Week Fifty Two - Jeanette

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1980)

Recommended by Stuart

            Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house.

I spent Christmas in Oxford, with Kathryn and her family. We played Yahtzee, we drank Lidl’s knock-off (and far nicer) version of Southern Comfort, we watched The Manchurian Candidate. Spending the festive season there was indeed like sitting at night in a lighted house. Lighted with the mini-bulbs on the tree, and a family’s love.

It’s still Christmas (ish). If I can’t be sentimental now, then when?

I also read Housekeeping. I purposefully kept this as the penultimate Two Readers book because I suspected it would be one of my very very favourites. And so it proved.

Anyone that leans to look into a pool is the woman in the pool, anyone who looks into our eyes is the image in our eyes, and these things are true without argument, and so our thoughts reflect what passes before them.

Thank you, Stuart Evers. Here he is cooking an egg. (He hates eggs).

Why is he cooking an egg on Battle Of The Pans for charity? Because he’s only an acclaimed novelist with two fabulous books to the good, Ten Stories About Smoking and If This Is Home.

I’ve known Stuart for ages now, way before either of us had a published book. (Always satisfying to say you knew them before they were famous, darling). We met during the post-university social whirl. He was friends with my friends, and a proper looker. I couldn’t fail to notice someone with his kind of louche grace! The first time I spoke to him properly I was about 22, and we were at (the now sadly closed) Rowan’s Bowling Alley in Finsbury Park. Neither of us could bowl but both of us could drink. The former was quickly abandoned for the latter, and we’ve been friends ever since.

He recommended both Jude and I fifty-two books to read. What a guy. Jude chose Georges Perec's Things; I decided to leave my book to the hand of fate. In our modern world, that hand equates to a random number generator on the internet. Although I promised the generator I would read Jack by AM Homes, I immediately broke that promise, because I saw Housekeeping at four. I knew that was the one.

(By the way, I’m keeping Stuart’s list of other novels for future reference. This year has taught me that I need to be far less sniffy about contemporary fiction. Stuart writes an excellent blog, and here is his list of this year’s best books. I shall be delving into that, too.)

Why did mine eye alight on Housekeeping? Partly because I knew it to be an important modern novel, but mainly because I was fascinated by Marilynne Robinson’s approach to fiction. Housekeeping, her first novel, was massively lauded at publication in 1980 and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Gilead, her second novel, was massively lauded at publication in 2004 and won the Pulitzer Prize. Twenty-four years and two masterpieces at either end. I have the hugest amount of respect for people with very high inner critics who will not dish up anything unless they are sure it’s astonishing.

Housekeeping’s power is stealthy. You get to know characters as you would in real life: they don’t dump out the contents of their individual personal history handbag on the table the first time of meeting. They’re guarded, waiting until they can trust you, sure that you understand them. And, because you’ve worked to get to know them, their tragedies become yours.

Ruth and Lucille, sisters and orphans, are well acquainted with loss. Their mother, Helen, committed suicide; their grandfather perished in a locomotive accident; their grandmother, after caring for them for five years, ‘one winter morning eschewed awakening’. They are then passed on to Lily and Nona, another pair of sisters. Uncomfortable with children, they struggle to relate to the introverted Ruth and Lucille.

‘That Lottie Donahue could help. Her children are alright.’

‘I met the son once.’

‘Yes, so you said.’

‘He had an odd look. Always blinking. His nails were chewed down past the quick.’

‘Oh, I remember. He was awaiting trial for something.’

‘I don’t remember just what.’

‘His mother never said.’

Someone filled the teapot.

Lily and Nona aren’t bad people, they just don’t really want the responsibility of bringing up two troubled little girls while in their twilight years. They connive to palm them off to Sylvie, Helen’s sister. Sylvie is a transient, who sleeps with her shoes under her pillow: an enigmatic woman who few people understand (or wish to). However, living with Ruth and Lucille brings her a sense of home, and the girls, at least initially, find solace with her unusual ways.

Not an especial amount happens in Housekeeping until the final fifty or so pages, when separation trauma becomes the primary theme. First comes a deeply upsetting schism between Ruth and Lucille, the latter growing embarrassed by Sylvie’s unusual behaviour – so much that she is prepared to forego her sister and Sylvie's defender. Very realistically, Robinson pulls out the hardness and the pity of how two formerly inseparable people grow apart.

‘It wasn’t the flowers, Ruthie.’

That sounded rehearsed. I waited, knowing that she would go on.

‘It was much more than that. We’ve spent too much time together. We need other friends.’

It isn’t only Lucille who views Sylvie as an unsuitable mother figure. The reader has been used to seeing Sylvie’s housekeeping from Ruthie’s perspective; all of a sudden we see it from a conventional viewpoint. The final act of Housekeeping is a quietly harrowing exploration of how alternative relationships and living situations are seen from the outside. Just as with Robinson’s characterisation of Lily and Nona, there’s no judgement against the people who are not comfortable with Sylvie and Ruth’s lifestyle. Although I felt Ruthie clinging on to Sylvie very strongly, also (and perhaps because I’ve worked in social care research) I understood also how they could not be left as they are. Neighbours don’t only stick their noses in because they don’t approve. There is a genuine, and laudable, desire to protect children from harm. Neglect is the hardest form of abuse to detect and to stop, and the consequences of not listening to that voice that says ‘that family down the street are worrying me’ could result in another Victoria Climbie or Baby P.

The book seems to be called Housekeeping because it looks at how we keep our homes in order: the domestic chores and the emotional well-being. Two Readers has been a sort of housekeeping, too. Reading and blogging on a book a week offers up its routine, while the critical reflection and heartbursts of love for my friends has been its emotional ballast.

Housekeeping this blog, and getting them all in before the end of the year, was something I thought I could do. I really did. But today my laptop power pack has broken: I've written my final post, Jude's recommendation of course, and I'm hoping the remainder of the battery will hold while I put it up.

2013, you bloody drama queen to the end.

Week Fifty-One - Jeanette

Written On The Body by Jeanette Winterson (1992)

Recommended by Anita

My body is written on.

I have three tattoos. Each is a carefully chosen design, patterns I knew I wanted indelibly inked upon me. The nuances shift, but their core meaning doesn’t: they represent transitions. I got each one during the final element of a pupa stage. They are memento moris of my past lives.

(We tattooed people do witter on about how deep ‘n’ meaningful the things are. Boring bores, the lot of us.)

But, lately, I’ve been wondering if there’s another, less highfalutin' reason for my tattoos. I think it’s also an expression of my background, a branch from the same root as liking amusement arcades and gaud at Christmas. Loads of people I grew up with have them. If you don’t tattoo the name of your child on your arm, well, what kind of mother are you? Don’t you love your kid?

I feel kinship with Jeanette Winterson. She has my name! There are precious few of us Little Jeans around. But, too, she was a working-class girl who found herself running with a different crowd when she went to university. For me, the process had already started before I left Norwich (a schoolfriend accused me of being a class traitor), but it certainly solidified after the age of eighteen. I never thought of it as a conscious denial of my background, although I’m sure others saw it that way. As I wrote in Week Sixteen, there are only two people from my pre-uni days involved in Two Readers.

It's a minor part of the book, but Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit captures this chequered experience well: the excitement and feeling of belonging with your new life, coupled with the sense of loss for the old. 

In her autobiography, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Winterson revisits the material she drew on for Oranges. Her conflicted feelings about her upbringing (and apart from the class aspect, her family circumstances are very different to mine) continue to be source material for her. Having read those two works, I approached Written On The Body with veiled autobiography in mind.

It was an interesting book to tackle directly after The Pursuit Of Love.

I had said them many times before, dropping them like coins into a wishing well, hoping they would make me come true. I had said them many times before but not to you. I had given them as forget-me-nots to girls who should have known better. I had used them as bullets and barter. I don’t like to think of myself as an insincere person but if I say I love you and I don’t mean it then what else am I?

The gender of Written On The Body’s narrator is never revealed, yet (perhaps because of my association of Winterson with memoir) I found myself thinking of that narrator as ‘her’ throughout. I assumed one of the country’s top lesbians must be mining her own relationships with women. But of course it could be a man, or a transgendered person. (There is no Smack My Bitch Up ‘surprise’ twist ending). I also suspect Winterson was drawing attention to the difficulty of expression without gender pronouns, critiquing how binary and constricting those categories are.

We begin by reading of the narrator’s back love catalogue. The prose is graceful, charged and often erotic, although it does sometimes spill into floridness.

I watched her break and butter each piece, soak it slowly in her bowl, let it float, grow heavy and fat, sink under the deep red weight and then be resurrected to the glorious pleasure of her teeth.

I do like it when Winterson gets a bit bawdier, too.

           June. The wettest June on record. We made love every day.

Most of the narrator’s women are flowing-locked anarcho goddesses (‘I had a girlfriend once who was addicted to starlit nights.’ Not addicted to Tetris, then?), but perhaps this is intended to show how the narrator idealises love objects rather than as a parade of unrealistic females. The Helenest of these Helens Of Troy is Louise: the pair embark upon an erotic and emotional odyssey until we discover that Louise’s body is more than honey-filled breasts and love-saturated heart. It has been invaded by leukaemia.

We are beholden to our bodies and, suicide aside, it is the body that has the ultimate control: the power of life and death. (That’s another reason why I decided to get tattooed. The body does enough stuff that you don’t want it to do, might as well get it to do something you do). The narrator now has to come to terms with this, and the book’s interlude, the extended prose poem ‘The Cells, Tissues, Systems And Cavities Of The Body’, explores Louise’s physicality as something more than sexual. It is an expression of the narrator’s love, framed by the new awareness of the cancer spraying graffiti on the inside and outside of Louise’s body.

Will you let me crawl inside you, stand guard over you, trap them as they come at you? Why can’t I dam their blind tide that filthies your blood? Why are there no lock gates on your portal vein?

Like Dennis Quaid in Innerspace, the narrator roams around: you can hear fingertips running on the corrugated roof of Louise’s mouth. But, when the narrator returns to the corporeal world, the hard fact of Louise’s illness is still there. What is more important, the health of the body or that of the heart?

One of us hadn’t finished, why did the other one go? And why without warning?

This novel didn’t, for me, have the personal clout of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit: the story seems deliberately not as strong, almost as if Winterson thinks that an abstract narrative is a more valid approach to literature. But I really enjoyed getting lost within Louise’s capilliaries, climbing her spine stepladder, being swaddled by her intestines. 

And while we’re thinking of bodies, what body do you picture when you hear ‘mermaid’? Ariel in The Little Mermaid? Daryl Hannah in Splash? Cher in fancy dress? Jerry Hall on the cover of Siren? Chances are it isn’t this…

 

Cryptozoology is a word I had never encountered before I met Anita. It refers to the study of fake or unproven creatures like the Loch Ness Monster, the Yeti, and Norfolk’s own Black Shuck. (Look at this fascinating list of cryptids – a Man-Eating Tree!). And then there’s The Buxton Mermaid, that beauty above.

Anita restored her. She is also her ambassador, telling her story to the press and to museums. Her care of The Buxton Mermaid goes beyond a job, and that is typical Anita. She will give her time and her support to those (and crypto-those) who she loves. She’s certainly done it for me. When I was in the midst of a crisis, Anita not only propped me up with words and hugs, she came to my place and did my washing-up. When everything is surreal because sadness is so huge, to have someone who can gently re-orientate your world, so you’re in no doubt it’s still worth living in because you have friends like her… it is a key to recovery.

I love conversing with Anita about books. (She's Tim's sister, equally as erudite as he) and as the year, and this project, has written itself on my body, I've realised I have my Two Readers friends to thank for more than just their book recommendation. It’s talking about the posts, sharing thoughts on the books in person, and to hear other interpretations of the stories and ideas that has been so incredibly inspiring, and the motivating factor in getting me to book fifty-one out of fifty-three.

Hold on to your hats. There are two amazing works coming down the Two Readers bridleway before midnight on the 31^st of December, 2013.

Week Fifty - Jeanette

 The Pursuit Of Love by Nancy Mitford (1945)

Recommended by Katherine

When I moved into my present flat (helped by Katherine, as well as Sharron, Nik, Tim, Kathryn, Rupert and the still-to-come Anita) I didn’t have much furniture. What I need, I said to Katherine, is not really a bed or a table. It’s a lovely vintage writing bureau.

‘I’ve got one of those in my garage,’ she said. ‘You can have it if you want.’

Since that beauty took up residence in the corner of my lounge, I cannot imagine life without it. Not having separate sections for creamy high gsm envelopes and the pound-shop jobbies for sending off the council tax? Pure savagery. (That sounds sarcastic if you don’t know me, but if you do, you’ll know how absolutely in earnest I am.) But, more importantly than even the correct ordering of stationery, I cannot imagine life without Katherine as my friend.

Last time I saw her, for a Christmas drink, our natter flitted between the effect of topography upon memory and the pantos we have known and ‘loved’; literary stylings and how Jem and the Holograms dolls were overpriced compared to Sindys. (Plus her husband comes from Norfolk. She’s as wry about the place as I am.)

Katherine is only a bloody qualified librarian, too! That’s the Red Rum (winning horse not backwards prophecy) of literary suggestion, right there. That’s why I wasn’t worried when I picked up The Pursuit Of Love and it had a hot-pink, Sophie Kinsella reader-friendly cover and praise from the Daily Mail on the back. I also wasn’t worried because I knew that Nancy Mitford was big mates with one of my revelations of the year: the prickly prince EvelynWaugh. And I certainly wasn’t worried when I started reading her cut-glass prose.

Over the chimney-piece plainly visible in the photograph hangs an entrenching tool, with which, in 1915, Uncle Matthew had whacked to death eight Germans one by one as they crawled out of a dug-out. It is still covered with blood and hairs, an object of fascination to us children.

The children include our narrator, Fanny, and her cousin (the book’s protagonist) Linda. A dramatic youngster, Linda attempted suicide by yew-berry at the age of ten (because of a dead dog). They both love Oscar Wilde and long for adulthood, because they presume it will be all social whirls and Grand Love.

While Fanny quickly gives up on the latter and settles for the up-down-four-square Alfred, Linda keeps her idealism and it, naturally, leads her to missteps. Seventy years ago, people generally married these missteps. First up for Linda is the Conservative MP, Tony Kroesig, son of the Governor of the Bank of England. I found the characterisation of the Kroesig family brilliant but extremely depressing, because it is exactly analogous to the Tory attitude of today.

The only mental qualities that they respected were those which produced money in substantial qualities, it was their one criterion of success, it was power and it was glory. To say that a man was poor was to label him as a rotter, bad at his job, idle, feckless, immoral.

It doesn’t work out with Tony.

Next, Linda throws herself into marriage with a Communist, Christian. His bad points are of a different hue.

‘I’m always saying to Christian how much I wish his buddies would either brighten up their parties a bit or else stop giving them, because I don’t see the point of sad parties, do you? And left-wing people are always sad because they mind dreadfully about their causes, and the causes are always going so badly.’

It doesn’t work out with Christian.

Linda’s refusal to settle leads to Paris and to a man named Fabrice (‘she was filled with a strange, wild, unfamiliar happiness, and knew that this was love’); but, for some of her social circle, her swelling heart doesn’t matter. She should have stuck with Tony or, at a push, Christian. She’s judged as superficial, reckless and selfish, quick to bugger off at the first sign of trouble to look for a pipe dream. Yet, the reader is led to a far kinder conclusion. Linda is pursuing love, and second best is never enough: you’ll do much better, baby, on your own.

Since we’re quoting Madonna, I re-watched Who’s That Girl lately, and it popped into my head while reading The Pursuit Of Love.

Now, I’m making no claims for its cinematic qualities (it’s quite crap). I bring it up as a point of comparison that’s easy to forget when you largely live in a literary fiction and arty movie bubble. At the end of Who's That Girl, Griffin Dunne jilts his dullard fiancée for the unconventional Madge, which is a textbook example of a standard and extremely common dramatic device. From the breezy chimes of Busted’s ‘Crashed The Wedding’ to the more textured The Graduate, those who pursue love (especially by taking drastic action) are treated in one way and one way only. They are rewarded. In real life, they’re generally not. For a start, we usually take the hint that we’re not wanted when our darling gets married to someone else. In popular fiction, the heroes and heroines are so thick-skinned that they see the nuptials simply as another hurdle to leap, and no-one will be upset, or angry that the thousands spunked on a wedding is wasted.

What I really liked about The Pursuit Of Love was that, even while it uses some of the expected structure of romantic comedy, there’s a strong discomfort about happy-ever-after. For when Linda does find love with Fabrice, she is put off by his apparent commitment to someone else (a dead woman: how can anyone compete with that?). It is not at all clear that when Linda finally has her strange, wild, unfamiliar happiness that it will result in anything like a conventional relationship, or even a relationship at all. In this way, it is very similar to the other major work I’ve read on l’amour this year, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love In The Time Of Cholera. Unlike ...Cholera, though, The Pursuit Of Love’s épée to cut through love’s cliché is not philosophical intensity but sharp wit and brutal social observation. It has a light comedic touch and firm location in a contemporary setting.

I think I said all I wanted to say about love in relation to the Marquez work. When I wrote that – my favourite post of the year – I was in the eye of a perfect storm, and that book was my lightning rod. Now it’s Christmas Eve, I have three books left of Two Readers, and a real storm is raging outside, pulling trees from their roots and causing brick walls to tumble down.

            ‘He was the great love of her life, you know.’

            ‘Oh, dulling,’ said my mother, sadly. ‘One always thinks that. Every, every time.’

Week Forty-Eight - Jeanette

Between The Acts by Virginia Woolf (1941)

Recommended by Tim

Tim came round for dinner on Saturday. As the last time we’d see each other before 2013 shut its eyes, our shared mood was reflective. I was taking stock of Two Readers, and talking of my impression of Between The Acts.

I thought Between The Acts would be one of the more challenging recommendations. I had read To The Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway, and retained no great affection for either. I did admire Virginia Woolf’s stylistic ambition, but the books themselves were fairly unloveable: similar to my thoughts on Joan Didion, you can appreciate writing for the achievement it is without ever wishing to read the fucker again.

In our Saturday conflab, Tim described Woolf’s non-page turner Mrs Dalloway succinctly as ‘all people preparing for dinner parties.’ Still, and certainly as one of my best-read friends, Tim felt he needed to persist with Virginia Woolf. He felt uncomfortable with dismissing an important novelist as only concerned with the bourgeouisie arranging flowers. And it was, with Between The Acts – Woolf’s final novel before her suicide – where he found satisfaction. This was the first reason for his recommendation.

In a note that precedes the text, Leonard Woolf (her husband) writes that Between The Acts was a complete novel, but Woolf had not ‘finally revised [it] for the printer’ before her death. I wonder if this was a reason why Tim, and I, reacted better to this novel. Perhaps, because there wasn’t that last opportunity to ruthlessly weed out what she considered sentimental, Between The Acts is a warmer book. It wasn’t half as much of a slog as I feared.

At that, the audience stirred. Some rose briskly; others stooped, retrieving walking-sticks, hats, bags. And then, as they raised themselves and turned about, the music modulated. The music chanted: Dispersed are we. It moaned: Dispersed are we. It lamented: Dispersed are we, as they streamed, spotting the grass with colour, across the lawns, and down the paths: Dispersed are we.

Concerning a play (actually, calling it a ‘play’ dignifies it: it’s more of an am-dram dickabout), Between The Acts’ most obvious theme is performance, and especially the relationship between an audience and the action in front of it.

‘Reality too strong’, she muttered. ‘Curse ‘em!’ She felt everything they felt. Audiences were the devil. O to write a play without an audience – the play.

Tim knows acting fascinates me (and that’s the second reason he recommended this book). This isn’t because I want to act myself, but rather because I’m intrigued by how acting translates into everyday life. If you can convince people that you feel emotions as part of a constructed performance, what’s to stop you using those skills in real life? Manufacturing deceit, onstage and off, is a longstanding interest of mine.

              We all act. Yes, but whose play?

The play in Between The Acts is written and directed by failed actor and ‘lady of wonderful energy’ Miss La Trobe. It is an annual event, almost a ritual, and the community comes together to watch and participate in the pageant. Rather than create a coherent work of fiction, La Trobe’s work is an anthology, stopping at different eras of British history. She creates not individual characters, but the nebulous and shifting character of national identity. Thus, it is less like (e.g.) a well-crafted Ibsen psychological drama and more like a Mummers’ play.

What Mummers’ plays and Miss La Trobe’s pageant (and, perhaps, Woolf’s novels) have in common is that they’re not that interested in dramatic tension. Each looks at archetypes (folk and mythological characters, representations from British historical periods, the contemporary mannered upper-middle classes) and reproduces them. The audience has a prior knowledge of what to expect. The drama instead comes from random factors: will it rain, who’s gossiping about whom in the audience, will the cows’ lowing drown out the dialogue. What happens, indeed, between the acts.

Miss La Trobe’s play is performed a mere few weeks before the outbreak of World War II. Woolf obviously knew that, soon, all existing community rituals would be shattered, replaced by the new ones of blackouts and air-raids. But, still, in 1941 the full horror of Nazism was yet to come: the Final Solution had not been implemented, with the first industrial extermination taking place at Auschwitz in September 1941, six months after Woolf's death. She could not know how fully even humanity itself would be torn apart. Still, it is said that the horror of the war (and her house being bombed in the Blitz) contributed to the re-emergence of her depression and her decision to drown herself.

Although it’s tempting with a carefully constructed book like this to get all lit-crit on yo' ass and disappear in a cloud of signifiers and discourse (read the introduction for an ample example of that), it seems equally possible to enjoy it as a storytelling snapshot. I found Between The Acts often surprisingly direct in its imagery.

There, couched in the grass, curled in an olive-green ring, was a snake. Dead? No, choked with a toad in its mouth. The snake was unable to swallow; the toad was unable to die. A spasm made the ribs contract; blood oozed. It was birth the wrong way round.

Even if that’s a metaphor for the futility of war or a comment on the impasse between the genders, it doesn’t have to be. It’s a striking passage that perfectly captures the mood at that point in the book. Between The Acts has several such images, which don’t necessarily have to be pored over, because in and of themselves they are evocative of that very moment. This includes impish as well as violent moments. This book is probably the closest Woolf ever got to serving up the LOLs.

However, it would be wrong to say this was an easy read. Woolf was a modernist writer, and Between The Acts is a modernist work. Despite being one of her gentler artistic experiments, it does require concentration and is not simple to grasp. A pioneering approach of hers was to try to replicate the mayfly that is the mind, often dislocating thought from speech and physical action.

Why’s stale bread, she mused, easier to cut than fresh? And so skipped, sidelong, from yeast to alcohol; so to fermentation; so to inebriation, so to Bacchus; and lay under purple lamps in a vineyard in Italy, as she had done, often; while Sands heard the clock tick; saw the cat; noted a fly buzz; and registered, as her lips showed, a grudge she mustn’t speak.

The third reason that Tim recommended this book, I think, is because much of it deals with the inner world. Woolf’s prose claims that outer action and spoken words are opaque signs as to what’s really going on in our psyche; sometimes this is meant to mislead (as in acting), but often it’s an automatic and quite prosaic process. We don’t unpick every step of our thoughts that flit from stale bread to Italy, yet we’re there, while our conversational partner has gone from clock-watching to brooding on a miserable grudge.

I would argue that it is when you’re really close to someone that you let them in to the way your mind works rather than just revealing the contents of it. With Tim, I have had some of the longest and deepest conversations I have had with anyone. Yet, more than that, I think we have an understanding of each other’s inner narrative construction, and we can spend a good while disentangling our cerebral journeys with each other.

Let's go back to Saturday night (we’d emptied the mulled wine by this point). Tim was talking of the difficulty in finding an appropriate radio station to wake up to. I knew he wouldn’t go for Radio One, and he’d already expressed frustration with Radio Four for his early morning hello. ‘What about Classic FM?’, I asked. ‘It’s alright if you want to buy a Saab,’ he said.

‘What about Radio Three?’ Well, he explained, the classical selection they play is far too random. Sometimes it hits the wake up just right with a Debussy. But sometimes, he said, it was full on military music at 6am: ‘and I wake up and think there’s been a coup.’

We debated for at least another ten minutes. He eventually detailed a convulted plan where the field recording of a chaffinch plays for ten minutes before the radio switches on.

Phoney coups.

Chaffinches.

Sharing thought processes.

You can see why I love this man so much.

Week Forty-Six - Jeanette

The Chrysalids by John Wyndham (1955)

Recommended by Sharron

The Cuckoo Sister, The Secret Garden, Moondial, The Children Of Green Knowe, the decidedly patchy Dramarama… I loved the one-off and short-run children’s TV dramas of the 1980s. Even the ‘school programmes’, the ones ruined by puppets teaching you what a consonant was (How We Used To Live, Dark Towers, The Boy From Space) – all amazing.

Many of these shows had a spooky sci-fi element to them, so it’s no surprise that John Wyndham had a foothold in this market. While The Day Of The Triffids was a big(gish) budget thing on the BBC at 9pm that I wasn’t allowed to watch (‘Muuuuuuum… how scary can it be?’ ‘You won’t like it. You’re scared of the Smash advert aliens’), Chocky, and its sequels, Chocky’s Children and Chocky’s Challenge, were on at squash-and-Club-biscuit time. I watched all three.

It’s surprising that The Chrysalids never got made into a kids’ TV drama, too. It has all the golden elements of that era – psychic power, a future dystopia, social comment about tolerance – and a very believable boy hero. I can picture the title sequence; a neon green BBC Micro font over a Lidl Delia Derbyshire soundtrack.

The Chrysalids is set generations after the world has suffered Tribulation (a Nausicaä-style environmental crisis). Much of the earth is now uninhabitable; the Badlands are barren, while the Fringes are full of semi-feral beings. In the supposedly civilised areas, society is strongly theocratic. People believe (or at least are told) that the Tribulation was dealt directly by God.

This God is a vengeful God, and nothing apparently riles Him more than irregular flora and fauna. Genetic deviations occur far more frequently now than they did before Tribulation, and this brave new world is anti-evolutionary and eugenic. If any animal, plant, or person, is deemed physically nonstandard then it is immediately culled. The reasons for this are never explicitly stated, but it seems partly as a method of societal control, partly out of a pragmatic but misplaced concern that allowing different takes on humanity will weaken it, and partly out of a genuine religious impulse.

There is a Definition of Man that every citizen is expected to know off-by-heart.

‘…and each leg shall be jointed twice and have one foot, and each foot five toes, and each toe shall end with a flat nail…’

I was reminded of H.G. Wells’s The Island Of Dr. Moreau. In that, sad vivisected animals have it drummed into them that they are human. In The Chrysalids, recognisable humans have it drummed into them that, because of something as minor as a hairless head, they are not. In both of these books, humanity is fluid. It is in itself a man-made concept, defined according to the requirements of society. What we may think of as fundamentally natural – our very status as people – can be successfully cast aside by ideological regimes.

As with real-life fascism, the most powerful tools of government are not its soldiers. It’s the everyday zealots and the quiet majority. Joseph Strorm, father to the book’s sensitive boy narrator Davie, is all Piper-Laurie-in-Carrie: a God squadder who skirts over the be-kind-to-the-unfortunates aspect of religion and uses his faith to dominate his family. In one memorable scene, Davie is struggling with a task, and shouts in frustration.

                             ‘I could have managed it all right by myself if I’d had another hand.’

My voice must have carried, for silence fell on the whole room like a clap.

[…]

I was aware that the rest had stopped gaping at me, and were now looking apprehensively at my father. His expression was grim.

‘You – my own son – were calling upon the Devil to give you another hand!’

Joseph Strorm soon has bigger problems on his (two) hands. Genetic mutations are not only physical, it seems. Davie and his baby sister Petra have extraordinary mind powers.

                              ‘You hear the words inside your head?’ he asked.

‘Well, not exactly “hear”, and not exactly “see”,’ I told him. ‘There are – well, sort of shapes.’

Those with this mental variation are able to communicate with each other, undetected by others. The second half of The Chrysalids concentrates on the relationships within this group of psychics, and of the increasing danger of discovery.

I liked the second half less than the first. I wonder why.

It’s nearly as well-written, however there do seem to be a few more portentous speeches, and some tiresome dashing around the Fringes, which didn’t hold my interest. But I think it’s more to do with the way the telepathy itself is brought out.

I’ve discussed the unexplained a little with Sharron, who goodness me is only Sharron Kraus, one of the country’s finest and most consistently evolving folk artists.

When I first met her, it was in an Oxford graveyard. I interviewed her there for Seasons They Change. As we discussed the influence of cinema and literature on her music, she talked about magic in everyday life. This wasn’t in a Harry Potter­-esque childish fantasy way, or couched in spaced-out hippy lingo, both of which are easy to dismiss. Rather, she has both an academic philosophy background, and a reflective nature which is happy with ambiguity. She is interested in the way that the dark mysteries of thought processes, of the natural world, of emotional connections, manifest themselves. Some things, she said to me, they just may make the most sense as a magical phenomenon. This is an influence on her, and funnily enough I hear it most in her wordless songs.

I remember the next time I saw her, which was just after submitting the Seasons manuscript. I went to Wales to stay for a wonderful few days. Our natters really rambled free. For instance, we discussed Lady Gaga at length. Her manipulation of image – did it mean anything? Did its very hollowness mean anything? Was the sexual element really that confrontational, when Gaga has a very conventional celebrity body type? After eighteen months of using my brain almost exclusively for psychedelic folk, this conversation was the mental equivalent of a weekend away in Paris. And that it was with someone else who dealt in psychedelic folk made it even sweeter.

Sharron lives in Sheffield, now! I get to be both her friend and her fan. We talk and drink red wine and listen to music lots, plus I get to see her perform live regularly. The picture below was taken a couple of months back: as part of the Sensoria festival, Sharron sang with the lovely Nancy Wallace, and Sharron and I were on a panel discussing folk music. The event took place in a disused department store! We saw a mummified bat, arsed around pretending to be mannequins, and then I kicked a hole in a wall.

Anyway. Away from spooky abandoned shops and back to spooky dystopias. The Chrysalids depicts people with real telepathic ability, and the other characters accept this power unquestioningly (they are either afraid or in awe of it), even though, for the most part, they don’t see it. In some ways, this fits squarely with a monotheist religious society: any competing mythical concerns are rooted out as viciously as a potential earthly rival. However, I think the odd skeptical voice would have worked well with Wyndham’s realistic depiction of human behaviour. You try telling a neighbour you’re telepathic; chances are you’ll not be deemed a deity or a devil, but get a derisive snort and a cup or tea to sort yourself out.

I also think it was a bit of a missed opportunity, given how Wyndham explores evolution and human mutation, to explore why this ability has developed in this society. Let me tell you something, and promise me you won’t respond with a derisive snort.

I have – only once – had an ‘out of body experience’. I felt myself lifting from my flesh, whirring away to somewhere else, seeing that somewhere else as if I was actually there, then bumping back into my bones. Now, I don’t think anything supernatural actually happened – for instance, I don’t think that my soul left my body and travelled, or that what I saw in the ‘travelled-to’ place was really occurring – but I do know that I experienced this at a unique time in my life. It was at a point when I literally wanted to be in two places. My mind was split like never before, and therefore it powerfully hallucinated, making me momentarily feel that my body was split, too.

And that’s I suppose what I’m interested in in terms of psychic phenomena, and what I would have liked to have had more of in The Chrysalids: Wyndham exploring telepathic ability as a potent reaction of the mind to a situation, rather than as a randomly bestowed paranormal gift. Davie and his cohorts live in an oppressive society, and it would be fascinating to consider whether this ability evolved as a result of that tyranny. Perhaps it’s there implicitly – Davie and Petra have it, and they are particularly subjugated by their father – but developing this strand more would have been very satisfying. As it is, the telepathic component of The Chrysalids seems similar to a number of other works that deal with the subject.

Having said that, this is a very brief book that tries to do a lot, and the amount it does squish in is impressive. It’s almost Orwellian in its success as both a powerful critique of conformity, and as a great read. It is unafraid to comment on destructive regimes and powerful vested interests.

‘They have become history without being aware of it. They are determined still that there is a final form to defend: soon they will attain the stability they strive for, in the only form it is granted – a place among the fossils…’

Dystopian books. We need to pay attention to them, for they are never about the future.

Week Forty-Five - Jeanette

The Picture Of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)

Recommended by Nicky

FOREVER YOUNG

FOREVER CURSED

Not the words of Oscar Wilde, funnily enough, but the tagline to the 2009 flop Dorian Gray, starring Ben ‘Who?’ Chaplin.

I’ve been trying to source my Two Readers books from Sheffield libraries as far as possible. That’s why I read a large-print The End Of Mr. Y and lugged around the Rabbit Angstrom Tetralogy. We must borrow from them: it is one way of standing up to the cultural desecration this government is wreaking. Fuck them and their assault on free and accessible books for everyone.

So that's why I'm holding up the already-dated film book jacket version of The Picture Of Dorian Gray. Always makes one look serious about classic literature. Still, in my case it felt appropriate. My introduction to The Picture Of Dorian Gray came at age 13. The 1945 film version (starring Hurd ‘Who?’ Hatfield) was the afternoon ITV matinee.

That film blew my tweenage mind. I knew of Oscar Wilde – Morrissey went on about him, and he was always the answer to quote questions on Going For Gold – but I didn’t know much of The Picture Of Dorian Gray. I found the story beguiling, and the one-liners killer; plus the film itself seemed very inventive. It was in black and white, but whenever it showed Dorian’s portrait, it switched to fantastic technicolour. When I saw the final, degenerate painting, I gasped in horror. (It’s here, but for the full effect I’d recommend not peeping and seeking out the movie instead).

I read the book shortly afterwards. Not much can compare with experiencing Oscar Wilde at that age. Wow. Who were these waspish sophisticates with an aphorism for every mood? I really thought I might become Lord Henry Wotton as an adult. Never mind that I was in some crap area of Norwich, and my day involved thinking up excuses to get out of cross-country running rather than flirting with duchesses and renaming orchids. I was in the gutter but, yes, I was looking at the stars.

He was amazed at the sudden impression that his words had produced, and, remembering a book that he had read when he was sixteen, a book which had revealed to him much that he had not known before, he wondered whether Dorian Gray was passing through a similar experience.

Nicky said that The Picture Of Dorian Gray meant a lot to him when he was growing up. I think it’s one of those special texts: key in forming a persona, or at least key in forming an ideal of what we’d like our persona to be. And, in Nicky, I can definitely see its influence.

Exhibit one: wit. Every advent Nicky counts down his ‘sexy boys’ chart. His type isn’t really my type (Jedward got in there!) but his commentaries make me cry with laughter. Last year, when talking about some actor no-one’s heard of (Ben Chaplin? Hurd Hatfield?), he wrote ‘He always seems to get in the lower reaches of the chart. Much like All About Eve singles in the late 80s.’

Exhibit two: sociability. An absolute joy to be around. We’ve started a semi-regular cinema club!

Exhibit three: disinhibition. Open and honest about all sorts of stuff – from sexual behaviour to Eurovision fan politics – he’s prompted me to think about relationships, sex, identity, and celebrity, in myriad different ways.

He’s far more Lord Henry’s heir than I am. Damn it.

                          ‘Believe me, no civilised man ever regrets a pleasure.’

It’s interesting to (re)read a book whose plot is so well-known in popular culture. The shorthand – vain pretty boy makes a Faustian pact that his portrait, not he, will age, and then goes on a massive debauchery binge – is pretty much what happens. But, as with any distillation, it conceals as much as it reveals.

Reading The Picture Of Dorian Gray as an adult, I found it to be a very sad novel. It is as much of an unapologetic ode to hedonism as Crime And Punishment is a sanction for the cracking wheeze of murder. Dorian is a paradoxical character. He is, at once, amoral and virtuous; a manipulator and a naïf; an anti-intellectual and a nerd. The lovely young Dorian, at the start of the book, is somewhat laconic and petulant, but absolutely magnetic. Hell, anyone would fall in love with him.

He does not stay so pure after he meets Lord Henry. Henry is an endlessly quotable bon vivant, and Dorian seeks to be both what he thinks Henry will desire (a young and beautiful man) and what he thinks Henry is (a pleasure-seeking wit). The pair enter into a Henry Higgins-Eliza Doolittle relationship, the key dynamic of the book; and it is Henry’s speech on how youth is the only thing worth possessing that prompts Dorian to strike his fateful bargain.

Henry gives Dorian a present.

It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian, who spent his life trying to realise in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own.

Ah! That’s bloody well À Rebours! I can’t believe how that book has followed me around this year. Although Wilde never names it, it’s such a unique work and once read, it’s easy to recognise any allusion to it. Chapter Eleven is almost completely given over to a parody (or an homage) to the narrative style of À Rebours, as Dorian meditates on his possessions and what they represent.

The King of Ceilan rode through the city with a large ruby in his hand, at the ceremony of his coronation. The gates of the palace of John The Priest were ‘made of sardius, with the horn of the horned snake inwrought.’

So yet another reason why I’m glad to have read À Rebours; I’m sure I would have found this chapter entirely head-scratching if not. Let’s have another picture of it, with its English title, to remind you to read this incredible work.

As the Henry-Dorian relationship progresses, its initial teacher-pupil aspect becomes far less straightforward. Although he wants to emulate Henry, Dorian is simply unable to do so. People love and indulge Henry, and when he is outrageous, it only serves to enhance his standing. Dorian, though, is different; he can beguile like no other, but once his initial charm impact wears off, he is seldom a popular presence in a gathering. He doesn’t have the élan of Henry – he’s too brooding, too conflicted, and his secret picture drags after him like a beached whale.

What is left to Dorian? Drugs. Sex. Material goods. Cruelty for the sake of feeling momentarily powerful. Looking into the mirror at his never-changing appearance. And all this makes society dislike him further. I found it fascinating how Dorian’s behaviour becomes more delinquent the older he gets: the amoralist, manipulator, and anti-intellectual win out, but in a very joyless way. In life, this is rarely spoken of, but it rings true. While younger, we may be afraid of consequence: age brings a new fuck-it-ness. Plus, if we do something exhilarating once (perhaps without exactly intending to) then we learn we can, and are far more likely to do it again. Yet, with each repetition, our tolerance grows, and the taste of transgression becomes blander.

Dorian and Henry are the headline acts in this novel, and I could see why each was so enticing to me at a younger age. But, reading now, it is the portrait-painter, Basil Hallward, whose tragedy struck me the most. In love with Dorian from the very start of the book, Basil watches his beloved muse get sucked in to a new life, and you can feel every jagged shard of his broken heart.

He drove off by himself, as had been arranged, and watched the flashing lights of the little brougham in front of him. He felt that Dorian Gray would never again be to him all that he had been in the past. Life had come between them… His eyes darkened, and the crowded, flaring streets became blurred to his eyes. When the cab drew up at the theatre, it seemed to him that he had grown years older.

           

It is Basil Hallward who is really Dorian’s picture. He is the one who bears the scars – as it says above, even grows older – as a result of Dorian’s behaviour.

And that’s why I found this book so poignant. Basil Hallward’s suffering is what happens in reality. When we’re cold-blooded or thoughtless, deliberately nasty or uncaringly selfish, the distorted mirror held up to ourselves is not a grotesque self-portrait. Rather, it is painted on the flesh, on the memory, on the very soul, of each person that we hurt.

Week Forty-Three - Jeanette

Rabbit, Run by John Updike (1960)

Recommended by Dan

So tall, he seems an unlikely rabbit, but the breadth of the white face, the pallor of his blue irises, and a nervous flutter under his brief nose as he stabs a cigarette into his mouth partially explain the nickname.

As I type, I’m on the sofa at the house Dan shares with Jude. I purposefully wanted to read Rabbit, Run this week; having liberated myself from the project’s alphabetical order, I thought it would be fitting to experience John Updike’s work while hanging out with the man whose favourite book it is.

I’ve been staying with Jude and Dan for a week. Here I am with Poppy, who lives with them (she’s my favourite cat! Any excuse for a photo).

As it turned out, Dan and I didn’t get much of a chance to talk on it. At the start of the week, and at the start of my reading, I told him that it was brilliantly written, and that I found it very unforgiving. (‘But that’s okay,’ I added).

I’ve known Dan for a long time, and how I’ve related to him has evolved a lot. In my late teens, he was the friend of a boyfriend; in my twenties, part of the ‘North London set’ of people in bands who were always at the pub; from my later twenties onwards, Jude’s partner and then husband. It’s strange, but until recently I’d seen Dan primarily through the lens of other people. That's changed over the last couple of years. Satisfying, now, to be clear-eyed, and to have my own unique friendship with him.

Dan is a fantastic musician and, like Dave, is in the awesome The Drink; he was also in Fighting Kites, Michaelmas and, many years ago, Adekola Sound. I feel I have a lot to learn from him about experimental music, minimalism, and modern classical. As I’ve pointed out before, I tend to generalise the whole thing as an impenetrable slab of cold marble, yet this week he played me Oren Ambarchi’s ‘Grapes From The Estate’ and the emotional appeal of it was plain as day to me. Maybe next time I look after Poppy I’ll turn off the internet, needle-drop Dan’s records, and binge on the impressive pile of The Wire magazines.

Rabbit, Run seems to be one of the Two Readers books that quite a lot of friends have already read, and most not only had an opinion on it but an opinion on how I might receive it. Most thought I’d admire it, but that I might not like it too much.

Hard-hearted: the word seems to clatter after them as they climb the stairs to the second floor.

Indeed, the word seems to clatter after the whole of the novel. Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom is an unpleasant man who, in his lack of compassion for others, borders on the sociopathic. In the most famous line of the novel, Rabbit declares that if you have the guts to be yourself, other people will pay your price.

Guts to be yourself. Guts. That word in itself asserts what I found so incredibly impressive in Rabbit, Run's characterisation. Rabbit believes that ‘being yourself’ (in his definition, indulging your own drives and damning the consequences) stems from an inner honesty and not from selfishness. He sees the world as rabbit-eat-rabbit, and if others aren’t prepared to cannibalise or be cannibalised, then it’s their own lookout. He has nothing but contempt for them.

            ‘Forgive me. I’m in a very depressed mood.’

There’s nothing exactly wrong with his saying this, but it rubs Harry’s inner hair the wrong way. It kind of clings. It says, Pity me. Love me.

Why is he like this? The psychology in Rabbit, Run is subtly explored. Rabbit was, once, a basketball prodigy, of whom great things were expected. Now he’s demonstrating a kitchen mod-con called the MagiPeel. There comes a point in all our lives where we stop having ‘potential’ and have to actually deliver on it. If we don’t, the feeling is excruciating. Rabbit isn’t one for lengthy oh-poor-me soliloquies; instead, he expresses his frustration at underachievement in a far less sympathetic way. The book is called Rabbit, Run because that’s what he does. Nothing – not a job, friends, home, marriage, fatherhood – is for life. Rabbit is never able to withdraw his foot from its default position, that of wedging open the escape hatch.

Janice, his pregnant wife, is a constant reminder to Rabbit of how he isn’t living the life he wants. She is an alcoholic and a sloth, but with a sadness that is clear to the reader. Rabbit ignores, is ignorant of, or is simply uncaring about the reasons that may underlay Janice’s behaviour. At the start of the book, he leaves her.

            ‘I’m not that interested in her. I was, but I’m not.’

Ouch. When long-term relationships break down, whether we are the dumper, dumpee, or at some more mutual point on the spectrum, we’d like to believe it nobler than the simple dulling effect of monotony. How many of us just think, ‘I’m sick of looking at your face each morning, because all it does it get older and tireder and less attractive?’ Far, far, far more of us than would ever admit it, I’d wager.

And what do we do when we think this? Often, like Rabbit, we run, run to someone new, even if it’s only in our heads. Rabbit runs to Ruth, a more obviously sexual being than Janice. He doesn’t change his behaviour very much.

He repeats, ‘Did I?’ and pinches her arm, hard. He hadn’t meant to do it so hard; something angered him at the touch of her skin. The sullen way it yielded.

                              ‘Ow. You son of a bitch.’

Still she lies there, paying more attention to the sun than him. He gets up on an elbow and looks across her dead body to the lighter figures of two sixteen-year-olds standing sipping orange crush from cardboard cones.

I didn’t like Rabbit (but then I doubt you’re meant to). But I didn’t hate him, either. I both admired and detested his unbridled id and part of me, a very small but very honest part, recognises in him something of my own questionable past behaviour. But, right there, that’s the difference between Rabbit and I: I am, at least, a little bit ashamed of it.

A criticism levelled at Updike is that he was an unapologetic misogynist (this Guardian piece is fairly typical of the arguments). Updike’s treatment of women reminded me of my favourite laugh-a-minute playwright, August Strindberg, who was also frequently labelled as a big ol’ sexist. In Rabbit, Run, as in (e.g.) Miss Julie, women are equally complex and shitty as men, although patriarchal society moulds them into a different complexity and shittiness. This includes affecting the pose of victim, which both Ruth and Janice do, at points. Depressing, yes, sexist… I didn’t experience it as such. It was perfectly in line with Updike’s angry critique of interpersonal relationships and his brutal frankness about how people take advantage of the power handed to them. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the book’s disturbing scene of sexual coercion. I consider Rabbit, Run a depiction of misogyny, while not being misogynist in itself.

The final section of the book was a rather different beast to all this, and absolutely magnificent. If you want to avoid a spoiler, stop reading now, but I feel I can’t discuss Rabbit, Run without revealing and praising the treatment of this plot point. Janice and Rabbit’s baby daughter dies as a result of parental neglect. The guilt, blame, shock, grief, and community response that follows her death drips with profound desolation, while never once threatening melodrama.

The coffin, with handles of painted gold, rests on a platform draped with a deep purple curtain; he thinks the curtain might draw apart and reveal, like a magician’s trick, the living baby underneath.

I would have, I’m sure, applauded Rabbit, Run even had it not taken this very intense turn. However, it is this that really does push it into the realm of great achievement. It is an unflinching, uncensorious, unkind, undeniable, masterpiece.