Apparently It’s Not Really Worth It. Great.

This week I have to do a presentation (at NINE IN THE MORNING – well, I am a student) on 1984 by George Orwell. Lovely, miserable old George. Or Eric, as he was known in his previous life in Burma riding around on a moped (in my imagination at least) being a police officer. Brilliant. Presentations are not my strong suit, especially not having done one for actually four years – I think – and the fact that I really did not enjoy 1984. Nor did I enjoy Down and Out in Paris and London, which I read last year. Charming little story that. Miserable George runs out of money, lives in horrid little hotels and has possibly one of the worst jobs ever in the kitchen of an expensive hotel. Not something he recommends I would think. He makes it in the end though, some friend in London lends him some money and gets him a job and he becomes a successful writer. Doesn’t make him any happier though. Just went on to write lovely things like Animal Farm and, of course, la piece de resistance, 1984. The bane of my week.

Old George was miserable, and frequently ill, but he was a clever one, no doubt about that. Though I don’t think he was the type to use his intelligence to see the higher beauty in our world and appreciate the finer things and all that; I think he used his intelligence to see how awful some things were and how difficult it was to fix them. This lead him to create brilliant but not very hopeful dystopian futures in his work. 1984 paints a vividly grey image (ooh, oxymoron, must be really be an English student then) of a cruel future world which none us would want to inhabit at any time, and it does not, let’s say, end well. Oh no. It all goes down the drain and The Man and His Evil Machines wins. Sort of like The Terminator but not nearly as fun and with no Christian Bale to try and save us once Arnie is ensconced in his mansion in California. One can appreciate bleak little images like this and look at the paper and go, yes, well, George may turn out to be right you know, but really it doesn’t make for an enjoyable afternoon on the sofa. One could be doing so much more enjoyable things… Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that when I read 1984, and reached the miserable end, I was left wondering, what was I supposed to learn? Was it supposed to instill fear to make me fight The Man Gordon Brown? Or make me run away from society and blend his vision with that of Aldous and go create a community of Shakespeare-reading Savages in a field? Not sure. I think it’s mainly supposed to shock us into rebelling against unnecessary government control and invasions of privacy (have you seen how shoddy changing room curtains are in underwear departments these days?), and we’re supposed to rally behind Miserable Old George and not let his dystopian visions come true. Here’s hoping. SO, I must trawl through library books and articles and the like to find a theme or something I want to talk about to my fellow students of EN2301: Modernity and the 20th Century British Novel. Maybe I’ll include that Terminator comparison and maybe even throw in some Matrix; and of course compare him (unfavourably, I have to say) to his former teacher Mr Huxley, whose view was rather more rounded and not quite so bloody miserable. Should be fun!! Wish me luck…

Batgirl.xx.

The Beauty of Personal Choice

When one is a student of literature at a brilliant university, books are read because they must be – because they should be. So, naturally, one forgets that one used to read purely and utterly for pleasure. It is not that one wishes to read books that are not intelligent, well-written, challenging and sublime,  it is just that one sometimes wishes one could read a book and not worry about deadlines and super in-depth analysis. There is much to be said for reading a book purely because it looks good and brings enjoyment, rather than because it is a seminal work of its genre and has been heaped with awards and accolades. Though these seminal books are sometimes the ones chosen, it is nice not to read them for that reason only. It is relaxing, liberating, and makes one feel that one makes intelligent choices at the bookshelf, not just the choices one’s professors have dictated.

I am spending the weekend reading Rebecca (1938) by the wonderful Daphne du Maurier; and my professors are none the wiser.

Batgirl.xx.

I Dislike Disliking Books, But I’ve Got To Be Honest With You Martin…

It took me longer than it should have but the other day I finished reading Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. It left me with questions, mostly about the narrator, John Dowell. The book’s blurb recounts that he is regarded as the epitome of an unreliable narrator and this is clear on completing the book. The problem is that he is so deeply personally involved in the situation that he cannot possibly have any kind of objective judgment and we cannot take anything he says at face value. As with many first person narrators, his opinions guide ours and we cannot help but be influenced by his judgments of characters and events. Also there is the truth factor – as outsiders, how can we know that his version of events is accurate? How can we know that he has not left things out or added them in to make the story more comfortable for himself?

Ford’s writing is very conversational and he himself is not particularly present, it is all Dowell. This is testament to Ford’s skills as a writer. I have not read any other of his works and so I am not the fairest judge but I was very impressed by his subtlety and style. This was the kind of book I like, one that explores human relationships and also the position of those humans in society. After it I had to blitz through a book that was not the kind I like…

That book was Money (1984) by Martin Amis.  Having never read an Amis before I went in with all his accolades before my eyes; and they promptly fell away. Once I reached the end of the book I could see why he is heralded, he is indeed a brilliant and clever writer. Characters are created as if for a movie, we are given snapshots and images. Obviously money is the issue that runs through the book and, yes, at the end one can see how evil it can be and how it has caused such a mess for our protagonist. It and other things. So, yes, Amis is a brilliant writer and he deserves his praise; but I did not enjoy this book. It is not the kind of book I would really choose to read on my own – I had to read it for year 2 of my course. It’s like reading Bret Easton Ellis for me – brilliant, clever, funny at times, dark, interesting – but not really enjoyable. I resented having to read it and I know I will resent having to study it come September. I did not feel I learned anything or gained anything, intellectually or emotionally. There were also very few moments where I paused at the sheer greatness and beauty of the literary skill on display. It’s almost as if Amis should have constructed the story as a movie rather than a novel. I now desperately want to move on to something that I would consider more artful and fulfilling for me personally. Something that does not just leave me with memories of sex, violence, endless swearing, racism, sexism and consumerism. Why would I want to read something that had all those things and little else? Was I supposed to learn, through John Self, that all these things are bad? I have no idea. Perhaps I have missed the point, perhaps I simply did not enjoy this particular little literary excursion.

I have recently read Piers Dudgeon’s Captivated: JM Barrie, Daphne du Maurier and the dark side of Neverland (which was unfathomably brilliant and should be read by everyone) and this has lead me to purchase my first du Maurier in the shape of My Cousin Rachel. So I’m going to take a break from course books again and read that. Perhaps Daphne will enlighten me where Martin failed to do so.

Batgirl.xx.

A Book Or Two Later…

Howdy. So, I finished Green’s Loving the other day; and it was brilliant. Green’s style becomes easier and easier the more you read and after a certain point you no longer notice that it is a little unusual. The story also becomes more gripping as you read on. Confusions over a waterglass and a sapphire ring shape the plot points, as does the event of a mysterious visitor with a suspect lisp. The Second World War further infringes on the characters’ minds and actions as the story progresses and you get a genuine sense of their concerns and how it affects their day-to-day. The title also becomes more and more appropriate, as relationships develop and change and feelings are wordlessly exposed. Charley Raunce and Edith become more central to the plot and have more and more scenes to themselves. From the standpoint of their relationship, other relationships are questioned and examined, if indirectly, and the dynamics of the wider group of characters starts to form more clearly in the reader’s mind.

The ending however is something that made me stop and think. Green actually ends with the words, “and lived happily ever after.” After all that modern, beautiful, tragic literature, there is a fairy tale ending. I for one was a little suspect and don’t quite believe it; but of course I won’t give anything away, you’ll have to read it for yourself. Given that it’s only 203 pages, that shouldn’t be too much of a feat.

After Loving I powered through Jean Rhys’ Good Morning, Midnight, a slim volume of only 156 pages in print that is not small. As a warning I must say that it is a rather miserable little book; but then again, if you know anything about Jean Rhys, that is not much of a surprise. The story follows a few days in the life of Sophia Jansen in Paris in the 1930s. She is in a post-trauma state of mind – i.e. she is mentally down and out. She wonders aimlessly around the city, stopping in cafes and bars for drinks and her meals. She comes across strange and mysterious characters, mostly men, and engages with them in strange, lonely exchanges. Her recent history, and thus the cause of her misery, comes out as the book goes on and we learn the details that brought her to this point, both geographically and mentally.

Rhys’ style is easy and at the same time not easy. It is conversational but brutally honest as Sophia describes events and feelings. It is poignant and sad, and one can easily see how Sophia has reached this point. The ending is a little vague, simply a scene after another with no more after that. It is unclear exactly what happens or why it happens, thus one is left with a strange unfinished feeling once the book is ended. Surely there should be more? Sophia does not appear to reach any conclusions or resolve anything within herself or with her situation. She only decides to no longer “despise” human beings.

Ultimately, Good Morning, Midnight is a portrait of a lost soul, an exploration of loneliness and despair, of loss and of misery. As quoted before the title page, it is named after an Emily Dickinson poem of the same name. In the poem the speaker addresses Midnight and says goodbye to Day. In a similar fashion, Sophia Jansen gives up on the happiness and light of Day and resigns herself to the misery and darkness of Midnight.

I have now begun The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. So far, so sad; but enjoyable and well written, though I am yet to make a judgment on the character and personality of the narrator. That is to say, I know who he is, but I am not yet sure what I think of him. We shall see.

Happy reading!

Batgirl.xx.

Shift Of Focus Brings… Well…

It’s been a while… forgive me. Wimbledon is a slight issue when it comes to concentrating on pretty much anything else in life. Partly due to this fact, and several hours of pondering, I have decided to take a break from Midnight’s Children. It really is brilliant but in the grander scheme of reading books for Year 2 I don’t think it was the best choice for First Book. I just seem unable to concentrate and need to ease into the vast amount of pages I must consume by late September. So, I have instead turned my attention to Loving (1945) by Henry Green.

Loving is a novel of less than 200 pages that takes place in a stately home, referred to throughout as “the Castle”, in Ireland at the start of the Second World War. The drama deals with the servants and their relationships, with each other and also the inhabitants of ‘upstairs’. Sebastian Faulks’ introduction to the novel was helpful in that it prepared me for Green’s writing being captivatiing but unusual, which it certainly is. Green sometimes leaves out full stops, and some conjunctions, and much of his descriptive prose seems to be written in a colloquial style that you only expect to emit from the characters’ mouths but instead comes also from that of the author. Faulks mentions a blurring between the three positions of character, author and reader in Green’s work and after fifty or so pages I am beginning to see what he means. Only time will tell if I am able to really understand what is actually going on so far. It seems as if all the characters, and Green, and are in on some part of the story, some plot detail, that I as the reader am not yet aware of. Perhaps it is just the colloquiallisms and over-familiarised patterns of speech that are throwing me off; I hope it is and after another twenty or so pages I begin to feel a lot more at home in Green’s offbeat world. Or perhaps he just baffles me a bit. Having said that, I don’t feel entirely lost and I am actually enjoying it so far. So let’s see how it goes with this particular Henry…

Batgirl xx

P.S. After this week I shall be sadly deprived of an internet connection for a bit, so updates may be a little sporadic. Apologies. Listen to Kate Bush and La Roux to console yourself.

Society

A love of literature brings people together. It has certainly brought a couple of hundred people together who have chosen to study the English variety at my university. If you study the same subject as someone, you can talk to them relatively easily (relatively). A slight issue occurs when some people (i.e. me and two others) decide to reincarnate the defunct English Society in a beautiful new form. People can talk about literature together and people can drink together; but whether a mutual love of literature will really bring them together to drink is a little doubtful. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I think English students like to get drunk and go nuts in their own way and this doesn’t always involve doing it with each other, unless they just like each other a lot and are genuinely friends anyway. My thought is that, at my university at least, there does not appear to be quite enough solidarity and camaraderie between the students of the English department. Sure everyone is willing to click a button and join the Facebook group, but asking them to show actual physical support seems to be something a little different. My theory so far has been that we are still only in the first year of the course, and so people just generally aren’t making that much effort. The academic side of things is zero-weighted in the first year, so maybe some people think other things are too. I don’t know. I just hope that next year those who really are dedicated will rise from the ashes of 0809 and we will have a much more academically and socially productive 0910.

In other news Midnight’s Children is tiring me out a little. We’ve moved through the generations to the narrator’s own parents, and lots of terribly interesting and dramatic political stuff is going on in the run-up to the narrator’s birth. It is definitely getting exciting, but I am becoming more and more aware of the sheer length of the book. Still “not overly daunted” but just a little tired now. Don’t panic. I shall manage to re-group and continue to plough through.

Batgirl xx

A Brief Comment

Okay, so Midnight’s Children is pretty brilliant. In my first full day free after the end of my exams, all I’ve done is read and sleep (the excitement of dinner draws ever closer) and I kept reading until I could literally no longer stay awake. At four in the afternoon. If I weren’t going out tonight I would keep reading until I fell asleep for the night. Undefined adjective expressing joy and praise.

Batgirl xx

Free But Tied Down

Final exam done, first year of university is effectively finished. The thought is rather odd. Now I technically have nothing to do until September. I say technically because I have a lot of reading to do for next year (including some brick-like novels including Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children which I have read about 20 pages of) and applying for a boring part time summer job… and what else? Ummm…

Thinking of a basically free summer is initially a great thing but then there’s that moment when you think, well what am I actually going to do for all that time? Having nothing to do is only great for a certain amount of time, then it gets boring. I must think of things to do. Of course I shall be reading a hideous amount and nattering on about it on here and to anyone who will listen to me.

Today’s Book: Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie (1981)

So I have started Midnight’s Children. I went into it only having heard of it but not knowing anything about it. The plot, as I have come to expect from our Mr Rushdie, is not exactly simple. Our main character, Saleem, was born at the stroke of midnight on the day of India’s independence. He is then somehow connected to 1,000 other ‘midnight’s children’ via telepathic powers. I haven’t quite gotten to all this yet in my reading. Thus far, on page 38, we are back in the time of Saleem’s grandfather and learning about his adolescence and marriage. He is currently on his honeymoon. I have never previously read Rushdie, but his prose is easy to read and likeable for two reasons. Firstly it is beautiful, absolutely lovely to read and flows nicely; secondly he throws in some very everyday phrases that any of us might say and this makes the work seem infinitely more human and natural. Though high prose may come to some of us, no one speaks it all the time. We all lapse in colloquisms and a bit of bad grammar here and there. As I am sure I have here. Though the book is 647 pages, I am not overly daunted and am looking forward to ploughing through it and discovering some depth of beauty that I have not yet met with. Hopefully Mr Rushdie will enlighten me just a little bit more.

Batgirl xx

Examine My Mind

Shakespeare exam at 9am tomorrow… when presented with Shakespeare I think of Ophelia, of Kate Winslet tormented in Kenneth Branagh’s hall of mirrors, of Rossetti’s Ophelia and her soft trailing hand floating in the water… Lear presents the infinte descent of ‘there is no worst’, the pain of the heath where Heathcliff and Cathy could appear at any moment, Gloucester as Oedipus finally seeing the truth, Edmund preening for Goneril and Regan, and Edgar standing on the sidelines as  Poor Tom. I never used to like Shakespeare that much, and even now I am somewhat sick of studying him, but it cannot be denied that one could waffle on about him for endless hours. Through my revision I have come across themes and images, comparisons and issues that I hadn’t even thought of, and in the end it is interesting. Old Will can take you into the world of the play and convince you it is utterly real, no matter how absurd, far-fetched or OTT dramatic it may be. I do not believe in the hero-worshipping of anyone (we are only human after all) so it automatically annoys me when he is feted as ‘the greatest’ and all that malarkey. That’s not to say he wasn’t extremely talented; though he may have copied many of the plot ideas, he elaborated on them and added depth that the original writers did not even appear to reach for.

Of the plays I have read, Henry IV Part One and Henry V stand out. I could certainly talk about them for hours. Their initial appeal was that they weren’t nearly as difficult to handle as the Histories are often presented to be; secondly it was their links with the world of Classical drama. Having studied Classics for five years at school I always seem to link things back to it and the Henrys are perfect for this, especially Henry V’s chorus (oh how I smiled when no one in my seminar understood the initial function of a chorus or what it really was). Hotspur in Henry IV Part One is a perfect example of Shakespeare drawing from or at least referencing Classical Literature. His ideas of and utter devotion to honour are taken right out of Homer and Virgil. Having studied Classics I completely understood his desperate need to die for honour and protect his legacy and his name. This is now a hideously outdated idea that no one would care about now, or has for a very many years, but I found it fascinating and frankly quite exciting to see it in Shakespeare and to be able to discuss it in class. I was actually quite upset that Hotspur dies; in my mind he was a Renaissance Hector (almost – few can equal that great Trojan or Eric Bana’s beautifully tragic portrayal of him in that hideously inaccurate film), a soldier who would do anything to protect what was most important to him – and of course to live forever. Immortality does not mean never dying; it means living forever. Anyone who hasn’t studied Classics never seems to get this.

If only I could just write about the Henrys for three hours tomorrow morning…

 

Batgirl xx