Spineless Reviews

Meaningless meaninglessness

Antic Hay, by Aldous Huxley

£6.99, Penguin (2004)

There’s no end to the fun one could poke at the Bloomsbury Group. Self-acknowledged legislators of their little literary world, their sense of their own worth led them to greater and greater excesses of pomposity; even as they wrote the occasional tract that might have supported their beliefs, were these essays not so easily buried under their public personas. The more recent concepts of celebrity were alive and well in the first third of the last century, and Bloomsbury exemplified them.

Satirist and novelist Aldous Huxley was, if not a close member of this set, then a well-liked one: close friend of Lawrence and indulging in a ménage à trois with his wife and Mary Hutchinson. It’s therefore odd to find his stance in Antic Hay that of on the inside, pissing in.

Written in 1923 and set around that time, this novel charts the lives of a handful of the bright young things flung from the dizzy merry-go-round of Great War moralizing into amoral, immoral or supermoral lifestyles. Predominating in the numerous personal strands that make up this tangled book is the narrative of Gumbril, inventor, everyman, made independent by his pneumatic innovation—inflatable pants—and quitting the drudgery of pedagogy in favour of the social whirl exemplified by Mrs Viveash, Mr Mercaptan and others.

From ridiculous trousers Huxley moves to the more and more ridiculous, culminating in a whirlwind farewell journey made by Gumbril. His one chance of emotional depth has been sacrificed for a triviality, and it is to a triviality he is about to depart: he and Viveash thus make one last pointless tour of his empty-souled companions. The strength of the satire, in this procession of emblems of uselessness, is palpable but like Gumbril it goes nowhere and accomplishes nothing. If the joke of this novel is in ironic vacuity, then once the instinctive and immediate comprehension of the period is lost, then so is the irony: what then is left?

It’s true: there’s no end to the fun one could poke at the Bloomsbury Group. But then; not now. Now they’re all simply dead, and dust, and the joke at the heart of this novel is already tight as parchment skin and dry as bones. Without the life of the carnival running through it, Antic Hay is a grinning, empty skull, laughing at a joke that maybe no modern reader can really get.

posted at: 22:03 | path: / h / huxley_aldous | permanent link to this entry

Scary then

Happy Now, by Charles Higson

£5.99, Penguin (1994)

Charlie Higson, writer of The Fast Show and star of many of its sketches—“running jokes” seems a better name for them—wants to be taken seriously, or at least sinisterly. Hence Charles rather than Charlie, and a threatening gilt-on-black cover, showing the white face of a sort of Chisely Higson peering at the prospective reader between the tines of a toasting fork. Granted once you know the significance of the fork then a tremble is put in the bowels by the image, but by then you’d have made the minor error of reading the book.

Should the cover not give it away, Happy Now is a thriller. It’s based around the lives of a number of middle-class fuckups who interact messily and inappropriately. Tom Kendall is a borderline Asperger, adrift on a sea of suppressed rage and misery that he cannot understand, let alone verbalize; yet he tacks the course of a normal life until struck broadside by Will Summers. Will breaks into homes, with the goal of a sexual frisson rather than any malice. But when he is discovered during a dinner party at the house of Tom’s brother-in-law bloody violence ensues. As Tom’s sanity unravels, so do most of the aspects of the book.

What this novel expertly captures is the core of self-hate that is meant to sit at the heart of middle England, a sort of Guardiangst or Daily Mourn that, if it doesn’t really exist, is at least embodied in such vacuums as Milton Keynes or Slough. Early pictures of Tom are rich and detailed, but when we discover that his extreme reactions stem from a childhood of extremes—a lump of indigestible Freudianism thrust at you in case you’re reading this undeniable page-turner too fast to notice it—then the book loses its edge. Tom is no longer normal enough to seem abnormal in this shadowy world of Manicheaen thrillerisms.

This book just about predates The Fast Show. Plenty of the subsequent sketches are more subtly twisted and dangerous than the story here. It would be better for Higson if nobody mourned the passing of Happy Now into obscurity. You don’t need to be a raving fan of the TV series (and its offshoots) to be willing to grant Higson the credentials of a gifted, populist writer, but after finishing Happy Now it’s difficult to remember precisely why you thought he was so good in the first place.

posted at: 21:59 | path: / h / higson_charles | permanent link to this entry

First impressions last

Too Loud a Solitude, by Bohumil Hrabal

£6.99, Abacus (2004)

Imagine you’re employed to pulp works of fiction and literature, compressing them to heavy paper bundles for recycling. For reasons never fully explained you must destroy copy after copy of Kants, Gauguins, Lao-Tzes, Rimbauds. But you start to take books home. You fill shelf after shelf. You construct works of art based on juxtapositions of knowledge only you’ll ever see, or paintings placed on the outside of bundles for everyone in the city to see as they’re transported away. But how do you survive thirty-five years of this creative destruction? How do you live with yourself?

This beautiful, word-soaked novella from Bohumil Hrabal attempts to answer that question by giving Haňt'a, the self-educated narrator, leave to speak. It sets the beauty of art, and the art inherent in a job beautifully done, against the everyday dirt and grime of slaughterhouse meat-wrappers and mouldy, mice-ridden sacks of once-paper. Rich and condensed, it’s more reminiscent of a warming, spicy single malt, drunk alone and pensively, than a sustaining meal or a night out with the author as a drinking companion.

Too Loud a Solitude demonstrates a clarity of thought and expression reminiscent of the best of Milan Kundera. It shows eloquently how the inner life survives and continues to express itself in spite of the police-state actions that seem, dimly, to be directing the pulping and transportation of art: Haňt'a is read a poem at knifepoint by a frustrated artist; a singer threatens the inhabitants of a bar so that he might perform, briefly, and then run. But Haňt'a himself is the true revelation, a quiet, unassuming, boozy man whose soul harbours the entirety of Western literature, an appreciation of life in all its forms, and the sorrow of lost love and unexpressed emotion, bottled up, condensed, potent like a toxin.

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There’s life in the old sea-dog yet

The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway

£6.99, Vintage (1999)

To what extent can nature writing function as a novel form: that is, how can observing the natural world and man’s interaction with it reveal to us the inner life of an individual? As the novel recovered from Victorian baroque only to be plunged into Joyce’s gothic intricacies of the human condition, could a novelist dig deep yet still remain on the surface, in the empirical?

Spanning as it did a period from the end of the first world war to after the middle of last century, Hemingway’s entire oeuvre seems like a response to these questions. His direct, declarative style eschews any sort of internal viewpoints, even with the first-person narrative of For Whom The Bell Tolls, and yet it is the plainness and directness of his approach that is so powerful. In The Old Man and the Sea Hemingway’s deliberately simple tools are at their keenest and smoothest, joining together perfectly to tell the story of an elderly fisherman on an epic odyssey, the trip that will either break his run of bad luck and no fish, or confirm it and reduce him effectively to a beggar. Three days at sea, and yet Hemingway takes only a hundred short pages to reveal to us every inch of the protagonist’s humanity. By the end of the novel we live and breathe this old man, his fascination with baseball, his sore and bleeding hands, the core of indefatigability in his salt-dried soul.

In writing so powerfully and yet so plainly, Hemingway has confirmed that one needn’t hear a character’s unspoken words, or be told explicitly about their emotions, to understand them through their actions and reactions. The one rhetorical device he uses to plug the gaps is making the old man talk to himself—or, at any rate, to the great fish he fights—but even this is believable, within context. It’s clear that Hemingway was deeply in love with Cuba and its people, and The Old Man and the Sea is his paean to a simpler way of life, a perfection that the cultured novelist could never truly attain.

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All his volcanoes flaming

Klingsor’s Last Summer, by Hermann Hesse

OOP, Picador (1973)

A young boy trespasses in his father’s study, and the consequences of a childish act bear him painfully and fearfully into a kind of emotional adolescence. A tormented soul, having killed his wife and child, escapes to a Mediterranean town. Through a brief relationship with a dancer he achieves a kind of relief from his torture. Finally, the eponymous Klingsor paints, drinks, declaims and debauches his way through the world, like a shooting star blazing across the sky, to a conclusion that only realises itself through his work and his loves.

At first glance this triptych seems to have been assembled as an afterthought, as a compilation rather than a coherent work. But the three stories share deep thematic resemblances, not easily uncovered, rather than any inheritance of characters or plot or surface ideas. All deal with painful transitions and an inner life examined in the same way as one scrapes paint off wooden furniture to see how the items might look without the veneers of civilization. In each, conventional morality comes up against a queer but powerful mixture, primal and implacable, an ideal morality of the soul arising from a mixture of fay ce que voudras and the unsullied aesthetics that a perfect artist might be able to express.

If society as a whole were to adopt this rather Nietzschean paradigm of ethics then anarchy, or at any rate a sort of meritocratic feudalism, might result. But Hesse never suggests that mankind as a whole ought to make such an ethical switch. Instead, this is the unique morality—a spirituality of unique codes—that each of the characters must follow on his own to achieve redemption. The boy eschews good and evil as incomprehensible, but perceives a deeper morality through fear of the chaos that he can instinctively see around the truly moral path; the man rejects his animalistic impulses to hurt and achieve advantage in favour of a dissolution of his own ego; the burnt-out artist surrenders himself to Bacchanalian impulses and the true expression of his soul in his art.

Hesse is invariably heavy-going, with melodramatic dialogue and concentration on the internal experiences of his characters. In fact, the density of his prose seems the greatest in the first story, that of the child: as this is arguably the most autobiographical of the three, that might shed light on its precise delineation of the narrator’s young self. But the effect of the stories is cumulative, amassing a richness of sense and feeling as the book proceeds.Were he not to make allusions and some direct references to Wagner himself then Hesse’s work would probably attract comparisons anyway. Here, lying hidden and quiescent, is a powerful furnace of a work, a crucible, to dip one’s self into and emerge changed by its alchemy.

posted at: 16:59 | path: / h / hesse_hermann | permanent link to this entry

What can be done with less

Borderliners, by Peter Høeg

£6.99, Panther (1996)

Existence on the borders of normality gives three institutionalized children singular viewpoints of how the rest of society works. Peter arrives at Biehl’s academy, at the end of a journey through orphanages and “homes” which has left him secretly, quietly scarred. In a halting, jumpy narration he explains how he meets fellow borderliner Katarina, and is put in charge of August (an aberration whose disruptive, violent presence at the school Peter can scarcely credit). As he probes deeper into the relationship between the school and its charges, Peter seems to uncover a conspiracy that strikes at the heart of every good Cartesian’s avowed disinterest: time itself, it seems, is being used to enslave and reshape children’s minds.

Peter’s eccentric view is that children are being bound with time (or rather, Time) into the system of the academy, and thus normalized for their emergence into the outside world. But this is fatally undermined by his own descent into a fever that seems to have crept up on him while his attentions were diverted towards this phantasmal threat. His conclusions can hardly be unrelated to the upset to his powers of reasoning. Yet Peter is clearly involved in what he sees as a fight to the death with Time, and the jerky, piecemeal retelling of the story is both Høeg’s literary device and Peter’s ultimate weapon against linearity. His fragmented personality is trying to escape its own limitations, and the pain of his reminiscences, by reassembling his experiences at the academy together in this cryptic, roundabout way. In its prevarications might be seen to owe as much to Laurence Sterne as to Ken Kesey.

Borderliners can be read as a Romantic treatment of how the label of “damaged” often precedes real harm to the individual’s soul, or as an indictment of the operation of certain tiers of the welfare state, or even as a story of suspense, as Peter searches for the mystical, magical secret at the heart of the academy but stumbles across a more prosaic, grubby one. It more or less works on each of these levels. But while continuing to entertain and grip the reader, it’s hampered by certain consequences of its nonlinear style. At times it reads like a well-constructed, neatly-seamed story, that has somehow been allowed to relax and unravel slightly before publication: the narrative is giving a little, like seams under strain. Gaps are easily bridged, however, and the archness with which flashbacks are forever partial and obfuscated doesn’t dispel the urge to follow Peter down all the subsided, rubble-strewn pathways he takes; to revisit with him the maze in which he found himself and has attempted to escape, a maze that somehow exists without ever having been planned or built.

posted at: 22:17 | path: / h / hoeg_peter | permanent link to this entry

How many gentle flowers grow

Crome Yellow, by Aldous Huxley

Free, Gutenberg (1999)

Condensed to the basics of its plot, Huxley’s Crome Yellow sounds more like an episode in the H.E. Bates Darling Buds franchise than a biting social satire. Denis Stone pootles over hill and dale on his bicycle, to arrive at Crome, the idyllic country house in “the green heart of England”, not far from the mythical village of Camlet. He joins an assortment of English archetypes—the languid, pale young woman; the horsey lady of the manor; her buffoonish husband; a pink-cheeked earnest bluestocking; a troubled, tempestuous artist; a rational Brunellian technologist; a sweet-talking mercurial womanizer—to lounge about in their little world, listen to some family history, attend a fête, and fall prey to charming misunderstandings.

If the happenings sound inconsequential, it’s because they are; and, with Huxley’s writing, if they are, then they’re meant to be. Not only does the novel draw energy from such small ironic paradoxes, but the very pointlessness of life for Denis, Anne, Priscilla and the rest is simultaneously a dig at their social stratum and a conveniently anonymous prop on which to base any number of subtle character sketches. As Denis with his pretensions to poet angsts and wrangles his way through his internal life, the opinions, mores and beliefs of his era are lifted one by one for examination in the summer sunlight, and hung up for exhibition, like bunting between the supports of the cake tent.

Huxley’s years spent in a country manor are far more conducive to his muse than the metropolitan set that inspired Antic Hay. In Crome Yellow Huxley has written a novel both of its time and of any time. The middle-class farce it evokes is taking place even now, and the elements that have lapsed still deserve just as much satirizing to prevent nostalgia setting in. Suiting its internal contrasts and ironies, this is an important novel masquerading as a trivial one, and it proves as easy to read as it is hard to put down.

posted at: 21:58 | path: / h / huxley_aldous | permanent link to this entry