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.

The Stranger’s Child

By Alan Hollinghurst, 2011 

I enjoyed reading The Stranger’s Child, mainly because of the glimpses it offers of gay male life at a series of points in the 20^th century. Or more narrowly, it offers pictures of gay male life in the affluent middle class in England. The first scenes are in the romantic Edwardian period before World War I blew apart the comfortable life of men’s colleges and secret societies. Then, the post-war society of the 1920s is disrupted with social decay and a somewhat bewildered questioning of values. In the upheaval of the 1960s, young men begin seeking each other out but hiding their sexuality when gay male sex was still a criminal act. This develops in the 1980s to a gay biographer looking into the tantalizing details that the relatives of his subject don’t want to talk about. By the end of the novel in the early part of the 21^st century, a campy society of same-sex marriages and funerals is commonplace, but old homophobic values still linger.

The thread that ties them together is Cecil, a charismatic and somewhat creepy young man in the first story who dies a war hero and minor poet. His relatives and numerous others reflect on his life at each point in the 20^th century as his poetry becomes famous, then a cliché, then a source for popular and academic re-examination, and finally the subject of an obscure book search. The connection to Cecil’s story becomes very thin and disputed by the end, which is probably the post-modern point of the book. In fact, the sections dealing with the biographer become almost comic as he puts his interpretation on very little evidence, while other characters actively strive to maintain their preferred interpretation. So, while giving these glimpses of gay life, Hollinghurst is also pointing out how subjective they are, and how they cannot be read simply from our current viewpoint.

While the glamour of Cecil’s privileged background is initially attractive, Paul in the later episodes is to me the most interesting character. He comes from a poor, working class town where homosexuality would be scandalous in the 1950s, and it’s interesting to see how he lives his life in his bedsitting room and banking job, but works his way into the gay literary elite of the TLS. (The picture Hollinghurst gives of the inner TLS culture seems satirically apt.) Paul is the only central character who is not from an affluent background and he seems to struggle with his identity, both as a gay man and as a literary fringe dweller. Class consciousness remains embedded in English society through all the changes of the 20^th century. It merely has different expressions at different points.

The title refers to a poem by Tennyson in which a stranger, looking at things in a new way, discovers anew something that had been lost. In the novel, the characters in each of the vignettes look on the subject and see it in a new way from their own contemporary perspective.

Not a lot happens in any of the vignettes. In a way, they reminded me of the way Henry James writes a scene – the interest is on the changing psychological relationships of the characters more than it is on anything they actually do. The characters have a lot going on internally, from their perspectives at different times and in their different relationships to homosexuality. The early scenes at the Two Acres cottage also reminded me of the domestic middle-class scenes that E.M. Forster described in some of his novels. Ironically, it all ends with a bookseller’s agent looking for saleable clues and finding none. The legend of the charismatic Cecil fades away, much like the gardened cottage that he memorialized in his most famous poem, left a crumbling site for re-development in the final scenes.

As I recall in his previous novels, Hollinghurst writes in the voice of a detached, ironic observer. This allows him a satirical and at times comic tone, although I find the detachment blocks any real engagement with the characters or the limited story line. The short length of each of the segments keeps the book moving, but it also limits a reader’s engagement. There was enough interest for me in the varied scenes of gay lives, but I think it would have been quite tedious to follow any of the characters on their own.

Suite Française

By Irène Némirovsky, 1942/2004 

What a wonderful range of people Nemirovsky created, with such depth that even minor figures don’t come across as caricatures or stereotypes. And it must have been a particular challenge to avoid stereotypes when she was writing during the German invasion of France and her own experience of evacuation to what she hoped would be a safe retreat with her children.

The first section of the book shows the chaos of the flight from Paris as the Germans appear ready to occupy the city. Everyone has different thoughts about what it means for them, from the wealthy bourgeois packing up to move to their country home, the effete artist worrying about his porcelain collection, but especially the Michauds, left behind by their boss but still expected to find their way to their work in Tour and thinking themselves lucky to at least be together. Although there are elements of satire poking at the venality and self-centredness of the more privileged classes, Nemirovsky still shows their humanity, worrying about a son or a parent. This section covers such a range of people and what they discover about themselves and their comrades under wartime assaults that it made me think of the characters in War and Peace as they contemplate war and its outcomes. Tolstoy, however, doesn’t manage to develop any characters below the nobility except as stereotypes, while Nemirovsky has a wide social range.

The second part of the book focuses mainly on the relationship between an affluent countrywoman and the German officer who boards in her home. Even in this section, though, Nemirovsky succeeds in showing a range of complex characters, French and German, drawn as individuals with families and futures at risk. This section, however, makes a contrast with the chaos and confusion of the first section. Here, village life is orderly, regular and commonplace, even with the German soldiers stationed in the village. The German soldiers who don’t speak French, for example, struggle to buy mementos in the local shops as if they were tourists. The French resent their presence, but can’t help treating them as friendly visitors and customers. It’s ironic that when the Germans arrange a grand celebration on the anniversary of the capture of Paris, they tactfully avoid mentioning the reason, although everyone knows it, and the French turn out to watch the dancing, music and fireworks. Everyone tries to act as normally as possible, even while resisting the situation where they can. This gives an interesting insight to life under enemy occupation, where attempting to live a decent human life can later appear as collaboration.

In the second part of the book, it almost seems as if the characters are all together in the upset of the war, until the killing of a German soldier forces everyone to see that they are on different sides, whether or not they choose to be. Nemirovsky touches on wartime collaboration, but in the book as it exists here, she doesn’t have room, or perhaps experience, to explore it as the post-war French writers did. She was killed before the issue of collaboration acquired its later dimensions.

It is tragic that such a humanist writer as Nemirovsky would become a victim of inhuman Naziism as she was working on the remaining parts of the book. The excerpts from her letters to her husband and her publisher are tragic. It’s particularly poignant when in her notes for the book she promises never to take out her bitterness on individuals – she shows the Germans, as well as French people of various classes, as complex real people. For a book written while under the threat of annihilation in war, it’s remarkable that Nemirovsky’s humanism is such a strong theme. Based on this book, I’d look forward to reading some of her earlier books.

The portrait of Mr W.H.

 By Oscar Wilde, 1889

“Art … can never really show us the external world. All that it shows us is our own soul, the one world of which we have any real cognisance,” Oscar Wilde’s narrator says in this book. As Wilde so often does, he captures intriguing insight in an epigram. What you see in art says more about you than about the subject.

The subject of Wilde’s novella is simple (though the telling is convoluted). The narrator describes a talk with his friend Erskine, who explains a theory created by another young man that Shakespeare wrote his sonnets for Mr W.H., an imagined “boy actor” from Shakespeare’s troupe at the Globe Theatre. Erskine says the story is a fraud, but the narrator becomes obsessed with the idea and analyzes many of the sonnets to show how they support the theory. This part is an interesting reading of the sonnets, giving a way of understanding them that was completely missing in my long-ago reading of the sonnets. In my own reading, the sonnets themselves are often difficult and obscure because the twisted syntax and allusions make many sentences hard to follow, but the story got me to go back and re-read some of them. 

I was interested to read the narrator’s (that is, Wilde’s) analysis because I like the idea of Shakespeare having what Wilde calls an intimate male friendship and writing impassioned poetry to his friend. (Although I wonder if the boy actor would understand the poems any better than I did.) And I read the novella as Wilde’s own interest in the notion of an artist falling for a beautiful young male lover, as he did later in his own life. This novella looks like a disguised way to bring homoerotic attraction to the late-Victorian society that later convicted Wilde for the crime of expressing that love physically. So this is me liking the idea of Wilde liking the idea of the narrator’s obsession about Shakespeare being drawn to an inspiring male muse.

As the story advances, the narrator develops a fascination with the imagined boy actor, his life and the so-called “dark lady” of one group of sonnets. He proposes a re-ordering of the Sonnets to support his reading. He writes up his theory and shares it with his friend Erskine. Erskine reverses his own initial scepticism and declares he is convinced, but the narrator suddenly decides it was a foolish and nonsensical obsession. Erskine adopts the obsession and pursues it further to a tragic but ambiguous end.

This is where Wilde’s epigram on art comes in. Wilde’s narrator reflects on it in after he rejects the boy-actor theory, suggesting that the narrator didn’t want to acknowledge what he saw in the theory. The narrator could not accept his own attraction to Shakespeare’s passion because he recognized that it revealed too much about himself. Erskine initially rejected that same recognition, but then followed it to a tragic result (presaging Wilde’s tragic result for the same obsession). 

The story has a further reflexive turn at the end, as readers then have to ask what their own response to the story says about themselves. While this self-recognition seems unproblematic for most modern readers, I wonder if Victorian readers were open to it. The story was published only in a shorter magazine form, but Wilde was unsuccessful in publishing the longer version that is available here.

Oliver Twist

By Charles Dickens, 1838

 I think I like Dickens’ truly comedic books more than his melodramas. This one does have many of his engaging features, like situations that evoke a reader’s sympathies, characters so bad that they become villainous archetypes, and settings that match the characters most extreme emotions. And (almost) everyone gets their just deserts in the end, however contrived that may seem.

What makes this novel problematic is, first, that poor Oliver is such a weak character. He has little character of his own beyond his innate sense of rightness and injustice, and since he is always the victim of injustice it takes little virtue for him to object to it. I think that everything that happens to him, whether good or bad, is imposed on him by other characters, from the governors of the orphanage or the evil den of thieves to the wealthy and principled family and friends who save him. Perhaps they would have been less inclined to save him had he not had such a pure and noble character, although they do try to save Nancy, too. But this is also a problem. Oliver is pure and noble only because he was born of a pure and noble mother, not because of anything he learned in his miserable upbringing. But Nancy has a common birth and she is too far gone to be saved, even though she is generous and protective toward Oliver. Dickens’ Victorian morals reserve good character to those of good birth, and only they are saved. I don’t know if Dickens was conscious of this, but it puts his sympathies for the working classes on a very limited basis.

Nevertheless, this is a social satire, and a pointed one. The contrast between Oliver’s true saviors and those who are appointed to help the orphans is acute. The self-serving, greedy middle-class governors of the orphanage and the small business owners who bully and exploit their child workers are little better than the criminal gang that Oliver escapes to – perhaps worse, as Oliver seems generally well-fed and warm with Fagin’s gang, and enjoys the company of Charley and Jack the Artful Dodger. Of course, the gang does threaten and intimidate him into thievery that Oliver clearly wants no part of. He only avoids them by the luck of being captured by good-hearted saviors who turn out to be the only people in London who can discover his true story.

In Dickens, it’s always the characters that make the story memorable, and their strength makes Oliver himself fade away. This story presents the pompous Bumble and the avaricious wife he ties himself to, the cheerful Dodger, the truly nasty Bill Sikes and his unhappy partner Nancy, and the conniving Fagin. These are such colourful characters that they overshadow the purity of Mr Brownlow, Harry and Rose, and even Oliver himself. The villains are always more colourful.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to ignore the anti-Semitism that colours Dickens’ portrait of Fagin, whom he commonly simply calls the Jew and shows hovering over his hoard of stolen treasure. The stereotype of the Jewish criminal miser leaves an unpleasant taste. Fagin only stops being a caricature in his final days when he faces death and Dickens shows his disordered torment with surprising sympathy. 

The Victorians had quite a taste for maudlin sentimentality, and that is one of the forces driving the story. Dickens’ characters and his descriptive writing elevate the novel beyond that, but modern audiences must have a hard time getting beyond the sentimentality. I suppose that’s why modern adaptations like the movies and the musical leave a lot of the story line out to create a celebration of the characters that is fun, if not very close to Dickens’ original.

The Way The Crow Flies

By Ann-Marie MacDonald, 2003 

I am in awe of Ann-Marie MacDonald. She brings together so many current themes, makes them dramatic, and makes them matter to me as a reader in a fluid and coherent storyline. Some elements of the story are intensely uncomfortable, and they are intended to be. Others raise provocative ways of looking at the mid-twentieth century that may not be new, but are insightful. She offers no simple resolutions, but nevertheless takes readers on a satisfying journey with some interesting characters and compelling stories.

The central character, Madeleine, is nine when we meet her, and we see a new home through her eyes. Unlike the over-knowing kids in some books (and movies), she sees and understands, or fails to, in a way that seems to me to be consistent with a nine year old, and her vision is fascinating. She does not understand a lot of what she experiences until she becomes older and tries to make sense of how it has marked her. The fact that she is a tomboyish, mouthy lesbian makes her perspective more interesting, especially as she adopts the voices of her smart-ass cartoon characters. The picture that MacDonald gives of her relationships with her friends and rivals seems completely plausible. As a successful adult queer woman, she later finds her childhood both a source of comedy and a painful impediment to maturity. Her knowledge and insights seem so right-on that it’s hard not to see MacDonald examining her own childhood for a realistic picture of Madeleine’s psyche. (And in some regards, they do parallel MacDonald’s own childhood, but not, I hope, in the traumas that make up the story.)

While Madeleine is interesting, so are the other protagonists, her parents. Her Acadian mother is the image of a 1960s housewife, and MacDonald shows that that means – organizing the household so that her husband is never troubled. The image of her hiding her cleaning clothes so that her husband need never imagine her as less than glamourous is perfectly telling. I never thought to be interested in the inner life of an air force executive officer, but Madeleine’s father Jack also has to struggle with a cruel morality. He makes his choices and pays a price, one of the themes of the book.

Hard moral choices seem to be the central theme of the book, as all of the central characters have to face decisions and painful consequences. This sets a personal framework within the context of the Holocaust and the ’60s space race (or the arms race), the Vietnam War, anti-queer discrimination and prejudice against both outsiders and Indigenous peoples. When the policing system comes into the story, it’s hardly surprising that even a conscientious officer follows the prevailing current in the wrong direction. While no one ends up without damage, MacDonald does find a positive outcome for some. We can only hope to be among the lucky ones who survive the damage.

While these are big and complex themes, MacDonald also manages to bring many other ideas into the plot, including trust and espionage, loyalty and truth, family, grief, pop culture and the news media, nature, and a distinct Canadian perspective on it all. Un Acadien errant stands in as a succinct summary of the storyline. It’s amazing how MacDonald uses philosophical observations on these subjects to move the plot and reflect on her characters.

At times, I felt that MacDonald was writing the story like a Hitchcock movie. The plot moves along like a movie, balancing quick cross-cut edits with slow building tension. I think the novel reflects her success as a playwright. Even the crow’s-point-of-view asides are a deliberate intrusion, an invitation to step outside of the plot and think about what the story means.

I’m disappointed that MacDonald has written only two novels, because I’ve read her first one, and I’d like to read more of her.