Lunchtime read: The Girls of Slender Means

For a while you try to work out where this book is going but it all comes together in the last couple of chapters. Spark seems focus on those moments of conversion or cataclysm where a character has the ability to change the thoughts and actions of others.

In this case the explosion of a bomb in the garden, something that has been a running point of commentary throughout the book, causes not only the destruction of the club building but as the fire escape collapses and the women upstairs wait it also claims the life of one of the residents.

The life is claims so the elocution teacher Joanna who takes comfort in calmly reading a psalm from memory as the smoke and the flames get ever closer. Her attitude to death impacts Nicholas, who is watching through the window profoundly. He starts to understand that away from the topical anarchism and posturing there are people who really believe in something.

That incident in the house, which collapses like the other bombed out buildings nearby, along with the casual murder on VJ night seems to have an impact on Nicholas who then heads off to become such a zealous missionary that the natives resort to killing him.

Just like the Ballad of Peckham Rye this is about the way people can be changed. In this case though it is not Nicholas, who you suspect of potentially playing a Douglas Dougal type role, but someone who has been heard throughout the book as she recites poetry but rarely seen. That is an idea in itself – the concept of influence through mystery – and you put this slim novella down with a few of the really big questions left going through your mind.

A review will follow soon…

Too upbeat?

There is a really good little book that comes with today’s Observer covering the publishing industry full of facts and figures and interesting stuff about how a book is created and then published. The only thing I have to disagree with is the upbeat introduction. It states that there are more books published than ever before. But then states that with literacy increasing and second hand bookshops flourishing then now is a great time for literature.

Hold on. According to various sources literacy is declining in some quarters. Bookshops are finding it harder to compete with online rivals and the large supermarkets and the whole debate about ebooks has clouded the actual problem with getting people to engage with reading.

Mind you put all of that in the introduction and I guess people wouldn’t read on…

book review - Frankenstein

This is a classic by the definition of it having entered the global language associated with a man made monster but you wonder how many people have actually read the book by Mary Shelley.

In a way you almost don’t need to because of the numerous films and the handing down over campfires and bedtime stories of the basics of the story. The problem with steering clear of the actual book is that as a result you are not getting the original interpretation.

There are major differences. In the book Frankenstein’s creation hangs like a shadow over the story but it is rarely seen. Neither is it inherently evil from the start that happens because of the rejection it receives not just from man but also from its maker.

That sense of rejection and revenge drives a story that is not just about man’s desire to tinker with nature. This is clearly about the ambition for science to make mortals as powerful as Gods and the consequences are a warning. But it is also pointing a warning finger about vanity and the consequences that come from failing to face up to responsibilities. It sticks in the kind that when the monster has warned Frankenstein that he will be with him on his wedding night the scientist assumes he is the target and only when it is too late does he realise that he was not the victim.

The device for telling the story is at first misleading because it is told through the diaries and letters of a Polar explorer who is writing to his sister. His crew sight Frankenstein’s creation and then rescue the doctor and it is over the course of a few days, as it turns out counting down to the breakdown of his health and his death, that Frankenstein tells the story of his misery.

He accepts the blame for going too far and taking his arrogance to the extremes of creating life. He accepts that as the creature looks for revenge and kills his family that he is responsible for their murders and deaths. He also accepts that he has to spend the rest of his life tracking the monster until he has killed it.

The story then unfolds and the pace comes from the presence of the monster in the shadows to pop out occasionally with warnings and acts of death and violence.

Frankenstein would rather lose everyone than make a pact with the devil and deepen his crimes by creating another mate for his monster. That decision seals his fate.

One thing that you wonder is who actually wrote the book. You know from her preface that Mary Shelley had the idea in the famous moment when Byron and her husband dreamt up a way to kill the boredom of a rainy summer. But Mary implies that her husband is responsible for most of the text and there are several nods to other poets that often are unnecessary but feels like signposting of authorship.

In the end Mary Shelley had an idea that was timeless in its concept. Man will always try to bend the laws of nature for their own aims and if they do then the consequences could be as devastating as Frankenstein’s example. As you would expect the book is much better than the film.

Version read – Penguin popular classic paperback

The Kindly Ones - post I

It seems an odd time to go right back but Powell starts the sixth book in the Dance to the Music of Time series by returning to his family home in the year 1914. A domestic scene that is populated by a reasonably isolated parents and a handful of odd servants is used to describe domestic life on the eve of the First World War.

Jenkins is an only child and when not being looked after by his tutor discovers from his mother that the cook is leaving to get married and as a result the maid, who was holding a torch for the chef, decided to hand in her notice. The understated humour comes from the way that the woman decides to resign, by bursting in completely naked on Jenkins’s parents and their guests.

All of the talk is of war with people trying to guess when things will happen. The reference to the title and the mentioned at the start is the furies and the hope that it will be the kindly ones that have an influence. Something that sadly was never going to happen after the shooting in Sarajevo that kick starts the war.

More soon…

A Void - post II

Before he disappeared Anton Vowl sent messages to several friends to tip them off that something has happened or is going to happen. The clues lead them to the zoo, to a lawyer who is holding Anton’s diaries and then to yet another friend who has more information.

The diaries seem to obsess about Moby Dick and the way the whale pulled them all into the void. But at the same time another well-known solicitor dies and at the funeral the friends meet up and are witnesses to the coffin dropping, opening and being revealed as empty.

That concludes the section on Anton and the narrative moves onto focus on the next stage of the investigation. One oddity, although how can you single out one in a book full of them, is the way that most of the male characters have lost their children in unusual circumstances.

It is hard to keep up with it sometimes as the narrative goes off at tangents and the plot moves backwards and forwards through literary and mathematical references. Numbers and characters seem to be important although not always clear. Even as a reader you sense the book dropping through a void in the middle of Anton Vowl’s rug taking you and everything else along with it.

More tomorrow…

Lunchtime read: The Girls of Slender Means

The characters start to emerge with Jane acting as the go between link from the past to the future when Nicholas has died. She is the one phoning round trying to find everyone to tell them the news.

Back in 1945 Jane is resigned to the fact that Nicholas is more interested in her attractive friend Selina and she allows him to use her as a way back into the club. The girls are largely harmless struggling to find their way through post-war Britain without any money and without too much idea of what they want to do with their lives.

Now and again Spark fast forwards and gives you a life summary taking a character right through the next forty years as lightning speed. It works well and I almost wish someone could sit down next to me and summarise my next twenty years in a sentence – only of course if it turned out well!

Spark really manages to create a watertight description of a little community and you feel at the point when Nicholas is waiting in the hall for Selina that you are almost there with him taking in the sights and the mood of the period and that is a result of her writing.

Is there going to be a moment when Nicholas acts a catalyst to change the lives of the girls on the top floor or is Spark writing a straight memoir type story of the year 1945 and live for girls with slender means? Not yet clear but still enjoyable either way.

More tomorrow…

A Void - post I

Sometimes you get reminded just how adventurous literature can be. Okay it sounds contrived to produce a novel without using a single letter ‘e’ but what ambition trying to do it. As you start reading you spend a few pages just trying to find an escaped ‘e’ and there are moments when he inserts a dash or apostrophe where a e should have been. But most of the time he simply chooses to express the story without using words containing ‘e’s.

The result is odd, not in an unpleasant way, but there is a different rhythm. The story is also written in a way that is no necessarily easy to get to grips with. There are hidden jokes, with famous French literary characters popping up, and references to mathematical and philosophical debates that are far out of my realm.

But at the heart of the story there is a character named Anton Vowl who becomes obsessed with the idea that he is slipping into a void. He suffers from insomnia and becomes more unable to distinguish between reality and dreams. He commits his increasingly random thoughts to paper and then disappears.

More tomorrow...

Lunchtime read: The Girls of Slender Means

Often when you like an author it is the world and the characters they are describing that makes the impression. As a consequence it can sometimes be possible to reach out and head for other books written about the same period to find other writers trying to paint similar pictures.

Although the war years haven’t been reached in Dance to the Music of Time the fact they arte coming inspired the choices of the Sword of Honour trilogy by Evelyn Waugh and now The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark.

This story is set in Kensington in 1945 just as the war has ended and focuses on a club come women’s hostel and Spark builds up a picture of the girls who live at the top of the old Victorian building. Some have fiancés, others focus on their jobs but they all have in common a lack of money and the challenges of living in a country that has rationing and not a great deal of anything in the shops.

Something is going to happen and it looks as if it will be connected to the poet Nicholas Farringdon, who appears at the start of the story to have died. But then he is introduced into the text in such a way that it is not clear if he is dead and then the past role he played with the girls starts to be introduced.

More tomorrow…

The Ballad of Peckham Rye - post IV

In the end it was perhaps inevitable that the kettle would boil over and Dougal would have to leave Peckham. The first sign that things are coming to a head start with a reference in passing to the head of personnel having a breakdown.

Those trying to bring Dougal down, led by Trevor, steal his cryptic notepads and then are given the impression the arts man works for the police. Far from endearing him to the local community this seems to confirm a reason to have a prejudice against him.

Spark then delivers a rapid series of blows that end with Dougal running from Peckham. In an incredibly understated scene Mr Druce kills his mistress after Trevor has told him that she is seeing Dougal a couple of nights a week. Back in his digs Dougal discovers his landlady has suffered a stroke and he packs his bags and heads for the station. He manages to have a fight with Trevor on the way and then head off into the distance.

His role seems to be transformational but ultimately he provokes a reaction and brings out feelings that are already there of jealousy, despair and anger. He might be a devil, with his apparent horns, but the ultimate evil resides in the people of Peckham. Dougal is only the blue torch paper.

A review will follow soon…

The Ballad of Peckham Rye - post III

In the sense that Dougal Douglas is a catalyst for change he manages to have an impact on an increasing number of people. The head of personnel is driven to the brink of a breakdown, Trevor is driven to trying to push a broken pint glass into his face and the good people of Peckham are driven to hold a view over the strange man – whether they like him or not.

As the book moves into the territory of devils and demons it reminds you strongly of Mervyn Peake’s Mr Pye. The same results to the tight knit community of Sark were felt with the arrival of a super confident, socially risky and a people manipulator and motivator. Although Douglas is also working at the personal level he takes a job in a rival factory and as a result is in an even stronger position to cause havoc.

He starts to advise people to break off engagements, walk away from long-standing love affairs and take time off work. Soon the circle will come round to join the opening chapter and the full chaos of Douglas’s last days will be described.

More tomorrow…

book review - Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

Anthony Powell uses the fifth volume in Dance to the Music of Time to cover the topic of marriage. There are discussions about the merits of getting married and the way that you seem to inevitably move towards that state as well as some graphic illustrations of what happens when marriages go wrong.

At the heart of the book are the three examples of Jenkins, the narrator, Hugh Moreland the musician that Jenkins meets in the opening scene and the critics Maclintick who is also in the pub in the opening few pages. The group move from the pub, where Deacon the artist and antique seller had also been propping up the bar, to Casanova’s Chinese restaurant to discuss women and marriage.

Jenkins has married Isobel Tolland and they suffer a miscarriage and then have to watch on in different degrees of embarrassment as Isobel’s sister has an affair with Moreland and threatens to break up his marriage.

If Jenkins is largely wedded bliss then Moreland is the middle way with plenty of ups and downs. He also suffers the pain of losing a child but seems to throw his energies into himself – his symphony - and his love affairs. In the end he goes back to his wife Matilda but only after he has carried out an affair over several months.

In that middle path there is also Stringham’s mother Mrs Foxe who has fallen in love with an actor Norman Chandler and relies on him to keep her life going. Buster, her husband seems to realise that the young man is essential to their happiness and allows him to play a prominent role.

The other extreme in marriage is the critic Maclintick who has open warfare with his wife with them verbally abusing each other and doing so in front of anyone who is present. In the end the marriage breaks down and she leaves him to run off with another musician and even after a visit from Moreland and Jenkins to try and cheer him up the critics decides to take his own life.

Death is a sub theme with Deacon’s death, already played out in an earlier volume, getting retold from a slightly different angle. Maclintick kills himself and is reasonably few people feel demise. Sir John Clarke the novelist dies and his death sends out ripples, which are there at the close of the book. The other hint of death, if not literal then at least in terms of talent and youth, is Stringham who makes an appearance that is both painful and hilarious. Fuelled by drink he manages to play the role of the outgoing confident Stringham of old. But when he is forced to head for home his true vulnerability and tragic situation is clear to all.

Of all of the five books so far this one not only feels more recognisably rhythmic but it is also a point at which because of his marriage Jenkins is finally more than just an observer. He is now in the orbit of a large and grand family and as a result he gets access to more interesting meetings – Sir John Clarke for example – but for the reader is adds a dimension to the narrative character that has been lacking up to now.

Version read – Flamingo paperback

bookmark of the week

As a result of having family in the US I get sent bookmarks from the library local to my parents in Warrenville Illinois. They always seem to have a good selection of bookmarks that are seasonal or tied into some sort of campaign that the libraries are running. But one thing is always the same - that the bookmarks aim to encourage reading - and this one is no different. One day I intend visiting Warrenville library for myself and taking a few more bookmarks to add to the collection...

book review - Officers and Gentlemen

You spend most of your time reading this second book in the Sword of Honour trilogy by Evelyn Waugh wondering just who are the title words about. The story lurches from disaster to disaster as the lead character Guy Crouchback gets closer to the theatre of war.
The story starts with Guy returning with a black mark against his name for something that was largely not his fault. But the ramifications of it are that he struggles to find a place again to settle sown and start attacking the business of developing a military career. He resorts in the end to the tried and tested way of using friends to get him back in. But even then there is only so much they can do and there are various moments when although pushing it some considerable distance Guy comes up against the line that keeps the army in check.

In the end he manages to get to Egypt with the commandos because not so much of his friendship with Tommy Blackhouse the unit commander but because they are short of men. Once there he spends more time waiting before being put on a boat and shipped into the chaos of Crete. The island is on the brink of falling to the Germans and those sent into keep up the defences find themselves falling apart under the strain of fending off the inevitable.

Guy manages to make it back to Egypt, only just, but is then sent back for the good of his health and again finds himself out on the drill square back where he started.

Waugh manages to convey the waiting and the anxiety and in a scene where the officer Fido Hound manages to mentally and physically collapse in various stages, he also provides a good idea of what can happen in the stress of battle.

But there is a lot that is left unsaid in this book, which you hope the final volume will answer for. Where is the anger at the complete shambles that is the British war effort? What is Guy really fighting for now he keeps getting knocked back by bureaucracy? But more importantly what direction is the conclusion going to come from? Obviously the war ended in a victory for the British but where is Guy's life going - that is the fundamental question.

Any hope that it might be heading in a direction where his former wife takes more of a part seems to be unlikely after she has an affair with Trimmer, an ex hairdresser who is used by the propaganda department to become a hero to boost morale.

The persecution and changed circumstances surrounding Guy's father, with the old man under attack for taking up two rooms in the boarding house, also illustrates that the life that might be worth defending has already been largely defeated with the impact of the war.

You also sense that as a modern reader you are being kept in the dark because of your ignorance of the times that this book was written. Names are clearly used as clues to readers to indicate the nature of a character with politicians names mixed up with the clearly methaphorical, Fido Hound might be one that causes a smile but there are others that probably should but you miss them. That is a shame because it is a device that Waugh also uses in Vile Bodies and again without reading the introduction the consequences of feeling excluded from the joke are the same.

Officers and Gentlemen is a test for the reader because it offers few of the characters that the first book had with Colonel Ritchie-Hook and Apthorpe and it fails to indicate if the quest for some sort of self fulfiment that Guy is on is anywhere nearing a successful conclusion. Only the final book in thr trilogy can do that and the test is whether or not after that one you feel that Waugh has delivered a complete story.

Version read - Penguin paperback.

The Ballad of Peckham Rye - post II

Spark has created not just a comical character in Dougal Douglas but also a device that can break with normal conventions. Because the Scotsman is so unusual he can not only do unpredictable things but can open up other characters and take them in different directions.

Dougal's ability to read people is not only used with girls in the typing pool but is deployed against his boss and is even used to try and gain the wily Scotsman a job at a rival where he can keep two jobs going and be carrying out 'research' so neither ever discover he is drawing a double salary.

However his impact on the wider community is being felt and you can feel that a tipping point is not a million miles away when charmed entertainer becomes a source of dislike and a magnet for aggression.

Half way through and Dougal is still getting away with it but there must be more than just Trevor the electrician who dreams of knocking his block off.



More tomorrow...

The Ballad of Peckham Rye - post I

There is a great deal of comedy in the character of Dougal Douglas that is both accessible but some of its is disconcerting. You sense that this man, so able to perceive the secrets of others, is going to influence the unravelling of quite a few lives in Peckham.

Things start with a man returning to South London after jilting his fiancé at the altar. In the discussion in the pub the explanation for Humphrey’s behaviour is levelled at Douglas, who has since quit Peckham.

With the interest in Douglas already primed he is then introduced joining the company of Meadows, Meads and Grindley, with responsibility for introducing an artistic touch that would inspire the staff at the firm to greater productivity and happiness.

Most of the time Douglas spends researching the workers at the company is spent walking Peckham Rye and staying well away from his office. This intrigues people but the more he discovers the closer to home truths he gets and his wealth of knowledge could be potentially explosive.

More tomorrow…