Patrick McGuinness: Throw Me To The Wolves

Is Throw Me To the Wolves a story about media manipulation that corrupts ordinary people? Is it a well-written, if too long, crime novel? Or is it, as The Guardian says, “an elegaic exploration of memory and the legacy of childhood trauma”? 

Haruki Marukami – 1Q84

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Several years ago I was given 1Q84 as a birthday gift and it has been gathering dust on my shelves ever since. Now with my project of reading one important book from the Twentieth or Twenty-first Century every month its time had come. It is a large book, 923 pages long, and as I discovered when I came to read it, really three books. The English language version has rolled the trilogy into one book.

Shock, horror!

Barbara Comyns – Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead

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There can’t be many books with such a great first line

The ducks swam through the drawing-room windows.

But that is Barbara Comyns. She has her own unmistakable voice, strange and dark, but also funny. At times when I was devouring this book in one sitting, I let out a shriek of laughter and then a little later a gasp of horror. What a writer. Her characters can be so cruel, but then we can rejoice with them as they escape captivity.

The flood in the Willoweed’s drawing-room, is the first sign that the times are out of joint. The peacocks from the garden are dead, a new-born piglet is dead, the hens commit suicide, but inside the house Grandmother Willoweed is still yelling for her lunch. During the night a storm breaks and the grandmother wakes the household. The maids, two young sisters, Norah and Eunice, who bear the marks of her blows are ordered to

‘Pull the curtains, you fools!’ screamed the grandmother as a flash of blue lightning filled the kitchen.  Norah climbed onto the table to reach the window; but a great clap of thunder came, and she made a dash to the broom cupboard under the stairs.

Grandmother Willoweed yelled, ‘Coward! What do you think I pay you for, you insubordinate slut?’

It is not just the maids who are under the bullying thrall of the old woman. Her indolent son Ebin and his three children, Emma, Hattie and Dennis live with her. They don’t go to school. Occasionally Grandmother yells at her son to teach them something and he gives a few tutorials but soon grows tired of it and the children are free again. She is also locked in a fight to the death with Old Ives the man of work to see who will live the longest.

But a greater catastrophe is soon to come upon the village, which some will survive and some not. And here is the beginning of it

In spite of the rather sinister appearance of the dark little rye loaves the villagers were delighted with them and enjoyed their bitter flavour.

Death and madness for some will follow from this kind gesture by the baker. But some will find love and freedom. The outcomes are always bittersweet in the work of Barbara Comyns.

This book was a beautiful reissue from Daunt Books. They are also re issuing another book by Barbara Comyns in July, A Touch of Mistletoe. How could you resist a book with this first line?

The morning I left home Mother was recovering from being poorly and she’d been sick in the vegetable basket.

To read Jacqui’s review (where we discovered it) go here

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns

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A tip for walkers

Sam Riviere – Dead Souls

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301-page books comprising a single paragraph do not always make for gripping reading. True there is Thomas Bernhard where the quality of the vituperation and self-mockery is totally convincing, and Roberto Bolano who uses many different poetic voices. But here we have a book by a poet, meant to be a take-down of the modern literary world, and it comes across as deeply annoying.

Kazuo Ishiguro: Klara and the Sun

Andrew Biswell – The Real Life of Anthony Burgess

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Why does Andrew Biswell title his book ‘The Real life of Anthony Burgess’? Probably because the man himself, whose name was not Anthony Burgess, but John Burgess Wilson, seems to mix scenes and characters from his novels with his own life and come up with conflicting versions. He is described as a ‘fabulist’ and ‘self-contradictory’, and Biswell has followed a mazy path in his efforts to unearth the truth about Burgess’ real life. His biography is a fascinating account of a wildly, almost excessively talented man who had something of a gift for getting on the wrong side of authority. Biswell analyses all of Burgess’ writing and communicates with almost everyone still living who had any significant contact with the writer. Letters, interviews, newspaper articles, television interviews; he leaves no stone unturned. It is a huge work, but one worthy of its subject.

John Burgess Wilson was born in Manchester in 1917. His father was a piano player. That’s not a ‘pianist’ but a man who plays the piano in pubs and cinemas, always after sinking many pints of beer. The only musical education he gave his son was to point to middle C on the piano and then to show him on a sheet of printed music what it looked like. From that Burgess was able to teach himself to play the piano and to develop his musical knowledge to the point where he often preferred to refer to himself as a composer rather than a writer. In later life he wrote symphonies, operas, and set poems to music. All with very little success. He once said

‘I wish people would think of me as a musician who writes novels, instead of a novelist who writes music on the side.’

On leaving school, at the age of seventeen he wrote a poem in homage to Gerard Manley Hopkins whose work had only been published a few years earlier. The flavour of Hopkins is very strong here, almost too much so, but quite extraordinary for a teenage boy.

Whether windowed a greycold welkin or a dawn that mounts and breaks.

In a roseflush wave each day arises this working man,

Heavy maybe but never for a thwarted life’s plan…

But in spite of his great facility with words (and a massive vocabulary) Burgess went on believing his true calling was to be a composer. It wasn’t until his first book was published in 1956 he realised that was where he would make his living.

After the Army and duty in Gibraltar Burgess spent time as English Master at Banbury College Grammar. Of course, he fell foul of the Head, and later books he wrote based around characters he knew there caused him to be sued for libel. But at this time too he was reunited with his wife Lynne.

Lynne made a vivid impression in Adderbury… her behaviour is still the subject of local gossip…the back garden of their cottage on Water Lane was full of empty bottles…a rumour Lynne was in the habit of cavorting naked in the garden persists to this day…she once got hopelessly drunk and disappeared for a few hours. A search party was sent out, and she was finally discovered sleeping in an empty field behind the village petrol garage.

They moved to live in Malaya (as it was called then) and Burgess wrote his first three books about life there. But always Lynne was with him, becoming more drunken and more indiscreet as time went by. Burgess had his own amours, but usually quietly. He did however, begin to drink every day. Not as much as Lynne but still far more than was wise.

It is extraordinary to realise how much work he did. Writing novels, book reviews, screen plays newspaper articles. Always writing; always drunk. And smoking eighty cigarettes a day.

Burgess was a polymath, a linguist, a worker. He could be kind and he could be insufferable. One aspect of his life that affected his views on the world was the loss of his Catholic faith. He referred to himself as a ‘Lapsed Catholic’ but would not countenance divorce as it was against Catholic law. He was also consumed with the question of Original Sin. As Biswell explains it, the idea that all humans are born in a state of sin and have to be redeemed by a Saviour or they will go to hell comes from the theology of Augustin of Hippo. The Roman Pelagius on the other hand taught that all humans are born in a state of grace; this became known as the Pelagian heresy. Burgess subscribed to Augustin’s theory.

Burgess’ most famous book A Clockwork Orange tangles with these ideas. The violent juvenile delinquent Alex, in one version of the book is capable of redemption, but the film version leaves off Burgess’ last chapter and Alex, the Beethoven loving sadistic Droog is still intent on his violent ways. Like all Burgess’ novels this is both funny and shocking but essentially a novel of ideas. It drew a storm of protest when it as first published as did the film.

There is so much in this book about the life of a brilliant writer who is slowly sinking from view. It is salutary to realise how quickly even the most talented of us can disappear.

This book is a sympathetic but honest account of one’s man’s tortured life and career.

If I were to read Burgess again, I would probably read The Doctor is Sick, The Malayan Trilogy and Inside Mr Enderby, the first of four books about the horrendous poet. Don’t read Burgess if you are shocked by things like this

This is in many ways, a dirty book. It is full of bowel-blasts and flatulent borborygms, emetic meals…and halitosis. It may well make some people sick, and those of my readers with tender stomachs are advised to let it alone.

And this is from the author’s review of his own book, written under the name of Joseph Kell.

Vicki Laveau-Harvie: The Erratics