The Years

If I’m honest, I’m not Virginia Woolf’s biggest fan.  Or any kind of fan of hers.  In fact, I’m a little of the opinion that her suicide note was the best thing she ever wrote.  It’s wonderfully poignant.  I’d heard bad things about her for quite a while, but after reading (and loving) Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, I decided to give her a go.  Mistake.  I was horribly disappointed by Mrs Dalloway and Orlando is quite frankly ridiculous.  Nonetheless, third time being the charm, I embarked upon The Years (if not with a fully open mind) and it’s kind of… really good.

The book tells the story of the Pargiter family between 1985 and 1930.  Or, at least that’s what the blurb on the edition I got from the library proclaims.  In reality, it tells mundane events in the lives of a few of the seven Pargiter children, their cousins, their children and their cousins’ children.  It largely skips the major events of the time period in favour of focusing on dinner parties and trips to the country.

And okay, Woolf could tell the story of the characters in a far more comprehensive way- one character (Delia Pargiter) disappears for years, cropping up only in the odd obscure reference to how she is handling the death of a character who is never introduced.  Similarly her brother Edward and sister Milly slip out of the narrative after the first chapter only to appear at a raucous family reunion in the last.  But the fragmented storyline works.  Once you accept that this is not the story of a family over forty-odd years, it’s the inconsequential moments within that story, the book becomes completely enjoyable.  As long as the reader is happy to fill in the dramatic events (the births, marriages, deaths and the heartbreaks) that we know must happen in between.

I’m ridiculously gone for this book.  I even like the way Woolf won’t shut up about the bloody smog.  In a way that’s severely reminiscent of T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock it’s always coming along and interrupting the story, creeping about and wrapping itself around buildings.  It’s almost completely unnecessary, I think.  And yet; I want to say it adds a certain je ne sais quoi to proceedings, but it doesn’t add a thing.  Atmosphere, maybe.  The best I can say for it is it is appropriate.  The novel completely fails to have a plot as is conventionally understood and Woolf’s obsession with the weather is just another (utterly British) method of focusing on the minutiae. 

My next book will be Aleksandar Hemon’s Nowhere Man.  And, as I’m only 90 pages or so in, it may be some time.

The Ghost Road

So, the basics first off.  The Ghost Road is the third book in Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy.  I read Regeneration itself when I was 18 and studying it for my A-Levels.  It tells the story of Siegfried Sassoon’s First World War protest, and his subsequent time in Craiglockhart hospital.  If I’m honest, the main parts of the story I remember are Sassoon’s discussions about poetry with fellow patient Wilfred Owen.  I skipped book two in the trilogy- The Eye in the Door (this in itself is big news for me, as I do like to read a complete trilogy in order).  All of this meant that I wasn’t too sure what to expect when it came to The Ghost Road.  Less sex, definitely.

The book follows two characters from Regeneration, real person Dr William Rivers and significantly more fictional Billy Prior, in the last few months of World War One.  As Prior shags his way through England and France, Rivers mopes, reminisces and occasionally does his job. 

I think I’m making it sound like I didn’t enjoy the book, but I really did.  The two stories play out almost entirely separately, barring one conversation and a few letters and it’s not until Barker gets all thematic that there’s a connection between the two.  Ultimately, it’s impossible not to draw links between the futile lives of soldiers unable and unwilling to stay away from the front and the concept of “Mate”- described as “a state of which death [is] the appropriate outcome"- that Rivers encounters.

There’s also a wicked strain of dark humour in the book that’s much appreciated.  It’s no real task to make a book that is, essentially, about the death and disease of a lot of people sad, but Barker makes it funny too.  One of Rivers’s patients is convinced his penis has been cut off and pickled by a nurse, and then he’s mortally offended when asked how he urinates.  Naturally, this dries up somewhat when the business of dying actually starts, but futile massacres do so rarely get belly laughs.

There’s another of Pat Barker’s books I have lined up.  It’s been sitting on my shelf for months, but (going by blurb alone), it’s about the War too, and its general inescapability.  There’s a childish part of me that’s been resisting reading it because the horrors of World War One are everywhere now we’re approaching the centenary.  It feels like you can’t turn on a history programme or even the One Show without some clued up expert shuffling in and muttering “War is Hell.”  Reading this has changed my mind (not about the documentaries- none of them can express the pity of war and all that as well as a single Wilfred Owen poem), but about reading Another World.  It’s definitely getting bumped up the list. 

Next time, I’ll be writing about much hated Virginia Woolf’s The Years…

The Idea

When I graduated from university, I was so happy to be done with reading lists.  I'd never seen them as the evil some people do and they introduced me to books I loved, my third year housemate will attest to my gleeful love of the Hollyoaks-eque drama of Matthew Lewis's The Monk.  But, for every wonderful book, there would be one I forced my way through, so the idea of freedom in what I could read was a staggering prospect.  Of course, I quickly remembered that I am just the worst at being decisive and that I actually crave structure.  So, I dug out my old copy of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die (okay, I downloaded a copy of the list from the internet), formatted it into a spreadsheet and input formulae to calculate the number and percentage of books I'd read.  The result was a pitiful 86- I join you today half way through number 264.   That's 26.27373% of the way in, for anyone who cares as much as I do about the numbers.

The fact that I'm more than a quarter of the way in does mean that there are some wonderful books and authors that I've missed the chance to blog about.  Absolute classics, like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye are long gone, as are authors like Kazuo Ishiguro and Kurt Vonnegut.  And then there are other books that are gone, the ones that quickly became my favourite type- the ones I would never have thought to read were it not for the list.  In the last six months alone, these have included Margaret Drabble's The Red Queen, which led to hours on Wikipedia researching the historical truth behind Prince Sado, The Poisionwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver and, most recently Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres.  I could go on for hours...

There are rules further "only read books on the list" that I have imposed upon myself.  Following one summer of glutting on the entire works of Jane Austen to the point of frustration, I came up with these five guidelines to provide variety.  They apply to any six books read consecutively and run as follows:

1. No two books by the same author.
2. There must be books written in at least two different centuries.
3. There must be books written by authors from more than one continent.
4. There must be at least one book not originally in the English language.
5. There must be at least one female author.

The rules, of course, will change as necessity dictates.  I anticipate running out of female authors at some point, and some of the foreign language books aren't actually available in English at the moment (my dedication does draw the line at learning a new language to read a book).   But there you have it, my life's goal- at my current rate I should be able to achieve it within ten years.

So stay tuned for my first book (or 264th, depending on how you look at it).  It'll be The Ghost Road by Pat Barker, the third of her Regeneration trilogy about World War One.  I'm only half way through, but it's fairly historically accurate, so I think I might know how this one's going to to end.