BRP 129: Possession, A.S. Byatt

I have chosen a Way – dear Friend – I must hold to it. Think of me if you will as the Lady of Shalott – with a Narrower Wisdom – who chooses not the Gulp of outside Air and the chilly river-journey deathwards – but who chooses to watch diligently the bright colours of her Web – to ply an industrious shuttle – to make – something – to close the Shutters and the Peephole too – you will say, you are no threat to That. You will argue – rationally. There are things we have not said to each other beyond the – One – you so starkly – Defined. I know in my Intrinsic Self – the Threat is there.

Roland Michell is a scholar in 1980s London, studying the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash. He finds some drafts of a letter between the leaves of a book from Ash’s own library, which leads him to investigate a possible connection with another Victorian poet, Christabel LaMotte – which leads him to a LaMotte scholar, Maud Bailey. The story is about the four of them – Roland and Maud tracing the connection between Randolph and Christabel – and where it all took them. It’s also about language, and poetry, and solitude, and relation, and academia, and stuff. Oh yeah, and feminism.

It took a very long time to get going, this book, and the “action” was intermittent even then – but there is action and there is insight, and poetry, and there is even feminism. I did like it, I did want to get to the end of it, I did gain something valuable from it, I have even found myself influenced by it in several directions – I just don’t think I would want to read it again! It had – too many words. The library fine will be enormous.

An Amazon link.
As hinted above, mine came from the library.

 

BRP 130: The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov

“The street veered sideways and vanished. Beneath her now was only an expanse of roofs, criss-crossed with brilliantly lit roads. Suddenly it all slipped sideways, the strings of light grew blurred and vanished.
Margarita gave another jerk, at which the sea of roofs disappeared, replaced below her by a sea of shimmering electric lights. Suddenly the sea of light swung round to the vertical and appeared over Margarita’s head whilst the moon shone under her legs. Realising that she had looped the loop, Margarita righted herself, turned around and saw that the sea had vanished: behind her there was now only a pink glow on the horizon. In a second that too had disappeared and Margarita saw that she was alone with the moon, sailing above her and to the left. Margarita’s hair streamed out behind her in wisps as the moonlight swished past her body.”

The Master is a writer working in Moscow who – among many of his fellow citizens – falls victim to the satanic Woland, who has come to Moscow with his coterie to throw his annual ball – and to cause a little havoc while he is at it. The Master, a gibbering wreck after all the strange things he has seen – including the apparent murder of his friend Berlioz – ends up in an insane asylum.

Margarita, the Master’s (married) lover is offered the chance of reunion with her beloved by the demon Azazello, if she will follow his and Woland’s instructions. She agrees, and becomes a witch, later to be hostess at the devil’s ball.

Interwoven with this story is the manuscript of the Master: the story of Yeshua (Jesus) and his execution by Pontius Pilate. Unlike the fantastical events in “contemporary” (1929) Moscow, the ancient story of Yeshua is told with a quiet, calm realism.

Sounds surreal? It is a bit. Mostly it’s political, although I try not to worry too much about that… What I mean is you can’t help noticing at least some of the allegorical elements, but I prefer not to dissect such things unduly, it’s not my way – I don’t want the novel to die on the table.

So I loved Margarita, adventuresome and courageous, and the only non-demonic character to profit by Woland’s visit – taking the bizarre in her stride, accepting the unacceptable, and demanding what is good from what is, to say the least, morally ambiguous. Big wow.

Here’s an Amazon link.
I already had a copy (I read it in a book club I was in years ago).

 

BRP 131: The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood

I admired my mother in some ways, although things between us were never easy. She expected too much from me, I felt. She expected me to vindicate her life for her, and the choices she’d made. I didn’t want to live my life on her terms. I didn’t want to be the model offspring, the incarnation of her ideas. We used to fight about that. I am not your justification for existence, I said to her once.

I want her back. I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.

I finished this book a while ago, but I wanted to let it sink in before I wrote about it. I had been saving it, and I wanted to savour it. Of course, there is risk in this approach: I might have lost all impetus and forgotten what the book was about. Well, I haven’t.

The scenario is that in a world not too far into the future, there has been a religious revolution in the geographical area currently known as the United States. A fundamentalist Christian sect has started running the country and renamed it the Republic of Gilead. Faced with environmental pollution that has caused infertility and birth defects to be common, coupled with a revolutionary fervour for population growth, the men have set about structuring society so as to give population growth (and therefore uterus control) total priority.

Men fall into various groups, all carefully labelled. The Commanders are the most privileged, serviced by Wives, Marthas and Handmaids (see below), living in large comfortable homes, working in comfortable sinecured jobs. The Guardians – called Angels if they are promoted to the highest rank – are the men who do the work and they may be allowed an Econowife if they are lucky but most are forced to be celibate (unregulated sex is strictly forbidden and viciously punished).

Women fall into carefully labelled groups, too.

The “privileged” women form part of the cook-Madonna-whore triumvirate. The blue-robed Wives have the highest status (irrespective of fertililty). The green-robed Marthas – remember Lazarus’ sisters? – are domestic servants who cook and clean and do their work. The red-robed Handmaids have the lowest status, the least dignity, respect or privacy – despite having on the face of it the most “valued” role. They are the women who have been medically screened for fertility and whose role it is to become pregnant and to hand over their children to the Wives.* The Handmaids do not serve the men: they serve the wives. How bitter for them both.

(* Remember the story of Rachel? The jealous, childless wife – give me children or else I die – who in her desperation for a child gave her handmaid Bilhah to her husband Jacob for the purpose of impregnation. Further reading: The Red Tent)

Aunts are the women who train the Handmaids: their role is indoctrination, they are the circumcisers. Other women must be “Econowives” – women who must be wife and housekeeper, and bear children if they can. The least fortunate are the Unwomen, sent to do dangerous work such as clearing up pollution, without protection – the disposable nonhumans. The final category is the secret one, the unacknowledged one: the prostituted women, working in government-run brothels.

On the upside, rape and pornography have been utterly stamped out.

On the downside – everything else. Freedom from (rape, assault) has been achieved at the expense of Freedom to (live your own life). Nobody has much freedom and women have the least, fertile women least of all. Freedom of speech has ceased. Freedom of religion has ceased. Freedom of association has ceased. Reproductive choice has ceased: indeed, those who carried out abortions in the pre-Gilead days are hunted down and executed. Unwomen are entirely disposable and unprotected: these are the women who do not comply, the feminists and rebels, the worn out prostitutes. Unbabies – those born with some kind of defect – are disposable too: disability is not tolerated.

So much for the set-up.

Fundamentally – although this obviously is a powerful dystopian vision and a feminist masterpiece – what spoke to me most loudly were the words about motherhood.

Clearly, this is a novel about enforced motherhood of the kind that the Handmaids (and, come to mention it, the Wives who must rear another woman’s child and be joyful for the gift) are obliged to undertake.

But it is also about the motherhood that happened before the age of Gilead. It is about the narrator’s motherhood, and about her own mother.

The narrator – whose real name we never learn, although she is referred to as Offred (of Fred) – had a child before Gilead, a little girl. Her marriage is decreed null and void because her husband had previously been divorced; her daughter is thus illegitimated and taken from her. We never find out exactly what has happened to this daughter, although it seems that she has been taken to a “privileged” life, possibly as a future Wife. The narrator’s (I cannot call her Offred) yearning for this daughter is a key element of the story, and indeed is used cynically against her by the Wife she serves. Her yearning for her first daughter is used to overcome her near-indifference to any future child.

But, more, the narrator has a mother. This mother was an ardent second wave feminist (she was sent to be an Unwoman). She was a deliberate single parent – she insists repeatedly that the narrator was a wanted child. A wanted child. And the two of them were often exasperated with one another: the mother wanted a radical feminist daughter, at least a conscious daughter; the daughter wanted to live a life of her own choosing, a postfeminist life. So much for postfeminism. So much for radical parenting.

That’s all I have to say, except –
Are there any questions?

Here is an Amazon link.
I bought my own copy, obviously.

 

BRP 132: Danny the Champion of the World, Roald Dahl

I will not pretend I wasn’t petrified. I was. But mixed in with the awful fear was a glorious feeling of excitement. Most of the really exciting things we do in our lives scare us to death. They wouldn’t be exciting if they didn’t. I sat very stiff and upright in my seat, gripping the steering-wheel tight with both hands. My eyes were about level with the top of the steering-wheel. I could have done with a cushion to raise me up higher, but it was too late for that.

Danny and his widowed father live a long in a tiny gypsy caravan parked behind his father’s filling station and garage. Danny absolutely worships his father who seems annoyingly good at everything to do with both cars and parenting. Oh, and to make things worse, the book ends with the following message to child readers: When you grow up and have children of your own do please remember something important. A stodgy parent is no fun at all. What a child wants and deserves is a parent who is SPARKY.” Way to make a mummy feel inadequate!

Anyway, Danny’s father has a secret vice, and it leads to a Great Adventure. And yes it actually is exciting, even for grownups – I was reading this book for at least the second time and even I was on the edge of my seat more than once. :)

Here’s an Amazon link.
I read my own.

 

Every Light in the House Burnin’, Andrea Levy

“Now, Miss Thompson has been telling me some very distressing things,” the vicar began. My heart began to thump.
“She has told me that someone has been calling names. We don’t have people calling names in the house of God. Come out to the front…” I waited for Michael’s name to be called. Now, I thought, God will show him how wrong he is, how bad he is to hate difference. But the vicar said, “Ada and Angela.”
At first I didn’t move, I thought he’d made a mistake.
“Come on out to the front,” the vicar said, beckoning us. Sonia pushed me and I stood up and walked to the front. So did Ada, slowly. The vicar put his arm around me and Ada. Ada held her head firmly on her chest. I looked up around me and saw Michael grinning. Then I dropped my head too.
“Now Ada and Angela and their families are coloured, but that does make them any different to you or me. We are all God’s children and in the sight of God, everyone is equal. Now we will sing the chorus together.” The vicar held on tight to me so I couldn’t’ go back to my seat. Then he began to sing “Jesus loves the little children.”
And everyone joined in…
When the chorus was finished the vicar patted us each on the head. Then he let us go.

In this compelling novel, narrator Angela Jacobs witnesses the slow death of her father and remembers the scenes of her own childhood, growing up in London as the youngest child of her Jamaican parents. The characters most strongly drawn are Angela herself and her parents – her father is so real you can see him.

I don’t know what else to say except: read it. It is real, unswerving, and funny too – as vivid a portrait as you could hope to find.

 

Tell me about Mary Seacole, John Malam

“When Mary’s mother was young, she had been taken against her will to Jamaica, from her home in Africa. On Jamaica she was a slave, like thousands of other black people. They were made to work very hard and were not free people. Mary’s mother was lucky because after a while she was given her freedom back…”

“England was not at all like Jamaica. Because there were not many black people, Mary looked different. Some people pointed at her and called her unkind names because of the colour of her skin. When she was older, Mary wrote about how children had made fun of her.”

This is a short, simple account of Mary Seacole’s life, with lots of “real” pictures (photographs and contemporary engravings or other images of the people and places mentioned). Suitable probably for children from about the age of three or four on up, it covers the main ground without either talking down to the reader or making things too confusing / difficult to understand. We like it.

It’s also a great way to start talking about slavery, racism, and the position of women in general and black women in particular. We have also spent quite a while talking about what war is and why people do it and how much hurt it causes.

 

BRP 135: Wyrd Sisters, Terry Pratchett

“You said it quite well” she said. “Just a bit more work on the screeching. Aint that right Nanny Ogg?”
“Very useful screeching, I thought” said Nanny Ogg, hurriedly. “And I can see Goodie Whemper, maysherestinpeace, gave you a lot of help with the squint.”
“It’s a good squint” said Granny Weatherwax.
The junior witch, whose name was Magrat Garlick, relaxed considerably. She held Granny Weatherwax in awe. It was known throughout the Ramtop Mountains that Miss Weatherwax did not approve of anything much. If she said it was a good squint, then Magrat was probably staring up her own nostrils.

Another fun read – what can I say, it’s the Discworld. They’re all pretty enjoyable, and all the same but very different.

This one features the three witches, possibly my favourite characters (along with Susan, who is Death’s granddaughter) who must save the Ramtop kingdom from a cruel, unstable and, worst of all, entirely indifferent usurper to the throne. All withot interfering in Politics, because everyone knows that a witch never interferes. Especially not with politics…

There are also ghosts, a reluctant Fool, some travelling players, many Shakespearean ripoffs and some other stuff. Yay!

Here’s an Amazon link.
I read a library copy.

 

Skin Again, bell hooks

The skin I’m in looks good to me.
It will let you know one small way to trace my identity.

But then again

the skin I’m in will always be just a covering.
It cannot tell my story.

If you want to know who I am you have got to come inside.

This book has a quality I love in children’s books (well any books really, it’s just that it is so much rarer in books aimed at children): a slightly offbeat rhythm, half-rhymes – not quite the easy verse we are used to, but poetry nonetheless.

It isn’t a story as such, but it will be meaningful for – and a good way to start a conversation with – any child who has got questions about race, colour and identity, or who has experienced or witnessed prejudice or exclusion and is trying to make sense of why and how much race matters.

Ariel likes the pictures.
I do too: they are bold, bright and sassy.

(And fortunately the somewhat creepy line “you have got to come inside” will probably be lost on most young readers…)

 

BRP 134: George’s Marvellous Medicine, Roald Dahl

George had absolutely no doubts whatsoever about how he was going to make his famous medicine. he wasn’t going to fool about wondering whether to put in a little bit of this or a little bit of that. Quite simply, she was going to put in EVERYTHING he could find. There would be no messing about, no hesitating, no wondering whether a particular thing would knock the old girl sideways or not. The rules would be this: whatever he saw, if it was runny or powdery or gooey, in it went.

Nobody had ever made a medicine like that before. If it didn’t actually cure Grandma, then it would anyway cause some exciting results. It would be worth watching.

Yes, I know, it’s Roald Dahl and kids everywhere doubtless love it – but – ewww. I can’t help thinking that this is such an irresponsible book! Put loads of probably poisonous and certainly inedible items in a pot and feed it to Grandma just to see what happens?

(And, yes, just one more story where it is a female relative who is wicked and/or comes to a sticky end. Ho hum.)

Here is an Amazon link.
This is already in my Dahl collection.

 

BRP 133: East of Eden, John Steinbeck

I remember that the Gabilan Mountains to the east of the valley were light gay mountains full of sun and loveliness and a kind of invitation, so that you wanted to climb into their warm foothills almost as you want to climb into the lap of a beloved mother. They were beckoning mountains with a brown grass love. The Santa Lucias stood up against the sky to the west and kept the valley from the open sea and they were dark and brooding – unfriendly and dangerous. I always found myself in a dread of west and a love of east.

In this novel, Steinbeck weaves the history of his own maternal family (the Hamiltons) and the place where he was born (the Salinas valley in northern California) into a fiction, a retelling of the story of Cain and Abel. The central character, Adam Trask, re-enacts that brotherly rivalry with his brother Charles: Adam is better loved by his father; Charles takes his revenge. In the next generation, Adam’s sons Cal and Aron follow that same pattern: Aron is better loved; Cal takes his revenge; and there is even a version of “am I my brother’s keeper?” worked in, somewhat inelegantly (the only inelegant thing, I think).

It is often said that this is a book about good and evil. I suppose it is, but primarily to me it was a book about redemption. A major theme is signified by the Hebrew word timshel, translated in the book as “thou mayest”. The point is, that this is what God says to Cain when he puts his mark upon him – not that you MUST overcome sin, not that you WILL overcome sin, but that you MAY. Must implies obligation, will implies inevitability but may implies choice. Timshel is a word of blessing which offers not a command or a predetermination, but hope and freedom – the possibility of true redemption.

Finally, I can’t let this book go without talking of sinful women, the Eves.

Adam’s mother abandoned him by committing suicide immediately after his birth. His stepmother (Charles’ mother) was a sick, passive woman who did what was required to survive her loveless existence, and no more. Adam’s wife, Cathy, the mother of Cal and Aron, was a more actively sinful woman. She is described variously as a monster, as missing some essential human quality, as impenetrable, as inhuman. Her sins are many and shocking, the primary among them (plotwise) being that she abandons her twins immediately after their birth and runs away to become a whore.

The only other women to really feature in the story are Liza Hamilton (Steinbeck’s grandmother) and Abra (Aron’s and later Cal’s sweetheart, of whom her father frequently says: I called another, but Abra came – meaning, he wanted a boy). I see these women as Rebecca figures – assertive, moral women, but women who ultimately submit unquestioningly to male headship.

There is no depth to these women. There is no reality to them. There is a certain note struck in the sketches, a certain likeness to an underlying reality, but no interest in their stories or to what shaped them. Indeed of Cathy we are repeatedly told that there is no possibility of understanding her, not even for the author who created her and who therefore knows what happened to her from the day she was born. The author cannot understand her, and so she cannot be understood. Or redeemed: Steinbeck puts the mark of Cain upon her, yet she is Eve, and for her there is no redemption.

One more thing. There is another character, Lee, a Chinese servant to the Trask family whose wisdom, learning and care nourishes them throughout, in some ways replacing the absent mother figure. Perhaps I am struggling to hard to fit him into the Biblical theme, but I see him with his ng-ka-py as a kind of Holy Spirit, an intermediary between what is, and what ought to be – perhaps a kind of angel.

Hmm. Overall, a fine novel – if you like to have your men at the centre, and if Steinbeck’s portrayal of whores (as, on the whole, willing sluts doing a job of work) does not make your my skin crawl.

Here is an Amazon link.
I already had a copy, although I had not read it until now.