20 classics #12: Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

I’m reading 20 classic, modern-classic or cult books. Read more about this project here. See the other classics here.

Why did I want to read it?

I’d only read Emma and Pride and Prejudice of Austen’s novels, and when I heard that Northanger Abbey was a sort of satire of the gothic novel, I was intrigued. I also visited Bath last year, where much of the novel is set.

When was it published?

Northanger Abbey was first published in 1818, posthumously, though it was one of the first novels Austen completed. My edition is the 2003 Penguin Classic with an informative introduction by Marilyn Butler. There are many editions available.

What’s it about?

‘Our heroine’ (referred to as such by the author within the novel) is Catherine Morland. She is young, impressionable, and experiencing Bath, and fashionable society, for the first time. There’s a sort of rivalry for her friendship and love between two new sets of acquaintances, the Thorpes and the Tilneys. The novel is also a very early example of metafiction, where the author is present and the characters have conversations about reading, the worth of a novel, fiction versus nonfiction/history, women writers, and more. The plot and events are also (seemingly fondly) parodic of both Gothic novels and ‘novels of sensibility’.

Tell us more about the author.

Jane Austen was born at Steventon on 16 December 1775. Her family moved to Bath when her father retired in 1801. When he died in 1805, she moved around with her mother. I learnt, when I visited the Jane Austen Centre in Bath, that after her father died her family had quite a difficult time, financially. She certainly got to see Bath and its ‘fashionable society’ from different points of view, and she was more productive living quietly at the family home before and after Bath (at Chawton). She received a marriage proposal while there, and accepted (one can assume, thinking of her family) but the next day withdrew her acceptance. She wrote to her niece, Fanny White: ‘Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection’. It is believed much of Austen’s genuine feelings on this subject are due to the true-love relationship of her parents. There is so much more to say about her, but I’ll keep this brief (see this blog for all the info you could ever need on Jane Austen). She is undeniably one of the warmest, cleverest writers who ever lived, and was modest about her own genius. She died at the age of 41 on 18 July 1817.

So, what did I think? Does it deserve to be a classic?

Northanger Abbey is generally considered to be Austen’s most ‘light-hearted’ novel, and the characters certainly don’t stick in your mind as much as, say, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy. However, Catherine Morley’s innocence (and almost transparence) is a deliberate method on the part of the author—Catherine is both a parodic character and a vehicle for the reader. The reader is also stumbling, wide-eyed, into this strange and undeniably shallow world (Mrs Allen, with whom Catherine stays, is obsessed with clothing, fashions and second-hand remarks). But the reader is also allowed distance by the intrusive, authorial voice. In one of my favourite parts, Catherine allows herself to be whipped into a kind of grotesque fancy by Henry Tilney’s comparisons of Northanger Abey to the settings of Gothic novels. She then spends a sleepless night wondering what could possibly be in the locked drawer of the cabinet! The reader (permitted ironic distance) knows it will be something ordinary, but we still can’t help but wonder.

Though it may be more ‘light-hearted’ than other novels by Austen, Northanger Abbey’s intellectual engagements and layers of meaning (and humour) are hugely impressive. I’ve read modern metafictional novels like John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Italo Calvino’s If On A Winters Night a Traveller and I didn’t realise Austen had beat them by about 150 years, winking to her readers. She even acknowledges (and rallies with) her fellow writers of novels, encouraging them to create heroines who read novels (the layers!):

Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronised by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the Reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure [turn over a novel’s insipid pages with disgust], and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body.

Catherine and Henry Tilney have a sparring relationship throughout the book. They debate the merits of fiction versus nonfiction/history, and have an exchange about women’s writing which cleverly inverts an idea and reveals Austen’s feelings on equality (we know she contradicts this in some ways, in her work, but I see her as being both within and ahead of her time). The exchange is as follows:

Catherine tells Tilney that she does not keep a journal and he thinks she must be lying. He says (among other things): ‘How are your various dresses to be remembered, and the particular state of your complexion, and curl of your hair to be described in all their diversities, without having constant recourse to a journal?—My dear madam, I am not so ignorant of young ladies’ ways as you wish to believe me; it is this delightful habit of journalising which largely contributes to form the easy style of writing for which ladies are so generally celebrated. Every body allows that the talent of writing agreeable letters is peculiarly female…’ He goes on a little. Catherine baulks. She says: ‘I have sometimes thought… whether ladies do write so much better letters than gentlemen! That is—I should not think the superiority was always on our side’. Very wry. The superiority is no doubt not always on the side of one sex or another in other matters, too.

But it is still this bullying fellow that Catherine begins to fall for. Maybe it shows that her character isn’t really so impressionable, that she enjoys a little intellectual sparring (and will grow to enjoy it more—the reader, as the reader of novels, often would side with her in these debates). Maybe she is more imaginative than impressionable, though the extent of what she imagines possible does result in her putting her foot in her mouth at one point…

Northanger Abbey’s cleverness impressed and delighted me at times, but the overall story is a little disjointed, and I was a bit underwhelmed at the end. I think the romantic hero is much less memorable than, say, Mr Darcy (*cough*). But there aren’t many endings that satisfy (on a specific level) as that of Pride and Prejudice. That said, it’s actually not one of my favourite books. That was another reason for trying Austen again. Emma is the best of hers I’ve read, and though everything about Austen and her work can be appreciated—she was undeniably ahead of her time, intelligent, genuine, clever—on some level my personal tastes swing more towards the (admittedly, often flowery) dramatic and romantic Gothics…

What’s next?

Perhaps, on that note, I should read a Bronte next, or Hardy’s Tess of the D’ubervilles? I’m also slowly making my way through Hemingway’s To Whom the Bell Tolls.

20 classics #11: Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett

I’m reading 20 classic, modern-classic or cult books. Read more about this project here. See the other classics here.

Why did I want to read it?

I adore Beckett’s plays Waiting for Godot and Endgame. Masterpieces.

When was it published?

Originally published as Malone Meurt in Paris and first in English in 1956 (author’s own translation) by Grove Press. My edition is by Faber & Faber, 2010.

What’s it about?

Like most of Beckett’s work, not much and a whole lot, all at once. Malone is lying on a bed in a room. He is dying. He is making up stories.

Tell us more about the author.

Samuel Beckett is undoubtedly one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, an early postmodernist and a key writer of the ‘theatre of the absurd’. He wrote Malone meurt between November 1947 and May 1948 ‘at the height of a period of intense creative activity’ according to Peter Boxall in the preface of my edition, in which he also wrote the novels Molloy and L’Innomable (which came to be known as the Trilogy) and the play En attendant Godot. Godot was the work which first brought him international recognition. Beckett was born in Ireland and received a BA from Trinity College, Dublin, before becoming lecteur d’anglais in the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. There, he met and was influenced by renowned Irish author James Joyce. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969. His works are still incredibly striking—playfully tedious, absurd, moving, gross and funny.

So, what did I think? Does it deserve to be a classic?

For many reasons. Imagine what it was like to break the mould when there was a mould. Exciting. Dangerous. But I think Beckett is still relevant because there is such depth to his work. The ‘absurd’ elements express profound themes: mortality, lack of fulfilment, desperation, distraction, boredom, exasperation, routine and repetition, hopelessness, alienation and a little bit of light shining in.

‘Live and invent. I have tried. I must have tried. Invent. It is not the word. Neither is live. No matter. I have tried. While within me the wild beast of earnestness padded up and down, roaring, ravening, rending. I have done that. And all alone, well hidden, played the clown, all alone, hour after hour, motionless, often standing, spellbound, groaning.’

This is part of Malone’s thought process, in this bed where he is dying. He doesn’t really know where he is. The clues are all contradictory. Sometimes he believes himself large, taking up space. There is always another pen. He makes up stories, about the Lamberts, about Lemuel, and about Macmann and Moll.

Beckett’s characters peel away the layers and reveal us for what we really are.

‘But what matter whether I was born or not, have lived or not, am dead or merely dying, I shall go on doing as I have always done, not knowing what it is I do, nor who I am, nor where I am, nor if I am.’

‘… if my memories are mine, and which you savour doddering about in the wake of the fitful sun, or deeper than the dead, in the corridors of the underground railway and the stench of their harassed mobs scurrying from cradle to grave to get to the right place at the right time. What more do I want? Yes, those were the days, quick to night and well beguiled with the search for warmth and reasonably edible scraps.’

I will try to explain how Beckett makes me feel, as a reader. First, there’s something addictive about the base kind of explorations of his characters. Morning and night, birth through death, we are each just a speck in the universe (with misbehaving body parts). And we stink of failure. He’s the first author I’ve read who has articulated boredom to me, in a quite unironic, un-boring way. Many contemporary writers write ironically about ‘inevitability’, whereas, I think, Beckett is actually very earnest. Some writing that is supposedly ‘absurd’ falls down, because it is either too distant (and ‘clever’), or is closer to bizarre. Beckett is an anti-realist who never departs from a notion of what is true. What could be more real, or true, than facing death?

I adore the small, tangible objects that tie Malone (and other Beckett characters) to a living, breathing (if altered, exaggerated, grotesque or confusing) world—objects so simple as a club, a brimless hat, and one old boot.

‘… I never saw a boot with so many eyeholes, useless for the most part, having ceased to be holes, and become slits. All these things are together in the corner in a heap. I could lay hold of them, even now, in the dark, I need only wish to do so.’

The objects have ‘remained quietly in their place, in the corner’ while he has been in the room, but it is also impossible for him to know, ‘from one moment to the next, what is mine and what is not…’ Objects, and reality, are tangible and exist (and are his), and are also intangible, and do not exist (and are not his).

Beckett is comforting to me, as a reader, in a way that is like looking at the stars. Your blood beats quick and warm, at the realisation that the universe is so large and cold. Tangible, intangible.

There is… taking up space, making up stories (distraction?) and someone, in the night, has bloodied your cane. Feeling the carpet under your feet and the silence at your questions. Not being able to be outside yourself, as Malone is unable to move from his bed. Not alone. Only alone. Writing crap. Tedium.

‘But the part he [Macmann] struck most readily, with his hammer, was the head, and that is understandable, for it too is a bony part, and sensitive, and difficult to miss, and the seat of all shit and misery, so you rain blows upon it, with more pleasure than on the leg for example, which never did you any harm, it’s only human.’

What’s next?

I got distracted from Doris Lessing, but I’ve picked up Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.

20 Classics #10: The Well by Elizabeth Jolley

I’m reading 20 classic, modern-classic or cult books. Read more about this project here.

Why did I want to read it?

There are way too many Australian authors I haven’t read. People told me I’d click with Elizabeth Jolley.

When was it published?

It was first published in 1986, which makes it a very young ‘classic’ (a little younger than me, even), but it is already spoken of as being one. My edition is a lovely orange Popular Penguin.

What’s it about?

Miss Hester Harper adopted Katherine some years ago and now Katherine is growing into a young woman. Hester increasingly fears that Katherine will leave her. They live a cloistered life, indulging in both memory and fantasy, and the money dwindles. One night on the road, they hit something large with the Toyota. In a panic, they drive it to the edge of the well.

Tell us more about the author.

Elizabeth Jolley was born in England in 1923 but we claim her as ‘one of ours’, since her literary career blossomed down under. She grew up in a German-speaking household (and she gives Hester a German-speaking childhood friend/governess in The Well). Jolley did not start to receive literary recognition until she was in her 50s (though she had been writing since her 20s). She won the Age Book of the Year Award three times, for Mr Scobie’s Riddle, My Father’s Moon and The Georges’ Wife) and the Miles Franklin Award for The Well. She was awarded with an AO for services to literature and received no fewer than four honorary doctorates. She was also a pioneer of creative writing teaching in Australia. She died in 2007. Jason Steger said of her, in the Age: ‘As a writer, there was no one like her. She had a distinctive style, idiosyncratic subjects and an original voice. Her work was peopled by eccentric characters and imbued with a deep sense of compassion.’

Elizabeth Jolley memories are welcome in the comments. (I received a few lovely ones via Twitter when I mentioned I was reading this.)

So, what did I think? Does it deserve to be a classic?

There’s such a dark cosiness about this story. There’s the dark well with its unknowable depths, and there’s the small, obsessively protected world of Hester and Katherine. Miss Hester Harper is possessive of Katherine. There are hints of repression, loneliness, the still-grieved loss of her childhood governess, the slow realisation of what really happened and why. In some ways Hester does not want to grow up. And the money allows that.

But then the money is ‘misplaced’. (I won’t give it away.)

Katherine is obsessed with movies and magazines. She loves John Travolta. She’ll adopt different accents and play dress ups. Hester is often annoyed by her. But she is more fascinated by her. Katherine will dress Hester up, too; cook for her, brush her hair. They exist together in a vortex of memory, illusions and fantasies; champagne, cornflakes and poultry.

The neighbours and the townsfolk talk to Hester, hint that it isn’t quite right to keep a young, healthy girl cooped up. They make offers for Katherine to babysit and suggest that she go to more dances. Hester won’t have it. She is also worried about Katherine’s friend from the orphanage who is coming to visit. The novel does something clever with that, too. As you’re reading, you keep thinking that the visit is going to be the big event that comes between them. Hester chats to a local writer at the shop who is writing a novella and must ‘keep to certain rules which have been accepted in literary circles’. She needs an intruder, in her story. There has been an intruder in Hester and Katherine’s story, but the reader is still thinking of the other, potential one (the friend). Both Hester, and the reader, ignore the local writer, in a way, just as Hester ignores everything that may have some impact on the little world she has built with Katherine. She ignores it or tries to make it go away. Through this, Jolley is also playing with the reader’s expectations about what will unfold and when.

Hester has succeeded, by the end, in making their world yet smaller. But it is also beginning to be less cosy, and more shadowy, like the inside of that well.

What’s next?

I need to finish writing up Beckett’s Malone Dies and I’m currently, slowly reading Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. I think I need to exit the 20th Century after that.

I’m counting this post toward my review tally in the Australian Women Writers Reading + Reviewing Challenge.

20 Classics #9: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

I’m reading 20 classic, modern-classic or cult books. I aimed to read them all in 2011, but that’s beginning to look unlikely. Read more about this project here.

Why did I want to read it?

I think I knew about the film before the book, but I’m yet to see it. The main reasons I wanted to read it were gothic + romance. Also because it is a more ‘modern’ gothic novel.

When was it published?

First published in 1938. My copy is a sexy, red 1994 Avon paperback. There are plenty of other editions.

What’s it about?

A nervy young lady with good morals meets a handsome rich man with a dark past. Maxim de Winter (how great is that name?) owns a famous country manor called Manderley. The rich flowers and woodland surrounding the house are constantly to be kept at bay. There is also a cove, where his attractive and charismatic late wife, Rebecca, drowned. Our young heroine does not know the first thing about running a household (or anything much at all), and feels severely inadequate. But Maxim prefers her this way.

Tell us more about the author.

Daphne du Maurier came from a creative family. Her father and mother were actors, her grandfather was an actor and cartoonist, and her older sister was also a writer (Angela du Maurier). She was born in London in 1907. She was a fan of the Bronte sisters and wrote novels, stories, a few plays, and biographies. Works include The House on the Strand, The Scapegoat and The King’s General. Many of her works have been adapted for the screen. She died in 1989 in Cornwall and there is a festival held there each May in her honour. This website has du Maurier news and reviews of her work.

So, what did I think? Does it deserve to be a classic?

At the beginning, I was captivated. What a champagne storyteller. What gorgeous descriptions. But after a certain revelation in the plot, I felt cranky. Then I began to notice all the metaphors.

Our heroine is well-rounded, and endearing with her anxieties and her desires. She meets Maxim, and he slowly draws her away from the horrid, gossipy lady she is ‘companion’ to. I love her first description of him:

I don’t think I should care for Palm Beach’, he said, blowing out the match, and glancing at him I thought how unreal he would look against a Florida background. He belonged to a walled city of the fifteenth century, a city of narrow, cobbled streets, and thin spires, where the inhabitants wore pointed shoes and worsted hose. His face was arresting, sensitive, medieval in some strange inexplicable way, and I was reminded of a portrait seen in a gallery I had forgotten where, of a certain Gentleman Unknown. Could one but rob him of his English tweeds, and put him in black, with lace at his throat and wrists, he would stare down at us in our new world from a long distant past – a past where men walked cloaked at night, and stood in the shadows of old doorways, a past of narrow stairways and dim dungeons, a past of whispers in the dark, of shimmering rapier blades, of silent, exquisite courtesy.

Evocative, isn’t it? At this point, we fall for Maxim along with our protagonist, and we want them to be together.

Newly married, back at Manderley, the new Mrs de Winter struggles to fit in. She is afraid of having to give orders to the servants, she is overwhelmed by the customs of her new social standing. To top it all off, the presence of Rebecca de Winter, her husband’s late wife, is still strong in the house. The more curious our protagonist gets, the more inadequate she feels, compared to this gorgeous, charming woman. The house and its gardens close in. Rebecca’s rhododendrons are ‘too powerful’, a ‘slaughterous red.’ Yes, there is something controlling, fecund, luscious about everything that was Rebecca’s. Our heroine begins to feel that the marriage might be a mistake. She is not feeling good enough for Maxim.

Before I explain where the book went wrong for me, I must throw up a *spoiler alert*. I hate to do it, but I’d like to discuss the problems I had.

So I was hooked up to this point. I knew there was more to Rebecca – something sinister about her that no one would talk about. And then we find out. A ship runs aground in the bay and they find Rebecca’s boat underneath. Her body is inside.

I’d suspected that she probably was murdered, but I never guessed it would have been Maxim. Aren’t we supposed to like him? Well, our heroine still does. Even more so. All she can think of when she finds out – and here’s the part where I flinched – is the fact that Maxim ‘did not love Rebecca’. How pleased she is, to learn this. Plot-wise it makes perfect sense – our heroine was anxious and shy; her cyclical, inward-facing thoughts stopped her from finding out the truth, or even guessing at it, beforehand. The reason it disturbed me, though, was that this woman did not care an ounce that her husband had killed another woman! Shot her dead!

Okay, okay. Rebecca was ‘evil’. But why? The reasons we are given are that she was manipulative, cold, clever and promiscuous. So it’s not a feminist book. The shy, young virginal woman is ‘good’, and the femme fatale – the sexy woman who gets what she wants – is so bad she must die. And the ‘moral’ woman agrees with that. Oh, she would never take money she didn’t earn (we learn at the beginning) but she would be okay with murder. Yes, she changes when she finds out about the murder. But Maxim likes her because she is wide-eyed and uncorrupted, the opposite of the carnal Rebecca.

Another problem is that du Maurier makes Rebecca sound so intriguing to the reader, just as she was to the characters she won over in her lifetime. I wanted to know more about her. She seduced me, in a way. I wanted to know her story (though I’m sure she would have told me a lie). But was she really a psychopath? Or just a powerful woman? We know how the main man in her life eventually saw her…

I think this is one of those novels that is exciting, well-written, a ripping yarn etc. but unfortunately too politically incorrect for me to fully enjoy it. Other books I’ve read for this project have been un-PC in some ways, but here the un-PCness is crucially related to the plot. It’s also backed-up by metaphor. The binary of nature and reason, carnality and innocence, excess and restraint. The flowers, excessive and luscious – threatening, to our heroine – are one aspect. Then there is Rebecca’s cousin (with whom she had an affair). When he is handed a whisky-and-soda Favell drinks it ‘greedily, like an animal.’ She goes on: ‘There is something sensual and horrible the way he put his mouth to the glass.’ Our heroine is disgusted by any reminder of sex, nature and excess. She also comments on his neck pushing at his collar, how he would soon lose his physique. There is such a fear of things spiralling out of control.

But there is much to enjoy in this book. I read it very quickly. I was interested to learn that in 1994 it was revealed that du Maurier was bisexual, and that she felt she had two sides to herself. Could Rebecca de Winter be her ‘masculine’ side, powerful yet publicly stifled? It’s a very interesting way to read it. I must watch the Hitchcock film and compare. Have you read the book or seen the film? Did you have any issues with it, or was it pure enjoyment? How does the film compare?

What’s next?

I’ve finished Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well and I’m reading Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies. I might pick up Doris Lessing after that?

author image via

20 Classics #8: Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

I’m reading 20 classic, modern-classic or cult books. I aimed to read them all in 2011, but that’s beginning to look unlikely. Read more about this project here.

Why did I want to read it?

I had vague ideas about Gulliver’s Travels. I remembered Ted Danson being tied up by some little people in a film version I saw as a kid. I always loved the Michael Jackson film clip for ‘Leave Me Alone’, which plays on that moment with the Lilliputians. And Tom Cho riffs on that part in the last, eroticised story in his book Look Who’s Morphing. But it was Gideon Haigh’s recommendation of Gulliver’s Travels as a brilliant satire that made me seriously consider reading it.

When was it published?

All the way back in 1726, though it’s more accessible than many books I’ve read from later eras, such as the 19th Century. Oh, those romantics. My copy is from lovely Vintage Classics range (super cheap).

What’s it about?

Gulliver can’t sit still. He finds himself in a series of fantastical lands with strange races (or species). He sometimes gets into a lot of trouble. He makes unforgettable friends. He learns how other societies can be run. When he tries to explain England to his new companions, it often comes across as ludicrous.

Tell us more about the author.

Jonathan Swift was born in 1667 in Dublin, and was educated at Trinity College and Oxford. He worked as secretary to Sir William Temple, in England. In 1694 in Dublin he was ordained as a priest. He spent the rest of his life between England and Ireland. He wrote under another name, and the first of his major satirical works was A Tale of a Tub, published in 1704. Through his writing he became close friends with Alexander Pope. They helped to found a literary group in 1714, called the Martinus Scriblerus. He wrote prose, satirical pamphlets, poetry, essays and sermons in his lifetime. He died in 1745, and his estate was left to found a hospital for the mentally ill, St Patrick’s, which still exists.

So, what did I think? Does it deserve to be a classic?

Undoubtedly. Not only was Gulliver’s Travels a hit in Swift’s lifetime, the book has been continually relevant to Western society. It has apparently never been out of print. It is also genuinely funny. I’ll give you a few examples of its brilliance. When Gulliver is in Lilliput (the land of the tiny people) he observes that there have been six rebellions raised on the breaking of an egg. His present Majesty’s grandfather once cut his finger on the shell when breaking it by the ancient principle, so an edict was published commanding all subjects to break their eggs on the small end. ‘It is computed, that eleven thousand persons have, at several times, suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end’. The ‘Big-Endians’ found sympathy in Blefuscu, the neighboring nation, and so a ‘bloody war hath been carried on between the two empires for six and thirty moons’.

To me, this seems a parody of wars begun (and continued) over differences in religion. England was in the process of crushing the Jacobites, when Swift was writing. Gulliver is eventually suspected of being a ‘Big-Endian’ in his heart and is accused of treason, after putting out a palace fire by pissing on it.

In Brobdingnag the people are giants and the king makes many observations of England. He has been carefully calculating what Gulliver has told him about taxes. Gulliver writes: ‘But, if what I told him were true, he was still at a loss how a kingdom could run out of its estate like a private person. He asked me, who were our creditors? and, where we found money to pay them?’ You can see why this book still strikes a chord. The king also wonders what business England has out of its own islands ‘unless upon the score of trade or treaty, or to defend the coasts…’. Swift is mocking England’s excessive conquering and colonising. When Gulliver tries to give the king the secret of gunpowder, he is horrified.

There is humour of a more ‘base’ kind in Gulliver’s Travels too. Satire works best if political and observational humour are mixed with slapstick and the rude (as with contemporary texts, like the Simpsons). In the Brobdingnag section, Gulliver remarks at the hideousness of the skin of the giants when seen up close. He describes a nurse’s ‘monstrous breast’, the nipple ‘was about half the bigness of my head… and the dug so verified with spots, pimples, and freckles, that nothing could appear more nauseous’. Later on he is astride the nipple of a maid of honour, ‘a pleasant, frolicksome girl of sixteen’.

On the other fantastical worlds, briefly: Laputa seems a place where logic or reason has gone too far (everything is judged by mathematical and musical terms). And there is a very fun passage in Glubbdubdrib where Gulliver is assisted in bringing back the dead. He learns from dead people of note that ‘the royal throne could not be supported without corruption; because, that positive, confident, restive temper, which virtue infused into man, was a perpetual clog to publick business’. Many of these dead owed their greatness and wealth to perjury, oppression, fraud – Gulliver observes – and worse: sodomy, incest, the prostituting of their wives and daughters, betraying their country, poisoning, and perverting justice.

My favourite land was the final one, of the Houyhnhnms. These horse-folk have no terms for power, government, war, law or punishment. The human-like creatures in their world are base, unintelligent and barbaric, called Yahoos. There is a brilliant passage when Gulliver’s host Houyhnhnm asks him what are the usual causes or motives of war, back in England:

‘Sometimes the ambition of princes, who never think they have land or people enough to govern: sometimes the corruption of ministers, who engage their master in a war, in order to stifle or divert the clamour of the subjects against their evil administration. Difference in opinion hath cost many millions of lives: for instance whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh: whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue: whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire: what is the best colour for a coat, whether black, white, red, or grey; and whether it should be long or short, narrow or wide, dirty or clean; with many more. Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long continuance, as those occasioned by difference in opinion, especially if it be things indifferent.’

It goes on, ‘Sometimes one prince quarrelleth with another, for fear the other should quarrel with him’, and so on. It is sad, funny, true. For the first time, staying with the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver really begins to see the ridiculousness of his race of ‘Yahoos’.

One reason this land struck me is because the seductiveness of a simpler, quieter, structured life is so understandable to contemporary readers. I was thinking of the desire for a sea change/tree change that many possess; my own desire (sometimes) to be tucked away in the sparsely populated, naturally beautiful Scottish Highlands. The ‘downfall’ of human nature into greediness and pride that Swift depicts has escalated, in many ways. In other ways, we are so much better off. That doesn’t even really need to be said. His criticisms are still relevant and still amusing. The book still has the ability to make you think about society, politics, war, religion; about human nature, history and the present. Parts of it induce laughter, delight; other parts stir a kind of longing. Well they did for me, at least. I have itchy feet.

One last thing I’ll say is that I felt sorry for Gulliver’s wife, the whole time. He would come back, tell her stories, get her pregnant and then run off again! My annoyance was somewhat appeased, though, by Alexander Pope’s Verses on Gulliver’s Travels included at the back of the book. One poem is called: ‘Mary Gulliver to Capt. Lemuel Gulliver: An Epistle’. In this, Mary Gulliver is reading over his adventures, lamenting them. She has kept herself for him, and is pretty cranky about him getting out his giant ‘appendage’ to put out the palace fire, among other things:

‘How did I tremble, when by thousands bound,
I saw thee stretched on Lilliputian ground;
When scaling armies climbed up every part,
Each step they trod, I felt upon my heart.
But when thy torrent quenched the dreadful blaze,
King, Queen and nation staring with amaze,
Full in my view how all my husband came,
And what extinguished theirs, increased my flame.
Those spectacles, ordained thine eyes to save,
Were once my present; love that armour gave.’

These poems perfectly complement the main narrative. It’s like putting the book down at the end and having a discussion with someone very clever about it, going over all your favourite parts.

What’s next?

I’ve finished Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and I’m reading Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well. Maybe some Chandler or Beckett will follow.

20 Classics in 2011 #7: Death on Tiptoe by RC Ashby

I’m reading 20 classic, modern-classic or cult books in 2011. Read more about this project here.

Why did I want to read it?

In The Children’s Bookshop in Edinburgh, I discovered a wall of yellow books with purple pinstripes: rediscovered, republished books by women. There were all kinds of stories, but the fact that Death on Tiptoe was set in a castle, and combined the Gothic with a traditional ‘country houseparty whodunnit’ meant it took my fancy.

When was it published?

1931, originally. Now published by Greyladies (2009). You can order books from their website.

What’s it about?

A bunch of characters come together in a castle bought by Lady and Harry Stacey. They bring all sorts of baggage: intrigues, unrequited loves, losses, jealousies, prejudices, debts. They are shown around the castle (and having been to so many lately I can smell that dusty old tapestry, the uncovered ‘Priest’s Hole’, the old Norman keep). There is a game of Hide & Seek, in the dark. The governess, pining after the Major, is left out. Someone hides somewhere that is extremely difficult to find…

Tell us more about the author.

RC Ashby is also known as Ruby Ferguson. She is apparently best known for her series of ‘Jill’ pony books for children. She was born in 1899 in West Yorkshire, went to Oxford, was a publisher’s reader and book reviewer before becoming an author. Her first book was Moorland Man in 1926. RC Ashby is how she signed her detective novels (often with a supernatural element). She used her married name, Ruby Ferguson, for her romantic novels. According to the Greyladies bio, the romantic novel Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary (1937) was a favourite of the Queen Mother. Another good one is apparently Apricot Sky, ‘a charming comedy of manners set in the Western Highlands’. She died in 1966.

So, what did I think? Does it deserve to be a classic?

I read this book very quickly, in two sittings, and was completely absorbed. I’ll admit that there’s an environmental factor. I’ve been reading ‘lighter’ things, for the most part, while travelling [NB. I wrote this while still overseas], as the brain fills up quickly with all the history, newness, sights, smells, people. Also, I’ve been visiting castles throughout the UK, and thus the setting was an immediate, palpable one. So it was perfect for my current state. The writing is admittedly flowery, but, if you can run with it, adds to the gothic element of the novel. Crumbling stone, old costumes, stormy weather.

Lady Stacey aims for an element of ‘authenticity’ and recovering the past in her castle: ‘The long table was six hundred years old, of pale old wood to correspond with the benches upon which the guests sat. Electric lights were cunningly hidden in the iron sconces in the walls; but Lady Stacey disliked such imitations, and had caused a single line of yellow wax candles in brass candlesticks to be placed the length of the table for its illumination.’ The book is really great fun, especially if you enjoy an old-fashioned murder mystery. I never guessed who could be behind the death – a rather gruesome one – as there were plenty of good clues and red herrings thrown up. It was suitably spooky in parts, too. And I’ve always enjoyed books with contained settings: a stage where all manner of dramas and intrigues can be played out in micro.

What’s next?

I’m getting a bit behind, aren’t I? Yikes. I’m currently reading Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift and I think I’ll soon pick up Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.

Pictured: Chepstow Castle, in Wales.

20 classics in 2011 #6: The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch

I’m reading 20 classic, modern-classic or cult books in 2011. Read more about this project here.

Why did I want to read it?

Years ago I saw the moving film Iris with Kate Winslet as Iris Murdoch. The film was an education, and I’ve been meaning to read one of her novels (and there are many) ever since. The Sea, The Sea won the Booker, and was the one some of you pointed me towards (on Twitter).

When was it published?

In 1978. Mine is the Vintage Classics edition, with an introduction by John Burnside.

What’s it about?

Charles Arrowby, a retired theatre director and personality, moves to an isolated, damp house on the rocks by the sea. He is alone for some time, swimming and cooking, then is visited by various visions and old lovers and friends. He soon realises his first love, the one he never got over, is living in the village nearby and he begins to think about ways he can ‘rescue’ her from her supposedly torturous marriage.

Tell us more about the author.

The first thing I’ll say is that Iris Murdoch was prolific. Between 1954 and 1997 she published 26 novels and five books of/on philosophy. She also wrote six plays and published poetry. She was born in Dublin in 1919. She studied at Oxford (which I’m visiting in a few days) and Cambridge and worked during the war was an Assistant Principal at the Treasury, then worked with UNRRA.

In 1956, at Oxford, she met and married English professor and novelist John Bayley. They were together until her death in 1999, and he wrote three books about her. She suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease from 1995. They had no children.

Murdoch received countless awards in her lifetime including the Man Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea, the CBE in 1976, the Gold Pen for Distinguished Services to Literature at the 1997 PEN Awards, and in 1987 she was made a DBE in the New Year’s Honours Lists.

The themes of her novels ranged but from what I’ve read her love of Shakespeare is evident in many of them, as is space for the inner lives of the characters, shaped by her philosophical study and writings.

I found an exquisite article, a personal story about Iris: ‘Watching Star Trek with Iris Murdoch’ by Wendy Lesser. Check it out here.

So, what did I think? Does it deserve to be a classic?

I admired this book. What intelligence and patience Murdoch must have had, to write something so meditative, so contemplative and even repetitive (the way our thoughts circle, recur, reconsider, reverse, recover). Charles Arrowby, at the beginning, is famous and alone with the rocks, the sea, the house and the tower. The sea is his companion, sometimes inviting, sometimes menacing. Throughout the book there are so many descriptions of it, and the weather, too:

‘The sea was in a restless, fussy mood, dark blue in colour, that grim cold northern blue which even in summertime can convey a wintry menace.’

‘I went out to see what the horrible sea was up to. It was calm and slippery, sliding in among the rocks like oil.’

Charles is also a proud cook and takes pleasure in eating. He records many meals in his memoir/diary/philosophical journal which he later calls a novelised diary. These passages are delightful, and all these small details give the novel such texture, and round out the character of Charles.

The first thing that really ‘happens’ in the novel, is that Charles is visited by a vision, an immense black creature rising from the sea. He is terrified by it, and later puts it down to a possible recurrence of a bad acid trip. Among the descriptions and the visions, Charles begins slowly to recount aspects of his past for us, about his career in the theatre, but mainly about his love affairs, his friends and his family, particularly his cousin James.

James is one of two characters who threads the past to the present, who provides an ever-present agitation for Charles. The other is Hartley, his first love. When he finds out that Hartley is living in the village he again experiences the ‘fierce indubitable magnetism of love’. Hartley becomes a kind of inscrutable character, a challenge for both Charles and the reader. He maintains that though she is old and plain and wretched, he loves her (maybe even more because of it). He fantasises about ‘rescuing’ her, and commendably Murdoch makes the situation, and the traps, ties and binds, multi-layered. Nothing is black and white, and as it’s in first person, of course we also try and pull apart Charles’ reportage. Just as anyone probably is in their diaries, he is at times creating the truth as he wants to see it. At other times he pulls back the facade by simply acknowledging its existence, or by asking questions of his earlier self.

‘Of course this chattering diary is a facade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure.’

By asking questions of his earlier self, around memory, around incidents, those memories and incidents are in fact rewritten. This kind of instability of truth, of memory and of feeling – due to pain, passion, regret, guilt, the ego and otherwise – seems to be one of the main points of the novel. This is enhanced by the visions Charles sees – both frightening, and later on, redeeming. There is another point to this, Burnside points out in his wonderful introduction, tied-up with some overriding themes of a spiritual quest (his cousin James, too, is a spiritual force throughout, being a Tibetan Buddhist). There are several references in the book to Milapera, the Tibetan poet-mystic, and Burnside relates a story of Milapera going into his cave and being confronted by demons. After trying to get rid of them with all sorts of tactics, ‘they would not leave until he ceased regarding them as “bad” and opened to them, saw them as they were… By being willing to accept the demons and gods and goddesses as they are, Milapera transmuted them. They became dakinis, or the energies of life’ (citing Chogyam Trumpa’s Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism). So the literal and metaphorical demons (the theatre folk he’d taken himself away from) at first, for Charles, are negative presences, and through jealousy and other reasons he cannot accept them. For example, he cannot accept that his ex-lover Lizzie and their queer friend Gilbert have shacked-up together because of a kind of ‘soul love’. Towards the end (without giving specifics away), some of those demons and goddesses have been accepted, including his life-rival, his cousin James, who manifests in a new and remarkable way to him. But the ending is deliberately not neat or tied-up (and some demons persist), as Charles says: ‘Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.’

As Burnside mentions, the novel also has ties to The Tempest and Charles also ‘rather theatrically adopts the pose of the Romantic loner, confronting the wild forces of the natural world, in his pools, his land, his sea.’

It’s a long time to spend in the voice of one character, 538 pages, but it never feels padded-out, there is no superfluity. He eats, he remembers, he drinks, he plots, he shares, he swims, and people die. They die and they go away. There is grief. There is grief and doubt. There is hope – nature, goddesses, no ending…

What’s next?

I’m halfway through my overseas trip and I’ve read several classics. I’m not sure which I’ll write about next, but perhaps a ‘lost’ classic I discovered in Edinburgh. I’m also finishing Richard Yates’ Cold Spring Harbor and Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And I’m keen to start on Muril Spark’s Memento Mori and Vladimir Nabokov’s Bend Sinister. Internet time has been limited on this trip, but I’ll have plenty of drafts ready to throw up on the blog when I get back.

Have you read Iris Murdoch? Is this your favourite? I’m keen on the idea of The Unicorn and The Black Prince also.

20 classics in 2011 #6: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

I’m reading 20 classic, modern-classic or cult books in 2011. Read more about this project here.

Why did I want to read it?

I love Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and dystopian fiction in general. Plus, the sections of my work-in-progress that people have read have been compared to Brave New World. I thought it was about time I read it (also to make sure I’m not accidentally riffing on it too much).

When was it published?

In 1932. Several years before Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) and in many ways containing more progressive ideas. Huxley wrote to Orwell in 1949, congratulating him on his book, and predicting:

‘Within the next generation I believe that the world’s leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.’ (via)

My edition was published by Longman, and of course there are many editions (see Aus, US, UK).

What’s it about?

Set in London in the year 2540, children are grown, rather than born, and are conditioned via Pavlovian methods and sleep-learning to be citizens of different castes. The idea is that society will be stable, and that people will be happy. They are essentially free to pursue pleasure through multiple sexual partners, soma (a form of medication/recreation) and ‘feelies’, which are movies with added sensation. The Model T Ford and Sigmund Freud are the fathers of this society. Ford is their God.

Bernard is a bit of an outsider both physically and mentally. He thinks his fellow Alphas are ‘morons’, and he fights internally against his own conditioning. He is able to see that happiness is a construct, and is therefore, of course, not happy. He sees the value in delaying gratification, and in being alone (both blasphemous in this society).

Bernard takes a woman he likes, Lenina, to a Savage Reservation, where they meet a woman from their World who had been lost there, and her son, who has learnt English through Shakespeare and who is curious about this place he’s heard so much about. The second half of the novel then deals with ‘the Savage’ and his encounter with civilisation.

Tell us more about the author.

Aldous Huxley was born into an educated family in Surrey, UK in 1894. He was educated at Eton college and was disqualified from service in the WWI due to an illness that left him mostly blind for two to three years. He would struggle with eyesight problems all his life. He studied English literature at Oxford and graduated with first class honours.

Huxley began writing seriously in his 20s. His first published novel was Chrome Yellow in 1921. Brave New World is probably his most famous novel. He moved to Hollywood in 1937 and became interested in Vedanta (and introduced Christopher Isherwood into the circle of Hindu Swami Prabhavananda). He earned a bit of money as a screenwriter, but his synopsis of Alice in Wonderland was rejected by Walt Disney ‘on the grounds that “he could only understand every third word”. (via) Huxley was at the time beginning to experiment with psychedelic drugs as an experiment in the search for enlightenment. I’d like to read that synopsis…

Huxley famously requested and took LSD on his deathbed in 1963. He was 69.

So, what did I think? Does it deserve to be a classic?

‘What fun it would be if one didn’t have to think about happiness!’ – World Controller Mustapha Mond

For a book that was apparently completed in just four months, Brave New World is almost shockingly prescient, dealing with issues of consumption, conformity and complacency. The idea that citizens will be conditioned to be able to fulfil themselves through the means available in order to create stability (as opposed to through threat or punishment) is even more relevant today. Other aspects are dated, of course, such as the psychoanalytic overtones, and the hypnopaedic ways of learning. But then again, some people do still buy into ‘subliminal learning’!

The retro-future aspects are still enjoyable, aesthetically, such as the fact there are lift operators, and helicopters are the advanced mode of transport. It’s like seeing the DOS computer systems in Blade Runner. You can’t read a futuristic novel written in the past and not think about what has and hasn’t come to pass, and what might by the date in which it’s set. There is still an environment in 2540, for example, where as any futuristic novel written today would surely grapple with the issue of climate change.

Bernard is a great character, both inside and outside his society – conditioned by it, like everyone else, but also fighting against it. He has a weak personality, and a large ego, and is easily buoyed by popularity and praise in the rare instances it is bestowed upon him. I think readers of the novel over time would have related to his character, particularly in the earlier chapters, when everyone else is loosening up and having a good time and he feels something is a little off. He is painfully aware of himself and the way he’s feeling. He is interested in ideas of the benefits of feeling pain and of delaying gratification – ideas I’m fascinated by in this era of rampant consumerism. Natural human desires have always been ever-renewing, but what happens to us when they can be fulfilled easier and easier? Huxley deals with the way dissatisfaction or boredom might set in with soma, where citizens can take a little drug-holiday. Soma reminds me of both valium and ecstasy. It calms, and it also creates heightened sensation. Bernard is too aware of its effects (but he still uses it). The Savage refuses to use it.

I enjoyed the ideas, too, about the way we are constructed through language – about how powerful language is. In the brave new world, all ‘old’ texts have disappeared, because they are unnecessary and will interfere with the conditioned ideas. A language of worship to a commercial god has replaced them. But the Savage, too, is constructed by words. His ideas about the world come from Shakespeare. He cannot reconcile himself with the (normatised) promiscuity of the world, and repeats phrases like ‘impudent strumpet!’ from Othello. He thinks and speaks in Shakespearian, and so becomes subversive to both his Savage society who do not read in English, and to his mother and civilisation, who are conditioned to think in specific oppositional ways. There is an Oedipal undertone, too, where he tries to kill the man in bed with his mother. His love and disgust for her is then transferred into his love and disgust for Lenina. He does not wish to ‘defile’ her, thought she literally throws herself at him. Conditioned to be sexually open, she doesn’t understand his response at all. The Savage is a tragic character. The greater message, here, I think, is that none of us escape some kind of ‘conditioning’ through language, during our socialisation process.

I was quite disturbed by the Savage’s repulsion of Lenina, though it is justified in the story. I was worried about a parallel message of nostalgia for female chastity and virginity. I suppose Huxley could have wanted to explore these thoughts (as he’s exploring the dangers of excess in general), and that’s also why Linda, the Savage’s mother, is rendered so repulsively (not just to the civilised, but to the reader). Lenina is a character who, if the novel were written now, I believe could have been developed further. Her tiny awakenings were due to the male characters she encountered and her desire for them. She could be more active, now.

I underlined and dog-eared much in Brave New World and I think it’s a novel that will continue to make people think, and definitely to entertain. I forgot to mention that it’s funny – particularly in relation to Bernard. The style is a little all-over-the-place, but it works. It’s a brilliant piece of art.

‘What you need,’ the Savage went on, ‘is something with tears for a change. Nothing costs enough here.’

What’s next?

I’m currently reading The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch. It’s a big’un so be patient with me.

Have you read Brave New World? What are your thoughts? I have to say that the mood of Nineteen Eighty-Four is quite different. I remember it well: a certain weightiness. Is there a dystopian vision you prefer?

20 classics in 2011 #5: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

I’m reading 20 classic, modern-classic or cult books in 2011. Read more about this project here.

Why did I want to read it?

I’d always heard Oscar Wilde was a wit, and the supernatural element of the story appealed to me.

When was it published?

It was first published in 1890, as an issue of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. A later revised edition was published by Ward, Lock and Company in April 1891. I read Gerard’s Digit Books edition, yellowing pages, blurry typeface and all (pictured). It has no ISBN and no date but is tied in with ‘current film success The Trials of Oscar Wilde’ which came out in 1960. See the front and back cover here. There have, of course, been multiple editions of the book (see Aus, US, UK).

What’s it about?

Basil Hallward, a painter, is infatuated with young beauty Dorian Gray. Basil’s friend Lord Henry Wotton (or ‘Harry’) is introduced to the subject by Basil, and becomes fascinated by the young man himself. The witty and cynical Harry goes on a rant to young Dorian which makes him think about the value of youth and beauty as he has never done so before:

‘You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats… Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed.’

We learn later that Harry will tell all and sundry (good-naturedly) his views on love, life, art and beauty – but this speech has a profound impact on young Dorian Gray when he lays eyes on Basil’s portrait of him. ‘A look of joy came into his eyes, as if he had recognised himself for the first time.’ The full force of Harry’s speech hits him, and in his realisation that he will wither and wrinkle, will lose the golden tinge in his hair, that the ‘scarlet would pass away from his lips’, he feels a sharp and intense pain and he cries that he would give his soul for the chance to be the Dorian in the painting – the one who would be always young.

And after his first unforgivable act – cruelty toward a young woman with whom he had been in love – he sees that his wish might have come true.

Tell us more about the author.

Wilde was a flamboyant writer and intellectual; a poet, journalist, essayist and playwright. He was apparently a wonderful conversationalist, possessed of a biting wit. The Picture of Dorian Gray is his only novel. The Importance of Being Earnest, a play, is perhaps his masterpiece. He was born in Dublin, went to University in Dublin then at Oxford, and lived and wrote in London after that. He lectured on aestheticism in America in the 1880s.

He was an aesthete, homosexual (though he did marry, in 1884), and was involved in the decadent movement. Wilde was convicted, in the mid 1890s, of ‘gross indecency’ and sentenced to two years in prison and hard labour. He fled Britain after that, and wrote about his difficult time in prison in The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He died, after converting to Catholicism, in Paris at the age of forty-six.

So, what did I think? Does it deserve to be a classic?

It’s by no means a perfect novel, but it is perfectly enjoyable. There were two aspects I liked best: the challenging engagement (particularly by Lord Wotton) with aspects of art, beauty, aestheticism and decadence; and the aesthetics of the novel itself – the way moments of drama are stylised.

The novel seems to warn against taking ideals of youth and beauty too far, so that they become depraved and soulless. Lord Wotton supposes (though it’s hinted by Hallward that he is being cynical) that beauty does indeed equal goodness. That you can judge a book by its cover, in other words. And Dorian’s story does actually confirm this, because his ‘soul’ in the painting becomes more and more hideous, depending on what nasty things he has been up to. But Dorian is already paying for taking the aforementioned ideals of youth and beauty too far. For believing there is nothing else.

In some way it feels as though Wilde was playing out some of his own internal conflicts though this. He did idealise beauty and decadence. I haven’t read any of his essays so I’m not an expert on his views, but the novel plays out a kind of duplicity: between a view of the value in beauty, and a humorous sending-up of this same view. Was he teasing himself? Was he both the wizened but misguided Lord Wotton, and the enthusiastic but secretly devilish youth Dorian Gray?

As mentioned I also enjoyed the way the dramatic moments of the novel are rendered. The dramatic moments are quite a contrast to the laid-back, observant wit in the dinner party conversations between Wotton, Gray and others. In one:

‘The bright dawn flooded the room, and swept the fantastic shadows into dusky corners, where they lay shuddering. But the strange expression that he had noticed in the face of the portrait seemed to linger there, to be more intensified even. The quivering, ardent sunlight showed him the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing.’

These moments of terror and anguish make really fun reading, and reminded me of reading something like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, though the other parts of this novel felt more modern.

Speaking of modern, I can’t help but wonder what Wilde would have thought of much of later modernism, or even post-modernism: a (20th Century) modernist novel might not have the same finality, the same dramatic ending, and the reader might also go where Gray secretly goes in the novel. (Most is only alluded to, until we visit an opium den with him). What would Wilde have thought of decadence, or aesthetics, had he lived to see the consumer age? It adds a layer to the reading of this book now, because concepts of ‘beauty’ have truly been warped (eg. consider the role of nature in art, back then). Concepts of youth, however… What would he think of expensive wrinkle creams and extreme cosmetic surgery? If you think about it this way, he was almost writing science fiction. Impossible and misguided goals of everlasting youthfulness, to maintain an appearance of success.

Dorian thinks heavily on the ‘monstrous’ forms of self-denial ‘whose origin was fear’, speaking mainly of religion, and wonders about a new spirituality and a new Hedonism ‘that was to recreate life, and to save it from that harsh, uncomely puritanism… It was to have its service of the intellect, certainly; yet it was never to accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience.’ He goes on, ‘Its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they may be.’ So it was to live without consequence, but not necessarily in a materialistic fashion.

The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

I could just go on quoting this book, and as I write this I see that I got much more out of it than I realised. I haven’t even mentioned the epigrams yet, which preface the novel, chanelling early forms of existentialism in the way they say: there is no meaning (but there is). Here’s a couple that preface the book:

All art is at once surface and symbol.

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Here are some of his epigrams online.

I can’t stop:

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.

Okay Oscar, I get it. Cheers.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

But seriously, despite everything above, read The Picture of Dorian Gray just for the sake of chattering with, nodding along to and arguing with Lord Henry Wotton.

What’s next?

I’ve finally read Brave New World. Maybe next I should tackle a biggie – Moby Dick? Or perhaps some Iris Murdoch, as I’m super curious about her.

Have you read The Picture of Dorian Gray? Are any of the film adaptations good? I’d be keen to read a bio on Oscar Wilde someday too…

20 classics in 2011 #4: Heroes and Villains by Angela Carter

I’m reading 20 classic, modern-classic or cult books in 2011. Read more about this project here.

Why did I want to read it?

I only heard of Angela Carter, strangely, when I started my doctorate and attended a seminar about one of the stories in The Bloody Chamber. It included a hand-out with an extract of the story. Feminist, erotic fairytales with layers of socio-political meaning, written in an enjoyable, playful manner – they sounded like heaven. I was also, recently, looking for something allegorical to read as part of a mini-research task within my thesis. I decided to go with Angela Carter, but I didn’t mind which text. I just wanted a taste of her. I came across Heroes and Villains for just $5.50 in Berkelouw Books, Newtown, and it seemed perfect.

When was it published?

Heroes and Villains was first published in 1969. My edition is a 1986 King Penguin with a wonderfully symbolic cover: a black snake, coiled around and ready to strike into the heart of a dewy, pink flower. There are other editions available (see Aus, US, UK).

What’s it about?

In a seemingly post-apocalyptic world, Marianne grows up among the Professors, who live in gated communities and are protected by Soldiers from the Barbarians attacking and from the diseases of the Out People. Marianne is somewhat an outsider, and bored, within her community, so when she has the opportunity to escape with a fearsome though surprisingly intelligent Barbarian, she does.

What she finds is that though the Barbarians live roughly and putrescently, they have their own rituals and structures within society, still patriarchal, and Marianne is both frustrated by, and caught up within them. The man who she ran away with, Jewel, is both a myth and a man. He seems just as trapped by his role in his tribe and his performances of honour and duty. Their relationship is one of seething hate combined with small moments of vulnerability and tenderness. Both are in conflict with themselves, each other, and the rules and structures (within the chaos). There is much erotic tension and conflict as Marianne is both repelled by and drawn to Jewel.

Tell us more about the author.

Angela Carter is an absolute legend. She was a postmodern writer in that her novels and stories worked within the traditions of genres such as science fiction, fantasy, magic realism and romance, but she also appropriated and renewed them with social and political comment. She started publishing at 26 (in 1966) and was very prolific until her sadly early death at age 51 in 1992, from lung cancer.

She travelled a lot after leaving her first husband and living in Japan for two years. She was a writer in residence at many universities around the world, including the University of Adelaide, South Australia. She married again in 1977 and had one son.

Besides novels and stories, she wrote articles, screenplays, radio scripts and a libretto. Totally inspiring.

So, what did I think? Does it deserve to be a classic?

Carter would probably come more under ‘cult’ than classic, and it isn’t her best-known work, but I do hope her books continue to be reissued. Heroes and Villains was a completely visceral read: dirty and sticky and stinky. It’s future-gothic, in a way. The buildings are broken-down baroque things with runaway moss and hanging bits of meat, and slippery, mucky stairwells. There are towers, there is mud, there is hunger, but then there are flowers and streams.

I enjoyed its pessimistic outlook, and I liked the fact that the male character, Jewel, was also trapped by a kind of fear outside what he knew. No one could act according to their own will – nor could they figure out their true motivations, or what came from need and what came from desire (and what the difference really was).

The book was written 12 years after Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, probably the most famous post-apocalyptic story of the Cold War era. But Carter was, as mentioned, working within and also appropriating a known genre. The narrative is entirely accessible, the writing is rich with imagery:

‘He picked her up; she climbed inside his jacket as much as she could and would have climbed inside his breast to vanish there if such a thing had been possible. Her nostrils were full of wood smoke, the rank richness of horses and the disturbing odour of imperfectly cured animal hide, all of which combined in Jewel’s particular perfume, but when she looked upwards towards his face, she saw no palpable structure, only a series of hallucinations.’

Marianne often sees people and space in a distorted way, particularly Jewel. She almost nonchalantly reflects, at times, on the fact that he may not be real. Even when they are making love, she cannot see his face. So there is a layer to the novel, too, about reality and unreality and the creation of stories, structures and myths. This also gives the novel a metafictional bent. The Professors wish to see the Barbarians as savage and fearful, and exotic, so they have nothing to fear within their walls. Within the Barbarian tribe is an ex-Professor, trying to create his own structures, symbols and myths – through fear.

It’s po-mo, it’s feminist, and you know what, it’s also just damn sexy.

Here’s a great BBC (audio) interview I found with Angela Carter, if you’re interested: ’Refusing to write about the bourgeoisie and their cleaning ladies‘.

What’s next?

The Picture of Dorian Gray. For reals.

Have you guys read Angela Carter? I know my Facebook page went nuts when I said I was reading her. Which novel or collection is your favourite? Are there other female authors of the era as delicious and political as Carter, whom I should check out?