Far From the Madding Crowd

For the longest time I thought that Thomas Hardy’s famous book was called Far From the Maddening Crowd.  I mean until I was about twenty.  It makes sense.  I’d want to be as far away from this hypothetical maddening crowd as possible and I respected Hardy’s honesty in that fact and decided said maddening crowd was a good reason not to read this book.  Anyway, turns out that it’s actually a line from a poem and “madding” just means frenzied.  So, I put off reading the book for ages for no good reason and instead choose Tess of the D’Urbervilles as my Hardy starter book years ago.  Naturally, with my feminist inclinations, I do not love that book.  Tess is wonderful and it’s very well written, but just all the men are utterly terrible.  Literally all of them.  I’ve been told that I’m being too sensitive in regards to this, but my point stands. 

Anyway, back to the book in question; Far From the Madding Crowd.  It’s good.  Really good.  The plot, in brief, is the tale of Bathsheba Everdene, wealthy farmer, bailiff and independent woman.  I like Bathsheba.  Two local men, Gabriel Oak and William Boldwood both fall madly in love with Bathsheba and, after a slew of refused marriage proposals; she elopes with soldier Frank Troy.  This is an incredibly poor decision on Bathsheba’s part as he is pretty much the only man in the entire book who doesn’t love her.  There’s quite a lot of rural shit happening too.  Multiple sheep-based plot point occur that I won’t bother to go into here.  They manly serve to drive Gabriel and Bathsheba together or apart, depending on what would be most dramatic at any given point.

As I mentioned, I like Bathsheba.  She is so ahead of her time it’s unreal.  She inherits her uncle’s farm and instead of getting a man to run the place she mucks right in and not only makes runs it, she makes it flourish.  She proves that she doesn’t need a man, despite the fact that men all around her are desperate to marry her.  Yes, sometimes the balance between independent woman and total dick falls on the wrong side of the line, but she is a young, single woman who voices her opinions even when they don’t agree with those of the men around her. 

It’s the men who let the book down really.  At proposal number one, Gabriel tells Bathsheba that she essentially has to marry him because he loves her and this is more important than the fact that she doesn’t love him.  She’ll get the hang of doing so in time.  Boldwood is jealously aggressive when it comes to Bathsheba’s relationship with Troy.  The entire book is made up of men trying to possess or to tame Bathsheba and she resists it throughout. 

It’s wonderful to see a book written at this time, 1874, celebrate a strong woman in the way that it does; in a way that a lot of media even now doesn’t and it really surprised me.  The women Hardy wrote about are the kind that laid the groundwork for feminism and I didn’t expect that from this book.  Far From the Madding Crowd is great.  Well, there are great bits of it.  If you don’t look too closely at the bits about sheep bloat, it’s utterly wonderful.  And my mum likes it.

I’ve now moved on to Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson.  

Love's Work

I’m not really sure what I want to say about Love’s Work.  It’s not what I was expecting, being the autobiography of someone dying of cancer.  I’ve never been that close to anyone with cancer, but the book is surprisingly not depressing.  I don’t want to call it positive or uplifting because that sounds like some ridiculous cliché and it’s just not true.  I think what I was expecting from Gillian Rose’s book was more cancer.  I assumed the book would be about the act of dying itself and the thing that’s killing her, but it’s not.  It’s about her life, being female, being Jewish.  All sorts; which is kind of obvious in retrospect.

There is stuff about cancer in there, or more the consequences of it.  She writes, more wryly that I’d manage I’m sure, about her colonoscopy bag and the pain she experiences when she realises that this is now a permanent state of affairs.  But even talk of doctors is wrapped up in other things.  The most interesting part of it that she recounts is a conversation with her doctor who has moved into his specialist area precisely because it’s what his father didn’t do.   Rose uses this to philosophise about the nature of parent-child relationships and how parents can use the fact that their children want to be different from them to encourage them to do the right thing.

I think that the main problem I have with this book is that Rose isn’t mad keen on feminism.  I want her to be.  She’s of the age where she’d have been young during the second wave stuff.  It’s ridiculous that I judge her so harshly for it, but she goes on about not getting a great education at Oxford because she was in woman’s college and then refuses to believe that she has not been silenced by the patriarchy.  If she had, she argues, how would she be able to speak out against it at all?  It's especially frustrating as earlier in the book she writes about how much she used to enjoy Roy Rogers and was mortified by the idea that her gender may not allow her to be a cowboy, instead forcing her into the much loathed role of milkmaid.

I don’t know what else to say about the book, really.  It’s readable and it’s short.  I feel just horrid and as though I’m essentially reducing down Rose’s life into two adjectives, but there you go.  As I said before, it’s not as depressing as I thought it would be.  The second chapter starts with a trip to Auschwitz (this follows on from a friend dying of AIDS) and at that point my heart plummeted, I was sure the whole thing would be pure misery.  But it’s not.  Love’s Work is by no means an easy read, but it’s about love, in the end.  And love’s not all terrible.

I’m now on Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd.

Waterland

I didn’t have high hopes for Waterland.  The blurb really doesn’t do it justice.  It leads off with how the book’s a two hundred year history of the fen lands.  I live pretty near the fen lands and, even as someone who likes history, it didn’t appeal.  It’s not that at all though; it’s a proper story with characters and a plot and everything.  By the end of the first chapter there’s even a corpse.  And not just any old corpse, a child’s corpse.  I should have really paid more attention to the only other Graham Swift book I’ve ever read, The Light of Day, which I thoroughly enjoyed rather than the bloody blurb.

Waterland does tell the story of the East Anglian fen lands, about three hundred years’ worth of history, and these bits are actually kind of interesting.  Swift links it, by and large, to his narrator’s family and it works.  It’s nice to know why there are so many local beers, at least.  The main chunk of the plot revolves around Tom Crick, soon to be retired history teacher, his wife Mary and his mentally disabled brother Dick when the three of them were young.  In 1943, then sixteen year-old Mary falls pregnant, but the fact that there are three possible fathers (the Crick brothers and soon to be corpse, Freddie Parr) mean far more complications arise than the expected shotgun wedding.  Most of the book concerns itself with the cyclical nature of history and how this seemingly little event impacts upon the lives of the characters for decades to come.

The book itself is very good.  I had low expectations but (disregarding a few asides about the history of eels) it far surpassed them.  The problem that I’m running into when writing about it is that there are no stand out moments of brilliance (or just god awfulness).  Usually now, when I read a book, I’m thinking of what I’m going to write about it and mark certain pages or phrases as I go (not in a way that damages the book.  I am not a barbarian.  There are Post Its involved).  But I didn’t mark anything in Waterland.  It has a couple of moments that are probably better than the rest of it, but they’re spoilers that need a hell of a lot of context; the reasons for Dick’s mental disabilities, for example. 

So this book is good, I am not disputing that.  In fact, I enjoyed this book far more than I thought I would and while I’m not recommending it with the same zeal I was for something like The Secret History, you could do much worse when looking for your next read.  The problem is there are just no outstanding bits and, as such it falls into that category of books I’m not sure really belong on The List.  Also Dick Crick is a stupid name. 

My next read is terminal cancer chronicle Love’s Work by Gillian Rose.

Invisible Cities

So; Invisible Cities.  I didn’t love it.  I don’t love Italo Calvino.  Years ago I had to study If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller as part of the first year of my degree.  I was nineteen and totally didn’t get it.  It’s written too much in the second person and it seems to go somewhere and then doesn’t- or goes in an entirely different direction after having quite a promising opening.  In all honesty, I don’t remember the ins and outs of it that well; I just remember not enjoying it.  Like, seriously not enjoying it, to the point that I haven’t even thought of cracking open another of Calvino’s works for almost seven years; there’s a reason he never actually won the Nobel Prize after all.

There isn’t really a plot.  Marco Polo describes various cities to Kublai Khan.  It’s probably quite a lot like that Netflix series about Marco Polo, except the pilot of that bored me something chronic too, so I never got any further.  Anyway, Calvino’s Marco Polo is actually describing Venice.  All the cities are Venice.  Literally nothing else happens.   Marco Polo and Kublai Khan chat a bit, but as it’s established fairly early on in the book that they don’t speak the same language, I’m a tad confused as to how this happens.  Maybe they’re just speaking their own languages but louder and more slowly, we’ll never really know.

It’s frustrating that I didn’t enjoy this book.  As I mentioned, part of it is concerned with the language barrier between the two characters and there’s a strong implication that Khan’s inferences don’t match Polo’s intent.  This should be fascinating given that I was, of course, reading a translated version which is bound to have changed so many of those details that only appear to be minor.  But, as I’ve mentioned, I didn’t enjoy Invisible Cities and found it generally pretty hard to care.  Calvino also peppers the entire thing with (I assume) deliberate anachronisms.  Again, Calvino probably had some clever intent for these, but by the time I reached them I wasn’t invested enough to care. 

Part of the reason that I didn’t like it was the plot, or lack therefore of.  Polo spends his time describing cities to Khan.  That is all that happens.  Each city is a short vignette (usually no more than a page of so) that is sometimes thematically linked to another city.  I ended up just thinking that most of the cities are impractical up until the point of impossibility.  There is one, Armilla, that has no walls, or floors; only water pipes.  I’m just going to let that sit for a moment.  I designed (and later destroyed with aliens and tornados) better places on Sim City when I was a child.  Things like that make me think Calvino was aiming for whimsy and hitting really fucking stupid. 

This isn’t a book I wildly enjoyed.  Luckily it’s a short one.  The most frustrating part is the fact that the entire book can be summed up in a one page conversation between Polo and Khan.  Polo is describing a bridge by each of its stones.  Khan insists that he doesn’t want to hear about each of the stones, only the bridge and its arch.  Naturally, Polo’s enigmatic reply is, “The bridge is not supported by one stone or another… but by the line of the arch they form… Without the stones there is no arch.”  Without the vignettes about Venice, there is no Venice.  It’s the best part of the book.

I’m now reading Waterland by Graham Swift.