Queen Elizabeth II's Literary Odyssey - "The Uncommon Reader" by Alan Bennett

Queen Elizabeth II is now Britain’s longest-reigning monarch.  What does this have to do with books and reading?  Well, The Guardian printed a short article entitled “The Queen of Arts: Elizabeth II in Fiction”: http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/sep/11/queen-arts-elizabeth-second-fiction?CMP=twt_books_b-gdnbooks.

That got me thinking about Alan Bennett’s book The Uncommon Reader which imagines the queen’s literary odyssey.  One of the highlights of the novella is the observations about literature and reading.  Here’s my baker’s dozen of favourites:

“What she was finding was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.”

“Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.”

“Books are not about passing the time.  They’re about other lives.  Other worlds.  Far from wanting time to pass, . . . one just wishes one had more of it.”

“The appeal of reading . . . lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.  Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not.  All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth.”

“I think of literature . . . as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but cannot possibly reach.”

“Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.”

“Can there be any greater pleasure . . . than to come across an author one enjoys and then to find they have written not just one book or two, but at least a dozen?”

“. . . reading was, among other things, a muscle that [can be] developed.”

“Books are wonderful, aren’t they? . . . At the risk of sounding like a piece of steak, . . . they tenderize one.”

“Who is above literature?  You might as well say one was above humanity.”

“A book is a device to ignite the imagination.”

“You don't put your life into your books.  You find it there.”

“...to her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them without prejudice.”

Reviews Archive - Rachel Joyce's Companion Novels: "The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry" and "The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy"

If you enjoyed The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, you must read its companion, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy.  If you haven't read either, two good novels await you.

Review of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

4 Stars

Harold Fry, a sad, lonely, 65-year-old recent retiree, is caught in a stale life and a fractured marriage in which “language had no significance.” He receives a good-bye note from a former colleague, Queenie Hennessy, who is in a hospice dying of cancer. He writes a bland reply although he feels his response is inadequate: “The knowledge of his helplessness pressed down on him so heavily he felt weak. It wasn’t enough to send a letter. There must be a way to make a difference.” When walking to mail his letter, he has a chance conversation which has him believing that he can keep Queenie alive by walking to her. Thus begins his trek.

Of course, what Harold actually embarks on is a journey of self-discovery; he asks himself “Who am I?” and even his cellphone message has a long pause as if “he was actually off looking for himself.” As he walks, he reflects on his life; he frees “the past he had spent twenty years seeking to avoid.” What he specifically feels burdened by is not revealed until near the end, but Harold feels that he is walking “to atone for mistakes he had made.”

Among his discoveries are wonderful everyday things: “it was as if everywhere he looked, the fields, gardens, trees, and hedgerows had exploded with growth.” Another epiphany is that he is not alone because there are many people like him just struggling to put one foot in front of the other: “It was the same all over England. . . . And what no one else knew was the appalling weight of the thing they were carrying inside. The inhuman effort it took sometimes to be normal, and a part of things that appeared both easy and everyday. The loneliness of that.”

While her husband is on his quixotic pilgrimage, Maureen waits at home and also does some reflecting. She too examines their marriage: “She sat . . . and stared into the air, seeing not net curtains but only the past.” As she has insights, her transformation is wonderfully developed through the symbolism of net curtains. At the beginning the curtains “hung between herself and the outside world, robbing it of color and texture, and she was glad of that.” Eventually she removes and discards the curtains and “Light, color, and texture fell over the room.”

This novel takes the reader through a whole spectrum of emotions; parts are heartbreakingly sad while others are funny. It encourages us to examine our own lives to find instances of misplaced anger and resentment and to rediscover “all the things in life [we’ve] let go.” Despite its bleakness in sections, the novel is hopeful and uplifting because it suggests it’s okay “to go mad once in a while” and because “Beginnings could happen more than once, or in different ways.”

The book is a meditation on life but it is also a quirky and charming novel. It is not surprising that it was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

Review of The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

4 Stars

  This is a companion novel to The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. The narrator is the woman whose note inspires Harold to walk 627 miles to visit his former colleague as she spends her last day in a hospice. As she waits for Harold to arrive, she writes him a letter detailing her life and confessing two secrets. It may be Harold who makes the long journey across Britain, but Queenie too makes a journey: “People think you have to walk to go on a journey. But you don’t, you see. You can lie in bed and make a journey too.”

The novel succeeds in being both comic and poignant. Queenie’s fellow patients in the hospice are a quirky crew; the exchanges between them are often hilarious. One of the patients tells a volunteer, “One of the pluses of chemotherapy . . . is that all her facial and body hair has gone. It’s like a permanent Brazilian for free.” A young naïve nun (who gives haircuts to the patients) doesn’t understand the term so she is told that a Brazilian is “a sort of haircut . . . Quite short.” Later Sister Lucy offers a patient a short haircut: “’If you like, you can have a Brazilian.’”

The poignancy arises because the end is inevitable for these patients. There are repeated references to the undertaker’s van coming up the drive: “He was not there this afternoon. The undertaker’s van - Well, you know the rest.”

As Queenie reminisces, she makes observations about life: “it is harder to argue with another person . . . than it is to argue with the darker recesses of oneself” and “sometimes you cannot clear the past completely. You must live alongside your sorrow.” What she emphasizes over and over again is the importance of stopping and finding happiness in small pleasures. In the past, she realizes that she was blind: “it was such a small, plain thing that I mistook it for something ordinary and failed to see.” As she nears death, she understands that “You don’t get to a place by constantly moving, even if your journey is one of sitting still and waiting. Every once in a while you have to stop in your tracks and admire the view, a small cloud and a tree outside your window. You have to see what you did not see before. And then you have to sleep.” Queenie’s philosophical musings are not original, but they bear repetition.

I loved the allusions to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: “we would grow old. You would wear the bottoms of your trousers rolled” and “I have measured out my life in ladies’ shoes.” Queenie even dares to eat a peach. Those who are familiar with T. S. Eliot’s poem will find additional layers of meaning in the book.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry was a delightful read; this companion piece is likewise charming. At one point, Queenie says, “people are rarely the straightforward thing we think they are,” and her story shows that there is more to Queenie than Harold has realized. Those who enjoyed the first book should definitely read this one.

Birthday Review - "The Cat's Table" by Michael Ondaatje

Today is Michael Ondaatje’s 72^nd birthday.  He is best known for The English Patient, but I’m posting my review of his most recent book.

Review of The Cat’s Table

3 Stars

In 1954 an eleven-year-old named Michael takes a 21-day sea voyage from Ceylon to England. He joins two other young boys, Cassius and Ramadhin, in exploring the ship.

For meals the three boys are seated at the cat's table, the least privileged place most opposite the captain's table, but "What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power" (75). From a position of obscurity, the lives of others can be observed: the boys "witness the fragmentary tableaux" (128) around them. By snooping and eavesdropping, the boys encounter the interesting and the important: "So we came to understand that small and important thing, that our lives could be large with interesting strangers who would pass us without any personal involvement" (129),

Aboard the ship, the boys are "for the first time by necessity in close quarters with adults" (27). They are befriended by a coterie of colourful, quirky characters who give them glimpses of the adult world and provide them with lessons in music, literature, biology, history, and life. The encounters with adults expose them to friendship, longing, dishonesty, secrecy, and sorrow.

The book is not just a memoir of a boyhood adventure. It is a coming-of-age story. The trip is a metaphor of Michael's rebirth; the Suez Canal which connects the west and the east can easily be seen as a birth canal between childhood and adulthood. Michael may be "startled, half formed" (84) but he tries "to understand and piece together the adult world, wondering what was going on there, and why" (27). Passing strangers help him in ways he does not fully understand until adulthood.

As a pre-adolescent on the sea voyage, Michael takes on the role of a careful observer. This role serves him well in his adult life and career; he becomes a writer

According to Ondaatje, "the novel sometimes uses the colouring and locations of memoir and autobiography" (267). It seems he has returned to his own sea voyage from Ceylon to England and has parlayed it into a book to convey themes about the benefits of the overlooked position and hindsight.

The problem is that Ondaatje's book left me unengaged. The vignettes were disjointed and left me feeling likewise. I've enjoyed this writer's other novels, but this one left me disagreeing with the book jacket's description that it was the work of "a novelist at the height of his powers."

What Qualities Should a Literary Critic Possess?

In a recent issue of The New York Times, in an article entitled “Is Everyone Qualified to be  a Critic,” two writers discussed what it takes to be a literary critic.

Adam Kirsch wrote, “The roots of criticism lie not in judgment but in receptivity and response. Everyone, upon encountering a work of art, has some kind of response, ranging from boredom or incomprehension to amazement and gratitude. In this sense, everyone really is a critic, in a way that not everyone is a painter or a poet. It requires some special talent to create an artwork, but any conscious person will have a reaction to that artwork. What makes someone a critic in the vocational sense is, first, the habit of questioning her own reactions — asking herself why she feels as she does. Second, she must have the ability to formalize and articulate those questions — in other words, she must be a writer. To be able to say what you feel and why: That is the basic equipment of a critic.

“It is in pursuit of this articulate self-expression that a critic finds herself needing to make comparisons and judgments. To explain why a certain novel moves her, she naturally starts wondering about what makes it different from another book that left her cold. Then she begins to ask what features of the book produced this reaction: Is it the handling of plot, or the lifelikeness of character, or the quality of the prose? In this way, appreciation passes into analysis, the next stage of criticism — trying to figure out how a work of art does what it does. And when you have had enough of these thoughtful encounters with different kinds of works, you can claim expertise — which is not a credential or a stick to beat people into submission with, but simply a shorthand for extensive aesthetic experience.”

Charles McGrath wrote, “If for a start we require that critics know what they’re talking about — that their judgments are actually informed — the field thins considerably, and if we also insist on taste and discernment, then the number of valuable and useful critics dwindles pretty drastically.

“A valuable critic is someone whose judgment you can rely on and learn from, which is not to say someone you always agree with. . . . in deciding which critics are worth attending to, literary critics especially, we can at least insist on readability — on clearness of expression, some stylishness, and even a sense of humor. Criticism may be a minor art, but it’s an art all the same, and critical writing ought to be pleasing in itself and not just piggyback on whatever work it’s discussing.”

Check out the entire article (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/books/review/is-everyone-qualified-to-be-a-critic.html?smid=tw-nytbooks&smtyp=cur&_r=0) and then let me know how I’m doing as a literary critic.

Review of "The Massey Murder" by Charlotte Gray

   3.5 Stars

I am not a great reader of non-fiction, but books by Charlotte Gray always tempt me and this one was chosen by both Amazon.ca and The Globe and Mail as a top 100 book of the year and was a finalist for the RBC Taylor Prize.  Gray does not disappoint.

Charles “Bert” Massey, grandson of the Massey agricultural-machinery empire, was shot by the family maid, 18-year-old Carrie Davies, on Feb. 8, 1915, when he arrived home at the end of the workday.  She claimed to be afraid of further sexual advances by her employer.  The crime and subsequent trial made headline news.

In the preface, Gray states, “This book is a story about Toronto in the early twentieth century, a fast-changing and divided community in the process of reinvention, and about Canada as it embarked on a century of dramatic evolution” and her description is certainly accurate.  It portrays life in Toronto during the first years of WWI, Canadian jurisprudence and politics, the sexual mores and class divisions of the era, the conditions under which domestic servants lived, the emergence of organizations fighting for women’s rights, and the wars between newspapers. 

Many times, the murder case takes a back seat to the study of society, so the title is actually misleading.  Gray sometimes does not meet the challenge of “prevent[ing] the layers of circumstantial detail from overshadowing the story.”  Gray describes Carrie as “a cork floating on powerful cross-currents of assumptions about class, race and gender” and Gray meticulously researched these cross-currents to explain the reason for the eventual verdict.

As in Gray’s other books, the portraits of participants are vivid.  Hartley Dewart, Carrie’s defense lawyer; Chief Justice Sir William Mulock, the presiding judge; John Ross Robertson, owner of the Evening Telegram; and Mary Ethel Massey, the victim’s sister-in-law, are especially memorable. 

This is an excellent example of narrative non-fiction.  It is a wonderful chronicle of life in Toronto one hundred years ago and it shows how the turmoil of that time decided the fate of a lowly domestic servant.  

2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist

The longlist for the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize was announced today (http://www.scotiabankgillerprize.ca/the-scotiabank-giller-prize-presents-its-2015-longlist/).
Here are brief descriptions (from www.amazon.ca) of the twelve books. 

André Alexis – Fifteen Dogs

A bet between the gods Hermes and Apollo leads them to grant human consciousness and language to a group of dogs overnighting at a Toronto veterinary clinic.  Suddenly capable of more complex thought, the pack is torn between those who resist the new ways of thinking, preferring the old 'dog' ways, and those who embrace the change.  The gods watch from above as the dogs venture into their newly unfamiliar world, as they become divided among themselves, as each struggles with new thoughts and feelings.

Samuel Archibald – Arvida

This collection of short stories (about innocent young girls and wild beasts, attempted murder and ritual mutilation, haunted houses and road trips to nowhere) is a portrait of a remote mining town in northern Quebec.

Michael Christie – If I Fall, If I Die

Will has never been Outside, at least not since he can remember.  For most of his young life he has lived happily – and safely – inside his small house with his mother, a fiercely loving yet wildly eccentric agoraphobe who panics at the thought of opening the front door.  But Will’s curiosity can’t be contained, and he finally ventures Outside.  Will embraces his newfound freedom, but life Outside quickly grows complicated.  When a local boy goes missing, Will is pulled further away from the confines of his closed-off world and thrust headfirst into the throes of early adulthood and the criminal underbelly of city life.  All the while his mother must grapple with her greatest fear: will she be brave enough to save her son?

Rachel Cusk – Outline

Outline is a novel in ten conversations.  It follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during an oppressively hot summer in Athens.  She leads her students in storytelling exercises.  She meets other visiting writers for dinner.  She goes swimming with an elderly Greek bachelor.  The people she encounters speak, volubly, about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets and longings.  And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face a great loss.

Patrick deWitt – Undermajordomo Minor

Lucien (Lucy) Minor is friendless and loveless, young and aimless, a compulsive liar, a sickly weakling in a town famous for begetting brutish giants.  He accepts employment at the foreboding and remote Castle Von Aux.  While tending to his new post as undermajordomo, he soon discovers the place harbours many dark secrets, not least of which is the whereabouts of the castle’s master, Baron Von Aux.  In the local village, he also encounters thieves, madmen, aristocrats, and Klara, a delicate beauty whose love he must compete for with the exceptionally handsome partisan soldier, Adolphus.  Thus begins a tale of polite theft, bitter heartbreak, domestic mystery, and cold-blooded murder.

Marina Endicott – Close to Hugh

A fall from a ladder leaves Hugh with a fractured vision of the pain—dying parents, shaky marriages, failure of every kind—suffered by those close to him. His friends are one missed ladder-rung from going under emotionally, physically, and financially. Somebody’s got to fix them all.  And it probably has to be Hugh.  Meanwhile, beneath the adult orbit, bright young lives are taking form: the sons and daughters of Hugh’s friends are about to graduate from high school and already floating away from the gravitational pull of their parents.  As complicated bonds form and break in texts and ticks on multiplying media, the desires, terrors, and revelations of adolescence are mirrored in the second adolescence of the adults.

Connie Gault – A Beauty

In a drought-ridden Saskatchewan of the 1930s, self-possessed, enigmatic Elena Huhtala finds herself living alone, a young Finnish woman in a community of Swedes in the small village of Trevna.  Her mother has been dead for many years, and her father, burdened by the hardships of drought, has disappeared, and the eighteen-year-old is an object of pity and charity in her community.  But when a stranger shows up at a country dance, Elena needs only one look and one dance before jumping into his Lincoln Roadster, leaving the town and its shocked inhabitants behind.  What follows is a trip through the prairie towns, their dusty streets, shabby hotel rooms, surrounded by dry fields that stretch out vastly, waiting for rain.  Elena's journey uncovers the individual stories of an unforgettable group of people, all of whom are in one way or another affected by her seductive yet innocent presence.

Alix Hawley – All True Not a Lie in It

Pioneer Daniel Boone tells his life story.  He discusses his childhood in a Quaker colony, his capture by the Shawnee as he attempted to settle Kentucky, his love for his wife Rebecca, and the fate of his children. 

Cliff Jackman – The Winter Family

The novel traces a gang of ruthless outlaws from its birth during the American Civil War to a final bloody showdown in the Territory of Oklahoma.   From the 1860s to the 1880s, the outlaws known as the Winter Family roam the harsh frontier, both serving and battling the fierce advance of civilization. Among its twisted specimens are the psychopathic killer Quentin Ross, the mean and moronic Empire brothers, the impassive ex-slave Fred Johnson, and the gunslinging child prodigy, Lukas Riddle. At the centre of this ultraviolent storm is their cold, dandified and golden-eyed leader, Augustus Winter--a man with a pathological resistance to the rules of society and a preternatural gift for butchery.

Heather O’Neill – Daydreams of Angels

This is a collection of dark fairy tales (e.g. the story of a naive cult follower in "Dear Piglet"; the struggle of two young women in occupied Paris in “Snow-White and Rose-Red”; the story of generations of failed Nureyev clones in post-Soviet Russia in “The Ugly Ducklings”).

Anakana Schofield – Martin John

This is a darkly comic novel circuiting through the mind, motivations and preoccupations of a character many women have experienced.  Martin John's mother says that she is glad he is done with it.  But is Martin John done with it?  He says he wants it to stop, his mother wants it to stop, we all want it to stop. But is it really what Martin John wants?  He had it in his mind to do it and he did it.  Harm was done when he did it.  Harm would continue to be done.  Who will stop Martin John?  Will you stop him?  Should she stop him?

Russell Smith – Confidence

In the stories of Confidence, there are ecstasy-taking PhD students, financial traders desperate for husbands, owners of failing sex stores, violent and unremovable tenants, aggressive raccoons, seedy massage parlours, experimental filmmakers who record every second of their day, and wives who blog insults directed at their husbands.  There are cheating husbands.  There are private clubs, crowded restaurants, and psychiatric wards.  

The shortlist will be announced on October 5; the winner of the $100,000 award will be announced on November 10.

It’s time to get reading some great Canadian fiction!

New Release: Review of "The Perfect Comeback of Caroline Jacobs" by Matthew Dicks

   3 Stars 

Caroline Jacobs, with her daughter Polly cheering her on, sets off for her hometown with the goal of confronting Emily Kaplan, her childhood best friend who publically unfriended her in the school cafeteria 25 years earlier.  Caroline feels that the rejection changed her “life trajectory” and turned her into the overly cautious, meek pushover she became.

Of course, the road trip becomes a journey of self-discovery.  It is not just the bully Emily that Caroline must confront.  There are other issues and secrets she must face because she is so obsessed with the past that she cannot clearly see her present. 

There is a bit of a mystery involved.  We learn that someone named Lucy was significant in her past, but information about her identity and fate is revealed gradually.  In the first discussion about Lucy, Caroline admits “Almost everything she had ever said to her husband about Lucy had been a lie.”  This statement proves to be an exaggeration and, indeed, her entire reaction seems overstated when the full truth is revealed. 

There are several quirky characters who add interest (a pet mortician, a man grieving a parrot’s death, a blind philosopher), but they do little to add realism. 

As a former teacher, I enjoyed the insights into school life.  Certainly the cliques and the machinations of teenaged girls are realistically portrayed.  Caroline’s relationship with her teenaged daughter is also well-developed.   And, because of her outspokenness, Polly serves as a great foil for her mother.

There is an appeal to this book:  after all, who wouldn’t like to have a perfect comeback against a childhood nemesis?  It does not, however, offer much thematic depth; what Caroline learns is predictable. 

This novel will receive praise from readers who want a quick, unchallenging, feel-good read.

Note:  I received an ARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.