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.