Bonjour Tristesse

I've noticed a certain tendancy in coming of age books.  I don't mean the Princess Diaries sort; I mean the ones about sexual liberation.  They all seem to follow a certain plot line: a young protagonist goes to the south of France for the summer, gets embroiled in some form of sexual intrigue (usually with someone older) and then it all goes wrong and somebody dies.  Our protagonist is left wiser than their years with an air of melancholy than replaces their innocence.  It’s a narrative that crops up in books like Patricia Duncker’s Hallucinating Foucault, and it’s the narrative of Bonjour Tristesse.

That’s not to say that Françoise Sagan’s book is bad.  It’s not.  I don’t even object too much to the fact that she was 19 when it was published and the entitlement that a thing like that reeks of.  It’s a good little story.  I know that sounds an incredibly demeaning thing to say, but there’s no other way to say it.  It’s more of a novella than anything else and it’s a story that probably couldn’t have been written by anyone much older than 19. 

The specifics of the plot are that while holidaying near Cannes, seventeen year-old Cécile is unable to accept that her father has split up with the young, fun, and flirtatious Elsa in favour of marrying the age-appropriate and rather more straight laced Anne.  Cécile being young and spoilt sees this as a threat to a lifestyle she quite enjoys and so goes about trying to end the engagement and restore Elsa to her rightful place as her father’s mistress.  Naturally, she does this by persuading Elsa to pretend to be in love with Cyril, Cécile’s own would be fiancé.  This all goes about as well as you’d expect.  Especially considering that Cécile’s father gives not two shits about Elsa.  That’s probably why he broke up with her.

I also have issues with Cécile as a character.  She is so selfish.  She turns her father’s impending marriage into a personal betrayal and is utterly unwilling to consider Anne’s point-of-view.  Only when her plan appears successful and she sees Anne crying does Cécile realise that she has damaged another living person with hopes and dreams and it is case of too little far too late.  She is not a likeable main character and any personal development she makes is not enough.  She is ultimately allowed to return to her previous life without her father finding out about her role in events.  Yes, she has learnt not to do it again, but she got what she thought she wanted.

As I said, I didn’t hate this book.  It’s a good quick read.  I just think I read it when I was too old.  It felt a bit like when I went back to Catcher in the Rye.  Having read that first when I was about 13 and thought Holden Caufield was a miraculous poet, I was so disappointed to find when I was about 20 that he was actually incredibly entitled and whiney.  I spent most of the time I last read it feeling bad for his parents and wishing he’d shut the fuck up.  It’s the same with Bonjour Tristesse; I can’t understand Cécile’s motives because I’m not in that place in my life any more.  My parents’ relationship doesn’t impinge in any way upon my personal freedoms to the extent that it’s difficult to empathise with anyone sabotaging others’ happiness to ensure their own.  And it’s not just Cécile, I don’t believe that Cyril or Elsa would go along with her plan.  They are both my age.  They should know better and the only reason I can think of that they wouldn’t is the naivety of the author herself.

I’m now on to Alan Hollinghurst again.  This time it’s The Swimming-Pool Library.

Stranger in a Strange Land

Stranger in a Strange Land is a pretty famous book.  I’m pretty ignorant of sci-fi as a whole and, while I didn’t know anything about it, it was a book I’d heard of before.  Regardless, my expectations were very high.  I’ve said it before, but sci-fi’s never been my favourite genre and, yes, that’s been challenged quite a lot this year by authors like John Wyndham.  I think the amount of sci-fi I’ve enjoyed recently just heightened my expectations for Robert Heinlein’s epic.  And, I’m a bit sorry to say, it doesn’t quite deliver in the way that I thought it would.

The book itself is the story of Michael Valentine Smith, a human who through a series of unlikely events ends up being raised on Mars.  By Martians; naturally.  Anyway, through a further series of plot contrivances, Mike is brought to Earth, discovered to be incredibly wealthy, broken out of hospital, and becomes a celebrity.  It all ends, as interplanetary travel is wont to do, with a cult.  It’s one of those cults built around an enigmatic figure and far more women than men.  This ends up about as well as you can imagine.

I didn’t enjoy this book.  I’m not too sure of the reasons for this, because there is a lot in there that I good and the concept itself is a fascinating one.  I think part of me was hoping for a fish-out-of-water version of The Running Man (a fairly trashy Stephen King/ Richard Bachman novel about a man who is part of a game show in which contestants are hunted and killed, made into an equally trashy Arnold Schwarzenegger film).  Instead, Stranger in a Strange Land is alternatively, an essay in fictional legalese, a discussion of human religion, cultural and economic philosophy, and the fear of death.  It’s a bit shallow and vacuous, but I really just wanted a bit more action. 

Another major issue I had with the book was how old fashioned it was.  It’s always amazing in sci-fi that predicts the future to see what people get right and what they get wrong.  Heinlein, like most, misses out on mobile phones.  This is forgivable.  The parts that I really object to are the bits about women, most notably in the work place.  One of the key characters, Jill, is a nurse and the way her male colleagues treat her is quite frankly disgusting.  It’s literally not okay to refer to a colleague as, “Dimples.”  There are other off hand remarks that show, even though the book was during it it, Heinlein was unable to predict the success of the Civil Rights Movement, also LGBT rights.  It’s sad that in 1961, people thought manned missions to Mars more likely than actual human equality.  I wish I could say that Heinlein also missed on predicting an end to Islamophobia, but it would feel like I’m doing our culture too much of a kindness. 

In all, I didn’t love this book.  It felt like it didn’t know exactly what it wanted to be.  This is a problem when the book is 220,000 words long.  It took me so long to read and it was so difficult to motivate myself to read it at times, which was the biggest problem I found with it.  I know when it was originally published, Heinlein’s editor’s made him cut around 60,000 words and I can see why.  Stranger in a Strange Land is a mission.  There is part of me that is curious about which parts were cut and which remained (the sex cult parts by the sound of it) but mostly I’m just so relieved that the book is over, that I can read something else, that I can’t bring myself to care particularly.  It’s a thing I hate to say about a book, but my favourite part (aside from a spot on paragraph or so about the symbolic nature of money) was that feeling when I’d finished it.

I’ve just started on Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan.  It’s much shorter than Stranger in a Strange Land.  

Under the Skin

As I mentioned in my last blog, I saw the film of Michel Faber’s Under the Skin earlier this year and I loved it.  It’s rare that I get to display the film side of my degree in this blog and I’m happy to take the chance to.  It’s wonderfully dark and it left me wanting to read the book.  It’s very unusual for me to the film first and so it’s a pretty novel feeling.  And I had my doubts about the book.  The is fantastic, but it’s a very visual thing.  There’s little dialogue, sweeping Scottish scenery and some ambiguous bits about men dying horrific deaths.  Also full-frontal male nudity.  In short, there’s a lot in the film that could make for a boring as hell book and I fully expected Anne Radcliffe-esque descriptions of hills in amongst the man killing alien parts. 

What saves the book is the fact that it is nothing like the film.  Normally when that happens (with the exception of the James Whale Frankenstein films) I get a bit livid.  But the fact that they are completely different allows both to be brilliant.  The book is far too high concept for a low budget British film.  The aliens, revealed in their true form in Faber’s book, would have looked ridiculous on the screen- like talking, double jointed lynx.  There is far more plot to the book than the film, which did surprise me.  The book’s narrative tells a story of Isserley, an alien who picks up male hitch hikers and brings them to her colleagues to fatten up before their murder and subsequent shipping out for food.  Isserley is so much more knowable in the book; she has a back story and interacts with characters she doesn’t later murder (or arranged to have killed).  She falls in love. 

As I mentioned earlier, the fate that the aliens’ victims suffer is horrific.  They are castrated.  Their tongues are cut out and they are fattened up all to serve as an extortionately expensive delicacy.  But Faber makes it possible for us to spend so much time in Isserley’s.  She too is so clearly a victim.  She has been mutilated from her original lynx-like body to resemble a woman, all to avoid being condemned to The Estates (little explained, but worse than death).  She is unhappy and alone and in chronic pain.  More so, she is victim of the men that she picks up.  Each one is given a brief internal monologue as they step into Isserley’s car and each one that dies objectifies the hell out of her.  And, while I understand that feminism isn’t actually about cutting the balls off misogynists; it’s a fitting fate.  

Faber also uses language fantastically to make us care about the serial killing aliens.  The aliens refer to themselves as human beings and the men that they kill as vodsels.  This barrier dehumanises the victims enough so that when celebrity lay-about Amlis Vess releases four of the men soon due for slaughter, it is Isserley’s frustration at her wasted work and the risk of them being found that concerns the reader rather than the lives of the men.  It’s simple, but it’s effective.  There is a horror in the film that is reduced in the book because of the steps Faber takes to make Isserley less other-worldly.  Even more simply, in Faber’s book Isserley has a name.

I quite simply love this book/ film combination.  There is so much in the book that would have made the film so much more marketable, and yet I am so happy that they left it out.  The two things work so well separately of each other.  I think the film takes a lot more patience than the book, but it’s incredibly rewarding.  I’m not even going to gripe that we’re meant to believe that Scarlet Johansson is meant to be mutilated in anyway because she is bloody wonderful.  I can’t recommend this book enough.  It took me so much surprise and it’s properly brilliant.  Go and read it.

I’ve now moved on to more sci-fi, this time Robert A Heinlein’s A Stranger in A Strange Land.

Memento Mori

I have mixed feelings about Memento Mori.  I’ve loved everything else that I’ve read by Muriel Spark- she’s gloriously harsh to her characters and I like that.  Reading her is a bit like reading a post-World War Two version of Game of Thrones- no-one’s safe and there’s a lot of social climbing.  Unlike Game of Thrones, however, my enjoyment of the book was patchy at best.

The plot, such as it is, centres on the aged Dame Lettie Coulson and her circle of friends- or frenemies, to be more accurate.  (I feel I need to take a moment here to be fully appalled that my version of Word recognises “frenemies” as a real word.  Good one Bill Gates.)  Anyway, the old women spend their time updating and cutting people from their wills for imagined slights the way teenagers do their top MySpace friends.  Teenagers still use MySpace, right?  So, the plot: Dame Lettie is receiving phone calls from an unknown party reminding her that she will die.  The rest of the ensemble flitters between treating it as a prank and believing that Dame Lettie is hallucinating, or attention seeking.  This is part of the reason I was disappointed in the book.  Death threats make far better fiction than old ladies chatting.

I think that another reason I couldn’t get on with Memento Mori is the fact that there are so many characters.  The ensemble cast is funny, but each person is so idiosyncratic that it is a bit difficult to connect with them properly.  Especially given that we don’t spend that much time in each character’s company.  It’s really frustrating because some of them- Jean Taylor for example- are fantastically interesting.  Or at least they have the potential to be.  This kind of thing makes Dame Lettie’s very interesting story so annoying.  I want so much more of it.  This is one of Spark’s earliest novels and it shows.  Some of her later books, like The Girls of Slender Means also have ensemble casts of characters but Spark keeps those under control.  By the time these characters die, it seems like a footnote.  Most of the deaths are reported in a list near the end of the book.  None are tragic or special and we don’t care enough about them for their deaths to mean much.

Another of my qualms with my book is the death of the fantastically named Tempest Sidebottome.  She is one of the few characters who are given a death with consequences.  The problem is that the consequence of her death is to pretty effectively end a plot strand.  She and Dame Lettie are contesting a will and, with Tempest dead, Dame Lettie can march on unopposed.  I know this is how real life actually goes, but it is underwhelming fiction.

I’m left with not much to say about Memento Mori.  It’s been a book that I tried to find for months and was so looking forward to and then it just left me completely disappointed.  It’s such a shame.  I know I keep saying that the trick to enjoying a book is to go into it without expectations, but realistically that is impossible.  And I had great expectations for this book.  Unfortunately, this is the last of Spark’s books on The List.  I’m just left wishing I’d saved one of the better ones for last.

Next up is Under The Skin by Michel Faber.  I saw the film earlier in the year and it raised a lot of questions.

The Corrections

I was disappointed by The Corrections.  It’s taken me absolutely ages to write this blog, just because I have so little passion for the book.  I think it is, mostly, another case of sky high expectations that couldn’t realistically be met.  Jonathan Franzen’s book is the story of a family; elderly couple Alfred and Enid and their three adult children and Enid’s desire for “one last Christmas” before Alfred is lost entirely to his Parkinson’s.  While I was hoping for some feeling of connection with the family dynamic I didn’t feel it.  Everyone in the book is kind of terrible.

Part of my issue is that it’s a very long book, around 600 or so pages, that starts off with a hell of a long visit to middle child Chip.  Chip is a wanker.  He’s a misogynist.  An ex-collage professor who, even years later and after losing his job for it, still thinks he was the victim after an affair with a student.  He spends much of his time in the early stages of the book being bitter and writing a screenplay about how evil women are.  I do not like Chip.  I think he put me the whole book.  After so many pages with him, I was unwilling to give any time to the people who raised him.  They did a shit job.  He’s an awful person.  His brother and sister aren’t much better, but I have sympathy for them at least.  Eldest son Gary is suffering from depression and so he gets a lot of leeway, their sister Denise is just chronically unable to get her shit together.  She ruins any job that she has by sleeping with pretty much anyone.

I expected something from the book that it never delivered upon.  My family has been through the ordeal of having a member have an incurable and degenerative disease, granted it was Alzheimer’s rather than Parkinson’s, but I still expected some level of familiarity or connection.  That just wasn’t there.  The family dynamic is such an odd one, and it crops up both between the Lambert kids and Alfred and Enid as well as between Gary and his wife and kids.  My problem with it is that rather than interacting with each other, they just try and impose their will upon each other.  Sometimes it’s like they have no connection to one another.  Or emotional maturity.  No-one has any emotional maturity and I think a book essentially about Parkinson’s calls for a dose of it. 

I’m sure there are some parts of the book that I did enjoy.  It certainly picked up after Chip was in it less.  And Denise’s parts were actually pretty entertaining.  But the overwhelming feeling that I am left with is disappointment.  And after leaving it some time, a good couple of weeks, it’s the feeling that I’m left with.  There are no parts of the book that stand out as excellent and I wanted there to be.  I always want there to be when I read a book on The List.  This isn’t like Intimacy.  I can why people could love this book, but I don’t.  I think maybe if I’d been in a different frame of mind when reading it I’d have loved it and would be singing its praises right now; or even if Franzen had started the whole thing by introducing us to Denise rather than Chip the chauvinist.

I’m now reading Momento Mori by Muriel Spark.  

Intimacy

I so enjoyed TheBuddha of Suburbia that I was super looking forward to reading more of Hanif Kureishi’s work, even more so when I found out that he also wrote My Beautiful Laundrette.  My Beautiful Laundrette is a wonderful film.  I can’t recommend it enough; if you haven’t already seen it, go and watch it now.  Even if mid-1980s mixed-race gay relationships aren’t your thing, it’s worth a watch for Daniel Day-Lewis’s hair alone.  Anyway, back to the point: I had high expectations for Intimacy.  It doesn’t really disappoint, but after such a long run of great books, it seems a little mediocre. 

The plot is simply the thoughts of a man, Jay, on the night before he leaves partner Susan and their two children.  Jay’s kind of a jerk.  After refusing to marry Susan he repeatedly proposes to his much younger mistress.  I’m not a big believer in marriage, but even I can see that this is a pretty shitty move on Jay’s part.  Everything plot-wise is revealed in flashbacks, so we get a sense of the relationship falling apart while we already know that, ultimately, Jay has no real interest in saving it.  I spent a lot of this book feeling bad for Susan.  She could do better.  It’s not by any means a bad book- no I didn’t like the main character and the ending- to spoiler it- is completely unbelievable.  His oft proposed to ex-mistress is waiting with open arms once Jay leaves his family.  It doesn’t seem likely and he’s not likeable enough that the unlikely can be overlooked.

I do like the narrative structure of the book.  It’s incredibly difficult to make 150-odd pages of essential plotlessness interesting, but Kureishi nails it.  The fact that you know the relationship is doomed from the start gives the whole thing this wickedly bittersweet air.  It does, however, make the book very difficult to write about.  Most things that aren’t Jay leaving Susan feel like subplot- his happily married friends and his miserably divorced ones.  The tone of Intimacy is much more grown up than The Buddha of Suburbia, I remember comparing that book to Adrian Mole at the time.  The adult tone isn’t too surprising, given that Kureishi is writing about adults this time, and cynical ones at that.  The book is a short one, and in all reality not much happens.  This does not make for edge of the seat blogging.

I found, generally, this to be an easy book to read quickly but I’m really struggling to write about it in much depth.  As I said, compared to the stuff I’ve been reading recently, it’s fairly mediocre and I’m not really sure why it’s on the list.  It’s a book that’s hard to see as an enduring classic or anybody’s favourite.  Maybe it comes down to lack of experience in the world.  I’ve never had a family to abandon and I don’t really care much for kids- especially Jay’s fictional and nameless ones, so some of the emotional punch of the family’s inevitable upheaval is lost on me.  In the end I’m just left with the feeling that Susan is better off without Jay and I really don’t think that’s what Kureishi was going for.

My next book is The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.

Chocky

So it’s blog time again and once more I have a book to rave about.  I’ve missed this.  It feels like it’s been an age since I’ve had a run of books that I really enjoyed and now I’m in one again and hope it lasts.  It never lasts.  I’ve been sporadically on about how much I love John Wyndham all year and I can’t believe I never tried his stuff before now.  I know we’re only half way through, but he’s shaping up to be my personal discovery of 2015.  Suffice to say, like The Midwich Cuckoos and Day of the Triffids before it, Chocky is just excellent.

It tells the story of David Gore, distant father to his two children: ten year-old Polly and her adopted older brother Matthew.  To be fair, he’s kind of a shit father to Polly.  He’s never really that interested in what she has to say- usually it’s nonsense about Twinklehooves the pony, main character in her favourite book series (as an aside, these are a pretty hilarious parody of kids’ books and include stories of Twinklehooves joining the circus and ballet).  Anyway, Matthew hears voices; or more specifically a voice, in his head and so is the more attention worthy child.  As the book goes on David and his wife Mary become more convinced that Chocky is more than just an imaginary friend, especially once they discover that she has the ability to control Matthew’s body.  As benevolent as these possessions are Chocky is an unknown and so Mary fears her to the point where it becomes clear that Chocky has to go.

There’s a hell of a lot to like in this book.  The more I read of Wyndham, the more I think that he was just decades ahead of his time.  Chunks of Chocky centre around the fact that Earth is pretty backward scientifically speaking and that we will, eventually need a new source of power.  This is a book written in 1968 implying that solar power is primitive.  I didn’t even know the technology for solar power existed in 1968. 

There’s also some marvellous gender politics at play.  Chocky, not being human, finds the delineation between male and female ridiculous.  While her confidant Matthew is find with this, she is only into using a gendered pronoun because no-one else can get their head around the idea.  You can see why she picked him.  Where this does however fall apart is the characterisation of Mary Gore.  Sometimes, it’s hard to see why David married her- she is the main negative influence in the book and David has a tendency to come across as scornful of her concerns for her child.  He doesn’t respect her worries.  He lies to her and makes Matthew complicit in his lies.

This is more cerebral sci-fi than Wyndham’s other books that I’ve been going on about this year.  Rather than concerning events that effect entire towns or countries, it’s the story of one family and their ability (or lack therefore of) to cope with extraordinary circumstances.  The actual science-y bit is theoretical in the extreme and not all that important to the plot.  In the end, it’s the family dynamic and the relationship between Chocky and Matthew that decides the story’s outcome far more than any science deus ex machina.

My next read is Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy.