Amanda Brookfield's Blog, page 7

A Natural Born Author

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Muriel Spark was one of those famous authors whom I had just never quite got around to reading. I knew about 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie', of course, mainly because of Maggie Smith playing the lead role in a film adaptation many decades ago. I remember liking the film, but not enough to pick up the book - a perfect example of why literature and their screen versions should be treated with caution!

As soon as I started reading however, I forgot Maggie Smith and everything else.

The biggest shock, and pleasure was how Muriel Spark manages to be acutely funny and deeply poignant at the same time. The story is set in 1936, in between the two World Wars, in the shadow of desperate social hardships. Poverty laps at the fringes of every town. There aren't enough men to go round; and the ones there are often carry wounds or mental scars from their time in the trenches. Miss Jean Brodie is a teacher at the Marcia Blaine Academy and likes to keep her small tribe of girls very close. Too close, those around her believe.

One of the joys of Miss Brodie however, is how little she fears the opinions of others. With her students she is refreshingly forthright, which is why they are in awe of her. She stresses the importance of making the most of life - of seizing one's prime - and allows them stirring glimpses into the adult world, revealing much about her own private life in the process. The tension builds as the febrile curiosity of the teenagers grows and the forces against their teacher gather strength. One knows it can only end in trouble.

Given the constraints of the world she inhabits, there is no doubt that Miss Brodie behaves imprudently, both as a mentor and as a woman. And yet the cleverness of Muriel Spark is how she has us rooting for her. Miss Brodie is like a light in the dark. She may be reckless but she is also brave. She is not afraid to speak her mind, to love and be loved, to fly in the face of convention. For her charges, floundering to make sense of things, their teacher is nothing short of an inspiration; albeit one that brings great dangers. All of them go on to difficult and highly contrasting destinies. One of them even betrays her. Yet the influence and impact of Miss Brodie on each of their lives is something they all recognise as everlasting.

Only after reading 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie' did I learn that Muriel Spark liked to let a book 'gestate' inside her head for about a year and then write it in a matter of weeks. I guess that explains why this wonderful novel is so very short and yet so packed with meaning. A true-born author if ever there was one.





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Lost and Found

Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


It was the recent death of Anita Brookner that made me return to this masterpiece. It won the Booker Prize in 1984, controversially, I seem to recall, firstly because it was such a 'short' story, and secondly because it was won by a relatively unknown woman at a time when the usual hard-hitting literary males were expecting to walk off with the accolade.

To be honest, my sadness at hearing of Anita Brookner's death was tinged by a certain guilt. For many years after 'Hotel du Lac' I read every novel she published - and she published frequently and regularly. Gradually however, I began to grow a little weary of the repetition of her themes - which I saw as loneliness, solitude (the two being very different), money vs love, the stifling urban contexts - and also with her microscopic, Jamesian, attention to detail, which at times made me feel as if I was being slowly suffocated by the density of the prose and the minutiae of thought behind it.

So it was with mixed anticipation that I re-opened 'Hotel du Lac' three weeks ago, only to find that it was even more of a masterpiece than I had remembered. For it might be the 'shortest' of stories, but it has a depth that makes it more than worthy of its status as a great novel. The attention to detail is ever-present, but handled so deftly and with such tight relevance to the plot and theme that a wonderfully cumulative effect of understanding is achieved as the book goes on.

On the face of it the story is simple: a woman is holidaying by herself at a hotel on the shores of Lake Geneva. The woman, Edith Hope, is a novelist and the tourist season is over, infusing the atmosphere with an air of decline. Edith is supposed to be working on a new book but spends all her time observing her fellow guests, a motley bunch, and writing witty descriptive letters to someone called David. Only gradually does the real story emerge, like colours filling a blank screen: David has been her married lover, whom she gave up on to accept a sensible offer of marriage (without love), only to scandalise her world by running out on her bridegroom at the last minute. She has been advised to take this trip to allow the scandal to blow over. The letters to David never get posted. Her heart is broken. Meanwhile one of the guests at the hotel is prepared to offer her another pragmatic marriage proposal, without love or even sex, but promising a sensible convergence of lifestyles and finances. Edith is flattered and also only too well aware that women of a certain age, especially those who have been the subject of public shame, should grab such opportunities where they can.

It is tempting to ruin the story by spelling out what happens. Suffice it to say that Brookner manages the closing of her tale with the same genius that she applies to the rest of it. Several times I was moved to tears, not just because of the mind-blowing subtlety and compassion of the story-telling, but because of the unflinching way Brookner faces down so many of the big questions about being human. We want companionship, but we need love. How can we settle for less without giving up on hope? And where does creativity sit? Do we need fiction to record our disappointments or to fill the void they leave?

Of course my 23 year old self must have grasped some of this, but it is little wonder that, now in my middle years, with a certain portion of suffering under my own belt, such issues resonate even more. I am so sorry that Anita Brookner has died, but so grateful that her loss has brought this book back into my life.



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Falling Short

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a hard book to review without giving away the central twist - a twist which, I have to say, hit me with all the force and surprise that Karen Joy Fowler was surely aiming for. Wow! I thought, and read on avidly, only to find my interest dwindling.

I think that's the problem with a story that relies too much on One Big Twist. You can imagine it sounding great when the novel is pitched, but if too much hangs on a single peg then that peg can get overloaded. And instead of being free to let the characters and narrative blossom, the author finds him or herself boxed in by the single, supposedly great, idea. I think that's what happened here. I kept willing the characters to really come alive, grow into themselves, find resolutions genuinely connected to the lives of credible humans. Instead it became a zigagging plot-line, as if Karen Joy Fowler was looking for a way out that she never quite found.

That said, it is such an usual book, and the scientific background is admirably researched, and the Big Twist - for all its problems - did get me thinking about stuff I hadn't thought about before, and so I felt it would be churlish to give 'We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves' anything less than three stars.
As a novel, however, it does not quite work. There is too much plotting and not enough story; too much telling and not enough showing; by the end I felt so disengaged from the characters that I didn't really care what happened to them. I am sorry if that sounds harsh, but truly powerful novels are hard to pull off and for me this one fell well short of the mark.



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A Writer's Demons

To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I found this novel on the shelves of my late mother's study, a beautiful Penguin original paperback, published in 1955 and in such a pristine state that I found myself speculating as to whether she (or my father) had ever got around to reading it! The other thing that caught my attention was the tag on the front jacket saying: "Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 1954."

I suppose I must have known, once upon a time, that Ernest Hemingway had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but somehow I had forgotten it. At first I thought he had been awarded the prize for the book I was holding, but actually it was for the body of his work in general, and the publishers were merely using the accolade on the jacket, as publishers do, to give added ooomph to a reprint.

'To Have and Have Not' was first published in 1937 and is in fact three long short stories covering key sections in the life of one Harry Morgan, a tough, rough Jack-of-all-trades who makes his living smuggling guns, rum and men between Florida and Cuba. The writing is everything one expects of Hemingway, terse and pithy, each sentence hitting you between the eyeballs and giving the impression of effortlessness that belies the true labour behind all great art. Harry is a classic Hemingway creation, a character who, for all his personal failings (he is not an easy man) and law-breaking, comes across as someone of great moral integrity. As a reader, it is impossible not to root for him when things go wrong. Which they do. Big time.

It was only half way through this book that it fully dawned on me what a Romantic Hemingway was. His male protagonists may mess up their private lives, but it is never due to a lack of understanding about what is at stake. That said, the one thing Harry Morgan does not mess up is his love life. One of the joys of the story is that he has found a good woman who is as glad of him as he of her. When things go wrong it is through the prism of this relationship that Hemingway defines what is suffered and what is lost, and it makes for hard reading.

What intrigues me most about Hemingway is that, in spite of scaling the highest pinnacles of literary achievement and being blessed with vast insights into the human condition, he was essentially an alcoholic haunted by demons. In 1961, just seven years after winning the Nobel Prize, he shot himself. By then he had had a series of accidents and health setbacks (some connected to the drinking of course), but even so. In fact the most haunting passage for me in 'To Have and Have Not' is one that seems to presage this dark ending. It is twenty five years until his own suicide and yet he writes of guns:

"Those admirable American instruments so easily carried, so sure of effect, so well designed to end the American dream when it becomes a nightmare, their only drawback the mess they leave for relatives to clear up."

We writers can deny it all we like, but our inner lives filter into our fiction, even if it takes hindsight to root them out.





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Big Theme, little book

A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Robert Seethaler is one of those writers whose story-telling exudes the simplicity of a fairy-tale. 'A Whole Life' has the brevity of a child's story too, coming in at under 150 pages in paperback. The narrative takes us, step by step, through the life of Andreas Egger, a man as simple as this story, eking out a living in the beautiful mountain valley into which his rough beginnings brought him, struggling to survive and adapt as the world storms through the middle of the twentieth century.

The mountainous landscape is as much a character as Egger himself, the source of his labour, his comfort and his suffering. It is through the prism of Egger's humble experiences - working on the first cable cars, briefly venturing off to fight in the war, returning to become a walking guide for tourists, then struggling through the unemployment and infirmity of old age - that we feel the force of 'progress' pushing through the world, taking mankind in its wake, drowning some and saving others.

A 'heavier' more universal subject-matter it would be hard to find, and yet the almost child-like straightforwardness of Seethaler's writing style belies this. We could not be taken more gently through the ups and downs of Egger's life; there are no frills, no twists, no fanfare. And though I admired this hugely (in writing, as in other crafts, the 'simplest' things invariably take the greatest effort and skill to achieve), there was some vital part of me that remained separate. It was as if I knew what I was supposed to feel without actually being able to feel it. I kept thinking, uncharitably, that Paul Coelho in 'The Alchemist' had pulled off the same trick rather better.

But The Sunday Times called it 'deeply moving' and the Daily Mail said it was 'a slim masterpiece', so maybe I just wasn't in the right mood. Liking books is so often about that, usually without us realising it.



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Literary Decathlete

The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


It is impossible to read a book by Julian Barnes - any book - and not be bowled over by his sheer intelligence. It means his stories are not always the 'easiest' narratives, but they are deeply rewarding. The connection between the difficulty and the reward being the key.

That aside, the main reason I was keen to read 'The Noise of Time' was because a few months ago I was lucky enough to go to a performance of Shostakovich's opera 'The Lady of Mtsensk'. Based loosely on the character of Lady Macbeth, it was this opera, acclaimed around the world, which caused Stalin to turn against his most favourite composer overnight. Imagine music being that powerful! Imagine it scaring a tyrant! What better proof of the power and truth of great art. Luckily the performance I attended did not disappoint. I began on the edge of my seat and was still there at the end.

What Julian Barnes does in 'The Noise of Time' is to take this infamous turning of Stalin against Shostakovich and consider the effect it would have had, not just on the composer's sense of personal safety, but on his ability to continue writing music, as he had to do. As the years passed more and more of his friends and fellow musicians fell out of favour, paying with their freedom or their lives, but Shostakovich remained free. This might sound like good fortune until you consider what Julian Barnes is examining in the novel, namely, the long-term impact on the nerves and the creativity of one forced to function within a state of perpetual fear.

The book is unbelievably short, and yet somehow manages to tell the entire story of the composer's life. It opens at the dramatic heart of the aftermath of the controversial opera, with Shostakovich camped out on the landing of his own flat, suitcase at his side, ready to be taken away and punished. For night after night he does this, afraid for his life, but wanting at least to save his wife and children from the horror of having to witness the inevitable abduction. The suspense of this NOT happening is almost unbearable.

The same sense of impending doom hovers over the two other main episodes of the book, when Shostakovich is allowed on a supposedly triumphant trip to New York and then as he sits many years later in the back of a chauffeur-driven car as an old man. In each section Barnes takes us right into the depths of the composer's psyche, conjuring his fears, his memories and hopes, so that a rounded story of the great man's life and achievements gradually and effortlessly emerges, almost like a magic trick working as we turn the pages.

Many writers like to stoke their imaginations with factual research. Few manage then to implement that research with such laudable invisibility. (Aside: The otherwise brilliant Sebastian Faulks lost me spectacularly when he failed to do this in his novel 'Human Traces', a story so weighted down by all its 'worthy' research that I could hardly keep it open). With 'The Noise of Time' the opposite happens: the facts lift the narrative while at the same time as supporting it. We feel the terror of Shostakovich's inner life precisely because Barnes underpins it with so much that actually happened. The data enhances the imaginative act. For this achievement alone - quite apart from the story-telling and the astonishing insights into music and the human condition - 'The Noise of Time' is a masterly achievement.

In one of the reviews quoted in my copy of the book a New York Times critic refers to Julian Barnes a "literary decathlete". I couldn't agree more.



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Retirement Plan Sabotage

Alive, Alive Oh!: And Other Things That Matter by Diana Athill

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Diana Athill was born in 1917. This means, she is at least (I don't know her actual birthday) 98 years old. And she is still writing books!!! Not just okay-ish books, but excellent ones, filled with warmth and wisdom and a directness of tone that makes me sit up and listen, no matter what she is talking about.

'Alive, Alive Oh!' is the latest product from this remarkable woman, an addition to the archive of wonderful memoirs that began with 'Stet', written after an acclaimed career as an editor with Andre Deutsch. 'Alive, Alive Oh!' is a bit gentler than its predecessors, in that there is less focus on her always interesting personal exploits and more reflection on things like the huge and beautiful gardens of her grandparents' home, Ditchingham Hall. But all her writing sparkles, whether it is descriptive or dramatic, and I think this is not just because of the acuteness of her perceptions, but the humility and gratitude with which she expresses them. Not even the miscarriage (in her early forties) of the unplanned baby she had decided to keep, gets her down. She was sad, of course, she explains, but also greatly - selfishly - relieved. Such honesty is rare and deeply engaging. One is left with the abiding impression of a woman with no edges, no hidden agendas. Diana Athill simply adores the business of being alive and this lights up every aspect of her prose.

Yet Death holds no fear for her either. In fact, anyone worrying about the life hereafter - or lack of it - should be advised to read this book. Athill writes that the world spun well enough, and without her being aware of it, before she came into being, and so assumes that the same state of affairs will prevail after she has gone. Such commonsense! How can one not be persuaded as well as delighted?

In fact, the only problem I have with Diana Athill is that she has scuppered my own - albeit distant - writing 'retirement' plans. I had always imagined I would give up one day, you see, to drift instead in a fug of allowable indolence, free from the novelist's challenge of trying to make sense of the world and graft it into stories. But now the achievements of Diana Athill make such thoughts seem shaming. For, as well as writing books, she continues to have a rich social and cultural life, surrounded by people of similar energies and a like-mind. In one chapter she describes how they all spent an afternoon planting rose-bushes. Life may tire her more - after the gardening she confessed to being exhausted - but she is still going at it full pelt.

So thanks, Diana Athill, for showing me that a possible forty-five years more work and hectic living beckons! You make me very happy.



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Magical Irish Spinning

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann l Summary & Study Guide by BookRags

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I bought Colum McCann's 'Let The Great World Spin' because of how much I enjoyed 'Transatlantic', which was his stunning factual, imaginative and beautifully lyrical take on the relationship between Ireland and America.

'Let The Great World Spin' is set in New York, where Colum McCann lives and which, no doubt for that reason, hums with authenticity. The hubbub of the city, the noise, the traffic, the tightly packed blocks of appartments in which humans co-exist - literally - in layers, on top of one another, regardless of wealth, jumps off every page, so intensely that at times it was a relief to put the book down and take a breather.

The focal point for the novel is Philippe Petit's famous tight-rope walk between the Twin Towers in 1974, an astonishing achievement in itself, but one that inevitably reverberates with added poignancy given that the towers no longer exist, thanks to an act of atrocity which shocks as much now as it did fifteen years ago. Indeed, one might justly call this book of McCann's the first great post 9/11 novel, for the way it echoes what was lost on that day, while shimmering with hope for the endless power of the human spirit to overcome it.

The story opens with a description of the Frenchman's tightrope feat - the sheer daredevil beauty of it. From there McCann starts to weave the stories of his characters in the city below, unique and diverse every one of them, but connected directly or tenuously to the balancing act undertaken above their heads. Some witnessed it, some missed it, some heard about it, some knew nothing of it. To some it seemed glorious, to others foolish. The reader is taken on many narrative journeys as a result, to places ranging from the squalor of poverty and prostitution in New York's darkest districts, to the most luxurious of Manhattan homes. In every scenario McCann leads us deep into the hearts of his characters: Claire, the mother grieving the senseless loss of her dear son in the Vietnam war; Corrigan, the would-be priest fighting his demons as he defends the down-and-outs; and to Gloria and Jazzyn, plying their trade as prostitutes thanks to private troubled histories of their own. Everyone seems to be a victim of loss, connected by suffering, and yet this is not a dispiriting book. It is the opposite of dispiriting. For there is Love everywhere too, popping up in unexpected places, shining its beam on those brave enough to acknowledge it.

What is it about Irish writers that makes their prose so mesmerising? It seems to be a knack, perhaps genetic, passed down via Joyce through generations of story-tellers with big hearts and a twinkle in their eyes. Whatever the reason, reading 'Let the Great World Spin' made me think of the fabulous novels I have recently enjoyed by the Irish writers, Ann Enright and Colm Toibin; like them McCann's writing feels as much like poetry as prose, granting those glimpses of 'truth' that only poetry affords but with a plot that spins you on, taking you somewhere unexpected and new.



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Funny Ha-Ha

Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals by Jesse Armstrong

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Jesse Armstrong is a very funny man. I know that, not just because he is one of the script-writing luminaries behind The Peep Show and The Thick of It, but because I attended a reading in my local bookshop when he was doing the rounds promoting 'Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals' last autumn. He read a couple of hilarious extracts, and was extremely engaging and witty in answering my and other listeners' questions.

On the back of that I bought the book (signed of course!). However, I fear I can now state with some authority that the passages Jesse Armstrong read out that night are the stand-out best bits in an otherwise meandering and rather unrewarding story. In fact, I feel a bit as one does when some fabulous trailers in a cinema have enticed a viewing of an otherwise mediocre film.

Frustratingly, the starting point of the novel is wonderful: Guy falls for Hot Girl, so hot that he signs up to a crazy idea of taking a 'peace play' to a war-torn part of eastern Europe, claiming in the process that he is fluent in Serbo-Croat, purely so he can devote himself to winning the affections of said Hot Girl. Indeed, the episode where our hero is called upon to demonstrate his supposed fluency in the local lingo is one of the hysterically funny passages mentioned above. The problem however, is that a set of comedic episodes strung together does not make for a compelling narrative; because comedies, just like tragedies - and anything worthwhile in between, for that matter - have to offer some sort of....progression in the inner lives of their characters if they are to have any serious hope of engaging the reader. With 'Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals' there was no sign of any such development. In fact, it was just like the Peep Show, a series of sketches, repeating jokes along a similar theme, and leading nowhere.

That said, the funny bits were very funny. So if you fancy a feature-length version of David Mitchell trying to get inside the knickers of a Do-Gooder girl writing a play for the war-ravaged population of Bosnia, then 'Love, Sex & Other Foreign Policy Goals' is exactly the book for you.



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Don't Listen To Me

Longbourn by Jo Baker

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Oh dear, oh dear. I am afraid I carried out my threat and gave up half way through - a heinous crime in my own eyes, but life is short and my to-read pile very high.

Perhaps it was because I was still reeling from the powerful, moving, gripping 'A Little Life', which I read and reviewed here a few weeks ago. Perhaps Jo Baker's 'Longbourn' never stood a chance.

More generally, I find myself irked by the way writers milk the works of other, truly great writers for their own purposes. Jane Austen was a genius. Her story about the Bennet family is one of the greatest novels ever written. It stands as a wise and joyous classic for all time. And so no, I do not want to read some imagined version of what the servants were doing while Elizabeth was falling in love with Darcy, whether it was washing menstrual blood off her and her sisters' sheets or preparing their meals.

Yikes, I'm sounding like a horrible spoilsport. Better to end it there.
Read 'Longbourn' and decide for yourselves.



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