R C Sherriff’s The Fortnight in September: on holiday in 1926

I was reading The Fortnight in September on the train up north on my way to the coast, and reading about the Stevens family on their annual seaside holiday. What novel could have been more appropriate? Because this was how they did it in the 1920s – The Fortnight in September was first published in 1931.

RC Sherriff was most famously the author of the play Journey’s End, based on his experiences in the First World War.  Journey’s End was phenomenally successful, but R C Sherriff couldn’t manage to replicate its success. The breakthrough came unexpectedly when he gave up on literary pretensions and embarked on a story ‘so simple that I shouldn’t have had the face to use it if I’d been writing for anybody but myself. A small suburban family on their annual fortnight’s holiday at Bognor: man and wife, a grown-up daughter working for a dressmaker, a son just started in a London office, and a younger boy still at school. It was a day-by-day account of their holiday, from their last evening at home until the day they packed their bags for their return’.

There is no plot. Nothing monumental happens. It is simply the trajectory of the family holiday, and in that respect it feels, surprisingly, like a very modern novel. An equivalent, perhaps, to Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘At the Bay’, written only a few years earlier. ‘At the Bay’ also shows a family on holiday at the seaside, although Katherine Mansfield’s story is set in New Zealand and not in Bognor Regis. That story starts with dawn and ends with the fall of night, and faithfully follows the passage of time through a single day. Like The Fortnight in September there is no plot, and by the end of the day nothing has changed. Instead of plot, instead of a journey made by the characters, we make the journey ourselves, as we get to understand how the characters are related, who they are in the world, and what motivates and animates them. Realising the similarities with Katherine Mansfield’s story made me wonder whether this novel was something more distinguished than an example of cosy pre-war fiction.

What The Fortnight in September does have is a quantity of detail which creates a picture of what life was like in the late 1920s – similar in some ways to our own, yet in others very different. The Stevens family live in suburban Dulwich, and the house in Corunna Road has a view of Crystal Palace – but it is the actual palace which they can see, not yet destroyed by fire. A porter has to be engaged to collect the family’s luggage, which includes one enormous trunk, and to wheel it on a trolley through the streets to the local station. We are shown fields being covered over with new houses – the inter-war period saw a real boom in housing, but then as now people had mixed feelings about housing development.  The jobs which Mr Stevens and his two grown-up children are engaged in bear no relation to jobs which we might do today. A clerk? Dressmaking? Although Dick has a revelation whilst on holiday – he decides that he must be an architect – at this point in the twentieth century architecture was taking off, no longer a craft but on its way to being a bona fide profession.

The Fortnight in September also has humour, as suburban life is given a heroic treatment – Mr Stevens negotiates the changing of trains at Clapham Junction as if it were a military operation. ‘Clapham Junction is perfectly all right if you keep your head’, he thinks, and when their train approaches the platform and the whole family needs to find seats ‘his movements became slow, strong, and deliberate’ and he becomes conscious of an ‘instinctive power’ which had come over him – ‘leadership, he supposed it was’.

I began reading The Fortnight in September sceptical and unconvinced that I would see it through to the end, but I was still reading it on my way back from Berwick upon Tweed to my own home in suburban London. Those two magic ingredients – humour and detail – drew me in and kept me reading, as I saw my own life in suburban London being reflected back at me. It’s a fascinating social document, and if you want to reflect on where we are now you could or should take a look at where we were a hundred years ago.

Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny: confused but marvellous

I have been reading at a rate of knots. So I will attempt to be brief and to the point. Which might be difficult since this is a huge, fat novel, epic in every sense. Apparently it took Kiran Desai ten years to write (and then edit down to a comparatively manageable 670 pages).

For starters and just to be clear – this isn’t really a love story. Which, to be fair, the title sort of warns us. Sonia and Sunny don’t even meet until 250 pages in. So if the novel isn’t about love, what is it about?

First off, what obviously fascinates Kiran Desai are clashes of culture, particularly between India and the US, to the extent that I sometimes thought that the real subject of the novel was not Sonia and Sunny, but American-Indian relations, which Kiran Desai examines in minute detail and with such indefatigable enthusiasm that it often seems as if she herself is making an appearance in the narrative, sticking her authorial head up above the parapet to comment on the significance of what is going on.

Secondly, what keeps the novel motoring along (most enjoyably) are portrayals of the idiosyncrasies of life in India and of the numerous characters to whom we are introduced. She shows us an India dusty and chaotic but full of colour, and characters so much larger than life that they often become comic caricatures.  But Kiran Desai is evidently embarrassed by what she is doing. Both Sunny and Sonia are writers, and so Kiran Desai finds an outlet for her writerly anguish in her characters. Sonia’s boyfriend in the US warns her against writing stories about arranged marriages, ‘because it was feeding the West what it wanted to consume about the East’. And Sunny, in Goa looking for a story, tells us how he finds it awkward to ‘jet in for an assignment that was more accurately a vacation’ and then ‘return to New York high on adventure to show off to a group gathered in a tapas restaurant in the West Village’. In more general terms Sunny is bothered by the ‘fundamental flaw in a brown person going to the brown world to tell the white world about the brown world, as if he were a white person believing in the centrality of the white world’. Which you could say is precisely what Kiran Desai is doing in Sonia and Sunny. Although she does it extremely well and seems to enjoy doing it.

The final thing which powers Sonia and Sunny is a focus on place – outside India we visit Vermont, New York, the mid-West of the US, Mexico and Venice. Settling her characters (and readers) into a constantly changing setting necessitates the expenditure of many (most enjoyable) words and effectively makes plot less important and less necessary.

You can feel all those ten years and those hundreds of thousands of words which had to be whittled down to their current form – there is a lot going on here. The novel isn’t what you might expect. But despite that or because of it I loved it all, although by the end I wondered if my fondness for novels set in the Indian sub-continent wasn’t some form of intellectual or moral weakness, whether I’m not just submitting to the delight of the exotic. But what the heck – Kiran Desai is doing it too.

Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Pick a Colour: a great scenario, but not a story

I can’t believe it. Here’s (yet) another story of the immigrant experience in North America, based, presumably, on the author’s own life. Souvankham Thammavongsa’s parents left Laos, presumably during the civil war in the 70s, and she was born in a refugee camp in Thailand in 1978, although when she was just one her parents managed to get to Canada, where she grew up. The immigrant novel is a whole new genre. I realise that I have recently read Patmeena Sabit’s Good People (was a death in the Afghan expat community an honour killing – or not?) and Ledia Xhoga’s Misinterpretation (Albanian refugees in New York lead to a lot of cultural misunderstanding). Cultural differences seem to provide excellent fertiliser for a story – so what is this author’s take on the immigrant experience?        

Pick a Colour is short, not much more than a novella, and inhabits the closed world of a nail salon somewhere, we suppose, in Canada, although we are given no specifics. This salon is staffed entirely by women from wherever it is that Ning, the owner, comes from. We might assume that this is Laos, but it’s never made clear. Since we don’t actually know where we are or where all the workers in the nail salon come from, the novel’s take on the immigrant experience is very generalised. What we gather from our day in the nail salon is simply that it is hard to make your way in a new world. People think you are all the same – Ning gives every woman who works in the salon a name badge and every badge says ‘Susan’; the women all wear black; all have the same hairstyle and they are all more or less the same height. Although the problem with this is that it’s not just the clients who can’t tell the difference between the women working in the salon – it is Ning who insists that all the women should look the same.

 So where is the story? Well, there doesn’t seem to be one. At first I thought that Pick a Colour would be driven on by our desire to find out about the narrator and her back story. Where did she come from and how did she get there, opening up her nail salon?  We gather that she trained as a boxer. Ning remembers her fights in the ring – and the contrast with the ambience of the nail salon is powerful. She is also missing the ring finger on her right hand. Surely, I thought, we will know by the end of the novel how that happened. But no. Details are added, information is drip fed – to begin with – but after a certain point no new information is forthcoming and I felt as if I and the novel were treading water and as if the author was recycling and reworking the material and ideas which she had already used. So many opportunities were left unexploited. The disgruntled customer whom Ning worries will return. The owner of the competing salon who turns up just as they are closing and who is given a very poetic mani-pedi by Ning – we’re never told what her part in the story is, nor why Ning gave up boxing.

Pick a Colour is based on the author’s earlier short story ‘Mani Pedi’, in which the boxing back story is given to a rather different protagonist (Raymond, who in Pick a Colour works in a competing nail salon). The short story starts by explicitly telling us how he, Raymond, got out of boxing and into the nail business. He stops winning his fights, does multiple dead-end jobs and his sister, who runs a nail salon, says that their parents ‘didn’t leave Laos, a bombed out country, in a war no one ever heard of, on a raft made of bamboo to have him scooping out ice cream or frying cabbages with old grease oil’.  So the short story is more explicit than the novel, although even the short story doesn’t go any further so that, like Pick a Colour, it is more of a scenario than a whole story, leaving me asking (forlornly) what is going to happen next.

What there is in Pick a Colour is good – the dialogue, the ambience, the rituals of the nail salon, the relations between the workers and Ning, the frisson that comes from knowing that Ning used to be a boxer. It’s just that there could or should be much more. If the novel features immigrant workers, tell us more about all that. And don’t just tantalise the reader with glimpses of Ning’s boxing past – tell us more, tell us anything. It’s the detail that counts.

Note

My review of Patmeena Sabit’s Good People and Ledia Xhoga’s Misinterpretation is here.

Kate Atkinson’s Normal Rules Don’t Apply: too much whimsy

I first read Kate Atkinson back in the mid-1990s. Her debut novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, had just been published and I loved it instantly. It felt special and quite distinctive, and it made such an impression on me that it is one of the few novels I can still remember reading. And I obviously wasn’t alone: it went on to win the Whitbread (which later became the Costa) prize in 1995. What attracted me was her ability to mix the detail of everyday reality with the cosmic and the fantastic, and to deliver it all in a playful, conversational voice.

And that same voice and that same modus operandi is still here in Normal Rules Don’t Apply. In ‘The Void’ she imagines a world in which at certain moments anyone not safely indoors is struck dead on the spot. Our heroine Genevieve is saved only because she is safely inside Waitrose, taking refuge from the rain and toying with a mini watermelon when darkness strikes. 

That mixture of the mundane and the supernatural is a persistent feature of Kate Atkinson’s writing, including her impressive novel Life after Life (which imagines a series of alternative lives for a woman who might just have ended up assassinating Hitler, and which won the Costa novel prize in 2013). But Alex Clark – a perceptive reviewer for The Guardian – noted that Kate Atkinson’s style works best when there is plenty of grit to counteract the whimsy.

Which it unfortunately fails to do in this collection of stories. As I continued reading Normal Rules I grew increasingly disenchanted. It all became just too fey and too whimsical, without enough substance or seriousness. In the final story, ‘What if?’, the protagonist Franklin reappears from a series of earlier stories – only here his life takes a different course to that which the earlier stories have charted and the narrative shoots off in a completely different direction. Kate Atkinson tells us that Franklin’s previous iteration was in fact not Franklin at all, but someone who looked like him. But if the author can play so fast and loose with her characters, why should the reader invest time and emotion in their stories? There is only so far whimsy will go.

Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef: all about Sri Lanka

Reef is a beautiful book, slim and spare. It tells the story of Triton, houseboy to Mister Salgado, who lives somewhere on the south coast of Sri Lanka. It was published in 1994, which is when I must have read it first, and I have always remembered it as something quite special. Thirty years on I have just re-read Reef and it still seemed magical.

Triton tells his own story from the vantage point of the future when he is living in London (we first see him on a petrol station forecourt, a sad contrast with the paradise of Sri Lanka) so there is every opportunity for him to give us the benefit of hindsight. But he avoids that temptation and stays within the mindset of his younger self. Mister Salgado and his house are Triton’s entire world and he dedicates himself to their maintenance. It is a compelling picture of a quietly serious paradise, a Garden of Eden.

But although Triton does not editorialise, the author develops a quietly allusive parable of changing times. We are not dealing here with the civil war which broke out in 1983 but with the violent Marxist student movement which preceded it in the 1970s and which allied extremist fundamentalism to appalling bloodshed. As the politics of the outside world impinges on paradise – ‘at the kade on the main road the talk was on the need for revolution, or for a return to traditional values’ – Mister Salgado’s paradise begins to spoil. The seductive Miss Nili moves in, allowing Triton to see her naked and flirting with an American friend of Mister Salgado. Mister Salgado neglects his study of the dying coral reef on the south coast, instead going out to endless parties, surrounded by a feckless crowd of hangers on. And then Miss Nili asks Triton to take her to the local fish market. She is expecting a picturesque outing, but they are met with ‘the clammy stench of fresh fish blood, guts, bile and brine cooking in the magnified heat’. A reef shark, still alive, is being hacked at with a cleaver. Outside, pieces of bleached white coral from the dying reef mark the parking lot. This is a paradise truly lost.

Then Mister Salgado’s oldest and truest friend is disappeared as the waves of political violence begin to rise; Miss Nili moves out; and Mister Salgado abandons his home and takes off for London – the dreary London of the 1970s – taking Triton with him. There they rebuild their lives but they are always looking back to what they have lost.

 One of the most moving aspects of this novel is that it mirrors the author’s own life. Romesh Gunesekera was born in what was then Ceylon in 1954 but left with his parents in 1966 and ended up in Britain. So his memories of Sri Lanka must be those of a child, and it is that point of view – where a house and a garden and the lane outside are a whole universe – that is one of the most magical elements of Reef.

Reef is quiet and understated. Romesh Gunesekera manages to walk the thin line between dealing with the terrible recent history of Sri Lanka, and making that story personal. It has a feel of parable, concise and pared down, but it is a parable of considerable delicacy.

           

Note

If you would like to know more about the dark history of Sri Lanka I recommend John Gimlette’s Elephant Complex, which will dispel any idea that Sri Lanka is some sort of India-lite.

Graham Swift’s Twelve Post-War Tales: looking back

Twelve Post-War Tales was given to me by my friend Paul, shortly before he died on Easter Sunday. You might imagine from this a soulful pushing of a precious volume into my hands but no, it wasn’t like that at all. ‘Do take it’, he said, ‘but I didn’t think much of it’.

But it is, nonetheless, relevant to death and memorialising since these stories are all works of memory, featuring characters thinking back into their past lives. Graham Swift was born in 1949 and many of these stories imagine childhoods during the Second World War or shortly thereafter, remembering a time which seems so very far from where we are now. A world where miners came home still filthy and needed a bath in the kitchen from which they would emerge, transformed from black into white. Where black US soldiers were objects of wonder, they seemed so strange.

 Graham Swift was a young writer when I was a young reader, so now of course he is a senior citizen of the authorial world. He is one of those authors with whom I have travelled through a reading life, and like him I am fascinated, now, by looking back to a past which seems like another country.

The stories work on associations made between one thing and another – they are expositions rather than forward-moving narratives starting with a question and ending with an answer. Perhaps that is why Paul didn’t rate them. But what wins me over are the voices that Graham Swift inhabits and brings to life, the voices of people looking at the strangeness of life, recognising it and turning it over and over, as it were, in their hands, reminding me, if I needed to be reminded, how much there is to it all.

So it’s a fine judgement or perhaps just a matter of taste, whether you will find these stories marvellously suggestive or just too insubstantial. I can understand Paul’s dismissal of them, but I am deeply sympathetic to Graham Swift’s stories as they follow the wandering thoughts of people who like me, and indeed like Paul, have reached a stage of life when looking back provides so much food for thought.

Note

See my review of Graham Swift’s Here We Are – you can find it in the index. My favourite Swift, however, is the novella Mothering Sunday, which I highly recommend (but which is not reviewed here).

Robert Harris’s Precipice: History isn’t story

So what is Precipice actually about? We have read the reviews, we have read the blurb on the back cover and so we know, or at least think we know, that it’s about the relationship between Asquith and the young, aristocratic Venetia Stanley as war breaks out in Europe in 1914.

But at a certain point I found myself asking who the hero/ine of Precipice actually was. Was it Asquith or was it Venetia Stanley? I wasn’t sure. Which led to a second question: was Precipice primarily about the outbreak of war or about a love affair? There were sections on the impending war, and then there were separate sections on the affair (quite possibly unconsummated) between Asquith and Venetia. But those two story strands never seemed to meet, and whereas the horribly inevitable progress to war was gripping, the relationship between Asquith and Venetia was dutiful and lacklustre – hardly the stuff of romance. The title doesn’t help either: it suggests that there is a precipice which someone might fall off but it’s remarkably non-specific, which makes me wonder if Robert Harris himself knew what the motor of his story was meant to be.

The two story strands do eventually come together – Robert Harris tells us that Asquith let himself and the country become embroiled in the disastrous Dardanelles campaign because he was too busy writing Venetia a billet doux when his cabinet colleagues were discussing affairs of state. As things go downhill militarily Asquith becomes increasingly obsessed with Venetia, who is alarmed and becomes determined to leave him – which she eventually does. The fall of Asquith’s government and the end of the affair also mark the end of the novel.

There are just two problems. Firstly, no one can claim this is history – according to Anne Perkins, who is writing a biography of Asquith’s daughter Violet and who has written a review of Precipice in The Literary Review. Although Asquith did have a ‘harem’ of young female friends, no one thinks that Venetia Stanley was quite as important to Asquith as Robert Harris makes out. The key letter to Venetia was written during a break in the Cabinet meeting in which the Dardanelles campaign was being debated, and not during it, as Robert Harris tells us. And Asquith’s failure to be an effective PM during this period was, according to Anne Perkins, down to the fact that he was better at peace than at war.

Which makes me ask – if the author is ready not merely to fill in history’s gaps, but to rewrite history and even to misrepresent it, that must surely be in pursuit of a really good story? Only neither Venetia nor Asquith ever come to life on the page. Perhaps character doesn’t really interest Robert Harris. Even the presumably invented Paul Deemer, a junior detective investigating discarded official telegrams which have been appearing by the roadside around London (Asquith has been showing them to Venetia and then casually tossing them out of the window of his moving car), is little more than a cipher to get us through the plot. He has no mother or father; no girlfriend or wife. There’s not even a male friend anywhere in sight; he works in lonely isolation without any colleagues. He has one brother who is shipped off to France to fight at the earliest opportunity; and the suggestion of an interest in Venetia’s lady’s maid, which is not pursued. There is nobody in Paul Deemer’s life to make him seem like a real or interesting person.

And the one moment in the novel where I sat up and began to pay attention, thinking that perhaps at last something interesting and of consequence was about to happen, was when Paul Deemer discovers that his boss is in cahoots with the proprietor of The Times, Lord Northcliffe (an enemy of Asquith), and is passing information uncovered by Deemer to him. Now something is going to happen, I thought. The shit is going to hit the fan. But no. The revelation is followed by – precisely nothing. It’s really most unsatisfactory.

 I have some doubts about using history as the basis for fiction – there is a real conflict of interest. But if Hilary Mantel did it, it must be possible. Robert Harris, unfortunately, doesn’t manage it, at least not here. 

Notes

If you are interested in the actual history of the outbreak of the First World War, I recommend the podcast The Rest is History, which has done a whole series on the lead-up to the war and has just started a new series on the course of the war itself. You might find it more gripping than Precipice.

I have also written about Robert Harris’s Act of Oblivion, and you can find my review here. As I say in that review, history isn’t exactly story, although Robert Harris makes a better attempt at turning the former into the latter in that novel than he does in Precipice.

Patmeena Sabit’s Good People and Ledia Xhoga’s Misinterpretation: immigrants in the USA

Good People is the story of the Sharaf family, Afghan immigrants to the US, and a tragedy which engulfs them – but is the tragedy just an accident or is it an honour killing? Misinterpretation is the story of an Albanian immigrant married to a native New Yorker.

It’s also a story about a clash between cultures (the clothes they wear! the way they behave!) and the difficulty of negotiating between two views of what constitutes normality (who is right?). But although the two novels should have so much in common, they feel like different creatures entirely.

As we begin (and even for the first fifty pages or so) Good People it is possible to work out that the story is about the Sharaf family, but we have no real idea where the story is going. Because the narrative consists of a series of testimonies from a whole variety of people – family friends, one investigative reporter (which might give us pause for thought, because why should the family have become a subject of interest for such a person?); the director of a tourist attraction at Niagara Falls, who has been piecing together CCTV footage (giving us further pause for thought, since this suggests that there might be a crime in here somewhere). But for at least those first fifty pages it’s not clear what has happened to which member of the family or in which direction the novel is taking us.

Despite or perhaps because of our confusion, this way of telling the story is incredibly effective, with gradual revelations carefully orchestrated as we are led along the path of the narrative. It also gives the immigrant Afghan community not only a voice, but a whole range of voices. Patmeena Sabit has said that she was moved to write about the subject of honour killings after a notorious case in Canada, when she was struck by the fact that none of the commentary on the case came from the Afghan community. So nothing is simple and nothing is obvious. It is never made clear whether the tragedy is an honour killing or just an accident – the awful thing, the author has said, was that such a thing should even be possible.

But as a result we don’t hear from Zorah, the young woman at the centre of the tragedy, and that didn’t help me believe in Zorah’s fall from grace. I couldn’t quite believe that she somehow hooked up with such an undesirable man and gave up everything – her family and her place in society – to be with him. We never see her weighing up the pros and cons of that relationship, and we don’t see how and why that relationship fails (which would have been quite something, to be there in Zorah’s head, as she realises that she has given up everything for someone worthless – what is she to do then?). The way that Patmeena Sabit has chosen to tell her story stops us from understanding Zorah’s motivations or living through her experiences since we only see her through other people’s eyes. And of course we don’t hear from her family (who might have instigated her death), or from anyone who knows what really happened.

In Misinterpretation the clash between cultures infects the marriage of our interpreter-protagonist and her husband Billy, who is a culturally privileged academic born and brought up in New York. She keeps being pulled towards helping people who because of their precarious circumstances and cultural differences seem to Billy to be decidedly dodgy.

That mismatch between cultures reminds me of living in Florence in the early eighties, where no one was able to see what was obvious to me – namely, that I was a serious and very nicely brought up middle-class girl. To them I was just another female foreigner – in other words, an unchaperoned young girl of probably dubious morals. We all depend on signals to indicate to others our social identity, but those signals often don’t travel well.

The sense of precariousness which hovers over our protagonist is not confined to immigrants. There’s also Helen, their elderly neighbour who is evicted for non-payment of maintenance fees – our protagonist realises that her erratic and weird behaviour came out of economic desperation. And there is Anna – the gifted violinist who is involved in a car accident which makes it unlikely that she will ever play again.

Good People is much more tightly written than Misinterpretation, which goes rather off the rails somewhere before the end, turning unexpectedly into something like a thriller. It is a real change of mood and tone. And then suddenly we leave the thriller behind and move onto a final section where the novel begins to focus on whether the narrator and Billy will stay together – or has it all been too much? It’s all rather odd. I read a review on a blog which put this down to genius. I’m not entirely convinced by that explanation, but I rather like the homemade approach to fiction. It’s like seeing the workings of the story exposed.

In contrast Good People Is so well put together that it felt less like a novel about the immigrant experience than a suspense novel which happens to be about an honour killing. But is that a bad thing? Am I just being picky?

Good People is great – great in the way that a Hollywood blockbuster is great: with plenty of suspense, cliffhangers and carefully timed revelations. I was riveted, but whenever I put it down and the spell was temporarily broken I kept wondering if something wasn’t missing. Because it wasn’t great in the way an indie film can be great, moving with infinitesimal slowness and great beauty, so that you are not sure whether you are bored or fascinated, and you can’t quite work out what is going on and don’t know if it’s you or the film that is at fault. Which was what Ledia Xhoga’s Misinterpretation felt like.

A note on precarity

Precarity is a word which I encountered in reviews of Misinterpretation. But whatever happened to precariousness? Which does have rather more syllables, but which is a perfectly good word. It’s a bit like comic suddenly giving way to its more happening cousin, comedic. Which I really have no time for.  People are rushing forward into the future, forgetting all the words which I have always used and which have always seemed perfectly serviceable.

 But Wikipedia (I looked it up because I was so bemused) tells us that the word precarity derives from the French précarité, which was popularised by Pierre Bourdieu (and if you don’t know who he is, Wikipedia will be happy to fill you in) and which describes a lack of stable and predictable employment. English-speaking (or writing) academics started to use the term in the 2010s and I suppose that reviewers must have caught it from them – or made use of the word to make their reviews seem more deep, meaningful and important.

There is, apparently, even a noun – precariat – which is a mix of precarity and proletariat. I love it. But whether it is precarity or precariousness, it is definitely Xhoga’s subject in Misinterpretation.

William Boyd, Gabriel’s Moon: Lights! Camera! Action!

Lights! Camera! Action! And we’re off.

This is a story (yes, an actual story and not just a novel) where stuff happens and where people (let’s not call them characters) make split second decisions that determine their safety and security and, on occasion, whether they will live or die. Yes, it’s a spy story. It’s gripping, plot-based stuff, and I feel as though I am in the hands of someone who knows precisely what they are doing. Which William Boyd obviously does, because he has been doing this and doing it very well for a long time.

The plot isn’t singular, but multiple, and the question is – how does everything relate? It all begins in 1960 on a hot, humid August day in Léopoldville, the capital of the newly independent republic of the Congo. Gabriel Dax is there not as a spy but as a travel writer. To his surprise he is summoned to the presidential residence to conduct an interview with Patrice Lumumba – shortly before he is disappeared. Back in London he is invited by the representatives of the ‘Institute of Development’ to act as a courier for them. But why does his brother lie to him about his own involvement with the secret services? It’s the sort of plot which feels complicated, but I could just about keep on top of all the questions which I wanted to ask, even if I couldn’t work out the answers – and for me that constituted a very satisfactory level of complication.

Patrice Lumumba is not, of course, a fictional character – he and his disappearance are not fiction, but history. And the places which William Boyd takes us to are entirely real.  As Gabriel, at the beginning of the novel, looks from Léopoldville across the Congo river, he sees Brazzaville on the far bank – and I recalled that I had read Boyd’s Brazzaville Beach years ago. These locations recur in Boyd’s fiction because he was born in Africa (Ghana, to be precise), so these places aren’t just place-holders for exoticism. Gabriel leaves Léopoldville to travel to Cadiz in Franco’s Spain and then to Warsaw, in the days when it was still behind the Iron Curtain. The foreign countries which William Boyd takes us too include the foreign country of the past, a country which people his and my age know well, but which it is good to be reminded of.

My only complaint relates to the hook on which Gabriel’s career as a spy hangs – his attraction to Faith Green, the head of the ‘Institute of Development’. It’s that attraction which keeps him going back for more, despite the dangers which his involvement brings. But to me the attraction did not seem sufficiently compelling. Perhaps that is down to William Boyd’s other existence as a screen writer – perhaps he imagines that the older Faith Green resembles the mother who died in a mysterious house fire when Gabriel was a child. But that is a resemblance which is never made clear on the pages of the novel, although it could be compelling on screen – a resemblance not stated but left for us to see for ourselves.

But despite that, more than one reviewer commented with surprise that the overwhelming sensation that they felt while reading Gabriel’s Moon was enjoyment. As if whether the reviewer actually enjoyed a novel wasn’t a question that they generally even thought to ask. I suspect that a reason for their (and my) enjoyment is the fact that Gabriel has real agency in his own story – like an actor who improvises as he goes along – and it was all bracing stuff, and perhaps an encouragement to us all to treat our own lives with the same degree of sang froid and determination.

Note

And see how things interconnect: I have just discovered that William Boyd wrote the screenplay for the film of Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson which came out in 1990. (My review of Mister Johnson is here: Joyce Cary, Mister Johnson)

And my review of William Boyd’s Trio is here:   William Boyd, Trio

Joyce Cary’s Herself Surprised: perhaps first person narrations aren’t always a good thing

Here I am, talking about the passage of time again. Joyce Cary was once a celebrated writer. Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Bowen all praised his novels; he appeared on the front cover of Time magazine; and was featured in the Paris Review. But that was a long time ago. He died in 1957, a few months before I was born, and his novels have become increasingly difficult to get hold of. So I took note when I saw in The Literary Review that Everyman are republishing a trilogy written during the Second World War. I must admit that I couldn’t quite face the thought of (literally) picking up a hardback volume into which three novels had been compressed, but its publication did spur me to find an old orange Penguin of the first part of the trilogy, Herself Surprised.

Cary designed the trilogy as an attempt to show three characters both as they are seen by themselves but also as they are seen by each other. So the three novels are all in the first person, the first being narrated by Sara Monday, a cook turned lady turned housekeeper who finally ends up with a prison sentence for fraud, which is the point at which we meet her at the beginning of the novel. Sara Monday is a character in every sense of the word and her life is a roller coaster.

Herself Surprised was published in 1941, only two years after Mister Johnson, which I first read when I was at school and which I continue to regard as one of the most luminous novels ever written(there is a link to my review of Mister Johnson below). It is the story, as Cary himself put it, of an African clerk who turns his life into a romance and creates for himself a glorious destiny. Despite the fact that Herself Surprised opens in Victorian England and Mister Johnson is set in twentieth century Africa, the novels both deal with the downfall of a person who is in many respects entirely admirable and indeed heroic in their positive attitude to life in the face of obstacles and setbacks: in the end both Mister Johnson and Sara Monday become victims of the legal system and of censorious society.

But I must admit that despite the similarities with Mister Johnson I found Herself Surprised a bit of a disappointment. It felt dull and it felt dated. Whereas Mister Johnson has for me a real sense of immediacy, Herself Surprised seemed strangely old fashioned,. so despite being closer to home than Mister Johnson it somehow felt further away, more distant to now. Perhaps it’s because class plays what now seems an unwarranted role – Sara marries above her station and struggles to adapt in a way which now seems incredible.

But perhaps something else is going on which could account for my disappointment. Mister Johnson is written in the present tense and Herself Surprised is written in the first person. Both of these ‘minimise the opportunity for reflection and explanation. So we are shown events, and characters are paraded before us, but we are left to make our own judgements’, as I wrote about Mister Johnson. But although a first person narration can bring immediacy it can also become a prison for the author from which he can’t escape. If Cary wants us to learn anything about Sara’s character he has to slip it into her monologue – she has to unwittingly reveal character traits that are perhaps not intended to be obvious to her herself. Which ends up, as you can imagine, feeling decidedly clunky.

And a related problem is that the novel has an awful lot of summary. Sara is telling us the story of her life, starting (almost) at the beginning and ending somewhere near the end (or at least at the point where she ends up in prison). And summary does tend to be relentless and boring: it too often remains in the realm of the general rather than the specific. It’s onlywhen the story of Sara’s life speeds up towards the end and the summary accelerates that I became more engaged by the narrative – and by the story of an inimitable woman.

I feel that this review should have ended on a note of triumph, that I should be able to tell you that Herself Surprised is a masterpiece which reinforces and vindicates my love of Cary’s Mister Johnson. But for me, at least, Herself Surprised is not a masterpiece. It is certainly interesting, and there are some marvellous moments. And it’s lovely to hold in my hands an ancient paperback, so ancient that it is actually stitched rather than glued together. But it does not feel like a work of genius. What a sadness.

Note

My review of Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson is here: Joyce Cary, Mister Johnson.