfied.

Then there were all those collections that somehow missed the point. People collect toys that couldn’t be played with, plates that couldn’t be eaten from, jewellery that couldn’t be worn. That was insane. And then there were collections of things peripheral to the activity that caused them to exist. I could see why people might want to go to the theatre or to football matches. I could see why people might go wild about Elvis Presley’s music, but not why they wanted to collect Elvis memorabilia.

So here we have an author writing a book he doesn’t believe in–or I should say trying to write a book he doesn’t believe in. And here’s yet another problem–Steve has accepted a large advance for the book, but although he’s compiled extensive notes, he’s unable to actually write anything. By trying to write this book, in the process, he’s paradoxically become a collector–the very sort of person he doesn’t understand. Is this why he’s mired in a serious case of writer’s block? As Steve pushes onward with his interviews of various eccentric collectors and their bizarre collections, something very strange begins to happen–various collections are mysteriously destroyed or simply disappear. What madness is afoot?

The novel goes back and forth between third person and Steve’s first person narration, and we meet an impressive cast of characters who are all obsessive collectors in one way or another. There’s Victoria who collects lovers, Victoria’s husband who collects cars, a comedian who collects jokes, “England’s foremost collector of and expert on beer cans,” a girl who collects sounds, and Mike who owns the successful, used “flash” car lot, Killer Kars, who collects women’s knickers. In the wake of meeting Victoria, Mike quietly undergoes a crisis of character.

He would say  that he believes in trying most things once, but he now sees how little he has tried. Of course there are all sorts of things he wouldn’t want to try–all the obvious ones that are painful and disgusting, and no doubt a hundred and one other things that people no doubt do but which he can’t even imagine, the sort of thing they get up to in London.

While Mike reexamines his life, his underachiever friend, employee and mobile home dweller Jim, embarks on the collection of knowledge. This rather peculiar, never-ending and somewhat ephemeral quest is inspired by Jim’s passion for a passing encyclopedia saleswoman.  Jim decides that “knowledge is power,” and driven by his desire to impress the rather strange encyclopedia saleswoman, he decides to groom himself for quiz shows and “become a bit of a celebrity.” Jim’s collection of knowledge is soon like any other–insatiable and unstoppable. He ‘invests’ in the set of encyclopedias. To say the entries in The Books of Power, are eccentric and bizarre is a wild understatement. Here are some samples entries for England:

English food: the sandwich, sirloin and pease pudding, spotted dick and custard, fish and chips, cakes and ale.

The English character: reserved. Except at pantomimes,  football matches, wedding receptions, in pubs and clubs, on picket lines, at New Year’s sales, at the bingo, at the seaside, on coach parties

Some famous English obsessions: Ireland, public schools, contempt for the French.

World War One: trenches, appalling casualties but some damn fine poetry

World War Two: the blitz, sleeping in the Underground, VE Day–dancing in the streets. The GIs, over here and all over everybody

Democracy:  chained themselves to railings, that woman who threw herself under a horse.

Steve’s rejection of collections is re-evaluated when he discovers that his all-time favourite author, the extremely reclusive novelist, Thornton McCain, may have written another book that appears to have vanished. Obsessed with discovering the truth (and the missing book,) Steve tries to locate his hero who seems to be everywhere and nowhere.

There are three things to remember about Geoff Nicholson novels:

1. They’re funny in a very dark humor sort of way
2. Nicholson does not create normal characters. In fact a great number of them seem to be pervies
3. Nicholson novels spin and build and appear to go out of control, but that’s just because you can’t seen the hidden, carefully constructed design behind all the madness.

And finally one last quote:

If you want to come here and fuck my wife that’s one thing, but if you do then you have an obligation to make a decent job of it, otherwise piss off and stop wasting everybody’s time.

I’ll be skipping the next Nicholson novel, The Food Chain. I’m a vegan and I’m sure the author will understand why I’m giving this one a pass.

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

“Haven’t you noticed how we all specialize in what we hate most?”

Thanks to the reissue of Lucky Jim by New York Review books, I decided on a reread–something I do occasionally with books that I’ve especially liked. The lure of this re-read can be explained by my inordinate passion for the Campus novel, my admiration for Kingsley Amis, and my fondness for NYRB in general. It’s been years since I first came across Lucky Jim, and I remember that I found it to be one of the funniest novels I’d ever read.

The intro written by Keith Gessen made the purchase worthwhile (plus my old copy has gone astray). Gessen writes with a light comic touch combined with an understanding of Amis’s early struggles and a good grasp of the humiliations suffered by anyone trying to get their foot in the door of academia. Gessen begins with a description of Amis and Philip Larkin:

Lucky Jim is a young man’s book, in fact the book of two young men. They weren’t exactly angry young men, but they were extremely irritable. College friends with similar backgrounds, they had graduated from both Oxford and the Second World War to find themselves in an England that was in terminal decline. It was bankrupt. It was losing the overseas possessions that had once been its pride, and the people in charge were snobs and incompetents. Worst of all, no one seemed to appreciate the young men’s genius: neither the women they met nor the publishers to whom they sent their work.

That’s the first wonderful paragraph that both sets the tone for the novel and makes the point that the relationship between Amis and Larkin became the genesis for Lucky Jim–a comic novel in which the protagonist is a “hybrid” of the two men. Included are a few hilarious extracts from letters Amis wrote to Larkin with their included digs at academia, and here we see the frustration felt by the fictional Jim Dixon. Amis and Larkin obviously chafed at the constraints imposed by academic life, and the invention of the game, ” ‘horsepissing,’  in which they’d replace words from classic texts with obscenities” is evidence of their rebellion within the ranks. And it’s this sort of rebellion that explains the duality of the behaviour of the novel’s protagonist, Jim Dixon, for while he bows and scrapes to ensure his continued employment at the university, he also actively sabotages his efforts.

The novel begins with Jim Dixon trying–somewhat unsuccessfully–to pin Professor Welch to an offer of tea at his home. It’s not that Dixon really wants to go for tea since this means having to endure Welch’s mind-numbingly boring company, but it’s a politically wise engagement for a young man who wishes to impress his boss and hopes to stay teaching medieval history at the university at which he’s tentatively employed for two years. Welch, a university fossil, is a powerful individual whose nod of approval will go a long way. This is a frightening prospect as Welch prefers to waffle on about his recorder playing or madrigal singing rather than discuss Dixon’s future at the university. Dixon finds it impossible to steer Welch onto the desired subject–let alone extract two coherent sentences from the man. Although, of course, Welch isn’t quite as deranged as he pretends to be. The waffling, the indecision, the rambling, barely coherent sentences are a modus operandi frequently employed by those fossilized professors who are firmly entrenched in the halls of academia. Here’s a wonderful example of Jim trying to have a conversation with Welch on that ever-important topic of publication:

‘Yes, that Caton chap who advertised in the T.L.S. a couple of months ago. Starting up a new historical review with an international bias, or something. I thought I’d get in straight away. After all, a new journal can’t very well be bunged up as far ahead as all the ones I’ve…’

‘Ah yes, a new journal might be worth trying. There was one advertised in the Times Literary Supplement a little while ago. Paton or some such name the editor fellow was called. you might have a go at him, now that it doesn’t seem as if any of the more established reviews have got room for your … effort. let’s see now; what’s the exact title you’ve given it?’

Dixon looked out of the window at the fields wheeling past, bright green after a wet April. it wasn’t the double-exposure effect of the last minute’s talk that had dumbfounded him, for such incidents formed the staple material of Welch colloquies; it was the prospect of reciting the title of the article he’d written. It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funeral parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw on non-problems. Dixon had read, or begun to read, dozens like it, but his own seemed worse than most in its air of being convinced of its own usefulness and significance. ‘In considering this strangely neglected topic,’ it began. This what neglected topic? this strangely what topic? His thinking all this without having defiled and set fire to the typescript only made him appear to himself as more of a hypocrite and fool. ‘Let’s see,’ he echoed Welch in a pretended effort of memory: ‘oh yes; The Economic Influence of Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450-1485.’

That quote is one of my favourites from the book as it captures Jim’s frustration (which he can do little about) and the niggling feeling that he’s a fraud since he cannot, in all honesty, believe that his chosen topic is anything less than catatonically boring and hardly relevant to the world outside of the university walls. But that’s the brilliant thing about academia: find some obscure topic which is obscure for a reason, and then write about it convincingly as though you’ve uncovered something that will rock the world to its foundations.

The novel is concerned with Dixon’s antics as he tries to ensure his future teaching History, but there’s a subconscious element to Dixon which, paradoxically, actively works against him, and it’s through this strain that the novel’s humour emerges as we see Dixon actively sabotage his own bowing and scraping efforts to please Welch. Dixon manages to get himself invited to the Welch home for the weekend, but since he knows he won’t be able to stand (read ‘behave‘) the company for the entire time, he arranges for a roommate to call with an ‘emergency’ that requires his presence back home. The weekend at Professor Welch’s home repeatedly illustrates Dixon’s inability to fit in. He gets drunk and trashes his room, and in order to cover up the damage he enlists the help of Christine, the girlfriend of his sworn enemy, pretentious, insufferable artist Bertrand Welch, who just happens to be the son of the man who can make or break Jim Dixon’s career.

For most of the story, Jim seems to be trapped in his own life. He’s frantic to impress Welch, a man he cannot admire; he’s not in the least attracted to neurotic fellow academic Margaret but still dallies with her as she seems within his league. He also tries to evade the earnest questions of serious student, Michie, who has the audacity of having an extremely attractive girlfriend and the annoying habit of trying to pin Jim down to concrete study descriptions. Does it escape Jim’s attention that he’s as wily and slippery with Mitchie as Welch is, in his turn, with Dixon?

Lucky Jim, published in 1954, was Kingsley Amis’s first book, and what a brilliant start to a glorious career. Apart from all the humour, it’s a significant book. Here’s Kingsley Amis, from a humble background, a scholarship boy, who made good and dragged himself up by his bootstraps into the hallowed halls of St John’s College, Oxford. Was he grateful to find the door open? Was he flattered to be invited inside that ivory tower to join the echelons of England’s Elite, or did he discover that no matter what, he was always going to be the awkward guest at the table?

Lucky Jim is a story of conformity, a story about how one man tries to fit in the confines of a career culture that part of him has no desire to belong to. We realise this, of course, before Jim does, and that’s what makes his half-hearted efforts and his self-sabotage so funny.  If he wants to impress Welch, he should learn to play the recorder and demand more madrigal singing. He should settle down and calmly and methodically court Margaret. He should flatter Bertrand and stop poaching Christine. But, of course, Jim can do none of these things, and this is where the novel’s wonderful humour can be found. Jim knows what he should do, but there’s part of him that rebels against conformity and longs to break free of the constraints imposed by an academic life. I, for one, identified with Jim, and so cheered him on through all of his delightful scrapes, hilariously bad behaviour, and unfulfilled revenge fantasies.

NW by Zadie Smith

If I had to describe Zadie Smith’s latest novel, NW, I’d say ‘brilliant but difficult.’ That’s a compliment, but at the same time I can see why many readers would drop out along the way. This is a novel set in a distinct geographical area of London, the NW (Northwest) of the title, but specifically focusing on Willesden–an area with a vast social history:

A great hill straddles NW, rising in Hampstead, West Hampstead, Kilburn, Willesden, Brondesbury, Cricklewood. It is no stranger to the world of letters. The Woman in White walks up one side to meet the highwayman Jack Sheppard on the other. Sometimes Dickens himself comes this far west and north for a pint or to bury someone. Look, there on the library carpet between Science Fiction and Local History: a knotted condom filled with sperm. Once this was all farm and field with country villas nodding at each other along the ridge of this hill. Train stations have replaced them, at half-mile intervals.

That passage gives the essence of the author’s style–a vibrant cacophony of voices and colliding lives in this exploration of class and race through friends and their relationships. At the heart of the story are two women–friends from childhood. Keisha has moved on from her beginnings and transformed into Natalie while her friend Leah appears to be locked in the past–stuck on the spot, left wondering about the validity of her choices while the rest of the world whirls by. Has Natalie matured, and this is the novel’s great question, or is maturity just another way of describing an upwardly mobile, affluent life?

The novel begins with Leah, a young white woman of Irish background, who lives with Michel, a French hairdresser of African descent, opening the door to the apparently distressed Shar. Leah’s neighbourhood is questionable, and even opening the door and letting this young woman in–someone who attended the same underachieving school, is an act of bravery, and even a sort of social defiance as it later turns out. The intruder is Shar, and she wants money, she claims, to go and visit her ill mother in the hospital. As in often true in good Samaritan acts, the decision to help Shar is based in Leah’s perception of herself, and this is our introduction to Leah.

This seemingly small incident has a ripple effect with serious ramifications for Leah. For Leah, time has stood still since she finished “three years of useless study” which culminated in the collection of a degree in Philosophy which has no practical application and does not translate to her employment as “the only white girl on the Fund Distribution Team.” Leah seems disconnected with her life, as if she washed up, shipwrecked in this place, in a relationship with no idea exactly how she arrived there.

Meanwhile Leah’s childhood friend, Natalie aka Keisha, “the girl that done good,” now a married barrister, invites Leah and Michel to dinner parties at their posh home, and it’s here amongst the other guests, that Leah and Michel stick out rather uncomfortably. Not that Michel seems to notice.

Nothing in Leah’s childhood prepared her for the frequency with which she now attends dinner parties, most often at Natalie’s house, where she and Michel are invited to provide something like local colour. Neither of them know what to say to barristers and bankers, to the occasional judge. Natalie cannot believe that they are shy. Each time she blames some error of placement but each time the awkwardness remains. They are shy, whether Natalie believes it or not. They have no gift for anecdote. They look down at their plates and cut their food with great care, letting Natalie tell their stories for them, nodding to confirm points of fact, names, times, places. Offered to the table for general dissection these anecdotes take on their own life, separate, impressive.

I can’t review the book without touching on the author’s style, and at this point I’ll add that I am not a fan of experimental writing. Don’t hand me a book that has pages without punctuation and even stream of consciousness is pushing it. These techniques may be fun for the author, but they annoy me.  Nonetheless, with these prejudices in mind, some of Zadie Smith’s stylistic decisions worked excellently, and she’s a genius for dialogue. Here for example, is a passage from one of Natalie’s swanky dinner parties. You can almost hear the dishes and cutlery, the mastication of the teeth, and the banal comments made to the person on the right by her upwardly mobile, and smug guests, safe in the cocoon of their ever-growing affluence.

Many of the parents are immigrants–from Jamaica, from Ireland, from India, from China–and they can’t understand why they have not yet been invited to live with their children, as is the custom, in their countries. Technology is offered as a substitute for that impossible request. Stairlifts. Pacemakers. Hip replacements. Dialysis machines. But nothing satisfies them. They worked hard so that we children might live like this. They “literally” will not be happy until they’ve moved in our houses. They can never move in our houses. Pass the heirloom tomato salad. The thing about Islam. Let me tell you about Islam. The thing about the trouble with Islam. What do you think, Samhita, yeah what do you think, Samhita, what’s your take on this?  Samhita, the copyright lawyer. Pass the tuna. Solutions are passed across the table, strategies. Private wards. Private cinemas. Christmas abroad. A restaurant with only five tables in it. Security systems. Fences. The carnage of a 4×4 that lets you sit alone above traffic. There is a perfect isolation out there somewhere, you can get it, although it doesn’t come cheap.

Other stylistic maneuvers did not work so well for this reader. The lack of inverted commas, at least for the first part of the book caused me to wonder, more than once, who was saying what, or even if these statements were thoughts rather than speech. While the first section of the novel concerns Leah, the second section moves ahead with Felix, a recovering drug addict who think he’s putting his past behind him and moving forward in a new relationship with the dynamic Grace. At first there was a sense of frustration that Leah was more or less left behind while Felix’s story developed. This section, however, was so good, I quickly forgot my grumbling and submerged myself into Felix’s story as he buys a dilapidated sports car from upper class Tom, the sort of person we might find sitting around the table at one of Natalie’s soirées.  

One of the novel’s very best scenes takes place between Felix and Annie, his former fellow addict and sometime sex partner. It’s in this scene that the entire notion of ‘getting ahead’ and ‘moving on’ is dragged out into the open and trammelled on by the very confident and self-possessed Annie. Note the appearance of inverted commas:

“You listening? Next level. People can spend their whole lives just dwelling. I could spend my whole life dwelling on some of the shit that’s happened to me. I done that. Now it’s time for the next level. I’m moving up in the game. And I’m ready for it.”

“Yes, yes, I’ve grasped the metaphor, you don’t have to keep repeating it.”

Annie lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply and exhaled it through her nose.

“Life’s not a video game, Felix–there aren’t a certain number of points that send you up to the next level. There isn’t actually any next level. The bad news is that everyone dies at the end. Game over.”  

It’s these sorts of vibrantly alive scenes that, for this reader, made up for the rest of the novel’s difficult moments. After finishing the book, I found myself returning and chewing over Annie’s arguments. She’s arguably one of the most fucked up people in the book, and yet she’s intelligent, coherent, perfectly comfortable in her own skin, and living in poverty. She is mentally in the sort of place that Leah can’t seem to reach. Leah is being propelled ahead by the current, but she’s not altogether copacetic with ‘moving up,’ and Leah, who is “faithful in her allegiance” to her roots certainly doesn’t want to be the sort of person that Natalie has become. There’s an uncomfortable undercurrent to the lives of these Londoners, and the novel questions society’s notions of “the next level.” Acquiring affluence is arguably a questionable goal, and yet that is the quest for the characters here who appear to succeed in a sink or swim society while other lost characters, Nathan Bogle is just one example, are wrecked and washed up by crack. I found myself wondering what would happen in Zadie Smith’s NW if we mixed up the characters a bit and invited Annie to Natalie’s table? Would Annie and Leah be friends? Would Felix admire Michel? How would someone like Natalie cope with someone as potentially myth-puncturing as Annie? These are all rhetorical questions, of course, because that’s the whole point of ‘moving on.’ You drop those people who no longer fit in.

A writer of Zadie Smith’s standing can get away with a lot of idiosyncratic moves that would trash a newer, humbler writer. The Big Questions here, and each reader will decide independently, are whether 1) the novel works and 2) whether Zadie Smith is aware of the unevenness and inconsistencies of the novel. For this reader, it’s a resounding yes to both questions.

Thanks to John Self at Asylum for recently interviewing Zadie Smith and reviewing the book.

Review copy.

What We Did On Our Holidays by Geoff Nicholson

Moving along with the third novel in my Year of Geoff Nicholson brings me to What We Did On Our Holidays, a dark, wickedly funny, and nastily subversive novel which follows the trials and tribulations of one man who drags his family off on a tent holiday. What We Did On Our Holidays was actually the first Nicholson novel I ever read, and while I recognised that I’d found a seriously different author, the book also made me a devoted fan.

Regular readers of this blog know that I have a weakness for books which depict people on their holidays. There are several reasons for this: Holidays are high stake events, but expectations don’t mesh with reality. Plus close confinement serves to highlight family fractures that perhaps have been deftly avoided or even unnoticed. You could definitely say that middle-aged Eric, our narrator, and the man who plans and organises the family hol, has no idea what he’s in for.

Eric’s 45th birthday is approaching. Wanting to “get off this rat race” for a while, and suffering from “an intense bout of middle-aged angst,” Eric overrules his family’s objections, and books two weeks in a caravan in the Skegness Tralee Carapark and Holiday Centre. Already by page 2, we know that there’s something wrong with Eric. His narrative presentations are somehow off. Here he sounds as though he swallowed the Holiday Centre advertising brochure:

It is a well-designed, attractively appointed, carefully screened, compact site, on level ground, with trees and bushes, sloping gently towards the sea on one side, with small but sylvan hills to the rear. It has outstanding panoramic views and is genuinely picturesque. There are extensive showering and toilet facilities, a site shop, a launderette, a children’s playground, and calor gas supply.

Perhaps Eric is just one of those boring, dull people who never show a spark of life or original thought. He suffers humiliating encounter after humiliating encounter with various characters in and around the holiday camp. Someone let the loonies out, and they’re all there to victimize poor Eric–there’s the psychotic policeman Hollerenshaw who’d like to fit Eric up for every crime that’s occurred in the area, a crooked car-dealer named Honest Iago, a gang of violent bikers, a disaffected shop clerk who’s ready to get violent for better pay, a stuttering bingo caller, and some sexually rapacious acrobatic dwarves. And what is going on with the Garcias in the caravan next door?

Eric may seem to be the meek recipient of constant abuse, but there’s a lot more to Eric than meets the eye. After all, any man whose Joan Crawford obsession is strong enough that he needs to take a coffee table book of his idol on holiday can’t be all bad, right? Perhaps still waters run deep.

I find it fairly hard to say just what Joan had that really hits the spot for me. Of course she was sexy and statuesque, but who wasn’t in those days? of course she had flashing eyes, a finely chiselled nose with flaring nostrils, and a warm, melting mouth. She was distinguished, determined, passionate, perhaps a little haughty. But she had something more than all of these. She had class. She was also something of an icon.

In later years it was revealed that Joan had appeared in blue movies before she got her big break. That didn’t exactly gild the lily but I never held it against her. It only made me feel a deep compassion for her; and it proved,. as if proof were necessary, that above all else Joan was a survivor.

But Eric is not just under assault from the strangers who cross his path–his family is also revolting (deliberate pun). His daughter Sally has turned into a religious maniac, and son Max decides that Skegness is a great place to go primitive. As for Eric’s wife, Kathleen, who packs up 4 suitcases of dirty laundry to take on holiday, she’s the originator of such vomit-worthy dishes as turnip and corned beef flambé, and she’s also a raving nymphomaniac who’s reading a book called Canine Orgasm. Eric calls it pornography, but Kathleen defends the book as erotica. Not that this insatiable woman needs any more ideas on the subject, mind you.

All of Eric’s sorry misadventures are recorded in diary entries. These entries amount to one humiliating encounter after another, but there are also a few lists such as Eric’s “pet hates” and his “political statement.” It’s through these very private lists and diatribes that we see that underneath Eric’s moronic exterior lurks some strange and equally moronic thinking:

Unions are a very good thing if they protect workers’ rights, but a bad thing if they become all militant and subversive.

I think people should be free to walk the streets without being molested by the police, and they should certainly be allowed to sleep in their own caravans, unless of course they’re criminals, in which case the police should go in fast and hard. It doesn’t pay to have a soft police-force. I think most police are doing a good job but there’s always one bad apple and unfortunately I seem to have met him. I’m no fan of capital punishment but how else can you make people see sense?

I think education’s to blame. Everybody’s entitled to an education, but sometimes it seems to me that all we’re doing is educating people to be unhappy with what they’ve got. They all think they’re so bloody clever. And if the State can’t provide a good education then it’s only fair to be able to send your kids to school so long as they don’t turn out a bunch of toffee-nosed snobs and poofs.

While the holiday was designed to bring Eric and his family closer, confinement in the tatty, smelly caravan has the opposite effect. Sally, Max and Kathleen all behave badly and go wild in their own ways. Here’s Eric remonstrating with Max about his behaviour:

“Don’t you see Dad, this is all a sham.”

He gesticulated wildly at me, at Kathleen and Sally, at the caravan, at the world beyond. He picked up his plate, scooped the food in his mouth, licked the plate clean and threw it over his shoulder.

“If rejecting civilisation means an end to good table manners, then it seems a sorry show to me,” I said.

Max roared again. He knocked over the table, snatched up a chair and smashed it against the caravan wall. He started to leave.

“Just where do you think you’re going, young man?”

After some more animal noises he said very distinctly, “I’m going native.”

“In Lincolnshire?” I demanded, incredulous, but it was too late to argue with him. He was already out of the door and disappearing on all fours.

I suppose this wasn’t exactly the effect I’d hoped my little chat would have, and if I had my time again I’d probably be more gentle with him, though frankly I’m still not sure exactly what I did wrong. Kathleen began talking to me again and accused me of being a bully and a home-wrecker, which I hotly denied. Nobody bullies Max these days. Basically I’m sure it will do Max the world of good to get away from the nest for a while, and, if nothing else, at least our little exchange has cleared the air.

These humiliating encounters which always have bad results for Eric typically end with this sort of peculiar non-response, so the last passage will give you a sense of the novel’s tone. This repetition is the novel’s weakness as a normal character wouldn’t take this, and after each anti-climatic encounter, I started to wonder if Eric was heavily medicated, but then again, we are seeing all this through Eric’s eyes, and just how reliable a narrator is he? Author Geoff Nicholson ties all the madness together in a very satisfying and transgressive manner, and by the novel’s conclusion as events spiral out of control, it’s clear that while Eric’s world is a strange, inhospitable place, perhaps Eric’s head is even a worse place to be. I could waffle on about how What We Did On Our Holidays is a subversive exploration of the moral bankruptcy of modern family life, and while that’s true, the book is also a good laugh for anyone who’s been stuck with their family for two miserable holiday-from-hell weeks.

Lionel Asbo by Martin Amis

I’m not interested in giving specifics, but British author Martin Amis seems to have a sour relationship with the press, and while I have no idea (and couldn’t care less) how this started, if there’s a horn-effect (the opposite of a halo effect), I’ve seen it in the many articles written about, or featuring Martin Amis–he can’t even go to the dentist without being criticised. Frankly, I don’t care how much he spends on his teeth; I just want to read his books. I’m glad to see that Amis is unapologetic in interviews–giving back as good as he gets.

I loved several titles by Martin Amis–Money is one of my all-time favourite books (any writer who makes me laugh deserves special note), but I disliked Yellow Dog, and this is a way of explaining that I am not a rabid fan of anything Amis writes. His memoir Experience included a section about the murder of his cousin Lucy Partington by serial killer Fred West which somehow drew criticism, but I found it to be one of the most moving pieces I’ve ever read. 

All this preamble to say that anything Amis writes will stir controversy, and this brings me to the author’s latest book, Lionel Asbo: State of England, a comic novel which targets celebrity culture and a book that has received its share of nasty reviews. We’ve all seen the sort of thing Amis is writing about, and reality TV plays no small role in the current obsession with the bad behaviour of a few people who are jettisoned to instant stardom for no other reason than they make startling and frequent headlines with their out-of-control behaviour.

Young Desmond Pepperdine, 15 when the novel begins in 2006, lives with his wily, uncouth uncle Lionel, a career criminal in Diston Town.  Des questions why his uncle changed his last name to ASBO (Anti-Social Behaviour Order) as it’s certainly a red flag to any judge or police officers, and he wonders if his uncle is stupid.  As we see as the novel plays out, Lionel, who is cunning and crafty, simply doesn’t care what people think of him, and his new surname is not only a signifier of defiance, but a full-on declaration of war.

While the novel explores the sometimes difficult relationship between Des and his delinquent uncle, this raucous tale (and I laughed out loud many times)  also examines Lionel’s relationship with society–a relationship which threatens to undergo significant change as the novel develops, but more of that later.

The novel opens with Desmond’s confession that he’s having an affair with his grandmother, the libidinous Grace, a lively 39-year-old, mother of 7 by age 19, and still a goer who’s so obsessed with the Beatles that she named 5 children after them (including the “forgotten Beatle“). Lionel, who seems to have a problem with women’s sexuality in general (he nurses a strange and unhealthy passion for the “promiscuous beauty” Gina Drago), can’t stand the idea of his mother having a sex life, and he’s long since declared she’s “past it.” With a dearth of males bold enough to visit Grace and test the wrath of Lionel, perhaps it was only a matter of time before  Grace, sporting a babydoll nightie, seduced Des–one of the few males Lionel allows to visit his mum. Whether or not Lionel is going to discover the short-lived affair between Grace and Des is one of the main story lines–or at least it’s a major pre-occupation for Des.

The other main thread concerns Lionel’s lifestyle changes when he wins the lotto and is dubbed the “lotto lout” by the papers, but when the novel opens Des and his uncle share a humble flat which is the centre of Lionel’s petty criminal operations and is guarded by two gigantic pitbulls, Jeff and Joe–kept vicious and temperamental through a diet laced with Tabasco sauce. The flat is badly furnished but includes a wall-sized TV which dominates the kitchen–not that there’s much else going in this room as pasty Lionel and Des don’t exactly believe in good nutrition, and daily breakfast consists of Lionel’s nod to fruit: the poptart.   

The two main characters, Des and Lionel, are an interesting study in contrasts. Orphaned Des, who attends Squeers Free School wants to get ahead in life–the non criminal way, and yet he’s under the thumb of his thuggish Uncle Lionel–a man who despises education, flaunts every societal code of politeness, and boomerangs back to prison every few years. Lionel, who’s an expert on the subject on crime and incarceration is “almost up to PhD level on questions of criminal law.” Des could be pressured into becoming a Lionel-clone, but instead while he obeys his uncle, he doesn’t agree with how he behaves:

Lionel’s trade was still something of a mystery to Des. He knew that part of it had to do with the hairiest end of debt collection; and he knew that part of it involved ‘selling on’ (Lionel’s word for selling on was reset). Des knew this by simple logic, because Extortion with Menaces and Receiving Stolen Property were what Lionel most often went to prison for … He stood there, Lionel, doing something he was very good at: disseminating tension. Des loved him deeply and more or less unquestioningly ( I wouldn’t be here today without Uncle Li, he often said to himself). But he always felt slightly ill in his presence. Not ill at ease. Ill.

Throughout this extremely funny novel, Lionel, as his nephew’s theoretical role model, provides Des with ‘fatherly’ advice, and coming from Lionel, the results are extremely funny and potentially corrupting:

Porn. You see, Des, this is it. You don’t actually need girls. Girls? They more trouble than they worth if you ask me. With the Mac, you can have three new bunk-ups every day–just by using your imagination! And it doesn’t cost you fuck all. Okay. Lecture over. So endeth the first lesson. Just promise you’ll ponder me words. And here’s an extra fiver for yuh. 

The novel’s comic aspects really takes off when Lionel wins the lotto–just imagine a thug “who work[s] at being stupid” winning millions. Guaranteed to always make a spectacle of himself  in public, he’s the darling of the paparazzi. Just what Lionel does with his money is hilarious, and of course the biggest question is: will Lionel end his criminal ways now he is filthy rich? 

Some of the criticism I’ve read about the novel is that there is an uncomfortable innate snobbery at the heart of this depiction of lowlife Lionel. After finishing the book, I’d argue against that. Yes there are times when Lionel’s dreadful family life is over-the-top–exaggerated for comic effect, but are we now so PC that we can’t enjoy a good laugh?  And some of the novel isn’t exaggerated at all–perhaps it all depends on how we live and who we mingle with.

Chewing over the criticisms I read about Lionel Asbo, I thought about Till Death Do Us Part–an extremely popular British television programme which ran for many years. The series featured Alf Garnett as a middle-aged East End working-class man, a racist, a sexist, an admirer of Enoch Powell and Mary Whitehouse, and an inveterate lover of the Royals. A great deal of the programme’s humour came from Alf Garnett’s ridiculous fascistic attitudes which he frothed about and spouted at every opportunity even as he choked on inchoate rage. While the programme had its share of controversy, the fact that it lampooned the ignorant attitudes of an East-Ender was not labelled ‘snobbery,’ and instead the criticism centered on swearing, so-called offensive language and “moral laxity.” One ground-breaking episode sent Alf Garnett dreaming that he was at Buckingham Palace talking and grovelling to the Queen, and there were headlines about the episode’s appropriateness. Attitudes change, and these days, Till Death Do Us Part would not make it to a pilot episode without considerable editing.

Martin Amis seems to have a great deal of fun with the character of Lionel, and the result is a refreshingly honest read–no touchie-feelie crap, no holier-than-thou resolution, no miracle of self-revelation, and no redemption. Lionel is exactly who he is–unapologetic, unrepentant, disinhibited, comfortable in his own skin, and giving the world the finger. I grew rather fond of Lionel–he’s easy to underestimate, and I suspect that Amis enjoyed creating this larger-than-life character. Is Amis making a larger social statement about England? Who knows. I don’t think Britain has the corner on the market when it comes to the Lionel Asbos of this world. Lionel reminds me of an American man I met who demonstrated how his pitbull, on command, could knock down his missus, and hold her by the throat while she lay frozen. He sniggered and said “just in case she gets ideas.” The happy couple both seemed rather proud of their dog’s ability to pin a human being at the drop of a word.

Special thanks to Kevin who read, reviewed and enjoyed the novel too.

The St .Zita Society by Ruth Rendell

Picking up a Ruth Rendell novel feels as though I am returning to an old friend. I know, more or less, what to expect, and I am delighted to be in this author’s company. Ruth Rendell seems to excel in creating fictional spaces, uniquely malignant cauldrons in which the fouler aspects of human behaviour breed and simmer before exploding into crime. In the novel Portobello, I had a niggling concern about snobbery through the delineation of the poor vs the rich characters with criminal behaviour landing solidly on the former, but Rendell has irrevocably swept that aside in The St. Zita Society, a psychological crime novel in which the servants and various hangers-on of the rich rub elbows with their employers in the upscale houses of Hexam Place. It’s in this unhealthy environment that violent death makes its appearance.  

The St. Zita Society (named after the patron saint of “domestic servants“) is formed by June Caldwell, the companion of the autocratic, petulant, self-invented woman who calls herself Her Serene Highness, the Princess Susan Hapsburg. The two women have lived together for sixty years, and June is HSH’s servant, companion, dog-walker, secretary and the recipient of all of her employer’s moods and temper tantrums. It’s very likely that this is the reason that June, now 78-years-old forms the society which holds its meetings at the local pub. Eligible for membership are the servants who work in the swanky addresses of Hexam Place, and June’s intention is that the St. Zita Society will give the servants some sort of clout, but in reality, the society is June’s attempt to make her own life more tolerable.

The servants include: cleaner Zinnia who splits her time at several homes, Dex the ”criminally insane” and now certified cured, gardener-for-hire who believes that the voice in his cell phone gives him orders, Thea who rents a Hexam Place flat and is misused and underappreciated by her landlords, Henry, the chauffeur of Lord and Lady Studley, whose after hours duties include secretly servicing the very attractive and neglected Lady Dudley, Monserrat, the unpleasant au pair to the troubled Still family, Rabia, the Still’s Muslim nanny, and Jimmy the driver to Dr. Jefferson.

While June is intent on addressing ”human rights,” there are other items on the St. Zita agenda–including dog feces left by those passing through the neighbourhood. Of course, since the servants are the ones cleaning up the dog poo, they are the ones who want the council to ‘do something.’ Meanwhile the homeowners are oblivious. This tiny subject of disgruntlement is the epitome of the division between the worlds of the wealthy and those they employ to make their lives run smoother. It’s an unhealthy relationship, even at the best of times, and we see some servants taking advantage of their employer’s good nature (Jimmy), and others taking advantage of their employer’s lack of interest (Monserrat). Of course, others are worked beyond reason, and June seems to be the most put-upon partly due to her age, her lack of choices and her tyrannical employer.

Monserrat comes from the same sort of privileged background as her employer, and she deeply resents her position as a servant for people she simultaneously envies and despises.  She’s facilitating her employer, Lucy Still’s affair and accepts ‘tips’ to keep her mouth shut about it.

Monserrat knew all about it. She made it her business to know who was having an affair with whom, who was skiving off, and who was borrowing a Beemer or a Jaguar when such a loan was strictly forbidden. She had never blackmailed anyone, but she liked to keep the possibility of a modified sort of blackmail in reserve. The only friend she had in Hexam Place was Thea, and the only member of the St. Zita Society who possessed a car of their own was herself, keeping her rather old VW in a garage in the mews that belonged to number seven.

It’s no coincidence that Thea is Monserrat’s only friend as Monserrat does not considers herself a servant and has little in common with the other employees of Hexam Place. Monserrat doesn’t slot easily into the servant-master dynamic; her father went to school with Lucy Still’s father and at one time, they were both wealthy men. Monserrat’s father lost all his money in “some banking scandal,” and Monserrat is given the job as the Still’s au pair as a favour to a friend. Monserrat is opportunistic and resentful and can’t help but notice that her employer, Lucy Still, has a relatively cushy life full of designer shopping, jogging, and an affair.  Thea isn’t a servant, but she is a doormat and she’s treated badly by her landlords. While she struggles against this role, she seems unable to alter it. Interestingly, these two characters, Thea and Monserrat, are connected by fate.

The St. Zita Society covers just a few months of the lives of those who live in Hexam Place–from Autumn to Spring. Marriages melt down, adultery runs rampant, and with a slow-building menace brewing, murder is the inevitable result.

Rendell argues that we know little about what goes on the house next door, and the book is a strong statement regarding the inherently unhealthy relationship between employer/master and servant. It’s a relationship that breeds familiarity, abuses and resentments on all sides. Some of the book’s scenes highlight the inherent fragility and hypocrisy of the relationships between the characters. A few visits from June’s famous soap opera nephew, Rad Sothern, sets Her Serene Highness reeling, and yet while HSH treats Rad coquettishly, like some ardent suitor, the Princess never shifts an inch in the treatment of Rad’s aunt, June, so some awkward evenings are spent with an unpleasant hierarchy between the three characters.

Ruth Rendell  is no stranger to the theme of the complex and difficult relationships between servants and those who employ them. A Judgement in Stone, considered one of this author’s finest psychological crime novels explores the twisted relationship between the affluent Cloverdale family and their psychotic housekeeper Eunice Parchment.

Review copy

Chapman’s Odyssey by Paul Bailey

Paul Bailey’s latest novel, Chapman’s Odyssey, is mostly set within the confines of a London hospital. The story plays with the idea of memory through the mind of one man, Harry Chapman, a writer aged 70, collapsed and whisked off to hospital where he remains undergoing numerous tests and awaiting a diagnosis. Naturally, he contemplates the possibility of death, and in the twilight moments of sleep and effected by drugs, he has numerous visitations and conversations with a wide range of ‘visitors’–mostly imagined. There’s his indomitable mother, Alice, who lived to the ripe old age of ninety–a reassuring thought when one is facing death at 70:

Was it courtesy of Dr Pereira’s wonder drug that he was hearing her now, her naturally harsh voice sharpened by hurt and disappointment?

During his quiet and lonely moments, sometimes tempered with sedatives and painkillers, Alice’s words return as arguments and recriminations are revived, and Harry recalls his mother’s favourite phrase:

–Get back in you pram, Harry Chapman.

That taunt for all his childhood; that lethal combination of five short words intended to diminish him; oh the terrible inference that he would never grow into the kind of manhood she might approve of–her it was, harshly expressed, unsettling him, angering him, in this hospital ward, in a changed London, on the eve of his seventieth birthday.

Fortunately, Alice is not the only memory to visit. There are many other visitors from Harry’s past, including a local homeless woman known as The Duchess of Bombay, but most curiously, fictional characters impose their equally real presence as they appear from the novels of Harry’s reading past:

–Who are you?

He was curious to identify the stranger.

–You don’t recognise me?

–I can scarcely hear you.

–I have not much to say. I have no reason to speak louder.

He thought he detected a subtle American twang, suggestive of a refined New England upbringing, perhaps.

–Then why are you bothering to talk to me?

–I am bothering to talk to you because I cannot–no, I must not–be bothered.

–Did I meet you in New York?

–You have met me in many places. We have been companions of a kind in London and in Rome and once, I believe, in Calcutta. I am unusually verbose tonight. I am, usually, a man of very few, necessary words. That is my customary condition.

And this is madness, Harry Chapman thought, to be communing with someone who never lived, except in the pages of a little book.

–Are you still there?

He was relieved that there was no answer. Of course Bartleby wasn’t there. It had been the purest lunacy to have imagined that he ever was.

That quote should give a taste of both the writer’s style and the sort of encounters Harry has throughout the novel as he lies in his hospital bed and waits for the results of his tests. Visits from Pip (Great Expectations) are every bit as real as Harry’s conversations with his dead lovers. It’s impossible to read Chapman’s Odyssey without wondering which literary characters would come and visit us in our hours of illness and loneliness, and yet even as I considered the possibilities, it seemed both fantastic and wonderfully reassuring that visits from some of the great fictional characters who have become… well… our treasured compansions in their adventures and adversities should come and visit in our hour of need. Unfortunately, this is a cleverly written novel which will appeal only to people who ‘get’ the frequent literary allusions as Bailey is writing for a literate audience who know their Austen and their Dostoevsky.

The book’s title, Chapman’s Odyssey, is in itself a play on words and a giveaway about the novel’s complexities. George Chapman translated the first complete Homer’s Odyssey in English in the 16th century and died in poverty and debt. Our modern-day protagonist, Harry Chapman, has his odyssey from the confines of his hospital bed where he recalls the highlights of his life, the people who meant a great deal to him, and the moments that shook his life to its foundations. These memories are mingled with his waking moments when he regales the nurses with poems he’d memorised, and then when he nods off to sleep, finally, he meets all the fictional characters who composed another part of his life: his reading life which is every bit as real as the great passions and that poisoned, tortured relationship with his mother.

Chapman’s Odyssey is a rather sad novel–not so much because of the direct subject matter–a man waiting to hear whether or not he’s going to die; instead the novel is sad because of its immense poignancy. Stuck in bed, surrounded by nurses, doctors and other patients, Harry is diminished, at first by his mother, and now at the end of his life to a set of symptoms and an elusive disease. Death and disease are the great levellers of humankind and no respecter of youth, circumstances or wealth. Harry struggles against this leveller not by the usual cliché ‘it isn’t fair,’; in Harry’s case he tries to assert his individuality by reciting poetry to the nurses and engaging in pedantic mental wordplay to assure himself of his individuality in the face of death. The figures from the past mingle equally with the figures of fictional characters as if there is little difference between the two, and perhaps, after all, this is the only level of immortality we will ever reach as we become visiting shades in the memories of those who loved us.

Had there ever been a golden age in the long life of Harry Chapman? He tried to recall it as he lay–dying, perhaps–in the room reserved for those poised on the very brink.

 Review copy from publisher

A Knot Garden by Geoff Nicholson

“Perhaps,” she said, “you think I’m trying to bury my feelings of guilt in a savage bout of loveless promiscuity.”

A Year of Geoff Nicholson continues with his second novel, A Knot Garden, and the reading of this novel just proved, all over again, how this novelist continues to surprise me. A Knot Garden is a mystery novel and it’s told (if I counted correctly) through the eyes of no less than 13 narrators. Now that’s a lot of different voices when you are talking about a novel that comes in at just under 200 pages. Perhaps for some readers that’s too many fragmented POVs, but I throughly enjoyed reading through the minds of these very different narrators who all provide a slightly different look at what is going on here, but first I’m going to back up and talk about Knot Gardens for a moment.

Knot Gardens, for anyone who doesn’t know, are formal gardens of very intricate design. Here’s a photo of one (in the public domain). Yes, quite beautiful and very skillfully done, and it’s also very complex. As for the design…well it’s hard to know where it begins and where it ends.  And this brings me back to Nicholson’s novel which is a literary version of the photo.

A Knot Garden begins with Fantham, the low-rent house detective of a hotel rooting around the room of an apparent sleeping pill suicide, and according to the detective, it’s an “open and shut case.”

It turns out this stiff is called Richard Wisden, and everybody runs around like I’m supposed to have heard of him, which I haven’t. Turns out he’s a gardener. I mean, come on, how many famous gardeners have you heard of? Turns out he’s on the telly a bit, runs a design firm, written a couple of books. Big bleeding deal. So it’s all got to be kept quiet and kept out of the papers. That’s what they tell me and they kept telling me, all of them telling me, the manager, the Old Bill, the PR girl, the doctor, everybody and his uncle. I mean what do they think I’m going to do? Stand outside selling tickets, ‘Step this way and see the famous stiff, two quid a shot’? I mean what do they think I am? An arsehole or what?

Fantham is the perfect character to get this mystery rolling. He’s very happy to move on until Wisden’s attractive and much younger widow, food critic, Libby hires him to dig into the case.

Now Libby Wisden looked the kind of woman I’d be prepared to keep on living for, but then again that might mean she was the kind some poor sod might be prepared to do himself in for. Either way you wouldn’t have picked her out as a grieving widow.

Libby claims that Wisden was supposed to be working on a knot garden in Derbyshire at the time of his death. She wants to know why he didn’t go to Derbyshire and how, instead, he ended up dead in a hotel near Paddington Station. And then again, why did Richard have a cheap plastic child’s ray gun in his suitcase? Libby, who led a completely separate life from her husband, also has some rather naughty photos from the dead man’s camera of a prostitute called Trudi. Fantham takes the 500 quid retainer and later wishes he hadn’t.

But Fantham isn’t the only person Libby contacts. She also asks her female GP (who has a thing for Libby) to travel to Derbyshire to the address where Wisden was supposed to design and build the knot garden, and she also employs Rowntree, an academic to read Wisden’s books The Happy Herbalist, Grand Designs, and A Turn Around the Parsley Patch and give her an opinion about their author. To his surprise, Rowntree discovers that Wisden’s books, full of gardening history and sexual innuendo also include generous allusions to Shakespeare and by the time his work is concluded, Rowntree feels that the real Wisden is indecipherable.

Another narrator is “slave to pleasure,” Basil Shaw–bank officer by day and membership secretary and archivist of the orgiastic Posthumous Society by night. It’s to Basil that Libby turns for information about who participated in orgies with her husband, and she’s prepared to go to any lengths to get the information she seeks. Other narrators include a pudgy, un-employed actor, Wisden’s illegitimate son, David who’s treated by everyone as a half-wit, a woman who worked with Wisden before he became famous, and George Woods, the kinky owner of the Fun Emporium, who claims to be a fan of Wisden and communicates through letters to Libby–initially asking for one of Wisden’s jumpers but eventually demanding a pair of Libby’s dirty knickers.

Lies, stories and various versions of events are knotted together over multiple narratives, and Fantham discovers 13 suicide notes–one plagiarised from Romeo and Juliet and one an exact copy of the note that screenwriter Paul Bern supposedly left for his wife, Jean Harlow. As various people become involved in the unofficial investigation surrounding Wisden’s death, the circumstances, instead of becoming clearer, just become murkier and more convoluted.

Author Geoff Nicholson’s dominant theme is obsession–and it’s a theme that allows plenty of quirky scope and also allows the author to have a great deal of fun playing with his characters. In this novel, obsession is unleashed via Libby’s quest to solve the mystery behind her husband’s apparent suicide, and that quest opens a Pandora’s box of other obsessions: sex, orgies, revenge, a crazed fan, a séance, and the mystery of the knot garden.

I’ll be the first to admit that Nicholson isn’t for everyone and is arguably for those with obscure tastes. For one thing he doesn’t seem to be interested in appealing to the masses, and some of his books, while focusing on various manifestations of obsession, will lose some readers along the way.