Fools of Fortune

It seems as though it has been an absolute age since I read Fools of Fortune.  In reality it’s been a couple of weeks and I barely remember a thing about it.  If that doesn’t tell you pretty much everything that you need to know about my feelings on William Trevor’s novel, the fact that I only marked one page as being of interest probably will.  I by no means intend to do the book a disservice here, it is not a bad book (the film version I’ve heard rumours of may be another matter), it is a perfectly okay book.  It does not deserve to be on The List.  While I didn’t suffer for reading it, this is clearly a book that I could have gone my whole life without picking up and been no worse off.  It seems like the kind of thing that you get when you let Peter Ackroyd put books on a list.

Trevor’s book tells the life story of Willie Quinton.  It actually starts off really well.  The Black and Tans are around and there’s a murder and intrigue.  Pretty much everything I know about the Black and Tans comes from one viewing of the film version of The Wind That Shakes The Barley when I was sixteen and most of what I remember about it was Cillian Murphy, so the early part of the book was a bit of a learning curve for me.  When an English spy is found dead in the grounds of local mill owners and general rich-os, the Quintons, suspicions are raised.  The natural course for these suspicions is to start a fire, kill most of the family and leave only a soon to be alcoholic matriarch and young Willie.  The small family then move to Cork where Mrs Quinton drinks and Willie is crept over by his new teacher.  For parts of the book, it’s not really clear whether she’s trying to seduce him or adopt him and these are the best bits.  Children in peril are really just my thing.

The problem with Fools of Fortune is that it doesn’t stay good.  Willie meets and impregnates his cousin and then pisses off to Italy for most of the rest of the book, not giving a damn about his child.  This is where I really take issue with it.  The narrative shifts to pregnant Marianne (and later still to incest-child Imelda) but the story is still Willie’s.  While Trevor gives women their own voices, they are still telling the story of a man.  Early parts of Marianne’s narrative are even written in the second person and directed towards the absent Willie and, while the blurb insists that they were in love, I do not see it.  Marianne is left with the consequences of their actions and her story changes entirely because of it.  Willie is still free to live his Italian escape fantasy.  It could be a really interesting concept, but it’s not one that Trevor choses to explore and so it’s hard to care about Willie when he returns.

And that’s it folks.  An okay book.  Writing about it has actually made me appreciate parts of it a bit more.  Pregnant Marianne trailing around Cork after the ghost of Willie and having no-one tell her where the hell he’s sodded off to is actually a pretty sad image.  Mind you, this is one of those books where everything’s a bit sad if you’re a woman, whether it be being pregnant and abandoned, killed in a fire, or drowning in a bottle, Trevor’s women don’t have it easy in Fools of Fortune and yet, it is still the men in the foreground of the book.

Come back next time for The Lover by Marguerite Duras.  Yes; it’s French.

Legend

Legend isn’t the kind of book that I’d normally go for.  It’s that kind of fantasy tale that I tend to associate with forty year old men who still live in their mother’s basements and spend their time abusing women on computer games.  Anyway, as none of the kind of books I’d normally go for have helped, I thought I’d give the kind I can’t stand a go to reinvigorate my love of reading.  And it kind of worked.  David Gemmell’s book isn’t great.  In fact, it’s downright stupid in places, but I wanted to finish reading it.  And I wanted to write about it.

The book tells the story of Druss, the legend of the title.  He is an aged warrior preparing for his final battle, one that he knows cannot be won.  It’s a story told from varying perspectives and there’s nothing wrong with it, as such.  Once the battle gets going it actually ends up being quite good and given that the battle is roughly half of the book that’s saying something.  Inevitably, Druss dies.  There’s some nonsense about a prophecy and some kind of battle rage known as baresark which isn’t really developed.  Given that this is the first book in a series, I can forgive that, even if I didn’t particularly enjoy those bits of it. 

Druss is sort of an interesting character.  He is respected and beloved by everyone; even his enemies acknowledge his greatness.  He has a meeting with the leader of the opposing forces before his death.  People are fascinated by him.  He is so famous that he is able to kill on his reputation alone.  At one point he mentions that most of the fights in his dotage were won because his opponents believed that they could not beat him.  There are parts of the book that really remind me of Blonde.  It’s a tale about a legend that simultaneously perpetuates the legend.

There are bits of this book that I simply could not stand.  The biggest offender is the romantic subplot.  Early on, solider Rek meets Virae.  She hates him.  Really properly loathes him and it’s made worse by the fact that he saves her life.  Anyway; she hates him.  And then, about twenty pages later they are madly in love.  It’s unbelievable and stupid and it’s just badly written.  It reads like it’s written by a man who has never spoken to a woman, much less cared for one.  There are lines in their subplot that read like they come from the cheesiest, most heavy handed love story out there, “’I love you,’ he said.  A dolphin surfaced below them, calling out a musical welcome before again seeking the depths.”  Lines like that are best left uncommented upon.

So that’s it.  A sort of okay book that has some seriously low lows and some kind of alright highs and some nice philosophising on the nature of war.  Most importantly, the book did its trick and I am looking forward to reading again so I think that Legend has done its job.  Luckily, I don’t have to read any more of Gemmell’s work.  It’s not bad, it’s really not.  It just isn’t the best book ever and while I enjoyed it well enough, I’m not certain what it’s doing on The List.

I’m now on to Fools of Fortune by William Trevor.  

La Reine Margot

I love Alexandre Dumas.  He is the one author I am really willing to forgive abusing historical facts  As such, I’ve been putting off reading La Reine Margot for the longest time.  I devoured the entire Musketeers trilogy in about a week (even going through the long slog of the first two parts of The Vicomte of Bragelonne) and I read the Count of Monte Cristo in at a similar lightning pace.  Maybe I left too long before coming back to Dumas, or maybe it’s linked the bigger picture of falling a bit out of love with reading recently, but I wasn’t impressed with La Reine Margot in the way I hoped to be.

I think what struck me as the biggest problem is that the book is more about political machinations than it is action.  Dumas is superb at action.  That’s why I love The Three Musketeers so much.  It’s about four young men doing stupid and dangerous things, but it’s so concerned with the doing.  There are great moments of action in La Reine Margot but the real problem of the book is that it’s so concerned with slow political back-biting that it just doesn’t have the same charm as Dumas’s other works.  On top of this, it makes the book a real commitment.  The characters shift their motivations and alliances like most people change clothes and, when you’re kind of in the mood to drift in and out of reading, it makes it really hard to tell what’s going on. 

The story itself is concerned with a period of history I know nothing about; the reign of Charles IX and Catherine de Midici’s attempts on the French throne.  As far as I can tell, and taking into account that this is a highly fictionalised account of history; the de Medicis were bad.  It call kicks off with the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, for which Catherine de Medici was pretty much solely responsible and then the narrative steers into the shadowy world of those trying to politically outmanoeuvre a de Medici (a practically impossible feat) and overthrow her sons (far easier as they had a tendency to die).  The main point of the fighting is the age old Catholics vs Protestants conflict.  The crown in France does not do much to help matters. 

It’s real shame that I couldn’t get into this book.  The titular character, Marguerite, is great.  As Catherine de Medici’s daughter she is married off to Henry of Navarre to form a political alliance.  Although the pair do not love one another, and both have numerous affairs, they work together to make their situation bearable.  Marguerite has all of Catherine’s good qualities: the wit and charm and intelligence that the men of the family seem to have missed out on, without her bad ones.  And I want her to just be in it more.  She’s relegated to so little because she is just a woman. 

Again, I am not sure why I didn’t get on with this book.  I usually love this kind of thing; political scheming and machinations that make the House of Commons and our democratic system look like a Communist utopia.  Catherine de Medici was, historically, a pretty shitty person and that should translate into a better character than it does.  I like the idea of her ruling with an iron fist from behind her sons’ successive thrones, holding the power with such subtlety that even they are left asking, “Am I King?  Am I master?”

My next read is Legend by David Gemmell. 

Marya: A Life

I actually read Marya: A Life ages ago.  My own life is currently conspiring against me in order to keep me away from books, blogs and any form of relaxation in general.  So apologies, but good things come to those who wait and, as Blonde shows us, Joyce Carol Oates is so very very good.  Okay, if I’m honest this book isn’t as good as Blonde but that’s essentially a matter of expectations and the fact that this one isn’t about Marilyn Monroe; one of my favourite film stars ever.  I’ll stop there or I’ll just witter on about how much I love Blonde for another 500-odd words and achieve nothing.

Again, Marya: A Life is a great book.  It’ s a relatively simple story, each chapter is a separate incident in Marya’s life that tells of her relationships.  Abandoned by their mother after their father dies, Marya and her two brother are brought up by their aunt and uncle who expect gratitude for every act of kindness.  Marya’s family and friends can’t understand her need to escape her past when she is young.  Leaving the little town she grows up in means she loses her fiancé, she is attacked by her male friends to bring her back down to their level, her aunt sees it as a rejection.  But what I love about Marya when she is young is that she does escape.  She doesn’t let other people’s opinions drag her down.  She does what she wants and it works for her and she gets out.  Naturally, it is only years after she leaves that she feels the inclination to go back, to question the stories she has been told about her mother’s death. 

I’m going to go back to feminism now.  I bloody love feminism and Marya’s such a feminist character, but more than that- she’s a really complicated one.  She is undoubtedly an accomplished woman; she is intelligent and she is successful at a time when women were encouraged to stay in the kitchen rather than go into the wide world.  But the thing is, her success is always shaped by men.  Her academic career is moulded by Maximillian Fein, her professional one by Eric Nichols.  In both these relationships she is the other woman and while she appears to remain on the fringes of her life, they fill hers and they change it.  It’s so fascinating to see her change as she experiences sexual relationships because she moves away from her early defiance.  It may be love, it may be aging, Oates never makes it clear.

It’s hard to pin down exactly why this book is so good.  It kind of defies any attempt to try.  I like it because Marya is strong, but she is also easily led.  It is terribly sad in places, but it’s also the story of a woman overcoming her awful past.  It’s a bundle of contradictions that are so wonderfully balanced that it’s a joy to read.  In short, it’s everything that I love about Joyce Carol Oates. 

Next up is La Reine Margot by Alexandre Dumas.