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.

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.

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?