Martin Jones's Blog, page 3

The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing – Rocket Man Meets Lovely Rita

I once went to a wedding where the bride and groom’s first dance at the reception was to the Elton John song Sacrifice. Strange choice I thought. ‘Into the boundary of each married man sweet deceit comes calling and negativity lands’. An interesting lyric, however, suggesting that marriage creates a new boundary as a condition of not being alone anymore. Two work colleagues have boundaries that do not exist for a married couple. And a married couple have boundaries that do not exist for two work mates going out for the evening. This sort of irony runs throughout Doris Lessing’s first novel, The Grass is Singing.

Here’s another song for you – Lennon and McCartney’s With a Little Help From My Friends, where someone keeps wanting to fall in love, but actually gets by with help from their friends. In The Grass is Singing, Mary Turner grew up on a farm in South Africa, but moves to the city and spends a contented few years doing office work, and getting along quite happily with her wide friendship group. Then she overhears some gossiping women remarking on the fact that she is unmarried and not as young as she used to be. Mary reacts by rushing into marriage with a farmer she meets at a cinema, moving out of the city to his remote farm.

Mary’s story goes from A Little Help From My Friends to Sacrifice. No more casual lunch meet ups for her. Out on the wide open spaces of the veld, Mary lives behind a new boundary. And as in Sacrifice, sweet deceit comes calling. It all ends in her murder. This is not a spoiler. We know from the beginning that Mary gets murdered and we know who did it. The question is what happened to get there?

We get there really through the contradictions of human relationships. Mary can only be accepted into white rural society by subscribing to the notion of white superiority. But Mary can only be accepted into humanity in general by accepting that the notions of her white rural society are vile nonsense. She can choose a sort of deluded friendship with her fellow white farmers, or a universal fellowship, specifically with her native servant. But the more that fellowship calls her, the more isolated she is from her own society, and the more harshly she behaves trying to live by its delusions of superiority. There is always a boundary it seems.

Reading a book is a kind of relationship. In some ways it can be a less real and intense alternative to reality, a pleasant meet-up for lunch. In other ways it can offer something more dramatic than reality. Both options are on offer here.

Generosity: An Enhancement by Richard Powers – the Science of Happy

Generosity: An Enhancement is a story about a troubled former writer, Russell Stone, who, after some moderate early success, has suffered a crisis of confidence. He ends up editing magazine copy, and teaching creative writing on a short-term contract at a college in Chicago. One of his students, an Algerian refugee called Thassafit Amzwar, comes to fascinate him. Her level of happiness and contentment is so marked that it might rise into a category known to psychiatry as hyperthymia. After news of this happy girl gets around, a genetic research team becomes interested in her, believing she might possess a ‘gene for happiness’. Generosity was published in 2009, a quick internet search revealing that this was a year seeing significant advances in the science of genetics. The book reflects a time when understanding of the human genome was increasing to the point where it might soon be possible to choose the characteristics of a baby.

The author Richard Powers hovers behind his book, occasionally making enigmatic appearances to comment on the characters he has created. This might come over as a fancy, postmodern-literature trick if it didn’t fit so well with the issues the book considers. There’s a feeling in Generosity that people might not have to accept for much longer the whims that fate deals out. Richard Powers presents a scenario where people have lived, in effect, as characters in a novel, at the mercy of their author. They have had no choice about the looks, intelligence or inherited diseases they are born with. That time might soon be over. Characters have the potential to become their own authors, controlling their own destinies. But before they get above themselves, those same characters also have to accept that control is contradictory. Think about it this way. Advances in genetics might seem to offer the prospect of humanity deciding their fate, but those advances actually give power over the vast majority to a tiny group of scientists who are the only ones who actually understand the science. Are they up to such a responsibility? Or are they in the situation of a writer like diffident Russell Stone, who finds the writing he is supposed to control taking on an unpredictable life of its own?

This is a book of big ideas from someone who clearly knows lots about literature and science. But for all that, I did not feel Generosity was a vehicle designed to show off its author’s cleverness and knowledge. I mean it is clever, and there is a great deal of wide-ranging knowledge. But there is something else, a feeling that while authors might appear to be up there in author heaven, deciding destinies, they are in fact – if they are any good – also down here with everyone else, from Nobel-winning scientists, to people who have no idea about the science, and have to look it up on Wikipedia, and even then are not much the wiser.

The result is a book that reads like a kind of low-key, brainy thriller, not with good guys and bad guys, but with guys whose good intentions end up making them into ambiguous guys. I would recommend.

Possession by A.S. Byatt – Writing Gods and Reading Angels

The job of a reader in the early days of literature was to admire, study, and learn. The only book on the shelf was the Bible, with an additional offering, after a while, of the rediscovered works of apparently superhuman Greek writers. The idea of having a go yourself was almost unthinkable. It was against the natural order of things. Echoes of this outlook remain in the academic world of modern times. A.S. Byatt was a prominent academic, before she became a writer. In her 1990 novel Possession we meet academics living in the shadow of the writers they study, in this case a pair of fictional Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. But as we get to know these writers through their poems and letters, we see that they are no different to the people who study them. Ash and LaMotte read each other’s work which feeds into their own. Writers and readers are not different species, with the blessed former up there, and the many latter down here. It’s a two way street. People seemingly hanging onto the coattails of others are actually helping to fashion their fancy coat, as something they can both wear.

Possession is very enjoyable, full of excellent fake Victorian poetry by fictional poets, and interesting ideas alongside down to earth romance tropes – such as two young people getting thrown together by a snow storm. The book is extremely sophisticated, but also enough of a romance novel with obvious scenarios and highly unlikely plot twists, to exist as a book with a human voice, serving to remind us that people rather than literary gods write and read.

The Seventh Son by Sebastian Faulks – A Wild Cat Hides In Your Pet

The Seventh Son is a 2023 novel by Sebastian Faulks, a sci-fi story set in the near future, about a human genetic experiment and its aftermath.

As an aspiring writer I often look at the websites of literary agents. A lot of them will say they are interested in promoting under-represented or diverse voices. Reading The Seventh Son I thought those agents might be interested in signing Seth, the book’s central character, who is unique in having some of humanity’s distant past implanted in his DNA. Ironically, however, Seth looks like someone the agenting world would presumably feel is over-represented – male, white, middle class, Oxbridge educated. Seth even takes the name Ken as an alias. I saw the Barbie movie recently. There are lots of different incarnations of Ken but they are all Ken. This book, supposedly about a unique individual, is actually more about how much people share.

I once visited the British Wildlife Centre in Kent. One of its jungly enclosures housed a wildcat. An information board described the wild cat as endangered, before qualifying this with the admission that wild cats are so genetically similar to domestic cats, that it’s hard to say if wild cats are endangered or doing very well in a slightly different guise. Seth, the central character of The Seventh Son reminded me of that wild cat, a lonely individual, maybe one of the last of his kind, who nevertheless is hard to tell apart from millions of other individuals who are doing very nicely, thank you.

As for the science in the book, some of it is made up. However, I did do a bit of reading and found the book might reflect a reasonable scientific position in a general way. Chris Stringer, a leading authority on ancient humanity suggests that former human species might have been absorbed into present Homo sapiens.

“If you add up all the Neanderthal DNA in the world today in everyone you could probably reconstruct 40% of the Neanderthal genome….” (Quoted in IFL Science, Why Are We The Only Surviving Human Species? 31 Dec 2024.)

So even if some of the science is fictional, my feeling is that there is a reasonable basis for Seth, who is unique in his recreated DNA and yet can easily pass as a normal person rather than being some kind of Frankenstein’s monster. A lost wild cat can be there in today’s domestic pet.

The Seventh Son is an interesting book, relevant to our times when the book industry, along with culture in general, is fragmenting into different enclosures. Rather than a book for everyone, there is more of a feeling that everyone must have their own book. The Seventh Son is a bit of a corrective to that, using human difference as a way to show what humanity shares. It reads like a thriller, carrying a reader along. And that reader could be a generic, white middle class man with a university education, or some other one-of-a-kind individual. There is much more of an overlap between those two people than we usually allow.

The Barbie Movie – Ken Making Friends With Ken, and Barbie

I have just caught up with 2023’s Barbie, a film where there are lots of different Barbies, all called Barbie, and lots of different Kens, all called Ken.

After having a bit of an existential crisis during a dance routine, Stereotypical Barbie leaves Barbieland with Beach Ken, who jumps uninvited into the back of her pink convertible. They head to real Los Angeles, where Ken discovers the patriarchy. He takes this back to Barbieland, where he sets up his own version, important elements of which are riding horses and dressing up like a rock star. The Barbies respond by turning the Kens against each other. They do this by offending the Kens’ egos during their beach serenading of the Barbies with Matchbox Twenty’s song, Push. Barbies listen for a while before moving to another Ken, causing devastating jealousy.

Following this debacle, there is a touching scene as Beach Ken and Stereotypical Barbie talk, Barbie telling Ken that he needs to find his own identity, beyond that of her boyfriend, or some kind of ridiculous bro. And that’s the thing – the unexpected philosophical twist of this charming film. Ken, in all of his incarnations, is Ken. After the beach serenading scene, when the Kens decide to fight each other, they have to decide which Kens are the enemy, and which are allies, a tricky task when they are all Kens. So maybe Ken would learn something by accepting that there is sameness in his variety. Ken’s jealousy is like one branch of a tree having a problem with another branch. Note the wall being built in the desert between Barbieland and the real world. What does that make you think of in the early 2020s? What does that suggest about creating division between people where none need exist?

So Barbie is about both finding identity and overcoming identity’s false limitations. Barbie can be President Barbie or housewife Barbie, black or white, different shapes and sizes Barbie, but she shares in the essential Barbieness. And Ken can be all sorts of Ken, but he can share in the essential Kenness. In the end Ken and Barbie can be themselves, but be with each other.

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell was published in 1936. Wikipedia tells me that a Harris poll in 2014 found it to be America’s second favourite book, behind the Bible. When I did English with American literature at university, Gone with the Wind wasn’t included on any reading list. All these years later it was with some trepidation that I downloaded a Kindle copy. A bit of initial review reading had revealed accusations of racism in some quarters. Was this book the equivalent of a gun? Guns are popular in America, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea for me to buy one.

Nevertheless, I started reading, finding myself in Georgia in 1861, where huge fortunes are made growing the valuable commodity of cotton using cheap slave labour. The resulting society is one of extremes, wealthy and poor, coarse and refined. Those at the top show off their money with fancy clothes, big houses, or perhaps by cultivating the image of gentlemanly intellectualism. Parallels between wearing fancy dresses at extravagant parties, and sitting around reading Shakespeare, immediately give a feel for what will become a major preoccupation of the book – the nature of value. If this book were racist, for example, one lot of people would be portrayed as better and more valuable than another. Does it do that?

This is a long book and there are so many examples you could reference. But from the early part of the story, showing the South at its decadent height, there are unexpected parallels between the role of slaves and pampered white women. Mammy the black nanny is stuck between plantation matriarch Ellen on the one hand, and Ellen’s head-strong, teenage daughter Scarlett on the other. Mammy has to carry out Ellen’s instructions with regard to Scarlett, even when Scarlett doesn’t want to do as instructed. Theoretically Mammy would be expected to obey both conflicting sets of demands. Considerable guile is necessary to navigate this treacherous situation. Then there’s Jeems, a servant to the Tarleton twins – not allowed to listen in on white conversation, unless his masters tell him that’s what they want him to do. The rules of good behaviour keep changing. And interestingly this is the same for privileged women. For a respectable young woman, winning a husband means cultivating the image of a meek airhead, which is only relevant until the woman is married, after which she is expected to became a competent estate personnel manager looking after a combined household and business perhaps involving hundreds of people, all the while making it look like the husband is in charge. Women and slaves have to balance one set of demands against a totally opposing set.

This all takes on another dimension when war is declared over the issue of slavery, between the northern Union and the Confederacy of southern slave owning states. The Confederacy, deluded in believing its agricultural wealth can challenge the industrial power of the North, suffers a terrible series of defeats, throwing it into a kind of post apocalyptic scenario worthy of Margaret Atwood. What do bonnets or books mean when you haven’t got enough to eat? People and values swap places, as the world tips on its head. Former strengths are now weaknesses and vice versa. Scarlett, bewails the end of slavery, but doesn’t seem to mind that in the confusion she has more freedom to throw off the shackles that weigh her down as a woman. She becomes a mill owner and entrepreneur, something that would have been unthinkable before the war. She manages, at least partially, to escape social rules that are as harsh as anything found anywhere in the world. Following the death of her first husband early in the war, exuberant Scarlett is expected to effectively end her life, spending what remains in mourning. Her admirer Rhett Butler tells her about the former Indian practice of suttee, practiced among high caste women:

‘In India, when a man dies he is burned, instead of buried, and his wife always climbs on the funeral pyre and is burned with him.’ ‘How dreadful! Why do they do it? Don’t the police do anything about it?’ ‘Of course not. A wife who didn’t burn herself would be a social outcast. All the worthy Hindu matrons would talk about her for not behaving as a well-bred lady should—precisely as those worthy matrons in the corner would talk about you, should you appear tonight in a red dress and lead a reel. Personally, I think suttee much more merciful than our charming Southern custom of burying widows alive.’

Racism demands that one set of people is valued above another. That is just not the case here. If Gone With The Wind were a gun used to shoot someone, it could just as easily become a weapon that turns on the person who wields it.

So did I miss out when my American literature course passed over Margaret Mitchell? If her book was nonfiction it would no doubt be misleading. I mean, Rhett’s quote about suttee makes out this is a common practice in India when it’s a tradition almost entirely consigned to the past. But then no account of history is perfect. And besides that, Gone with the Wind is a novel, a fictional form, the best examples of which explore the fictions people deal in. And this novel both projects and undermines a smug, distorted image of closed-minded exceptionalism. Shakespeare is mentioned a number of times, and a play like Henry V, seemingly jingoistic, also subversive, does something similar. These are works of literature helping us to understand strange, interesting, often brutally self-centred societies, and also helping us understand people in general.

The book ends with those famous words, ‘tomorrow is another day’. This is the sort of book I will continue to think about, and people will continue to argue about. Tomorrow I might give it one star. Today, however, I’ll give it five.

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis – an Honest Fake

Lucky Jim is a novel by Kingsley Amis, published in 1954. It tells the story of young Jim Nixon, who is in his probationary year as a lecturer in medieval history at an unnamed provincial university. He loathes the pretensions of his colleagues, and wages a vendetta against the son of his boss, a second rate artist with first rate belief in his own genius.

And yet while those colleagues and egotistical artists are useless fakes, so too is Jim. He seems to hate his subject, only taking medieval history because it had been the soft option when he was studying for his own degree at university. He doesn’t like teaching, ignores the one conscientious student the university seems to posses, while favouring prettier, less able ones. He bluffs his way along with the rest of the staff, living in mortal fear of losing his detested job.

Meanwhile in his personal life he is in an uneasy relationship with Margaret, an emotionally volatile fellow academic, who seemingly tried to commit suicide following a previous failed relationship. Jim feels compelled to continue with her even after meeting another girl with whom he seems much happier.

These personal and professional tensions all lead up to a chaotic climax at a lecture Jim is obliged to give on the theme of Merrie England. He is expected to extoll the lost virtues of a society engaging in summer morris dancing and winter mummers’ plays.

I suppose, getting to the end, I was asked to accept that there was a difference between Jim’s fakery and the fakery he was surrounded by. While Jim was an honest faker, the other staff were of the dishonest variety, especially it turns out, Margaret – I will leave you to discover the details there. So then I had to ask myself, is it possible to have this sort of distinction between good and bad fraud? I then wondered, thinking of the bigger picture, if we are perhaps being asked to accept that novels are themselves a kind of honest sham? After all, Lucky Jim is rather self-consciously a novel, in the sense of having novel-like things in it, like an enemies to lovers scenario, and proving your love by racing to catch someone before they board a train at a station. Can you get more truth from this sort of thing than say, an academic paper on fifteenth century ship building? Maybe life is, and always has been something of a swindle. There was no age of innocence, no Merrie England. And there is no place of innocence. Universities are not some sanctuary offering the truth and fairness lacking in the rest of society. A university is just another work place dominated by favouritism, internal politics and saying what the boss wants to hear.

Maybe the fakery of a novel is the best way to get to the truth of such a situation. Maybe in the end Jim is lucky to be a character in a pretend novel rather than an academic at a real university.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates – What Happens When a Writer Doesn’t Write

Revolutionary Road was Richard Yates’ first novel, published in 1961. It tells the story of Frank and April Wheeler, who live a typical suburban life in 1950s America. They seem to have been sucked into a vacuous sort of existence, which they dream of escaping by moving to Paris.

So is this book a satire on 1950s American values? Well I wasn’t sure. There are plenty of references to boring working lives in the service of buying houses and ice-cream coloured cars. On the other hand there are some personal decisions going on here too. When Frank leaves university he chooses to take a boring, undemanding job in a business equipment firm, because that would leave him free to concentrate his attention on other more important work in his spare time. The thing is he never gets round to the painting, sculpture, composing, or writing to which his spare time was meant to be devoted. Does Frank blame society for a sort of personal laziness?

Revolutionary Road isn’t just a satire on 1950s American values, with America empty and materialistic while Paris represents some unachieved creative nirvana. In America or Paris, you just have to get on with some creative stuff. Maybe Frank Wheeler is the book’s author Richard Yates, if Richard hadn’t knuckled down in his home office and got on with his writing. In a way this bleak book offers grudging encouragement. You are where you are, and wherever that is offers an opportunity at fulfilment. You too can create a beautifully written, compelling, complex book like Revolutionary Road. That’s what I took from it, before getting on with some editing.

Enlightenment by Sarah Perry – Comets, Stars and Dodgy Quotes

The ‘cosmic question mark’ in an image taken by the James Webb Telescope

Enlightenment by Sarah Perry is a Booker Prize nominated novel published in 2024.

Thomas Hart, a journalist on a local newspaper in Essex, becomes fascinated by astronomy after his editor asks him to write a column on the subject. With a museum official, he investigates a nineteenth century woman, a past resident of a nearby country house, who may have been a keen amateur astronomer, and unacknowledged discoverer of a comet. The story follows Thomas’s investigations, and his attempts to accommodate religious feelings with both his scientific interests and the austere church he attends, which obliges him to hide the fact that he is gay.

This book is much concerned with making it appear that science and religion are not at odds in exploring life’s unknowns.

Was it persuasive? Well I don’t know. Some of the science religion parallels were certainly interesting. There was the irony of a rigid church dealing in universal mysteries, reminiscent of the apparently rigid business of science revealing all kinds of weird stuff, like enigmatic, shape shifting electrons that seem to be in two different places at the same time, (don’t ask) and a universe so vast that you can’t get your head around it. That said, I also felt the theme felt forced. Late in the book Thomas Hart ponders on a quote dubiously attributed to scientist Werner Heisenberg, of the famous Uncertainty Principle.

“At the first sip of the natural sciences you will become an atheist – then at the bottom of the glass God will be waiting for you.”

Thomas admits the attribution to Heisenberg might not be correct. From what I can see, doing an internet search, it’s almost certainly incorrect. This use of a very dubious quote to equate science and religion was indicative of straining too hard around this equivalence theme.

The book was better for me in the first half, poetic in its descriptions of astronomical phenomena up there in the sky above Essex. The second half was harder work. And as I say, the main theme sometimes seemed forced. Science revealing uncertainty is not the same as science revealing God, which seems to be the implication.

Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange – Inventing the Novel

Wandering Stars is a 2024 novel by Tommy Orange, nominated for the Booker Prize.

This is a book by an author of Native American descent about the destruction of Native American culture by European settlers. We see this process taking place over successive generations from the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, up to the 2020s.

The first and perhaps most interesting thing about Wandering Stars is that it’s a novel, self-consciously so, using many kinds of novel writing techniques – frequent changes of viewpoint, switches between third, first and even second person narration. The native tribes of north America did not have novels. Reading and writing were something Europeans brought with them. Reading is part of the regime of assimilation we see at work in a facility in Florida, something which massacre survivor Jude Star comes to love, amongst all the things he hates about what is imposed upon him. So a book about the destruction of native culture is itself a cultural form involved in its loss.

For me the interest of the novel comes out of this basic irony. The book certainly makes clear the tragedy of a people having their culture destroyed. But from that starting point, we get a very nuanced look at what culture and identity might mean. Confined to the Florida correctional facility, Jude Star is forced to read the Bible. He notes that the creation myth described in Genesis is similar to tribal myths, suggesting archetypes common to all people. The things that define us actually turn out to define other people too. For a book about loss of identity, Wandering Stars is surprisingly revealing about how indefinable that lost identity was. Native American society had no uniformity. Many hundreds of tribes each had their own languages, customs and varying ways of life. Cultural identity, apparently such an important thing to people, starts to evaporate once you try to pin it down. The people in the book who are really hardline about cultural identity are white supremacists – hardly a good advert for taking such a fundamentalist stance.

Reading Wandering Stars can be hard work, given all the point of view switches. You are not a passenger in this novel, carried along by an immersive reading experience. Maybe that’s useful given the context. Readers don’t just submissively receive. They have to be part of the effort perhaps? I thought the required effort was well worthwhile.