What Book to Read?

Reading The Snow Queen, which was published in 2003, made me realise that it really does help if you have a particular interest in the subject matter that is central to a story. I recently wrote that I wasn’t interested in the haute couture described in Rosalie Ham’s The Dressmaker, and didn’t enjoy the book as much as friends who did have an interest in it. It probably doesn’t work like that for great books, but maybe it does for rather more ordinary books like this one. This time the focus is on ballet and Adelaide, and I’m very interested to read about both these topics. Be warned if you aren’t.

Set in the 1970s, the story is shared by two main characters. Edward Larwood has returned to Adelaide to take charge of the nascent state ballet company, Ballet South, after a successful career as a dancer and choreographer overseas. Galina Koslova is a retired ballerina who trained in Russia and briefly ran her own ballet company as well as a ballet school in Adelaide before marrying and settling down there. Teddy and Galina have unfinished business; she feels he betrayed her when they were younger. She writes and account of her life which includes her view of him; she hopes to turn Adelaide’s arts community against him. From this memoir we learn of her training at the Imperial Ballet School in St Petersburg, the impact of the Russian revolution, joining the Ballet Russes, and being stranded in Australia at the outbreak of war. Larwood returned to Adelaide briefly after the war, and danced in her ballet company until their falling-out. The Snow Queen is a ballet created for Galina’s company.

McConnochie is a very competent writer, and she’s been quite clever with Galina’s voice. ‘You think my English is not good enough,’ she says to her husband, who replies ‘you’re not really a word person, are you?’ So it reads realistically that Galina’s memoir is a bit stilted. She is also quite clearly an unreliable narrator; Teddy recollects the same events quite differently, so we know that any truth lies somewhere outside their version of events. Galina and Teddy personify different approaches to ballet, and to life. Galina has fully imbibed the rigorous discipline of the Russian system, where technique is everything; self-expression comes a poor second. ‘Before you ever get to dance, to leap about, to express yourself (there is such an emphasis these days on expressing yourself), you must learn the basics,’ she writes. Teddy, on the other hand, has presence and charisma to cover his dislike of hard work. Galina wants to be the best. Teddy wants to be loved. McConnochie presents a thoughtful psychological picture of the clash that arises when these two world views collide. Can they ever be reconciled?

Combining the present, the memoir, and the characters’ own recollections of the past, makes for a rather untidy story, but I guess it works well enough. There are clunky bits, like Teddy’s relations with his family, which are very two dimensional. A homosexual encounter by the River Torrens is probably only there because of a notorious homosexual drowning in that river in 1972. I think the section dealing with Galina’s company is a bit too sketchy; where, for example, could she possibly have got all those dancers from in Adelaide? It’s true that a number of the Ballet Russes dancers chose to remain in Australia after the outbreak of war, but I doubt there were enough ballet schools of sufficient standing – certainly not in Adelaide – to make up even a part-time company like the one McConnocnie describes. (In fact the history of Galina’s company is rather like that of the Borovansky Ballet Company which began in Melbourne in 1939 as a part-time company and grew into the major ballet company in Australia before its closure and the foundation of the Australian Ballet in 1962. McConnochie seems to suggest that the Borovansky company formed well after Galina’s company.) But this is just me being pedantic; the story is ultimately quite satisfying.

So did I enjoy the ballet? Yes, there are some interesting reflections on the practice of ballet, on choreography, and on the role of ballet as a part of the national consciousness. Teddy thinks dance can help ‘uncover the real Australia’, a fairly trite insight perhaps, but the book would be weaker without the discussion, particularly as the 1970s were a time of burgeoning national consciousness in the arts. And what about her treatment of Adelaide? McConnochie was brought up in Adelaide, but was only just born at the time she is writing about. Her view is fairly stereotypical: the boring provincial city, the arts-supporting community largely made up of philistine society ladies, the ballet-going public preferring the old standard classical ballets to anything more modern. It’s a pity she didn’t populate her Adelaide with more interesting characters, particularly as the Galina she describes would never have fitted into that society in the way she has her do after she finishes her dancing career. And don’t sneer at audiences who loved Swan Lake; I remember queuing for hours to get tickets. And there was a embryonic avant garde in Adelaide; I also remember the ballet school I attended putting on a production of L’enfant et les sortilèges, set to Ravel’s spikey music. McConnochie could have done a bit more with Adelaide. But then I would say that, wouldn’t I?

There’s not much about McConnochie on the internet; here’s her Wikipedia entry. She was named one of the Best Young Australian Novelists by The Sydney Morning Herald on the strength of this book.

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David Malouf is one of Australia’s most accomplished writers. This is his 2009 rendering of sections of Homer’s Iliad– roughly, a much abbreviated version of books 16 to 23. But it explores details not in the original, and exhibits a grace and imagination that befits both the story and the writer.

Ransom deals with the death of Patroclus, Achilles’s battle with Hector, his abuse of Hector’s body and Priam’s recovery of it. This last makes up Part 3 of the book, and goes well beyond Homer’s version. When I started reading, I couldn’t help feeling an overwhelming weariness in the face of the apparently never-ending horrors of what men do to each other in war. Why write about it again? But as I read further, the beauty of Malouf’s writing, and the essential humanity of this retelling of the story drew me in.

Malouf was first attracted to the story of the invasion of Troy by the Greeks when he heard part of it as a child during World War II in Brisbane – then the headquarters of General MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the war in the Pacific. The story seemed to him the archetype of all stories about war, especially as at time he didn’t know how the war on his doorstep would end. So rather than writing something new, he wrote about the first war to appear in literature. ‘There’s little new that matters under the sun,’ writes David Marr, reflecting on Malouf’s work. ‘We are what we have always been, what moves us has always moved us; we’re writing now as we have always written.’ Malouf says that the ‘whole story of the Trojan war is really central to my notion in terms of feeling of what war is and what the vulnerability is of people, women or children, but also soldiers in war. So it’s haunted me for a long time.’

Malouf believes that since Achilles and Priam were going to come together at the climax of the book, ‘the reader must know as much about those two people as possible’. Achilles is a very divided figure; a hero, the greatest warrior of the Greek army, but also in his grief and anger, capable of doing un-heroic things, as can be seen from his treatment of Hector’s body, as well as sulking in his tent and letting Patroclus fight in his place. He knows that he will die in the war – his mother, a goddess, has told him so – and it becomes a question of how he will be remembered. He is if you like ransoming his future reputation. Future remembrance is also Priam’s concern. He knows that ultimately Troy will fall and he will die, but in addition to acting out of genuine grief over the death of his son Hector, and his outrage at the desecration of his body, he wants to do something that he will be remembered for. He is offering a ransom for his son in a conventional way, but his manner of doing it is startling – an act of moral rather than physical courage.

But Malouf didn’t want just to re-tell the story; ‘I wanted to deal with different aspects of stories from the ones that Homer deals with,’ he says. Thus he writes about Priam’s childhood, and the chances that brought him to the throne of Troy. He also makes it clear that Priam’s choice of how to act in this instance is quite revolutionary. I think the carter who transports the ransom – and certainly his mule – are also from Malouf’s imagination.

I’ve said the writing is beautiful. It is simple and clear, yet quite profound. One random example can show this. Priam is trying to explain to his wife Hecuba his reasons for making his moral act to ransom Hector’s body; he is telling her how it felt to be a child in danger. ‘Imagine, then,’ he says, ‘what is was like to be that child. To actually stand as I did at the centre of it, of what was not a story, not yet, but a real happening, all noise and smoke and panicky confusion. To know nothing of what is to come and simply be there – one of a horde of wailing infants, some no more than three or four years old who have been driven like geese out of the blazing citadel, along with rats, mice and a dozen other small, terrified creatures, all squealing underfoot.’ The precision of the detail is important in evoking sympathy, as is the use of italics. But it’s more than that. Somehow it just gels –the right word in the right place.

It is now agreed that Homer’s story has a basis in fact. As I read about Priam’s expedition to the Greek camp, I was sharply reminded of the landscape of Troy as it is today. The seashore, where the Greeks were camped, is further away now than it was then; his journey would have been considerably longer. The archaeological site that contains the ruins of Troy sit in the middle of open country, with a scattering of olive trees; it is easy to understand how Troy simple disappeared from history until its rediscovery in 1871 by Heinrich Schliemann, the archaeologist/adventurer who essentially looted the site, carrying off what may or may not have been Priam’s treasure. The entrance to the site sports a giant wooden horse – a part of the history of the Trojan Wars that comes from Virgil’s Aeneid, not Homer’s Iliad.

You can read more about David Malouf here. And here’s an interesting interview with him about the book, from which the above quotations are taken. I’ve also reviewed another book which has Achilles and Patroclus at its centre: The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller.

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I first came across Bryan Appleyard in 2009 when I read his article in the Sunday Times repudiating his previous scepticism about global warming. He is a columnist who often questions the dogmatism of science, so this was a significant conversion. What brought about the change? ‘I exposed myself to any journalist’s worst nightmare — very thoughtful, intelligent people.’ He’s written several non-fiction books, mostly about some aspect of science, and this is his second novel. It is only indirectly about science.

Bedford Park (2013) begins in 1912 with Calhoun Kidd on his way back to America after spending more than twenty years in England. It then jumps back to his original decision to quit America, his arrival in London and his reluctance to leave it – a kind The Europeans in reverse. I say this because while the book is clearly a satire on the English literary establishment of the day, I’m not always sure just who or what is being poked fun at. Henry James gets a mention, but doesn’t appear in person. Cal is the very opposite of the stereotypical American – he is languid and indecisive. Soon after he arrives, he finds the murdered body of an acquaintance, but is he too ineffectual to do anything about it?

Bedford Park is a real place, developed on the (then) western edge of London in the 1880s. It was seen as a place for residents to escape from the dirty and crowded inner city, the first of the ‘garden suburbs’. And a number of members of the cultural elite lived there or frequently visited it, including the Yeats family and their poetical son Willie, G.K Chesterton, Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad. The Russian anarchists Stepniak and Peter Kropotkin frequented it as well. In the book, Cal meets all of these real people, and others; indeed, an important factor in his decision to stay in England is an encounter with Maud Gonne, Yeats’s muse, and reputedly the most beautiful woman in Europe. He also becomes friends with the editors of two rival periodicals, W.T. Stead of the Pall Mall Gazette, and Frank Harris of the Fortnightly Review. Some readers may enjoy this; others may find it all too clever by half. I probably missed heaps of sly references.

In an article about the actual Bedford Park, Appleyard seems quite sympathetic to the place, but in the book he emphasises its ‘artistic and political pretensions’. These range from a sort of folksy ‘merry England’ through spiritualism, with Blavatsky and Bessant, to a vague sense of the inevitability of scientific progress. ‘It is a place of art and genius … These suburbs are the way of the future,’ says Cal. ‘It is here that history is being nursed into being,’ says Ford Madox Ford. None of the real characters is treated seriously. Where does the science come in? W.T. Stead claims that spiritualism has a scientific basis, which is clearly nonsense, yet Cheiro, the Irish palm reader (a real person) gives an extraordinarily accurate reading of Cal’s character. This is contrasted with the view of one of the made up characters who has an equally unscientific view of the powers of electricity – but he knows that he doesn’t really understand it, and has real insights into the pretentions of Bedford Park. This exemplifies one of the things that puzzles me about satire: what is being mocked, and what is not? Is there any solid ground for the reader, or is nothing to be taken at face value? I think here it’s the latter, which leaves me flailing round trying to get a grip on what Appleyard is really saying. Though maybe he’s not really saying anything, except that the search for certainly is futile.

Despite the interest of real characters and real places, I have another problem with the book: the plot is thin to the point of being non-existent. It’s hard to write a compelling narrative about a weak man who is ‘blown from side to side like a falling leaf’. Throughout the story the insubstantial Cal is contrasted with Frank Harris, who is blunt and forceful, but his actions are too chaotic to give structure to the story. Instead, we have several set pieces, which are versions of things that did happen, but seem there for effect rather than narrative drive. These include a séance with Madam Blavatsky, a Festival of Healing, and visits to the Bioscope to see moving film and the Olympics at White City in 1908, all historically interesting, but not satisfying as a plot.

There is a twist in the book which I suppose could be called playful, and which isn’t apparent (or wasn’t apparent to me) until you read the appendix at the end. Don’t cheat and read it first – though one review I saw stated it as a known part of the story. It turns on a detail that some people might know, and others might guess, but I think finding it out at the end gives strength and even structure to the story that is otherwise lacking these qualities. Intrigued? Yes, but don’t go overboard trying to find a copy of the book. I think I’d stick to Appleyard’s journalism.

Appleyard doesn’t seem to have a webpage. His books are listed here. And all his articles are available here. He has been three times Feature Writer of the Year and is currently Interviewer of the Year in the British Press Awards; try this interview with Philip Pullman to see why.

PS There’s a Bedford Park here in Adelaide, but it is definitely not a garden suburb. There is a university in it, though, so perhaps it could be said to have intellectual pretentions.

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End of the Night Girl was published in 2011, as part of the prize attached to an Adelaide Festival Award for a Best Unpublished Manuscript. Apparently it had been turned down by a number of other publishers before this. I find this hard to understand; I think it is a very good book.

The first thing that struck me about this book is how well written it is. I just wanted to keep reading. It made me wonder yet again what makes some writing seem so entirely appropriate to the story it is telling. Is it the right word in the right place? Do the images the writer uses evoke the feeling or the place in a particularly striking way? Or is it because of the story itself touches something specific to the reader’s experience or imagination? Whatever it is – a combination of these perhaps? – I would have thought the book worth publishing just for the power of the writing. Some readers might not like some of the language – I don’t much like the C word myself – but Matthews has a great ear for dialogue, and for language appropriate to character. She captures how people do think and feel.

So what of the plot? Molly is a waitress in an Adelaide restaurant. She has dropped out of university, had a number of boyfriends, drinks too much after work, and is drifting, directionless. Much of the story is made up of small incidents to do with her work and her family, and finally her decision to take on a bit more responsibility. Molly has a sharp tongue and is given to feckless behaviour, but is an interesting and engaging character. Yet if the book consisted only of the daily round of her life – however sensitively portrayed – it might leave the reader saying so what? Is that all there is to it?

But Molly is haunted by the Holocaust. And she writes down bits of a story about a young woman, a Polish Jew, that come, seemingly unbidden, into her head. ‘I’ve been writing this stuff for a couple of years,’ she says, ‘just little scribbles on spare bits of paper.’ The fragments that she has written, set perhaps unnecessarily in a different font, are interspersed throughout the book. They are not in strict chronological order, but start in the 1930s. They tell – or at least indicate – the story of Gienia a village girl, from the death of her father to an arranged marriage in Warsaw then all too soon to the Nazi death camps. The back cover of the book talks of ‘a murdered Polish Jew’, and Molly does write of Gienia’s death. I thought at first that there was sufficient ambiguity in Molly’s account to suggest that she has allowed Gienia to survive. But I guess that whoever wrote the notes for the back cover knows better than I do. Matthews has certainly shown Gienia suffering deeply, and perhaps more unexpectedly, shown her battling for survival against other Jews in the camps.

There is a constant tension between the stories of Molly’s and Gienia’s lives. On one level, they are totally different. Molly’s urban hedonism contrasts with Gienia’s peasant upbringing. When Gienia is starving, Molly is throwing away uneaten food. Gienia tries to hold onto her family, Molly pushes hers away. Gienia has a fierce determination to live while Molly just drifts. But while Gienia’s story has its own outcome already to a large degree predetermined by our – and Molly’s – knowledge of the Holocaust, it also reflects Molly’s own circumstances. Through what she writes about Gienia’s life, Molly is examining her own. ‘I don’t know why I find this life so hard, when it should be so easy,’ she thinks. ‘Standing before the cliff-face of the Holocaust the wild fear I feel sometimes makes perfect sense.’ ‘I build horrors, to make mine trivial, and send her into hell.’ And ‘There is no equivalence, a little voice hisses, but not wanting to listen, I let my thundering heartbeat drown it out.’

So is there an equivalence, and if not, what point is Matthews making? I’m just not sure. Maybe it’s a case of ‘read it again’, or maybe Matthews isn’t clear enough. What worries me is Gienia’s death. Why show all that suffering, all that determination to survive, only to kill her off? If there isn’t a link, an ‘equivalence’, between the two stories, then Molly’s story is diminished. If there is – and surely this is the case – then what is it in Molly’s story that is equivalent to Gienia’s death? We’ve known of that death from near the beginning of the book (to say nothing of the back cover). Sometimes Molly seems scarcely able to control the story she has created; she fears ‘the flurry of words will bury me alive’. But she has chosen that outcome for Dienia; quite early in the story, she says that Dienia’s death ‘has become a constant in my life, something I can depend on when all else falls away.’ Perhaps the point of equivalence is that by the end, Molly no longer needs her? I feel this would be perverse, though I can’t exactly say why. Perhaps I’m just being sentimental about wanting her to survive. Or maybe just too literal; there are ‘non-realist’ elements in the book. I’d love to know what other people think.

You can read a little more about Amy Matthews here (strangely she doesn’t seem to have a web page), and here is an interview with her. She worked for a time as a waitress, so really knows what Molly’s life was like. And just out of interest, here’s another opinion of the book which doesn’t differ all that much from mine. But I was interested to see that it cites a critic from a major Australian newspaper who thought that Molly’s and Gienia’s stories could be considered separately. I think that’s missing the point.

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This is the book I mentioned recently when reviewing Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue (2012) – I wrote about it but forgot to post it at the time. So here it is now.

I suppose it had to happen, but it’s always disappointing to find you don’t respond warmly to a book by an author you normally admire. This is the case for me with Gentlemen of the Road (2007). Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is one of my favourite books; you can read my review here. And I’ve also recently enjoyed The Yiddish Policemen’s Union; that’s reviewed here. But I just can’t get my head properly around this one, though I can see there is much to like.

The story, which is set in about 950 AD, concerns two Jewish wanderers who scratch a living by thieving, trickery and any other nefarious pastime that comes their way. One, Zelikman, is originally from what is now Germany, the other, Amram, is Abyssinian. They are at this time wandering in the Caucuses. Despite arguing over ‘whose definition of “easy money” was the least commensurate with lived experience’, they agree to transport a dispossessed and fugitive prince from neighbouring Khazaria back to his mother’s family in Azerbaijan, though he wishes to return to Khazaria to avenge himself on the usurper who has killed his parents. ‘A gentleman of the road worthy of the title would convey him to the nearest slave market and see what price he fetched,’ says Zelikman. ‘I fear that explains our overall lack of success at this game, Zelikman,’ says Amram. ‘Because I’m not going to do that.’ Unsurprisingly, fulfilling their agreement turns out to be even more difficult and dangerous than this cynical pair imagined.

To my ignorant surprise, Khazaria, ‘the fabled kingdom of wild red-haired Jews on the western shore of the Caspian Sea’ turns out to have actually existed. Zelikman can hardly believe that there really is a place ‘where a Jew rules over other Jews as king’. Towards the end of the first millennium, the Khazars, whose settlements on the Volga formed a multicultural buffer between Christian Byzantium and the Islamic peoples of the East, adopted a form of Judaism, and welcomed persecuted Jews from both West and East. Jewish Radanite traders on the Silk Road were also welcomed there. I was even more surprised to find that the Rus referred to in the story were actually Vikings originally from Scandinavia; indeed the Rus eventually defeated the Khazars and seized their land, becoming in time ‘Russians’.

I think that my unfamiliarity with the history and geography of the region underlies the problem I had with the book. With the Khrazars, the Arsiyah (Moslims), the Rus and the soldiers of the usurper Buljan, all variously hunting the heroes, or fighting each other, or changing sides, I got confused about who was who and what on earth was happening. I also had to re-read some of Chabon’s very long sentences to catch their meaning – though I did wonder whether reading the book on a Kindle contributed to this. I think Chabon is deliberately writing in a somewhat ponderous style, in homage to the writers of earlier adventure stories like Alexander Dumas. And the long sentences are often quietly funny, as in ‘The African patted the horse’s neck and spoke to it in a velvet language, and Hanukkah caught sight of the broad ax slung across the giant’s back and began to regret his decision to call attention to himself, because kindness to horses was often accompanied in soldiers by an inclination, when it came to men, to brutality.’ The story was originally published as a fifteen-part serial in the New York Times Magazine, which accounts for the disconcertingly discrete nature of each chapter.

Writing swashbuckling adventure stories in deliberately stilted prose isn’t usual territory for Chabon. But a closer look reveals the presence of many of his characteristics. His interest in a historical Jewish state matches his creation of an imaginary one in the Sitka Federal District of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. His subtle humour suffuses this story, as it does in his other books. Who can’t enjoy such wry observations as ‘Mercy was a failing, a state of error, and in the case of children, a terrible waste of time.’ Or Zelikman’s ‘I don’t save lives … I just prolong their futility.’

Having got this far with my review, I find I’ve talked myself round. I do like the book, and suggest it is very worth reading. It’s just a good idea to know something about the setting first. You can find out more about Khazania here, and Michael Chabon here.

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One of the great things about being in a book club – besides the interesting discussions and wonderful food provided by my generous book-club friends – is that I get to read books that I probably wouldn’t otherwise come across. The downside is that what we read comes from a list of books held in multiple copies generated from a local library – and taking pot luck doesn’t always result in a satisfying book. After becoming Richard and Judy’s top Summer Read in 2006, this one went on to sell 1 million copies in Britain alone, and the author won the Galaxy (now Specsavers) British Book Award for the New Writer of the Year in 2007, so it seemed a good bet. Not so. I don’t know who Richard and Judy are, but apparently the award is more about sales impact than quality – and it shows.

The story begins in the present day with Alexis, who is visiting Plaka, the village on Crete where her ancestors once lived. Her mother, Sophia, has always been reticent about her family history, but now that Alexis is holidaying in Crete, she has agreed to put her in touch with an old friend who can tell her about the family. The friend, Fotini, agrees, and most of the rest of the book is about what happened to the family between 1939 and 1958. Alexis and Sophia return briefly at the end.

The story that she hears is partly a history of the island of Spinalonga – Greece’s former leper colony – which is located just off Plaka. It is partly a story of the German occupation of Crete during World War II, and partly a family saga of romance and tragedy. Of these, the history of the leper colony is by far the most interesting and even moving, perhaps because the least known. The war history is perfunctory; if you really want to know about the kidnapping of General Kreipe by British special forces, read Ill Met by Moonlight, the account written by one of the participants, W (Billy) Stanley Moss, or better still, see the classic film starring Dirk Bogarde. The family saga unfortunately doesn’t rise above a Mills and Boon romance.

One of the problems with the book is that despite the author saying at the beginning: ‘It was here that Fotini began to relate Sophia’s story’, and near the end: ‘As Fotini reached this point in the story’, Fotini doesn’t actually tell the story. Instead, it is written as a third person history of the family, and contains information that Fotini, a by-stander, could not possible have known. This makes the whole device of Alexis’s visit pointless. Hislop might just as well have told the story, without a modern reference, or alternatively, told it in Fotini’s voice. I don’t think she can have it both ways.

The second, and even greater problem for me, is that Hislop just doesn’t write very well. Some of the description is OK, but her weakness as a writer shows in the excessive use of adjectives, as for example: ’Dressed in the unfamiliar feel of crisp, ironed cotton, she wandered down the dark back stairway and found herself in the restaurant kitchen, drawn there by the powerful aroma of strong, freshly brewed coffee.’ And if she ‘found herself’ in the kitchen, she wasn’t ‘drawn there’. The adjectives are often banal; hair is ‘lustrous’ and roast meat ‘succulent’. Elsewhere, ‘the green fields were verdant’ – no doubt they were, since verdant means green. And ‘he was being pressurised by his parents to find a wife’ – I’m perhaps being picky here, but what’s wrong with ‘pressured’? This is disappointing from someone who read English at Oxford and worked in publishing and as a journalist.

Furthermore, Hislop has not succeeded in giving any depth to her characters. Circumstances ensure that the course of true love doesn’t run smooth, and some of the characters behave badly. But no one has any shades of grey, and each is absolutely predictable in their actions and emotions. The ‘good’ characters are just too noble. I know you can’t expect writers to come up with entirely new angles on romance, but Jane Austen did the one found here first, and better, with Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park. I’m simply not convinced.

One of the comments on the back of the book praises it for showing that ’love and life continue in even the most extraordinary of circumstances’ and this is perhaps the book’s saving grace. The information Hislop gives about the leper colony on Spinalonga and the disease itself is interesting and important, given the strong prejudice against lepers that has existed for centuries. That people managed to live any sort of normal existence in the colony – and she seems to have done her research on this – is indeed a testament to the human spirit.

Obviously other people don’t agree with my less than flattering estimate of this book; here’s the review that generated the blurb on the front: ‘a beach book with heart’. Hislop has written two further books, one of which, The Return (2008) is set in Granada during the Spanish Civil War. Given the Spanish emphasis of my current reading, I should try it – but somehow I don’t think I will. You can read more about Hislop here.

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It’s probably evident only to me that lately I’ve had a bit of an obsession with books about aspects of Spain. Recent posts include Robert Wilson’s crime fiction series set in Spain, with The Hidden Assassins and The Blind Man of Seville; then there was Moorish Spain, an historical account by Richard Fletcher and The Alhambra, by Washington Irving, a nineteenth century mixture of reportage and legend. OK, but what has this got to do with George Eliot? Well, Deronda is a name that would once have been de Ronda; though he doesn’t know it, Daniel’s family were Jews living in the Spanish town of Ronda before being driven out by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. I should in all consistency write a post on Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, which is set in the Spanish town of Segovia, and recounts events that actually took place in Ronda. But that’s for another day.

Daniel Deronda (1876) was George Eliot’s last novel. For the critic F.R. Leavis, it confirmed her greatness as a novelist. He initially suggested that the two story threads that make it up could best be seen as two separate books, one chronicling the fate of Gwendolen Harleth, the other dealing with Daniel Deronda. But he later concluded that what bound their stories together was more important than the seemingly disparate elements. In this I agree with him.

The book begins with Gwendolen, a spoilt young woman who wants to be independent – but not from any feminist desire for self-improvement or doing good to others: ‘She meant to do what was pleasant to herself in a striking manner; or rather, whatever she could do so as to strike others with admiration and get in that reflected way a more ardent sense of living’. She is a main character, but is she a heroine? Certainly she is no Emma; Austen Jane said that Emma was ‘a heroine whom no one but myself will much like’, yet everyone does so. This is not the case for Gwendolen. Yet the power of Eliot’s writing is to show Gwendolen as selfish and conceited, but at the same time to show that she has other, better feelings. You can’t completely dislike her.

Gwendolen is in the same position as other nineteenth century females in life and literature in that her life chances are drastically limited; there are few roles open beyond wife and mother. Her story in some ways echoes the form of the ‘romance’ of which Jane Austen was such a mistress; a man and a woman find they love each but obstacles arise and they must struggle to overcome them. (There are some interesting comparisons between Austen’s and Eliot’s preoccupations; see for example two quotations: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.’ And ‘Some readers of this history will doubtless regard it as incredible that people should construct matrimonial prospects on the mere report that a bachelor of good fortune and possibilities was coming within reach.’) But without telling you what actually does happen, I can say that this is not the case here; it is more a story about redemption than successful romance. This is probably one of the reasons a critic like Leavis approves the book; he thought literature should carry moral weight. But how Gwendolen comes to understand herself differently seems to me to show great psychological insight on Eliot’s part, and I certainly didn’t find any sense of there being a moral for morality’s sake.

Deronda is the protégé Sir Hugo Mallinger, a well-to-do English gentleman who has brought him up to be an English gentleman in his turn. Deronda himself, and most other people, think he is Sir Hugo’s unacknowledged illegitimate son. This belief has an unsettling effect on him; what are the implications of it for his place in English society, and as we would say these days, for his sense of identity? It seems at first that Deronda’s story is secondary to that of Gwendolen, and it’s true that Eliot could have written a whole novel about her fate, and Deronda’s part in it. But a kind act on his part leads the narrative into another path altogether where Deronda seeks to find out about his mother. In doing so, he finds he has quite a different heritage from the one he was brought up with. I guess I gave this away be saying that his family name was originally de Ronda, but knowing that (which may in any case have been be self-evident to some) doesn’t spoil the story of what he finds out. Unlike Gwendolen, however, Daniel is rather too much a paragon of virtue. Eliot occasionally gently mocks him, and we see his doubts and fears. But he is unvaryingly generous and thoughtful. In my view, being consistently nice makes him a foil for Gwendolen, rather than deserving the title role; his circumstances change, but he does not develop as she does.

These two stories are linked in many ways into an intricate pattern. Thinking about it in a purely objective way, there are too many coincidences, too many parallels. But reading the book, I really enjoyed these. There is so much insight, so much interest in Eliot’s narrative that somehow the twists of fate seem acceptable in ways they might not in the hands of a lesser writer.

I haven’t left much space to comment on Eliot’s writing. Yes, there were a few times when the long sentences seem over-burdened with qualifying clauses and the nineteenth century prose style makes reading seem like wading through treacle. Eliot writes with the ‘god perspective’ that allows her to know all, and reveal all about her characters, and to moralise, if you like, in ways that are quite unfashionable among modern writers. It took me a little while to get used to it, but Eliot in general writes with such a light ironic touch that reading her quickly becomes a pleasure.  I’ll give just one tiny example: ’Lord Slogan [was] an unexceptionable Irish peer, whose estate wanted nothing but drainage and population.’

The link with Spain turned out to be tenuous – but I’m really glad it prompted me to read the novel. You can find out more about George Eliot here, and about the book here. There’s rather more to it than I’ve indicated in this post. F.R. Leavis wrote the introduction to the edition I read; I found his prose far more opaque than George Eliot’s. A 2002 TV series based on the book sounds interesting.

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January 27^th is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorated annually on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. It seems highly fitting that I finished reading The Street Sweeper (2011) on that day, for much of it concerns events at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Questions about the liberation of Dachau are also important in the plot. The book took me some time to read; I had to put it down and leave it several times because I simply couldn’t go on. Is it the power of the events, or the power of the author in telling them that makes such an impression? The events would speak for themselves whatever the medium; Perlman’s achievement is to make you want to read on.

The book tells a number of stories that belong both to Perlman’s characters, and to the history of the twentieth century. The book is set in New York in the present, but the action often reverts to the past. The two main characters in this vast sweep are Lamont Williams, a young African American man just out of gaol after serving six years for a crime he didn’t commit, and Adam Zignelik, a historian at Columbia University whose personal and professional life is falling to bits. Although unknown to each other, a web of connections links them, made up of people they come into contact with, and things they learn from and about them. The story is much too complicated even to outline here, but it reaches back to the experience of African American soldiers in World War II, to the Warsaw Ghetto, to Auschwitz-Birkenau, to unionism in Chicago’s slaughterhouses, to school desegregation and the American Civil Rights movement. How do these fit together? Adam says ‘you never know the connections between things, people, places, ideas. But there are connections.’ This is the premise the story based on, and I am in awe of the amazing feat of story-telling that Perlman has produced to tie it all together. Almost everything and everybody in the story relates to, or makes reference to, something or someone else. This could be seen as artificial, but I didn’t find it so. One tiny example suffices to illustrate this sort of referencing: the daughter of Adam’s boss at Columbia (whose father was a friend of his father) is speaking to her mother, (who is Lamont’s cousin, though she hasn’t seen him for many years) about a book she is supposed to be reading for school. ‘It sucks … It’s boring and … unrealistic.’ What is the book? Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, the great American realist classic set in the slaughterhouses of Chicago.

History, then, is central to the story. Early in the book, Adam asks his students: ‘What is History’? ‘With the facts you know are solid underneath you,’ he says, ‘build a bridge to the unknown. Is this true, likely to be true, unlikely to be true or is there not enough known to you to say?’ Though this book is fiction, a lot of it is based on what is true, and a lot more on what is likely to be true. A number of the characters are either real people or based on real people; the book is dedicated to eight women, four Jewish, four African American, ‘who all died from different manifestation of the same disease’ – racism.

But being fiction, Perlman invokes another category: the imaginative recreation of what might have happened. What the imagined historian Adam discovers could have been true; it is fiction based on the spirit of what actually happened rather than any of his more precise historical categories. In the story, the imagined ex-prisoner Lamont Williams is the source of an account of real events he has learned about from a Jewish ex-inmate of Auschwitz; that never happened, and the historical account he reports is known from other sources. But Lamont is also true to the spirit of what happened; he is ‘desperate for people to remember other people.’ In this, he is unconsciously echoing the plea of the Jews of Auschwitz-Birkenau to ‘tell everybody what happened here’, a plea at the heart of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and of this book.

You can see from the sort of history being covered here, which, by the way is beautifully researched, that much of the book is very grim. The personal relationships of most of the characters are not happy either. So why did I keep going? It was partly the compelling interest of both the story and the characters, and the urge to know what would happen next. I think I also felt some kind of a duty to the victims of this history. Who could refuse to hear when they cry ‘tell everybody what happened here’? I also took heart from the book’s epigram from Ana Akhmatova: ‘Mountains bow down to this grief … But hope keeps singing from afar’.

Elliot Perlman is the son of second-generation Jewish Australians, and he grew up in Melbourne. You can read more about him here. This is his third novel, and he has a book of short stories. His second novel, Seven Types of Ambiguity (2003) was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2004. It was beaten by The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard – no disgrace there. But for a novelist that one French literary magazine has called ‘one of the 50 most important writers in the world’, he seems strangely little known in Australia.

The history in this book is fascinating, if horrifying. You can read more about the Little Rock Nine here, the Packinghouse Workers Organising Committee here, the history of wire recorders here and the Sonderkommando revolt here. It is interesting that the publicity around the publication of the book also contributed to finding evidence relevant to one of the historical disputes that is important in the story; for the dispute, see here, and for Perlman’s disclosure of the new evidence on it in 2012, see here.  Will it resolve the dispute? ‘One wonders,’ he writes, ‘whether there are still some people for whom the eyewitness testimonies of African-Americans and of Polish Jews are not enough.’

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This book won the 2012 Orange Prize for fiction, but rarely has that award resulted in so much disagreement about the merits of the recipient. A.N. Wilson said he was ‘awestruck with admiration for the quality of its writing, its narrative pace and its imaginative depth’, whereas a reviewer in The New York Times thought it had ‘the head of a young adult novel, the body of the “Iliad” and the hindquarters of Barbara Cartland’.

The Song of Achilles is a retelling of Homer’s Iliad – otherwise known as The Song of Ilian, another name for Troy. The story is narrated by Patroclus, who becomes the beloved companion of Achilles and accompanies him to the war in Troy. The Iliad starts during the last years of the Trojan War. But Patroclus and Achilles don’t even reach Troy until over half way through this book. The first part is taken up with Patroclus’s own story: his childhood, his meeting with Achilles, their growing friendship, their education by the centaur Chiron and the attempt by Achilles’s mother, the sea nymph Thetis, to keep Achilles from the war with Troy by disguising him as a woman. Miller has elaborated on existing legend; she hasn’t actually made stuff up. But she has put the relationship between Patroclus and Achilles at the centre of the story. Its precise nature is never explained in the Iliad; here is clear that they become lovers. Indeed Miller refers to the book as a love story.

The question of foreknowledge operates at two levels in the book. On one hand, the characters have some knowledge of the future by means of prophecy, and information given by the gods. The world Patroclus describes is one where the actions of gods are an accepted part of life, as is the need to propitiate them. Only Thetis – an immortal, if not actually a god – actually plays much part in the story, though Apollo also appears at a crucial point. But the gods and their whims are a constant presence. ‘There is no law that gods must be fair’, Chiron tells Achilles. Achilles is told that he will be the best fighter of his generation, and later that while Hector lives, Achilles cannot die. Achilles and Patroclus know that ‘the best of the Myrmidons’ – the followers who have accompanied Achilles to Troy – will die before Achilles does. Such riddles add tension to the story, and I found it easy to accept Patroclus’s world view. But how can human love stand against the will of the gods?

The second issue of foreknowledge is that of readers, most of whom will have at least some familiarity with the events of the Trojan War. (The best known story of the war – that of the wooden horse and the defeat of the Trojans – doesn’t come into either the Iliad, or this story.) Does this knowledge interfere with the tension of the book? I didn’t find it did; indeed knowing what was to happen only made the tension greater. The story actually extends beyond what happens in the Iliad, and Miller has taken a few liberties with the ending. But it works well enough.

So what is there to cause all the controversy? Miller writes well, in a tone appropriate to her subject, so it can’t be that. There are a few places where her prose slips up – you can see a couple of them here. The story flows, and is easy to read. I guess it’s a question of whether or not you think she has sufficiently humanised her mythic characters. Through Patroclus, she tries to come to terms with the fact that Achilles is being trained, and training himself, to be an instrument of war, a killing machine. But making it a love story has made this hard to do. Achilles accepts that honour in battle is the highest cause – greased, of course, with the desire for plunder. ‘What is more heroic than to fight for the honour of the most beautiful woman in the world, against the mightiest city of the east?’ asks Odysseus. To remain within the spirit of Homer’s epic, Patroclus has to accept this too, and even in the face of all the killing, he offers unconditional love. He presents himself as somewhat passive – a natural follower. What is there interesting enough in him to inspire the sort of love that Achilles feels for him? I find their relationship a bit too bland – though not to the extent of comparing it with a Barbara Cartland romance!

Madeline Miller is a trained classicist who was teaching Greek and Latin to American high school students while writing this book. She certainly clarifies a story I’ve always found a bit confusing, and probably awakens an interest in classics like the Iliad. Some of the story as she tells it has real power. But even though it fleshes out aspects of the legend that aren’t clear, it doesn’t make an imaginative leap beyond it. A strength or a weakness? I’m still not sure.

You can read more about Madeline Miller and her work here

PS. I always thought that Achilles was invulnerable everywhere else but his heel, which had been gripped by Thetis when she dipped him into the river Styx to try and make him immortal – hence the phrase ‘Achilles heel’. But apparently this is a later accretion to the legend and not part of the Iliad, or this book.

PPS. If you like this book, you might also have a look at Mary Renault’s The Last of the Wine (1956), set in 5^th century Greece, in which there is another close male relationship – though I didn’t recognise it as sexual when I read it fifty years ago.  Miller is often compared to Renault.

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