Novella as Prose Poem

Orbital 

by Samantha Harvey

This novella surpasses the standard for books of its kind thanks to its remarkable start and superb writing. However, there are issues that caused me to view the book less favorably overall. These included a lack of narrative coherence and what seemed to be repetition that slowed down the story. Some have called this novel a meditation, but it might be more accurate to read it as a meditation on an experiment in space orbiting the Earth.

"Orbital," the Booker Prize-winning novel by Samantha Harvey, is a brilliant and reflective prose poem that forgoes conventional narrative in favor of a deep and personal examination of perspective, humanity, and our delicate planet. The novel, which takes place on the International Space Station (ISS) and spans a single day, follows six astronauts as they make sixteen orbits around the Earth, their memories and thoughts blending with the amazing scene below.
The undisputed star of this celestial show is Harvey's prose. She creates a lyrical and accurate stream-of-consciousness narrative in a style that has been compared to Virginia Woolf. The rich, evocative language perfectly conveys the breathtaking beauty of Earth—the "blue marble" in all its dynamic, swirling splendor—as seen from space. The familiar shapes of continents and oceans acquire a new and profound significance, and sunrises and sunsets become transient, frequent miracles.

The novel focuses more on the inner landscapes of its characters than it does on a compelling plot. Through their fragmented thoughts, we glean insights into their pasts, their families, and their motivations for venturing into the void. An Italian astronaut reflects on a promise made to a fisherman, a Russian cosmonaut carries the weight of a family legacy, and an American astronaut grapples with a recent loss. These individual stories, however, are not the central focus but rather threads in a larger tapestry of human experience, all viewed from the unique and isolating vantage point of orbit.

One point of contention is the purposeful absence of a traditional plot. "Orbital" might be a frustratingly static experience for those who are looking for a story with a clear rising action, climax, and resolution. The characters also experience a sense of transience, with their unique identities occasionally blending into a collective consciousness that speaks for all of humanity.

To criticize "Orbital" for what it is not, however, would be to miss the point of what it so brilliantly accomplishes. It is a philosophical meditation on our place in the cosmos and a novel of ideas. The artificiality of borders, the interconnectedness of all life, and the overwhelming beauty and precarity of our world are some of the profound themes Harvey explores through the astronauts' unique perspective. As the astronauts observe the real-world consequences of climate change from their divine vantage point, the environmental undertones are subtly potent.

"Orbital" is a book that simultaneously rewards and challenges patience. It is an invitation to slow down, to observe, and to contemplate. It is a deeply moving and ultimately hopeful work that reminds us of the extraordinary privilege of our existence on this "pale blue dot." Samantha Harvey's "Orbital" is a genuinely remarkable read for readers who value fine prose and are receptive to a more avant-garde and philosophical style of narrative.

A Mother with Suffering Child

Hamnet 

by Maggie O'Farrell

“He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.”   ― Maggie O'Farrell

Hamnet is a historical fiction novel about the life of William Shakespeare’s family at the time of his son Hamnet’s death in 1596 and the writing of the play Hamlet around 1600. I was disappointed with this award-winning novel. I found it boring, but even worse was the prose style of the author that succeeded in what I can only call piling on the adjectives and adjective phrases in describing in detail the mundane activities of the characters.

The description of William Shakespeare’s early life, his marriage to Anne Hathaway, whom O’Farrell calls Agnes, the death of his son Hamnet from the plague and the subsequent impact of this tragedy on their marriage and his work comprise the plot of the novel. Will is never named and is referred to as ‘her husband’, ’the father’ or ‘ the latin tutor’. He also has very little to say for himself. This deliberate omission is most likely made to free the narrative from the weight of association that his name carries, but I found it quite contrived considering how much detail we are given about the setting, including the house interiors and streets of Stratford.

The novel begins with Hamnet but the central character is his mother Agnes who is unconventional, free spirited, a gifted herbalist and clairvoyant. It is the events between Hamnet’s parents’ meeting and his birth that provide a major part of the story. At her first meeting with Will she presses the flesh between his thumb and forefinger which reveals his incredible future to her but disappointingly very little subsequently emerges from this insight. There are some interesting descriptions of his former home and the life of the household. The story is narrated in a non-linear fashion with each chapter relating to a different time period. However I found the frequent back and forth an unnecessary stylistic approach that added to my overall disappointment.

A "Different" Boy

Shuggie Bain 

by Douglas Stuart

“He had long perfected the art of staring through people, leaving conversations to follow his daydreams through the back of their heads and out any open window.”   ― Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain

In a book whose story has moments of wry humor interspersed between many more moments of almost unrelenting sadness, Shuggie Bain, the titular character, is tossed back and forth between disappointments too numerous to count. We meet him as he is growing up in the projects in 1980s Glasgow with his mother and family. Both his mother, Agnes, and the environment of lower class Glasgow are characters that rival and sometimes surpass Shuggie in interest for the reader. The combination in this first novel from the pen of Douglas Stuart make for an engrossing read in spite of a heavy dose of heartbreak.

After a brief introductory section and two chapters where we meet Agnes, her girl friends, and her second husband, Shug, we finally meet a five-year-old Shuggie who is dancing while being cheered by his mother in her Glasgow tenement. Shuggie is the last born among Agnes’ children. The other two children were sired by a different father. Agnes abandoned her first husband for a taxi driver who is rarely at home. Shuggie’s father, Big Shug, is a womanizer and has pushed Agnes into a depression due to his philandering behavior. Agnes has turned to alcohol, thus, becoming a shadow of her former self. In spite of flaws, Shuggie loves his mother and sometimes misses school to look after her.

Agnes’ behavior forces her first two children to plot their escape. Therefore, Shuggie is left with his mother. Shuggie hides from the outside world for being mocked about his sexuality. This leaves him alone and he spends much time with his mother. To make his mother happy, Shuggie sings and dances for her. When Agnes’ conditions worsen, men take advantage and molest her sexually. Readers get insight into a bitter and humiliating woman, whose downfall is catalyzed by love and marriage. Simply, it is a case of a dysfunctional love affair.

Shuggie is displayed as a character who longs to make his mother happy no matter what happens. Although he has been failed by his parents, Shuggie is never judgmental. Gradually he begins to realize he is "different" than the other boys.
"He felt something was wrong. Something inside him felt put together incorrectly. It was like they could all see it, but he was the only one who could not say what it was. It was just different, and so it was just wrong."

In spite of this devastating realization, or perhaps because of it, Shuggie is a strong character dealing with rejection by friends and abandonment by his father, just as his mother is also dealing with rejection. The rejection experienced by a mother and her son leads to a huge love that binds them together. The decade of the eighties is not kind to either Shuggie or Agnes. While Shuggie gradually enters manhood in his teen years he begins both to accept his gay persona and to learn how to dance for himself.

Stuart's book won the 2020 Booker Prize whose judges praised this "amazingly intimate, compassionate, gripping portrait of addiction, courage and love."

A Little Person in The Troubles

Milkman 

by Anna Burns

“People always said you'd better be careful. Though how, when things are out of your hands, when things were never really in your hands, when things are stacked against you, does a person - the little person down here on the earth - be that?”  ― Anna Burns, Milkman



Milkman is a unique historical novel told from the personal prospective of an unnamed young female narrator. Walking while reading, a girl - Middle sister - is pursued by the Milkman. This original sometimes mesmerizing narrative made me successively fascinated and bored with the dizzying rapidity of thoughts that connected - somehow, sometimes and ultimately. 

 The history is the setting of the novel during the time of the "Troubles". This refers to the conflict in Northern Ireland during the late 20th century. It was also known internationally as the Northern Ireland conflict and it is sometimes described as an "irregular war" or "low-level war". The conflict began in the late 1960s and is usually deemed to have ended with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Among other awards it won the Booker Prize in 2018.

What makes Milkman unique, among other things, is that the narrative portrays the "Troubles" without using such terms as ‘the Troubles’, ‘Britain’ and ‘Ireland’, ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’, ‘RUC’ and ‘British army’ and ‘IRA’. On the other hand, the narrator’s personal, first-principles language, with its phrases coming at you so frequently with inverted commas and sudden changes of register, is also used to describe the inner world of a young woman ... 
“I used to puzzle over the extent of this anger, of all of ma’s blaming and haranguing and complaining. It was only much later that I came to realize that this was a case of her not forgiving him for many things – maybe for all things – and not just for not cheering up.”

It’s a brilliant rhetorical balancing act, and the narrator can sometimes be very funny. The tonal changes are subtle and the plot has some absurd moments, yet, while it is easy to overlook on a first reading, at least until the final stretch, there is a density and tightness of plotting behind the narrator’s apparently rambling performance. What’s more, the comic unfolding of the plot runs counter to the narrator’s tight sense of what can and can’t be said and done in her neighborhood, and, after a chilling final encounter with the milkman, the ending is a surprise and perhaps a relief.


The author uses imaginative language and her limited use of proper names creates a sort of distancing effect. The style of the novel is demanding, but as a reader your perseverance is rewarded in the end. I would compare the difficulty I encountered with its style to a similar difficulty that I experienced reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2004). While very different in many ways both of these difficult reads are worth the effort required.

Do you Remember What Really Happened?

The Sense of an Ending 

by Julian Barnes

“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.”   ― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending





At the end of Part One of this short novel the narrator, Anthony (Tony) Webster, says "I survived. 'He survived to tell the tale' --that's what people say.". In this novel one learns to be skeptical about the tale that Tony tells about his life. Slowly, inexorably one begins to realize that events that Tony relates may not have happened quite the way he remembers. This makes the novel more interesting, and more frustrating, than it might otherwise have been.

This is a short novel; on that everyone seems to agree. Beyond that it is a compelling read that is written well, owing its brevity to the paucity of details about Tony and his life. Part One tells of his school years wherein he and his two pals, Colin and Alex, are augmented by the arrival of Adrian Finn. Adrian becomes an important part of the story and in Part Two his importance grows. However, in the preface to Tony's schooldays he warns the reader that he will share "a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. If I can't be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That's the best I can manage."(p 2)  Do these impressions provide any real sense of the reality of Tony's life? I will let other readers answer that for themselves.

Tony's story becomes a tale about memory, aging, time, and remorse. But the remorse is based on what Tony believes happened and that, unfortunately, is based on the story that he tells himself which has gaps that come back to haunt him. I hesitate to share many details of the plot for this is where the book is most interesting. It is so because of the unreliability of the narrator and the mysteries that ensue; mysteries that Tony pursues in part two only to be rebuffed by his first love and by his own blindness to the details and facts that his memory has somehow elided from his impressions.

For the reader this story can be comforting, for who has not forgotten the details of past events that once important have long ago faded into ineffable impressions? But it is also disturbing because you are carried along with Tony and only late in the book begin to discover his shortcomings as a truth-teller, or the difference between what may have really happened and the impressions to which he claims to be true. Tony alternatively claims to envy the "clarity" of the life of his friend Adrian while apologizing to his first love, Veronica, all the while oblivious to the reality which leads her to claim that "he just does not get it".  That idea pervades most of Part Two and leads the reader to question the sense of the ending of The Sense of An Ending.

In spite of the brevity of this novel, or perhaps because of it, the reader may appreciate the situations that suggest the vagaries of memory and the devilish disappointments that may result. Tony admits as much when he says:
"What had Old Joe Hunt answered when I knowingly claimed that history was the lies of the victors? 'As long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated.' Do we remember that enough when it comes to our private lives?"(p 133)

Julian Barnes is the author of Flaubert's Parrot and other novels. He received the Mann Booker prize in 2011 for The Sense of An Ending.

Old Memory

The Sea 
by John Banville


“Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, the will butting its blunt head against the world's wall, suchlike, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to the simple search for shelter, for comfort, for, yes, I admit it, for cosiness. This is a surprising, not to say shocking, realisation."  -  John Banville, The Sea



The Sea is old memory made newly vivid. Art historian Max Morden returns to the Irish seaside village in County Wexford where he spent his childhood summers more than fifty years earlier. He has retreated there ostensibly to write the definitive book on the French painter, Pierre Bonnard. Settling into the former house of the Graces, a family that held claim to his adolescent heart, he reconnects with his innocence, with his first glimpse of love, but also with a profound experience of sorrow.

Banville's brilliant, but flawed novel, which won the 2005 Man Booker Prize, presents a man, Max Morden -- an Irishman, mourning his wife's recent death —and his blemished life. "The past beats inside me like a second heart," observes Max early on, and his return to a town by the sea where he lost his innocence gradually yields the objects of his nostalgia. Max's thoughts oscillate between the events of his wife's final illness and the evocative summer, many years past, when the Grace family—father, mother and twins Chloe and Myles, a strange young lad who has never spoken — lived in a villa in the seaside town where Max and his quarreling parents rented a dreary "chalet." It was there he fell under their spell. In a style reminiscent of Proust or Thomas Mann, Banville seamlessly juxtaposes Max's youth and age. Each scene is rendered with the intense scenic specificity of a painting ("the mud shone blue as a new bruise"); the theme of painting is reinforced by references to paintings and painters, especially Bonnard whose noted sketchiness is apropos. As in much of Banville's oeuvre, things are not what they seem. Max's cruelly capricious complicity in the sad history that unfolds, and the facts kept hidden from the reader until the shocking denouement, brilliantly dramatize the unpredictability of life and the incomprehensibility of death. Like the strange high tide that figures into Max's visions and remembrances, this novel sweeps the reader into the inexorable waxing and waning of life.

You can open the book to almost any page and read beautiful, poetic language. As the narrator remembers a storm: "At last , I thought, the elements have achieved a pitch of magnificence to match my inner turmoil! I felt transfigured, I felt like on of Wagner's demi-gods, aloft on a thunder-cloud. . ." Or as he describes the sea: "Down here, by the sea, there is a special quality to the silence at night. I do not know if this is my doing, I mean if this quality is something I bring to the silence of my room, and even of the whole house, or if it is a local effect, due to the salt in the air, perhaps, or the seaside climate in general." Unfortunately the prose can also tend to be overwhelming in its gratuitous pretentiousness.
Inexorably the novel courses its way to the moment of climax and the explosion rocks the reader. The magnificence of memory juxtaposed with sometimes evocative prose makes this a wonderful book to read.


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The Great Mutiny

The Siege of Krishnapur 
by J.G. Farrell



“Things are not yet perfect, of course,’ sighed the Collector. ‘All the same, I should go so far as to say that in the long run a superior civilization such as ours is irresistible. By combining our advances in science and in morality we have so obviously found the best way of doing things. Truth cannot be resisted! Er, that’s to say, not successfully,’ the Collector added as a round shot struck the corner of the roof and toppled one of the pillars of the verandah”   ― J.G. Farrell


Set in India, 1857, during the Great Mutiny, this novel by J. G. Farrell is both a mighty work of historical fiction and a humane study of man. Farrell has the ability to create a world filled with flawed but often sympathetic characters and that sets this novel apart from typical historical fare. He also underlays the action both subtly and with irony depicting the contrast between the civilization of science and rationality, represented by the Great Exhibition of 1851 and its' Crystal Palace, with the culture of India as seen through the eyes of their British overlords; who at this time are from the British East India Company. It is this presentation of the attitudes of the British in India that makes this as much a challenging novel of ideas as it is an historical drama.

The action takes place during the period of unrest that leads to the end of the control of the Company with battle sequences during the siege by the Sepoys that are riveting, but do not detract from more abstract discussions of theology, philosophy and medicine. Ultimately the British in Krishnapur are faced with a battle for their lives against multiple attackers; disease in the form of Cholera, starvation and the Sepoys. All the while, the novel seems to overflow with wit, tenderness, satire and the whole of humanity. As told in a very readable style with both irony and humor by J. G. Farrell this is one of the best historical novels I have had the pleasure to read.

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Romance from a Bygone Era

Possession 
by A.S. Byatt


“They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side... He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.” ― A.S. Byatt, Possession



Possession: A Romance is a 1990 bestselling novel by British writer A. S. Byatt that also won the 1990 Booker Prize. The novel explores the postmodern concerns of similar novels, which are often categorized as historiographic meta fiction, a genre that blends approaches from both historical fiction and meta fiction. In this specific case one of the main themes, struck in the epigraph from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, is that this novel is a romance in its attempt to "connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us".

The romance follows two modern-day academics as they research the paper trail around the previously unknown love life between famous fictional poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. Possession is set both in the present day and the Victorian era, pointing out the differences between the two time periods, and satirizing such things as modern academia and mating rituals. The structure of the novel incorporates many different styles, including fictional diary entries, letters and poetry, and uses these styles and other devices to explore the postmodern concerns of the authority of textual narratives. The title Possession highlights many of the major themes in the novel: questions of ownership and independence between lovers; the practice of collecting historically significant cultural artifacts; and the possession that biographers feel toward their subjects. 

The romance concerns the relationship between two fictional Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash (whose life and work are loosely based on those of the English poet Robert Browning, or Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose work is more consonant with the themes expressed by Ash, as well as Tennyson's having been poet-laureate to Queen Victoria) and Christabel LaMotte (based on Christina Rossetti (although LaMotte is presented as much less well-known poet than was Rosetti) as learned by present-day academics Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey. Following a trail of clues from various letters and journals, they work to uncover the truth about Ash and LaMotte's history before it is discovered by rival colleagues. Byatt provides extensive letters, poetry and diaries by major characters in addition to the narrative, illuminating the work with poetry attributed to the fictional Ash and LaMotte.  I enjoyed the many references to literary and philosophical sources and themes that the author interpolates within the narrative.  One favorite theme of mine is reading which is explored near the end of the novel:

"It is possible for a writer to make, or remake at least, for a reader, the primary pleasures of eating, or drinking, or looking on, or sex.  Novels . . . do not habitually elaborate on the equally intense pleasure of reading.  There are obvious reasons for this, the most obvious being the regressive nature of the pleasure, a mise-en-abime even, where words draw attention to power and delight of words, and so ad infinitum, thus making the imaginative experience something papery and dry, narcissistic and yet disagreeably distanced, without the immediacy of sexual moisture or the scented garnet glow of good burgundy.  And yet, natures such as Roland's are at their most alert and heady when reading is violently yet steadily alive." (pp 510-11)

Written in response to John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman the novel explores the postmodern concerns of that and other similar novels, which are often categorized as historiographic meta fiction, a genre that blends approaches from both historical fiction and meta fiction. Byatt wrote elsewhere that "Fowles has said that the nineteenth–century narrator was assuming the omniscience of a god. I think rather the opposite is the case—this kind of fictive narrator can creep closer to the feelings and inner life of characters—as well as providing a Greek chorus—than any first–person mimicry. In 'Possession' I used this kind of narrator deliberately three times in the historical narrative—always to tell what the historians and biographers of my fiction never discovered, always to heighten the reader’s imaginative entry into the world of the text." 
This is only one of the many ways that Byatt keeps the novel (romance) interesting for the reader. The combination of mystery, romance, and literary references made this an engaging and delightful book that become progressively more interesting as I read toward its unexpectedly exciting denouement.

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Nest of Vipers

Bring Up the Bodies 
by Hilary Mantel

“What is the nature of the border between truth and lies? It is permeable and blurred because it is planted thick with rumour, confabulation, misunderstandings and twisted tales. Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.”   ― Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies


I began reading this book with trepidation because I was dissatisfied with her earlier novel, Wolf Hall. Fortunately I was quickly disabused of this notion and found myself truly enjoying the narrative and style of this second volume of a planned trilogy, although I could not find any characters that I really liked.
The novel spans the death of one spurned Queen (Katherine) and the execution of another. It displays an Anne Boleyn reduced in power—“her dark glitter, now rubbed a little, flaking in places” (36)—to one encircled, tried, and eventually executed, flattened to a “puddle of gore”(397). This is not a novel about Queen Anne, however, so much as a continuation of Mantel’s thorough and interesting portrait of the man in charge of underwriting her doom, Thomas Cromwell. Mantel portrays a Cromwell as a penetrating and unsettling man who “has a way of getting his way . . . [who] will explain to a man where his true interests lie, and . . . introduce that same man to aspects of himself he didn’t know existed” (6).

Later in the novel this passage sums up Cromwell's mission:
“Rafe asks him, could the king's freedom be obtained, sir, with more economy of means? Less bloodshed?
Look, he says: once you have exhausted the process of negotiation and compromise, once you have fixed on the destruction of an enemy, that destruction must be swift and it must be perfect. Before you even glance in his direction, you should have his name on a warrant, the ports blocked, his wife and friends bought, his heir under your protection, his money in your strong room and his dog running to your whistle. Before he wakes in the morning, you should have the axe in your hand.”

After the death of Thomas More (in the previous novel) the Church and State are one under the mastery of Henry VIII. And immediately under Henry is Thomas Cromwell, a Machiavellian who finds Machiavelli’s book “trite,” a statesman who can crush a man’s life with a single word (71). He is also brilliant, untiring, and capable of deep loyalty and surprising acts of kindness and charity. Mantel presents through Cromwell's eyes an England teeming with beauty as well as with cruelty and death: a landscape where “each leaf of a tree, the sun behind it, [hangs] like a golden pear” (8). Cromwell is, like many of Mantel’s fictional characters, an outsider—in this case, one that cannot forget his own history, retaining empathy for the maltreated, the poor and ill-bred. His is the oblique gaze of a modern: even as he carries out the King’s dark orders, Cromwell imagines an England with better roads built from taxes levied on the wealthy (43). The court may scorn him as “a blacksmith’s boy,” but Cromwell is convinced a man can rise from humble origins: “In a generation everything can change” (43). However, I am not sure he is completely convinced of this as he is continually under pressure to carry out Henry's wishes. Thinking about writing a book about Henry Cromwell imagines a faux Henry in his mind as he remembers Erasmus's words: "you should praise a ruler even for the qualities he does not have. For the flattery gives him to think. And the qualities he presently lacks, he might go to work on them." (67) This is a dream for the lies abound and the deeds are often bloody, but the nobles and courtiers who are affected are not a sympathetic lot. The whole crowd of primary players resemble nothing better than a nest of vipers.
As the novel winds its way to the expected denouement Thomas Cromwell plays families against one another and uses the fear of Henry as a trump card. The result are indictments of the Queen and her "conspirators".
"When the indictments come to his hand, he see at once that, though the script is a clerk's the king has been at work. He can hear the king's voice in every line: his outrage, jealousy, fear." (346) They are filled with details about kisses, touchings, gifts, and multiple dates of offences, so "if there is specific denial of one date, one place, it will not be enough to injure the whole." (347)

There are some warm moments between Cromwell and his son Gregory, but by the end of the novel he is preparing Gregory for the realities of adulthood by bringing him to witness, albeit kneeling and bowed, the beheading of Anne Boleyn. In spite of the bloody politics of state among mostly detestable characters the tautly-written narrative was appealing and presented the events in a more understandable manner than the first volume. This is a historical novel worth reading for its insights into events that most will be familiar with before they open page one.

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Friends unto Death

Last Orders 
by Graham Swift

“Literature, after all, from Homer onwards, is littered with the recounting of deaths and with the fascination for death, and in this it only expresses what we all repeatedly dwell on but do not necessarily or readily voice. So far as death goes, I don't claim any oddity. There is only one sea: I'm in the same boat as everyone else. And that seems, more generally, to be the position that every novelist, unless they are possessed of a peculiar arrogance, should take: I am mortal too, I am human too. I too, like you, share life's joys, pains, confusions. We're all in the same boat.”   ― Graham Swift

Today is the birth anniversary of Graham Swift who was born in 1949.  This is his Booker Prize-winning novel from 1996.  Some have noted similarities between it and  Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, but that does not detract from its quality which has been evident in Swift's writing since his earlier success with Waterland (a novel that was short-listed for the Booker).  While I found it a bit slow at first, it eventually evolved into a captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request--namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. None could be better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies--insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war.

The narrative start is developed with an economy that presents (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth with a minimum of melodrama. The group is uncomfortable at first as evidenced by weak and self- conscious jocular remarks when they meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader gradually learns why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does--or so he thinks. As you might expect there are stories shared with topics like tales of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms. There is even a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling sea waves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Graham Swift is able to avoid artificiality by listening closely to these lives and presenting realistic voices that share stories of humanity with the proverbial ring of truth.

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Iris Murdoch

All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.

- Iris Murdoch

On this day in 1919, the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin. British writer, university lecturer and prolific and highly professional novelist, Iris Murdoch dealt with everyday ethical or moral issues, sometimes in the light of myths. As a writer, she was a perfectionist who did not allow editors to change her text. Murdoch produced 26 novels in 40 years.

"She wanted, through her novels, to reach all possible readers, in different ways and by different means: by the excitement of her story, its pace and its comedy, through its ideas and its philosophical implications, through the numinous atmosphere of her own original and created world--the world she must have glimpsed as she considered and planned her first steps in the art of fiction." (John Bailey in Elegy for Iris, 1998)

In 1948 she was elected a fellow of St. Anne's College, Oxford, where she worked as a tutor until 1963. Following that time, Murdoch devoted herself entirely to writing. Between the years 1963 and 1967 she also lectured at the Royal College of Art.

Murdoch's first published work, SARTRE, ROMANTIC RATIONALIST (1953), was a critical study. She had met Sartre in the 1940s, becoming interested in existentialism. Murdoch made her debut as a novelist with UNDER THE NET (1954), which had as its protagonist the Sartrean hero Jack Donaghue, but also suggested a familiarity with modern British philosophy. A SEVERED HEAD (1961) exploited Jungian theories of archetypes. A Severed Head analyzes Freud's theories about male sexuality and desire, and particularly the fear of castration. THE BELL (1958) is among Murdoch's most successful novels. It depcts an Anglican religious community in Gloucestershire. The events focus on the replacement bell to be hung in an abbey tower. Finally the difficulties of the task culminate in an effort to move the bell along a causeway to the gates of the nunnery - the bell suddenly falls into the water and sinks without a trace. The story was later televised.

Often, Murdoch used fantasy and gothic elements, but her characters were realistically portrayed in their attempts to find meaning to their lives in extraordinary situations. In the 1950s, Murdoch wrote, "We live in a scientific and anti-metaphysical age, in which the dogmas, images, and precepts of religion have lost much of their power," and we have been left with "far too shallow and flimsy an idea of human personality." Many of her novels have a religious or philosophical theme, but she avoided clear political statements. "As I said, I do not think that the artist, qua artist, has a duty to society. A citizen has a duty to society, and a writer might sometimes feel he ought to write persuasive newspaper articles or pamphlets, but this would be a different activity. The artist's duty is to art, to truth-telling in his own medium, the writer's duty is to produce the best literary work of which he is capable, and he must find out how this can be done." (from Existentialists and Mystics, Peter Conradi, Ed., 1997) In THE TIME OF THE ANGELS (1965) the protagonist is Carel Fisher, an eccentric Anglican priest in an inner-city parish, who engages in devil worship. His daughter Muriel finds out that his niece Elizabeth is his illegitimate daughter, and lets him die following an overdose of sleeping pills. "Those with whom the angels communicate are lost," says one of the characters.

In the experimental novel THE BLACK PRINCE (1973) the narrator is a self-conscious writer, Bradley Pearson. He is obsessed by perfection and sees the artistic calling as "a doom," a Last Judgment. A passionate love awakens his Black Eros, a source of love and art, and he lands in jail for a crime he did not commit. "Can there be a natural, as it were Shakespearean, felicity in the moral life?" he asks. THE GOOD APPRENTICE (1985) was an allegory of the battle between good and evil, focusing on the protagonist's suffering. Stuart Cuno has decided to become good, and his methods include celibacy, chastity and the abandonment of a promising academic career. Stuart's stepbrother Edward Baltram is tormented by guilt because he has, he believes, killed his best friend. Stuart goes to rescue Edward from his 'journey to the underworld' and causes a final catastrophic clash of forces. Murdoch's major work is considered THE SEA, THE SEA, which won the Booker Prize in 1978. The narrator, Charles Arrowby, is a tyrannical director-playwright who, after 40 years, again makes contact with his worn-out childhood sweetheart, bullies her without being able to change, and then starts an affair with an equally monstrous 18-year-old girl. My personal favorite of her novels is A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970), in part because it was my introduction to her writing. In recent years The Black Prince, due to its' themes and style has also become a favorite of mine.

She died in Oxford on February 8, 1999. In his memoir Elegy for Iris John Bayley portrays his brilliant wife lovingly but unsentimentally. "She was a superior being, and I knew that superior beings just did not have the kind of mind that I had." Murdoch's benevolent personality was not broken by her disease. In Iris and Her Friends: A Memoir of Memory and Desire (1999) Bayley continued his examination of his long romance. Richard Eyre's film Iris (2001), starring Judi Dench, Jim Broadbent, and Kate Winslet, was based on Bayley's Elegy fo Iris.

Barbara Pym

The British novelist Barbara Pym was born on this day in 1913 in Oswestry, Shropshire. She was privately educated at Huyton College, near Liverpool. After studying English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, she served in the Women's Royal Naval Service during World War II.
Her literary career is noteworthy because of the long hiatus between 1963 and 1977, when, despite early success and continuing popularity, she was unable to find a publisher for her richly comic novels; then, just three years before her death by cancer at age sixty-six, sudden rediscovery and international fame for being "a twentieth-century Jane Austen." The turning point for Pym came with an influential article in the Times Literary Supplement in which two prominent names, Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin, nominated her as the most underrated writer of the century. Pym and Larkin had kept up a private correspondence over a period of many years. Her comeback novel, Quartet in Autumn, was nominated for the Booker Prize. Another novel, The Sweet Dove Died, previously rejected by many publishers, was subsequently published to critical acclaim, and several of her previously unpublished novels were published after her death. Barbara Pym died of breast cancer, aged 66. Following her death, her sister Hilary continued to champion her work, and the Barbara Pym Society was set up in 1993. The sisters are both buried in Finstock churchyard.

Several strong themes link the works in the Pym "canon", which are more notable for their style and characterization than for their plots. She is part of a tradition that may be traced back to Jane Austen or, more recently, Elizabeth Bowen among others. A superficial reading gives the impression that they are sketches of village or suburban life, and comedies of manners, with excessive significance being attached to social activities connected with the Anglican church (in particular its Anglo-Catholic incarnation). However, the dialogue is often deeply ironic, and a tragic undercurrent runs through some of the later novels, especially Quartet in Autumn and The Sweet Dove Died.

The latter is my personal favorite with its rich characters including Leonora Eyre, an attractive and elegant, but essentially selfish, middle-aged woman. She becomes friendly with antique dealer Humphrey Boyce and his nephew James. Both men are attracted to Leonora, but Leonora prefers the young, good-looking James to the more "suitable" Humphrey. While James is away on a buying trip, Leonora discovers to her annoyance that he has been seeing Phoebe, a girl of his own age. Leonora makes use of Humphrey to humiliate Phoebe, and turns out a sitting tenant in order that James can take up a flat in her own house. She does this in an apparent attempt to control his life. While abroad, the bisexual James has begun a relationship with an American, the amoral Ned, who later follows him to London. Ned pries James out of Leonora's grasp, only to reject him for another lover. James attempts a reconciliation with Leonora, but she refuses to give him a second opportunity to hurt her, and settles for the admiration of the less attractive Humphrey. As with all Pym's fiction, the novel contains many literary references, notably to works by Keats, John Milton and Henry James. Another favorite of mine, and much more in the comic vein, is the delightful Crampton Hodnet which has Oxford as its setting, a plus.

All of Pym's oeuvre is consistently readable and I would recommend her novels to all.

The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym. Moyer Bell. 2003 (1978).
Crampton Hodnet by Barbara Pym. Moyer Bell. 2000 (1985).

The White Tiger

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga is a novel in the tradition of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and Ellison's Invisible Man. That is to say it is not your traditional Indian novel, but one that presents the hero as the outsider, a man who is both literally and figuratively underground and invisible.
The novel is narrated by Balram Halwai, "The White Tiger" who over seven nights shares his life story in the form of a letter to a Chinese official. In Balram the author has created an anti-hero who, with both charisma and charm, shares a very dark story about corruption, death and escape from the most extreme poverty into the wealth of successful entrepreneurship. The author uses the metaphors of light and dark to help us understand his traversal of a side of India seldom seen in most tales of that country. The theme of naming/identity also plays an important role as Balram takes on different names as he grows and changes from the simple munna to his eventual magisterial identity as "The White Tiger". The author has created a sort of modern journey, much as Ellison did where the hero overcomes his beginnings, and the corruption he finds everywhere, to create a new life for himself. It is, however, a new life that is strangely cut off from society so he remains an outsider to the end. The brilliant conception of the author impressed me as he presented believable characters, the realistic details about the best and worst of Indian society, and a clear depiction of the nature of the hero at the center of the story. There is black humor that is sometimes excruciatingly funny alongside true regret, and underlying it all hints of a fear (of the past) that cannot be completely eradicated. The author's voice is original and challenging as he takes you on a journey that, while seemingly straightforward, has many layers of meaning and leaves you with questions to ponder. Genuinely deserving of the Man Booker Prize of 2008, The White Tiger is both an engaging enjoyable read and a thought-provoking meditation on life.


The White Tiger: A Novel by Aravind Adiga. Free Press, New York. 2008

The Remains of the Day


I have just read this novel for the second time, having read it in the not so distant past of the mid-nineties shortly after it was published and won the Booker Prize for fiction.
My current reading confirms the reasonableness of that award and reminds me of the felicitous style demonstrated by Kazuo Ishiguro in writing this book. The music of the prose helped make bearable the oppressiveness of the past and the icy gravity of Stevens" approach to his work and his life (the two are interchangeable). Stevens is the narrator of the story and as a butler he demonstrates dedication to his craft that goes above and beyond "a life of service". The price he pays is an inability to relate to other humans with any sort of feeling that goes beyond the formality of his work environment. As is typical of truly good books you can tell a lot from the first page as to what will be important. Ironically, we find reference to both an "expedition" and "imagination" on the opening page; two things that Stevens has never experienced in his life of service. As the story is told looking back from a vantage point near the end of his life it has the flavor of nostalgia, but with that flavor the flatness of a life that is as plain and worn as the sleeve of Steven's butler jacket. While the prose style kept this reader turning the pages I wondered what Stevens new employer, an American named Farraday, saw in this worn out man. Perhaps he saw the humanity that Stevens himself never found.


The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. 1989.

Waiting for the Barbarians


A visionary novel by J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians is challenging with a lucid style and deceptive simplicity. It is an allegory of a place that seems familiar yet cannot be identified with any specificity. The protagonist, known as the Magistrate of the local outpost of the Empire, tells a story of the Barbarians poised on the edge of the Empire waiting. The story suggests conflict, yet there are no battle scenes. The Empire seems as amorphous as the threat from the Barbarians. There are even moments that seem Kafkaesque in their sheer surrealness.
The primary details of the story center on the relationship between the Magistrate and a young blind girl, a barbarian who begs for her survival. The Magistrate takes her in and the relationship that develops between them mirrors the growing dissatisfaction of the Magistrate with the Empire. He eventually takes action that will have significant consequences for his life, leading to lessons about freedom, justice, and the meaning of life within the Empire. The climax of the novel is powerful in the sense that principles are powerful in the lives of humans. The allegory is effective and the story is masterful. It is not surprising that Coetzee won the Booker Prize for this novel.


Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee. Penguin Books, New York. 1999 (1980)

Prize Winner


What are the qualities that make a prize-winning novel? Having read more than two dozen such novels in my Lincoln Park Book Group which I have attended regularly for more than nine years I pondered this question after our meeting last night. We were discussing the novel, The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2006. The general reaction of our reading group was summed up in the quizzical expression on the face of one of us as if to say: this book won the Booker prize? While our discussion uncovered some redeeming features in Desai's novel, I found these features far outweighed by the problems in the novel. The lack of characters, while interesting enough, that I cared about topped my list. But as far as prize winners go this book must have had little competition in 2006 because it was not in the same stratosphere as former winners like Midnight's Children or The Sea, The Sea. This is not the first time that I've encountered an unevenness in the choice of an award winning novel. Each time the experience only makes me more curious about the selection process and question whether the quality of the writing is ever the main criteria...

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. Grove Press, New York (2006)