The Uncommon Reader

By Alan Bennett, 2007

I thought this would be an entertaining light read when I picked it up at a library book sale. It was, and happily it was also a thoughtful look at how reading changes the reader. The Queen, out of curiosity, pops into a library van that had stopped in Windsor, and borrows a book. She discovers that reading for pleasure is quite different from reading for work, or reading the literature that she is expected to know.

I liked the fact that the Queen’s first guide to reading for pleasure chose books mainly because he thought the writer was gay. (Okay, I identify, as I expect does Alan Bennett.) As a starting point to a diversity of interesting writing, it works. And it’s entertaining to imagine how the elevated figures in the Queen’s circle of contacts might react to the thoughts and characters she finds in many books.

Reading, the Queen discovers, can create empathy by allowing you to identify with a range of different characters or at least to see into aspects of their lives that would otherwise be completely unknown. It also becomes unsatisfying and leads an empathetic reader to want to do something about what they see. Reading leads to writing and to action.

This is a nice fantasy, of course. Most people read for an escape from their reality. The ones who are drawn to empathy and action are the empathic and dynamic ones. Their own priorities are reflected in what they see when they read. I don’t know if the current resident of Windsor Castle has the empathy and dynamism that Bennett gives to his Queen, although she clearly has not taken the path that Bennett draws here. In spite of romanticising a feudal institution, though, I enjoyed reading this and imagining the power of literature as Bennett describes it.

The Luminaries

 By Eleanor Catton, 2013 

This book, for me, starts out better than it ends. The first sections are engrossing, detailed and mysterious. I didn’t know what was happening, but it unfolded small piece by small piece, slowly creating a picture of some unexplained events experienced by 12 men in an isolated setting on the west coast of New Zealand. Like a long 19^th century novel by Wilkie Colllins, it builds a mystery from the fragments that each participant sees, while a listener tries to puzzle it out and understand how it relates to the mystery in his own life.

In the sections that follow, the characters find more pieces of information, and intriguingly end up in a big courtroom scene in which they conspire to present a false story to the judge. But in more and more brief snippets of the story, the villain dies mysteriously, the conspirators continue to live frustrated lives and the hero and heroine seem drawn together by unknown forces. The last sections are so brief that it felt as if the author got so tired of writing out the first part that she was no longer interested in finishing the novel. Or perhaps she is telling us that her novel is not an entertainment, but it is a highly wrought literary creation and ought to be appreciated as such.

In part, this reflects one theme of the novel, that everyone has their own piece of the story, and it can never come together in a complete and satisfactory way. But here, it seems as if Catton’s objective is to deliberately alienate her readers and tell them that the interesting story she began with isn’t worth her time, or theirs, and they should just deal with it. Or instead, appreciate the artful way she has structured the story, like the phases of the moon or the spiral of a fern. There is a great deal of artistry that I admire in the novel, but the structure feels more like clever trickery than artfulness.

What I do admire particularly, in addition to the intricate plotting, is the detailed picture Catton creates of a small 19^th century frontier town. Reading her description of Hokitika gives me a parallel to the goldrush towns of British Columbia, which I’ve grown up with but not seen portrayed so well. Catton has researched the language and lifestyles so thoroughly that I can visualize the settings and how the characters fit into them. Even the details of claims registration, banking and shipping insurance fit plausibly into the narrative in a way that seems accurate and precise. Many writers describing details of contemporary society are not as successful. The characters are also plausible and varied. I assume they fit the astrological structure that Catton imposes on the book, although whether they do or not seems to have no bearing on the story and I was not interested enough in that aspect to try to work it out.

Perhaps because of the frontier setting, the range of characters is limited. The women characters are largely overshadowed by the men, with only two women showing any kind of agency even though the story revolves around them. Two Chinese laborers play small roles but both have the depth of a backstory. The Maori character has the least development of the central characters. He comes and goes at his will and is portrayed with sympathy, but we know nothing of his background and little of his motivation. If Catton is trying to avoid appropriation of an indigenous character, she ends up coming close to stereotyping him as the silent unknowable native. Perhaps this is how her 19^th century characters saw him, but her readers see all the other characters through 21^st century eyes, and it seems inconsistent to let him remain a shadow.

In spite of my criticism, I enjoyed reading the book. It filled up my Christmas hours pleasurably even if I didn’t fully appreciate the literary construction that it seems to be.

The Parcel

 By Anosh Irani, 2016 

Anosh Irani has a poetic style that shows the inner torments of a transgendered person living in hellish circumstances in a brothel in Bombay. He gives the reader a sense of the terrible violence and abuse done both to and by his subject, Madhu.

This is a terrible story and yet valuable for giving insight into the life and the feelings of Madhu. She chooses castration and a life of prostitution because she knows that her family will never accept her. She has understood that there will not be a place for her in her society, and decides that the support and love she finds within the brothel community is the best life she can choose. She discovers that the love there is mixed with exploitation and abuse, and her only physical comfort is with a man who lives outside the community. Even within the transgendered hijra community, there are castes and rivalries, and many hijras despise those who turn to sex work. She longs for her absent parents, and like the others in her brothel she dreams of a life where she can be who she is, even knowing how unrealistic that is.

In a twisted sense of caring, when asked to prepare a young girl to be raped, Madhu thinks that she can save the girl from a life of violence by teaching her to deny herself and her own feelings – exactly what Madhu cannot do in her own life. She takes pride in her ability to prepare young girls without violence, and feels that she is saving them from a worse alternative. By training the girls to be numb, she thinks, there will be no need to use violence. This will not only spare the girls direct physical violence, but it will leave them with a spark of hope and prevent them from going crazy. Is this merely rationalization on Madhu’s part, or is it a reflection of what she has had to do in her own life?

Irani also voices the rationalization of Bombay’s proper citizens, who know but avoid thinking of the violence and abuse in the city’s prostitution district. They think that by allowing rape in the brothels, they are protecting other girls and women from the violence of men. And so they choose to ignore it, or to avoid dealing with an unpalatable subject.

This is of course a difficult read, both because of the pain in Madhu’s life, and because of the prospect that the girl faces. Madhu and the others in the brothel refer to her as a parcel to be prepared for opening, and that helps them distance themselves from what they are doing. Irani also focuses mainly on Madhu and her struggles, leaving the girl’s world to be seen and guessed at from outside. Without this, it might have been too much to deal with, as perhaps it should be. Reading this, I had a feeling like the feeling I had on reading Umberto Eco’s The Prague Cemetery, that aspects of the story are too repellant to want to read, but here, unlike Eco’s novel, I was also engrossed in discovering the hijra’s life in Bombay, how she chose to live in the brothel and how she turned to sex work and numbing her pain.

And in spite of the evocative language that Irani uses, his narrative can also be distancing. Except for Madhu’s inner thoughts, Irani describes most situations in a detached matter-of-fact style, whether the cell in which the girl is kept or the revenge that a brothel’s leader inflicts on the man who violated her. Madhu’s experiences and feelings are vivid and the language gives a sensuous picture of the parts of Bombay as Madhu sees them.

I was disappointed in the ending, though, which seemed melodramatic, and the liberal tone in the Epilogue seems simply out of place. I suppose that Irani had to so something to close the story, and a realistic ending could lead readers to despair. After all, there are few happy endings in a story like this, whether it takes place in Bombay or in North America. The book explores a life and a perspective that is rarely shown and calls for empathy where it would not often be offered. And that is enough in a well-written novel.