Couldn’t get through it.

At the moment I’m reading a book which feels like the mental equivalent of wading through treacle. It is Nabokov’s The Gift, which a friend gave me in exchange for The Goldfinch. I won in terms of the physical object, since it’s a lovely Penguin Classics hardback that falls open at any page I command it with a satisfyingly intellectual thud, but in terms of content I’ve definitely been given the harder job. It’s about a young poet living in Berlin, wandering around thinking about poetry and his father’s butterfly collection and eventually writing an inspired novel called, you guessed it, The Gift. It was supposedly Nabokov’s farewell to the world and boy, was he determined to make a go of it before he popped off to the afterlife. Some of the sentences are exquisite, but you have to wade through an awful lot of detail about light falling through blinds, the fluttering of a moth or some Russian guys with indistinguishable names debating about Pushkin, and I just can’t handle that on the tube at 6.24am. Still, at least it’s poetic rambling and not just general word vomit, which makes up about forty per cent of The Goldfinch (sorry, I don’t get the fuss).

I’d quite like to abandon The Gift and read something I actually enjoy, but I just can’t. I’m obsessive about the need to finish every book I start. If I don’t, the book sits on my shelf or under my bed or wherever else I’ve tried to hide it, taunting me with my dwindling attention span and failure to follow through. So I drag myself through turgid prose alongside characters I despise, groaning like someone at a Chinese buffet who’s already eaten three plates full but continues to shovel food into their mouth just to get value for money. People are impressed by my track record with finishing books, but I’ve started to wonder: is it a good thing, or am I just wasting time? What do I get out of a book when I skim read it as quickly as possible so I can move on to something better? Has forcing myself to finish a book I don’t like ever changed my mind about it? Do I read just to enjoy myself, or do I want something more out of it?

I got into the habit when I was at university. I walked into my first seminar convinced that if I hadn’t read the book from cover to cover and prepared a list of insightful comments to deliver with the illusion of spontaneity when called upon, I would be laughed out of the room. I remember blinking back tears as I read through the catalogue of ships in The Iliad because I was so bored it actually hurt. Obviously I would then be the only person in the seminar who had read the book, although everyone else would do a better job of convincing the tutor they had by throwing out strategic questions – ‘But might one describe this as proto-modernism?’ – before sitting back with an enigmatic smile to watch us all squirm. My only defence against this shameless dissembling was to actually know what I was talking about. I don’t need to do that now – there’s no-one testing me on what I’ve read, and it’s much easier to talk rubbish about things you know nothing about in the pub – so why do I still bother?

Perhaps being a writer makes things more difficult. I imagine someone tossing aside a novel I’ve written halfway through, and even though the novel is hypothetical, it hurts. That’s my hypothetical baby! I want to grab the imaginary person by the shoulders and shout, ‘It gets better, I swear!’ Out of respect for the writer who probably spent years struggling through late nights and early mornings, the after-effects of drinking gallons of coffee, lectures from their mother about getting a real job, constant bouts of crippling self-doubt and loathing and countless rejection emails, I feel like I have to at least finish the thing. Then again, I only seem to have this respect for writers whom I deem to be suitably important. There is an unfinished Philippa Gregory novel on my shelf, begun in a self-deluded moment when I decided I fancied some ‘light reading’, which I can die happily knowing I never finished. So let’s not hide my snobbery behind an apparent concern for the poor author’s feelings.

Having thought about it a bit more, I think I realise why I always have to finish a book.

One of the things I enjoy most about books is talking about them – not in a poser-ish way, but in-depth. If I’m going to argue my case for why I don’t like a book, I have to have read it. For example, I recently returned to a book I was unable to finish a few years ago, determined to defeat it: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. I picked it up during my university phase of wanting to be a bit of a hippy, but I couldn’t stand it. Everything that happened seemed so utterly aimless (surprise, they’re going to Frisco again), the prose incontinent, the characters hopelessly immature and impossible to relate to. I think I was predisposed to dislike it because it represented a subculture which had become the dominant culture in my lecture theatres and which I was struggling to fit into. I abandoned it, but it niggled at me for four years afterwards. Everyone foamed at the mouth talking about how brilliant it was. What if I had judged it too quickly and for the wrong reasons?

Well, I’ve just finished it, and although I have that wonderful feeling of a burden lifted, it hasn’t won me over. Now I can give reasons why. Dean is not a visionary. He impregnates women and then abandons them to flounder off on another of his soul-searching trips, and is inexcusably attracted to child prostitutes. Sal sustains his free-spirited lifestyle by leeching money off his poor aunt, because nothing is really free, Sal. Most readers focus on the romanticised elements of their journeys – the drug hallucinations, the jazz music, the no-strings-attached love affairs and the speeding down highways whooping in the Californian sunshine – but all I could think about was how poor, dirty and malnourished Sal and his buddies must be. I appreciate that the novel is intended to give voice to the deadbeats, those who don’t live up to the standards of white middle-class American society, who have no career trajectory or five-year plan and don’t worship money, status or ‘settling down’, and that’s great, but now I understand why it irritated me that some of my fellow middle-class students adopted the most superficial elements of the On the Road lifestyle but would be utterly depressed if they actually had to live like the book’s characters. They clutched a dog-eared copy of the book as a gesture towards the beatnik lifestyle, like a pair of battered brogues or an Aztec-print poncho, without necessarily understanding its context. I read it properly – I hope I even learnt some lessons from it – and though I didn’t enjoy it, I’m glad I finished it.

Does this mean I finish books just so that I can make myself look clever (or be an extremely tedious conversationalist at parties)? I don’t think so. If I haven’t read something someone else is bragging about, I don’t feel embarrassed or pretend to have read it. I add it to my ‘to-read’ list – and once it’s on the list, I will finish it if it kills me (although if I ever do find a book so bad it brings me to the brink of death, I’ll probably let myself off).

Enough from me. Here’s a far better-written article about this same subject. It talks about our psychological tendency to want to see things as ‘whole’ or ‘complete’, rather than embracing chaos and incompleteness, and the abandoning of a book as a liberation from this mindset. I suppose chaos is inevitable because no book is ever ‘complete’: no author is one hundred per cent satisfied with what they’re written, and no reader will ever get everything possible out of a book even if they read it a thousand times. So I’ll continue to be a slave to the final page – and I’ll probably even finish The Gift. Just don’t expect a blog post about it, because I don’t have a clue.

Shakespeare in Love at the Noel Coward Theatre

Earlier this week I went to see the play of Shakespeare in Love. I expected to love it, as with all things Shakespeare, and I did love it: it’s funny but also a bit sad, witty and warm, and works just as well on stage as on screen – perhaps even better, considering it’s about love for the theatre as much as it’s about the love between a man and a woman.

It got me thinking, though: why is it that most Shakespeare fans esteem the film just as much as those who like their history sexed up a bit? Us literary types are snobs and purists. Why should we like a story that suggests Shakespeare needs a love interest to make his life interesting? The theatre was full of school children who’d clearly been dragged there by an English teacher trying to prove to them that Shakespeare is fun and sexy. Shouldn’t taking them to see some actual Shakespeare be enough? What if some people – and let’s face it, there are people like this out there, the same people who think Sherlock Holmes was a real person – are led to believe it’s actual history?

In spite of all of the above, I think Shakespeare in Love is great. Is that just because it’s written by Tom Stoppard and therefore has ‘lit cred’? I hope I’m not that superficial. I like it because it’s clever, and it’s probably clever because Tom Stoppard is clever, but that’s a different thing. The thing is, we know so little about Shakespeare’s life that most of the things people say about him are largely speculation. Carol Ann Duffy speculated that Shakespeare left Anne Hathaway their second best bed because that’s where all the romance happened. In Shakespeare in Love, Tom Stoppard speculates that Shakespeare is estranged from Anne and in love with a woman called Viola who dresses as a boy in order to be allowed on stage, that their love story mirrors the plot of Romeo and Juliet (which he’s struggling to write), and that she’s the inspiration for the character of the same name in Twelfth Night. The idea is that Shakespeare’s poetry is so beautiful it can only have been inspired by love for a real woman. How could anyone who’s never experienced love write about it so eloquently?

And why not speculate? Unlike writers today, who so often have to become ‘personalities’ – acting eccentrically, making pointless controversial comments or just being improbably young and good looking – to get their writing noticed, the mystery surrounding Shakespeare means that who he was doesn’t overpower what he wrote about: human nature, love, the immortality of art. These are all themes that are explored in Shakespeare in Love, and so in my opinion the play is in the true Shakespearean spirit. I think he would have approved.

He may not have approved of the play’s suggestion that before he finds inspiration in his love for Viola, Shakespeare filches ideas from the more famous and talented Christopher Marlowe, who dictates Sonnet 18 (Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?) to him while he flounders under Viola’s balcony. It’s these literary in-jokes that I like so much about the play. It acknowledges the feud between Shakespeareans and those who think Marlowe is actually the better playwright, as well as weaving Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s lives together in the plot. We know that Marlowe was killed in a tavern brawl – stabbed in the eye with his own dagger – which was probably an accident but which people like to speculate was murder. In the film/play, Shakespeare pretends to be called Marlowe when wooing Viola, leading him to believe that Marlowe’s possible murder was meant for him. The parallels between Romeo and Juliet and the plot of the play – although Shakespeare in Love leaves us something with more bittersweet than the morbid ending of Shakespeare’s original – are also skillfully done. Will intends his new play to be a comedy, but as events unfold it transforms from a farce called Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter into the tragic love story we know and (unless you’re a GCSE English student) love today.

The way the play is staged is great and reflects the links between history and invention, the real world and the world of theatre, in the way the set shifts between onstage and backstage often mid-scene. While the play makes many nods to the conventions of Elizabethan theatre, the characters behave and speak in a modern way; but rather than being jarring, this highlights the play’s witty and self-referential nature. Tom Bateman’s Will makes a believable transition from the awkward newbie languishing in Marlowe’s shadow to a great and inspired playwright, while Lucy Briggs-Owen’s husky-voiced Viola, writhing on the floor in poetic ecstasy after reciting Will’s verse in her first scene, took a while to grow on me but got there eventually. My only problem with her was that I didn’t quite buy the idea of her being the brilliant actor that Will takes her to be; when she’s banned from the stage by her fiancé and Will has to take over the role of Romeo, he does it much better. But it’s necessary for the plot, and I like how their roles eventually switch so that Will is Romeo and Viola is Juliet, their lives merging almost seamlessly with the play on its fraught opening night.

I also love the ending, because it’s not necessarily a happy one and yet it feels right. Viola forces Will to choose his love of the theatre over his love of her, refusing to be the woman who denies the world of the words of Shakespeare. She leaves with her husband, and Will starts to write Twelfth Night. Great art requires both love and loss. You can read these meanings into the play, or you can just enjoy it for its comedy and exuberance. I hope that at least a few of those bored-looking school kids emerged feeling inspired by the magic of the theatre. They’re going to need it, since their souls are soon to be crushed again by An Inspector Calls. Poor things.

The Email Book Club, first installment

A few friends and I have just started an email book club, and in so far it’s so much better than a normal book club. Why? Obviously I hate face-to-face human interaction, especially when it’s with my own friends. PSYCH. That’s not the reason. There are several reasons I find it better:

1. You can discuss books whilst nestled in your duvet without having to buy a £5 drink for the privilege of ramming yourselves into the corner of some pub;
2. You can dispense with all that ‘How was your day?’ preamble that no-one really cares about and get straight to the point;
3. It is much easier to co-ordinate with your busy important friends;
4. You have time to refine your thoughts about the book and properly compose an email about them rather than making stupid off-the-cuff comments that don’t quite express the way you feel, such as, ‘I thought Andrew was a bit of a tool – hey, does anyone fancy getting some chips?’ rather than, ‘I disliked Andrew’s character because I felt he was used by the author as a lifeless conduit for his shallow political ideals,’ or something of the like. This is probably the most important point.

It’s early days though, and so far we’ve only discussed one book. That book was The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks, which is something I never would have read if my friend hadn’t suggested it; such is the beauty of a book club. I never read sci-fi, and although Banks isn’t solely a sci-fi writer, I assumed everything he wrote would have the same tint. In the case of The Wasp Factory, his first novel, this is certainly the case: in the introduction to the book Banks describes how after receiving countless rejection slips for his sci-fi novels he decided to give up and ‘write an ordinary, boring, mainstream novel.’ However, he says that ‘a first-person narrative set on a remote Scottish nearly-island told by a normality-challenged teenage eccentric with severe violence issues allowed me to treat it as something resembling science fiction.’ I can see that – because the world of Frank (the main character) is nothing at all like our world. It is dark, twisted, full of violence and utterly disturbing… not a place you want to occupy whilst eating your lunch, I can tell you.

Frank is a sixteen-year-old boy who lives on a tiny island with his father and who according to official records doesn’t exist. Instead of going to school he spends his days stalking the island with his home-built weapons, flamethrower-ing rabbits, sticking animals’ heads on poles and concocting pagan rituals using skulls and dead wasps to predict the future. He tells us how when he was younger he murdered three other children: the son of family friends, his cousin and his little brother, but he doesn’t intend to kill anyone else – that was ‘just a stage I was going through.’ He believes it’s his brother, Eric, who’s the crazy one of the family after suffering a mental breakdown: having escaped from the psychiatric home, he’s on his way back home, occasionally calling Frank to update him on how many dogs he’s eaten. We know something is going to happen when Eric arrives home, but when he finally does the surprise isn’t quite what we expect it to be.

Here were my thoughts on the novel, which I shared with the group: one of the main themes of the book seems to be how we define madness. Frank is clearly naturally intelligent, and there is a twisted logic behind what he does. He describes in detail the technicalities of the weapons he uses to commit his animal massacres, as well as the rationale behind his rituals and even his murders. When he was a young child the family dog mutilated his genitals, and therefore he compensates for his lost manhood through his brutal acts of violence (or perhaps he’s trying to get revenge against the animal world). His brother Paul was born at the exact time the offending dog was strangled, and therefore became possessed by the spirit of the dog – hence why he had to die. Frank is able to explain his reasoning for his behaviour whilst acknowledging the wrongness of his acts and the need to conceal them, whereas Eric sets fire to dogs and runs around screaming and trying to batter doors down with axes, unable to control himself. Who is ‘madder’?

Eric is more outwardly mad, but I found Frank much more dangerous. He may acknowledge the immorality of murder in an intellectual sense, but he doesn’t seem to feel that immorality or experience any genuine sense of remorse. The flippant way in which he describes the killings as a ‘stage’ – like that stage when I was really into Eminem when I was 13 – is extremely sociopathic and disturbing. I felt sorry for Frank, who is clearly a victim of his circumstances – abandoned by his mother, his father distant and uncaring, with no education, only one real friend and his body mutilated by a horrible accident – but I couldn’t empathise with him. His an an anti-hero whom I think we’re supposed to like in spite of our moral qualms, but I never quite got around to liking him. What I did like, though, was how Banks made me question how much I liked myself. I was utterly absorbed by Frank’s narration of the murders, which made me quite disgusted with myself. I felt like I was being sucked into Frank’s grimy, hopeless and chaotic world, and it made me wonder: what would I be like if I lived in this world, if I were in Frank’s position?

There were a few other things I had mixed feelings about. Firstly, Frank philosophises about the world in a way that is quite poignant – he’s not educated, but he’s clearly a deep thinker who wants to understand human nature and find order in the world, and is terrified by his inability to do either – but his voice sounds at times too writerly. Would a boy who had never been to school really say something like: ‘Having no purpose in life or procreation, I invested all my worth in that grim opposite, and so found a negative and negation of the fecundity only others could lay claim to’? It’s a nice phrase, but… really? Secondly, phrases like that whiff to me of simplified Freudian psychoanalysis out of a can. I would have preferred it if Frank hadn’t tried to analyse himself and let me have a go instead. There is also a twist at the end I was unsure about, but I can’t tell you about that. At first I hated it, but on hearing my friend’s analysis of it I think I’ve changed my mind – the other beautiful thing about a book club!

Ultimately, the pace with which I ripped through The Wasp Factory suggests I did find it very compelling. The novel is extremely visceral, and the physical effect it had on me – I had to give up on the sandwich I was eating as I thought about Eric eating a dog – was obviously uncomfortable, but I was impressed with Banks’s ability to do that to me through his language. I was even more impressed when I reminded myself that this was his first novel, and what a bold and unique way to burst onto the scene (much more original than my angsty twentysomething-wanabee-writer-living-in-London novel… I wonder where I got that topic from?). I’d certainly consider reading another novel by Banks, and I think it would be interesting to read and compare an Iain Banks with an Iain M. Banks (his sci-fi alias). So there you go: the email book club has expanded my horizons already!

Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell

I hate being asked what my favourite book is. Unfortunately, people love asking me that question, and I get the sense they’re expecting a mind-blowingly profound answer because being bookish is my ‘thing’. In truth, I never have a clue what to say. Most of the time I arbitrarily pick a book that I like, because hearing myself say, ‘Oooh, that’s a tough question, there are sooo many good books out there, it’s impossible to pick a favourite!’ makes me want to punch myself in the face.

In spite of my hatred for the question, I asked a it to a colleague a few weeks ago. I knew he’d have good taste, and I was frustrated after several disappointing reads in a tow. He gave me what I thought was a very good answer: Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell. A writer well-known and respected enough to ensure it’s good, but a book not well-known enough to make it a mainstream choice. Very hipster. I dutifully went out and bought the book, and read it in a few days. I was not disappointed again, and now I shall tell you why.

The novel is about Gordon Comstock, a ‘moth-eaten’ failure who has quit his decent job in advertising to work in a bookshop and focus on writing his poetry. His trousers are soiled, his shoes are falling apart and he is basically starving in his grotty London bedsit, but he tries to convince himself that he is suffering for his art, which is better than being a slave to the god of money. It doesn’t work, because he also knows the truth – or at least what he thinks to be the truth – that money really does make the world go round, even the world of literature: ‘Money, money, all is money! Could you even write a penny novelette without money to put heart in you? Invention, energy, wit, style, charm–they’ve all got to be paid for in hard cash.’ Nothing much happens to Gordon. He slopes around composing his second-rate poetry and moaning about capitalism and how we are all dead people living dead and meaningless lives, exasperates his only friend and his faithful girlfriend when they try to help and encourage him, and eventually gives up and goes back to his safe and predictable job.

Why is he such a relatable character, then, and why did I care about his petty little predicament? Firstly, I think we’ve all had that moment – at least I certainly have – where the 9 to 5 job becomes too much for us, we’ve seen one too many spreadsheets, and we vaguely contemplate quitting our jobs in pursuit of some wild and passionate artistic endeavour. You’ve got to admire Gordon for actually having the balls to go through with it. Secondly, Gordon’s bitter and cynical attitude towards life and everyone in it, whilst taken seriously by him, is quite amusing to the more objective reader. The opening chapter depicting Gordon working in the bookshop is brilliant, and the vignettes Orwell draws of the customers are razor-sharp. For example:

A dejected, round-shouldered, lower-class woman, looking like a draggled duck nosing among garbage, seeped in, fumbling with a rush basket. In her wake hopped a plump little sparrow of a woman, red-cheeked, middle-middle-class, carrying under her arm a copy of The Forsyte Saga–title outwards, so that passers-by could spot her for a highbrow.

Gordon judges everyone in terms of their class and how much money they have, showing himself to be imprisoned by the mindset he hates so much. In his resentment of every single customer who walks into the shop, he reminded me of a prototype of Bernard Black: both characters shabby, selfish, irresponsible misanthropists with no real drive or ambition to improve themselves. There are differences, though. Bernard is contemptuous to everybody to their faces, and despite his disgusting lack of personal hygiene also manages to be incredibly cool; Gordon is too cowardly to openly insult his customers, instead brooding and wallowing in his own mental narrative, and rather than making this seem cool, he’s just a loser. It’s amazing that his girlfriend Rosemary sticks by him, or that his friend Ravelston keeps publishing his poetry in his magazine, but they see something in him, and I think it’s something the reader sees too – because while Bernard is merely comic, Gordon is mildly tragic. He’s the part of ourselves we’re all scared of, the part of us that sometimes fails, and so we want to cheer him on even though we know he’s going nowhere.

What’s the significance of the aspidistra? It’s the ugly houseplant Gordon sees drooping in the window of every middle-class home, and which has become the symbol of everything he hates: ‘That was what it meant to worship the money-god! To settle down, to Make Good, to sell your soul for a villa and an aspidistra!’ The plants seem to breed at an incredible rate, like malicious alien creatures, and are impossible to kill no matter how much one neglects them (and Gordon tries very hard). It’s obvious symbolism which Orwell makes no attempt to deny. At the end of the novel, when Gordon decides to settle down with Rosemary and lead a conventional life within the constraints of society, he insists they buy an aspidistra: ‘It’s the proper thing to have. It’s the first thing one buys after one’s married. In fact, it’s practically a part of the wedding ceremony.’ The aspidistra is transformed from a symbol of dull conventionality and slavery to a symbol of the love between Gordon and Rosemary and the security of their future together.

I don’t necessarily think that through this Orwell is saying we should all give up our artistic ambitions; perhaps he is criticising a society which forces poverty upon those who don’t want to be slaves to an office job, and that ending is meant to be slightly depressing in its mundanity. I’m not sure, though, because Gordon seems genuinely happy at the end. I think Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a very pragmatic novel, and I find that refreshing coming from a writer. Orwell isn’t criticising Gordon for wanting to be a poet, but for being so fixated on one rigid idea – that Money is Evil and Art is Good – that he is unable to achieve his own ambitions and neglects the people who care about him. Meaningful relationships are, ultimately, the only thing that can bring contentment in life, and they have inspired some of the greatest poetry that’s even been written.

Literary analysis aside for a moment, Keep the Aspidistra Flying is simply a well-written, funny, sharp and highly readable novel. It seems it was a bit of a flop when first published, and Orwell didn’t think it was one of his best – I’ll admit it’s certainly no 1984, but that kind of novel is difficult to write twice – but I think many people would be able to relate to it today. I’d like to put this novel into the hands of any London hipster who styles themselves a ‘creative’, or anyone considering throwing in the towel in order to become a trapeze artist/bubble tea shop owner/VW camper van refurbisher, and give them a good strong dose of Orwellian perspective as well as a good read.

King Lear at the National Theatre

My love of Shakespeare didn’t begin until I saw Hamlet when I was eighteen. Before then, I’m not sure I even liked Shakespeare; I remember hating being forced to study Romeo and Juliet at school, and especially resenting how they made us watch the Baz Luhrman adaptation in an attempt to convince us that Shakespeare is ‘cool’ (attractive people speaking in couplets?! Mind blown!). Hamlet was different. The ending made me sob, which is a pretty big deal when you consider that not only was I the only girl in my class not to cry when we had our BCG injections, I also jumped on top of a broken bottle when I was seven and sat on the doctor’s table looking merely bored as he stitched my foot back together. Moreover, I adamantly maintain that the ending of The Notebook is ridiculous and idiotic, and to be honest, I’m not sure I even welled up when Simba’s dad died. There, I said it.

Hamlet was a big deal for me because it proved that I was in fact capable of empathy with other human beings, but since I’m also a very fickle and heartless person it was surpassed three years later by King Lear. The first time I saw King Lear, I actually felt fairly indifferent: my only real memory is of the merciless bullying I received after Lear tore off his shirt and I commented (in a very offhand manner, might I add) that he was in pretty good shape for his age. It wasn’t until I wrote an essay on the play later in my degree that I realised how important it is, and how vital. Hamlet still comes a close second, but it’s more about one guy falling apart as he questions the point of his existence – while King Lear shows an entire society falling apart as everyone questions the point of everything. Which is a feeling I think we’ve all experienced at 3pm on a Tuesday afternoon.

Because the play is set in a vague pre-Christian world and lacks historical specificity, it has a sense of universality: the questions it raises are timeless and pertinent to all of us. Lear may be a king but, as he gradually realises, his title doesn’t protect him from feeling pain, humiliation and betrayal at the hands of his own children and subjects. As the characters scheme against one another, they all try to impose order on their experience – evoking the gods, the natural order and the ‘wheel of fortune’ variously – but everything that happens is essentially meaningless. Lear expects to be able to give his land and power away to his daughters and still be treated like a divinely appointed king, but they lose respect for him and he becomes what they treat him as: a ‘foolish fond old man’, hiding from a storm in a hovel with a madman and a fool. The fool is the only character who speaks honestly to him, while the naked, jibbering madman represents man’s essence. As Lear says to Mad Tom, ‘Thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.’ 

I love the fact that the play doesn’t have a satisfying resolution, and that there are very few lessons to be learnt from the carnage at the end. Numerous critics have questioned why Cordelia, Lear’s most beloved daughter, has to die: on a thematic level, her death serves no real purpose that I can see. But that’s life, isn’t it? People don’t die to bring about neat resolutions; they just die. When Lear comes onstage with Cordelia’s body in his arms, his howl of existential despair, too painful to put into language, is in my opinion the most powerful moment in all of Shakespeare.

I banged on about the play for a lot longer than I intended there, but the point I was leading up to was this: I went to see King Lear directed by Sam Mendes and starring Simon Russell Beale at the National Theatre last Sunday, and I was very excited about it. Unfortunately I was too tired during the first half to enjoy it as much as I should have (party lifestyle catching up with me, yeah) but a double espresso shot in the interval sorted me out, and by the end I was in my usual ‘I just love Shakespeare soooo much!!!!!’ paroxysms. Since I’ve already talked for too long, I think I’ll just write a list of the things I liked and I list of the things I wasn’t sure about. 

Things I liked:

• The contemporary setting, in which Lear is a despotic leader and his knights a bunch of rowdy, rifle-toting soldiers. The set is dark and slick, the uniforms crisp, and Goneril and Regan totter around in heels and silk dresses while Cordelia sports khakis and military boots as the Queen of France. The sleekness makes Lear’s decline more apparent in contrast, and the modern update emphasises how relevant the play is while remaining non-specific enough to capture its timelessness. In productions that stick to a pagan setting, it’s easy to fall into the trap of reducing Lear’s world to an amoral one in which all the characters are unenlightened slaves to nature – but we know better, don’t we? Not necessarily…
• Simon Russell Beale, obviously. He was brilliant at playing Lear as both old and doddery and a force of nature, thrusting his torso forward and waddling around the stage in a battle charge. There’s little to like about him when we first encounter him staging a public ceremony in which he forces each of his daughters to declare over a microphone how much they love him. The more deranged and less like a dictator he becomes, the more sympathetic he is. Shuffling around the hovel in a saggy vest and underpants, he is both laughable and deeply moving.
• I really liked Edmund. He transforms from a nerdy scholar, bearing up to his father’s cruel dismissal of him as a bastard child with no trace of emotion, to a ruthless and disturbingly seductive villain. Most other productions seem to sympathise with his father, Gloucester, whom he betrays, but at this Gloucester is actually a bit of a bully. By the time he has his eyes put out (with a corkscrew in his own wine cellar!) later in the play, you do feel sorry for him, though. One of the really great things about this production was the way you see and feel the characters develop and your feelings towards them change throughout. 
• The storm scene, in which Lear and the fool are lifted up on a ramp that rises out of the stage, made my spine tingle, although I read one review that said it was overly showy and a bit hammy. Hammy or not, I enjoyed it!

Things I wasn’t so sure about:

• Edgar. He is Gloucester’s legitimate son and Edmund’s brother, virtuous, a bit gullible and incredibly dull. It’s rarely the actor’s fault: most actors seem to agree that it’s nigh impossible to make him interesting. Tom Brooke did a better job than many, as his interpretation of the character was quite unique; he portrayed him as a slobbish wastrel, sloping around his father’s office in scruffy clothes with a cigarette and a glass of liquor, a bit of a spoiled brat basking in his privilege. I don’t know when it happened, when he spoke the last words of the play, which I love – ‘The oldest hath borne most. We that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long’ – I realised that I actually quite liked him. Oh, and he got fully naked, which is one sure way of livening the character up a bit, I suppose…
• I didn’t like Cordelia much; I thought she over-acted and shouted her lines. Although I liked Anna Maxwell-Martin’s portrayal of Regan as a hysterical vixen turned on by violence, which struck a great contrast to the quietly venomous Goneril, she garbled her lines a lot and many of them were lost on me.
• Mendes made a few decisions I wasn’t sure about. In the play, the Fool mysteriously disappears halfway through the play after speaking the line, ‘And I’ll go to bed at noon.’ In most productions it’s assumed he has somehow died; at the end Lear says, ‘And my poor fool is hanged,’ which probably refers to Cordelia, but could also have a double meaning and refer to the Fool too. Directors often use their creative license when deciding the Fool’s fate; Mendes decides to have Lear batter the poor guy to death in a bathtub with a metal bar. I suppose this is meant to show the extent of Lear’s madness, since he loves the Fool and would never in his right mind resort to such senseless violence. I found it simply too difficult to believe – it felt like it was done just to shock (in a production that is generally quite bloody!).
• As Edmund lies dying, Mendes cuts the line where he says he’d like to do one final good deed and sends instructions to have Lear and Cordelia released from prison. Yes, it does seem like a inconsistency in his character that he has a sudden change of heart, but without this line it isn’t clear how Lear gets out of prison. Not only does this cause a plot hole, it misses an important point: that Edmund sends his message just in time to save Lear, but not Cordelia, thus rendering his good dead futile and emphasising the arbitrariness of Cordelia’s death. Perhaps Lear’s release was explained some other way that I completely missed, though; it’s plausible that my espresso high was staring to wear off by that point.

Those are all my thoughts. I am never going to not recommend you go to see any production of King Lear (although that movie with the samurais is pretty weird), but this is a particularly good one, even with the few small elements I was unsure about. I make no apologies for the length of this post. If you’ve made it to the end, well done: you clearly have the stamina to sit through a three-hour play, in which case you should definitely see King Lear. You may emerge feeling slightly miserable about the world, but you will also feel enriched as a person. Guaranteed.

Norwegian Wood and a disproportionately long rant about back cover descriptions

Every writer deserves a second chance. Those who have been reading my blog for a while (squints into the distance, a plastic bag tumbles by in the wind, police sirens howling etc.) will remember that I wasn’t enthused about Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I didn’t hate it, but nor did I love it, and was left with a feeling similar to the prose itself: flat and ever-so-slightly bland. I said I wouldn’t be in a hurry to read another Murakami novel, but after a gap of a couple of years I decided to give him another go, and bought a copy of Norwegian Wood.

I thought I’d like it better for its simplicity. Essentially, it’s a boy meets girl story – complicated by death, grief and mental illness, admittedly, but lacking the absurdity and weird symbolic motifs in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Toru Watanabe is in love with Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki, who committed suicide at seventeen. While Toru’s response to Kizuki’s death is to become emotionally numb – which suits Murakami’s prose style here – Naoko grows increasingly unstable and books herself into a ‘retreat’ for people suffering from mental illness to recover. Toru loves Naoko but knows he can’t be with her, which complicates his developing relationship with fellow student Midori. The story is narrated in retrospect by a middle-aged Toru, whose voice is infused with sadness and regret, but it’s never clear whether he was able to move on from Naoko to be with Midori (I imagine he wasn’t – ever the cynic).

It turned out I liked this much less than The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, though I’m not sure whether that’s due to what the book actually was or what I expected it to be. I felt misled by the back cover, which gave me expectations the book couldn’t live up to – not Murakami’s fault at all, of course. The blurb is fixated on the idea that Norwegian Wood captures the essence of student life in the 1960s, with Toru ‘adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire’. I was expecting drink and drugs, music, politics and protest, all the things you associate with the 60s… but what I got was pretty pedestrian. Toru does sleep around a bit, but the sex is described in a disturbingly detached and utilitarian way – like a science teacher taking a sex education class – and there are no wild parties, hallucinogenic epiphanies, student riots or anything else at all controversial or surprising. In fact, it’s the opposite: because of the shock of Kizuki’s suicide, Toru is unable to engage in student culture, with any attempts at enjoying himself leaving him cold and wondering what the point is. That’s why it annoyed me so much that whoever wrote the copy had taken an aspect of the book they thought made it a bit sexier, misrepresented it, and laboured it to the extent that I felt disappointed by a book which I might otherwise have quite enjoyed.

That leads me onto the tangential rant I’ve been building up to. If the books on my shelf are anything to go by, it seems too many publishers don’t know how to write good copy. Working in publishing myself, I appreciate the need to write a piece of copy that sells to the target market rather than a 300-word masterpiece that crystallises the literary mood of the book. In academic publishing it’s different because it’s usually about sexing down. While authors often want to write something punchy and exciting for the back of their book (fair enough when they’ve spent years writing it) we’ll rework the copy using clear, informative language that says what the book’s about, who it’s for and what the advantages of reading it are. I appreciate that trade (fiction and non-fiction) publishing is more about sexing up descriptions, and that it’s a crowded marketplace where you need to grab the reader’s attention, but I think there’s a line you can cross into disingenuousness, and many novels I pick up do cross that line.

Some publishers writing copy apparently think there is a special register you need to use which is not spoken or written by anyone in any other context. The best way to find something new to read – if you don’t have hours to spare leisurely browsing bookshops – is asking people for recommendations. Every time someone has convinced me to a buy a book, it’s been because of the honesty of their language – they say they loved a book, it made them laugh, it made them cry, it was the best thing they’ve read in years. Simple. No one has ever said to me, ‘Hey, you should read Catch-22, it really is a savage indictment of twentieth-century madness!’ (Does madness change its nature every 100 years?) Often I’ll feel like reading something funny, or sad, something set in a dystopia or during a war, but I’ve never thought to myself, ‘I really fancy reading something that sheds a blazing light on the present!’ (Brave New World does, apparently.) ‘A blazing light on the present’ is a meaningless phrase which doesn’t make me want to read the book (although I did, and it was very good, but that’s another blog post). People describe books as friends – so why can’t books talk like a friend would too?

I think quotes on the back of a book are much more effective than flowery descriptions of hearts being rended, tears being jerked and foundations being rocked. People’s opinions matter. OK, perhaps not in film adverts where they stop a random punter coming out of the cinema who garbles, ‘It was amazing! It made me choke on my popcorn! I might as well die now I’ve seen this!’ with the self-satisfied glow of an idiot who has been convinced by a camera crew that his thoughts on everything are big and important. What does make me want to go and see a film is a good review by a critic. What makes me want to read a book is a quote from another writer I admire praising it (although not from Marie Claire telling me a book is ‘unputdownable’, which is the harpy screech of publicists everywhere and which I will never, ever accept as a legitimate word even if the OED does). Of course, I am being a snob, and it’s all about targeting your audience – that might appeal to some people…

In conclusion, people seem to think that writing good copy is easy, that anyone can do it. It’s not. Talking like a normal, honest person is difficult when you’re doing it too consciously. Publishers could try harder with this, myself probably included. I write this with the self-satisfied glow of a blogger who has been convinced by social media that all her opinions are big and important.

I had a point originally, didn’t I? Oh yes. Norwegian Wood. After a second date, it’s clear Murakami and I aren’t going to work out. If you want a book that’s ‘undeniably hip, full of student uprisings, free love, booze and 1960s pop’ (that’s the Independent on Sunday apparently not reading the same book I did) I wouldn’t recommend this; read something like The Buddha of Surburbia if you want salaciousness. If you like the idea of an honest story about how loving someone can be bleak and difficult and not end in any kind of resolution, let alone a happy or satisfying one, give Norwegian Wood a go. You may very well like it more than I did.

My Greene phase

As I mentioned in my last post, I recently became a little obsessed with Graham Greene, reading three of his novels in quick succession: I started with The Quiet American after seeing the film; enjoying that immensely, I moved onto Brighton Rock, which I thought was probably his quintessential work; and I finished with perhaps a slightly lesser-known novel, Travels With My Aunt. I enjoyed each slightly less than the the last (although that could just be the effect of reading too much of a single author at once), and at first I was surprised at how different in tone they seemed to be. All of them shared the same lucid, readable style, but in terms of character, plot and location I thought they were extremely different. You can tell that Greene himself was a well-travelled man who thought deeply about politics, religion and morality, as these themes underpin all three novels – and it was in considering this that I realised perhaps there are more similarities between them than I initially thought, and that there certainly is such a thing as a ‘Green-esque’ novel.

Let’s start with The Quiet American. If you want a brief summary of the book, scroll down to my post below. What I loved about this novel was its ambiguity. Oh, I do love a bit of ambiguity. When I think about novels I haven’t enjoyed, I realise it was often because I felt like the author was smacking me around the head with the sledgehammer of his or her opinion – and whether I agreed that opinion or not, I don’t like the world being presented in terms of one person’s viewpoint. I like it when authors ask me questions: have you thought about this? And I like it even more when they conclude that they don’t have the answer themselves. The Quiet American had that complexity. Ultimately Greene suggests that neither Fowler’s cynicism and lack of conviction, nor Pyle’s naive idealism which causes massive destruction when put into practice, is a better way of viewing the world. Fowler has Pyle defined as an innocent, but Pyle eventually demonstrates that he is not as innocent as he seems – politically if not morally, as he never seems to fully understand the consequences of his political activity (which results in the needless death of Vietnamese people). Fowler’s weary cynicism, on the other hand, is wearing for the reader too; it’s frustrating that he refuses to believe in anything, even standing aside with a figurative smirk as Pyle attempts to win Phuong’s affections although she is the only thing he really seems to care about. When Fowler finally takes decisive action at the end of the novel, resulting in Pyle’s murder, we can’t help but feel that Pyle’s death is a tragedy that hasn’t solved any problems. There must be another solution to both the characters’ ideological war and the actual situation in Vietnam, although no-one has any idea what it is, and this sense of frustration underlies the entire novel (along with the knowledge of what will happen ten years later when the Americans turn up to wage their war against Communism).

What I loved most about The Quiet American, as I mentioned in my last post, was simply the way it was written. It was clever, with the love triangle between Fowler, Pyle and Phuong running parallel to the book’s political themes, but this cleverness never announced itself in difficult, convoluted writing. I thought this was less the case in Brighton Rock, which had a distinctly more ‘literary’ tone to it. Apparently Greene initially tried to separate his novels into two groups: thrillers and literary works. I strongly dislike attempts to categorise novels like this, and I think Greene also realised that it’s not that simple. Brighton Rock isn’t fast-paced and full of suspense, granted, but it certainly has a plot. It begins from the viewpoint of a journalist, Hale, who has been an informant for a gang leader in Brighton. Now that gang leader is dead, Hale knows the rival gang are going to kill him in revenge. He rushes around Brighton in a panic, trying to latch himself onto various women so the gang can’t get him alone. He succeeds in convincing Ida Arnold to come for a drink with him, but when she leaves him briefly he disappears and is killed. We then follow seventeen-year-old Pinkie, the thug who’s responsible for the murder, as he tries to cover his tracks. This involves evading the suspicious Ida, but also silencing Rose, a local waitress who’s seen more than she should have. He does this by marrying her, then trying to convince her to commit suicide. Pinkie collapses under the pressure of holding together his rapidly disintegrating gang and covering up his crime, pulling Rose deeper into his world of petty corruption. Greene was a Catholic, although he didn’t want to be seen as a ‘Catholic novelist,’ and religion is a key theme in Brighton Rock. Pinkie and Rose are both Catholics, but Pinkie has a strange attitude to his religion which Rose also adopts: he revels in the fact he has broken its precepts and is consequently damned. He thinks damnation makes him an exceptional figure, a true gang leader. What’s apparent to the reader, however, is the true pettiness of it all. Brighton is Pinkie’s entire world. Greene evocatively portrays Brighton as dismal and shabby, a seedy pleasure resort where no-one is really enjoying themselves and the characters are physically repulsive: Rose, for example, is bony, pale and insipid like her personality, and Pinkie resents her for making it necessary to marry her. The exception to this is Ida, who is big, buxom, full of life and laughter, and who doesn’t care for Pinkie’s self-aggrandisation. As the introduction says, ‘Pinkie and Rose believe in Good and Evil; Ida believes in more down-to-earth Right and Wrong,’ and so is determined to solve the murder. It would seem that Ida’s viewpoint shines out as the only valid one, but once again I think there is ambiguity (yay). Greene suggests that Ida can only be happy because she is too single-minded – she laughs off anything that might disrupt her simplistic worldview, refusing to confront life’s bigger questions. Then again, why bother to confront the big questions like Pinkie and Rose, when they only make us unhappy? Ooh, complexity…

I felt rather depressed reading Brighton Rock, which I suppose was the aim, but it meant I enjoyed it less than The Quiet American. I needed something to cheer me up, so it’s a good thing I then moved onto Travels With My Aunt, which could be described as a comedy more than a novel. It was a lot more simplistic than the other two, which is probably why I liked it least. Henry Pullinger is a retired bank manager who has lived a quiet suburban life in Southwood with only his beloved dahlias for company. When he is reunited with his Aunt Augusta at his mother’s funeral, she coerces him into travelling with her and drags him into her mad, bohemian world of crime and adventure. While initially resistant, he eventually comes to regret the dullness of his existence thus far. Henry makes a good foil for Augusta, describing her eccentricities with passivity and slight bemusement, but becoming more and more involved as his narrative progresses. Although he’s dull, he’s not dull to read about: it’s amusing to see his reaction as Augusta’s hotel room in Istanbul is searched by a General Hakim for the gold ingot she is hiding inside a candle, for example. I do think Augusta is somewhat a caricature of an eccentric old lady, and it annoys me that her view of the world – that living a quiet and routine life is soul-draining, and travelling is the only way to really live – is presented as inherently right. She’s a prototype of the ‘gap yah’ kid before that joke even existed. If Henry’s life in England with his dahlias makes him happy, what’s wrong with that? Is he really happier at the end of the novel when he is living in Paraguay and is about to marry a not-yet-sixteen-year-old girl? Perhaps my dislike is a reflection of my own personality – I’ve never been very sympathetic to the hippie lifestyle – but in any case, this book seemed more to be about Greene having a bit of fun. That’s fine, I suppose: we’ve all got to take a break sometime!

Speaking of taking a break, I think it’s time I moved onto another novelist, as much as I admire Greene – I’ve started to read Little Women, which could hardly be further removed, really! If you’re a writer, or just someone who enjoys good writing, I would recommend reading any of the novels above. Greene shows how it’s possible to combine literary themes with seemingly effortless writing, although I’m sure a lot of effort and precision went into it. He subtly plays characters and the concepts they represent against one another in a wide range of different settings, asking questions and not necessarily providing the answers, and so showing the universality of the problems we all face in life. These are things I’ll be aiming to replicate in my own writing as I plough on with my attempt to write at least five hundred words every day – though I can’t hope to be quite as successful.

My reading log: 2013

Happy new year, blog readers! I hope you haven’t yet abandoned all your positive resolutions and fallen back into the mire of your old bad habits, losing a little more self-motivation with every reduced-to-clear mince pie you stuff into your mouth to create the sugar high necessary to get through another hungover day in the office (how’s dry January going?). No, I’m pretty sure no one will be reading this blog, since you’re all currently pounding treadmills, attending bikram yoga, writing your novels and making kale detox smoothies, so I can ramble on as incoherently and insignificantly as I like.

So far, my 2014 has been extremely busy, evidenced by the fact this blog post has been in the works since January 1st. One of my resolutions is to make more time for myself to write, but obviously that isn’t going so well. Oh well. At least I’m having fun, even though I don’t have time for the basic practicalities of living and have subsisted on almost nothing except cereal and red wine for the past two days…

Last year I wrote this post looking back at the books I’d read in 2012. Although an avid reader, my actual reading technique is poor: I’m in such a hurry to read as much as possible in my lifetime that I race through books too quickly, racing to the end of a chapter on the tube journey to work when I’m only semi-conscious and have an armpit in my face. Writing a summary of the year in books is great in that it allows me time to reflect, figure out what I’ve actually learnt through my reading, and also to associate books with what I was doing when I read them. I remember, for example, the look of bemusement on the faces of my fellow commuters when I whipped out my enormous Hilary Mantel hardback on the train: that was before I moved to London, when I was taking an hour-long train to work and was getting through some seriously substantial literature.

Apart from the reading opportunity created by my commute, having a job has unfortunately diminished the number of books on my 2013 reading log. In 2012 I read 50 books, whilst in the year just gone I only managed 41. Still, I’m pleasantly surprised that I only read nine less books, considering I was a jobless bum for six months in 2012! (I don’t recall watching that much daytime TV in my unemployment days, so I’m not sure what I was doing instead of reading and writing job applications: I can only assume I was trapped in a warp in the space-time-employment continuum.)

At the end of 2012, I set myself some reading resolutions for the year ahead. Did I fulfill them? One was to read War and Peace, which I can proudly say I achieved (and even wrote a fine post comparing it to Made in Chelsea, if I do say so myself). Two was to read more non-fiction; I did a little better on this front, but there’s still room for improvement. Three was to be more original when selecting which book to read next, properly browsing bookshops rather than buying the latest prize-winner. To be honest, most of my reading this year was dictated by a) stuff I got from work and b) stuff I borrowed from friends. This did mean that I ended up reading many books I never would have picked up otherwise – although some of them turned out to be pretty mediocre. I still need to work on this resolution!

Without any further ado (and I’m aware the above was rather a lot of ado), here’s a summary of my 2013 in books:

The best books I’ve read in 2013:

The Quiet American by Graham Greene: I was a huge fan of this novel. It’s narrated by Thomas Fowler, a British journalist living in Vietnam in the 1950s and reporting on the war there. He has fallen in love with the beautiful, placid Phuong, but when he meets Pyle, an idealistic young American, he finds a challenger for Phuong’s affections. Their conflict runs much deeper than being mere rivals in love, however: their views on the war, and on the world in general, are almost diametrically opposed. Thomas is deeply cynical and disillusioned with the political situation in Vietnam, but loves and respects the Vietnamese people; Pyle, on the other hand, is a political idealist with an innocent but dangerously black-and-white view on life. I actually watched the film version of this first, and thought it might spoil the book, but knowing what happened didn’t lessen my enjoyment at all. I loved the novel mainly for lucidity of Greene’s prose, which inspired me to write myself. He really nails the art of saying exactly what he needs to, and conveying layers of subtle meaning, in as few words as possible – for example, when he writes that Phuong ‘sometimes… seemed invisible like peace’; or the soldier who smiles ‘brightly, neatly, efficiently, a military abbreviation of a smile.’ My own sentences seem messy and cluttered in comparison… I have since read Brighton Rock and am now reading Travels with my Aunt, so expect a Greene-themed post in the near future!

Although it defies my resolution of not reading things just because they’ve been nominated for prizes, I can’t deny being blown away by Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. The fact I was willing to lug the enormous hardback editions on my commute every day (as mentioned above) attests to how addictive they were. At the same time as being hugely readable, though, both books are also beautifully written, complex and challenging. Although I knew how the story ended – it being history, obviously – I was compelled to turn the pages by Mantel’s brilliant characterisation: I was dying to see how each character would react to the events I knew were about to happen, especially Cromwell, King Henry and Anne Boleyn. The amount of research Mantel has put into each novel is impressive (I definitely lack the diligence to write historical fiction), and naturally she wants to demonstrate this, which does result in a few dense passages of historical context that aren’t exactly scintillating, but I was more than happy to make allowances for this. I’m glad there’s a TV series to look forward to, since I highly doubt I’ll be able to get hold of tickets for the RSC adaptation…

I wrote several blog posts on books I enjoyed over the past year, including Kerry Young’s Pao and Tove Jannson’s The Summer Book, which are also highly recommended.

The worst books I’ve read in 2013:

Fortunately I didn’t read any appallingly bad books, so these are the ones that simply weren’t as good as the others.

You may have already read my criticism of Elif Shafak’s Honour, so I won’t go into detail. It remains the most disappointing book I read, if only because of the hype surrounding it. It wasn’t inherently terrible, but as a writer I picked up on quite a few things that made me cringe. There were too many narrators, many of them boring and insignificant, some characters were little more than mouthpieces for various stereotypes, much of the dialogue was painfully unrealistic, and I thought there was insufficient exploration of what was apparently the book’s central theme (honour killing).

I also read some books considered classics which I was disappointed by. Dickens’s Great Expectations is among my favourite novels, and so I was surprised at how bored I was reading David Copperfield. As the title suggests, it tells the life story of the aponymous narrator. Probably because like many of Dickens’s novels it was serialised, it seemed to me like one not-particularly-exciting event happening after the other with no sense of a developing plot or building tension. Not every novel has to go out with a bang or deliver a profound message about the world, but I felt the story was just trotting along rather pointlessly, and found it hard to finish. In the same vein, I was almost lulled to sleep on my tube journeys by Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (originally serialised in a magazine edited by none other than Dickens!). I remembered enjoying the BBC TV adaptation of Cranford, which followed the lives of people living in a rural English village. I discovered that the TV series was actually an amalgamation of several short novels by Gaskell, with Cranford forming only a small part of it. Cranford is narrated by Mary Smith, who talks about her stay with two spinsters, Miss Matty and Miss Deborah, and the dull and insignificant things that happen to them, such as Miss Matty confusing a petticoat for a birdcage (how charmingly provincial!). While Jane Austen’s novels make the social niceties of a small self-enclosed world seem as important to the reader as they are to the characters, Cranford left me wondering why I should care.

The most depressing book I’ve read in 2013:

I read On the Beach by Nevil Shute, I writer I’d never come across before, because my housemate was clearing out her bookshelf and I can never turn down a free book. I’m glad I read it, but my, was it morbidly depressing. The events of the novel take place mainly in Melbourne after a hypothetical world war in which China and Russia have nuked one another so badly that the radiation is now slowly spreading around the globe and gradually wiping out the human race. Australia will be one of the last places to go, and the characters know they only have a few months left to live. In spite of this, they carry on with their lives as if nothing is going to happen: they continue to have children, talking about what they will be when they grow up; one of the characters takes a typing course in order to further her career; they plant flowers in their gardens and talk about how beautiful the flowers will look next summer, when they won’t be alive to see him. I found this extremely poignant. Shute makes the tragedy worse by offering a scrap of hope – a radio signal has been detected in Seattle, where everyone is supposedly dead, and a submarine pilot goes there to investigate – and then tears this hope away. I hope that’s not a spoiler, because the ending is inevitable. If you’re going to read this, don’t expect a happy ending, but do expect to be moved and made to think pretty hard about the cost of human conflict.

On re-reading books: 

I’ve decided that I would like to re-read some of my favourite books, because how can I claim that they’re still my favourites when I haven’t read them in over five years? For example, I first read Pride and Prejudice when I was 15 – almost ten years ago – and haven’t read it again since, although I’ve seen so many film and TV adaptations that I feel like I have. My younger self was under the impression that reading P&P made me quite the literary heavyweight, but on re-reading a few months ago I was struck by what an easy read it actually is. I also remember intensely disliking Darcy when I first read the novel, though he won me around at the end; on re-reading, of course I saw his reservation as being misunderstood for rudeness, and was much more sympathetic. It’s a real shame that the Darcy character has been spoiled by his name becoming a buzzword for ‘every woman’s perfect guy’; it makes it extremely difficult to appreciate how his character develops to become less proud over the course of the novel, which in turn makes it more difficult to identify with Elizabeth when she misunderstands him. Novels should explore how characters evolve through time and experience, but because we now see Darcy and Elizabeth from the start as ‘the perfect couple’, the novel loses that experiential element and it’s become something of a cork board for people (basically, women) to pin their own desires onto. How I wish I could read P&P for the first time over again!

I also re-read Wuthering Heights last year, and this year I plan to re-read Little Women, having receiving a beautiful Penguin Threads edition for Christmas. Re-reading novels I loved, to see whether I view them differently now that I have changed and grown as a person, is one of my 2014 reading resolutions. I’d also like to read books more closely, so that I stop forgetting everything that happened in them about a week after moving onto the next book. I’m going to make a slight change to my reading log: instead of just writing down the titles of books I’ve read, I’m going to write down at least one thing I’ve learnt from each book. I believe you can learn something from every book, even if it’s just how not to write poorly (thanks, Elif Shafak!) or how to bore people (thanks, Elizabeth Gaskell!).

On that slightly harsh note (sorry guys, I’m sure some people love you) I’m off to do some work on my own novel! Hopefully I won’t leave it quite so long before I’m back with another post – and hopefully you’ll all be bored of the treadmill and the kale smoothies by then.

Richard II at the Barbican

For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings;

How some have been deposed; some slain in war,

Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;

Some poison’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d;

All murder’d: for within the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king

Keeps Death his court… (Richard II, 3.2)

If you watched the BBC’s The Hollow Crown last year, you might remember a disheveled, deranged Ben Whishaw (I don’t do this on purpose, honestly – he just seems to permeate every area of my life…) speaking these lines whilst sprawling on the sand like a wailing child whose sandcastle has just been destroyed. On Tuesday night I saw David Tennant speaking the same lines in the RSC’s excellent production of Richard II at the Barbican. I couldn’t help but compare both versions, although the media were quite different; both were great, but there were subtle differences in Whishaw’s and Tennant’s performances that I couldn’t pinpoint until I thought about it afterwards.

First, some context. Shakespeare’s history play tells the story of Richard II, a weak and ineffective king who is deposed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, later known as Henry IV (and the subject of the next play). At first Richard carelessly flings around commands, beheading and exiling his subjects with the authority just a few words, complacent in his belief he is the divinely appointed king. The rise of Bolingbroke, who demonstrates the truly kingly qualities of honour, strength and most importantly forgiveness of his enermies, shows Richard that,

 I live with bread like you, feel want,

Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,

How can you say to me, I am a king? (3.2)

Richard has been puffed up by the flattery of those around him, and without that flattery he loses his sense of self (and consequently his mind). I see Richard II as Shakespeare once again demonstrating the relation between words and power. At the beginning of the play, after Richard has exiled Bolingbroke from England for ten years and then reduced his exile to six on seeing his father’s grief, Bolingbroke remarks wryly: ‘Four lagging winters and four wanton springs / End in a word: such is the breath of kings.’ Richard’s words are powerful but it is an arbitrary power, an illusion constructed by the flattering words of his subjects. As soon as they stop considering him king and turn to Bolingbroke instead, his kingly persona is exposed as a fiction. The crown is indeed hollow – it is empty and meaningless without the right person to fill it.

Although Richard is a terrible king – and a vain, frivolous and uncaring man to boot – I find it hard to dislike him. Shakespeare artfully evokes pity for Richard, who is humiliated and betrayed by everyone around him, whilst also recognising that Bolingbroke, who takes no pleasure in deposing his cousin, is a much better king. In The Hollow Crown, I thought Whishaw’s Richard came across as mentally deficient, a child’s mind in a man’s body. Tennant plays the character slightly differently. He doesn’t seem completely mad, and is more in control of himself; instead he’s just a weak-minded man born into a position of power he isn’t capable of occupying, and who doesn’t understand what it really is to be king. He slumps on the throne with a bored expression, paces up and down, and gazes vacantly past people as they speak to him. At first he seems too willing to surrender his crown to Bolingbroke, as if relieved to be free of the tedium, but rupturing his weak facade of dignity is his realisation that no-one respects him without his crown, and this realisation is tormenting him. It was a subtler performance than Whishaw’s, and I think that perhaps – dare I say it? – I preferred it. It seems much more difficult to command a stage than a TV screen, and Tennant does so confidently, resisting the temptation to make Richard too comically camp or obviously insane.

That’s something I really liked about the RSC production: it’s a very straight adaptation, well-cast, well-acted and well-staged. It recognises that Richard II is a history play about politics and power, not a deep exploration of the complexities of the human soul (although many of Shakespeare’s other plays do offer this!). The costumes are beautiful – at one point the enrobed Richard looks like he is made out of gold – and so is the set. It’s simple and elegant, with images projected onto the stage and light effects used to represent different scenery, and this allows the throne and the crown to retain their power as the play’s main symbols. I could say that the lack of objects onstage and the constantly shifting light represent the shifting and intangible nature of power… but that would just be obnoxious, wouldn’t it? The prison scene was extremely powerful, with the chained Tennant rising on a platform from underneath the stage, his broken body reflected by an enormous cracked mirror above him, an image which appears throughout the play to represent his shattered vanity.

Tennant didn’t turn the play into a one-man show with his trademark restless energy and was supported by a strong cast, particularly Oliver Ford Davies as the Duke of York and Nigel Lindsay as Bolingbroke. There wasn’t a single weak actor. Importantly for me, the subtlety of the production allows Shakespeare’s words to shine through, and there were a few points when I found myself struck afresh with amazement at how beautiful his language is.

 Ha, ha! keep time: how sour sweet music is, 

When time is broke and no proportion kept! 

So is it in the music of men’s lives. 

And here have I the daintiness of ear 

To cheque time broke in a disorder’d string; 

But for the concord of my state and time 

Had not an ear to hear my true time broke. 

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me. (5.5)

It’s easy to blather on about how he is the greatest playwright in history, a master wordsmith and so on, but it takes a great production to really make you aware of this. This is one such!

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day…

Last October – and I can hardly believe a full year has passed since then – I marked the onset of autumn by sharing some paintings by Millais in this post. Last weekend as I took a stroll around the green patches of my corner of north London in my trusty leather boots, which haven’t seen a sun-drenched woodland path in months, tromping with child-like delight through the first few fallen leaves, I decided it was time to celebrate autumn once again. This time, I’d like to share with you one of my favourite poems by Keats. It’s probably trotted out by every literature blogger as soon as the temperature drops below 20 degrees, but since Keats is one of the very few poets I actually like I have a limited choice, so you’re just going to have to read it again. It’s a wonderful poem so I’m sure you won’t mind.

To Autumn (1819)

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

 

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,

Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cider-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

 

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

I love this poem because it perfectly evokes the spirit of autumn in an explosion of giddy, almost overwhelming sensory language. Reading it makes me feel drunk. I can imagine myself basking in the maturing sun; I can taste the swollen, overripe fruit; I can see the clouds blooming above me in the sky turning pink as the sun sets, and the lambs bleat, and the crickets sing and the swallows twitter. You could read the poem in this way, just seeing and hearing and tasting everything, without having to read anything else into it.

Or you could also appreciate the way the poem is perfectly structured, with the progression both from early to late autumn and from morning to sunset; the rhythm of the lines that seem to spill out of themselves like the cells of the bees and the cider-press; and the syntax and assonance of phrases such as ‘mists and mellow fruitfulness’ and ‘oozings hours by hours’  and ‘barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day’ which sound exactly like the meaning they are trying to convey.

Or you can sense the anxiety inherent in lines such as, ‘Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?’ and think about the full-grown lambs which are in fact about to be slaughtered, and the fact that winter is just around the corner. Then you can think about Keats’ own life and the fact that two years after writing this poem he died of tuberculosis, the same disease that killed his brother less than a year before he wrote the poem, and so the winter of his life was approaching too. When you think about that, the poem seems to be not just a celebration of a beautiful season but also incredibly sad. Andrew Motion described this as Keats’ ‘most untroubled poem’, and while I can see that he has tried to remove his ego from the poem as much as possible, I can also still sense the fear of mortality that defines Keats’ poetry for me.

Cleverer people have better things to say about To Autumn than I do, though, and there’s plenty of material online, so look it up if you’re interested (this analysis is pretty good). I think your time and mine would be better spent going outside and enjoying the kind of day Keats describes, however – even though autumn in London, pretty as it is, will never be quite the same as the unspoiled rural autumns he knew.