Is Heathcliff a Murderer? Puzzles in nineteenth century fiction – John Sutherland

This is a blast. Sutherland picks away at the plot holes and hidden subtexts from a wide range of Victorian literature and comes to some fascinating and startling conclusions. The business about how Frankenstein animated his monster is eyebrow-raising to say the least.

It turns out that your average nineteenth century novel is somewhat racier than you may have thought at first glance.

Kim – Rudyard Kipling

Kipling portrays colonial India as an exciting melting pot of diverse cultures, but the beneficial role of the English ruling class remains uninterrogated. That’s not necessarily a problem , but the picaresque plotting tries the patience and the streetwise Kim is not quite as charming as he needs to be, so the reader is left trying to come up with reasons to enjoy the book rather than simply having fun with it.

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

Bloody, hell.

I don’t mind violence (in its fictional form, you understand) but if it becomes too all-encompassing then the effect is severely blunted. In American Psycho, for example, the horrors are interspersed with long passages of hilarious banality, so the novel’s satirical effects are achieved brilliantly.

In Blood Meridian, McCarthy presents the reader with a seemingly unending catalogue of murder, rape and sundry outrages with no relieving counterpoint. The idea is to present an American history steeped in the twin original sins of genocide and racial subjugation, set in a landscape at once beautiful and drenched in blood. For me it doesn’t work because I became numb to the violence very early on and could find no compensatory interest elsewhere.

This is my third attempt at McCarthy and we still don’t get on, it seems.

I read this because of the rave it got on First Tuesday Book Club. Different strokes, I suppose.

The Seven Basic Plots; why we tell stories - Christopher Booker

The first half of this mammoth tome is interesting, outlining 7 basic plots that form the basis of all storytelling. These are:

Overcoming the Monster – Beowulf, Jack and the Beanstalk
Rags to Riches – David Copperfield, Dick Whittington
The Quest – Pilgrim’s Progress, Watership Down
Voyage and Return – Alice in Wonderland, Brideshead Revisted
Comedy – Shakespearean comedy, The Marriage of Figaro
Tragedy – King Lear, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Rebirth – Sleeping Beauty, A Christmas Carol

Later on he adds a couple more, the individual vs the implacable Other (Job, 1984) and the mystery (Sherlock Holmes).

By necessity, large chunks of text are taken up by plot synopses which I tended to skim, either because I already knew the outline or because it was opera, so who cares right?

It’s fun to consider the films, novels and plays one enjoys and figuring out how they fit into Booker’s scheme and, to be fair, just about everything does. However, my suspicions were raised by a few factual errors and some egregious misreadings. For example, he considers the story of only the original Star Wars film and therefore judges it as a failed Overcoming the Monster plot, whereas it was obviously designed as a series of stories that would straightforwardly fit into the Rebirth plot.

The first big problem arises with the thesis is that Booker regards stories that do not conform to these archetypes are, by definition, failed stories. Waiting For Godot is a failure as a Rebirth because the condition of stasis is never relieved. Around The World In Eighty Days is a failure as a Quest because the hero rescues the girl halfway through. No room is allowed for variation. As he says in discussing the “failure” of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, “Lawrence has sought to defy the archetypes. As always, the archetypes have won.”

This is even more egregious when based on a misreading, as when he attacks Joyce’s Ulysses because it fails to copy the archetypal template of The Odyssey. This is nonsense, because Joyce was ironising the original poem rather than attempting, pointlessly, to recreate it.

The second big problem overwhelms the final section of the book, in which Booker attempts to apply his ideas to the real world. He is revealed as a pretty old-fashioned reactionary, as when he describes A Clockwork Orange (the film) as “a glossily-packaged commercial for sex and violence”. No it isn’t. And what’s wrong with sex, incidentally? (He’s none too keen on swearing either. )

Eventually the book deliquesces into a broth of Jungian gobbledegook and unsupported political assertions. Towards the end there’s a very odd broadside against the state of Israel, provocatively worded and utterly out of place.

If this book fits into a fictional genre, it is that of Tragedy. The splendid chapters on Thomas Hardy and Hamlet offer intriguing, stimulating readings of texts that I have read plenty about. Like Othello’s jealousy or Lear’s pride, Booker has a Fatal Flaw. It is overambition (he spent 34 years writing the thing) and it brings about his downfall.

Tono-Bungay – H.G. Wells

The strange title refers to the snake oil panacea invented by our narrator’s uncle that leads to fame, fortune and, inevitably, ruin. The satirical depiction of the business can easily be applied to, say, the homeopathic industry, but much of it applies to capitalism in general. While this main thread is followed the vitality of the book remains, but the effect is diluted by numerous sidetracking episodes.

It was published in 1909, and offers a confounding political outlook. The overall vision often appears to be English conservative, and this is a little too late for the anti-semitism to be shrugged off, but then you are hit with a radical passage like this:

"Great God!" I cried, "but is this Life?"

For this the armies drilled, for this the Law was administered and the prisons did their duty, for this the millions toiled and perished in suffering, in order that a few of us should build palaces we never finished, make billiard-rooms under ponds, run imbecile walls round irrational estates, scorch about the world in motor-cars, devise flying-machines, play golf and a dozen such foolish games of ball, crowd into chattering dinner parties, gamble and make our lives one vast, dismal spectacle of witless waste! So it struck me then, and for a time I could think of no other interpretation. This was Life! It came to me like a revelation, a revelation at once incredible and indisputable of the abysmal folly of our being.

I have a biography of Wells lined up for future reading, perhaps reading that will give me a better understanding of the political angle.

Deliverance – James Dickey

I’ve always considered the movie to be an overrated bit of superior schlock, so I didn’t expect much from this despite it being on a couple of major “best novel” lists. To my surprise the opening section works really well, introducing the characters and a range of themes that are only partially explored in the adaptation: masculinity, conservation, a very late-sixties take on sexuality.

The first, most famous set piece retains its shock factor, and I was surprised not to find the oft-quoted bit of dialogue from the screen version, the “squeal like a pig” bit.

After this, though, the tension begins to dissipate culminating in a very dull final 40 pages or so in which our intrepid heroes go to great lengths to, er, save themselves a bit of hassle. Maybe this was development of a theme I didn’t pick up on, it’s certainly incongruous.

As an aside, I did learn an awful lot about archery from this book. Apparently the key is to keep your left arm as still as a statue and to release the bow fluidly, and the hardest trick is to keep the string taut for an extended period.

Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald

In which we are introduced to the beautiful, successful Divers swanning around the south of France, but this being a Fitzgerald novel we are aware that this glamorous facade is likely to fall apart in a miasma of alcohol and mental disintegration. So it goes in glorious, hauntingly beautiful fashion, and the shocking central revelation on which the whole plot hinges flashes by in just a sentence.

Diary – Chuck Palahniuk

The familiar Palahniuk traits of repetition and shock are used here in a surprisingly affecting work, veering closer in tone to Vonnegut than his more outrageous material. There are some laughs/gasps to be had but the overarching result is almost wistful.

Cheri – Colette

This brief account of a doomed love affair between a spoilt young man and his middle-aged courtesan/teacher is distinguished by a clear-eyed view of sexual relations. It’s interesting, and I’ll ascribe the occasional clunkiness to the translator.

Which Lie Did I Tell? – William Goldman

Subtitled More Adventures In The Screen Trade, this is as mightily entertaining and insightful as its predecessor.

In the last chapter Goldman offers the reader an unmade screenplay and then submits it for comment by a number of professional colleagues. It makes for fascinating reading, and has changed the way that I view films for the better, I think.

Reflections in a Golden Eye – Carson McCullers

A short, sad work touched by poetry.

I have just discovered that John Huston made a movie of this starring Marlon Brando and Liz Taylor, no less. I’m glad I didn’t know that as I was reading, but I would now like to see the film. Many themes are shared with her McCullers masterpiece, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter.

Dombey and Son – Charles Dickens

The first and last 200 pages of this enormous novel are great. The set-up is intriguing and concludes with a truly surprising narrative turn, and there is some real melodrama towards the end.

Unfortunately, the central section loses its way rather badly and I lost interest in the comical goings-on of the over-stuffed supporting cast.

Also, is this the least enticing book cover you have ever seen?

The Psychopath Test – Jon Ronson

My better half is a clinical psychologist so I am very aware of the importance of the DSM-IV, which is perhaps the most significant theme of this amiably rambling book. In characteristically revelatory yet haphazard fashion, Ronson riffs on the presence of psychopathy and other perceived disorders in society, by way of absurd Florida businessmen, Broadmoor and the sad case of whistleblower-turned-fruitloop of David Shayler.

I’m not sure exactly what point was reached, but I thoroughly enjoyed many of the stops while I was on the journey.

How I Escaped My Certain Fate – Stewart Lee

Lee is the best stand-up working today by some distance. His shtick is to begin a riff and then take a step back and pontificate on the meaning of the routine and a dissection of its mechanisms. It sounds academic and dry, but I find it hysterical.

This strange book takes things to yet another level of meta. Most of the book is taken up by a transcript of three separate routines annotated by absurdly extended footnotes, so we get an analysis of already self-conscious art that is simultaneously hilariously funny. Terrific.

If you don’t know Lee’s work, this might give you some idea what he’s about:

Tor!; the story of German football - Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenberger

As with the Spanish counterpart Morbo, I learned a fair bit of German history as a by-product of learning about its football culture. There’s a grim, inevitable fascination with the Nazi era material, and occasionally one winces with the incongruity of sentences along the lines of “In the same week that the Luftwaffe started bombing London, Schalke were playing away at Borussia Munchengladbach”.

The Blackwater Lightship - Colm Toibin

This is another beautiful work from Toibin, one of the best writers around. The plot is somewhat literary, with a group of contrasting characters gathered around a dying man’s bed, but this skilful author makes it work beautifully.

Incidentally, this is possibly my favourite novel title, just something about the sound of it.

Mondo Desperado – Patrick McCabe

Sex! Delinquency! Blasphemy!

As the title suggests, this is an entertainingly OTT portrayal of the Irish town of Barntosna, full of all sorts of seedy goings on. I found it great fun, although others may not be keen on its gleefully freewheeling plotting and sense of humour.

Morbo; the story of Spanish football - Phil Ball

My knowledge of Spanish history is horribly weak, filtered primarily through my understanding of the cinema culture and now that of football. The key theme is that of regionalism. Now I really want to get back to Spain and maybe even take in a match or two.

Erewhon - Samuel Butler

This is a cerebral take on all those “upright chap ventures into an unknown land” tales that were very voguish in the late Nineteenth Century. The main inspiration is evidently the earlier Gulliver’s Travels, as much time is taken making satirical points about the prejudices of society that are rather lost now.

Love etc – Julian Barnes

The sequel to Talking It Over adopts a darker tone than its predecessor, but it slips down just as entertainingly. Once again, the three main characters (plus a supporting cast) address the reader directly offering their own biased, and often contradictory, versions of events.