Lemprière's dictionary

By Lawrence Norfolk, 1991

This extraordinary tour de force kept me reading despite bogging down in a few places. The book ranges from poetic atmospheric descriptions to the gritty urban realities of 18^th century England, broken up with scenes that introduce magic realism and outright fantasy. Although occasionally it slows down in confusing sidelines, other sections run like a fast-paced thriller. Norfolk juggles multiple points of view so deftly a reader sees interrelated stories without being aware of a shifting ground for observation.

The book opens with a wonderful description of young John Lemprière’s visually impaired world where everything is fuzzy and imagined until his father gets him a set of glasses. When he sees clearly, everything becomes sharp, terrifying and ugly. Perhaps because of his horror of real life, he focuses on classical Greek and Latin literature, which brings him to connect with the beauty and the love of his life. This turns out to be the first step of a strange and complex future.

The story shifts from a realistic storyline that builds on the details of 18^th century life to fantasy elements that are described with the same kind of concreteness. It’s as easy to visualize the rainy cobbled alleys of London that John walks through as it is to imagine the mysterious caverns where the Cabala plots his fate. There’s a tension between the historical details of the story, which feel quite realistic, and the fantasy that Norfolk fits into those well constructed scenes. While the strange entertainment of the Stoneeater seems plausible, I resisted the automaton figures created to entertain wealthy guests at a party. And while the sailing ships seem real enough, I had to wonder how they could travel along a busy coast without attracting attention. Is it at all plausible that an Indian assassin would live for months in London spying without resources or even knowledge of the city?

Constantly questioning the details weakens the more realistic plot points, such as the secret deal between the English and the French traders or even the scheme to have John write his dictionary of classical characters. If these elements seem questionable, then what does one make of the whole story? Is it purely a work of imagination with tenuous links to reality? This undermines my interest in the story. By contrast, I found the equally fantastical pirates’ collective entertaining, so perhaps what I’m resisting is the notion of a powerful cabal that set in motion a plot to control someone’s fate. I’m more willing to indulge in a fantasy where people respect and support each other.

And while I admire Norfolk’s stylistic skills, I did find the complexity of the story lines and characters so dense that I often had to ask how a plot incident was related to anything or just where a character fit into the story. This, I think, is what led me to wonder at times why it was taking so long to get through a section. While everything seems to connect up in the end, and part of the story is figuring out how it all works, I couldn’t keep everything in my mind. That led me to wonder what the point is, and if I shouldn’t just skip ahead. I did persevere, but a few more signposts might have kept my mind on track.

Some of the story’s themes suggest that Norfolk wants to point to a social or political context. The story sets the rise of trading capitalism and imperialist exploitation against the deliberate sacrifice of the Rochelais and the fury of the mobs in London. The vengeful Indian assassin ends the greed and destructive manipulation of the Cabala in a completely fantastical series of events. This, however, contrasts with the idealism of the three ship’s captains who restore the gold to its resting place. There’s also the search for the truth of John’s and Juliette’s parentage while John finds comfort in compiling a dictionary of fables and legends. The book is so dense that it would take a thorough re-reading to draw these themes out and try to make sense of them. Unless these are all playful fantasies with no given meaning.

Despite my reservations, Norfolk’s imaginative scope and verbal energy made the book a rewarding, if demanding, reading experience.

Queer As All Get Out

By Shelby Criswell, 2021

This was a pleasant, enjoyable read with a lot of facts about some diverse folks pulled from queer history. I was happy to see a diverse range of figures, some of them fairly obscure and not known to me. But it was a treat to see the details of South African Simon Nkoli’s life, as I met him many years ago and didn’t know what had happened to him since. It was sad to find that he had died relatively young, but he accomplished so much successful organizing for black and working class people in South Africa.

Covering ten figures in a short graphic story is naturally going to mean that the coverage is simplified, especially when a lot of space is also given over to explanations and resources. I would have appreciated more details and depth, but I think the book is intended as a high-level introduction for people new to the queer community, and perhaps their allies. The graphic treatment makes it very approachable, so I’d say that it succeeds in its objective.

I think this would be a good book for American queer youth groups to explore and talk about their history and the issues in their lives. The author’s linking story shows how a young trans man can live a good life even while recognizing the homophobia that exists in his home state of Texas. The strong American focus, though, makes it less useful for readers in other countries.

Birnam Wood

By Eleanor Catton, 2023

Some things in Eleanor Catton’s novel are clever and well observed, but I found that these broke down in the last third of the book, where it becomes an action-driven suspense story.

I felt that the first parts of the novel were like a contemporary Middlemarch (a literary allusion that makes more sense to me than Macbeth). In the first third of the book, we are introduced to a range of contemporary characters and their relations to each other and to their small society. Catton takes readers into their heads as they try to work out what they want from themselves and from each other. Shelley’s conflicted feelings toward Mira, Mira’s charismatic leadership undermined by self-doubt, Tony’s idealistic quest for ideological purity as well as personal recognition make an interesting setting for an examination of radical personal politics.

I especially liked the comic earnestness with which the characters in the Birnam Wood collective try to work together to create the social relationships that they want to see in an ideal society. Naturally, these conflict with their material conditions under capitalism, with their emotional lives and with their differing interpretations of their ideals. These scenes play with such authenticity that I imagine that Catton has lived through similar experiences herself (as I have, and recognize clearly). Catton’s wit in describing the scenes and the interactions brings a humour similar to that in Eliot’s asides in Middlemarch.

Catton goes into a few other characters, but with much less depth that suggest she is filling out a few stereotypes rather than creating living characters. Owen and Jill are plausible as good-hearted New Zealanders who have build up a small fortune in business, but we don’t know anything about their business practices, and that’s relevant here. Robert Lemoine as the socially charming, sociopathic billionaire is provided with childhood trauma to twist his psyche, but it doesn’t get him beyond stereotypes. Mira shares some of Robert’s manipulative traits, but not his skill or self-confidence. And the humorous insight that Catton brings to the Birnam Wood group is absent here.

So the suspense builds in the second third of the novel when ambitious, idealistic Tony works out Lemoine’s world-dominating plot. It goes full paranoid in the last third, and over the top in the last dozen pages. The suspense-movie plot takes over the psychosocial drama, although Catton makes a valiant effort to pull the characters’ psyches to the front. Mira is relieved when she realizes that if the Birnam Wood ideal blows up, it absolves her of responsibility. Jill goes back to her New Zealand self-reliance to protect her home from the evil (American) intruder. Does Catton intend it to be meaningful when the nouveau bourgeois has to defeat the superrich billionaire to save her world? Does Tony survive through his determination, idealism and backwoods skills? It’s all a bit confused by the end.

Catton gives realism and texture to the story in the details of everyday life, as she did with the details of frontier life in her historical novel, The Luminaries. She highlights the communications technology that has become both a tool and a trap in contemporary life. The useful, but slightly creepy, location tracking that Shelley uses to keep touch with Mira becomes a life-threatening danger in the hands of a malevolent techie. Yet it is central to plans of both the idealist and the sociopath. This, I would say, is a more likely threat to society than the private ambitions of one billionaire, although Catton doesn’t take the story in this direction.

I had a similar response to reading this novel as I did to The Luminaries – it started out interesting and intriguing, but become rushed and less interesting by the end.

Wide Sargasso Sea

by Jean Rhys, 1966

I’m not completely sure what I think of this novel. It didn’t grab my interest particularly, although I’m interested in the themes around colonialist influence on England and English literature and I can enjoy a novel that explores grand passions. But the storytelling here is a bit abstracted, leaving a lot to be inferred. And the shifting narrators – it sometimes takes pages to identify who is telling the story – further distances the reader.

The novel explores the way racism and colonialism destroy the possibilities of a loving relationship between the Caribbean heiress Antoinette Cosway and the English landowner Edward Rochester. Both seem to have lost the money that supports them: Antoinette’s family lost its wealth when slavery was abolished in the British Empire; Rochester’s English estate is agricultural and his family has not caught on to the industrial revolution. Antoinette’s mother marries the wealthy Mason, who arranges her marriage to Rochester with presumably a rich dowry. Antoinette initially refuses Rochester, but comes to love him after he reveals his vulnerability. He hates the colonial isles and their history, but comes to accept Antoinette’s beauty and spirit and wants to resettle her in England. Rochester’s mistrust of islanders and his inherent racism lead him to jealous resentment when Antoinette’s mixed-race half-brother tries to undermine her. In her frustration at his growing coldness, she turns to rum and magic potions. This goes badly and leads to violence. Eventually Rochester convinces Antoinette to come to his estate in England. She hates the unfamiliar land and the cold, and he has her confined to an attic suite. And this is where Antoinette becomes Rochester’s mad wife Bertha in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.

The somewhat disjointed narrative reflects the disorientation that Antoinette and Rochester feel. They are pulled by emotional, social and economic forces that they can’t withstand or even recognize. Antoinette loves the sensuous richness of the islands, but the racist and colonial tensions isolate her from the divided island communities, except for a few long-time Black family servants. In the end she has no one except the husband who has been poisoned against her. Rochester is drawn to the beauty of the Jamaican country, but fearful of the forest he doesn’t know and people he doesn’t trust. He thinks the England he knows will be a refuge, but his wife cannot live there and becomes increasingly delusional. This makes sense of the book’s title, which I didn’t entirely understand until I looked it up. The Sargasso sea is a patch of the Atlantic between the Caribbean and Britain that forms a gyre driven by four Atlantic currents. It’s actually clear and productive, but has a reputation for tying ships up in pools of seaweed. Like the Sargasso Sea, Antoinette and Rochester are pushed in different directions by forces beyond them, which pull them under and drown them.

Rhys doesn’t fill in the details of these stories. Instead, she leaves it to the reader to imagine the confusion, misunderstanding and resentment that Antoinette and Rochester feel, in spite of a love that seems to develop between them. But the love is short-lived when Rochester feels uncomfortable in Antoinette’s Jamaican household, especially when dealing with black servants whom he does not trust. His isolation and discomfort make him easy to manipulate by Antoinette’s half-brother. Her intimacy with her black servants, her love of the tropical forest that he finds foreign, and her inability to meet the English social customs that he knows play into his mistrust. His English reserve increasingly turns into a cold distance, which she does not understand. When she turns to her black servant Christophine for extra-normal help, he thinks she is trying to poison him. And it’s not entirely clear whether Christophine is trying to help or hinder their relationship.

Because so much of the novel is left to inference and interpretation, I found that I did not feel for the characters and their evident tragedy. Perhaps I’m just not drawn to the plight of the slave-owning colonists and their inability to find emotional satisfaction. I may be more sympathetic to the fires that the Jamaicans set to Antoinette’s family home and to the one she later sets to Rochester’s home.