Good Morning, Midnight

I’m not sure I was really paying attention to some of Jean Ryhs’s novel.  I got that it’s about youth and poverty and misery and while the first of these may be slowly slipping away from me, I have been well acquainted with the latter two this year.  Okay, maybe I’m being a touch dramatic there but fuck off; this is my blog and I’ll cry if I want to.  Anyway: Good Morning, Midnight is well written misery porn set in 1930s Paris and while it’s so bleak that it’s difficult to call it properly enjoyable, it is certainly a good book.

I think the moment that best sums up the plot as a whole comes mid-flirtation.  A (not very important) Mr Blank is hitting on the book’s main character, Sasha Jensen, who tells him, “We can’t all be happy, we can’t all be rich, we can’t all be lucky… There must be the dark background to show up the bright colours.”  This is actually a moment in one of the book’s more cheerful sections so, yeah, you get the picture.   Other gems include, “The touch of a human hand… I’d forgotten what it was like, the touch of a human hand,” and, “I hadn’t bargained for this.  I didn’t think it would be like this- shabby clothes, worn-out shoes, circles under your eyes, your hair getting straight and lanky, the way people look at you… I didn’t think it would be like this.”  I’ll give it to Rhys; she’s bloody good at being bleak. 

The story concentrates on Jensen’s return to Paris as a (naturally) poor middle-aged woman.  She spends most of this trip reminiscing about other times she was miserable in the same place.  Nothing is solved or resolved.  Her marriage was still awful, her child is still dead, she is still poor.  It’s a real wonder that the critics at the time thought the book a bit repellent to the extent that it, if not ruined, severely damaged her career.  It fits in with the tone of the book, at least.

On top of all the misery, there are also moments of startling misogyny.  My personal favourite is the description of the worst type of woman.  A célébrale: a woman “who likes nothing and nobody except herself and her own damned brain or what she thinks is her brain… a monster.”  Because, it is important to remember that when things aren’t awful or women are feeling remotely self-confident, women do need to learn our place- how else do we have a chance at the endless domestic misery that Rhys paints for us?

I know I’m being very negative today, so I’ll leave you with a happy thought.  What I always love about reading novels from the early Twentieth Century is the things that haven’t changed.  In almost every one there is a moment that I recognise as something that I’ve done, that I’m sure most people have done.  In Good Morning, Midnight this moment comes when Jensen is visiting her hair dresser.  Bored and waiting for her hair to take the dye she picks up a trashy magazine and reads about a woman who had a boob job.  It’s a nice moment, if only because the boob job didn’t go horrifically wrong. 

I’m now moving on to Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse.  It has jokes in it.  It’s not all awful.

Solaris

As I mentioned at the tail end of my last blog, I have been waiting to read Solaris for ages.  I think it’s got to the point where it has literally been years.  I read something about the 1972 film version back when I still read things about film instead of shaking my head and despairing of the entire industry, and it sounded fantastic but (me being me) I had to read the book version first.  It’ll probably be years again before I can track down the film.  Anyway, the book’s one of those slightly too obscure to get cheap in a charity shop but popular enough to always be checked out of the library types and I’ve only just managed to get my hands on it.  Naturally, after all the waiting, I read the entire thing in a day.  Needless to say, I really enjoyed Stanislaw Lem’s book. 

It’s about this sentient ocean on a distant planet (Solaris) and the scientists who, when they get no-where in studying it with standard science just x-ray the shit out of it and seem to piss of said sentient ocean pretty badly.  The novel starts with Kris Kelvin arriving to an angry sea, a recently dead colleague, and two paranoid scientists.  He quickly discovers that the ocean uses repressed memories as a form of attack and soon his dead wife starts visiting him.  I don’t really want to give too much more of the plot proper away.  It’s good, it doesn’t end well: spoilers over.

One of the great things about this book is the fact that it reflects the obsession of the scientists.  It does that proper sci-fi thing of building a great interesting world and Solaris is so different from Earth, so unknowable that it’s fascinating.  Lem provides the whole history of the study of the planet which, given that it’s essentially a century of “it might be like this; it might be like that, fucked if we know,” should be boring.  But it’s not.  Lem manages to make you both invested in the planet and the oceanic creature that inhabits it and lets you understand why the scientists can’t just leave well enough alone.  It’s a real feat.  On top of this, Solaris includes philosophy about the nature of living things and gods and it somehow all comes together in one coherent, fairly short, novel.  It’s great.

The only thing I didn’t like, and this feels like such a minor nit-pick, is Kelvin’s wife.  Harey (or Rheya, depending on which translation you’re reading), was nineteen when she died.  Now, Lem doesn’t actually mention the exact age of Kelvin and Harey has been dead ten years, but the novel still makes it feel like there was probably a super-creepy age gap.  I don’t know why, it’s just a vibe I got from the thing.  On top of that, Kelvin makes a throwaway comment about having lived with her for years, so there was almost definitely a time when things were questionable age-wise. 

To sum up: I like this book.  You should read this book.  It is a good book.  I really don’t want to write more of a summary than that, so have a quote about god instead; “That is the only god I could imagine believing in, a god whose passion is not a redemption, who saves nothing, fulfils no purpose- a god who simply is.”  I think they took that part out for the George Clooney version.

I’m now moving on to Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys.  

The Lover

“Lover” is one of my least favourite words in the English language.  I hate it.  The idea that love and sex are inextricably linked just rankles with me in a way that’s quite visceral and I find difficult to explain.  In short, I wasn’t off to a great start with Marguerite Duras’s book.  As a result, I’m going to ignore pretty much all of the sex bits.  The romantic relationship is the least interesting bit anyway.  It’s actually fairly easy to just ignore the shagging as there’s a whole bunch in the novel about familiar love rather than the eros kind.

The Lover is about much more than sex.  Even the sexual relationship isn’t just about sex.  It’s about gold-digging and (apparently) love.  It is mostly about gold-digging, though.  A young French woman (read: school girl) has an affair with a much older man while she’s in Saigon with her mother and two brothers.  It’s sort of a coming of age story, but there’s a real level of creepy age difference that is best ignored.  She’s still in school and the guy’s buying her diamonds; it’s all kinds of inappropriate and our protagonist’s mother’s cheering her on.  Anyway, this teenage girl sleeps with an older man and he gives her money.  It’s not okay.  This continues for a while until richbags realises that his gold-digger is not Chinese and really isn’t the sort of girl that you bring home to Mum so things really need to end.  He does rock up a few years later when she’s back in Paris and actually age appropriate, but it’s really not a part of their affair. 

Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, it’s the family that I care about.  Duras refuses to give any of her characters names and it works so well in relation to her mother and brothers.  Throughout the book she refers to them as, “my mother,” “my older brother,” “my younger brother,” and it’s so effective. What Duras does with this technique is create a brilliant sense of distance between the protagonist and her family.  While we’re being told that she doesn’t care about them, that she can go a decade without speaking to them, it’s hammered home by their namelessness.  The fact that Duras does this also dulls the impact of their deaths.  It’s hard to give a crap about a random, penniless gambler.  The namelessness gives the whole of The Lover a strange transitory nothingness; even the siblings seem to be interacting as ships in the night.

I did enjoy this book, but I’m finding it difficult to write about.  It is a book that I found it quite difficult to motivate myself to read. It’s perfectly enjoyable when you’re actually reading it but it has this narrative that just drifts along like silk on a breeze.  There is just so little that drives the plot forward.  The non-linear narrative only heightens this.  There is no urgency to read on and the fact that you already know what happens means that by and large you don’t really need to read on.  As much as I hate to quote my mother in these things, it is incredibly French.

I’m now moving on to Solaris by Stanislaw Lem.  I am so excited; I’ve been waiting to read it for ages.