Bonjour Tristesse

I've noticed a certain tendancy in coming of age books.  I don't mean the Princess Diaries sort; I mean the ones about sexual liberation.  They all seem to follow a certain plot line: a young protagonist goes to the south of France for the summer, gets embroiled in some form of sexual intrigue (usually with someone older) and then it all goes wrong and somebody dies.  Our protagonist is left wiser than their years with an air of melancholy than replaces their innocence.  It’s a narrative that crops up in books like Patricia Duncker’s Hallucinating Foucault, and it’s the narrative of Bonjour Tristesse.

That’s not to say that Françoise Sagan’s book is bad.  It’s not.  I don’t even object too much to the fact that she was 19 when it was published and the entitlement that a thing like that reeks of.  It’s a good little story.  I know that sounds an incredibly demeaning thing to say, but there’s no other way to say it.  It’s more of a novella than anything else and it’s a story that probably couldn’t have been written by anyone much older than 19. 

The specifics of the plot are that while holidaying near Cannes, seventeen year-old Cécile is unable to accept that her father has split up with the young, fun, and flirtatious Elsa in favour of marrying the age-appropriate and rather more straight laced Anne.  Cécile being young and spoilt sees this as a threat to a lifestyle she quite enjoys and so goes about trying to end the engagement and restore Elsa to her rightful place as her father’s mistress.  Naturally, she does this by persuading Elsa to pretend to be in love with Cyril, Cécile’s own would be fiancé.  This all goes about as well as you’d expect.  Especially considering that Cécile’s father gives not two shits about Elsa.  That’s probably why he broke up with her.

I also have issues with Cécile as a character.  She is so selfish.  She turns her father’s impending marriage into a personal betrayal and is utterly unwilling to consider Anne’s point-of-view.  Only when her plan appears successful and she sees Anne crying does Cécile realise that she has damaged another living person with hopes and dreams and it is case of too little far too late.  She is not a likeable main character and any personal development she makes is not enough.  She is ultimately allowed to return to her previous life without her father finding out about her role in events.  Yes, she has learnt not to do it again, but she got what she thought she wanted.

As I said, I didn’t hate this book.  It’s a good quick read.  I just think I read it when I was too old.  It felt a bit like when I went back to Catcher in the Rye.  Having read that first when I was about 13 and thought Holden Caufield was a miraculous poet, I was so disappointed to find when I was about 20 that he was actually incredibly entitled and whiney.  I spent most of the time I last read it feeling bad for his parents and wishing he’d shut the fuck up.  It’s the same with Bonjour Tristesse; I can’t understand Cécile’s motives because I’m not in that place in my life any more.  My parents’ relationship doesn’t impinge in any way upon my personal freedoms to the extent that it’s difficult to empathise with anyone sabotaging others’ happiness to ensure their own.  And it’s not just Cécile, I don’t believe that Cyril or Elsa would go along with her plan.  They are both my age.  They should know better and the only reason I can think of that they wouldn’t is the naivety of the author herself.

I’m now on to Alan Hollinghurst again.  This time it’s The Swimming-Pool Library.

Stranger in a Strange Land

Stranger in a Strange Land is a pretty famous book.  I’m pretty ignorant of sci-fi as a whole and, while I didn’t know anything about it, it was a book I’d heard of before.  Regardless, my expectations were very high.  I’ve said it before, but sci-fi’s never been my favourite genre and, yes, that’s been challenged quite a lot this year by authors like John Wyndham.  I think the amount of sci-fi I’ve enjoyed recently just heightened my expectations for Robert Heinlein’s epic.  And, I’m a bit sorry to say, it doesn’t quite deliver in the way that I thought it would.

The book itself is the story of Michael Valentine Smith, a human who through a series of unlikely events ends up being raised on Mars.  By Martians; naturally.  Anyway, through a further series of plot contrivances, Mike is brought to Earth, discovered to be incredibly wealthy, broken out of hospital, and becomes a celebrity.  It all ends, as interplanetary travel is wont to do, with a cult.  It’s one of those cults built around an enigmatic figure and far more women than men.  This ends up about as well as you can imagine.

I didn’t enjoy this book.  I’m not too sure of the reasons for this, because there is a lot in there that I good and the concept itself is a fascinating one.  I think part of me was hoping for a fish-out-of-water version of The Running Man (a fairly trashy Stephen King/ Richard Bachman novel about a man who is part of a game show in which contestants are hunted and killed, made into an equally trashy Arnold Schwarzenegger film).  Instead, Stranger in a Strange Land is alternatively, an essay in fictional legalese, a discussion of human religion, cultural and economic philosophy, and the fear of death.  It’s a bit shallow and vacuous, but I really just wanted a bit more action. 

Another major issue I had with the book was how old fashioned it was.  It’s always amazing in sci-fi that predicts the future to see what people get right and what they get wrong.  Heinlein, like most, misses out on mobile phones.  This is forgivable.  The parts that I really object to are the bits about women, most notably in the work place.  One of the key characters, Jill, is a nurse and the way her male colleagues treat her is quite frankly disgusting.  It’s literally not okay to refer to a colleague as, “Dimples.”  There are other off hand remarks that show, even though the book was during it it, Heinlein was unable to predict the success of the Civil Rights Movement, also LGBT rights.  It’s sad that in 1961, people thought manned missions to Mars more likely than actual human equality.  I wish I could say that Heinlein also missed on predicting an end to Islamophobia, but it would feel like I’m doing our culture too much of a kindness. 

In all, I didn’t love this book.  It felt like it didn’t know exactly what it wanted to be.  This is a problem when the book is 220,000 words long.  It took me so long to read and it was so difficult to motivate myself to read it at times, which was the biggest problem I found with it.  I know when it was originally published, Heinlein’s editor’s made him cut around 60,000 words and I can see why.  Stranger in a Strange Land is a mission.  There is part of me that is curious about which parts were cut and which remained (the sex cult parts by the sound of it) but mostly I’m just so relieved that the book is over, that I can read something else, that I can’t bring myself to care particularly.  It’s a thing I hate to say about a book, but my favourite part (aside from a spot on paragraph or so about the symbolic nature of money) was that feeling when I’d finished it.

I’ve just started on Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan.  It’s much shorter than Stranger in a Strange Land.  

Under the Skin

As I mentioned in my last blog, I saw the film of Michel Faber’s Under the Skin earlier this year and I loved it.  It’s rare that I get to display the film side of my degree in this blog and I’m happy to take the chance to.  It’s wonderfully dark and it left me wanting to read the book.  It’s very unusual for me to the film first and so it’s a pretty novel feeling.  And I had my doubts about the book.  The is fantastic, but it’s a very visual thing.  There’s little dialogue, sweeping Scottish scenery and some ambiguous bits about men dying horrific deaths.  Also full-frontal male nudity.  In short, there’s a lot in the film that could make for a boring as hell book and I fully expected Anne Radcliffe-esque descriptions of hills in amongst the man killing alien parts. 

What saves the book is the fact that it is nothing like the film.  Normally when that happens (with the exception of the James Whale Frankenstein films) I get a bit livid.  But the fact that they are completely different allows both to be brilliant.  The book is far too high concept for a low budget British film.  The aliens, revealed in their true form in Faber’s book, would have looked ridiculous on the screen- like talking, double jointed lynx.  There is far more plot to the book than the film, which did surprise me.  The book’s narrative tells a story of Isserley, an alien who picks up male hitch hikers and brings them to her colleagues to fatten up before their murder and subsequent shipping out for food.  Isserley is so much more knowable in the book; she has a back story and interacts with characters she doesn’t later murder (or arranged to have killed).  She falls in love. 

As I mentioned earlier, the fate that the aliens’ victims suffer is horrific.  They are castrated.  Their tongues are cut out and they are fattened up all to serve as an extortionately expensive delicacy.  But Faber makes it possible for us to spend so much time in Isserley’s.  She too is so clearly a victim.  She has been mutilated from her original lynx-like body to resemble a woman, all to avoid being condemned to The Estates (little explained, but worse than death).  She is unhappy and alone and in chronic pain.  More so, she is victim of the men that she picks up.  Each one is given a brief internal monologue as they step into Isserley’s car and each one that dies objectifies the hell out of her.  And, while I understand that feminism isn’t actually about cutting the balls off misogynists; it’s a fitting fate.  

Faber also uses language fantastically to make us care about the serial killing aliens.  The aliens refer to themselves as human beings and the men that they kill as vodsels.  This barrier dehumanises the victims enough so that when celebrity lay-about Amlis Vess releases four of the men soon due for slaughter, it is Isserley’s frustration at her wasted work and the risk of them being found that concerns the reader rather than the lives of the men.  It’s simple, but it’s effective.  There is a horror in the film that is reduced in the book because of the steps Faber takes to make Isserley less other-worldly.  Even more simply, in Faber’s book Isserley has a name.

I quite simply love this book/ film combination.  There is so much in the book that would have made the film so much more marketable, and yet I am so happy that they left it out.  The two things work so well separately of each other.  I think the film takes a lot more patience than the book, but it’s incredibly rewarding.  I’m not even going to gripe that we’re meant to believe that Scarlet Johansson is meant to be mutilated in anyway because she is bloody wonderful.  I can’t recommend this book enough.  It took me so much surprise and it’s properly brilliant.  Go and read it.

I’ve now moved on to more sci-fi, this time Robert A Heinlein’s A Stranger in A Strange Land.

Memento Mori

I have mixed feelings about Memento Mori.  I’ve loved everything else that I’ve read by Muriel Spark- she’s gloriously harsh to her characters and I like that.  Reading her is a bit like reading a post-World War Two version of Game of Thrones- no-one’s safe and there’s a lot of social climbing.  Unlike Game of Thrones, however, my enjoyment of the book was patchy at best.

The plot, such as it is, centres on the aged Dame Lettie Coulson and her circle of friends- or frenemies, to be more accurate.  (I feel I need to take a moment here to be fully appalled that my version of Word recognises “frenemies” as a real word.  Good one Bill Gates.)  Anyway, the old women spend their time updating and cutting people from their wills for imagined slights the way teenagers do their top MySpace friends.  Teenagers still use MySpace, right?  So, the plot: Dame Lettie is receiving phone calls from an unknown party reminding her that she will die.  The rest of the ensemble flitters between treating it as a prank and believing that Dame Lettie is hallucinating, or attention seeking.  This is part of the reason I was disappointed in the book.  Death threats make far better fiction than old ladies chatting.

I think that another reason I couldn’t get on with Memento Mori is the fact that there are so many characters.  The ensemble cast is funny, but each person is so idiosyncratic that it is a bit difficult to connect with them properly.  Especially given that we don’t spend that much time in each character’s company.  It’s really frustrating because some of them- Jean Taylor for example- are fantastically interesting.  Or at least they have the potential to be.  This kind of thing makes Dame Lettie’s very interesting story so annoying.  I want so much more of it.  This is one of Spark’s earliest novels and it shows.  Some of her later books, like The Girls of Slender Means also have ensemble casts of characters but Spark keeps those under control.  By the time these characters die, it seems like a footnote.  Most of the deaths are reported in a list near the end of the book.  None are tragic or special and we don’t care enough about them for their deaths to mean much.

Another of my qualms with my book is the death of the fantastically named Tempest Sidebottome.  She is one of the few characters who are given a death with consequences.  The problem is that the consequence of her death is to pretty effectively end a plot strand.  She and Dame Lettie are contesting a will and, with Tempest dead, Dame Lettie can march on unopposed.  I know this is how real life actually goes, but it is underwhelming fiction.

I’m left with not much to say about Memento Mori.  It’s been a book that I tried to find for months and was so looking forward to and then it just left me completely disappointed.  It’s such a shame.  I know I keep saying that the trick to enjoying a book is to go into it without expectations, but realistically that is impossible.  And I had great expectations for this book.  Unfortunately, this is the last of Spark’s books on The List.  I’m just left wishing I’d saved one of the better ones for last.

Next up is Under The Skin by Michel Faber.  I saw the film earlier in the year and it raised a lot of questions.