Spineless Reviews

“Tha mother’s mad, tha knows.”

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson

£6.99, Vintage (1991)

(This review appeared in the ReadReverb newsletter, Feb 3, 2006, and on the ReadReverb website)

So this is what Alan Bennett’s been trying to do with those dreadful bloody Talking Heads all these years. Jeanette Winterson, with her debut novel, has managed to flesh out a rich, tortured, brittle, and above all Northern ageing lady in a way that Bennett never could. Poor Bennett, trying to recreate his mother, or at least rebuild his mother’s shattered mind, while Winterson—and the main character is called Jeanette, notice—breezes through fluid gorgeous prose while fitting together a character both easy to construct and (well, she should be) impossible to convincingly maintain: a harridan, an interfering, self-righteous, bigoted, over-religious Protestant old baggage. But all the time, like the young narrator, you love this dreadful woman as much as you hate her.

Oranges are Not the Only Fruit is a novel about the relationship between a young girl and her mother, as the former tries desperately to become an adult and the latter foot-binding her with edicts and passages from the Bible. None of the saints, though: God forbid. It moves slowly and thematically through the life of the daughter, while the mother tries her hardest to be constant and unyielding, not bending to the looser, more liberal lifestyle her daughter is trying to adopt.

There’s always a lot made about the sex, of course. The torrid antics of the main character, and the hints of it that occur in relation to the local sweetshop owners who, in the words of Mother, “‘dealt in unnatural passions.’ I thought she meant they put chemicals in the sweets.” But through subtle touches—photos disappearing overnight from old albums, hints of affairs that weren’t just with Mother’s “downfall” Pierre—all is linked back to Mother. Mother is the subject, and Jeanette is just a cipher, bringing her Mother to three-dimensional life, created by that Protestant God, almost solely in order to create Mother in turn for the reader. Even in the deepest of despairs Jeanette seems resigned to her fate: as the narrator she can see it coming. But her mother battles on, against Satan and evil, against the fornicators next door and under her very roof. The resignation springs from the knowledge that, whatever Jeanette’s story, her mother’s must be told too.

There are faux-naive sections that cut with the main narrative and are intrusive, gauche and sluggish, and although they develop well through the book—moving from children’s stories through to adolescent girls’ stories—they are juxtaposed clumsily and suddenly, and thus jar with the harshness of Mother’s reality. Ultimately the story is only ever at home in the imperialism of her laws that are not her laws, but what she hears every Sunday, learns from the pastor, picks up from her CB radio as she calls prayerfully into the night, “This is Kindly Light calling Manchester… come in Manchester, this is Kindly Light” and waits forever for the response.

posted at: 22:00 | path: / w / winterson_jeanette | permanent link to this entry

Therefore, he speaks the truth

Billy Liar, by Keith Waterhouse

£6.99, Penguin (1970)

Billy Liar is a fantasist. Trapped in the gauche, garish town of Stradhoughton and longing for escape to London, he invents a cast of characters and an alternative universe or two that gradually turn from comic to tragicomic. Billy is the narrator of his week-long trip, culminating—so he hopes—in a move to London to start writing comedy for Danny Boon, instead of shifting coffins for Shadrack and Duxbury. The real world encroaches on his every dream and fantasy, leaching them of colour, and Billy must fight for the rights to his delusional inner life.

Billy Liar is also a nightmare to review. Iconic, over-analysed, a set text on many a syllabus… people who bought this item also bought A Kestrel for a Knave and Of Mice and Men. Cultural commentator Malcolm Bracewell raves over it in England is Mine. It sits at a turning-point in 20th century culture, post-war, where the cities have suddenly begun to encroach on the towns. Not geographically, yet, but news and disaffected youth have brought the giddy buzz of London too close to Stradhoughton for comfort. The metropolitan and the provincial chafe together, and Billy’s frantic merrygoround life is fired up by the violence of this collision. Regional accents, and the words spoken in them, have begun to lose their sense to the new generation. Connections, Billy realizes, are being unmade as much as they are being made.

Billy Liar’s every step is dogged and sometimes revoked entirely by what he sees as threats to the way of life he wants to pursue. Shadrack, in Billy’s estimation too small a man to keep him captive, tightens his grip all the same. The promotional calendars, never posted, Billy pushes around the countryside like Sysiphus’ rock. And his childlike, innocent revelations to Liz are encroached upon by the smallness of Stamp and his idiot friends. These experiences make no sense as an aspirational journey; instead we should read it as a demonstration of the indefatigability of the human spirit, the meagre but dependable protection that his learning gives him throughout all of his trials. He’s also thoughtful, compassionate—the final scenes with his grandmother and mother are heart-rending—and, in the final analysis, very funny indeed. That is, if there ever were a final analysis of Billy Liar.

posted at: 12:19 | path: / w / waterhouse_keith | permanent link to this entry

This farce: so good

Ronald Fish loves Sue Brown. Hugh Carmody loves Millicent Threepwood. Ronald Fish thinks Sue Brown loves Hugh Carmody, but Percy Pilbeam is the real threat. Lord Galahad Threepwood is writing his memoirs, the mere prospect of which sends Lady Constance into spasms. Speaking of spasms, if Baxter doesn’t return to the position of personal secretary at Blandings Hall, which Carmody has filled since the unfortunate flowerpot incident, her ladyship will have one, or at any rate wish one upon Emsworth, lord of the hall. But Baxter is too busy stealing that manuscript, while Carmody steals his lordship’s prize pig; or did Sir Gregory steal the animal, to distract from Pilbeam, under his employ, finding those damn memoirs that he too wants destroyed? Well, over all this nonsense presides the woolgathering Lord Emsworth; or at least he would, if Lady Constance didn’t try to do it for him. Besides, everyone knows Beach the butler is really in charge. But now, suddenly, he’s hiding the pig and saving the manuscript and matchmaking the couple and fixing the drinks: something has to give.

Being spontaneously farcical is easy, as almost every character in Summer Lighting proves to him or herself sooner or later. Composing and executing the perfect farce as a writer, however, takes skill, effort and an innate recognition of the perfect balance of all your characters’ desires and detractions against each other. The result of Wodehouse’s hard work whizzes round at breakneck pace like a crazed fairground ride, out of control and with the glorious, whirring machinery just visible as it pirouettes its way down the hillside into the lake. The stored energy is released in a rush, and what could have been a foolish throwaway holiday read is both that and a complicated, enjoyable firework display.

The novel is eventually, easily, discarded. Of course: that’s the point. But the short stories accompanying the novel, bound together in an out-of-print Heron edition, are a little too easily forgotten. The series, based around Lord Emsworth and his wayward son Freddie, disappoints. Each one’s brevity reduces the possibility of complexity and energy that makes Wodehouse worth reading. You don’t see the three chapters of winding up and clicking pieces in place; then any unwinding happens all too quickly and the pace is all wrong. Still, Wodehouse’s writing still bangs a gong for a genre often condemned for its shallowness and silliness. Or was that Beach, calling us in for another course?

posted at: 20:21 | path: / w / wodehouse_pelham_grenville | permanent link to this entry

Girl, uninterpreted

Morvern Callar, by Alan Warner

£6.99, Vintage (1996)

(This review appeared in the ReadReverb newsletter, Feb 17, 2006, and on the ReadReverb website)

If you arrived home to find your boyfriend had slashed his own throat, shortly after chopping his own hand off with a machete, what would you do? Probably, not the same as Morvern Callar does. She switches on her walkman, steps over him (avoiding the blood) and carries on as if nothing has happened: tidying the body when it becomes necessary, keeping her shift at the local supermarket, and going out drinking with her best friend Lanna. Only later does she discover that, along with a suicide note and all his money, her boyfriend has left her a book, waiting on the computer’s hard drive to be published. There’s even the beginnings of a publishing contract. All she has to do is print it out, maybe changing the name on it first…. Oh, and there’s the matter of the body as well, of course.

In a dialect-heavy style popularized by Irvine Welsh and Alasdair Gray among others, Alan Warner lets Morvern drag us stumbling through the sleepy, characterful village where she grew up and lives; to Spain in search of music, a scene, that intangible togetherness of which ecstasy convinces; and to London, for the more down-to-earth motive of passing off her boyfriend’s book as her own. Her uncomfortably close, semi-sexual relationship with Lanna waxes and wanes, strengthened by the prospect of a holiday, weakened by accusations of infidelity. Morvern, though, remains utterly impenetrable, like a puzzle with a piece missing. Indeed, explanatory chunks of this novel seem to be absent: perhaps Morvern, conjured beside Warner’s writing desk, removed incriminating passages herself in a fit of mischief. It’s a shame, because the remainder is enjoyably macabre and threatening in a Lynchian mode. But it’s also infuriatingly aware of its own mysteriousness, and is equally Lynchian in that it reads like its plot arc was cut down in its prime.

Morvern is in some ways a Holly Golightly for the 1990s, transplanting the brittleness of Capote’s heroine into rave scenes, explicit sex and Club 18-30 holidays. But for Morvern there is no moment of true fragility that might hook the sympathies of the reader. When the emotional distance is reduced—during her biggest row with Lanna—the intellectual distance is in a way increased to compensate, as one has to rapidly reassess all her actions and reactions so far. At one point a Spanish hotel clerk lets slip that “callar” translates as “to not speak”, and Warner is probably using him to lay his own cards on the table: Morvern’s allure lies in the thoughts she leaves undeclared. But in such behaviour as hers there’s a fine line between Callar and callous. Perhaps in those chapters and pages, that we can only guess at by their stark absence, we’re actually told which one she really is.

posted at: 14:26 | path: / w / warner_alan | permanent link to this entry

His is the Hand that writes

The Island of Doctor Moreau, by H. G. Wells

£5.99, Phoenix (1993)

Wells is rightly considered one of the founding fathers of modern science fiction. While there are many proverbial grandfathers—Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, Stevenson, the strain of occult that pervades pre-Victorian detective fiction—Wells took many existing strands of the gothic and the sinister, and twisted them into a structure capable of supporting the sudden growth of the genre in the twentieth century. He managed to plait together three apparently irreconcilable ideas concerning science: the optimism of the scientist, the whole of the physical world ripe for conquering; the pessimism of the realist, who foresees the ultimate impact of science as being negligible on the development or indeed redemption of the human race; and the antagonism of the naturalist, who saw science overturning the order of the universe with little understanding of the potential consequences. All of his scientists initially embody the first notion; the morals of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds might be seen to imply the second; but The Island of Doctor Moreau is without doubt an example of the third.

The narrator Prendick has found himself delivered to some Micronesian backwater after being recovered from a shipwreck, and soon discovers Moreau and his right-hand man Montgomery indulging in hideous vivisection, reshaping animals of all species to both look and behave more like men. To the two scientists their own work appears progressive and of little account, respectively. Other areas on the island have been colonized by past experiments, a society as feral as it is feudal, and governed by Moreau’s mantra of the Law. In his construction of Moreau’s isolated dystopia, Wells is in some ways cautioning against not merely scientific hubris, but social hubris as well. Moreau has been attempting to refashion an ecosystem in his own image, that of man: in a sense, his created community consists entirely of reminders that such homogeneous ideals as the nation state will invariably turn out dysfunctional and cryptofactional. Ironically too, although he never admits it outright, Moreau has failed in every single experiment he has conducted on the island, in both humane and practical senses: without supervision and the pervasive fear of Moreau and his “house of pain” the beast-men invariably become less like men and more like beasts.

At no point in the novel does Wells seriously attempt to engender suspense in the reader. Although his unlikely hero Prendick speculates on, and occasionally pre-empts his own relating of, the fall to which Moreau is heading, this is partly little more than a gossipy confirmation and some of Prendick’s many mental wanderings. The nature of Moreau’s experiments is confirmed matter-of-factly perhaps a third of the way into the novel, and is only ever an explicit horror. Instead, Wells works in a potboiler–thriller mode, similar to John Buchan, providing action and excitement in which, against all expectations, he subtly drops ethical and moral weights which seem to disappear from view, but nonetheless give the novel substance and force. Wells may have hoped that the genre his child would continue to ask philosophical questions, rendering the ethically complex palatable with a framework of slightly silly fisticuffs and scientification. Like many of his scientists, Wells was an incorrigible optimist; perhaps had he himself had a time machine, he might have felt otherwise.

posted at: 21:10 | path: / w / wells_herbert_george | permanent link to this entry

What a terrible mess we’ve gotten in

Laughing Gas, by P. G. Wodehouse

£9.99, Everyman (2001)

Earl Reginald “Reggie” Havershot, dispatched to America against his will in order to save his dypsomaniac cousin from the clutches of both liquor and the woman to which he wishes to become engaged, finds himself in the same dentist’s waiting room as child star Joey Cooley. Both are to have a tooth out, and both find themselves under general anaesthetic in adjoining surgeries. But Reggie wakes up horrified to find that he and young Cooley have somehow swapped bodies during the otherwise routine clinical process of tooth extraction. Cooley, he soon finds out, is bolting around the place in the bulky body of the aristocrat bopping the noses of people he hates, and the police are gradually forming a pattern, while the Earl is prisoner to Joey’s curls, his miserable schedule of pranks and public appearances, and the curtailment of his adult activities by the formidable Miss Brinkmeyer and the surprisingly sinister aspect of his fiancée, April June. As the scales fall from his eyes he soon realises: he needs to get out, get his body, and get back to England.

Wodehouse spends much of the brazenly hackneyed Laughing Gas perversely turning his own techniques inside out: a rescue attempt aided by the apparently friendly butler ends in a failure that Jeeves could never conscience; the lead character ends up (apologies for spoiling what plot there is) engaged, albeit not to the quite obvious disaster he sets out to court. Moreover, he happily shatters some of the golden rules of farces. To keep up the pace, they ought to resort to high-speed, physical dynamics. Characters hare around, fall over, drop into the shrubbery, are chased by thundering, brachiating Spodes. However, Wodehouse has prevented himself from resorting to such literal speed increases, as the Earl is frequently trapped against his adult will by Cooley’s guardians. The result is a very stationary novel, compared to Jeeves & Wooster, or even to the Blandings series.

In places this static method works: the tension of the Earl bouncing off the walls, as Cooley in the Earl’s body bounces his fist off his erstwhile oppressors with gleeful, childish and increasingly illegal abandon, coils and uncoils like a spring, keeping the story moving even when the Earl does not. But frequently it feels as though Wodehouse’s usually powerful stroke of farce is treading water. The great strength of Wodehousian fiction lies in the author’s ability to tell a cracking story, with sparkling characters, in which nothing actually very much happens; that the lack of plot is almost the point, or that the plot has a lack of a point. But plot is not the same as activity, any more than steel girders or a network of lead counterweights are like popping, fizzing champagne. The moral behind the relative flatness of Laughing Gas is: if you’re not accomplishing anything, it’s best to look busy.

posted at: 21:02 | path: / w / wodehouse_pelham_grenville | permanent link to this entry