Penelope Lively, “Moon Tiger”

Yes. Yes, I agree with all of you who have recommended Moon Tiger. Wonderful as Penelope Lively always is, this is probably her best book to date. (It won the Booker Prize in 1987.) I actually considered going right back to the beginning to read it all over again — Moon Tiger is one of those books that deals out information artfully. Not only does Lively keep the narrative tension going this way (i.e. exactly what IS going on between Claudia and her brother Gordon?) but also she often gives us scenes that alter the meaning of what has gone before. They’re like little explosions, altering the contours of what existed before, exposing what had previously been hidden.

British M3 Tank next to burned Panzer tank in No. Africa, June 1942. Courtesy Imperial War Museum

The novel begins with the elderly Claudia Hampton in a hospital bed, proclaiming that despite her advanced age and illness, she intends to write a history of the world. Pretty nervy — open your story with a character who’s trapped in a hospital bed? But Lively’s not a practitioner of the straightforward narrative, so before long we’re plunged into Claudia’s past, then her further past, then brought back to her present. We’re in her point of view, then in a third-person narrative, then in the point of view of another character. Sometimes even the dialogue overlaps between points of view, an approach that could be annoying but somehow isn’t. As for Claudia herself, she is unrepentantly uncongenial. Brilliant, stubborn, insensitive, beautiful, she has cut a swathe through mid-twentieth century highbrow England, first as a journalist based in Cairo during World War II, and later as a popular historian. She’s opinionated, impatient, and very, very interesting.

Claudia is drawn to conflict. Her longstanding relationship with Jasper, the father of her daughter Lisa, is often contentious. She’d just as soon have a loud argument as a peaceful discussion. Social convention and other people’s feelings bore her. Yet this is not one of those novels about characters whom the author despises or dislikes. Moon Tiger doesn’t even have the detachment of Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel. We readers are implicated in Claudia’s emotions and in the end, we are sympathetic. More, we share her thought process, which is fascinating. After all, Claudia is an historian, thinking about how narrative shapes history. The narrative of this novel is pleated and twisted like origami, to expose certain aspects of Claudia’s life to view, and to create a coherent outline. We are always aware of this process, never more so than when another voice is added at the end. But Lively is artful: she can draw attention to her materials and process while still immersing us in the illusion she creates.

A “Moon Tiger” is a form of insect repellent (to be found on eBay) — a green coil that you burn. There’s a Moon Tiger alight in one of the central scenes of the book. Atmosphere? Metaphor? Anybody want to tell me?

Jane Gardam, “Crusoe’s Daughter”

There are a lot of books on the market that are more or less interchangeable,  and I read ‘em and like ‘em. But then there’s Jane Gardam, whose work sounds so conventional. Crusoe’s Daughter, for instance, is about a woman named Polly Flint who grows up in an isolated house on the North Sea and ends up as a school teacher. But the novel — like Polly herself — is just slightly weird.

We are used to this odd quality in Gardam: her lovely diptych Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat presents shards of a pair of lives that intersect but also contain vast secret stretches. You never know, in her books, who or what will turn out to be important because the narrator doesn’t weight the information for you. This could be baffling, but instead it’s rather delightful because Gardam is just such a good writer.

Lady Ottoline Morrell by Adolf de Meyer ca. 1912, courtesy Metropolitan Museum

Her foreword to this book proclaims it as her favorite, despite the much greater success of later books. It’s based on the life of her mother, who grew up in North Yorkshire like Polly Flint. The world of women in the early twentieth century was limited even before you factor in the geographic separateness of her home. And what’s most striking about Crusoe’s Daughter is the way Gardam places the reader very deeply in Polly’s awareness of the world. Much of the time Polly is puzzled. As a six-year-old she is deposited with a pair of aunts in a vast yellow house and her father departs back to the sea, where he is a merchant marine captain. The aunts and their peculiar household absorb her seamlessly and she soon takes for granted her life there though it is true that her best friend is Robinson Crusoe.

This sounds twee, but it’s not. Polly Flint (as unsentimental as her name) is a bookish girl and Robinson Crusoe is her particular lifeline. Or perhaps her alternate life. The good news is that, although Polly is as evidently marooned as Crusoe, she shows little awareness of this fact and the similarities are left to the reader to tally up. Or not. (I didn’t, having left Defoe alone since college.) Maybe there are point by point likenesses between the book but Gardam is a subtle, tricky writer, so I would doubt it. Over and over she subverts your expectations so that the most comfortable way to read her is to have none. Here is Polly, defending the unfashionable Robinson Crusoe to an aristocratic literary patroness (possibly based on Lady Ottoline Morrell?):

I said, ‘It is wonderfully written. It is true to his chosen form. Because of this verisimilitude it reads like reality. I have read it twenty-three times. In a novel form is not always apparent at a first or second reading. Form is determined by hard secret work — in a notebook and in the sub-conscious and in the head.’

‘You speak of journalism.’

‘Yes. Why not? With glory added.’”

If Jane Gardam, speaking through her protagonist, wanted to think of her fiction as “journalism… with glory added,” I’m fine with that. But I would stress the glory.

John Galsworthy, “The Man of Property”

I spent almost as much time with The Man of Property as I did with Ken Follett’s Fall of Giants, which is three times as long, and the reading experience was strangely inverse in nature. Follett’s book spans over 20 years of Euro-American history, hitting the high spots and aiming to keep the pages turning. John Galsworthy isn’t at all interested in plot and The Man of Property moves very slowly over the course of a few months in 1886. It’s set in a narrow slice of society, the upper middle class of London. But the most important difference is that while Follett places his invented characters into historical episodes, Galsworthy focuses his microscope so closely on the members of the Forsyte family that they take on universality. I must say, this novel was very slow going, especially at first, as Galsworthy lumbers through the family relationships, gradually exposing the sources of dramatic tension. Yet in the end, it was hugely satisfying because the main characters really come to life. I won’t be reading the next Follett book in this trilogy, but I moved on right away to the next novel in what’s now known as “The Forsyte Saga.” (Yes, as in the TV series that introduced us to Damian Lewis.)

John Galsworthy, a Forsyte by upbringing but not by temperament.

Galsworthy’s drama arises stems from his characters’ collisions with the values and practices of their class. The Forsytes are a large clan — nine elderly siblings survive at the book’s opening. Most of them are rich, and intend to hang onto their money, while still spending enough to be “respectable.” But human nature erupts through the controlled, predictable behaviors expected of the Forsytes, most notably in Soames Forsyte’s marriage. Soames is that complex creation, an unsympathetic character who nevertheless excites the reader’s compassion. He is a lawyer, cautious and analytical, but rashly married the beautiful and poor Irene Heron — who doesn’t love him. Has never loved him, has never made any pretense of loving him. In an impetuous moment, Soames commissions a country house from his cousin June’s fiancé Philip Bosinney. Bosinney, aside from being handsome enough for the family to nickname him “The Buccaneer,” is somewhat Bohemian, more motivated by his artistic judgments than by money. Irene and Bosinney fall in love.

It doesn’t end well. It couldn’t, really. Galsworthy is setting up the Forsyte family to stand in for the bourgeoisie of the English empire, and he intends to demonstrate how their obsession with property interferes with human relations. He makes this very clear, using “Forsyte” as a general term for the upper middle class. His achievement is making these archetypes into believable, compelling characters whom we are willing to follow through a suspense-free narrative.

Galsworthy’s biography adds a few interesting details to the reading. First, that he had an affair with (and later married) his cousin’s wife and that her middle name was Nemesis. The relationship seems to have inspired the Soames/Irene/Bosinney triangle. Second, if I read the bio correctly, The Man of Property was initially a play, which explains its structure as a series of conversations or dialogues in different, largely domestic settings. And finally, Galsworthy won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932.

Edith Wharton, “Old New York”

When I was talking to Pat Ryan of the New York Times about this wonderful piece in that newspaper (commemorating Mrs. Wharton’s 150th birthday on January 24), I remembered Wharton’s marvelous series of novellas called Old New York, and realized I needed to read them again.

Morris-Jumel Mansion at 160th St. in Upper Manhattan: a country house to Old New Yorkers

My clearest memory was of the first, which involves the sensitive eldest son of a domineering businessman. Lewis Raycie is sent to Europe for a Grand Tour in the 1840s, entrusted with $5,000 to buy pictures for what his father wants to call the “Raycie Gallery.” Charged with purchasing work from the Italian Renaissance, Lewis (under the influence of John Ruskin) buys instead works by Giotto, Mantegna, Piero della Francesca. His homecoming is disastrous. This story is called “False Dawn,” and like the others, it involves some shifting of time-frames; by the end of the story, the paintings are worth five million dollars and have been sold to buy pearls and a Rolls-Royce. From the 1840s we go to the 1850s, to the longest tale which is called “The Old Maid.” (Yes, it’s the source of the 1939 movie with Bette Davis.) Let’s just say it involves several perennial Wharton themes, including the conflict between the security of a bourgeois life and the urge for adventure. This one’s very moving. Wharton never had children but she wrote over and over again about thwarted mothers and complex familial arrangements, always taking into account the tricky weave of emotions surrounding maternity. By contrast, “The Spark” is a simpler thing,  set in the 1890s but with the key action — which we as readers never see directly; interesting choice — occurring during the Civil War. It’s basically a portrait of a stolid society man, Hayley Delane, who fascinates the narrator because of some inexplicable core of generosity that seems to surprise Delane himself. Finally, set in the 1870s comes “New Year’s Day,” which starts with the marvelous line, “‘She was bad… always. They used to  meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel,’ said my mother.”  The “she” under discussion is Lizzie Hazeldean and as is usual with Wharton, she’s neither as bad as the mother thinks nor as good as the narrator believes at one point.

Of course New  York is a character in all of these stories. Wharton grew up an awkward, clever society girl in a tight-knit world that she returned to repeatedly in her writing. She managed to break away, but her most famous novels, like The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, keep circling around the question of how the individual fits into her community and what is gained or lost by that embrace. She often uses physical settings to underline action. Take the business with the Fifth Avenue Hotel in “New Year’s Day” — a hotel is full of transients, people who don’t belong. (The word “promiscuous” was sometimes used in those days to describe the social mix.) So when Lizzie Hazeldean of Old New York is seen exiting the hotel on New Year’s Day (a day traditionally spent with family), in the company of a man she isn’t married to, and the hotel is on fire — well, that hammers home Wharton’s point about potential social conflagrations when people don’t stay fixed in their circles.

Old New York was published by Appleton & Co. in 1924 and it must have been successful, for it was followed by three more “Old…” city books, all in the same attractive illustrated format. Unfortunately, none was as good as this. In 1931 Appleton published Old New Orleans by Frances Tinker, and in 1933, Old San Francisco by Ruth Comfort Mitchell. E.F. Benson contributed Old London in 1937 but it’s not as good as the “Lucia” novels. I’ve always wondered whether Wharton was commissioned to write Old New York by some clever editor with the extended series in mind, or whether the other collections followed Wharton’s success. This book is by far the best of them.

Elizabeth Bowen, “The Last September”

With books as with people, sometimes it’s hard to assess incompatibility: is it me, or is it him? I had respectful (if not exactly fond) memories of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September. I know her work is highly prized in literary circles and maybe in another mood I would have been more appreciative. But this time around I found myself impatient with Bowen’s quirks of style. Normally I’m perfectly happy with books in which nothing obvious happens, but I found myself tapping my foot at Bowen’s start/stop approach to narrative. In fact, my error may have been in expecting story telling in the first place.

Where the book is heading all along.

The novel was written in 1929. My grasp of Irish history is pretty vague but we’re in the midst of “the Troubles” and the action centers on a big Anglo-Irish house called Danielstown. The central character is the young Lois Farquar, niece of Danielstown’s owner. Lois is nineteen, just out of school, and seriously underemployed. One of the enduring impressions I took away from the book — and this is certainly intentional — is one of time passing very, very slowly. Light shifts; furniture settles; people change their minds about each other. Visitors arrive at the house, meals are consumed, letters written, flowers arranged, oh! the tedium! Lois is utterly at loose ends and the only intrigue is supplied by the English soldiers stationed nearby. One — handsome, opaque — is in love with Lois, or at least with the idea of Lois. There’s a great deal of dialogue that shows the two at cross-purposes. Meanwhile genuine drama, like military raids, all takes place off-stage, and the climactic action of the book is summed up in a dry little epilogue and we never find out what happens to our characters.

But “happening” is hardly Bowen’s concern. The Last September is barely serial, if I can put it that way. It’s more like a panoramic photograph stitched together to portray different angles of a place. Incidents like a dance in the British camp or a long walk into the mountains exist to illustrate the different angles of the fraying of British rule in southern Ireland. It’s almost like the painted backdrop to a Mollie Keane novel. Only I was in the mood for a little bit more action, so I found the novel beautiful but achingly  slow.

Carol Wallace, “Leaving Van Gogh”

No, I’m not actually going to review my own book! But I’ve made a page for it — see the tab above, far right. It doesn’t come out until April but we are starting to build an online profile for it. I’ve also made a Facebook fan page that will feature regular updates.

Joseph Roth, “The Radetzky March”

In a scene about three-quarters of the way through The Radetzky March , Joseph Roth shows us the old Emperor Franz Joseph reviewing troops in an eastern portion of the empire. The Emperor loves his troops, loves the noise, the pageantry, the horses, the polished brass — he regrets that on this day the men are all wearing “field gray uniforms,” an innovation that does not please him. Indeed, Roth has spent much of the novel until now lovingly describing the multi-colored gaiety created by the armed forces of the Austro-Hungarian empire. (Do listen to this: you actually know Strauss’s famous “Radetzky March” and having it in your head will make the novel all the more poignant.) He uses the showy external glory as a marker for social rank, as early as page 5. Young Joseph Trotta, having saved the life of the Emperor at the Battle of Solferino, has been elevated to the rank of Captain and the civil rank of Baron. As a new aristocrat he visits his father, a groundskeeper. The young man “stood… wearing a gleaming officer’s scarf, a lacquered helmet emanating virtually its own black sunshine, smooth fiery waxed riding boots with glittering spurs, two rows of lustrous, almost blazing buttons on his coat, and the blessing of the ethereal power of the Order of Maria Theresa.”

der Kaiser Franz Josef

Over and over in The Radetzky March, clothes make the man. But Roth makes the baubles work hard, too; they not only rank and place each character but they actually hold them together, carapace-like. And when, toward the end of the novel, the third-generation Baron von Trotta leaves the army, the shedding of the uniform becomes a ceremony of its own.

But I’ve gotten beyond myself. The first Trotta is the Hero of Solferino, a career military man. His son becomes an imperial administrator, the district captain of a town in Silesia. The third Trotta, Carl Joseph, a young man of very moderate gifts, follows his grandfather’s example and joins the cavalry. The relationships between the generations of men (wives & mothers conveniently dead: women are nothing but trouble in this book) are governed by formality and shyness. Roth moves smoothly from the point of view of one character to another, even-handedly exposing the aching tenderness, the yearning, the nascent affection. Even the Emperor functions paternally, with a perpetual beneficence toward the Trotta family.

Only, of course, it’s the early twentieth century. Roth seeds the tale with clues: telephones, labor unrest, ethnic and national impulses. Poor Carl Joseph, the main protagonist, loses first his mistress then his only friend to early deaths. He’s not going to outrun that shadow. (And Roth makes it, literally, a shadow: watch for the way he uses color throughout the book.) The set-piece in which the news of Sarajevo reaches Trotta is magnificently cinematic, with a thunderstorm, darkening skies, blasts of lightning prefiguring you-know-what.

“The Radetzky March is the great poem of elegy to Habsburg Austria,” said J. M. Coetzee in a wonderful New York Review of Books article back in 2002. I’m not going to argue.

Caroline Blackwood, “Great Granny Webster”

I’ve always been fascinated by the combination of glamor and emotional mess that seems to surround the Guinness clan of Ireland and England. Reckless marriages, feral parenting arrangements, and stunning looks seem to be pretty reliable family markers. All were features of the life of Lady Caroline Blackwood, who was married to painter Lucian Freud, composer Israel Citkovitz, and poet Robert Lowell. And none of this would matter if Blackwood weren’t a steely observer of her own family’s rather spectacular foibles.

Great Granny Webster, a slender 103 pages, was published in 1977 and short-listed for the Booker Prize. Honor Moore’s introduction to this New York Review Books edition says it lost out to Paul Scott’s Staying On because Philip Larkin thought it was too autobiographical. Moore also says that “Blackwood is Merchant Ivory from hell” and maybe it’s that furious darkness that makes this book so… bracing. So…piquant.  So …irresistible.

Clandeboye, where Blackwood grew up

The narrator is a young, observant girl, sent to recover from anemia at the home of her great-grandmother in 1947. (Father dead in Burma, mother otherwise occupied.) Even though she spends only two months in this gloomy luxurious seaside villa, her great-grandmother’s character is so remarkable and so poisonous that we can see its mark on all of the subsequent generations. Great Granny Webster does not yield; not to emotion, not to gravity, or kindness, or fear. She has all the humanity, as Blackwood observes, of a piece of teak.

Then there’s Aunt Lavinia, only sister of  the narrator’s dead father. This one’s a charmer; gorgeous, luxury-loving, always the life of the party. The first sign of trouble comes when she telephones her niece, laughing. She is being detained in a hospital after having failed to commit suicide. “‘I had it all perfectly planned, darling. It couldn’t have been more Roman…I was in my bath with my bottle of whisky for courage, and my gleaming razor. It all went like a dream. It didn’t even hurt.” But “‘There’s something unexpectedly ghastly about finding oneself in a bath full of gore and melting soap.’” A subsequent chilling visit to Aunt Lavinia gradually reveals the mental imbalance. “She took one of her poodle’s charcoal biscuits out of the packet and ate it herself. ‘Either these are quite delicious or quite disgusting. Like so many things in life, it’s hard to tell which,’ she said.”

There’s no mystery at all about the intervening generation, Aunt Lavinia’s mother and Great Granny Webster’s daughter.  This woman lives in a mouldering Anglo-Irish ruin and fancies herself a fairy — the kind with wings. Blackwood’s meticulous description of the ludicrous discomfort and indignity of this menage is the richest thing in the book. The damp wallpaper peeling off the walls in lush coils, the dried-out pheasants served at lunch and dinner every day of the week, the pieces of string cunningly attached to oozing ceilings to guide leaks into the ready jam jars littering the floors… It could only be true.

Blackwood gets revenge, of a sort, in the final scene involving the burial of the great grandmother. Which just goes to show that those of us with pencils or keyboards must always be placated, don’t you think?

Another entry in the NYRB Reading Week co-hosted by Mrs. B of The Literary Stew and Honey of Coffeespoons.

Colm Toibin, “Brooklyn”

I’m not entirely sure I know why Colm Toibín’s Brooklyn is not simply a shorter, quieter Maeve Binchy novel. Which would have been fine — I love Maeve Binchy. And at a glance, you can see my confusion: Eilis Lacey, a young woman in Enniscorthy, Ireland, is maneuvered by her family into emigrating to Brooklyn where there will be more opportunities for her than there are at home. Pushing her out of the nest is her beautiful, accomplished elder sister Rose, whose earnings have largely supported the widowed Mrs. Lacey and Eilis herself.

Brooklyn Bridge -- what else?

What’s different from Binchy, though, is what Toibín achieves through sheer authorial control. It’s a kind of sleight of hand: I would have to read the book again to see if I could catch him at it. Because what he manages to capture is nothing less than the expansions of Eilis’s consciousness and ultimately, the rewards and the costs involved.

The structure is pretty simple. The first section of the book takes place in Enniscorthy, the reader’s sense of the town radiating outward from the Lacey house on Friary Street. This is the part that’s familiar from Binchy: the sense of the dense web of small-town relations. But rather than stepping back a bit to direct the reader’s attention to this, Toibín writes strictly from Eilis’ point of view, and she barely notices. This is the water she swims in: how could she have words for it?

Not until Toibín narrates her ocean crossing do we grasp how limited her experience is: she is seasick without being able to identify what is happening to her, for instance. She arrives in Brooklyn to find a place ready made for her, with a job and a room in an Irish boarding house, but merely being there exhausts her: “For each day, she thought, she needed a whole other day to contemplate what had happened and store it away, get it out of her system so that it did not keep her awake at night or fill her dreams with flashes of what had actually happened and other flashes…  full of rushes of colour or crowds of people, everything frenzied and fast.”

One of the interesting choices is that Toibín doesn’t specify the time period  right away. You sort of home in on it: there are cars, women wear stockings, they talk about “the war.” It’s very different from the usual scene-setting of an historical novel. Nothing is mentioned unless it stands out to Eilis. She builds a life in Brooklyn, a more spacious, self-determined existence. She is barely aware that she’s doing so. Only when she returns to Ireland does the change become apparent.

So where, I kept asking  myself, is the conflict? Where is the lure that keeps the reader turning the page? The tone is scrupulously measured, almost flat, almost clumsy. Toibín passes no judgment on anyone’s character or behavior and has no interest in charming the reader. Yet I found myself describing the book as “lovely,” perhaps because of the author’s generosity and earnestness and sympathy as Eilis tries to work out the definition of the word “home.”

David Mitchell, “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet”

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet has gotten a lot of praise, but it was the fact that I could read a sample chapter on my Kindle that made me buy it. Whatever else David Mitchell’s qualities as a writer may be, he creates lively, readable prose that sucked me right into his story. And while I wondered at first whether I wasn’t just reading a premium version of Shogun, I realized the difference pretty quickly: I never finished Shogun. But The Thousand Autumns…, though a hefty 500 pages, zipped past.

The place is the island of Dejima, a man-made island next to Nagasaki. It is 1799 and the Dutch operate a limited trading post on Dejima, the only European trading facility with cloistered Japan. We are introduced first to Aibagawa Orito, a midwife, then to the young Dutchman Jacob De Zoet, as he arrives in Dejima on shipboard. One of the undeniable attractions of historical fiction is exposure to worlds we would not attain on our own, and this is where the resemblance to James Clavell resides. But ethnography and plotting are incidental in this case to Mitchell’s larger points which cluster around issues of perception and understanding between cultures. Much is made of the translation process and one of the most appealing characters in the book is an interpreter. As De Zoet matures he begins to grasp both the difficulties and the opportunities that occur so richly in the floating border town of Dejima.

Culture clash, Nagasaki 1800

All of which sounds quite dry, but Mitchell’s gift is to bring his characters to life. And while the book begins in a fairly straightforward style, the narrative mechanics expand in the second half. Time and again, the novel’s action is held up as a character tells a story which might be a myth, a lie, a memory, a fable. Normally this drives me crazy but I was putty in Mitchell’s hands. The midwife Orito, about halfway through the book, ruminates about the human need for stories: “It is stories, she believes, that make life in the House of Sisters tolerable… Orito pictures the human mind as a loom that weaves disparate threads of belief, memory, and narrative into an entity whose common name is Self, and which sometimes calls itself Perception.”

Finally, the writing is vivid enough to provide arresting imagery throughout. “Shuzai knees at the water’s edge and drinks water from his cupped hands. A feathery fish hovers in the current; a bright berry floats by.” It’s a spare composition like a Japanese print – on the page. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet isn’t spare. It’s rich in poetry and character, but reading it is like a remarkably satisfying dream.