I read this book, thinking I would put it in under my Contemporary Brit Lit list, but I'm not sure if that it's a valid text to include. I'm finding lots of places where the author is considered Canadian, not British (he was born in England, but lived for the longest stretch (and died) in Vancouver).
Not that I couldn't include Canadians on the Brit list - there's certainly precedent for that, but that would also mean that I would need to include some secondary readings in postcolonial theory (the variety a la Stephen Slemon that includes Canada as postcolonial nation) in the list. The department has just approved an ad for a Brit/postcolonial hire with interviews at this year's MLA, so including him or not might just depend on who we get in po-co (and how long this process will drag out). But anyway, back to the book...
The point of view most frequenly adopted in the text, what Mieke Bal calls "focalization" is that of a drunk. He interpretst everything around him through a haze of alcohol, which provides the reader with some interesting opportunities to play a guessing game to determine how skewed his perceptions really are. Geoffrey is a British consul in Mexico, and his duties are (obviously for a drunk) very light... pretty much non-existent. His wife, who left him a year earlier, has just returned to attempt to renew their marriage (though why she wants to do this is something I could not understand - even when she is the focalizer of the narrative). Yvonne, the wife, is also attracted to Geoffrey's younger brother (not an alcoholic - no surprise why she might be attracted to him), who has recently moved in, partly to take care of his older brother, and partly because he's lazy and hasn't decided on a career.
The book apparently started as a short story but Lowry expanded it to a novel, changing some of the characters (Yvonne was originally the consul's daughter), and expanding upon the existential angst that Geoffrey contemplates during some of his more lucid moments. It is an admirable pice of work - describing the world through a drunk's eyes - and I certainly wonder, given that Lowry himself lived in Mexico and ended up in B.C. while his character lives in Mexico and dreams of Canada - how much of that facility in imagining the life of a drunk might come from personal experience.
Even though it is written in the style typical of its era (mid-twentieth century), I enjoyed this book. Hopefully it will fulfill my mid-century requirements and I won't have to read other, less interesting, books instead.
Wednesday, October 20, 2004
Atonement Ian Mc Ewan
There's another person in the book club who wants to read this book, so I might get a chance to revisit it (which I would love to do, since there's a lot in there that I think really will only begin to make sense in the context of discussion with other people who have read it). We'll see if I can get anyone interested in a secondary go-round.
The novel is about story writing. The protagonist first writes stories as a child, and her view of the world is affected by her understanding of the events around her as a novel as well as her difficulty in separating the reality of her life, actions and their consequences, from the fiction she writes.
The novel is constructed in three parts with an epilogue - the first part, comprising almost half of the book describes a family and their hired help in 1935. 13 year old Briony Tallis witnesses an argument between her older sister, Cecilia, and their charlady's son, Robbie Turner, but she is far enough away that she only sees the action without hearing what they say. Her active imagination (she aspires to be a writer), imagines a scene in which Robbie threatens her sister and she interprets the rest of the events of the day in light of this supposition. But Briony is too young to understand adult motivations and she gets it all wrong.
Her older cousin Lola and two younger twin brothers Pierrot and Jackson, have come to stay with the family while their parents separate (their mother is in France with another man). She is enraptured by the scene, imagining it as a scene in a novel, something she has decided she will write because she is currently frustrated with playwriting (at least the directing and producing part). Robbie is not threatening her sister, he is in love with her and they've both just discovered it. During the evening, the twins, in frustration and homesickness, run away and a search party is sent out into the night to look for them. As everyone separates, Briony wanders for a while until she comes upon what she thinks is a bush, until it separates, revealing itself to be a man and a prone figure on the grass. The figure is Lola and she has been attacked. Briony, with her newly formed ideas about Robbie as a madman and her desire to protect her sister, names him as the attacker. The section ends with him taken away in a police car, and enough foreshadowing of Briony's actions and complicity in accusing him for the reader to clearly know he is sentenced for the 'crime'.
The second part describes Robbie's trek across France to Dunkirk as part of the retreat of May 1945 after he was offered the chance of commuting his sentence by working it off in the army. It describes the horrors of war, the camraderie, the numbness that he feels as he walks, despite a wound full of shrapnel across the landscape and how he hates Briony for what she has done and loves Cecilia, who has promised to wait for him and loves him. It ends with him dreaming of rejoining her (a feverish dream in a burnt out basement), on the beach awaiting evacuation the next day.
The third section describes Briony's decision to forego university and sign up as a nurse instead, her decision to recant her testimony and her confrontation with her sister and Robbie in her sister's flat. They tell her what she must to do recant, and she leaves them to pursue their own lives together. She decides she must write the story as well as part of her atonement. This final section is signed "BT 1999".
The fourth part, the epilogue, is Briony's reflection on the fiction she has written in which she reveals that she is dying but Lola and her husband Marshall (her actual attacker) are still alive, so she cannot publish the account, and, unlike parts of the third section, we find out that Robbie dies of septicemia that day and Cecilia in a bomb raid a few months later (a bomb raid at a Tube station that she wouldn't have been taking if she and Robbie had gotten together and moved to their cottage as the fiction that Briony created had them doing). Briony realizes in the end, that she will be dead before the novel can be safely published and her atonement will make no difference. (There are also discussions of whether the writer can atone, since the writer has the power of god in writing the story and one can never know what is true and what is not.)
The novel is about story writing. The protagonist first writes stories as a child, and her view of the world is affected by her understanding of the events around her as a novel as well as her difficulty in separating the reality of her life, actions and their consequences, from the fiction she writes.
The novel is constructed in three parts with an epilogue - the first part, comprising almost half of the book describes a family and their hired help in 1935. 13 year old Briony Tallis witnesses an argument between her older sister, Cecilia, and their charlady's son, Robbie Turner, but she is far enough away that she only sees the action without hearing what they say. Her active imagination (she aspires to be a writer), imagines a scene in which Robbie threatens her sister and she interprets the rest of the events of the day in light of this supposition. But Briony is too young to understand adult motivations and she gets it all wrong.
Her older cousin Lola and two younger twin brothers Pierrot and Jackson, have come to stay with the family while their parents separate (their mother is in France with another man). She is enraptured by the scene, imagining it as a scene in a novel, something she has decided she will write because she is currently frustrated with playwriting (at least the directing and producing part). Robbie is not threatening her sister, he is in love with her and they've both just discovered it. During the evening, the twins, in frustration and homesickness, run away and a search party is sent out into the night to look for them. As everyone separates, Briony wanders for a while until she comes upon what she thinks is a bush, until it separates, revealing itself to be a man and a prone figure on the grass. The figure is Lola and she has been attacked. Briony, with her newly formed ideas about Robbie as a madman and her desire to protect her sister, names him as the attacker. The section ends with him taken away in a police car, and enough foreshadowing of Briony's actions and complicity in accusing him for the reader to clearly know he is sentenced for the 'crime'.
The second part describes Robbie's trek across France to Dunkirk as part of the retreat of May 1945 after he was offered the chance of commuting his sentence by working it off in the army. It describes the horrors of war, the camraderie, the numbness that he feels as he walks, despite a wound full of shrapnel across the landscape and how he hates Briony for what she has done and loves Cecilia, who has promised to wait for him and loves him. It ends with him dreaming of rejoining her (a feverish dream in a burnt out basement), on the beach awaiting evacuation the next day.
The third section describes Briony's decision to forego university and sign up as a nurse instead, her decision to recant her testimony and her confrontation with her sister and Robbie in her sister's flat. They tell her what she must to do recant, and she leaves them to pursue their own lives together. She decides she must write the story as well as part of her atonement. This final section is signed "BT 1999".
The fourth part, the epilogue, is Briony's reflection on the fiction she has written in which she reveals that she is dying but Lola and her husband Marshall (her actual attacker) are still alive, so she cannot publish the account, and, unlike parts of the third section, we find out that Robbie dies of septicemia that day and Cecilia in a bomb raid a few months later (a bomb raid at a Tube station that she wouldn't have been taking if she and Robbie had gotten together and moved to their cottage as the fiction that Briony created had them doing). Briony realizes in the end, that she will be dead before the novel can be safely published and her atonement will make no difference. (There are also discussions of whether the writer can atone, since the writer has the power of god in writing the story and one can never know what is true and what is not.)
She H. Rider Haggard
This book was very difficult to read.
Not only were there several typos in the copy I had (along with some agonizingly complicated sentences) but the misogyny that literally dripped from the pages was really hard to swallow - no matter how much I focused on its status as a piece typical of its genre and period.
If you saw the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, you met a Haggard character, Alan Quartermain (played by Sean Connery). Haggard likes his men virile (even when they are bookworms like the narrator of this book) and he displays a very Victorian euro-centrism in his treatment of natives. I think though the hardest part of the book to swallow was the fact that Haggard didn't bother to create an African society for his Englishmen to interact with, he just took elements of a 'savage' society (cannibalism and women who make decisions) and pasted them onto an English society.
Case in point: The narrator is horrified to find himself in a matrilineal society in which the women choose their mates and can divorce them as easily as turning them out of the house. BUT, he also has those women acting like sychophants toward the European men, not speaking till they're spoken to, following the men around, being excluded from important discussions etc.
Really, really hard to just read as a period piece and get beyond the misogyny.
Not only were there several typos in the copy I had (along with some agonizingly complicated sentences) but the misogyny that literally dripped from the pages was really hard to swallow - no matter how much I focused on its status as a piece typical of its genre and period.
If you saw the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, you met a Haggard character, Alan Quartermain (played by Sean Connery). Haggard likes his men virile (even when they are bookworms like the narrator of this book) and he displays a very Victorian euro-centrism in his treatment of natives. I think though the hardest part of the book to swallow was the fact that Haggard didn't bother to create an African society for his Englishmen to interact with, he just took elements of a 'savage' society (cannibalism and women who make decisions) and pasted them onto an English society.
Case in point: The narrator is horrified to find himself in a matrilineal society in which the women choose their mates and can divorce them as easily as turning them out of the house. BUT, he also has those women acting like sychophants toward the European men, not speaking till they're spoken to, following the men around, being excluded from important discussions etc.
Really, really hard to just read as a period piece and get beyond the misogyny.
Saturday, October 16, 2004
Lord of the Flies William Golding
Another book club book. It was a quick replacement last month because the woman who recommended the book that we were supposed to read wasn't going to be at the meeting, and it was difficult to get ahold of. So we thought we would re-read a classic that most of us had read earlier in life.
The consensus was that the things that struck you about the book as a kid were not the same things that stood out as an adult. What was traumatic as a kid was almost de rigeur as an adult, and what was insignificant (or perhaps just confusing) as a kid seemed monumental as an adult. It's the same experience I had re-reading 1984, Animal Farm and Brave New World as an adult. That probably says something about the social commentary in those texts.
That same social commentary is in Golding's text too of course. The force of his argument - that society is degenerate and easily could become so - is diffused by the time frame of the novel. It's difficult to know if the boys are on the island for only a few weeks, or a few months or even a year, and so the speed at which their schoolboy manners and sense of society deteriorates is hard to guage. If only over a few weeks, the criticism that society is degenerate is more potent. If over months, or even a year, well, then the boys actions seem more comprehensible simply as the kind of degeneration that any human being might experience in the same time frame, and excusable since they are after all boys and not men who are trying to deal with being stranded on a deserted island.
Useless aside: ["Stranded on a deserted island" - now there's a cliched phrase if ever there was one. After all, have you ever heard of anyone stranded on an inhabited island? It's not really stranded then, is it?]
One thing that the group did discuss (Angela was there too, to provide a young person's perspective) was whether the story would unfold differently if it was a group of girls stranded on the island. We decided it would.
For one thing, the conflict would likely not have been over hunting, even if it had been about food. We also figured that girls would dig an animal trap for the pigs rather than go after them with sharpened sticks. And instead of warpaint, feathers and braided hair. They may have been even more afraid of the 'beast' than the boys and that might have been what the conflict that led to the split would have been about. And they would have likely (or at least some) been a bit more maternal about the 'littluns'. The conflict might then have arisen between the ones who wanted to take care of the littluns and those who expressed an everyone-for-herself kind of attitude.
But the one thing we decided is that conflict would have happened regardless of gender. [There wouldn't be much of a story without a conflict for one thing] Though the more I think of it, the more I wonder if the conflict would have had to have happened if adults were stranded. Not that I'm saying adults don't have egos that would lead them into conflict, but adults also usually have developed more skills for avoiding open conflict either through compromise and concilliation, or through subterfuge. Kids just aren't that subtle. The boys responses on the island are perfect examples. And Ralph's 'blank' moments when he can't think of what to say next are probably signs of immaturity, not of some kind of mental illness or disability (as they would be, say, in an adult). It would make for an interesting re-write/take-off on this classic story.
The consensus was that the things that struck you about the book as a kid were not the same things that stood out as an adult. What was traumatic as a kid was almost de rigeur as an adult, and what was insignificant (or perhaps just confusing) as a kid seemed monumental as an adult. It's the same experience I had re-reading 1984, Animal Farm and Brave New World as an adult. That probably says something about the social commentary in those texts.
That same social commentary is in Golding's text too of course. The force of his argument - that society is degenerate and easily could become so - is diffused by the time frame of the novel. It's difficult to know if the boys are on the island for only a few weeks, or a few months or even a year, and so the speed at which their schoolboy manners and sense of society deteriorates is hard to guage. If only over a few weeks, the criticism that society is degenerate is more potent. If over months, or even a year, well, then the boys actions seem more comprehensible simply as the kind of degeneration that any human being might experience in the same time frame, and excusable since they are after all boys and not men who are trying to deal with being stranded on a deserted island.
Useless aside: ["Stranded on a deserted island" - now there's a cliched phrase if ever there was one. After all, have you ever heard of anyone stranded on an inhabited island? It's not really stranded then, is it?]
One thing that the group did discuss (Angela was there too, to provide a young person's perspective) was whether the story would unfold differently if it was a group of girls stranded on the island. We decided it would.
For one thing, the conflict would likely not have been over hunting, even if it had been about food. We also figured that girls would dig an animal trap for the pigs rather than go after them with sharpened sticks. And instead of warpaint, feathers and braided hair. They may have been even more afraid of the 'beast' than the boys and that might have been what the conflict that led to the split would have been about. And they would have likely (or at least some) been a bit more maternal about the 'littluns'. The conflict might then have arisen between the ones who wanted to take care of the littluns and those who expressed an everyone-for-herself kind of attitude.
But the one thing we decided is that conflict would have happened regardless of gender. [There wouldn't be much of a story without a conflict for one thing] Though the more I think of it, the more I wonder if the conflict would have had to have happened if adults were stranded. Not that I'm saying adults don't have egos that would lead them into conflict, but adults also usually have developed more skills for avoiding open conflict either through compromise and concilliation, or through subterfuge. Kids just aren't that subtle. The boys responses on the island are perfect examples. And Ralph's 'blank' moments when he can't think of what to say next are probably signs of immaturity, not of some kind of mental illness or disability (as they would be, say, in an adult). It would make for an interesting re-write/take-off on this classic story.