Book World

Dramatic tension is the real curse of the novel

Whilst reading the essay I Dream of Toys from Gabriel Josipovici's collection The Singer on the Shore in bed last night, I experienced one of those wonderful moments where someone takes hold of something that I've been vaguely thinking but been unable to articulate properly, and puts it into clear and eloquent words.  In a discussion of Tristram Shandy (a favourite of mine) comes this:

"In the end the book's greatness and originality lies precisely in this, that it shows up narratives that go from A to B as poor, limited things, driven to their conclusions by forces outside their control.  Milan Kundera, himself no mean exponent of the novel as hobby-horse, puts it well:

These novels are like a narrow street along which someone drives his characters with a whip.  Dramatic tension is the real curse of the novel, because it transforms everything, even the most beautiful pages, even the most surprising scenes and observations merely into steps leading to the final resolution, in which the meaning of everything that preceded it is concentrated.  The novel is consumed in the fire of its own tension like a bale of straw.*

On the other hand, by the time we have finished Tristram Shandy (or Kundera's own Immortality) we feel we have been exploring a field, in the course of which we have learned not facts about the world but a series of practices."

This really is an extremely interesting and insightful collection of essays.

* The quotation is from Milan Kundera's Immortality.

A good seam of reading to mine

Books are more absorbing than blogging at the moment, but here's a short update:

I finished London: the Biography (all 700+ pages) and declare it a work of genius. 

I read James Joyce's Dubliners quietly and slowly over the course of ten days and fell in love with it.  Thank you to everyone who recommended it as the place to start.  I may re-read it immediately in place of the final one of February's choices, The Road.  Unfortunately, my heart sinks every time I so much as think about opening the book. It may be brilliant but I just can't face it.

I am a third of the way through James Wood's How Fiction Works and so far my thought is: Is this it?  Is this the best our generation's finest literary critic can come up with?  (I actually think the answer is 'no' and that he's distracted by young children but that's just supposition).  However, consider this just a provisional view until I get to the end (which I will because, whilst somewhat disappointing, the book is enjoyable, if that's not a logical impossibility).

I read Gabriel Josipovici's essay on Reading, Writing and Teaching Literature in The Singer on the Shore and, it was deeply interesting.  I like his voice and mindset and am encouraged to dig into the rest of the collection.

All in all, a very good seam of reading to mine at the moment.

Yes, but this time I want to join in

Usually I look the other way when memes come along but I utterly can't resist this one (seen at Light Reading and Of Books and Bicycles and Work in Progress) even though no one has tagged me.  Sniff!  (Admittedly on the entirely reasonable assumption that I wouldn't do it anyway...)

Ten signs that a book has been written by me.  (As I haven't actually written a book then consider these answers as more or less plausible fantasy*):

1. It is unfinished; handwritten in pencil in microscopic script on multiple un-numbered loose leaf sheets of narrow feint A4, consisting of interesting (to me) fragments which bear only a slight connection or resemblance to each other. 
2. It is set in Eighteenth century London and yet heavily influenced by Dickens.
3. Peter Ackroyd would be mentioned in the acknowledgements.
4. It would be the only children's book submitted to an agent without the customary accolade that "I've read this to my kids and they love it so you're bound to want to publish it"**.
5. It contains more adjectives than verbs.
6. It contains more shadow than sunshine.
7. It has rather more plot twists than originally planned as a result of accidental index card shuffling.
8. The names of the characters change from chapter to chapter; again, more authorial indecision than post-modern frolic.
9. It is a daring blend of nit-picking historical accuracy (picture its author spending a week researching what the Georgians ate for breakfast, only to discover that it was probably something as banal as toast, and then eventually summing up the week's work with "after breakfast they went out") and outrageous inaccuracy and anachronism (when the author doesn't have a week to spare and decides to write a description of a shipwreck in half an hour without knowing where the ship is, what sort of ship it is, what the bits of the ship are called, what would have happened to the passengers or any other sort of actual helpful detail, but does manage to sweep a cursed box out to sea along with its fanatically obsessed owner. Who doesn't yet have a name.)
10. In attempting to emulate all the authors I loved as a child (Leon Garfield, Joan Aiken, Rosemary Sutcliffe, Susan Cooper, E. Nesbitt, Henry Treece and er, Enid Blyton) it manages to fall between several stools whilst positively sawing the legs off the rest and rendering them generally unfit for use.  It also has a nice line in (usually unintentionally) comic mixed metaphors. Which occasionally become similes.

*  Looking at the list though, I have to confess that all except no. 3 are factually accurate when applied to my heaps of paper of wishful thinking about a novel.

** Based on a random reading of one chapter to the Misses Book World last year.

A rare occurrence

A quick glance at the books I've read so far in 2008 suggested the odd notion that I'd read more non-fiction than fiction.  A quick bit of arithmetic proved the hypothesis:  1255 pages of fiction versus 1415 of non-fiction.  A rare occurrence chez Book World.

Well, what would you do in a book barn of five million books?

 

Half term holiday

Yes, the children are on the loose for the week, so no more posts until Monday when I can foist them back on their long-suffering teachers. 

The wielding of tone

I've read a few minor/shorter Henry James works (Turn of the Screw, The Europeans, The Spoils of Poynton) but have struggled to find a way into the longer and later work.  Reading The Master by Colm Toibin though, I have fallen for Henry and his work am busily looking at my reading plans for the year and working out how I can fit him in.  I'm only halfway through but already the blend of sensitive psychological recreation of the author and some lightly sketched literary criticism of the works, has me sighing with deep contentment every time I pick up the book.

"Henry discovered a large bundle under the stairs of the house in Newport which contained back numbers of the Revue des Deux Mondes, complete with its salmon-coloured wrapping, which sang to him in the privacy of his room like a choir of angels.  Even the names opened for him a world of possibility beyond the surrounding dullness and domesticity and patriotism and religiosity: Sainte-Beuve, the Goncourts, Merimee, Renan. Names which suggested not only the modern mind at its most enquiring but the idea of style itself, of thinking as a kind of style, and the writing of essays not as a conclusive call to duty or an earnest effort at self-location, but as play, as the wielding of tone."

The Master by Colm Toibin

More theatre

At the end of last year I took stock of what I'd enjoyed during the year and what I'd hated, with the intention of doing more of the former and none at all of the latter in 2008.

Into the 'I want more of..' column went theatre visits.  I love going to the theatre and we managed just a single visit in 2007, so this year I have been busily booking tickets.  Sadly, I couldn't find a date when we could see The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other by Peter Handke.  The Guardian has sneaked into rehearsals ahead of its opening on 13 February and has a write up here.  Sounds fascinating but I will have to be satisfied instead with my first sight of a Harold Pinter play later in the month: The Homecoming at the Almeida, which gets a bit of advance publicity here at The Times. 

I tried to convince Mr Bookworld that he wanted to spend a quality Saturday with the children while I spent it seeing the RSC perform Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 followed by Henry V (yes, all on the same day) but sadly he wasn't convinced.  I can't imagine how exhausted the actors must be after a day like that.

London lists

Lee Rourke of Scarecrow fame seems a man after my own (literary) heart.  This from his Tuesday ten at the Book Depository

"London, no matter how hard we try to resist, draws us closer to its blackened heart. It contains, on every street, everything a writer needs. London is the perfect milieu, everything required resides either side of the murky Thames: history; event; the multitudes; architecture, monotony; tension; every amount of failure; every amount of hope; myriad nooks and crannies that reveal hidden truths; all of this over and over again. It confronts us. It challenges us. London is an ever repeating dynamo of faltering progress."

Of his choices of ten London books, I've read four: Remainder; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Moll Flanders and Confessions of an Opium Eater and have to say the man has good taste!  What would my own London list look like I wonder?

1. London: the Biography by Peter Ackroyd.  The equivalent of the King James Bible in the religion of London.
2. Bleak House by Charles Dickens.  Fog.  Grime.  Hope.  Despair.  As big and various as London itself.
3. Either of Mrs Dalloway or Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf.  She is so good on the mood and temper of London living.
4. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad.  Terrifying.  Thinking about it, I'm tempted to add it to my re-reading list for the year; it's too long since I read it.
5. Chatterton or Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd.  Two novels that made a deep impression of place and of London as a character in its own right.  Again, it must be time to go back and re-read these soon.
6. Sherlock Holmes stories.  More fog.  Holmes simply could not have existed in any city other than London.
7. London Orbital by Iain Sinclair.  Driving round the M25 will never be the same again after reading Sinclair's account of walking London's perimeter. 
8. Capital by Maureen Duffy.  The war veteran Meepers is obsessed with the history of London which replays in short alternating sequences with his quest to prove that London wasn't abandoned during the Dark Ages and his (deluded?) belief that if he can prove this, then he will secure the city's future.  A bad summary of an excellent book that I rarely see mentioned.  Shame.
9. 1599: a Year in the Life of Shakespeare by James Shapiro. Yes, I know, it's really a book about Shakespeare but in 1599 he was busy in London and here Shapiro gives a fantastic idea of what that year was like for Shakespeare and the ordinary Londoner.
10. Dr Johnson and Mr Savage: a Biographical Mystery by Richard Holmes.  As above, but substitute Eighteenth Century London for Elizabethan London.  Proving the point that no one who ends up in London can escape being influenced by the city.

I'm sure there are many more that I haven't read.  Dr Jekyll is high on the tbr list, ditto Patrick Hamilton and Lee Rourke's own stories Everyday.

Our Horses in Egypt by Rosalind Belben

I have, I confess, been procrastinating on writing about Our Horses in Egypt by Rosalind Belben.  It is a wonderful book, but difficult to pin down.  It felt like a complete breath of fresh air: not only is it set mainly in the large landscapes of Egypt and Palestine during the First World War, but it is also a book which isn't claustrophobically hemmed in to a single solipsistic character (my pet peeve with several contemporary literary fictions I have started and abandoned over the years).

Belben tells a simple story of Griselda Romney's voyage to Egypt, with daughter Amabel and Nanny, to try and find her horse Philomena who was requisitioned for war service and then, at the end of the war, sold off to Egyptians as a work horse.  I admit I started off thinking that this was a bit of an odd premise for a novel, but after 30 pages or so I was in love with the book.

The narrative alternates between the story of Griselda's sea voyage out and then her stay in Egypt and her mishaps and near mishaps.  The style is slightly choppy and broken: the way horsey home counties women of the time would have spoken, probably.   Griselda is wilful, spirited and slightly wild; Amabel serious and lovely; Nanny simultaneously fearful and stoutly practical and together they are a very engaging threesome.  Their adventures on ship and in Egypt where they haven't quite found their social footing are funny and unsettling with a hint of danger, all enhanced by Belben's elliptical style of writing. 

I started by preferring the Griselda and Co sections to the alternate sections following Philomena the horse through her long war career, but by about a third of the way through the book, I was completely won over to the Philomena sections.  They're not an easy read: full of military and horse jargon, manoeuvres, place names and a changing cast of soldiers and battles.  Not at all the sort of thing I usually like, but I soon found that the technical language could be skimmed and that I didn't have to look up every piece of equipment or horse ailment to follow the sense.  Indeed, I was too impatient to get on with Philomena's story to have time for the dictionary.

Philomena's story is a marvel.  I don't think I've encountered a narrative told in the third person but essentially from the point of view of an animal before; indeed its done so lightly and skillfully that I didn't realise that that was what was happening at first.  Belben notes in a factual way the sensuous details I imagine a horse would note; she observes and records killing and hardship (to men and horses) without sentimentality but with such poignancy that I read every page with sheer joy and awe at her skill. 

And the ending.  I would not dream of spoiling the ending, because I do urge you to read this book.  All I would say is that I sobbed.  And sobbed.