Travelling in shadow with John Le Carre

A friend of mine’s father considers that there is no finer novel nor more complete intellectual exercise than the wonderful Tinker Tailor Solider Spy. Although I don’t think I would go quite as far as that, I am very, very fond of it and very much in love with its hero, George Smiley. It came as a surprise therefore to recently discover that there is Smiley beyond the famous trilogy of Tinker, Tailor, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People. Two rather splendid novellas, Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality kept me company on a recent trip to Italy.

In Call for the Dead, Smiley finds himself investigating the death of a civil servant who has only just been subjected (and passed) a security check by Smiley himself. He has apparently killed himself, but Smiley smells a rat and chases down the truth from leafy suburbia to dingy London pubs and Thames side garages. He is nearly killed twice but manages to survive with his wits, his outstanding spy-craft and the help of Mendal and Guillam (trusty side-kicks who will be familiar to Tinker, Tailor fans). I read the book in a hill-top town called Ravello on the Amalfi coast on a day when the whole place was blanketed in cloud and I think that rather helped me to get in the mood. I could just about see the page although neither I nor anyone else could see normal things like buildings and pavements.

The day after (and with a little more sunshine), I dived straight into A Murder of Quality. This is a strange novella for Smiley to have become embroiled in as it is really a straight forward murder mystery, with elements of spy wallpaper. It is not about espionage. Rather it is about the brutal murder of a non-conformist teacher’s wife in a public school. It deals, as Le Carre is wont to deal (and indeed, there is no reason why he shouldn’t) with the overwhelming significance of class in British society – its power to shape and distort and dehumanise.

These are simple easy books but they show how Le Carre never lets his standards slip. The writing is fluid and excellent, always saying just the right amount and never too much. His books are always about something and he never falls into the trap of thinking that because he has a genre that means that there is no need for substance or thought.

Smiley is a character who has repaid strenuous effort and thought on his creator’s part. He is a complex and flawed wonder. One can’t help but slightly take the impression that Smiley is an idealised version of Le Carre himself. He is divided between the intellectually curious academic and the sharp-eyed, sharp-witted memoriser of dangers, the wounded cuckold with much to prove and the Smiley who actually wants to win and to be the best. His social position is deliberately ambiguous, as Le Carre puts it in Call for the Dead “Smiley, without school, parents, regiment or trade, without wealth or poverty, travelled without labels in the guard’s van of the social express”. His cleverness and reserved nature and loyalty to those who deserve it make him lovable, but equally he is a most flawed hero. Both Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality testify to this. I will not say how as I don’t want to spoil the books for readers of this blog – but he emerges at the end of both of them a little more shadowy than before.

Readers of this blog may recall that I have had a foray down the path of espionage before, and very much enjoyed it, here.

As usual there are other excellent opinions around. In particular from Double O Section and From Smiler with Love. I have included a picture of Le Carre and of Ravello, but for the purposes of this blog, you will have to imagine it dripping in cloud.

Happy (belated) birthday, Charles Dickens, you put this blogger to shame

I realise that I must be possessed of the procrastination gene. The reason for this is that during the international Charles Dickens is 200-fest which took place in February, I was actually reading (courtesy of a kind gift bearer) Claire Tomalin’s door stop biography Charles Dickens – a life. Yes, reader, I was so near to actually blogging on a topical subject that others were thinking of *at the same time*. However, the glare of the popular was all too much, and somehow it is now, in late March that I am finally cogitating over what I really thought of it.

When it comes to Charles Dickens, it is fair to say that I have history. That history is that I love his work, for all of its sentimentality, I absolutely love it. Also, I have always got the impression that, for all of the laudable charity work and modernity of the man, he was in many respects cruel and difficult. Tomalin’s book has not disabused me of either of these views, and so it has not revolutionised what I think about Dickens. As usual she is a cracking biographer, who sets the scene before her reader and does not make too many judgements.

There were probably 2 major revelations, 1 of which puts me to shame and the other of which is just a point of interest, for your delectation.

First, Tomalin really brings out and hammers home how astonishingly prolific Dickens was. Not for him, putting off a measly blog entry for 2 months. He could write 2 classics at once and it is not as though there were major sacrifices of quality or depth. No, he was just a remarkably fast and industrious worker. I am shamed, but also inspired.

Secondly, so much ink has been spilt on Dickens’ relationship with women, whether they be wives or daughters or mistresses or whores. What Tomalin does, which for me was new, was to look at his relationships with men.  One gets the impression that although he liked a good time, and his male friends had to be able to drink and carouse with the best of them – he did not like to be outshone. I found myself thinking that this attitude was somehow pre-figured by his troubled relationship with his charming, hopeless, feckless father. Dickens’ best friend, John Forster, was in some respects the most significant personal relationship of his life. It was certainly the longest lived and the least chequered. It suggests a trust and candour on Dickens’ part that I did not find so much evidence of in his other relationships.

Tomalin’s account of the breakdown of Dickens’ marriage is engaging. I have used the word “breakdown” but that is somehow wrong. The reality, for those who have not read about it, is that Dickens was married young to an apparently sweet although not enormously interesting young woman. After 22 years of married life, and upteen children, Dickens simply left her and lived in barely concealed sin with a young actress called Nellie Ternan. Claire Tomalin’s The Invisible Woman: the story of Nellie Ternan and Charles Dickens, next stop in the biography train, methinks.

Once on a blog on fire

In about 2000 Once In A House On Fire was everywhere, like a track that everyone was listening to except me. In book shops and coffee shops and on buses, the lot. I was working like a maniac for my A Levels at that time, on the final straight to my long time ambition, to get into Oxford. What with Chaucer and John Donne and Suetonius and John Stuart Mill and all the rest, a passing interest in Andrea Ashworth’s memoir, available in all good book shops and not the subject of an imminent examination, was put on the deal-with-me-another-day shelf.

That “other day” has just come to pass, and 12 years after first deciding upon it, I have read Once in a house on fire. It has set me on fire too. It is a candid, monstrous and poetic source of truth and light and I am amazed by it.

Andrea Ashworth’ story begins when she is 5 years old and her painter and decorator father dies in a freak accident, leaving her young mother a widow with two little girls to look after alone. There then follows a tale of two step-fathers, of beatings and punchings and unending anxiety. In addition to the violence, there is sexual abuse, although this is less serious and shorter in duration. It feels wrong to be calibrating such things but there you are. Andrea’s mother shrinks from a nice looking good time girl to a bruised and emaciated desperate heap of whom even kindly relations despair. All of this takes place against a backdrop of grinding poverty, potato dinners and periodical homelessness.

Most of us can remember things from childhood, but Ashworth seems able to remember things as they happened. Her memories do not have the feeling of having been re-processed and squished into convenient shapes and sizes. They are what they are. They are both real and urgent.

Like that other memoir of domestic warfare Chelsea Child, there is a mismatch between the deprived circumstances of the writer in childhood and her ability to write so fluently in adulthood: one is left wondering how she managed it. The big difference is that in the case of Once In A House On Fire, we know from the inside flap that Ashworth is (or at any rate was) a junior research fellow at Oxford. Therefore, we know that despite it all, somehow, she must find a means of escape. As a result, I for one raced through the narrative, looking for where the road out must be.

Truth, it turns out is stranger than fiction, and Ashworth was never on the receiving end of a “big break”. There were no towering intellectuals in the family or the neighbourhood, no amazingly inspirational teachers. She did get a scholarship, but could not take it up. So, she went to a bog standard school like all of her neighbours. Hers was the triumph of an outstanding mind against a sea of troubles and the terrible truth is that it must have been in some way attributable to those troubles. She is not too shy to acknowledge that.

The strange love and attachment which the abused feels for the abuser is dealt with – both in the person of Ashworth’s mother, and in the child herself who admits to remember the pulls of love towards men who beat her up and treated her as a household slave. There is nothing shy or pedestrian about this novel, and I find that I can’t say more than that.

Curiouser and curiouser: A Book of Secrets by Michael Holroyd

I have always deeply loved the work of Michael Holroyd. On this blog, I have reviewed Basil Street Blues, and I have also enjoyed, but in a non-blogging way, his biographies of Augustus John, Lytton Strachey and his “group” biography of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their families. All of this Holroyd mania is based on something more than the simple fact that I enjoy reading about the people and periods that this writer addresses. I also find his narrative voice funny and intelligent and humane. But, even beyond that, the work of Michael Holroyd brings out some secret childhood part of me that does not otherwise get much of an airing. The reality is that if life had been different, I would vey much have liked to be a private detective.

I imagine myself, possibly in the 1920s or ‘30s with a flat in London, armed only with an A to Z, a good knowledge of Somerset House and an ability to get chatting to anyone. Like all romantic detectives, I believe that most of the time, things are traceable, and one discovery leads to another. If it doesn’t, then I am content to consign it to history. That appears to be how Michael Holroyd gathers information. He never seems to be in an awful hurry and he accepts, as all thinking biographers must, that there will be gaps, probably better described as gaping chasms, in his knowledge.

The reason for this gushing introduction is the enormous sense of sadness I felt, in reading the final chapter of his latest offering A Book of Secrets; Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers, in which he describes it as “my last book”.

A Book of Secrets is about a collection of women, books and a place, that all connect to Ernest Beckett, second Baron Grimthorne, a 19th Century banker and have-a-go politician. Beckett had a wife and children and he also had mistresses and they had children. Holroyd focuses on those who resided and were born on the wrong side of the blanket. He alights first on Beckett’s mistress, Eve Fairfax whose bust was modelled by Rodin during her glory days and sold to a museum in Johannesburg in more straightened times. Then he moves to the potential offspring of a liaison between Beckett’s son and a married woman (whom he later married himself). From this his focus falls on Beckett’s most famous illegitimate daughter, Violet Trefusis nee Keppel. His adventures weave in and around the lovely Villa Cimbrone, near Ravello and take in the modern day survivors of his protagonists, both biological and emotional.

The story of Alice Keppel and her daughter Violet Trefeusis is well known already, as is the affair between Violet and Vita Sackville-West.

Really, I was most interested in Eve Fairfax. She fascinated me because I had never heard of her, and she seemed to sit on the edge of so many things. She appears to have suffered greatly for the fact that Beckett never married her and nor did anyone else. As a result, she ended her life destitute and rightly described as a “genteel tragedy”. She was positionless and that was her problem. Her contribution to history appears to have been an enormous scrap book, in which the great and the good were encouraged to write and stick things. We must assume that many of them did so under duress and with a degree of embarrassment. By the time Eve dies, she is 106 years old, and I almost wept for the sadness of her life. I felt that Holroyd was completely right in his comment that although she lived in Victorian and Modern times, she seemed to belong to neither.

A Book of Secrets is exactly that. It is by no means all worked out, but the mysteries are there, as is the desperate desire to know about oneself and others. It has been a pleasure reading it and I recommend it warmly.

Will anyone called VESEY please stand up?

As some readers of this blog may have picked up, I really love names. I like to know why names were given to people and where they come from. If you had occassion (and I don’t suggest that you would) to give me a cheque, I would almost certainly take the opportunity to ask you what your middle names are.

Thus, in reading Elizabeth Taylor’s 1951 novel Hide and Seek, I spent a good deal of time pondering on the main male character’s name. Who ever heard of a man called Vesey? I certainly haven’t. I don’t even know how to say it. I wonder whether it is “vee-see” or “ve-see” or what. The name, although it is not really important speaks of the authenticity of the book. The characters are not made to please you, but readin of them one gets a powerful sense that they are real.

The novel concerns the love between Harriet and Vesey. Harriet and Vesey belong to the generation of people born in the early 1920s. In both cases, their parents were both more revolutionary and more conservative than they themselves were. Harriet’s mother was a suffragette and is appalled at the lack of ambition and idealism exhibited by her daughter. At the same time, she is a social conservative, desperate for Harriet to be settled. Vesey’s mother is a much more louche character but is not really interested in him at all. His aunt, who is to an extent in loco parentis to him, looks upon him as a dangerously radical person in the house and a hopeless layabout outside of it. Harriet and Vesey, for their part are twice embarrassed, first by parental exhibitionism and second by their own failure to really “do” anything.

Vesey seems confident, but he isn’t really. He talks a pretty big game, but in reality he lets himself and other people down on most, if not all, occasions. Harriet doesn’t seem confident and she isn’t confident. They are both crying out for a normal life, preferably in one another’s arms. Their chances seem to die on the alter of pride and repression and because neither is bold enough.

Thus, like many ladies before and since, Harriet marries another, less for love and more because nobody else has turned up. Her husband, Charles pursues her slowly and tenaciously. Rather than seducing her, he persuades her, and she is persuaded because she believes that Vesey is gone for ever.

In fact, he is not gone, but I will not spoil the book for those who have not yet been delighted by it. It develops into a beautifully balanced study on marriage and fidelity and love and I enjoyed it very much. It is all the more powerful as Elizabeth Taylor had a passionate affair during her own marriage (described by Nicola Beauman in her excellent biography The Other Elizabeth Taylor).

It is unquestionably well written and well constructed. I found myself caring about the characters. As a study on the nature of marriage, its powers and its frailties, I must say that it has not knocked the wonderful Someone at a Distance off my top spot.

Other excellent opinions can be found at Frisbee, Daydreams and Delights, Harriet Devine and Book Group of One.

Norwegian Wood: too much sex, not enough cats

Last year a truly lovely Japanese lady, who I now miss very much, introduced me to the work of Haruki Murakami. She recommended Kafka on the Shore which I read slowly but with great enjoyment. It is the kind of book that surprises you at every turn but not in the usual way. It is not a case of dramatic “you-didn’t-see-me-did-you” twists. Rather, it is like stepping through a series of new paradigms, each slightly stranger than the last. Just the sort of thing I like. And there are talking cats, so you can’t ask more than that.

Because it is all so odd, I decided not to jump into Murakami feet first. I thought that he is probably the mind of writer who repays careful and considered consumption.

Thus I find myself, well over a year after Kafka, having read my second Murakami, Norwegian Wood.

As you may be able to guess from the title, this novel has its feet planted firmly in the 1960s. It is the nostalgic memoir of an enigmatic student in Tokyo, Toru, who is up to his ears in free love and student protests. He is smart and interesting and as his girlfriends comment, he does have a funny, spare kind of way of talking. His problem is that his best friend has committed suicide and Toru has responded by, essentially falling in love with the best friend’s girlfriend.

It does not take long to work out that the girlfriend is none too well either. Through her Toru meets a kindly middle age woman whose life as a mildly unhappy provincial piano teacher has been destroyed by false accusations of sexual assault from an adolescent girl.

At the same time, Toru starts seeing another girl who accosts him as he eats alone in a restaurant. Midori is vibrant and funny and seems very real. She talks about sex incessantly and in great detail. If she were a modern day girl, she would definitely be a text-pest. Apart from the girls, and Toru’s conservatively minded room mate, whom he names “storm trooper” to amuse others, Toru only really has one friend. That friend is an almost pneumatically promiscuous clever clogs called Nagasawa. Nagasawa has the sweetest girl in town and cheats on her all the while, except that he doesn’t really see it as cheating.

As I read, I imagined Toru as a young man, good looking but not extremely so, ordinarily dressed. He is standing up and surrounded by the girls and the dead friend and Nagasawa and they are all prodding him, trying to push him their way. He has before him the living and the dead and the nearly dead as well as the pursuit of love and the pursuit of non stop you know what.

I enjoyed his tale and thought it was good. I am not sure that I thought it was more than good though. I was surprised that it was a straight story, albeit quite a poetic one. I am ultimately saddened by the lack of talking cats.
For many, Norwegian Wood is their favourite Murakami and there are plenty of other, differing opinions to be found. Some of them can be seen at: Katie’s Book Blog, Steve Reads and Middlebrow Magazine.

Good morning, Mexico City

OK - so I am not actually there now, and this picture is about 3 weeks old. Still cool though...