Winner of the 1979 Booker Prize
⭐⭐⭐⭐½
This was lovely, and I think it suffers, poor thing, from miscategorised expectations. A lot of 21st century readers approach it as A Booker Winner, but seen that way, by readers who are seeking out old Booker winners, it may seem inconsequential - to quote Warwick's (a Goodreads friend) review of Fitzgerald's The Bookshop, "teetering on the edge of tweeness". However, if it were placed alongside the likes of Persephone Books, it would fit perfectly among their collection of escapist, elegantly written realist works by mid-20th century British women writers, "neither too literary nor too commercial", or "quality middlebrow": comfort reading from a lower-tech, slower world. But more down-at-heel than the typical upper-middle-class setting of Persephones. This was something I'd been looking for anyway - reaching for a description a couple of months ago I'd said "like Barbara Pym but grittier"… Offshore is also more eccentric.
It's a world with characters like this:
"Richard was the kind of man who has two clean handkerchiefs on him at half past three in the morning."
But it also undercuts some of the pretensions of the conventional world of well-off land-dwellers:
"The waiter invited them to choose between coq au vin and navarin of lamb, either of which, in other circumstances, would have been called stew."
and the bohemians themselves:
"Like many marine painters he had never been to sea."
and has awareness of the ways people may feel about their circumstances:
‘There is nothing to be ashamed of in being poor,’ said Heinrich. ‘Yes, there is,’ Martha replied, with a firmness which she could hardly have inherited either from her father or her mother, ‘but there’s no reason why we shouldn’t go and look at things.
It even has the occasional inadvertantly amusing double-entendre that adds entertainment value to many vintage books.
Offshore has the comforting feeling of "a children's book for adults", set in the romantic but grubby world of Thames houseboats, in which everyone is escaping in one way or another from conventional lifestyle, and has "the curious acquired characteristics of the river dwellers, which made them scarcely at home in London’s streets". Its shabby-genteel 1960s setting, which could have been any non-wartime decade from the 20s to the 80s, felt like the world of many books I read as a child and teenager. And as in all those stories found in kids' books, of children having adventures unsupervised by parents (a few of which actually happen in Offshore as well), there are among these grown-ups the scattier people and the sensible ones who look after them. This houseboat world is one which appealed to me when I was younger, before I realised that living in small cramped spaces with things sliding about on surfaces, wouldn't be idyllic, even if I stopped being a martyr to motion sickness. No matter how much I badgered for a barge holiday as a child, we never went on one: quite right, as I would have spent the week literally puking and whining, and it would have been a stressful waste of money and time off. However, it was a joy to experience houseboat life second-hand via Fitzgerald's characters. She had lived on a barge herself and uses many technical terms for parts of the boats; she manages to make boat life picturesque (and picaresque) to read about, whilst not concealing the inconveniences, making it, rightly, something many would want to hear about, whilst showing why plenty of people wouldn't want to live it themselves:
"All these old boats leak like sieves. Just as all these period houses are as rotten as old cheese. Everyone knows that. But age has its value.’"
I loved the way that, near the beginning, a guided tour is overheard describing the boats as an "artist's colony" - although in fact only one resident is an artist, as is so very much the way with real-life bohemias I've encountered. Among the others are two financially secure chaps with, or retired from, office jobs who just prefer barge living to houses. There's a rent boy named Maurice, no doubt after the E.M. Forster novel published a few years before Offshore. (As I'd only got round to watching A Very English Scandal - considered one of the best TV programmes of 2018 - a few days before reading this, I kept hearing Maurice as a more grounded version of Ben Whishaw's Norman Scott). Nenna is a quondam classical musician, sweet but generally hopeless at life skills - in a way an attractive middle class woman could still just about carry off back then - separated from her equally incompetent and disorganised husband; her two daughters are exactly the sort of clever children that fans of books like this one would have wanted to be friends with when *they* were kids themselves - though to older eyes, one has taken on rather a lot of codependent / young carer characteristics.
Alan Hollinghurst's introduction explains that the book is set in the early 1960s, although when characters venture out to the King's Road, it becomes a blended, dreamlike version of the whole 60s in which preteens are excited to buy cheap Woolworths cover versions Cliff Richard records, while hippie boutiques waft incense. There are little details about the era otherwise rarely heard, like the late opening times of the fashionable shops:
‘I should like to visit a boutique,’ said Heinrich. ‘Well, that will be best about five or six, when everybody leaves work. A lot of them don’t open till then.’
How the market for a marine painter has dwindled since the 1920s and 30s: "After the war the number of readers who would laugh at pictures of seasick passengers, or bosuns getting the better of the second mate, diminished rapidly."
I had thought a fashion for interest in the 18th century was an 00s thing, but perhaps the revival started earlier: "The brewers to whom it belonged, having ideas, like all brewers in the 1960s, of reviving the supposed jollity of the eighteenth century"
London has changed so much in certain ways:
‘42b Milvain Street, Stoke Newington.’ ‘In Christ’s name, who’s ever heard of such a place?’ (Did that already sound comical in the late 70s?)
and so has Britain:
‘You don’t have to stay there! There’s plenty of jobs! Anyone can get a job anywhere!’
These were common types of shop on the Kingsland Road, which wouldn't be seeing gentrification for another 45 years or so: "Radio shop, bicycle shop, family planning shop, funeral parlour, bicycles, radio spare parts, television hire, herbalist, family planning, a florist" … was this the early-60s equivalent of listing vape shops, nail bars, those places that sell mobile phone covers and suitcases, charity shops and bookies - or something more local and specific?
Commuting from Northampton was already going on, although not for cash-strapped young professionals desperate for a toehold on the property ladder, and who can only dream of these hours:
Oh, a gentleman’s county,’ Pinkie replied, wallowing through his barrier of ice, ‘Say Northamptonshire. You can drive up every morning easily, be in the office by ten, down in the evening by half past six.
Fitzgerald has a good understanding of Catholic schools and the ideas learnt there:
"It came to her that it was wrong to pray for anything simply because you felt you needed it personally. Prayer should be beyond self, and so Nenna repeated a Hail Mary for everyone in the world who was lost in Kingsland Road without their bus fares."
It wasn't difficult to believe (as some schools did far worse) that praying publicly for certain pupils and their families happened then. Martha's instinctive affront at this, a sense of strong boundaries she has developed despite, or somehow in response to, her muddled family life, made me think again about something - indignation about knowing one is being prayed for - that I'd seen as a feature of the New Atheist movement.
In a conversation between a sixth-form age boy and an eleven-year-old developing a crush on him (the one part of the book which would be frowned on today), Fitzgerald's 1995 historical novel The Blue Flower is prefigured: "you are like the blonde mistress of Heine, the poet Heine, wenig Fleisch, sehr viel Gemüt, little body, but so much spirit’. He leaned forward and kissed her cheek"
If I'd read Offshore in my teens I suspect it would have stayed with me as a favourite in a rosy glow, alongside similar books like Rumer Godden's The Greengage Summer, with the perfect balance of cosy and slightly but discreetly unsuitable, books I probably wouldn't dare re-read now in case they weren't as good as I remembered. It was still lovely to read now, although not such an event, and shows a bohemiana akin to that which overwhelmed me with nostalgia in Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton (1987), one almost gone now, apart from a few ageing survivors, due to astronomical property prices and the need to spruce everything up for social media. For a while I thought I was going to be disappointed by the ending, though it seems to have worked out reasonably well - however Offshore does suffer a little from the idea that it's more 'literary' to have a partly inconclusive ending. These days it would seem braver, with growing respect for genre in the literary world, to go ahead and write a neater ending in a story like this one, which would suit it - unless planning a sequel (which if this were a recent film, it would surely get) - but that wasn't how things worked 40 years ago.
(Read Dec 2018, reviewed Jan 2019. The review on Goodreads.)
Showing posts with label published 1970s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label published 1970s. Show all posts
2 January 2019
29 December 2018
Heat & Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
1975 Booker Prize joint winner, and when I started it, the shortest Booker winner I hadn't yet read.
⭐⭐½
An only-just-postcolonial novel about the British in India, by an author who described herself as "a Central European with an English education and a deplorable tendency to constant self-analysis," and who was married to an Indian man.
Some friends will see from that quote why I might have been interested in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, but I read this very short book mostly to improve my count of Booker winners (this being only the 14th), as I'm active in a group where many people have read more. That characterisation - along with her scriptwriting work for Merchant Ivory - was pretty much all I remembered about the author at the time I started reading Heat and Dust. (And I only learnt a few months ago that she wasn't, as I'd always previously assumed, Anglo-Indian.) About ¾ of the way through the book, I read more about RPJ and her attitude to India, and this at least partly cancelled out one of the interpretations of the book I'd been building up to that point.
Although I was intensely engaged in note-taking and thinking all through the book, the analysis was almost all I got out of it. I found the prose boring, and the parallels between the two protagonists' stories became heavy-handed.
There are two alternating narratives in Heat and Dust. One is told in the third-person, about Olivia, the bored, naïve and sheltered new young wife of Douglas, a British colonial official in West Bengal; we are told in the book's opening sentence that she ran off with a Nawab in 1923. The other is a first-person narrative contemporary to the book's writing in the 1970s, by the unnamed British granddaughter of Douglas' second marriage (whom I'll refer to as the narrator or the granddaughter.) She is in her late 20s or early 30s and travels to India, with a cache of Olivia's letters, to see the scenes of this family scandal which is now beginning to be talked about, and to experience some of the 'simplicity' of India that attracted young Westerners on the hippie trail.
No less than five of the first ten Booker Prize winners (1969-77) address the British Empire and its end. I haven't read any of the others, but it's clear from these wins that it was a big topic for British literary fiction at the time, and was predominantly written about from the British viewpoint (all the winners other than V.S. Naipaul were British or Irish). I had never been very keen to read these novels, as I expected the writing about India and Indian people would be clumsy from a contemporary viewpoint, and I didn't expect there would be much to learn about the old India hands that I hadn't already seen in old documentaries and light novels read when I was younger. Starting Heat & Dust, I wondered if it might be different because the author had lived in post-independence India for 24 years with her Indian architect husband - surely very a different experience from that of colonial staff or tourists.
Through most of the book, before I'd done more research, I developed a tentative hypothesis that Prawer Jhabvala a was notably progressive and perceptive in her attitudes by the standards of her time, and was subtly critiquing the granddaughter and people of her generation from similar old colonial service families - and the hippies - who thought they were more open-minded about India than they actually were. Thus, the stereotypes in the third-person story about Olivia were present because the granddaughter was telling that story and because that was how she, and the sources from which she got the information, saw the people involved. (The wilful, coercively seductive Muslim Nawab, for instance, seems to fit the old desert sheikh stereotype in romance.) This made it seem like a potentially rather interesting piece of literature for its time, and such layered complexity would explain its Booker win (although some 2010s commentators, such as those who criticise the lionising of sexist or abusive male narrators, e.g in Rebecca Solnit's essay on Lolita, would argue that the widespread critical elevation of such narrators is at best questionable). I was never 100% sure about this analysis, and was planning to write a review in which I outlined both that interpretation and a simpler, less favourable one. 1975 must not have been a great year for British and Commonwealth literature anyway, as the Booker shortlist consisted of only two titles. Even though what I read about Prawer Jhabvala and her feelings about India pointed towards the simpler interpretation - in which the granddaughter's attitudes have a fair bit in common with the author's, and in which the story of Olivia and the Nawab is told straight - one could perhaps argue the book still has something going for it *because* it has the flexibility to be interpreted in more than one way.
Pankaj Mishra's 2004 NYT review of another Prawer Jhabvala book refers to a 1980s essay of hers which said "'how intolerable India -- the idea, the sensation of it -- can become' to someone like her… Jhabvala spoke of the intense heat, the lack of a social life and the 'great animal of poverty and backwardness' that she couldn't avoid". (Heat & Dust does contain a lot of hackneyed scenes of vast crowds and poverty - but at the same time everyone here whom I've heard talk about going to India, including British people of Indian descent, has said that it's one of the things you notice at first because of the contrast - so I'm not totally sure what the correct take on that is, except that it's overused while other less stereotypical aspects may go ignored in western writing about India.) I can certainly relate to the dissatisfaction of living in a place you don't like, and to some other ways which Mishra describes her: "the confident exile -- of the much displaced person who, finally secure in her inner world and reconciled to her isolation, looks askance at people longing for fulfillment in other cultures and landscapes", or " When fully absorbed by self-analysis, the perennial outsider usually ends up regarding all emotional and intellectual commitment as folly. Such cold-eyed clarity, useful to a philosopher or mystic, can only be a disadvantage for the novelist, who needs to enter, at least temporarily, her characters' illusions in order to recreate them convincingly on the page." And these days more than ever, lack of respect for a place where you've spent a lot of time will win you few friends. (IME it takes about as long to wear off as the time you lived there.) I think there may be limited use in reading this novel these days, especially for those who find the writing as uninspiring as I did; to learn about India in the 1920s or the 70s it's probably better to read non-fiction, and its frequently stereotypical attitudes will annoy some readers.
Where there may be interesting things going on are in the cynical caricatures of young British hippies by a westerner who's been in India longer, and in feminism / attitudes to women.
When the granddaughter tries to explain the hippies to her Indian landlord (a few years younger than herself), it sounds as if she has a little affinity with them: "I tell him that many of us are tired of the materialism of the West, and even if we have no particular attraction towards the spiritual message of the-East, we come here in the hope of finding a simpler and more natural way of life." [Directly following this is one of the very few occasions in which a convincing Indian voice appears, in his reply, "This explanation hurts him. He feels it to be a mockery. He says why should people who have everything -motor cars, refrigerators - come here to such a place where there is nothing? He says he often feels ashamed before me because of· the way he is living. When I try to protest, he works himself up more, He says he is perfectly well aware that, by Western standards, his house as well as his food and his way of eating it would be considered primitive, inadequate - indeed,. he himself would be considered so because of his unscientific mind and ignorance of the modem world. Yes he knows very well that he is lagging far behind in all these respects and on that account I am well entitled to laugh at him. Why shouldn't I laugh! he cries, not giving me a chance to say anything - he himself often feels like laughing when he looks around him and sees the conditions in which people are living and the superstitions in their minds."
A hippie couple who came to India after being swept up by a swami's talk in London on universal love can be summarised thus:
"Why did you come?" I asked her.
"To find peace." She laughed grimly: "But all I found was dysentery."
These young travellers don't seem to be particularly well off, so the reader doesn't have to endure the most tedious aspects of the 21st-century "gap yah" caricature. (Some even have regional accents!) This is instead about an absurd gulf between romantic expectation and physical reality, and how some Indian spiritual teachers seem to be either milking a cash-cow, or are just oblivious to realities: e.g. apparently training up a white lad as a mendicant sadhu, when Indian people are unlikely to give money to a white British man begging. Even the 1970s episodes seem to echo the old colonial idea of the 'white man's graveyard': the narrative intimates that the climate and the bugs are even bad for westerners who've been in India for several years, although an Indian doctor argues with the granddaughter that "this climate does not suit you people too well. And let alone you people, it does not suit even us."
One feature of 1960s-70s hippie culture that has emerged from the shadows in recent years is how some women felt exploited because "free love" meant they felt obliged to have sex with men they didn't really want. Heat & Dust contains the first example I remember seeing from something written at the time: the unwantedness is clear, but so is a certain amount of buying-into the spiritual side.
I don't think it's entirely a "white feminist" book, in that nebulous 21st century term on which I will certainly not claim to be any kind of expert. Perhaps there is a certain amount of cheap hippyish respect for natural local medicine and so forth, but there is a theme running through the book being subtly positive about greater solidarity between women. If Olivia had sought a respectable acquaintance with the Begum, or if she had gone to Simla with Beth, perhaps she would never have got into the mess she did with the Nawab. The two Bertha-from-Jane-Eyre figures still don't get a lot to say but they are at least shown to be victims rather than monsters; the granddaughter wants to arrange better treatment for the one in the 1970s, and she seems to be genuinely open to befriending some of the Indian women she meets (though we can't tell what they make of her). Other than a doctor or two, and possibly the Nawab's London-based grandson, the Indian men don't come out of this awfully well, in terms of specific characters or general descriptions. Though neither do most of the white British men, other than possibly Douglas, who had "the eyes of a boy who read adventure stories and had dedicated himself to live up to their code of courage and honour" (too normie and straightforward for Olivia ultimately?). The granddaughter sounds kind of optimistic at the end, but I felt the author wasn't very convinced by her either; I think RPJ treats everyone with detached cynicism, although some more politely than others.
I'm not sure I'd really recommend Heat & Dust for anything other than some sort of academic project on early British post-colonial literature. I mean, the second I reached the end, I heard myself saying as if by a reflex, "thank fuck that's finished … that was a bit crap" - though hopefully the above paragraphs show it's not quite that simple, and I did kind of enjoy trying to analyse it. It is very short, so at least I wasn't bored for that long. And Booker completists will read it despite its not having aged terribly well.
(Read & reviewed December 2018. The review and comment thread on Goodreads.)
⭐⭐½
An only-just-postcolonial novel about the British in India, by an author who described herself as "a Central European with an English education and a deplorable tendency to constant self-analysis," and who was married to an Indian man.
Some friends will see from that quote why I might have been interested in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, but I read this very short book mostly to improve my count of Booker winners (this being only the 14th), as I'm active in a group where many people have read more. That characterisation - along with her scriptwriting work for Merchant Ivory - was pretty much all I remembered about the author at the time I started reading Heat and Dust. (And I only learnt a few months ago that she wasn't, as I'd always previously assumed, Anglo-Indian.) About ¾ of the way through the book, I read more about RPJ and her attitude to India, and this at least partly cancelled out one of the interpretations of the book I'd been building up to that point.
Although I was intensely engaged in note-taking and thinking all through the book, the analysis was almost all I got out of it. I found the prose boring, and the parallels between the two protagonists' stories became heavy-handed.
There are two alternating narratives in Heat and Dust. One is told in the third-person, about Olivia, the bored, naïve and sheltered new young wife of Douglas, a British colonial official in West Bengal; we are told in the book's opening sentence that she ran off with a Nawab in 1923. The other is a first-person narrative contemporary to the book's writing in the 1970s, by the unnamed British granddaughter of Douglas' second marriage (whom I'll refer to as the narrator or the granddaughter.) She is in her late 20s or early 30s and travels to India, with a cache of Olivia's letters, to see the scenes of this family scandal which is now beginning to be talked about, and to experience some of the 'simplicity' of India that attracted young Westerners on the hippie trail.
No less than five of the first ten Booker Prize winners (1969-77) address the British Empire and its end. I haven't read any of the others, but it's clear from these wins that it was a big topic for British literary fiction at the time, and was predominantly written about from the British viewpoint (all the winners other than V.S. Naipaul were British or Irish). I had never been very keen to read these novels, as I expected the writing about India and Indian people would be clumsy from a contemporary viewpoint, and I didn't expect there would be much to learn about the old India hands that I hadn't already seen in old documentaries and light novels read when I was younger. Starting Heat & Dust, I wondered if it might be different because the author had lived in post-independence India for 24 years with her Indian architect husband - surely very a different experience from that of colonial staff or tourists.
Through most of the book, before I'd done more research, I developed a tentative hypothesis that Prawer Jhabvala a was notably progressive and perceptive in her attitudes by the standards of her time, and was subtly critiquing the granddaughter and people of her generation from similar old colonial service families - and the hippies - who thought they were more open-minded about India than they actually were. Thus, the stereotypes in the third-person story about Olivia were present because the granddaughter was telling that story and because that was how she, and the sources from which she got the information, saw the people involved. (The wilful, coercively seductive Muslim Nawab, for instance, seems to fit the old desert sheikh stereotype in romance.) This made it seem like a potentially rather interesting piece of literature for its time, and such layered complexity would explain its Booker win (although some 2010s commentators, such as those who criticise the lionising of sexist or abusive male narrators, e.g in Rebecca Solnit's essay on Lolita, would argue that the widespread critical elevation of such narrators is at best questionable). I was never 100% sure about this analysis, and was planning to write a review in which I outlined both that interpretation and a simpler, less favourable one. 1975 must not have been a great year for British and Commonwealth literature anyway, as the Booker shortlist consisted of only two titles. Even though what I read about Prawer Jhabvala and her feelings about India pointed towards the simpler interpretation - in which the granddaughter's attitudes have a fair bit in common with the author's, and in which the story of Olivia and the Nawab is told straight - one could perhaps argue the book still has something going for it *because* it has the flexibility to be interpreted in more than one way.
Pankaj Mishra's 2004 NYT review of another Prawer Jhabvala book refers to a 1980s essay of hers which said "'how intolerable India -- the idea, the sensation of it -- can become' to someone like her… Jhabvala spoke of the intense heat, the lack of a social life and the 'great animal of poverty and backwardness' that she couldn't avoid". (Heat & Dust does contain a lot of hackneyed scenes of vast crowds and poverty - but at the same time everyone here whom I've heard talk about going to India, including British people of Indian descent, has said that it's one of the things you notice at first because of the contrast - so I'm not totally sure what the correct take on that is, except that it's overused while other less stereotypical aspects may go ignored in western writing about India.) I can certainly relate to the dissatisfaction of living in a place you don't like, and to some other ways which Mishra describes her: "the confident exile -- of the much displaced person who, finally secure in her inner world and reconciled to her isolation, looks askance at people longing for fulfillment in other cultures and landscapes", or " When fully absorbed by self-analysis, the perennial outsider usually ends up regarding all emotional and intellectual commitment as folly. Such cold-eyed clarity, useful to a philosopher or mystic, can only be a disadvantage for the novelist, who needs to enter, at least temporarily, her characters' illusions in order to recreate them convincingly on the page." And these days more than ever, lack of respect for a place where you've spent a lot of time will win you few friends. (IME it takes about as long to wear off as the time you lived there.) I think there may be limited use in reading this novel these days, especially for those who find the writing as uninspiring as I did; to learn about India in the 1920s or the 70s it's probably better to read non-fiction, and its frequently stereotypical attitudes will annoy some readers.
Where there may be interesting things going on are in the cynical caricatures of young British hippies by a westerner who's been in India longer, and in feminism / attitudes to women.
When the granddaughter tries to explain the hippies to her Indian landlord (a few years younger than herself), it sounds as if she has a little affinity with them: "I tell him that many of us are tired of the materialism of the West, and even if we have no particular attraction towards the spiritual message of the-East, we come here in the hope of finding a simpler and more natural way of life." [Directly following this is one of the very few occasions in which a convincing Indian voice appears, in his reply, "This explanation hurts him. He feels it to be a mockery. He says why should people who have everything -motor cars, refrigerators - come here to such a place where there is nothing? He says he often feels ashamed before me because of· the way he is living. When I try to protest, he works himself up more, He says he is perfectly well aware that, by Western standards, his house as well as his food and his way of eating it would be considered primitive, inadequate - indeed,. he himself would be considered so because of his unscientific mind and ignorance of the modem world. Yes he knows very well that he is lagging far behind in all these respects and on that account I am well entitled to laugh at him. Why shouldn't I laugh! he cries, not giving me a chance to say anything - he himself often feels like laughing when he looks around him and sees the conditions in which people are living and the superstitions in their minds."
A hippie couple who came to India after being swept up by a swami's talk in London on universal love can be summarised thus:
"Why did you come?" I asked her.
"To find peace." She laughed grimly: "But all I found was dysentery."
These young travellers don't seem to be particularly well off, so the reader doesn't have to endure the most tedious aspects of the 21st-century "gap yah" caricature. (Some even have regional accents!) This is instead about an absurd gulf between romantic expectation and physical reality, and how some Indian spiritual teachers seem to be either milking a cash-cow, or are just oblivious to realities: e.g. apparently training up a white lad as a mendicant sadhu, when Indian people are unlikely to give money to a white British man begging. Even the 1970s episodes seem to echo the old colonial idea of the 'white man's graveyard': the narrative intimates that the climate and the bugs are even bad for westerners who've been in India for several years, although an Indian doctor argues with the granddaughter that "this climate does not suit you people too well. And let alone you people, it does not suit even us."
One feature of 1960s-70s hippie culture that has emerged from the shadows in recent years is how some women felt exploited because "free love" meant they felt obliged to have sex with men they didn't really want. Heat & Dust contains the first example I remember seeing from something written at the time: the unwantedness is clear, but so is a certain amount of buying-into the spiritual side.
I don't think it's entirely a "white feminist" book, in that nebulous 21st century term on which I will certainly not claim to be any kind of expert. Perhaps there is a certain amount of cheap hippyish respect for natural local medicine and so forth, but there is a theme running through the book being subtly positive about greater solidarity between women. If Olivia had sought a respectable acquaintance with the Begum, or if she had gone to Simla with Beth, perhaps she would never have got into the mess she did with the Nawab. The two Bertha-from-Jane-Eyre figures still don't get a lot to say but they are at least shown to be victims rather than monsters; the granddaughter wants to arrange better treatment for the one in the 1970s, and she seems to be genuinely open to befriending some of the Indian women she meets (though we can't tell what they make of her). Other than a doctor or two, and possibly the Nawab's London-based grandson, the Indian men don't come out of this awfully well, in terms of specific characters or general descriptions. Though neither do most of the white British men, other than possibly Douglas, who had "the eyes of a boy who read adventure stories and had dedicated himself to live up to their code of courage and honour" (too normie and straightforward for Olivia ultimately?). The granddaughter sounds kind of optimistic at the end, but I felt the author wasn't very convinced by her either; I think RPJ treats everyone with detached cynicism, although some more politely than others.
I'm not sure I'd really recommend Heat & Dust for anything other than some sort of academic project on early British post-colonial literature. I mean, the second I reached the end, I heard myself saying as if by a reflex, "thank fuck that's finished … that was a bit crap" - though hopefully the above paragraphs show it's not quite that simple, and I did kind of enjoy trying to analyse it. It is very short, so at least I wasn't bored for that long. And Booker completists will read it despite its not having aged terribly well.
(Read & reviewed December 2018. The review and comment thread on Goodreads.)
12 September 2018
The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington
A book I've been circling for years, even before I joined Goodreads: depending what I heard about it, sometimes it sounded enticing and light (a charming, funny, Alice-like fantasy with intellectual depth) sometimes depressing (about an old lady in an oppressive nursing home). I was finally induced to read it by this recent interview with Olga Tokarczuk, in which she says it influenced her newly-translated Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead.
Some editions of The Hearing Trumpet, including the Virago Modern Classic, include a 1991 introduction by Helen Byatt. This contains material about crones and witches in surrealism and feminism, madness, boarding schools, occultism including Gurdjieff, the Grail and Robert Graves' [book:The White Goddess|820465] (a book I'm glad I read when I was younger, before I knew people rarely bother with it these days, as it's referenced in a surprising number of things) and vaguely Margaret-Murrayish ideas of wild pre-Christian matriarchal religion, equating maleness with Christianity and authoritarian sky-gods generally. This did not make me look forward to The Hearing Trumpet itself - it made me glad the book was short - but it was interesting to have my attention drawn to the ideas about modernity and religion while in the middle of Sarah Moss' Ghost Wall, which includes the idea that modernity is better for women, and soon after reading a friend's review - of yet another book - which pointed out the contradictions between feminisms.) By the end of the book, I thought there were topics the introduction had unjustly neglected, but more of that later. If I have read the newer introduction in the Penguin edition, by Ali Smith, it would have been years ago in a bookshop and I can't remember anything about it - I'd like to read it (again?) now.
In the novel, I was surprised how good, and how instantly likeable, the narrative voice is. Marian, 92, absolutely sounds like an old lady. (And like the author, she is an English expat in Mexico.) In the early part of the novel, it reads like a really good children's book, with delightful lines like "people under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats" on nearly every page. Her existence seems idyllic, and so one inevitably feels it is unjust that her callous, image-obsessed son and daughter-in-law decide to put her in a home. (Even if one is an age at which peers consider homes for aged parents.) Although the home turns out to be architecturally adorable (and worthy of a surrealist art exhibition) and to have intriguing fellow-residents, the management are a new-age cult who continually invalidate and refuse to listen to the people in their care. Carrington portrays them with sufficient lightness of touch that they are ridiculous caricatures at least as much as monsters. Rather than making a big deal out of the 'reality' or otherwise of what Marian says - as many contemporary authors would, creating an unreliable narrator who may have dementia, or in children's fiction, in which a child hero needs to persuade at least one adult that something is real - she is a reliable narrator of her own reality, a reality which makes up pretty much all the book and which reads as a slipstream fantastical narrative. (She is always clear other than one passage near the beginning, in a stream of consciousness mode like disjointed thoughts from the edge of sleep). Even if a reader were to bring a cold and clinical attitude that most of what happens is in Marian's imagination, it would surely make one think about the amazing worlds that a person may contain.
The humour tapers off in the second half (or perhaps becomes darker and more subtle) as the narrative approaches the story-within-a-story, an account of a covertly occult 18th-century Spanish saint and abbess. It reads, minor historical inaccuracies and all, like an early-20th century horror tale. I think it was at the end of the story of Abbess Rosalinda, when Marian remarks "I had become affectionately attached to the intrepid and energetic Abbess. The fact that the snooping priest... had done his best to portray her in a pernicious light, hardly distorted the purity of her original image. She must have been a most remarkable woman" that I first thought 'what a twentieth-century book'. Perhaps it's because of a comment I read somewhere online recently that only from a century's 20s does the character of a century start to emerge (there are counter-arguments, but in English history, the late 30s of the 16th and 19th centuries fit) and sufficient distance is established to characterise the earlier century as a whole. Approbation of the Abbess disregards her own crimes and her disregard of those committed by others. I've seen it said elsewhere, with disgust, that sexual abuse, especially of boys, by male clergy was such an open secret that it had become a running joke in 20th century British literature, and one that should no longer be funny. Perhaps that's an especially 2010s sentiment - it's far too early to tell. But in the context of fantasy literature, it feels like this is another way in which this isn't just a very 1960s-1970s book, but encompasses ideas that ran through more decades either side: the lineage from the Golden Dawn through Gardnerian Wicca to the New Age; from Kellogg's sanatorium to dodgy hippie cults; elderly people talk of the First World War and have peculiar deference to aristocracy in a world of plastic wallpaper and electric fires with glowing fake logs, and on one level it's about social liberalisation and increased human rights, and the throwing off of a stuffy old order, the big Western narrative of the whole second half. (It still seems remarkable that Carrington apparently wrote this in the early 60s - if only she'd published it then, she'd have been so ahead of her time, and I suspect the book would have been better known. It's full of stuff which feels like end-60s burnout: indictment of cults and their leaders, jumping off tall buildings and dying under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs; apocalyptic tabloid scare of the time, a new ice age, also fictionalised with flair by Anna Kavan, as well as the playful, psychedelic exuberance of a couple of years earlier, and the principles of Szasz and Laing.)
There's quite a lot of upper-middle-class Englishness here (though Leonora, is rather remarkably, nothing at all to do with Dora Carrington of the Bloomsburies) but I'd love to hear more, well, anything, about The Hearing Trumpet in the context of Latin American art & lit. (Byatt describes Carmella's repeated mentions of firearms as masculine, but I thought them more likely to relate to the prevalence of revolutions, coups and armed rebels in the region.) I haven't read enough Latin American myself to say exactly what's relevant, but it does feel like there's something connectable in The Hearing Trumpet to the magic realism and tricksiness of the Boom.
The line-drawn illustrations in this edition, by the author's son, are in a style quite different from the cover painting (hers) and are not my sort of thing, but may appeal to fans of David Shrigley and Allie Brosh.
I've rated it 4 stars rather than 5, unlike many GR friends, because I didn't find the joy in it that makes a 5-star read (due to the setting) but it is absolutely a wonderful little book that deserves to be more widely read.
(read and reviewed September 2018; the review on Goodreads.)
Some editions of The Hearing Trumpet, including the Virago Modern Classic, include a 1991 introduction by Helen Byatt. This contains material about crones and witches in surrealism and feminism, madness, boarding schools, occultism including Gurdjieff, the Grail and Robert Graves' [book:The White Goddess|820465] (a book I'm glad I read when I was younger, before I knew people rarely bother with it these days, as it's referenced in a surprising number of things) and vaguely Margaret-Murrayish ideas of wild pre-Christian matriarchal religion, equating maleness with Christianity and authoritarian sky-gods generally. This did not make me look forward to The Hearing Trumpet itself - it made me glad the book was short - but it was interesting to have my attention drawn to the ideas about modernity and religion while in the middle of Sarah Moss' Ghost Wall, which includes the idea that modernity is better for women, and soon after reading a friend's review - of yet another book - which pointed out the contradictions between feminisms.) By the end of the book, I thought there were topics the introduction had unjustly neglected, but more of that later. If I have read the newer introduction in the Penguin edition, by Ali Smith, it would have been years ago in a bookshop and I can't remember anything about it - I'd like to read it (again?) now.
In the novel, I was surprised how good, and how instantly likeable, the narrative voice is. Marian, 92, absolutely sounds like an old lady. (And like the author, she is an English expat in Mexico.) In the early part of the novel, it reads like a really good children's book, with delightful lines like "people under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats" on nearly every page. Her existence seems idyllic, and so one inevitably feels it is unjust that her callous, image-obsessed son and daughter-in-law decide to put her in a home. (Even if one is an age at which peers consider homes for aged parents.) Although the home turns out to be architecturally adorable (and worthy of a surrealist art exhibition) and to have intriguing fellow-residents, the management are a new-age cult who continually invalidate and refuse to listen to the people in their care. Carrington portrays them with sufficient lightness of touch that they are ridiculous caricatures at least as much as monsters. Rather than making a big deal out of the 'reality' or otherwise of what Marian says - as many contemporary authors would, creating an unreliable narrator who may have dementia, or in children's fiction, in which a child hero needs to persuade at least one adult that something is real - she is a reliable narrator of her own reality, a reality which makes up pretty much all the book and which reads as a slipstream fantastical narrative. (She is always clear other than one passage near the beginning, in a stream of consciousness mode like disjointed thoughts from the edge of sleep). Even if a reader were to bring a cold and clinical attitude that most of what happens is in Marian's imagination, it would surely make one think about the amazing worlds that a person may contain.
The humour tapers off in the second half (or perhaps becomes darker and more subtle) as the narrative approaches the story-within-a-story, an account of a covertly occult 18th-century Spanish saint and abbess. It reads, minor historical inaccuracies and all, like an early-20th century horror tale. I think it was at the end of the story of Abbess Rosalinda, when Marian remarks "I had become affectionately attached to the intrepid and energetic Abbess. The fact that the snooping priest... had done his best to portray her in a pernicious light, hardly distorted the purity of her original image. She must have been a most remarkable woman" that I first thought 'what a twentieth-century book'. Perhaps it's because of a comment I read somewhere online recently that only from a century's 20s does the character of a century start to emerge (there are counter-arguments, but in English history, the late 30s of the 16th and 19th centuries fit) and sufficient distance is established to characterise the earlier century as a whole. Approbation of the Abbess disregards her own crimes and her disregard of those committed by others. I've seen it said elsewhere, with disgust, that sexual abuse, especially of boys, by male clergy was such an open secret that it had become a running joke in 20th century British literature, and one that should no longer be funny. Perhaps that's an especially 2010s sentiment - it's far too early to tell. But in the context of fantasy literature, it feels like this is another way in which this isn't just a very 1960s-1970s book, but encompasses ideas that ran through more decades either side: the lineage from the Golden Dawn through Gardnerian Wicca to the New Age; from Kellogg's sanatorium to dodgy hippie cults; elderly people talk of the First World War and have peculiar deference to aristocracy in a world of plastic wallpaper and electric fires with glowing fake logs, and on one level it's about social liberalisation and increased human rights, and the throwing off of a stuffy old order, the big Western narrative of the whole second half. (It still seems remarkable that Carrington apparently wrote this in the early 60s - if only she'd published it then, she'd have been so ahead of her time, and I suspect the book would have been better known. It's full of stuff which feels like end-60s burnout: indictment of cults and their leaders, jumping off tall buildings and dying under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs; apocalyptic tabloid scare of the time, a new ice age, also fictionalised with flair by Anna Kavan, as well as the playful, psychedelic exuberance of a couple of years earlier, and the principles of Szasz and Laing.)
There's quite a lot of upper-middle-class Englishness here (though Leonora, is rather remarkably, nothing at all to do with Dora Carrington of the Bloomsburies) but I'd love to hear more, well, anything, about The Hearing Trumpet in the context of Latin American art & lit. (Byatt describes Carmella's repeated mentions of firearms as masculine, but I thought them more likely to relate to the prevalence of revolutions, coups and armed rebels in the region.) I haven't read enough Latin American myself to say exactly what's relevant, but it does feel like there's something connectable in The Hearing Trumpet to the magic realism and tricksiness of the Boom.
The line-drawn illustrations in this edition, by the author's son, are in a style quite different from the cover painting (hers) and are not my sort of thing, but may appeal to fans of David Shrigley and Allie Brosh.
I've rated it 4 stars rather than 5, unlike many GR friends, because I didn't find the joy in it that makes a 5-star read (due to the setting) but it is absolutely a wonderful little book that deserves to be more widely read.
(read and reviewed September 2018; the review on Goodreads.)
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