Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road: persevere

I hadn’t expected this novel to be quite so big – over 600 pages – so big that the author felt he had to preface it with a list of characters in case we forgot along the way who was who. I also hadn’t expected it to be so concerned with society, with quite so many characters, given that his last novel – Mayflies – was short, sensitive and dealt with a friendship between two boys. (My review of Mayflies is here.) But the author is (in real life) a regular contributor to The London Review of Books, and often writes about social issues, including a (very long) piece on Grenfell Tower in the LRB. So society is his thing, after all, and I shouldn’t have been so surprised.

 At the centre of the novel is the Caledonian Road in Islington, bounded on one side by the homes of the wealthy and on the other by the homes of the dispossessed. It provides a literary map of the extremes of wealth and poverty which characterise London. And at the centre is Campbell Flynn in Thornhill Square, born (like O’Hagan) in Glasgow to parents of modest means but who has made it big in the cultural world of the capital (and who has married the daughter of the Countess of Paxford). He links all the characters in the novel: he has a passing acquaintance with Aleksandr Bykov, the Russian oligarch who is using London as his playground and who is buying social cachet and acceptance by deploying his immense wealth; he becomes close to one of his students, Milo Mangasha, a social activist, whose Polish girlfriend provides a link to the East European low life dealing in drugs and people-smuggling. And then there’s his friendship with William Byre, a university friend who has taken money from the Russians, sailed much too close to the wind, and who is about to pay the price.

But the problem is that the novel begins with the exposition of all these characters, who are unpleasant, or clichés, or both. I wasn’t even sure if it was the characters whom I disliked or (much worse) the author. Was he trying to impress by telling me that Campbell Flynn, the boy from Glasgow, now drinks at Claridges, eats lunch at Fortnum and Mason’s, and stays at the Danieli in Venice when he visits his mother-in-law (who happens to be a dowager duchess)?  And does he expect us to be stunned with awe at his description of Campbell’s university office, which contains a ‘red Malaka rug … from a sale of the belongings of Bunny Roger’ (unfortunately, I don’t know who on earth Bunny is, and even what gender they might be, but I’m sure I’m meant to know); a green teapot which had been ‘a present in the 1990s from Anne Yeats, daughter of the poet’; and ‘a drinks trolley, from which, in a direct steal from Anthony Blunt, he often served [his students] whisky in crystal tumblers’? Does the author really think that you can create character through product placement?

I almost discarded the novel at this stage, and it is a long stage – more than two hundred pages of a six-hundred-page novel, so you can see that carrying on required a certain amount of determination. But then I began to feel glimmers of hope – some Polish drug dealers injected a bit of welcome reality. And it became clear that the exposition sets up the loom for a piece of weaving that is intricate and engaging, and in which it becomes clear that everything and everybody is connected, and that together we form society, and aren’t just a collection of individuals.

And then the ending(s): there’s a lot to wrap up. It’s marvellous. A lot of people get some sort of come-uppance, which is enormously satisfying.  Some characters escape more or less scot-free, including the Duke, Campbell’s brother-in-law (no surprise). But it’s not always so simple, and there is tragedy too: someone is imprisoned for a murder (gang related) at which he was present but which he did not commit. Milo and his girlfriend escape to a Scottish island, funded by blackmailing the Duke (so perhaps he didn’t get off scot-free after all). The Russians retreat to Moscow. Campbell. Ah Campbell. He ends on a bit of an ambiguous note.

It’s as if the author started with the cliché, the veneer, about each character (and there are a lot of them) and then went on to add nuance, understanding, and a sense of the difficulties underlying even apparent privilege. But beware: reviewers are left with the glow of the ending – the beginning of this huge novel seems, by the time you have come to the end, so long ago – and might fail to hold the author to account for the what he puts reader through at the outset.

Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time: reading for grown ups

So the question is – do you want a novelist to hold you by the hand? Do you want a captivating intro, an intro which has obviously been worked over to the degree that it has become almost translucent? Then would you like the author to take a step back, to describe the characters one by one, perhaps even telling us the colour of their eyes (although how that is meant to help the reader I really don’t know)? And would you like this to be facilitated by a reliable and all-knowing narrator who makes sure that you always knows where you are and where you are going?

Or not? The not is what Sebastian Barry gives you in Old God’s Time. I thought I was in for a gentle tale told by a reliable narrator. But instead I found myself on an unexpectedly wild ride. Tom Kettle is newly retired, formerly a policeman, and so in in a state of recalibration. You would think that a retired Irish policeman named Tom Kettle would be the very definition of solidity and reliability. But reading Old God’s Time was like trying to stand on the deck of a ship in the midst of a storm, or at least a heavy swell. Because when Tom is visited by his daughter, who is doing that daughterly thing of trying to whisk him into shape since her mother is no longer there to do it, it turns out that his daughter is – dead. Tom constantly describes events and people who just aren’t there.

The novel opens on a dark and stormy night with a visit from the local police. They are trying to solve an old crime – one which, it seems, is very personal and painful to Tom. But what is it and who was responsible? We aren’t entirely clear and it seems that Tom isn’t, either. We are kept firmly in the dark, because that is where Tom Kettle is himself. In fact I was more than half-way through the novel before it became clear that the crime which the policemen are investigating is the murder of a priest, and that Tom is the prime suspect. The priest, it turns out, had abused Tom’s late wife while she was growing up in care, although the police are not aware of this pertinent fact. And although we are inhabiting Tom’s mind, it’s not clear if he did it or not. The tone is highly wrought, emotional, but simultaneously down to earth and with moments of comedy, the sort of comedy which derives from a close observation of real life. It’s a great voice, and voice is one of the great engines of fiction.

So there we are, enjoyably confused, tossed on the sea of the narrative, trying to find our footing in the unstable territory of Tom Kettle’s mind. There is no life raft for the reader to hang onto; no alternative narrator to give us a steer, to outline a sense of solid reality which Tom Kettle cannot give us. But Sebastian Barry goes way beyond this. We are told that Tom visits a single mother who has taken up residence next door with her young son, only for him to revisit her flat to find it uninhabited. We are told of an instance where Tom visits his landlord and his wife, only for it to become clear later in the novel that the landlord’s wife is long dead and the venerable car in which he offered Tom a lift long gone too.

Here I felt that the author had crossed a line; that he wasn’t just describing a mental state but an alternative reality. A reviewer in the New Yorker put it succinctly: ‘Kettle hasn’t simply dreamed these people up; they seem to have an existence independent of his thoughts’. It’s as if Sebastian Barry is suddenly plunging his main character into a different world – it’s as if the confusion about what reality is moves from being confusion on Tom’s part to confusion (albeit deliberate confusion) on the part of the author. Let me be quite clear. This is not just a question of Tom revisiting his past; it’s a question of the author putting Tom into a time or with people of which and of whom he had no prior knowledge.

But together with all this there is also – surprisingly, perhaps – real momentum to the story. In fact the novel could almost read like a policier. The two policemen who turn up at Tom’s house are in a bit of a bind. They want to charge an associate of the murdered priest with acts of sexual abuse of which he is undoubtedly guilty. But the priest suspects that Tom was guilty of the murder of his former colleague, and is determined to make things difficult for them –  if he is going to go down he wants to take one of them with him. And who knows? Perhaps the prospect of indicting one of their own will lead the police to back off. But Tom and the two young policemen are determined to see justice done, whatever it takes – although they would dearly love to leave Tom alone in his retirement.

So the momentum of the story, on one level at least, is derived from the question of what will happen to Tom. Will his crime (although is it really a crime, he wonders) be uncovered? And the sense of momentum comes complete with cliffhanging moments. After an interview with the police in which it is revealed that the accused priest has made specific allegations against Tom, Tom thinks of events as an arrow,  ‘this little floating arrow arcing high in the sky of things now, so high you would be forgiven for thinking it was heading away from you. But it wasn’t. Soon its own weight would check its upward path, and slowly, slowly … it would begin its journey downward. An arc still, but one searching for his heart.’ That arrow, its seeming innocence but its deadly intent, describes the novel’s energy and momentum perfectly.

But a more substantial source of momentum lies in working out not so much what will happen to Tom in the future, but working out what has happened to him in the past. We know when the novel begins that he has been widowed – but it takes a long time for us to learn how his wife died, and the nature of her death makes a real difference to our perception of the story. We only gradually learn that both his son and his daughter are also dead – and again we have to get to near the end of the novel to find out how and why they died. The excitement in the novel comes from getting the reader to work out what has happened in the past, and not just telling them what will happen in the future. This is an author who wants grown-up readers.

In the process of revealing Tom’s back story Sebastian Barry reveals his subject: the systematic abuse by Catholic clergy of children in their care. This brings to my mind Claire Keegan’s novella Small Things like These, which deals with the same subject. I thought Claire Keegan’s novella just slightly underwhelming, and having read Old God’s Time I think I now understand why. In Claire Keegan’s novella the protagonist looks at the events and the abuse from the outside and plans to save a victim. In Old God’s Time Sebastian Barry’s protagonist Tom Kettle has suffered the abuse himself, as has his wife, so it is internalised – he is not just looking at it from the outside. And it’s clear that the real evil that the Church has committed lies in the fact that the stain cannot be washed away; that victims cannot just be ‘saved’. We see in Old God’s Time that the aftermath of the abuse is murder, suicide, and drug addiction cascading down through the generations. Tom and his wife have gone to such lengths to make a loving family home – but they fail to keep their children safe. It is as if the wrongs perpetrated on them are contagious.   It’s an incredibly powerful portrayal of the consequences of abuse.

The ending of the novel sees Tom rescue his (imaginary) neighbour’s son from his abusive father. Poetic justice! you might think. But it turns out that it is just a dream – his neighbour and her son belong to that alternative reality into which Tom seems to slip at intervals. The ending, in other words, seems to hover somewhere, rather unsatisfactorily, I thought, between the real and the dream-like, the symbolic.

But I was so glad to have been treated, as a reader, with such respect; to be given so much to think about; for the writer to assume that I would indeed relish the thinking. And for that, combined with his ability to keep me guessing and to keep me turning those pages; to, in short, maintain such a pace, such momentum, I can only think Sebastian Barry a writer who knows precisely what he wants to achieve and how to do it.

After I had read Old God’s Time I embarked on Michael Cunningham’s Day, the story of two relationships portrayed over three days on three consecutive years. And this author does take his reader by the hand, making sure that everything is made entirely clear: we are given character sketches (as though characters couldn’t become clear through their own thoughts and actions and words); he lays out the feelings between the characters rather than allowing the reader to work it all out for themselves.

The first section – the first day which the author describes – is very workmanlike. The scenario is set out; we flit from character to character in bite-sized sections which allow the reader no opportunity to get bored. But the subsequent two sections fall increasingly flat. Because there is no momentum; no jeopardy; no quandary in which the characters find themselves and from which they have to extricate themselves. It becomes increasingly inconsequential. How did the author manage this?

He also kills off a major character, assisted by Covid. But his death is random and unbelievable (I would have said incredible but that could have been misleading). I have rarely been so annoyed at an author staging a character’s death. And despite this act of authorial manslaughter the author fails to harvest from it anything like plot development. Everyone is very sad that the character in question has died, but it really doesn’t make much difference to their lives.

So there is the difference between these two novels – one managing to combine momentum with subtlety; the other achieving neither. Writing a good story is obviously a difficult thing to achieve.

Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli: revisiting Matera

We were about to visit south east Italy and it was time to confront my past. It was also clear that the only book which could appropriately accompany this visit was Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, the author’s memoir of his exile to a remote village in what is now Basilicata but was then Lucania in the mid-1930s.

My last visit to Matera, which must have been sometime in 1979 or 1980, was to visit the family of my then (Italian) boyfriend. I ended up sharing a bed with his mother, while his father was exiled to the second bedroom with his sons.

If Carlo Levi’s exile to the village of Gagliano felt like an exile to a country far removed from the Italy he knew (which was Turin – just about as far as it is possible to get from Basilicata in all possible senses) my visit in 1980 was similarly not just a visit to a different place but to a different culture, and to a different society. I spent a sleepless night illuminated in the glow of the electric Madonna by the bed I was sharing with my boyfriend’s mother; in the kitchen she tied an apron around my waist and urged me to look after her son.

It was a world where boys, desperate, I presume, for an escape from parental oversight, would rent a room (or was it an entire apartment?) to use as a ‘club’; and where the worth of girls was measured solely by their modesty and virginity. It was entirely surreal. I didn’t even remember seeing the cave dwellings for which Matera is now famous; what I do remember is that their existence was regarded as a source of shame and the fact that they had been cleared (evacuations were enforced from 1952) as a sign of progress. Now the caves are a meticulously maintained tourist attraction. How times change.

So I do sympathise with Carlo Levi – even in the 1980s Matera was a different world. The title of his memoir refers to the fact that in the 1930s the railway line stopped at Eboli (south-east of Naples), where civilisation seemed to stop too. Even when I lived in Italy the word Cristiano, when used in southern Italy,didn’t just mean Christian – it indicated someone civilised, decent, and not from over the water – Sicily and southern Italy have had the most chequered of histories including colonisation by Arabs and Greeks. The un-Christian world must have seemed quite close.

What I haven’t said so far is that much to my surprise I found Carlo Levi’s memories captivating and authentic. The inhabitants of Gagliano, the remote village where he ended up, lived in the direst penury and without any hope of improving their lot since the crash of 1929 had cut off the only route to betterment – emigration to the US. Exploited by the local gentry (although they too were living in penury and miserable with it, only fortified by the feuds between themselves) and by the state they led entirely miserable lives. But Carlo Levi describes all this in transparent prose, avoiding judgement but with much affection and even love.

The preface, which he wrote much later, suggests why. His memoir was written in Florence in 1944, when Italy had changed sides in the war but while the Allies were still working their way north. The Gestapo were still very much in evidence – and of course Levi was not only a socialist but also a Jew – so ‘at that time each moment could have been the last; in itself each was the last, the only moment. There was no place for embellishment, experiment – for literature – but only for the real truth that exists in and beyond things. And there was a place for love, for, even if always defenceless and truncated, it alone was able to hold together a world that without it would have been dissolved and annihilated’.

To understand the significance of this statement you have to understand that the default style for Italian literature is florid to the point of incomprehensibility – you can spend a long time trying to work out what an author is trying to say only to come to the conclusion that under all the linguistic ornament there is nothing at all of any substance. Urgency and danger seem to have purged Levi’s prose. The default style is visible in the preface itself – so don’t begin by reading it.

While Levi lived in Gagliano he used his medical training to help the villagers and he also pursued his interest in painting. So if you visit Matera you can see the portraits which he painted of local boys in the Palazzo Lanfranchi – it is amazing to read his descriptions of them in Christ Stopped at Eboli and then to see the same boys immortalised in paint now, so many years later.

So that was my return to Matera. Not traumatic, not even triggering, since it seemed so different to the place it had been: in 1980 few people had heard of Matera and no one could place it on a map, but now it is just another tourist destination. Levi’s description of Gagliano seemed closer to my memories of my visit south than the current reality. But then perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised: my first visit to Matera was separated from Levi’s by 45 years; and since that visit almost another 45 years have passed.

Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose: theft and boredom

After I had finished The Book of Goose  I discovered that I had read Yiyun Li’s collection of short stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, back in 2015. It had been a book club choice, but I was reminded, reading the notes that I made at the time, that none of us thought much of it – and we cover a wide range of reading preferences and proclivities. So perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised that The Book of Goose was such a disappointment. It deals with the friendship between Fabienne and Agnès, who live in a remote village in post-war France. They are set apart from other children in the village – Fabienne is wild and uncontrolled and Agnès acts as her partner in crime. Fabienne develops the idea that they must write a book – which she does and which is eventually published under Agnès’s name. Its reception is rapturous, the public fascinated with the girls’ macabre stories of rural life.

The problem for me is that this scenario seemed to be a dead ringer for the relationship between Elena and Lila in Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. And I wasn’t the only one to notice it: virtually all the reviewers commented on it too. But for me it was deeply disturbing – it seemed as if Yiyun Li had taken those characters and that relationship and transported them from Naples in the ‘40s to rural France in the ‘50s. It seemed like theft and it made the story she was telling feel inauthentic, as if she had produced a great exam paper by copying someone else’s work.

After the publication of Les Enfants Heureux Agnès is, somewhat improbably, whisked off to a finishing school in Surrey under the charge of a headmistress not unlike Miss Jean Brodie. So we seem to move from one instance of literary theft to another. And from here the world of the novel is reduced to a fable without any descriptive immediacy, as if Yiyun Li were writing an outline for a novel to be written, rather than the novel itself. I found it incredibly tedious – nothing actually happens during the time Agnès is at her finishing school; there is no evocation of place; in short nothing to keep me, the reader detained.

When Agnès demands to return to her village and to Fabienne she finds that Fabienne no longer believes that their friendship has a future. Which gives rise to a farrago of emotion – but that outpouring of emotion has no basis in event or circumstance – no basis in anything outside the fevered minds of Fabienne and Agnès. This must be intended as the high point of the novel– but to me it just seemed to be a fictional invention, and I had no time for it.

After which Fabienne runs away with the circus (no, really? Couldn’t the author do better than that?) and Agnès, rather randomly and without much to-do, marries an American. This story – The Book of Goose – is told by Agnès, now living in America.

It could be that Yiyun Li has in mind stories of cultural deracination – she came from China to the US in her twenties. And also of the problems of authorship – the two girls are like figures in a zoo, the object of everyone’s gaze. And there is the added zest that although Agnès is named as the author of the books which the girls produce, Fabienne is in fact the brains behind their plan – so when they are parted Agnès is unable to produce anything of interest. The Book of Goose proves that she can do it after all. Which all goes to show that it could have been a really interesting story. Only it isn’t.

Arturo Perez-Reverte’s The Siege: it’s all about Cadiz

Because the siege in question is the siege of Cadiz, which lasted from 1810 to 1812 – Napoleon was attempting to take over Spain, having installed his brother Joseph as King, and Cadiz was one of the cities that held out (successfully) against him.

Why on earth, you might ask, was I reading this? Historical novels; novels about war – those don’t constitute my usual reading diet. But we were visiting Cadiz and The Siege was recommended by my husband – whose reading definitely includes historical novels dealing with war. What better subject could there be? he would say.

But The Siege appealed to me too – because it’s one of those novels which relies upon a multiplicity of characters and story lines to create a picture of a place and a time, and it does so with incredible success. After we returned and looking back, remembering my time in Cadiz, I could see every place which the author described still there today. Cadiz had grown wealthy on the trade from the South American colonies before they became uppity and started demanding independence and free trade with other countries – a process which the author describes as representatives from Spain and her colonies meet in Cadiz to hammer out a new constitution for a post-Napoleonic Spain. As a result the city’s source of wealth gradually dried up, so that it remained to some extent frozen in time – especially since, lying on an isthmus projecting out into the Atlantic, and hardly connected to the mainland, the city had limited opportunities for expansion. Which is what makes this novel so completely absorbing – the city which the author describes is the city that still, largely, exists today.

There are some problems with The Siege. Just when you think that one of the major plot lines has been tied up, it turns out that we are not done yet, that there are still mysteries to be solved, and the novel picks itself up and seems to start all over again. And some of the author’s  narrative devices become clunky. The Commissioner of Police, Rogelio Tizon, develops his ideas in lengthy discussions with his friend Barrull, who seems more like a device to convey information than an actual character; and the love interest between Lolita Palma and a rugged corsair descends from the intriguing to the embarrassing.

But if you know Cadiz you will realise that all this is largely incidental, and not really the point of the novel at all. Because the novel is a detailed examination of the city itself. One of the major strands of the novel concerns Simon Defosseux, an Imperial Artillery Captain in Napoleon’s army, whose sole aim is the difficult and almost impossible task of reaching the centre of Cadiz with cannon and mortar fire, a task which involves a very precise awareness of the geography of Cadiz and the waters which surround it. And when The Siege finally does end the perpetrator of a series of gruesome murders in which the victims are flayed to death is tracked down to the Oratorio de la Santa Cueva, a monument to Spain’s particular variety of Christianity which includes an underground chapel in which upper class penitents flagellate themselves in order to mortify their flesh. So that the story seems in more than one way bound to Cadiz, to its topography and to its history.  

So how you react to The Siege is all, in the end, down to reader reception theory, that is, to the entirely reasonable idea that the appreciation of anything anyone reads is composed of two parts: what is read and who is reading it. If that somebody is somebody who knows Cadiz I think they will be captivated, as I was, imagining the dark underground chapel of the Santa Cueva which I had visited days before and the ramparts surrounding the city and against which the Atlantic crashes and along which I had walked so recently, looking back to the positions from which Simon Defosseux tried so hard to bombard the city but (luckily for us) failed.

Richard Ford’s Be Mine: telling us how to live

I went to a synagogue service once – it was the Bat Mitzvah of a friend’s daughter – and the Old Testament text up for discussion and exegesis was the occasion when the Israelites, wandering around the desert with Moses, succeed in crossing the Red Sea. The waters part to let them through to safety, but then close, leaving the Egyptians, who have been pursuing them, engulfed and drowning. The reaction of the Israelites – wait for it – is to dance with glee, singing The Lord is a Man of War at the top of their voices. It’s a bit unseemly. The person given the unenviable task of saying something uplifting about this text was a young rabbi from the States. And I still remember what he said. The gist of it was that the Israelites’ words were worrisome and that we were right to question them – that is always our duty. And that the moderate, middle path is always the most difficult path not only to follow, but also to advocate.

Frank Bascombe, the hero of Be Mine, reminds me of that young man from the US. Sweet and reasonable in the face of adversity and evidence of bad stuff happening. Pouring oil on troubled waters. Seeing that good can exist alongside bad and not hesitating to identify the former as well as the latter. Be Mine is the fifth novel in a sequence which started with The Sportswriter back in 1986, which was when I first started reading about Frank, and I have followed his fortunes ever since. Frank is now in his seventies, and has just received the dreadful news that his 47-year-old son Paul has had a terminal diagnosis of ALS – his brain is failing to communicate with his body. The subject matter could be appallingly sentimental – but it isn’t. Frank loves his son Paul, but also sees how decidedly unappealing he is. Paul has never been a success in life and does not have any personal characteristics to compensate, which makes Frank’s determination to do the right thing all the more striking. Frank accompanies Paul to the Mayo Clinic so that Paul can take part in medical trials, and then decides that they should make a final trip together to Mount Rushmore to view the four US presidents carved into the rockface.

So the novel doesn’t depend on plot; instead – and I suppose that’s the thing about a road novel – it’s just one thing after another, the constantly changing scene and the people Frank and Paul meet along the way providing the matter in hand. Although the novel also has a very definite destination – Paul’s death. Rather than plot, the novel is all about the voice, Frank’s voice as he talks to his readers. His voice is measured and reflective, giving the reader the impression of going on a meandering walk with a loquacious friend, his vocabulary veering from the high falutin to the popular, and from abstract philosophical questions (Frank carries a copy of Heidigger with him) to the trashy and mundane.

And Richard Ford uses that voice to describe the world through which Frank and Paul travel – a world which is wacky and surreal in a way which is only possible in the US. For a start there’s the place where they rent the RV which is to take them on their trip – winningly named A Fool’s Paradise, where you can also find ‘for-sale-or-rent golf carts, septic tanks, porta-potties, snowmobiles, cherry pickers, enormous American flags, blank grave monuments, and waterslide parts’. And then there’s the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota, where they stop off en route to Mount Rushmore. The Corn Palace was ‘conceived initially by stolid, melancholy Lutheran town fathers as a …festive, if Kremlin-esque homage to Demeter’, its exterior covered in ‘corncob minarets, corncob squinches, corncob Moorish arches and corncob “Russian” roof onions – plus corn entablatures featuring farmers cog-dancing, farmers singing, and farmers farming’.  The juxtaposition of the sublime and the mundane-verging-on the-ridiculous is one of the delights of Be Mine.

There’s just one thing. Frank has a brief dalliance with Betty Tran, a Vietnamese – American masseuse. Frank sort of falls for her: he buys her a valentine card but, more extremely, is rather inclined to ask her to marry him. And the strange thing is, that in contrast to the precise and at times painfully authentic and unflinching detail in which he describes Paul’s physical decline or the people he and Paul come across, Betty Tran remains a generically warm female figure. And even stranger – was this me, I wondered, or was it the author’s doing? – I wasn’t ever sure whether they had actually had sex, and if not, what it was that they actually had had. What, in sort, did Frank and Betty get up to during his appointments? It was never clear.

And then I started thinking about Frank’s other relationships. He has been married twice – but also divorced twice. And his ex-wives are off the scene. His first wife has died of Parkinsons – at the beginning of the novel Frank scatters her ashes. And his second wife has become a sort of lay nun succouring needy people in a distant location. He has or had three children. His first son Ralph died early on in the sequence of novels; Paul is currently dying; and Frank himself declares that he does not like his daughter Clarissa, who lives in Scottsdale, Arizona and votes Republican.

So Frank, despite his persona of acceptance, tolerance and generally making the best of everything, given that everything will generally turn out to be desperately bad, floats free of relationships throughout this novel. Why? Does Richard Ford intend us to see this as a weakness or failing on Frank’s part? Or doesn’t he see it himself? Or could it be, I wonder, that Frank floats so free because he isn’t really or so much a character in a novel as the narrator, the voice of the author, or indeed of God himself. I’m putting my money on that last possibility.

The novel, or at least the story part of the novel, ends with Frank and Paul making it to Mount Rushmore. It’s a moment at which cynicism disappears. Paul is transfixed by the sight of the presidents and there’s a sense that they have succeeded in completing the challenge that they set themselves. And then there’s a final section, a sort of epilogue. We Paul has now died, and Frank has retreated to California, where he is staying in the basement of a house overlooking the Pacific, corralled and confined by Covid. The house belongs to an old flame. He has considered, throughout Be Mine, making a declaration to her. But someone else has beaten him to it. So he has to make do with occasional visits from her, armed with Stoli and snacks, to watch television with him. It’s a typical Frank relationship – all potential and no actuality. Although he is still looking forward to the future and what happiness might be wrung from it.

But despite the fact that Frank seems strangely unanchored to the world which he inhabits I am very much in love with him – it’s Frank’s voice, seeing the ridiculous in life and telling me and you and everyone how to live it anyway. Telling us to take everything seriously but lightly; to do the right thing whilst acknowledging that you might well come unstuck along the way; to appreciate the small and even the ridiculous things in life; and to accept that you are never going to be the hero you might once have hoped or wanted to be.

Bernadine Evaristo’s Mr Loverman: a marvellous sitcom

Oh my days! Bernadine Evaristo! I was just beginning to read Mr Loverman (under strict instructions from book club) as an article appeared in the Guardian about unhappiness in the Royal Society of Literature about its new regime, which is led by none other than Bernadine Evaristo. Apparently she is making efforts to be more inclusive and diverse, and to this end she has changed the process by which new fellows are selected. Previously they were chosen by existing fellows, which does seem a recipe for prolonging a certain culture. So now the RSL fellows are less old, less white and less august than they once were. Which you could say just goes some way to redressing the balance – or constitutes a takeover, depending on your point of view

So as I took up Mr Loverman I was preparing for a combative experience. But Mr Loverman isn’t like that at all. In fact the best way to characterise the novel is to think of it as an engaging sitcom. Because Bernadine Evaristo has created a great character in Barry – a closet homosexual from Antigua, married to Carmel and with two daughters, he has been carrying on an affair with his friend Morris since before they emigrated. He is sharp dresser, always in handmade fifties-style suits, an autodidact and a stickler for the Queen’s English, with a string of rental properties which has made his fortune. And hilariously forthright in his reactionary views

The question posed at the beginning of the novel and which is answered by the end is – will he finally leave his loveless marriage to Carmel to acknowledge his homosexuality and set up house with Morris?  Which carries the novel successfully to its conclusion. Along the way there are glimpses of the pain that can be caused by the denial of the truth and the withholding of love – but we are saved from the bleakness of real life by plot twists and revelations. In fact Mr Loverman almost reminded me of Dickens – great characters, not drawn with much subtlety, but with such vigour that it hardly matters. And comfort and rescue arriving from the heavens – incredibly but very conveniently – when we least expect it. Everything, despite it all, turning out for the best. And then there’s the ebullience of the characters – no one is a victim here, but always in charge of their fate. And the novel’s kindness towards all its characters. It’s marvellous. Although I suspected at times that it wasn’t telling the whole unvarnished truth about life. Just like a good sitcom.

Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait: making sense of reviews

How much attention, precisely, should you pay to book reviews? What a confusing combination of contradictions and disparities they can present – if you read more than one of them. There are rather equivocal reviews of Maggie O’Farrell’s Marriage Portrait in both The Guardian and The Observer. One on the grounds that the narrative is overwrought in its style and unvaried, so that there is no relief from high emotion; the other that it reads like a  novel for a teenager readership, without sufficient nuance. And then there’s a review in The Scotsman, which claims that The Marriage Portrait is even better than Hamnet.

Sometimes reviewers seem to sense something about a novel they are reviewing, seem to know that there is something, but can’t quite put their finger on what that something is. And as a result tend to randomly ascribe that certain feeling to some imagined quality in the book they are reviewing. But although you often can’t trust their diagnosis, it’s nevertheless true that they did feel the symptoms, and it’s worth trying to work why they experienced them.

The Marriage Portrait is the story of Lucrezia de’ Medici, who left Florence to marry Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, in 1560. A year later she was dead, and there were suspicions that her husband had murdered her. The potential problem is obvious. We know in advance what will happen to Lucrezia (death, even if we don’t know what manner of death). And in case we don’t know the history of Lucrezia, Maggie O’Farrell prefixes her novel with a historical note to tell us. The novel itself opens with Lucrezia in an isolated fortress – a building as difficult to escape from as to enter. It’s midwinter. Her husband has brought her there, leaving her servants behind so that she is completely isolated and defenceless. And the realisation suddenly comes to Lucrezia that Alfonso is going to murder her. It’s a great opening. But where do you go from there?

The answer is that from this point the narrative oscillates between present and past, going back in time to the circumstances of Lucrezia’s conception and includes a chapter which revolves around the arrival of a tigress to add to her father’s menagerie. It’s wonderful how much Maggie O’Farrell makes of this – thirty-five pages, to be precise – and it reminds me of the slow walk downstairs that opens Hamnet, a single moment which she draws out almost to infinity. It’s all breathless, in the moment and in Lucrezia’s head, and totally absorbing. 

So what is my response to those reviewers? The Marriage Portrait is indeed narrated in a very close third person, so close that Lucrezia might almost be telling us her story herself. The effect is that we are indeed stuck with the mindset of a sixteen-year-old girl with limited experience of the world. And the sense of limited viewpoint is heightened by the use of the present tense (also a source of displeasure for one of those reviews). There is none of the luxury of knowledge of what is yet to happen – there is no context for actions, no frame, no understanding of the significance of political events in Florence (Lucrezia’s birthplace) or Ferrara (the home of her husband, Alfonso d’Este) – although what happens, as it happens, is made more immediate. Even the sections written towards what we assume is to be the end of Lucrezia’s life can’t give much sense of considered reflection since she is then still not much more than a child and in the throes of the action.

The novel is frenetic and interior and I think about the fact that Maggie O’Farrell began writing it in lockdown, when we too felt frenetic and had to live domestic, interior, constrained lives. There’s Lucrezia, before her marriage, walking around the palazzo in Florence, looking down on what is going on in the piazza outside without being able to go out and join in. The marriage festivities in which she is not allowed to take part. The carriage ride from Florence to Ferrara after her wedding in which she only manages to glimpse her surroundings through the gap left between the door and the frame of the carriage. And when she finally arrives at the villa outside Ferrara she doesn’t know what is happening – her only source of knowledge of the political events in the city being her maid Emilia. Did lockdown feed into that sense of heightened emotion and isolation, in which we didn’t know what was going on? Sequestered, just like Lucrezia.

But that set up also accounts for the sense of being a) stuck in a novel for young people and b) being febrile, overwrought rather than analytical (the present tense). We, the readers, are stumbling along, looking for meaning just as Lucrezia is. On the other hand it is magnificently done – as the review in The Scotsman points out.

And then there’s the ending. I don’t believe in spoiler alerts, or at least only in extreme cases. But this is an extreme case. I’ll just say that the novel doesn’t end as you suspect it is going to end. And in the process the novel moves from history into something more like fable. But Maggie O’Farrell makes The Marriage Portrait end in the way it does because the novel is the story (a very modern one) of willing its central character, a young woman – a teenager, hardly more than a child – to empower herself in the face of a culture which does all it can to disempower her. Which isn’t at all historical, but it’s powerful and it’s redemptive, and who is to say that that isn’t better?

Jonathan Coe’s Bournville: read it now

Once, a long time ago now, a friend described someone we both knew as straightforward. And I paused, thinking that this couldn’t possibly be a compliment. Probably more of a backhanded dismissal, or a polite way of saying boring. But he kept a completely straight face, and I realised, after that pause, that he really did mean straightforward as a compliment. In a nanosecond I was recalibrating, reimagining that word (straightforward) so that it began to conjure up new depths. No need, with a straightforward person, to tread gingerly, to test the waters before committing yourself to an opinion for fear that you might offend. God, I even imagined, might best be thought of as straightforward.

I had been thinking of Jonathan Coe as straightforward, as being reliable but rather dull. He’s been around for ages, after all; has accompanied me throughout my reading life. Not many linguistic fireworks, I thought; tends to deal with an epic sweep of history; to favour the social (and political) over the deeply psychological; employs (by contemporary standards) a vast cast of characters; tends towards using the third person and an omniscient narration; he’s humorous, or possibly even satirical. What could be more old hat than that? But after I had been reading Bournville for a while I paused and thought Aha! He’s that other variety of straightforward.

In Bournville Jonathan Coe follows a family over several generations from VE Day in May 1945 to lockdown in 2020, tracking how they (and we) changed and developed over that time. His method is to home in on a series of nationally significant moments. It’s like looking through an album of family photos which show history caught, crystallised, but the whole thing, taken together, making something larger and more significant. And that was the sensation of reading the novel: the sense of a growing wave, of a picture accumulating layers, starting sketchy and underpowering, but gradually taking shape as it progressed, until in the end it revealed its whole self.

And then I remembered – that was what Annie Ernaux was aiming for in The Years. She says that she wants to write something like Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past or even Gone with the Wind – to ‘assemble multiple images of herself’ and ‘thread them together with the story of her existence starting with her birth during World War II up until the present day’. But she doesn’t succeed in achieving what she says she wants to achieve. The Years focusses on historical events and on the social and political context in which she has lived her life, but is deeply and fundamentally impersonal. It feels as if it’s a broad-brush description of an era which is there to serve as a prelude and context for a story which is about to begin – only it never does. She never succeeds in bringing together the social and political with the personal.  But Jonathan Coe does.

Nevertheless I thought at first that it might be rather clunky, that process of highlighting significant national moments. On VE Day Jonathan Coe gives us, verbatim, large chunks of Winston Churchill’s radio broadcast, and the subsequent broadcast by the King. Could this count as plagiarism, I wondered?  Or laziness? In any case, drawing a neat parallel between the history of a nation and the history of an individual isn’t always convincing: I remember only hazily the fall of the Berlin Wall since I was busy looking after an infant son at the time, which consumed all of my mental capacity.

But I need not have worried. Jonathan Coe treats subsequent moments in the nation’s history either ironically as a distant backdrop to the personal, or as quite possibly irrelevant to the characters who are living through them. At the coronation of the Queen Mary is there in person outside Buckingham Palace but ‘too far to have anything other than a distant, indistinct view of the four people who were standing there’. And during the funeral of Princess Diana Peter has a gay awakening. As he and Gavin watch the funeral on television and Tony Blair reads the passage from Corinthians about the centrality and necessity of love – if I have not love, I am nothing – Gavin gives Peter a blow job. Orgasm comes as Tony brings the reading to a close. It’s subversive, but also rather moving.

Jonathan Coe does humour, irony, satire – all those things – very well. And that’s a rare talent. But he is also deeply serious; he writes about what is important to him. Music runs through the novel, which begins with the youngest of the characters on a European tour in March 2020 as Covid spreads through the continent. And the section which revolves around the funeral of Princess Diana is divided into chapters named after the movements of  Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps, which Peter is about to perform, and the music is described as only someone who understands and loves it could do. And then there is his mother’s death, which is also the death of Jonathan Coe’s own mother, who died alone, her family denied access to her: her son’s drive through the Oxfordshire countryside after his last visit to her is also the drive that Jonathan Coe made in similar circumstances. And his fury at how she was made to die is just part of a passion that animates the whole novel and drives it forward, making it the best sort of straightforward novel I can possibly imagine.

More reading

Ian McEwan’s Lessons, which also covers the span of a whole life, and which you can now read in paperback, so there is another reason to read it.

Annie Ernaux, The Years

Ferdinand von Schirach’s The Collini Case: the novel is only part of the story

It’s as if a lot of the novel isn’t in the novel at all. That is, the novel I thought I was reading turned out to be a rather different novel to the novel that revealed itself at or rather just beyond the end of the novel, just outside the frontier of the novel itself.

The novel I started reading – the novel I thought I was reading – was a court room procedural about a man who commits a murder, surrenders himself to the authorities – but refuses to say why he has committed the murder. (If you read my last review of The Great Mistake you will be thinking that this scenario is remarkably familiar.) Despite this promising set up I wasn’t at all impressed. The Collini Case is incredibly short – I hadn’t realised quite how short it was since I was reading it on my e-reader and when the ending arrived I was taken completely by surprise. And length is an overlooked element in literary criticism. I should have been suspicious. In this case the novel is short because it consists of little more than the bare bones of a story.

Which follows Caspar Leinen, a newly qualified defence lawyer who takes on as his first client Fabrizio Collini, who has committed a brutal murder in cold blood but refuses to say why. It turns out that Caspar knew the victim, Hans Meyer, but in the course of his research he discovers certain events in Hans Meyer’s wartime career which he would rather not have discovered.

But there is little sense of Caspar’s life outside the court room: at the end of the legal day it often seems as if he dematerialises until the court re-convenes. And I kept feeling as I was reading a film script rather than a novel: all the author’s descriptions resemble stage directions. When a character walks into a room the author doesn’t describe what the character sees and hears as they enter – instead he gives us what feels like a utilitarian and omniscient thumb-nail sketch. One of my first and most memorable writing lessons included the instruction to always walk a character over the threshold of the room. We had to imagine what they would see and hear and smell as they entered; and how the room would gradually take shape in their mind. The author fails completely to do that. Von Schirach is a lawyer whose fiction is all based on his legal work – he might be a good lawyer but he could do with a few writing lessons.

And then there is Collini, around whom we might reasonably expect the story to revolve. But he is simply an immovable totem in whom the author seems to have absolutely no interest, apart from the fact that he provides a hook on which to hang his plot. The really perplexing thing is that if Collini wanted to avenge a wrong by committing the murder he has committed, why on earth would he refuse to give any inkling of his motivation to the court; why would he pass up this opportunity to broadcast the guilt of his victim?

So I felt that the novel I was reading was thin (in all senses); that the author had a grasp of plot but no ability to exploit it as a writer should. But then I got to the end of the novel and there is a note:

‘In January 2012, a few months after the publication of this novel in the original German, the Federal Minister of Justice appointed a committee to reappraise the mark left on the Ministry of Justice by the Nazi past. This novel constituted one of the points of reference.’

So in a way I felt that what I had been reading wasn’t a novel at all. And that possibly I shouldn’t have judged it as a novel, but rather as a political act designed to cast a spotlight on dodgy German legislation designed to let Nazis off the hook. I felt completely wrong-footed.  And was left wondering who was at fault – the author or me?

But that’s really just a rhetorical question. I know that I was right first time round. Von Schirach’s aim to question post-war legislation which imposed a statute of limitations on prosecuting former Nazis is entirely laudable, but there is no reason why he couldn’t write persuasively about this in some form that wasn’t a novel. Because The Collini Case doesn’t work as a story – it’s compelling despite its (unsuccessful) novelistic treatment and not because of it.

But then the novel does achieve another interesting thing. Von Schirach’s grandfather, Baldur von Schirach, was the leader of Hitler Youth, so the author had faced a lot of questions about his family’s involvement in the Nazi regime. By identifying himself with Caspar Leinen, who regards the victim Hans Meyer almost as a grandfather, and by making Caspar uncover the truth of Hans Meyer’s wartime exploits and by making him reveal both those exploits and the injustice of the fact that they no longer provide a legal basis for prosecution, he succeeds in (sort of) exculpating himself, or at least in distancing himself from his family’s dodgy past. Sort of. Because this is, after all, fiction. I think.