Amanda Brookfield's Blog, page 6

Much Missed Mastery

Pour Me: A Life by A.A. Gill

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


For years I have enjoyed A. A. Gill's journalism, especially his TV criticism which, much to the annoyance of my family, I often used to read out loud, so eager was I to share his genius with a wider audience. His mastery of the English language, the ability to pick exactly the right words in order to illuminate an original, often complex and invariably overlooked insight, remains unparalleled. I flick through the TV crit these days, missing him every time.

Given such admiration, I was of course interested when he published his memoirs a couple of years ago. I put off buying a copy, however, thinking I would get to it when I had more time. But time is a funny thing. You can run out of it. As happened to poor A. A. Gill himself, caught off guard aged just 62 by a cancer he called 'the full English' and which did for him in a matter of months.

So, on hearing of his untimely death, I went straight out and bought a copy of 'Pour Me: A Life'. I expected to like it. I just had no idea how much. It is not simply the writing itself that is so good - as succinct and striking as his journalism - but also the utter lack of self-pity with which he describes his addiction to alcohol, offering honest answers instead of easy ones as he tries to account for it. As a personality, A.A.Gill had a reputation for arrogance, but there is no sign of it here. Instead, he explains how every day after the near-death nadir he reached at the age of thirty, when he finally gave up drinking, felt like a blessing. His writing never ceases to entertain, but a humble gratitude at being alive shines through it; all the more poignantly given how close he was to the end.

The most astonishing aspect of A. A. Gill's achievements and skill as a writer is that he suffered all his life from the most acute form of dyslexia. I had no idea about this until I read 'Pour Me.' Written off as 'thick' in a brainy family, it meant that he had to work a thousand times harder to read, remember and be listened to, learning to store up every crumb of a fact that fell across his path in order to have an arsenal of information with which to defend and present himself to the world. Even at the height of his drunkenness, he says, he would have a radio on in every room so as to feed his brain with as many useful pieces of information as possible.

Late in life he was asked to return to his school to talk about dyslexia and how he had overcome it. He was terrified. But when he opened his mouth the most fluent celebration of the power and importance of the English language poured forth. Reading his rendering of it on the page brought tears to my eyes. I am tempted to quote the whole passage, (yes, I always find myself wanting to quote A. A. Gill - see above!), but will limit myself to an edited taster:

"English is the finest language ever coined, so exact and specific it can encompass a universe and split an atom. It is a thing of peerless beauty and elegance. It is heroic and mythic, has the strength to crack worlds and is as delicate and subtle as dew on a web. If you have English in your head you can already think things that people who don't have it don't even know they can't think. And no one can take it away from you."

Hear hear. I miss your words, A.A. Gill. Rest in peace.



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Protecting our Inner Life

Commonwealth by Ann Patchett

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


An excellent writer has to have the skills of an ace photographer: knowing when to zoom in, when to pull back for the wider shots, and how to make both just as interesting. Ann Patchett has this down to a tee. The opening chapter of 'Commonwealth' throws us deep into the minutiae of a christening party at which an unexpected injection of alcohol is making the parents forget they have kids. We are up close and personal among families and friends and acquaintances, watching them get drunk and seeing how they trip up. We learn smatterings of their back-stories as we go. Someone is a cop. Someone else a lawyer. Someone else a priest. During the melee an illicit kiss takes places, wrought by the spark of hands accidentally touching, skin on skin.

Oh-oh, I thought. Here we go. A story of adultery. I knew it would be well-written, with twists and turns. Mentally, I sat back for the ride. But the next thing I know Ann Patchett has pressed her pull-back button, and we have been fast forwarded many years to the consequences of that kiss: separation, divorce, re-marriage, more children, step-children, half siblings, different homes, different jobs. It was, quite literally, like the turn of a kaleidoscope. Best of all, it was utterly compelling. The kiss changes lives, as kisses can do. And as the story progresses this happens time and time again - micro-moments forging destinies; moments which have no visible significance as they are being experienced, but which have cumulative and momentous consequences.

For, what Ann Patchett recognises and illustrates so well, is that making sense of ourselves is a process that never ends. We are all at the mercy of incidents and decisions we are not equipped to appreciate fully until they are long done with. It is only when we look back that we can start to understand.

What made me enjoy 'Commonwealth' even more was that subtly woven into all this was the theme of story-writing itself, how the narratives of 'real' life make their way onto a page. So many readers think that all novelists do is experience something and then throw it into a book! But through her main character in 'Commonwealth' Ann Patchett quietly addresses this misconception, showing that while a story may be informed and affected by the emotional world of its creator, authors also need to protect their inner lives, to keep something back for themselves.



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Strength in Fragility

a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1..." style="float: left; padding-right: 20px">All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


One of the indicators of a great - as opposed to a 'good' - novel is when a story, following the paths of specific fictional characters, manages nonetheless to resonate with vast universal truths. 'All the Light We Cannot See' is one such novel. On the face of it we are taken inside the lives of two child protagonists in war-ravaged Europe, one a blind French six year old girl called Marie-Laure, living with her devoted father in Paris, and the other an eight year old German orphan called Werner whose precocious skills fixing radios is to rescue him from a life of harsh labour.

Anthony Doerr weaves back and forth between these two narratives while the war unfolds, grabbing our hearts as he goes. The story is a page-turner in every sense. It is impossible not to root for Werner and Marie-Laure, both endearing, resourceful, innocent characters, both trapped by a place in history they must learn to cope with even though its wider causes are beyond their comprehension.

The structure of the novel is beautifully knitted and elegant, from the first word to the last, and this is central to its power. In fact it made me think of the delicate, spiraling beauty of the shells that Marie-Laure collects on her walks on St Malo beach, seeking consolation for the disappearance of her beloved father. And as the novel reaches its climax Werner and Marie-Laure spiral towards each other too, or at least towards the same critical point that will seal their respective fates for good.

'All The Light We Cannot See' entertains as every novel must. But it is also a moving reminder that vulnerability is no measure of actual strength, that the bravest among us are often the most fragile.



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Faces From A Lost Past

Sweet Caress by William Boyd

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


William Boyd is one of those authors to whom I have remained loyal over three decades now. I love how each of his books is so totally different from its predecessor. Never has his story-telling settled on anything approaching a 'formula'. The settings and plots always surprise. Nor does he have any qualms about the gender of his protagonists, effortlessly and credibly occupying the points of view of women as easily as men. 'Sweet Caress' is a case in point, since the story is told through the eyes of its main character, a woman with the unusual name of Amory Clay, who becomes a pioneering photographer, covering many things during the course of her long career, including occupied France in the Second World War.

With the life-decisions of Amory Clay at its core, questing for love as well as career success, 'Sweet Caress sweeps us through an impressive array of seismic events in the twentieth century, from Berlin in the 1920s, to New York in the 1930s, to the Blackshirt riots in London, as well as war-torn France. Indeed, structurally at least, 'Sweet Caress' did for once remind me of one of Boyd's earlier novels - the highly acclaimed 'Any Human Heart' which tracks the life of one man, through all its twists and turns, trivial and significant, from the very beginning to the very end. Reading that novel I was one of the few who at times found this structure somewhat arduous for being so linear, and so it was with this story of Amory Clay. Boyd's style is of course always beautifully crafted, but the combination of an essentially matter-of-fact tone and a dead straight time-line (for 450 pages) did occasionally make me long for more emotional colour. Amory Clay carried out and witnessed so many interesting things, but for my tastes Boyd never quite drilled deeply enough into her psyche. By the end I was even fighting a slight sensation of 'so what?'

An element of the novel that worked beautifully however, were the photographs scattered through its pages - 'real' pictures that Boyd found in his research but which he attributes to the lens of his protagonist. A simple but stunning idea, these pictures add an original and wonderful touch of authenticity to the novel, cleverly raising the question of reality which I think Boyd is trying to explore. Amory Clay may be a product of his imagination but the presence of the photographs subtly suggests otherwise. I found them poignant too, snapshots of unknown faces from a bygone era, playing their part in a story they never knew.



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A Rollercoaster Ride

Freya by Anthony Quinn

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


'Freya' is one of those books where the jacket cheats a little bit, since its alluring black & white photograph of an attractive, windswept young woman, is clearly from a decade far more recent than the novel's namesake and post-war protagonist. Yet artistic licence allows for all sorts of liberties, and maybe Anthony Quinn would argue that Freya is a woman whose traits of courage and spirit are supposed to have a universal appeal, transcending the literal boundaries of the era in which she lived....

That said, the era in which the novel is set is crucial. The opening pages launch us into the thick of London's VE Day celebrations in May 1945, when Freya, losing her friends in the melee, first bumps into the shy, elusive, charismatic Nancy Holdaway with whom she is to embark on a lifelong friendship that is as devoted as it is competitive. Quinn vividly and effortlessly captures the euphoria on that historic day, at the same time drawing us into wanting to know more about the inner lives of the two young women. Even more impressively, the quality of Quinn's writing never falters as the canvass of the novel expands. Through war-haunted Oxford, to the seedy world of Soho, to the Nuremberg war trials, his touch is sure, keeping us turning the pages in order to track the progress of Nancy and Freya in their respective quests to find emotional and professional fulfilment in a damaged and hostile world.

At times I found myself thinking of Elena Ferrante's now famous look at the lifelong friendship between two women in her Neapolitan quartet. 'Freya' has the same blend of the personal and the political, coupled with a believable take on the rollercoaster ride of a relationship that extends over so many years, ebbing and flowing as it goes. As with reading Ferrante, there were moments I found the narrative - for this very reason - somewhat relentless. On and on it went. At times I yearned for a structure that was less linear, for more shape. Occasionally I even riffled through the pages to see how many there were left to go...

Ultimately however, the central story held me. Freya is a fascinating character, so admirably capable and feisty (as a female journalist would have to be to achieve recognition in such a pre-equal-rights world),and yet she is armed with one of those self-destruct buttons that some people really do have. When they need to blow, they blow, regardless of the obvious horror of consequences. Time and time again Freya had to dig herself out of holes of her own making. It was hard to read sometimes, but I never stopped rooting for her.

No spoilers, but the only part of the novel that did not ring true for me was a plot thread to do with the underworld of secret agents and spies. It really wasn't necessary. Indeed, it smacked a wee bit of that author-panic that goes along the lines of, 'Yikes, I need more PLOT!' It is seldom true, less being more, especially if that 'less' is in the hands of a writer with the skill and insight of Anthony Quinn.






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Courage & Humanity

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


'Being Mortal' by Atul Gawande is not for the lily-livered. As its subtitle indicates - "Illness, Medicine, and What Matters in the End"- this is a book that stares stark reality in the face, via case-history after case-history of terminal diagnoses (mostly of cancer) and descriptions of death. At times I had to put it aside and take a breather. There is just so much of one's darkest imaginings that one can take: the sore throat which turns out to be a fatal tumour, the back ache which turns out to be a fatal tumour, the headache which turns out to be a fatal tumour... For those of us still dodging such bullets, it made for gruelling reading.

However! If you are still with me, which I hope you are, let me quickly add that Atul Gawande may be a man of science, but he writes as a man of the deepest compassion and understanding, using very moving personal experiences as well as professional anecdotes to make his points. Yes, the subject of 'Being Mortal' is, ultimately DEATH, but that is the Elephant In The Room for all of us. We are all dodging bullets one way or another! We are all going to die! So we should not be afraid to look that fact in the face, or at the very least, to discuss looking it in the face. I applaud Atul Gawande with all my heart for doing so.

Crucial to Gawande's thesis is the recognition of the failure of most doctors to know how to handle terminal illnesses in their patients. He realised this himself long after qualifying, a moment of epiphany, when he saw that, as a medic, he had merely been taught how to 'fix' things. Whenever fixing became impossible he was floundering, thereby ensuring that patients floundered too. For it is the 'fixing' mentality the lies behind the prescription of expensive, intrusive and often debilitating treatments which might buy weeks or months of possible extra existence, but at the cost of the potential quality of life a patient might yet enjoy. Gawande cogently points out the madness of this, arguing that instead, with the right conversations between medics, patients, carers and loved ones, the final stretch of a life can be about fulfilment rather than fear. All it takes is the courage for the right questions to be asked,and the answers listened to. Like the guy who said he would prefer to be able to eat ice cream and watch baseball games rather than risk total paralysis through a operation on his spine. He died, eventually, but on his own terms, with minimum discomfort and able to communicate with his family until the end.

Atul Gawande is certainly courageous, to write a book that goes to the heart of this difficult debate. He also gives of himself, weaving a moving account of the sudden illness and decline of his own father through the narrative. As a personal story, it moved me to tears. It also underpinned the wider point that Gawande is making: We each deserve to be able to savour every last drop of our lives. If we cannot do our best to make that happen, if we cannot, in other words, deal humanely with our own mortality, then what right have we to call ourselves civilised?



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A 'Modern' Classic

Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


As well as reputedly being a masterpiece, 'Of Human Bondage' is also described as the most autobiographical novel Somerset Maugham ever wrote. Knowing such things for me always lends a certain 'spice' to embarking on a book - all readers have a voyeuristic streak! But the deft way Maugham weaves his real-life experiences into his plot quickly makes the autobiographical element seem irrelevant. Pieces of the author's life are definitely present - the early death of parents, medical training, the love of art - yet 'Of Human Bondage' is very much a page-turning human drama, a tightly-packed work of fiction rather than a 'confessional'.

The story follows the life of Philip Carey, tragically orphaned at an early age, burdened with a club foot and desperate for life and love. After a few months studying in Heidelberg, and a brief spell in Paris as a would-be artist, Philips settles in London to train as a doctor. It is at this point, just when his life should be taking off, that he has the misfortune to fall in love with a waitress called Mildred. The misfortune being that Mildred not only feels nothing for him in return, but is merciless and slow-witted and generally the most unrewarding object of ardour he could have imagined. What Maugham clearly understands and writes about so well however, is LOVE, which - when it is the 'real' thing - is not something over which one can exercise control. It happens TO a person, no matter how ill-advised, unrequited, or doomed. Mildred may not love Philip, but he loves her and is powerless in the face of it.

Another strong and credible thread of the story is the importance of money in Philip's fight to survive and thrive. Orphaned with very limited private means and a penny-pinching guardian-uncle, Philip has to find a profession through which he can support himself financially. This takes many years, driving him in the process almost to the point of annihilation, largely because he continually puts the needs of the destructive and ungrateful Mildred first. Philip's suffering on account of this woman, how close he gets to destroying himself, is at times hard to read. This is central to Maugham's skill; he draws us so deeply into Philip's psyche and his quest for lasting security and fulfilment, that we feel every hurt ourselves.

If all of this sounds a bit 'heavy' then rest assured, it is not. 'Of Human Bondage' is compact and dense, always moving on to the next thing and taking the reader with it. Maugham was such a master of his craft that he knew exactly the effect of his words - how to entertain and how to shock. Indeed, the story at times felt so 'modern' that I had to keep reminding myself that it was written over one hundred years ago.

Somerset Maugham was the bestselling author of his day, selling over one million copies of his books - a remarkable total for the first half of the twentieth century. Apparently, in his dotage he became a bitter man, not easy to be with, as well as cruel and petulant with his lovers. But then he was gay during the dark ages when such proclivities were still forbidden, and he was also a genius; so I think he deserves forgiving.







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Two Remarkable Marys

Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


On the face of it this is a fat double-biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, the eighteenth century ahead-of-her-time luminary of the feminist movement, and the daughter she died giving birth to, Mary Shelley, author of the equally ahead-of-its-time 'Frankenstein', written at the tender age of 19. Mary Shelley continued her mother's legacy by demonstrating an equally pioneering spirit in all other ways too, including eloping with the already married Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and having children with him long before they got around to marrying.

I embarked on Charlotte Gordon's book shamefully aware of my lack of knowledge on its two subjects and expecting to be educated. What I wasn't prepared for was to be so thoroughly entertained! Despite how it might sound, this is NOT a book for 'literary scholars' (though they will get a lot out of it too). It is simply the gripping story of two remarkable women. Gordon is so at home with her protagonists, inhabiting their inner lives with such conviction, that she leads us through every factual detail with us barely being aware of it. Key to this is the way she cleverly interleaves the two 'biographies', leap-frogging between the time zones so that the echoes between the two Marys' respective hopes and achievements radiate off the page. An effortless poignancy permeates the narrative as well: Mary Shelley lost her mother by being born. From her earliest childhood, every choice she makes clearly derives from an effort to honour that loss and to keep the spirit of her mother's beliefs alive.

The other reason Gordon's book is so gripping is because both Mary W and Mary S led such rollercoaster existences! A novel would be hard-pushed to come up with anything as exciting. Both women travelled extensively on their own, Mary W living alone and pregnant in Paris during the Revolution and then later going to Sweden to try and sort out the finances of the loser of a man she had fallen in love with, taking her out-of-wedlock baby with her! Mary S also spent a lot of time journeying through and living in Europe, (most notably Italy), sometimes managing her children alone while Shelley gallavanted on ahead. Tragically, Mary was to end up losing not just three of those children to various illnesses, but Shelley himself, drowned in an Italian lake thanks to a barely seaworthy boat, designed purely to out-do his arch rival in all things,the genius show-off, Lord Byron.

Most fascinating to me was Gordon's examination of the battles both Marys fought in order to remain true to their feminist ideals while at the same time falling headlong in love with men. No mean feat, let alone back in those days! Happily, both women eventually found marital happiness, Mary W albeit briefly, until her untimely death, with the unlikely dry, much older scholar William Godwin, and Mary S with Shelley, to whom she remained devoted, living with their sole surviving son, until her own dying day.

So there we have it: A double-whammy of a biography that contains the all power of an action-packed novel. Even today the lives and achievements of the two Marys would hit the headlines. In the context of their times their stories are truly astounding.



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Doomed or Redeemed?

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Steinbeck's 'The Grapes of Wrath' was one of those gaps in my reading history. I knew it was supposed to be amazing - it won a Pulitzer prize - but sometimes the weight of such a reputation can lead to disappointment. As it turned out I needn't have worried. Oh my goodness no. I was gripped from the opening word to the last. And appalled. And moved. And astonished.

The story tracks the Joad family as they are forced to abandon their farm and head west out of the drought-stricken desert bowl of Oklahoma in search of work on the West coast. Along with thousands of other starving farming families, they are following the dream that a land of milk and honey awaits them - water, work, food, a solid roof over their heads. And like all the other families, they are to find nothing but suffering and wretchedness, not just in California, but in the torturous journey to get there. On arrival the few fruit-picking jobs are long since gone; but even with those, the over-supply of labour means that the greedy West coast employers have reduced what they pay to pitiful levels.

The descriptions of suffering make for hard reading. Hardest of all - and most skilful on the part of Steinbeck - is the cruelly gradual way in which the hopes of the Joad family are worn down. One by one things go wrong, eating into their parlous savings and their desperate hopes, whittling the once chirpy, energetic family down and down, until only a few of them are left, eking out a life that one wouldn't wish on a rat, let alone a human being.

Although it is a story of one family, Steinbeck is looking at the biggest issues on the planet: the crushing wheel of 'successful' economies on the less fortunate; the speed with which trust can turn to hate; the power of human kindness to ease but not solve big problems. In fact, I kept finding myself thinking of the migrant crisis engulfing Europe now: all those hundreds of thousands of people fleeing horrors in search of a better life, placing their faith in the rumoured richness of Europe, only for so many of them to meet nothing but mud and barbed wire.

Steinback famously said of 'The Grapes of Wrath, "I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags" and he certainly succeeds. The ending of the novel is shocking in the extreme. No wonder it caused such a stir when it was published in 1939. It depicts people in the direst situation imaginable, clutching at the very last threads of hope to stay alive. As I read it - and even now thinking back on it - I honestly cannot say whether Steinbeck was aiming to leave us with an image of hope or despair. Are we doomed or redeemed? I wish I knew.





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Domestic Pot-boiler

Mrs Craddock by W. Somerset Maugham

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


When Somerset Maugham first presented the manuscript of 'Mrs Craddock' to his publishers it was deemed too shocking to publish. When the book finally did see light of day, in 1902, it was on the condition that the 'shocking' sections were removed. Knowing this, it is impossible not to embark on a reading of the novel in its current unedited form without speculating on what had been judged too terrible to appear in print, while at the same time marvelling that any publisher would want to leave out a single one of its brilliant sentences.

Lots of authors swing in and out of female and male heads in the telling of their stories, but I have to say that - speaking as a woman - Somerset Maugham's understanding of the female psyche is uncanny. In fact, if I had not known that the author of this wonderful story was male, then I swear I would have decided that such insights could only have come from a fellow female! Couple that with the book having been written a hundred and twenty odd years ago and the achievement is all the more remarkable.

As its title suggests, 'Mrs Craddock' is essentially the story of one woman, Berta Ley, who inherits a lot of money on her father's death and promptly marries Edward Craddock, a placid, unimaginative man with whom she believes herself to be deeply in love. Love is a funny business. If you believe yourself to be in love then....you are! But Maugham shows us so skilfully, right from the get-go, that this is not going to be a match made in heaven. Berta is wilful, and romantic, and misguided, ensuring in so many ways that the road she travels is never going to be easy. Yet neither do her choices turn out to be wholly bad either, happiness and satisfaction often emerging from the most unexpected situations. Best of all, it never feels as if Maugham is judging Berta, or indeed any of his characters. Instead, he creates the impression of merely presenting what happened in this woman's life, managing in the process both to heighten the tension of his plot, and also to create the clever illusion that his story is just a reflection of the haphazard roller-coaster of real life: Stuff happens. We make decisions. Some of them go wrong. We regroup. We make more decisions. There unexpected highs and terrible downs. Surviving it all can take many forms.

All of which made 'Mrs Craddock' for me one of the most perceptive and poignant portraits of a marriage that I have ever read. Its realism is startling and compelling. No wonder the Victorians/Edwardians were shocked!! And by that I refer to the realism of feelings explored, rather than anything remotely 'pornographic'. There are physical longings aplenty between the characters, making the world go round as they always do, but never overstepping the bounds of decency in terms of how they are described. Maugham is too great a writer for that, knowing that what is suggested has far more power than what is actually set down in black and white.

At various points of reading I kept imagining that I knew what was going to happen next. But I was always wrong! And that was another reason I loved this novel. A domestic pot-boiler! Vivid and relevant in spite of being 120 years old! Somerset Maugham may have written many more famous titles, but 'Mrs Craddock' has it all.



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