Mason & Dixon

Thomas Pynchon, 1997 (November 2015)

  This is a mad book, and wonderful to read. It’s dense and took me months to get through but it’s so much fun that I read the last hundred pages with some sadness, knowing that it was approaching the end.

  What I liked about it was the sheer imaginative creation of so much colour and incident, such weird characters and a setting that brings out not only the founding myths of the USA, but also contemporary issues like racism, paranoid fantasy, imperfect science vs. popular culture. The stories of the increasingly powerful mechanical duck, or the fortune-telling English dog, mysterious palaces in the forest, or the subterranean world are so numerous that by the end I just wanted to go back and check them out again. Some are so striking that they stay with me, such as the confusion and loss felt when the calendar was reformed to eliminate 11 days. But this is a book that academics can (and do) study to understand the meaning of the details, while casual readers can read just for the pleasure of the stories. You can get hung up on the details and the archaic language, but it’s more fun just to enjoy it as a fireside story with plenty of incident.

  It is genuinely comic to read, including satirical portraits of English, American and South African class cultures. And yet it comes together in a touching way as Mason and Dixon work out their antagonisms and develop a kind of closeness and friendship. One of the themes that comes through all the mad detail is how the working friendship helps two very different men find connections with their societies and their families in tumultuous times.

  For me, the key theme and the central story in the book is the founding of America, so-called. The form of the book itself, written in a faux-18^th century style, is a first person narrative of someone who claims to have been at some of the central events leading up to the American Revolution. Yet his story is obviously made up to entertain his listeners so that he can stay on living comfortably with his relatives. He makes up absurd and impossible, but highly entertaining, incidents involving Franklin, Washington and other Americans, as well as their British colonizers. I love the idea that the political discussions of the time all take place in coffee houses so thick with smoke that people cannot see each other and are intoxicated with caffeine, nicotine and alcohol – they don’t know who they are talking to or what they are talking about. They best political strategies don’t come from the intellectuals, but from pirates planning insurrection in the warehouses along the New York harbour. The talk of liberation comes in a society in which casual racism, slavery and aboriginal massacres are endemic. This points to the myths that underlie the foundations of any nation, and the unreliable but convenient stories that they are based on. It’s good that it is Pynchon, a respected American intellectual, who shows this, because it would be unwelcome from many other voices. It is curious that the theme, which to me seems so significant, has not shown up in any of the reviews I’ve read of the book. I think it’s also interesting that Pynchon ends the story on a meditative tone with Dixon’s family populating the new country and giving up the old country with its ghosts. Yes, it seems to conclude, there’s a lot of ridiculous storytelling going on, but let’s acknowledge that and get on with making a good life.

  In the end, I enjoyed this book so much that I look forward to reading more Pynchon, whom I have not read for decades. But first I’ve decided to read a real 18^th Century picaresque, Tom Jones. It’s been sitting on my bookshelf in a lovely leather binding of 800 pages, so it too will take some time to read, but there I look forward to another extended visit to the 18^th Century. 

If the Dead Rise Not

Philip Kerr, 2010, (June 2015)

This book is awful. Having read Philip Kerr’s first three novels in the anthology edition, Berlin Noir, I knew what to expect, so I was not really surprised that I didn’t enjoy this book. It had the same things that I liked and hated in the first novels, and I chose to read it because there are some things I like in it.

  Kerr’s historical description is detailed, concrete and sufficiently accurate factually that I’m willing to credit him with likely getting the life details right. So if you want to know how one negotiates life under a fascist bureaucracy, and that’s the sort of thing I am interested in, then there is a reason to read Kerr’s fiction. Of course, Kerr’s protagonist, Bernie Gunther, does much more than negotiate everyday life – he’s kicked out of the police for his support of the liberal goals of the Weimar Republic, but feels compelled as a hotel detective to look into the criminals in the hotel who are profiteering with the Nazi government. Under a tough exterior, he has an honest heart, but one he has to hide to survive the corrupt times. His frequently cynical, sarcastic comments can be read as an expression of the conflict he feels.

  Between the seedy bars and Alexanderplatz police station, the Olympic construction site and the Adlon Hotel, he covers a lot of Berlin, and later covers similar ground in Cuba. He shows the petty and major corruption, the ambitions and the avoidances that Berliners adopt to get by or to profit under the violent, anti-Semitic and racist nationalism of the Nazis. He paints a picture that is vile and gritty with no sense of hope except to just get through until things change. I imagine that that’s how a lot of people did try to survive.

  Unfortunately, Kerr overdoes the historical detail, so some passages read as if he found some interesting descriptions in his research, and wants to cram it all in. Curious as I am about the period, I don’t need exaggerated architectural description to get the point.

  What I don’t like about this book, and the earlier ones I read, are the clumsy, overdone “hardboiled” style in which it is narrated. Kerr adopts the most obvious characteristics of Raymond Chandler’s style without restraint, and embellishes them with grotesque exaggeration and unrelenting sexism. Written in the first-person voice of narrator Bernie Gunther, it’s inescapable and it’s too much. Where Chandler used a sarcastic wit to illuminate his character’s point of view, Kerr turns the style into caricature. By half way through the book, I began to skip the satirical asides because they added nothing to the characters or the storyline.

  Kerr’s characters are little better. They are stereotypes with little depth or development. When they do something unexpected, rather than think that there is a new side to a complex personality, I just think, where did that come from? The relationship that develops between Gunther and the American hotel guest merely seems absurd and unbelievable. The introduction of a string of American characters seems more of an attempt to build up readership in the USA rather than anything necessary to the storyline.

  I started the book as a light alternative to the fairly heavy novel I had been reading, but it’s not light or a pleasure to read. So I’m done with Philip Kerr. I’ll learn about Germany under the Nazis elsewhere.

The Paying Guests

Sarah Waters 2014 (May 2015)

I was not really taken by this book, although there are a lot of good things about it.

  It has Sarah Waters’ characteristic awareness of the roles of women and class in society, with its focus on an upper middle class lesbian in 1920s England. Written as an interior narrative, it shows the point of view of Frances, an anti-war lesbian of a privileged middle class, supporting her mother in reduced circumstances after the death of her brothers in the War and her father in its aftermath. She feels the personal loss, but also the social changes that the war has brought to England. Both of these changes are reflected in the fact of having to do her own housekeeping and take in boarders after she and her mother can no longer afford servants to maintain their large house. Nevertheless, she expects and receives deference from lower orders such as the police, and is conscious of the difference between her family and her boarders, who are of the rising “clerk class” but who are rooted in the even lower retail trades and manual workers.

  Waters also gives a strong sense of time and place, with Frances and her mother struggling to adapt to their restricted financial and social circumstances. From Waters’ concrete details of housekeeping chores, I can appreciate much more the work that goes into maintaining a household before modern appliances, and Waters’ concrete details, such as the path to the outdoor privy, will stay with me. She also shows clearly the life of a young educated woman living in London in the early-1920s. The language and point of view are an insight to the times, and seem to me to be quite apt.

  Waters also turns around the conventional police novel by showing the events of an investigation from the point of view of one of the subjects of the investigation. While the police do their slow, careful work, Frances knows what the truth is, and she agonizes about what they will discover. Her emotions as she is part of the investigation, and then in the subsequent trial are drawn out in exquisite detail – so detailed that the reader can feel the tedium and the crazy desperation of just wanting to get through it and waiting for it to end.

  It’s interesting to see Waters’ portrayal of the Frances’ life as a lesbian – she feels no moral ambiguity, just some natural fearfulness. She knows the social consequences of coming out in the 1920s, as well as the condemnation she will face from her mother. Nevertheless, she secretly maintains her friendship with a former lover and her lover’s new partner, and when she is drawn to her new upstairs boarder, she joyfully seduces and initiates her into an emotional and sexual relationship. The detailed interior description of Frances’ growing connection is very natural, with its hopes and contradictions.

  Unfortunately, I just did not find Frances a very interesting person. The story was fine as long as it was showing new details about the society of post-war London. But the despondent moping as Frances tries to figure out what to do about her relationship and then the investigation begin to seem endless. She struggles within her limited point of view, but sees no way out (probably a realistic assessment). We never get to see anyone else’s point of view, which might restore some interest. With a few hundred pages to go, I was counting down to the end of the book, hoping something would happen to pick things up. Possibly Waters wanted her readers to experience the frustration and tedium of Frances’ situation, but it just gets to be too much, for me at least.

  I like Sarah Waters, and will read her again, but I don’t think I could go back to this book.

Bring Up The Bodies

by Hilary Mantel, 2012 (March 2015)

Bring Up The Bodies was, for me, less interesting than Wolf Hall. What I liked in Wolf Hall was Mantel’s detailed picture of life and politics in an England changing from a medieval world to a modern one. It illuminated themes that are still relevant, such as the relationship between the individual and the state (in the person of the ruler), religion, science and economy. Most of these are shifted far to the background in Bring Up The Bodies, or absent entirely.

  What we do have is the story of how a ruthless political operative manipulates the machinery of the state for the benefit of his faction, as well as for reasons of personal satisfaction and profit. This of course remains a current theme and there is some interest in seeing exactly how Thomas Cromwell played the power game in the Tudor court (at least as Mantel sees it). But I find I am less interested in the grimy details of who lied to whom, or how a succession of victims is coerced to acquiesce in their own trials. Wolf Hall had a broader context that made for more interesting reading. Thinking of it now, it seems to illustrate the Stalinist purges and the show trials of the 1930s more than contemporary political manipulation (although no doubt there are contemporary parallels).

  It is interesting perhaps that Cromwell struggles so single-mindedly to amass power and wealth at the top of the political pyramid in a world that despised him for his common origins. He thinks frequently about how to protect himself should his political fortunes shift, and how to ensure his son a secure place when he is no longer there to arrange things for his son. (And his son does not seem to have the same strength of character of his father, although it seems that he survived to establish his own aristocratic line.) Yet we know that his predecessor and mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, ended up in the Tower, that the historical Cromwell was also arrested and executed. Mantel opens the book with a dream of Cromwell’s children falling from the sky, an image that recurs from time to time. In spite of this rather poignant perspective, though, Cromwell remains an unappealing character. And it is telling that his only friendly relationships seem to be with the foreign ambassadors whose ambitions he wants to block.

  In Wolf Hall, Cromwell was a more sympathetic figure as a man of science and reason, particularly as opposed to the fanatical Thomas More. Here, although Mantel uses personal details to reflect on Cromwell’s loss of his wife and daughter, or his hopes for his son, there is very little to make him likeable, particularly when he is so blatant in his personal and political scheming. And Mantel’s style of writing in the present tense with a third person pronoun, although it implies a very personal point of view, is rather distancing since a reader has to pay careful attention to keep track of who the pronouns refer to. Mantel’s rich and poetic descriptive detail does help to bring a reader into the time and place, but this time it was not enough to overcome the limited perspective.

  It appears that Mantel wants to create an iconoclastic portrait, a counter to the usual heroic focus on Henry and More. In this, I think she succeeds. No one who reads her books on Cromwell can think of Henry’s rule without being strongly influenced by the shape she puts on it. She creates a strong and detailed portrait of a dramatic figure from history, which perhaps justifies the awards she has won. It’s just disappointing that the portrait in this volume is not more engaging.

Second Person Singular

by Sayed Kashua (trans. Mitch Ginsburg), 2012

  For a view into the minds of two Palestinian Israelis, who could be stand-ins for an upper and lower class of Palestinians, this is a revealing story. Initially, it seems to be a mix of social satire in the case of the affluent lawyer who remains unnamed throughout, and personal angst in the case of the young social worker whose Arab name is close enough to a Jewish name that he sometimes slips into the unexpected luck of mistaken identity.
  It becomes clear early on that the whole story is one of identity – mistaken, appropriated, constructed, rejected identities within Arab and Jewish Israeli society, where it seems identity determines not only one’s social standing but much of one’s self and emotional health.
  The lawyer is a bit of a caricature – he thinks he has to struggle constantly to maintain a position at the top among the Palestinian lawyers, although why he has to be at the top is not evident. But it is his identity as a bright, self-made affluent Israeli from the villages, and he fears losing his status to the young lawyers coming behind him. He is so centred on Europeanized Israeli culture that it is a shock, and not entirely convincing, when he suddenly turns into the stereotype of a wife-abusing traditional tribal misogynist who sees wife’s virtue as key to his identity and his social standing. His obsession perhaps underlies how the tribal culture remains close to the surface of some Israeli Arabs, and it threatens to destroy the very status he wants so much.
  The social worker, Amir Lahab, I found a much more sympathetic character. His back-story, although not detailed, shows true pathos, someone who is rejected in his own culture because of his father’s actions, and who, as a result, rejects that culture, including his mother who wants him to become part of the village. With no culture, he has no future, or at least does not know what it could be. So he takes a dead-end job, which turns out to offer him the miracle of a new identity that fits him well. Significantly, in his new identity he finds success taking realistic photographic character portraits of Arab Israelis in the old town of Jerusalem.
  The contrivance that brings the lawyer together with Amir may be improbable, but it sets a suspenseful edge to the stories, and offers the contrast of their two positions: one clinging to a newly created identity while the old identity pulls him back, while the other rejects the old identity and slips into a new one totally at odds with his old identity.
  The only problem I have with the book is that the happiest outcome seems to be with the Arab Israeli who turns into a Jewish Israeli. This seems to suggest a message that I hope Sayed Kashua did not intend, that Arab Israelis might find happiness only when they abandon their old (tribal) culture and fully integrate into the new culture, secular but Jewish. Perhaps Kashua intended to imply that Israeli Arabs need to overcome their tribal traditions to fit into a modern culture, but it seems to imply that there is nothing to be valued in the traditional Arab culture. In fact, Kashua shows nothing positive in Palestinian culture – as it appears in the book, it is all tribal, misogynistic, narrow and without ambition. Perhaps Kashua does intend to imply that, and certainly those factors are worthy of criticism, but it does seem to me (an outsider who really knows nothing of Palestinian or Israeli culture) that that must be overstating the situation. I think there must be something between tribalism and abandonment, and not the self-satisfied self-deception of the caricatured lawyer.
  Nevertheless, I liked reading this book. It presents a convincing picture of Israeli Arab life in Jerusalem that I haven’t seen before, it’s engaging and the characters are interesting.

The Master

Colm Tóibín, 2004 (2015)

This is a masterful book about a masterful subject – Henry James and his writing. The book opens with an imagined nighttime awakening from which James thinks about his day and how it might go. In a few paragraphs, he condenses the tone and content that he then fills out and details in the rest of the book.

Though the book is called The Master, the title could almost be ironic. As portrayed by Tóibín, James is uncertain, often uncomprehending, self-doubting and self-deceiving. He misreads his support in London after his first and only play opens and fails on its first night, then flees to Ireland rather than face his friends. He allows a domineering acquaintance to push him into furnishing his home with items he doesn’t really want. He allows his servants to appear drunk and slovenly in front of guests rather than confront them. Most disastrously, he allows his closest friend, a woman, to fall in love with him, but rather than talk about it, he avoids her, leading or contributing to her recent suicide. (Following which, he manages to have himself appointed her literary executor, and secretly burns any compromising correspondence with her.) He has strong homoerotic feelings without even acknowledging them for what they are (understandable in the context of the times, when Oscar Wilde, whom James thinks shallow and clumsy, faces his own disgrace and imprisonment). Far from being a master, this view of James has him as a diffident, ineffectual stumbler.

Yet he observes and interprets what he sees around him as the basis for a lifetime of deeply sensitive, insightful literature. In spite of the frequent misunderstanding of his readers, his family and friends, he stays fixed to his conception of his writing. He thinks about style, themes, content for a variety of stories in the course of the novel (and it’s fascinating to see where well known stories like The Turn of the Screw come from – curious also to find out how much ghosts, both spectral and metaphorical, fit into his life and his writing). He pulls themes from his own complex relationships with his family and friends, and from what he understands, or is willing to admit, about them. Underlying much of the characterization of James is his repression of his homosexuality, which leads to his need to control and hide so much of his life from others and from himself. And yet, while struggling to repress, or at least control, his life, he somehow has enough awareness to use his observations as fodder for his stories. He is, in fact, a master in his writing. It is fitting that the book ends with James explaining to a friend that “the moral … is that life is a mystery and that only sentences are beautiful.” After which, he sends his friends home and returns to his writing.

Tóibín himself writes with a control and insight that seem equal to James’. As a skilled writer himself, and author of a previous book on James, I can see his fascination with the details of James’ life and writing process. He uses James’s own style, complex and internal, on James himself, a kind of homage to a literary master. He traces the development of James’ thinking, his development of story ideas, his resentment of other people’s misinformed views of his writing and his appreciation of the few who do understand him. In James’ interior monologues, Tóibín traces the shifting relationships and sense of control, just as James would do in his own writing. I wonder how much of this is Tóibín’s imagining of the literary process taken from his own insight as a masterful writer, and how much comes from his research into James’ thinking from James’ letters and other personal writing. I think it must be at least as much the former as the latter, for this is a work of imagination, not simply a knitting together of various stories from James. And, as always in fictions about real people, the stories are about the author’s characters, not the people they are modeled on.

In the end, the book gives me an insight, not only into James’ life, but also into his stories. It makes me want to read more James. But it also introduces me to Tóibín as a skilled novelist that I want to read more.