The Fingersmith

I don’t think I’m too much of a fan of historical fiction.  It’s not like the murder mystery genre where there has to be is an intriguing corpse and I’ll be content, any amount of sub-par writing aside.  If I’m going to venture into the past, the book has to have enough of a plot to make the setting incidental.  My scathing comments about authors like Peter Ackroyd and Peter Carey because they turn the past into a character, forever sticking its nose into events and ruining any plot.  Sarah Waters doesn’t do this.  The Fingersmith has a plot which is only occasionally reliant on the gimmick of a different time period and only ever in a way which moves the story forward.

The story itself is one of a con with more twists than an episode of Hustle.  Susan Trinder (posing as Susan Smith) plays maid to Maud Lilly with the intent of encouraging her to marry Richard Rivers, have her committed to an asylum and pocket a cool three grand.  Naturally, things are far far more complex than that, but any further plot points would be straying into spoiler territory and it’s the kind of book that would be no fun to read I you didn’t have the rug pulled out from under your feet at least once.   It is by far not a believable story, but it’s exciting.  None of the characters are particularly smart, at least not the ones you root for and so throughout you do have the feeling that it could all go wrong- something so important with criminal dramas and something that improves the book no end.

The only point, I found, where The Fingersmith falls down it the romance.  While embroiled in the con Susan and Maud fall in love.  First of all, I’m sceptical of this love because they’re both seventeen.  I remember love when I was seventeen.  It wasn’t enduring and Maud and Susan’s love has so much to endure.  Their relationship is based in lies and the pair spend literally no time together when they are not manipulating one another.  Both acknowledge that they could save themselves a whole lot of grief by telling the truth but choose to remain silent and go for the money.  No amount of pining makes it seem like anything other than an ill-advised teen romance that Waters tacked on after the main story was all figured out.  I don’t see it ending well.

Teen drama aside, I think one of the reasons I did enjoy this book is because it is filled with strong women.  It’s told from the points of view of both Maud and Susan.  And surrogate mother Mrs Sucksby is a brilliant mixture of child rearing and cunning.  She is not limited or defined by the children she looks after- this is just one facet of her personality.  She isn’t the female lead, but she has depth.  It’s wonderful.  In fact, most of the men are pretty much cool with the women taking charge.  There’s only one point of ridiculous sexism in the book and it is so incongruous that it stands out like a sore thumb.  Two doctors blame madness on, “the over-exposure of girls to literature-  The founding of women’s colleges…  raising a nation of brain cultured women.”  Ironically, as a woman well exposed to literature, such views do make me mad.

The Fingersmith is a fun book to read.  Strange as it is to be reading about dank Victorian hovels while the summer’s starting to show, I enjoyed it.  It’s the kind of book that seems so simple when it begins but I’m betting that on re-reading much more would be revealed.  There are whole chunks of the book that, with the knowledge of what comes next, would undoubtedly seem completely different upon a re-visit and that’s a nice feeling, knowing that even though the story’s finished, there’s still potential for so much more to come.

Next time is final Ian McEwan book, The Cement Garden.

The Passion

The Passion is a very soft spoken book.  I don’t know if I’m saying that because of the title or it’s because it’s written by a woman and I’m being a little bit sexist, but it’s true.  As strong as the two main characters are, I can’t help but imagine them both as having a delicate Tilda Swinton-esque bone structure and a wistful tone.  I really like Jeanette Winterson in general.  She’s one of those authors that I didn’t quite get at first, but was converted after months of studying Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit at A-level with an English teacher I had a ridiculous crush on.  If I’d have been less inclined to impress him with my knowledge, I probably wouldn’t have got half as much out of the book as I did.

The book tells the story of Henri- a young man so besotted with Napoleon he joins the French Army and proceeds to follow the Emperor around Europe for eight years.  He is not a fighter; instead he works in the kitchen slaughtering innumerable chickens to slake their leader’s hunger.  It also tells the tale of Villanelle- a Venetian cross dresser who works in a casino seducing men and women alike until she is eventually sold to the French Army by her possessive husband.  The pair’s obsessions themselves are arbitrary as Winterson focuses on the after effects of passion, rather than the thing itself.  Henri’s love turns to hatred as sees that Napoleon has no desire to end the wars and he eventually deserts the army.  Villanelle falls in love with a woman she can never be with and, after spending nine nights with her the pair are separated by circumstance.  It is the bittersweet kind of love that although it is never replaced burns itself out with time.  As Winterson writes earlier in the novel, “time is a great deadener.”

For a book called The Passion, both its leads also have strange relationships with their hearts.  It’s not quite accurate to say that both lose their hearts to their obsession.  Villanelle willing and literally gives hers away to her lover forcing Henri to steal it back from an abandoned mansion years later.  Henri is more complex still.  He lives in a contradictory state in which in order to fulfil his passion for Napoleon he gives up his heart and his passion for life.  Henri, however, believes that, “there’s no pawnshop for the heart.  You can’t take it and leave it awhile in a clean cloth and redeem it in better days.”  Although he only loses it in the metaphorical sense; he is the one unable to regain his heart completely.

If I’m honest, one of the main reasons that I enjoyed reading this book so much is simply because I have wanted to visit Venice for years.  I remember reading a book called City of Masks when I was quite young and falling in love with the idea of the place.  Granted, that City of Masks is set in a parallel Venice-inspired city, but the point stands.  It’s a place that I have a terrible habit for romanticising in my mind; I can just imagine getting lost on its winding waterways and backstreets (with my sense of geography a very real possibility) and The Passion plays into the picture I have of the city exactly.  It reminded how much I still want to go there, apparent smell aside.

I was saying after Oscarand Lucinda that I felt a bit burnt out and jaded by reading at the moment and with this book Winterson has very aptly reminded me of my passion for books.  This is a great, strange love story that, I suspect, like Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit would only improve on closer inspection.  More than that, it’s motivated me in to what I think may turn into hours of trawling through holiday websites and, maybe, booking that trip to Venice at long last.

I’ve now moved on to The Fingersmith by Sarah Waters.

Oscar and Lucinda

I find myself in the awkward position again of having no idea how to start my blog.  I’m not sure what I want to say about Oscar and Lucinda.  I enjoyed parts of it and parts of it I knew, objectively, while reading them were good.  But reading isn’t an objective thing and I found it so difficult to connect with or care about.  At times it felt like watching an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? starring a celebrity I’d never heard of.  It’s a story about another family’s unbelievable family legends and their gambling problems.

I went into this book knowing nothing about it that I hadn’t read in the blurb.  The blurb promises a story of an heiress and a vicar who love each other but can’t be together.  Also they both gamble.  I had no idea that Peter Carey is Australian so went into the thing expecting swooning maidens and meaningful gazes across a game of bridge; all the while making sure local gossip Mrs Miggins doesn’t catch wind of the mutual longing.  I thought there would be talk of Oscar being below Lucinda’s station.  Turns out, Australia didn’t really go in for all that shit; it’s set in the 1880s and the pair end up living together while unmarried.  Lucinda gives precisely zero fucks about the gossip this causes.  And as much as I want to like her, I can’t.  I spent most of the book feeling utterly disconnected from everything that happens in Australia.

The story’s told from the point of view of one of Oscar’s descendants.  The narrator turns Oscar into a thing of legend.  It’s told like a tale that’s been passed down through the generations.  Or it sort of is.  The narrator’s simultaneously omnipotent and a character involved in the tale.  He knows things that it’s impossible to know and so when he occasionally refers to Oscar as “my great-great-grandfather,” it’s jarring.  It takes you out of the story because the book is neither one thing nor another.  We get to know Oscar too well for him to be a real thing of legend.

I get what Carey’s doing through most of the book.  It’s about chance.  The whole plot hinges on gambling multiple times.  Oscar only leaves England for Australia because of the flip of a coin and he leaves Lucinda on a fool’s bet.  She bets him, in a plot development that sounds like one of those drunken bets Dave Gorman used to take, that he can’t transport a glass church 400 km along the Australian coast.  Naturally, Oscar takes this bet because he is an addict.  This I accept.  It’s mostly the concept of a glass church that I take umbrage with.  It’s-well- stupid.  It detracts from the rest of the book because of its ridiculousness.  

Oscar and Lucinda isn’t a bad book.  I think all my problems with it come down, again, to my expectations of the novel verses the reality of the book.  I know that I’ve said time and time again that the trick to really enjoying a book is to go in without any expectations.  I’m just beginning to think that this can only be achieved by not even reading the blurb… 

My read is Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion.  I haven’t read anything by her for years, so I’m looking getting back into her.

The Trick Is To Keep Breathing

The Trick is to Keep Breathing is another wonderfully titled book and thankfully the story’s good too.  It probably has about as much cohesive narrative structure as Autumn ofthe Patriarch, but I enjoyed reading it far more.  It’s a novel obsessed with finding ways to keep going when life goes wrong and depression hits and ultimately not coming up with very many answers that its protagonist finds useful.  The re-occurring problem of “what will I do while I’m lasting” never really finds a viable solution.

The book roughly tells the story of the ironically named Joy Stone who is in the midst of a breakdown following the sudden death of her boyfriend Michael.  This being a first person account of mental deterioration, it’s not told in a linear sense which allows Janice Galloway to blend together Joy’s relationships with men: at times it is impossible to discern who she is describing or if the events occurred before or after Michael’s death.  The death of Michael and that of Joy’s mother also become linked through this method, even though they seem to occur years apart and she is in a relationship with someone else when her mother dies.  The story of both lives and deaths are told throughout the novel in patchy flashbacks that never reveal the whole picture.

The bulk of the book is set in an institution and so I feel this overwhelming urge to compare the thing to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, never mind that I must have been about 16 when I read that book and so my recollection of it is sketchy at best.  One thing the two definitely have in common is contempt for those running the place.  Granted, there’s no Nurse Ratched ruling Galloway’s novel with an iron fist, but Joy is scathing of the chain of unnamed doctors who run the place and are both unable and unwilling to agree on a treatment plan.  She is told numerous times that she is there by choice and she can choose how she gets better, but the doctors scoff at her suggestions largely without offering any of their own.  Obviously, this is all filtered through a super unreliable (and cynical) narrator but it’s not so far out there that it’s blatantly untrue.  At times Joy seems so reasonable, and then she mentions her refusal to eat and you’re reminded that she does need help.

As I said, I enjoyed reading this book, Joy is a clever and funny woman and I always enjoy reading about them.  I read her as being a feminist and so to me a lot of her comments on her personal body image could be taken as satire, if they were removed from their context.  She reads all sorts of women’s magazines and so a lot of the language that she uses when she talks about herself mirrors these.  The most obvious example is The Ultimate Diet; “eel the tension in your stomach even after the lightest meal as a warning.  Drink endlessly to bulk away the craving.  You know it’ll all be worth it in the end.”  With phrases like that it’s hard to tell whether to laugh or cry.

This is the kind of novel that makes me want to read more of the same author.  I love those kinds of books.  It’s especially rewarding as this is Galloway’s first novel and, despite this being her only entry on The List (yes, capitalisation necessary) debut novels are rarely an author’s best work.  Harper Lee’s a possible exception.  It’s exciting to discover someone new, especially as there are now even more authors that I love that I’m close to crossing of the list altogether. 

Next time: Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey.

The Autumn of the Patriarch

The best thing about Autumn of the Patriarch is its title.  I like the idea of the title.  It’s been sitting (very aptly) next to Everyday Sexism on my bedside cabinet and stirring up my hopes.  Unfortunately, the book itself left me less hopeful for a misandrically matriarchal utopia.  Yes I know- not all men!

The book itself is about the death of a despotic dictator; a man so enshrouded in lies and the Cult of Personality that it is impossible to discern the lies from the legend.  Supposedly (thank you once more Wikipedia), the fact that each sentence is roughly ten pages long feeds into this, making it difficult to distinguish between words and thoughts and deeds.  It does.  It also makes it really hard to read and even more so to care.  Now I know I’ve banged on about how much I value proper punctuation previously: more than once.  Not even Nobel Prize winners are going to change my mind on this.  In fact, I’m pretty sure James Joyce has a Nobel Prize and he’s chiefly to blame.  Each chapter of Gabriel García Márquez’s book is an intimidating 40-odd page behemoth of a paragraph.  Reading any chapter is a real commitment and concentrating through the whole thing is a challenge.  To be fair, it would have probably been easier it I hadn’t been reading it while watching The Mummy Returns for the umpteenth time.  It’s really not the kind of book you can half-arse.

Another reason I think I missed something from the novel is that I know nothing about its context.  Aside from Stalin and Hitler, the dictators I know things about are the ones that came after the book was released- people like Colonel Gaddafi and Kim Jong-il.  My knowledge of the international politics in the 1960s and 70s is pretty limited to the Vietnam War.  And even Richard Nixon wasn’t that bad.  I think it’s a case of if I knew more about historical figures, like Franco, who are represented in the book I would be able to relate to it more closely.  It’s not a failing by García Márquez, just a case of poor timing.  If I were twenty years older, I’m sure I’d get the book far better.

Naturally, there were bits of the book that I did like.  García Márquez had an extraordinary turn of phrase at times.  My favourite, by far is, “after so many long years of sterile illusions he had begun to glimpse that one doesn’t live, God damn it, he lives through, he survives, one learns too late that even the broadest and most useful of lives only reach the point of learning how to live.”  It’s maybe not the most cheerful of thoughts to end on, but what else can you expect from a novel about a tyrannical dictator?

I’ve now moved on to The Trick is to Keep Breathing by Janice Galloway.  It has paragraphs.