Empire of the Sun

There are loads of quotes all over the cover on Empire of the Sun proclaiming how good it is.  That’s not particularly extraordinary, but most refer to it as something along the lines of the best novel about the Second World War, if not any war.  And while it’s good; it’s not the best novel about World War Two.  I can’t tell you what that would be.  To be honest, I’m struggling to think of any other novels about that war- I’ve just come off the back of two ten hour shifts at work and things are a little hazy.

I’ve never been that keen on JG Ballard as a rule.  I read Cocaine Nights so time ago (it’s on The List) and I loved it, but every book I’ve read of his since does seem to be very similar.  His novels essentially involve an outsider coming into close-knit community that isn’t quite as innocent as it sees and being corrupted.  And I was also sceptical.  I don’t believe that close communities are throwing drug fuelled orgies every other Thursday.  But having read Empire of the Sun, I can see where Ballard’s coming from.

It tells a (sort of) autobiographical tale of a young teenage boy who ends up in a prisoner of war camp outside of Shanghai during World War Two.  This actually happened to Ballard and having that perception and experience of that kind of community would alter your views on how they really function.  My formative years were spent in a small village in Kent.  The most sinister things that happened were one accidental house fire and a couple of nicked bikes.  There was no corruption within the village so naturally, I don’t assume it is watch all social structures are built upon.

There’s one part of the book that I found so interesting.  Reading it just after the 100^th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme it struck me particularly.  Jim likens something in his mind to the trenches of Ypres and the Somme that he has seen in encyclopaedia illustrations.  It is mentioned that these are unvisited.  And that is something that is near incomprehensible today.  They are almost tourist attractions, and so many of the sites of death of the Second World War have become the same.  We are now more actively encouraged to remember, to go and see the sights of the horrors of the past.  It’s probably a meant to be a way of stopping the horrors of the future but, let’s be honest, it’s not working.

That was another thing that hit home about the book and probably the most poignant part.  As soon as Jim leaved the Lunghua camp he wants to go back.  He is young and scared and he wants to be prepared for the next war.  He is certain that World War Three will start immediately after the conclusion of World War Two.  And while it doesn’t in the book and it didn’t- the Cold War did.  In many ways this is really just a book about a child learning the reality of the world; a reality that is just as true today as it ever was.  There is always a war somewhere.  All we can do is prepare for the next one that will involve us.

Next time a slightly lighter read, Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

I was not keen on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  I read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer I don’t even know how many years go and I wasn’t keen on that either, so I’m not sure why I expected any different.  I’m sure I’ve read things about Mark Twain actually being a pretty cool chap, but I’m just too old to read a book about a teenage boy who takes pride in his ignorance.  I don’t like Huck.  He needs to do less messing about on the river and more learning to read.

To be fair, pretty much everyone in the novel is stupid.  An entire town seems to get taken in by the cons of a man pretending to be the (actually dead) Louis XVII.  Pro-tip, if someone tells you they’re the rightful King of France, they are lying.  Most of the novels characters are so stupid they’d fall for one of those Nigerian Prince e-mail scams.  Although, in many ways it’s reassuring to know that cons haven’t really changed in the last couple of hundred years or so.

As much as I keep banging on about it, it’s not really the characters’ stupidity that ruined this book for me- that’s only part of the picture.  The novel is written in about five different dialects of the Deep South.  Now, I have nothing against books written in local dialects.  Once you get your head around it, Trainspotting’s really enjoyable-if enjoyable is the right word for it.  But it makes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn so much bloody work.  The fact that no two people talk in quite the same way makes it so hard to adjust and then finally you get there only to find that they’re talking absolute shit anyway.  It was a true exercise in frustration for most of the book.

I wanted to like this book or find a way to engage with it.  The Black Lives Matter campaign shows that there are parts of the novel that are still horribly relevant today, but the frequent use of the n-word just made me feel a bit uncomfortable.  Yes, you have to judge it by contemporary standards and Huck is forward thinking by them; but he still does sound very racist.  And the dialect that Jim speaks in is cringeworthy.  All of this seems horribly at odds with Oxford World’s Classic’s ever wonderful (and in this case highly optimistic) explanatory notes that are deemed necessary the first time the n-word appears.  I mean, even if society weren’t institutionally racist, we’ve all heard Jay-Z songs.  That word does not need explaining to anyone old enough to read this book.

I will leave you on a positive note.  There was, in retrospect, one part of the book that I actually quite enjoyed.  One of the con men (the Duke, I think) is giving a Shakespearean recitation and it’s glorious.  The whole thing’s written in Shakespearean English so it’s by far the easiest part of the book to understand.  And it’s this brilliant mash-up between Hamlet, Macbeth and Richard III.  It’s utter nonsense, but it’s Twain writing clever nonsense; which I appreciate.  It includes the lines, “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns, breaths forth contagion on the world.”  Which is kind of true, when you think about it…

I’ve now moved on to Empire of the Sun by J G Ballard.  

The Path to the Spiders' Nest

I’m going to just come out and say this.  I quite enjoyed The Path to the Spiders’ Nest.  I did not hate, or judge harshly while reading, an Italo Calvino book.  Maybe my tastes are growing up.  Far more likely, I enjoyed this because it’s Calvino’s first novel from back in the days when he still believed stories should have crazy things like plots.  At this point in my rant, I realise that for all my well-readliness, I am (on occasion) very much like my mother.  She likes things like narrative in novels, and there are almost 200 pages of narrative in this one.

The Path to the Spiders’ Nest tells the story of Pin, a young Italian boy too used to the company of adults in pubs to be appropriate friends for children and too naïve to really hang with the grown-ups, in the time of the Second World War.  After he steals a gun from a German sailor to impress his adult friends, he is forced into a war he doesn’t really understand.  He spends most of the book hanging out with a group of anti-fascist freedom fighters in the mountains and trying to sound cool by telling far too many people about this gun he nicked and the titular hiding place he chose for it.

Pin is young and the partisan group he ends up with do not take him seriously, he ends up falling into a catch 22 situation where the more that he tries to impress them, the less they believe he has the goods.  But The Path to the Spiders’ Nest is a good book and it’s a good book about war and politics.  Calvino really captures a child’s innocent and lack of understanding about the wider issues throughout the book and I think that it would only have been made more enjoyable if I actually knew a bit more about Italy’s role in World War Two.  Other than having a stellar train system, I’m probably a little bit ignorant about Mussolini’s role.

Another reason that I enjoyed this book was that it really reminded me of For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway.  And no, it doesn’t come close to how fantastic that book is (I could go on and on about the style of that book alone), but there are similarities.  Pin is entrenched in a group of militant extremists hiding out in the hills and, quite frequently, disagreeing about the philosophy of fighting. 

One of my favourite parts of the book is an impassioned speech about the different ways in which people define their country and how it impacts upon their decision whether to fight for it.  Granted, there’s no fabulous side story about bullfighting but you can’t have everything in such a short book.

In all, I think this might have changed my perception of Calvino a bit.  Invisible Cities and If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller… both made me think that he was just a bit pretentious.  But maybe he was like Picasso who mastered the basics of how to draw things before he moved on to all that Cubist shit.  Of course, the great flaw in this theory is that I’ve always kind of like that Cubist shit.

The final Lake District read was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.  Swing by soon for that.  I will be insulting it lots.  

The Graduate

There’s something disturbing about reading The Graduate.  I’ve seen the film and should have known what to expect, but it still made me uncomfortable.  There’s something a little too relatable about Benjamin Braddock.  The plot, in case you’re not familiar with it is very simple; man graduates, has affair with a friend of his parents, falls in love with her daughter, stalks daughter.  There’s also an incredibly uncomfortable rape lie bit, which isn’t as much of a plot point as it should be.

Charles Webb’s book is brilliantly written, and I think that’s part of the issue.  It might have been five years ago now, but I still remember how it felt to graduate.  To have achieved this thing that I had essentially worked my whole life for and to be set lose in to the world with all the proper adults I knew expecting me to have a plan.  I get why Benjamin Braddock has no idea what he’s meant to do.  So, when he goes off the rails post Mrs Robinson- affair, it’s worrying that I related to him.  In the latter half of the book he is quite simply mad.  He stalks the object of his affections and makes her life hell until she is worn down and guilt tripped into accepting him.  It’s horrible and misogynistic and made all the worse for how likeable and funny the man doing it all is to begin with.  It’s one of those books that, if it were told from the woman’s point of view, would be a horror story.

As I mentioned, the book starts with real humour.  Webb works to make Benjamin likeable.  There’s a great bit near the beginning in which Benjamin tells both his parents, separately, about his time travelling.  The story he tells his father involves prostitutes and drink and the version his mother hears is about pretty scenery.  It reminded me of my brother’s yearly drunken Christmas Eve chats with our dad, in which he forgets not only to filter what he’s saying, but also the fact that our parents do talk to one another.

So, the story moves on and as Benjamin stalks Elaine Robinson, it becomes darker.  There’s a real issue to the way women are treated in the book and not just by Benjamin.  I’m happy to write him off as a bit crazy (and, yes, there are social and cultural pressures of the time that cause this but he does not react to them in a way that’s in the bell curve of normal).  I have an issue with Mr Robinson too.  He’s not best pleased when he finds out that Benjamin and his wife have been at it, but he has a horrible attitude to his daughter.  There’s one line in particular that is incredibly creepy: after Benjamin tells him that he loves Elaine, he responds, “I’m sure you think you do, Ben, but after a few times in bed with [her] I feel quite sure you’d get over that as quickly.”  I might be taking that the wrong way, but it’s odd and it’s far too proprietary for my liking.

The Graduate is an incredibly easy read; it disappeared for me in an afternoon- albeit it one spent on a train.  It relies so heavily on dialogue, with a minimal description of everything else that I can see why it worked so well as a film.  At times, Webb’s book feels more like a screenplay than a novel (it’s probably at this point that I realise that I accidentally borrowed the screenplay from the library).  It’s so minimal and that’s what makes it brilliant.  It’s a book that demonstrates that brevity is the soul of wit and so does away with the outward flourishes. 

I’m now on to The Path to the Spider’s Nest by Italo Calvino.

Silas Marner

I know that Silas Marner’s actually quite a famous book, but I found pretty forgettable.  As in I literally forgot that I read this book.  I read most of it on a train in one go, and I guess that must be it because it’s not bad enough to be worth deliberately forgetting.  In fact, I suspect that George Eliot was far more interesting as a person than her book is.  Shockingly, my love of feminism extends to the women who laid the foundations in the times before feminism was a thing, and Eliot’s demands that her work be taken seriously (even if to do it she had to use a male pen name) always appealed to me.  Also, I had this teacher called Mr Elliott in school who named his son George, so there’s that too.

As I said, it’s a pretty simple story.  Silas Marner is framed for a theft he didn’t commit by his best friend who subsequently steals Silas’s fiancée when he is banished.  Moving down south (a little bit) to the village of Raveloe, he shuns company and loves only money until he too is the victim of a theft.  He decides that this the perfect time in his life to become a father when he finds a child with a dying mother.  Literally no-one objects to this, because apparently the law of finders-keepers used to apply to orphans.  The fact that he names the kid Hephzibah should in itself have been a hint that giving the lonely hermit a child might not be the best of ideas.  The only time anyone questions whether Eppie should be with Silas is years later when her father decides that he’s ready to do some actual parenting. 

Silas Marner is pretty much what I expected it to be.  It reminded me quite a lot of the Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge.  There’s this whole celebration of country life and the low down rural communities going on.  The pursuit of wealth and love of money is the main evil in the book; Silas is stolen from by a rich and spoilt younger brother of the local gentry and Eppie’s golden hair is shown to be more than enough replacement for his actual literal gold that was nicked.  Personally, I’d rather have the precious metal, but it takes all sorts.

My main criticism of this book is that it is too short.  It’s an enjoyable read but there’s this massive 16 year ellipsis and we go from Silas struggling with how to discipline a toddler to him being the proud father of a wonderful young woman beloved by all Raveloe.  It’s frustrating.  I want more detail about their lives, the way the book ends would be so much more impactful if we were given this.  And, just maybe, the book would have been more memorable for it.

He second of my great train ride books is The Graduate by Charles Webb.

A Severed Head

The more I read of Iris Murdoch the more of a trend I start to see.  I feel like every one of my posts about her books says the same thing- I liked it, but all her characters are ridiculously pompous academics.  I’m starting to wonder if she was ever exposed to the grittier side of life.  I mean, she lived through the War; she must have had to eat Spam or scrimp a bit at some point.  Her characters aren’t posh, except in the way that they’re never troubled by money, but it often seems that they can all afford to live in a world that’s not quite the one the rest of us populate.  Theirs is the world in which everyone has affairs and, at the very least, a master’s degree.

Take A Severed Head, for example.  The title in itself is evidence of my entire point.  A severed head is, to renowned anthropologist Honor Klein, a symbol of devotional love- a thing worshipped by tribes as a symbol of their gods and power.  When the book’s main character, Martin Lynch-Gibbon, falls madly in love with her, this is how she refers to herself while asserting that it is not her that he loves, but the idea of her and this is not truly love.  To be fair to her, this part is wonderfully written; Honor’s speech to Martin is probably my favourite part of the book.  It is just fantastic.

The point when the book crosses the line from typical Murdoch to slightly farcical comes when Martin, upon discovering that he adores Honor, rushes to tell her only to discover her in flagrante with her brother… with whom Martin’s wife is having an affair.  The entire book’s in this vein, like an incredibly high brow Hollyoaks.  Anyway, when Martin discovers the incest his first reaction is not, “Oh my god!” it’s a rumination on whether he is disgusted by incest, why people in general are disgusted by incest and whether this potential disgust, or darkness, actually heightens his desire for Honor.  It is not a believable human reaction.

My only other niggling issue with this book were the constant references to Honor as a Jew.  Her beauty, as described by Martin, is Jewish beauty.  For someone who earlier calls himself an atheist for the most cynical of reasons, he seems a bit too caught up in the importance of religion and religious heritage.  I know that this is a sign of the changing times and I don’t doubt for a second that if this book was written much after 1961-when it was first published – there would have been no mentions of Honor’s irrelevant Jewishness, but it just frustrated me.

That’s it then.  Expect a very similar log post in a few months when I read my next of Murdoch’s books and don’t bother going back to see what I’ve written about her previously.  Unless she ever felt like throwing a bit of a curve ball and writing a book about anything other than middle class academics and well-to-dos who aren’t half as stuffy as they seem.

My next read is Silas Marner by George Eliot.  It’s actually sitting on my shelf already finished thanks to a trip to the Lake District and the series of car and train journeys that entails.