Reading the 80s - 1981

Ruth Rendell - Put on by Cunning

The first thing I want to say about this book is that although it was originally published in 1981 the version Kensington Libraries have is a 2010 copy by Arrow books, and up to page 117 (when I stopped counting) there were 11 typing or scanning errors. Some relatively minor (‘I’ for ‘in’ ‘on’ for ‘one’) and some larger ('gugs' for 'rugs'), which pulled me out of the narrative as I stopped to work out what the word was meant to be – and that was a shame because it damaged the readability of what is a very competent story. So avoid this edition if possible. It will drive you mad. 

I don’t think I’ve read any of Rendell's Wexford books before, but although we’re clearly well into the series here and the Chief Inspector has a grown up soap star daughter about to get married and an inspector recently married and so on I never felt lost – the characters are sketched in neatly, Wexford thinks about them just enough to be believable – noticing the slight differences from before (Burden is happier, for example, and slightly smarter as a result) and giving us a little info without it becoming contrived. (I’m thinking of another author I read recently as I write this, where the sister of the main character was thinking extensively and intently about him; his marital prospects, his emotional state, his history, in a way that no-one would really do unless said brother had recently topped himself and you were trying to work out what you’d missed. Clunk went the exposition.)

Anyway Cunning starts with the banns being read in church – 80 something year old flautist (sadly arthritic and no longer able to play) is marrying 20 something year old, for companionship rather than anything else. He also intends to change his will, partly because he is remarrying, but also to disinherit the daughter who he hadn’t seen for about 15 years until she read about the engagement in the paper.

If she is his daughter. What begins as the assumed death by misadventure of the flautist at the edge of an icy pond begins to look increasingly like murder as it seems the daughter might, just might, be an imposter. The rest of the book is Wexford increasingly convinced of this, even though the solicitors are moving in the other direction, equally convinced that she is who she says she is and releasing her father's money to her under the terms of the will he never had a chance to change. 

Finally, still sure he's on to something, Wexford books a holiday in America to find out more about where she was for those 15  years. But he's not going to be in time to prevent another death.. 

Bliss - Peter Carey 

I did briefly mention this on the Guardian TLS when I started it (as always please excuse the cut and paste):

'Cheerily oblivious 'Top Bloke' Harry Joy goes in for surgery convinced he's going to die, and comes out convinced he's in Hell, when all that's really happened is that he's started seeing the world and his family as they really are, not as he thought (or assumed) back when he was being cheery and oblivious.'

At that point I was clear in my own mind that Harry wasn't in Hell. By the end, although there was nothing in the book not within the bounds of possibility, I wasn't so sure.

In fact I felt ambivalent about this book and it's characters on quite a few levels. I wondered, for example, about Harry's relationship with his kids. It felt like he loved them, but didn't feel he had to look out for them or offer guidance or be responsible for them or stay and look after them in their mother's absence.

Instead he tells them stories, and that adds another layer, another pattern, to the book. Because Bliss is not only a narrative and a comedy, but also a book about story-telling itself. About it's power to let the storyteller get away with things and put a good spin on things. Harry is also a seller of advertising, and his sales pitch is another form of fiction. From which we see that Harry is misusing his ability, just as all the stories he tells to his family are really his father's stories, and he's using them wrong because he doesn't understand the meaning of them himself.

And Carey does the same thing - perhaps intentionally. There's some lovely writing, and some deliberately no-punches-pulled writing. It's a fantastically ambitious narrative which dazzles and makes you identify with Harry, who actually is a very self indulgent man, and puts you in the head of some really quite horrible people but gives you their story too, the story of why they're like that, and makes you empathise.

And then when you step back and think a little later, when you've put the book down, and especially when you come to review it, you start to wonder why. Have you just been dazzled by Carey's way with words. Are you imagining it or is Harry really just the same very self indulgent, self delusive (albeit in a different and more useful way) and luckier than he deserves man he was at the start? And is that effect deliberate too?

Working with Structuralism - David Lodge.

I think it's fair to say that the first couple of essays in this book were a bit sticky. There were definitely paragraphs of the sort of stuff that makes the lay person despair of ever understanding what literary critics are going on about.

But Lodge, thankfully, addresses this early on, asking:

'Is it possible, or useful, to bring the whole battery of modern formalism and structuralism to bear upon a single text, and what is gained by so doing? Does it enrich our reading by uncovering depths and nuances of reading we might not otherwise have brought to consciousness, help up to solve problems of interpretation and to correct misreadings? Or does it merely encourage a pointless and self-indulgent academicism, in  which the same information is shuffled from one set of categories to another, from one jargon to another, without any real advance in appreciation or understanding?'

Whether or not you agree with his reasons for believing the first answer to be true, or care for the 'jargon' he uses to explain them, I'm just reassured to see that someone, anyone has asked and answered the question. It's a question I think everyone who has studied English above a certain level must have asked themselves, and it's nice to see it acknowledged in print.

In fact this book isn't all - in fact isn't mostly - literary criticism of that sort. There are reviews, a section on ambiguous endings, a discussion of modernism and postmodernism (the last of which appears to have been a new thing in 81). Lodge has a real skill for not assuming his audience knows things but not making heavy weather of telling you. He writes with humour, although not the slightly slapstick comedy found in his fiction, and he is generally, with the exception of the first two essays, clear as crystal and not sticky at all.


So - what did these books have to teach me about 1981? Actually not a lot. They were datable - the restaurant Wexford goes to is run by a Asian refugee from the Ugandan expulsion, Lodge tells us that postmodernism is new, there is a little paranoia about communists in Bliss, but they are only datable, not dated. There's no particular thread or theme that struck me.

Next stop 1982.  

Book Reviews - Agatha Christie and David Lodge

David Lodge – The British Museum is Falling Down. 

Apparently David Lodge wanted to call this book The British Museum Has Lost it's Charm, a line from a song he was listening to while writing it, but his publishers couldn't get permission. Personally I prefer the title he ended up with. The other isn't funny enough, and despite being a little bleak in places, this is a very funny book. 

Unlike his campus novels it's also very clearly a book about being Catholic in the 60s, and in particular the rules about contraception and the lunatic intricacies of the rhythm method, which is still, fifty years later, the only method of birth control the Catholic Church endorse. 

So for people like the young couple in Museum, with three children already and possibly another one on the way which they can’t afford and haven’t space for, there’s a sense that all around them London is swinging, but they’re not invited to play, and a hope that the Church will finish deliberating on the pill and let them use the rotten thing. In the meantime they wait.   

So it’s funny but a bit painful – there a strong sense of not being able to have a proper grip on events because you don’t know what fate will throw at you next, and the single day that this book covers is all that in microcosm.

What really made me laugh though was the reference to the bus. It never occurred to me to question it when I was growing up but now it’s been drawn to my attention I can see that there is something very, very odd about that fixation on the bus that might knock you down tomorrow with your soul less than shiny-bright.

It’s odd to think that presumably other people (my own father in fact) grew up without the bus. Or maybe had a bus that knocked you down: squish, finito, and made you more careful when crossing the road.

Three Act Tragedy – Agatha Christie.

Reading this was part of the sporadic Christie reread I’m doing. I didn’t really remember the plot, but I knew I definitely had read it before because as soon as the murderer came onstage I remembered he was the murderer, and because I thought the first time round (as I think now), that the girl called ‘Egg’ might have wandered in from an earlier book - except Christie’s women don’t usually have such a deep and unpleasant streak of jealousy as Egg seems to have.  

Beyond Egg – who is one of our four sleuths, but apparently more interested in attracting Charles the Actor (whose surname I have already forgotten) than catching a murderer – we have Mr Satterthwaite, whose prosaic self is normally seen in conjunction with (and offset by) the otherworldly Mr Quin, Hercule Poirot, who we see very little of until about half way (when a chance meeting with Satterthwaite brings him back to England) and Charles the Actor himself, who does a lot of whizzing about and sleuthing in precisely the way Poirot insists is most pointless but which impresses the impressionable Egg. 

I have to add at this point that it’s quite hard to see someone called Egg as a romantic heroine, especially if you’ve read a lot of P G Wodehouse. Her real name is Hermione, which doesn’t help much.  Hermione is the name even J K Rowling couldn’t bring back into fashion.

The book is well worth reading, although the use of multiple detectives doesn’t work quite as well for me as it does in Cards on the Table, and so Christie suffers unfairly by being compared with another Christie. 

I also found myself out of sympathy with the romance between Egg and Charles, and with the young man of her own age who’s in love with her.

Less of these people, I wanted to say, and more Poirot please.

It’s all gone a bit strawberry fields..

On Tuesday I went to Barnes for a philosophy lecture from which what I took away, mostly, was the impression that cogito ergo sum is assuming too much, and that we don’t know how we get mind from brain. So there’s the world of thought or ideas, and the material world; and some philosophers believe one exists and not the other, others think the first lot have it the wrong way round, some believe they both exist but don’t relate (which is the one I really don’t get. Unless the idea is that God was just bored and doodling matter in the margins. Most of the theories seem to have a God, possibly because they were first propounded such a long time ago. As an atheist with a lower case a I’m not against gods, even ones who are making it up as they go, but I’m not convinced that they’re a good first principle to work from) and some think there are both worlds but aren’t clear how they relate.

On the whole, generally, I tend not to think too hard about this sort of thing. Partly because I think it’s more or less insoluble, except in the sense of making up your own mind or (as I did at one point) drawing some tempting but equally fuzzy parallel between the relationship of brain and mind and the relationship of hardware and software; and partly because last time I thought too hard about it I had a dream that I believed I was Joan of Arc.

(I’m sure I told someone this on Tuesday night. It’s the sort of conversation you end up having when philosophy lectures are held in pubs. Still, they can only think I’m barmy. Or drunk. Or both. As, gentle reader, can you.)

Also, and not completely tangentially, my second MA assignment is in. This time I’ve swung right from one extreme to the other. Since I read almost no secondary material and didn’t put full enough quotes in number one, I’ve read a lot and quoted extensively in number two. Maybe too much.

I think I’ve mentioned before (if not here then on the Guardian book pages) that studying in English lit sometimes makes me feel like I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole into an early David Lodge novel; so it was serendipitous or possibly Freudian or most likely both that I stumbled across this when looking for more tube line books and straight after my second assignment went in:

This one isn’t a novel. It’s a selection of essays. I think I’ve also said before that I have a casual relationship with books of essays. I enjoy them, but there are very, very few I want to own, so this is a library book.

What I like about Lodge is his sense of humour and his imagination. Someone undoubtedly should write a book entitled ‘Graham Greene, Frequent Flyer’, and ‘The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of Kingsley Amis’ is a great title.

My favourite essay in this book though is the one about Terry Eagleton and Theory. Specifically, the way in which Theory has fallen out of favour in English Lit, but the observation (or agreement with T.E.) that academia can’t return to an innocent pre-theoretical state either.

It’s like a spotters guide to the particular rabbit hole I have recently fallen down, written by the person who first made me aware of that world.

The fact it makes me laugh as well can only be a bonus.