The Black Prince

I would say that I didn’t know what to expect going into The Black Prince, but that’s not quite true.  I’ve read a couple of Iris Murdoch books previously; The Sea, The Sea and The Bell and I’ve noticed that she tended to go in for tales about artist/ writer types struggling with The Muse.  Or, to put it another way, men (and always men it seems) of a certain age with too much free time on their hands.  Hero of The Black Prince is Franz Kafka-esque former taxman-cum-author Bradley Pearson.  At 58 he’s retired from his day job and following a small amount of earlier success plans to write.  Naturally, he does everything under the sun but write.

The story itself is full of twists and turns that we completely unexpected (one lust fill romance aside).  What starts as a total farce of a man’s attempts to leave London for a break being thwarted by his ridiculous friends and family gets pretty dark later on and ends in a place so far removed from the book’s beginnings that they barely resemble the same story.  I’m trying to not reveal too many spoilers her.  This is a good book (if you have a fair appreciation of Hamlet) and I want to encourage people to read it.  The Black Prince is a wicked blend of dark humour- there’s a hilarious scene early on involving Pearson’s suicidal sister, his meddling best friend and recently returned ex-wife- and stunning literary technique.  The story is followed by four post scripts from characters that call the reliability of Pearson into question when he cannot respond and we’ve previously been given no reason to doubt him.  At least not any more than your standard first person narrated tale.

Aside from the story, there’s a hell of a lot of feminist fodder in The Black Prince.  I don’t know if Murdoch herself had much to do with feminism.  She would have been one of those women of my grandfather’s era (he was only a few years old than her) who would have been nearing the end of middle age when second wave feminism really got big.  Pearson himself is of the same age.  Accordingly, Pearson’s views on women are somewhat dated.  Yes, some of this is definitely just the character rather than the period he was formed in.  Pearson is naturally distrustful of women and holds firm in his view that platonic friendship between the sexes can’t exist.  But the book itself at times seems to be patronising its female characters: Julian is ridiculous for wanting to learn from an educated man, Rachel is deemed so for craving affection away from her indifferent and at times violent husband.  Of course, we’ve already established that the whole thing’s told to us by the unreliable Mr Pearson, so it could just be a symptom of that.  In fact, any accusation of misogyny can be passed off as Pearson’s own.  In the post script it is revealed that Julian marries her once mentioned childish ex-boyfriend.  Again, as our previous view of him is filtered through Pearson it’s hard to tell if Julian was ever indifferent to him, but it’s still surprising that she is not changed or developed significantly by the events of the novel.

In all, it’s a good book and I’m not quite sure what I want to say about it.  The way it plays out is so unexpected that going on about any of the elements too much is pretty spoiler-y and, as I’ve already said, I don’t want to ruin the book for people.  I’ve really enjoyed reading The Black Prince, though.  Murdoch’s one of those authors I always seem to forget about and rediscover periodically.  Its’ a strange thing; I’m never in the mood to read her, but doing so is always so rewarding.

The next book up is sci-fi classic, The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham.  

The Mysteries of Udolpho

I wasn’t looking forward to reading The Mysteries of Udolpho much.  I read a few extracts of it at university and studied another of Ann Radcliffe’s works, The Italian.  She’s one of those authors who use a hell of a lot of words to say very little of any meaning.  I mean, The Mysteries of Udolpho is just shy of 900 pages and yet the plot summary on Wikipedia is two paragraphs long.  One phrase, “many frightening but coincidental events happen within the castle,” sums up a good eighty per cent of the plot.  I have to confess, my enjoyment of the book hinged largely on the fact that I just started speed reading any time Radcliffe got started on the adjectives.  Or the poetry.  Yes, there are poems and they read like school girl fan fiction of the Lyrical Ballads.  For the sake of my sanity, they’ll not be mentioned again.  This, in case you haven’t guessed it yet, is going to be another of those blogs where I bitch but include a disclaimer that I didn’t hate the book.  In fact, in places I quite enjoyed it…

One thing that really annoyed me throughout the novel was Emily.  She’s the main character.  I think had I been reading this book eight or nine years ago, I’d have an entirely different view of her.  She’s young and she’s immature.  But we’re forced into her company for 800-odd pages and she’s not the sort of character who flourishes in adversity.  Once she discovers that life isn’t butterflies and rainbows, she’s whisked off to the creepy Castle of Udolpho by her indifferent aunt and fairly sketchy uncle.  The problem is that she holds an utterly unreasonable view of her uncle.  In her mind, she turns him into an evil villain capable of multiple murders and any crime that strikes her fancy.  Time and time again she is shown to be over-reacting, but still cannot see any good in the man whose only act of violence in the entire book is committed defending her.  The third person narrator doesn’t help matters, taking her flights of fancy seriously.  Sometimes it feels a bit like Harry Enfield’s Kevin the Teenager, accusing his parents of being “so unfair” but without a common sense viewpoint to highlight its ridiculousness.  And okay, Montoni does slightly imprison Emily (with the wonderfully cheesy line, “You speak like a heroine… we shall see whether you can suffer like one,”) and try and steal all her wealth but she could face adversity with a bit more grace.

Another issue I had was down to the fact that I have studied Radcliffe.  I remember being taught that she and Matthew Lewis are the polar opposites of one another.  While Lewis is off telling tales of men accidentally seducing ghost nuns, with Radcliffe everything has a natural explanation.  There are no ghosts.  There are no demons.  Knowing this also means there is little suspense in her work.  She loves to half tell a story, leaving you wanting more only to reveal hundreds of pages later that the resolution that you’ve been craving is utterly trite.  So going in knowing that it’ll be trite does cure you the inevitable disappointment, but also the hunger.  The book should be a real page turner and I just didn’t find it so. 

There are proper positives that I’m taking from The Mysteries of Udolpho though.  First off, it’s made me really want to read Northanger Abbey again.  I remember enjoying it before, but now I’ve read the actual book it’s ripping on and not just a general glut of the genre, I’m sure I’d appreciate it more.  It’s a good read in parts.  It is very much a genre piece and it has the foibles of any genre work.  It’s stupid and cheesy in parts and so ridiculously improbable that you wonder why Radcliffe didn’t just throw a ghost in there anyway for all the likelihood of the actual plot.  But it has its wickedly atmospheric moments, Emily’s discovery of her aunt significantly less murdered than she feared but dying terribly nonetheless is a particular treat.

I’ve just started The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch.  So far, so good.

The Island of Dr Moreau

So, as I mentioned last time, this is attempt number two to read The Island of Dr Moreau.  It’s very rare that I abandon a book part way through but I just couldn’t get into it last time around.  I downloaded it from Project Gutenberg a couple of years ago and, while I think Project Gutenberg is a wonderful thing, I have a real issue with reading books from a computer screen.  I know I’m fighting what will ultimately be a losing battle on this one but I feel the need to stand my ground.  Books will never be obsolete.  Or not in my lifetime.  Anyway, back on point, I wasn’t that into it, so I put the text aside until I eventually decided to start again afresh.  I’m glad I did.  It’s a right good book and despite its length there’s a hell of a lot going on.

The story, I think, is a fairly well known one.  Edward Prendick is rescued from a shipwreck by the heavy-drinking, failed doctor Montgomery and taken to his mysterious island home to recover.  While there he discovers that Montgomery is a disciple of the banished scientist Dr Moreau.  Driven out of England for his extreme experiments, Dr Moreau secludes himself on the island vivisecting animals and creating humanoid half-breeds.  As I said, it’s a great book and I can objectively tell where H.G. Wells is going for the jugular horror-wise.  My problem isn’t the book, it’s me.  I started watching South Park when I was about ten and the early series are full of Dr Mephisto.  Everytime Dr Moreau introduced a new animal creation all I could think of was the grand reveal of a baboon with four arses.  I couldn’t take Dr Moreau seriously as a figure of terror as I knew him first as one of comedy.  I know that what South Park is really riffing off is the much mocked Marlon Brando film version of the book and now I really want to watch that.  It looks ridiculous and fun and I don’t care that that’s really not what they were going for.  If they wanted people to take it seriously someone should have stopped Marlon Brando when he thought a midget companion would be a good idea.

I do have a couple of issues with the book itself, though.  My first is one that I have with pretty much all books written by Brits in the 1800s- or at least the ones that involve other cultures.  It’s the treatment of these other cultures and races.  I think historically we British folk had a pathological need to feel superior; it’s odd considering how famously self-depreciating we now are.  Okay, so The Island of Dr Moreau doesn’t contain that many other races.  It’s essentially a book about three white men on an island.  I’ve read a lot of fiction contemporary to this book and the language that is used in those about other races reflects exactly the adjectives Wells uses to describe the creations.  Take, for example Arthur Conan-Doyle’s The Sign of the Four; the words he uses to describe the pygmy race are the same as Wells’ when he calls the creatures Dr Moreau creates as “twisted” and “amazingly ugly.”  I don’t think this is something that I’m pushing onto the book, I’m sure it’s there and I think it’s an implication that readers of the time would have picked up on and understood.  At least I hope it is; if it’s not really there then I might just be being a bit of a racist.  This is one of those points that makes me sad I don’t get to study books anymore.  I’d love to do proper research into this and write an essay about it.

There’s another train of thoughts I went off on too, reading The Island of Dr Moreau.  In many obvious ways it reminds me of Frankenstein.  And, like Frankenstein, the protagonist is a bit of a dick to what are essentially victims of a mad man,  Prendick wanders around the island being alternatively terrified of and disgusted by by Dr Moreau’s creations.  He insists on referring to them as brutes or “the Beast People.”  He shows contempt and hatred even towards the loyal Dog-Man who attaches himself to Prendick as everything goes south on the island.  Throughout the book Prendick asks for our sympathy as the victim of circumstance and crazy men but displays none himself for others in the same position.  We are supposed to rejoice when he is saved from the creatures.  I was left feeling sorry for them.  They are abused and then abandoned and no-one cares enough to save their humanity, manufactured as it is.  I feel the same way about Frankenstein.  All my empathy has always lain with Adam, the creature, rather than Victor.

It’s been really interesting reading The Island of Dr Moreau and it’s one of those books I’ve loved writing about probably more than I enjoyed reading it.  I feel like most of what I’ve written is not about the novel itself, but actually my responses to it and how my experiences have shaped my reactions to the book.  I don’t know if I’ve written about this before, but it’s really what I’m going for here in this blog.  The experience of readership, I mean, over the intentions of authorship.  It’s been a really good book to flex my readership muscles on, the best ones always creep up on me and they’re a pleasure to find.

I’m currently on Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho.  It’s slightly longer than The Island of Dr Moreau so it may be some time.

The Double

I was so looking forward to reading José Saramago’s The Double.  It’s one of those books that my local library insists is available but is never actually on the shelves.  I’m not sure if this means all of Norwich loves Portuguese literature or if everything you read on the internet might not be true.  Eventually I just gave up and popped it on my Christmas list.  Yes, I’m 25 and still have a Christmas list; but that’s how I get cool books and nice pyjamas instead of junk I don’t want.  Anyway, I’ve been waiting to read it for a while is what I’m trying to say.  This means I had some pretty clear expectations from the book and, as recent experience has shown, this isn’t always a good thing.  The Double, however, is a good thing.  Mostly.  Okay, the novel’s a bit of a mixed bag.  I loved the story, but couldn’t stand the style. 

First off, the negatives.  The entire story is about loss of identity and Saramago’s style reflects this.  There are huge chunks of texts, free flowing run on sentences chock-a-block with commas and shifting subject matters.   There’s also a complete lack of speech marks.  At times, as characters find it difficult between to distinguish between each other, the style makes it difficult at times to tell who is speaking.  Try and read it in a hurry and it is bloody confusing.  I’m such a stickler for punctuation and I don’t understand why people mis-use it deliberately.  I was reading and getting flashbacks of Ulysses and I think I’ve mentioned before just how much I loved Ulysses.  It’s so frustrating because Saramago clearly achieves what he’s going for so I don’t feel like I can insult it in a way more clever than by whining that I just don’t like it but, in the end, that’s what it boils down to.  It also makes me feel really hypocritical when I say that because I know about my personal penchant for commas and twisting sentences.  But there you have it; it’s not to my taste and it didn’t ruin the excellent story.

The tale itself is pretty simple.  A man, Tertuiano Máximo Afonso, watches a film only to find that one of the extras is his exact double.  He becomes obsessed with the man.  After tracking down his name and persuading the movie studio to hand out his home address (which takes alarmingly little persuasion) he meets with Daniel Santa-Clara (real name António Claro).  It’s around this point that their identities start to overlap in a fairly confusing way.  I want to write a hell of more about the plot but I also don’t want to spoiler all over the place.  It’ll suffice to say that I was sold on the book and then the epilogue happened and things somehow got better.  In a non-spoilery way; there is a wonderful little aside when Tertuiano Máximo Afonso is freaking out about how the sensation of doubles is not unique (naturally) and that there were two identical woman born two hundred years apart, but as no-one took any notice of the first she was forgotten by the time the second born.  It’s much better when Saramago tells it- that’s probably why he has a Nobel Prize and I don’t. 

Another thing that I really love about the book is a bit of a niche thing.  There are theories about cinema in there.  And, yes, they’re mostly from when Tertuiano Máximo Afonso is bullshitting excuses and reasons for his erratic behaviour, but they’re interesting theories.  The idea that film promotes and demonstrates ideological signals or concepts from the time and culture in which it is made is, I’m pretty sure, a basic assumption that went into at least half of the essays I ever wrote about film.  I love it when things like that show up in books.  Things that get you thinking or remind you of why it is you love the things you love.  I had it all the way through Blonde and that’s why I enjoyed it so much and there were glimmers of it again in this book.  Basically, any time anyone writes well about film I’m sold.

So, to conclude: the book was good.  It’s nice to have positive things to say in the blog.  I’ve been feeling terribly negative about things after my last two posts and I feel like I might be back on track a bit.  There’s just no point in my doing this if I’m going to miss what’s good about the books on the list and just make myself miserable.  Especially in January- the most depressing of months, it’s been a pain hating what I’ve read.  Yes, it’s still January at the time of writing.  I feel like I’ve gotten back on target and the fact that this is book 300 is sort of just the icing on the cake.

Book number 301 is The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells.  It’s my second attempt to read it and it’s going much better than before.

Ivanhoe

I did the same thing again.  I know I said that I was going to come into Ivanhoe with no expectations but I didn’t do it.  I was so ready to get a story like The Three Musketeers.  Basically, a lads-on-tour type adventure; full of action and featuring Robin Hood.  It’s not a big ask.  I’m not really sure why I was thinking this, I’ve read quite a lot about the period of history the story’s set in and I’ve read books from the time.  It’s all just talking about bloody chivalry and high Romance.  I’m at least 90% sure that every knight of old was all mouth no trousers- or pantaloons or whatever it was they had back then.  Naturally Sir Walter Scott emulates this.

My main issue with the book is Ivanhoe himself.  It takes an age for him to show up in the book, all the while we’re being told he’s marvellously brave- the sixth most brave knight guy in some previous important battle.  The five who beat him bravery-wise are also listed in meticulous detail.  Anyway, Wilfred of Ivanhoe finally rocks up in disguise and is pretty cool.  He goes about brainwashing his estranged father’s surfs, winning tournaments and being a little bad-ass.  That is until he gets injured in one of the (let’s face it) pointless tournaments.  He spends basically the rest of the book being useless and recuperating whilst mooning over his second-cousin before winning a fight by watching his opponent die of a seizure.  The only one who seems to get shit done in the book is King Richard, and according to my year seven history lessons (and therefore in depth knowledge), that’s a wildly inaccurate depiction of how things were.  King Richard was a totally irresponsible king, always razzing off to convert heathens to his religion with his sword and leaving his little brother to collect taxes and generally be misunderstood.  I have a lot of sympathy for King John in history.  I know his crapness was partially responsible for the dissolution of the power of the throne; but if he’d been competent we might not have democracy.

It was also a really uncomfortable book to read while the terror attacks in France were ongoing.  Two of the main characters in the book are Jewish and everyone else is so anti-Semitic that it’s just uncomfortable.  Possibly the most horrible parts of it are the way that Isaac is treated by others and the way his daughter, Rebecca subjugates herself because she feels that she is not worthy of Christian company.  What I disliked so much is that these attitudes aren’t obsolete.  The book’s set over 800 years ago and the persecution remains.  No, it’s not as systemic and it’s certainly not deemed acceptable in modern society, but it’s still there.  It just makes me despair slightly for the future of the human race.  We’re baby-stepping our way to equality and hoping no-one notices by celebrating ever victory.  It’s an utterly depressing thought.

Again, the reasons I don’t like this book boil down essentially to not living up to my expectations or at least my wants from the book.  I don’t doubt that Sir Walter Scott knew his stuff about the time period, but he chose the bloody boring bits to write about.  I don’t care about the high speech, I care about the battles.  By the time there was any action in the book- a siege on a castle- I just didn’t care.  I’m having that feeling again with Ivanhoe that the problem isn’t the book, it’s me.  It’s been pretty popular for a very long time and I’m fairly certain that somebody would have noticed by now if it were actually as terrible as I believe it to be.

My next read is José Saramago’s The Double.  I’m halfway in and thus far it’s really fantastic.