Hand in love
Maurice, by E.M. Forster
£7.99, Penguin (2000)
Bright college days! Arcady! Quadrangles! Gay sex in pre-Great War Britain! Forster’s novel Maurice has it all. The lead role is filled by a genial young man, vapid and self-serving, whose awakening homosexuality brings him into close, physical (but not overtly sexual) contact with Clive, an acquaintance at university.
In a novel with so many parallels with Forster’s own situation, analysis of the few differences are inevitable. Maurice is Forster’s intellectual and physical opposite: slow-headed if not actually stupid; well-built and fully aware of the fact; a man of business, society and common-sense. The roller-coaster ride his emotions undertake build in him a moral sense, if not an intellectual one, and lead him from college through disgrace and enterprise into heartache and eventual—tentatively optimistic—true love. Clive, and later Clive’s gamekeeper Alec, awaken self-knowledge in Maurice. If he cannot change, and cannot improve, then he can at least be true to his own self: a trite sentiment now, but a dangerous idea during Forster’s lifetime.
In Maurice there are two books, repelling and repellent to each other, but knit together so closely that the tensions between the two are palpable. Forster famously spent much of his life working on Maurice (which was published posthumously), changing his mind several times about numerous passages, writing and rewriting large chunks. As such the dialogue and memorable scenes flow past with charm and wit, whereas the frequent internalizations—no doubt mirroring Forster’s own tangled thoughts—are overwrought and dense.
That there is more to this book than polemic, against a society where homophobia is not merely the norm but is almost a moral compunction, is a testament to his writing skill. That Forster has—unintentionally—padded a lovely, funny book with churned-up meanderings of introspection is a shame, but inevitable. Like the better fiction Maurice is largely enjoyable and entirely readable; like the worst of fiction, it tells you less about the lead character than about the author.
posted at: 15:29 |
path: / f / forster_edward_morgan |
permanent link to this entry
Ticklish delight
Moab is my Washpot, by Stephen Fry
£7.99, Arrow (2004)
Stephen Fry had an interesting first twenty years. So did a lot of people, and a lot of biographies describe such childhoods. So far, so similar. Well, in Fry’s case, his life might have been rather conventional, and sometimes dull in a middle-class way, were it not that he himself unintentionally, self-destructively, livened it up. Theft. Fraud. Abscondment. Pursuit by the law. A criminal record. Add in this mix an all-boy’s public school, smatterings of sex, and the tortured writhings of an adolescent’s soul, related by a literate, interesting, talented adult who writhes just as much in embarrassment: from its premise, Moab is my Washpot can only be either a harrowing car-crash of a read or a source of page after page of fascination.
To grow up anywhere in the vicinity of Fry’s comedy and writing is to fall a little in love with his public persona: occasionally irritated, certainly, and tired at his relentless tweediness, but love, like public school’s rather robust ersatz, sometimes hurts. We all want an evening with Stephen Fry, and this autobiography is exactly that. He talks, he reveals, he riffs and creates, tying his slightly unexciting toddlerhood to funny (although nowadays slightly hackneyed) observations on English culture, and relentlessly analysing (and largely castigating) his later actions. One gets the sense of the author sitting by one’s side and telling the story: luckily, it’s told so well that this only adds to the experience.
Oddly, for a pedant like Fry, there’s an abundance of minor errors (in the 1997 edition) that even the most basic of proofreading would have discovered: missing vocative commas, commas in the places of full stops, the occasional clumsy or ambiguous sentence. It’s almost as though he has indeed dictated it to an amanuensis, perhaps to deliberately develop the flavour of An Evening With Stephen Fry. Yet at least once he mentions he’s typing it himself. Has he fallen victim to the post-proofing butchery of sub-editors, or is this really only a first draft, printed stet and off the cuff? If this is a first draft, we should all feel a pang of jealousy towards this genius—although he would balk and dissemble if so called—who is able to engage and entertain, for some four hundred pages without a break, with all the apparent ease of a don smoking a pipe in the senior common room.
posted at: 15:49 |
path: / f / fry_stephen |
permanent link to this entry
Why have birds and sing yourself?
Birdsong, by Sebastian Faulks
£7.99, Vintage (1994)
(This review appeared in the ReadReverb newsletter, Jan 20, 2006, and on the ReadReverb website)
Putting together a book about the Great War, for a half-decent writer, is easy money. The material speaks for itself. Almost every single soldier’s story contains enough joy, misery, fear, horror, excitement and feelgood spirit to be more than worth reciting. With authorial interference no greater than that of the proofreader or editor (and careful sequencing to highlight the irony of a modernist society, so willing to accept its own belief in ever-improving quality of life, which found itself facing such a horror) one can tug any reader gently from one end of a book of such stories to the other.
In this spirit it seems almost pointless to mention the plot of Birdsong. Taciturn, laconic Captain Stephen Wraysford struggles through battles backlit by a tragic love affair that occurred around the same geographical region, while men get their heads shot off or drag the cheese-decayed bodies of their dead brothers out of no man’s land to give them a decent burial. Indeed, where Birdsong abandons all pretence of book-length structure, and lets itself be yet another collection of war yarns, it works tremendously well. To be fair to the love story of the protagonist, when left to its own emotional devices, it too has equal power to stir the reader to tears and smiles. By comparison, the contemporary love story that attempts to parallel Wraysford’s experiences and give structure to the history that unfolds throughout the book is not at all engaging, and can be completely discarded without affecting the rest.
But where Faulks contributes what feels like his own content to this body of myth, he comes utterly unstuck. The limit of Faulks’ power to intellectualize seems to be circumscribed by such banal received ideas as a church being nothing but a giant “memento mori”, and Wraysford feeling a mixture of—gosh!—condescension and envy at the faith that supports the congregation. At these times it’s almost as though the Tommies would prefer for Faulks to keep the hell out of it, and instead be a conduit for the stories which they can tell perfectly well (just as they used Erich Maria Remarque or Timothy Findley, both incidentally far more talented writers than Faulks). Every time Faulks chips in with his own observations, you can’t help feel that he should’ve aired them some modern-day newspaper column, instead of managing to foul the already dirty, fecund air of ‘14–’18 Amiens. An enjoyable, readable book, though; no thanks to its author.
posted at: 15:46 |
path: / f / faulks_sebastian |
permanent link to this entry
