Reading group: One Moonlit Night by Caradog Prichard

Warning: some plot spoil.

Two people had recently recommended this book to me, and the group took up my suggestion that we read it. Set in the north-Welsh quarry town of Bethesda in the mid 1910s and portraying, apparently through the eyes of a young boy, the terrible hardships experienced by the population, it was first published, in Welsh, in 1961. Earlier work by Prichard's contemporary Caradog Evans had been disliked in Wales for similarly revealing the hardships and corruptions of rural Welsh life, but One Moonlit Night was apparently warmly received and very popular in Wales. However, an English translation did not appear until 1995, receiving a boost in 2014 when the English-language Welsh Arts Review, in a move to celebrate Welsh literature and help to create a Welsh canon, offered 25 books for public vote, and One Moonlit Night was the winner.

We were all certainly attracted to read the book the moment we saw the arresting beginning:

I'll go and ask Huw's Mam if he can come out to play. Can Huw come out to play, O Queen of the Black Lake? No, he can't, he's in bed and that's where you should be, you little monkey, instead of going around causing a riot at this time of night. Where were you two yesterday making mischief and driving village folk out of their minds?

However, although everyone was very interested to have read it, we did have problems with it.

Commentators, including Jan Morris in an Afterword to the Canongate edition, have expressed the view that this is a work beyond rational analysis, suggesting that this is indeed its appeal. However, I find it hard to read novels without looking for a meaningful pattern, and (as we have discussed before), I think most of the group feel the same. We were all captivated by the voice of the narrator, and riveted by the agonising, grotesque and yet sometimes touching world portrayed, but, since we do indeed read in this way, there was a lot that at the time of our discussion we found confusing and indeed unexplained or unexplainable. However, having looked at the book again more closely in order to write this, it seems to me that there is a rationally intended structure which can be ascertained via rational analysis, and that in fact the book makes much more sense than we felt at the time or than others have allowed. 

Both Jan Morris and Niall Griffiths in a Foreword to the same edition, as well as other reviewers, have taken the book as being told, in Jan Morris's words, 'by a single, unnamed voice'. However Jan Morris does go on to say that it's not quite so simple, since 'although the voice is that of a young boy, sometimes it evidently speaks with the experience of a grown man' (my italics) and she notes that 'three times in the course of the book it is superseded by vatic pronouncements' which she sees as 'of no explicable origin, as though some deus ex machina has intervened.'

This too was how everyone at the meeting, including me, had read the book, and as a result we found the book confusing, and, for me, lacking. (The others were generally more positive than me, since they found fascinating the extent of the hardship with which I - Welsh-born and spending a good deal of time in a north-Welsh ex-quarry village, the history of which I have researched for my own writing - was already familiar.)

I said that I had indeed appreciated the book as an antidote to previous unrealistic romantic representations of rural Wales, but I did have some serious problems with it. Firstly, while I loved the voice with its energetic colloquialism, I had found no discernable story arc or narrative progression, which ultimately made me impatient and a little bored. For a very long time the village and its inhabitants seemed simply to be set out as a tableau, as the boy - who lives with a mother widowed by a quarry accident and thus poverty-stricken and dependent on the parish - first roams the village with his friend encountering its damaged, corrupt and unhappy population, and then walks alone remembering incidents from the past. Secondly - as a result, I thought, of this apparent lack of narrative progression - I became very confused about what happened when, and having lost grasp of the sequence of events, to some extent I also lost interest. Thirdly, I felt there was a obvious error of structure concerning the 'vatic pronouncements'. The first, a four-page lament of archaic poetic language, comes as a shock after the colloquialism of the previous chapters:

I am the Queen of Snowdon, the Bride of the Beautiful One. I lie upon my ascension, eternally expectant, forever great with child and awaiting the hour of his delivery. / My thighs embrace the swirling mists and my breasts caress the low-lying clouds... Though hast enslaved me...

We all felt quite confounded by this. Who or what is the Queen of Snowdon? Who or what is the Beautiful One? What is being referred to by that word 'ascension'? None of us knew, and most said they had skipped these sections, Mark even suggesting that Prichard, who was frequently successful in national eisteddfods, had simply taken the opportunity to insert some of his poetry. It is only later in the book that we will learn the answer to these questions: The narrator relates a walking trip over the mountain with his mother to visit farming relatives; from their fields there is a view of Snowdon in which the slope (presumably the 'ascension') takes the shape of a reclining pregnant woman (forever trapped in place by the mountain itself - the 'Beautiful One'). Without knowing this beforehand, however, we could make nothing of the section in question, which, for readers not steeped in such local lore, makes for a structural error. In any case, there was still a fundamental unanswered question: where does the voice come from? Is it, as Jan Morris suggests, and as it seemed to us, that of some deus ex machina, and why is it there?

Fourthly, a point with which everyone in the group strongly agreed: at the end of the book it appears that the narrator has committed an act which seemed simply entirely unaccountable and unbelievable in the light of what we have experienced of his character, which, as Jan Morris says, is 'engaging ... innocently ready for fun and harmless mischief but precociously tender in his sympathies'. The only explanation is that of madness, on which there is a great stress in this book. Many of the characters, including eventually - and crucially - the boy's mother, with whom he has an especially close relationship, are driven 'mad' by their circumstances, and there are constant references, as in the very first paragraph, quoted above, to people going 'out of their minds'. In the space of the first short chapter and a short afternoon, the boy narrator and his friend Huw encounter a catalogue of damage: the sexual abuse of a class mate, Little Jini Pen Cae, by their beer-stoked schoolteacher, a flasher, epilepsy, domestic violence, the body of a man brought home from the asylum, a woman who, evicted from her house, has shut herself in the coalhouse and is crying like a cat, the dropping down dead of an overworked horse, two men having a fist fight outside the pub, adultery and incest. The chapter ends with this heart-breaking casualness:

And that's all that happened. We weren't anywhere except walking about and I didn't know till this morning ... that Moi's Uncle Owen [the perpetrator of domestic violence and incest] had hanged himself in the toilet and that they'd taken Little Jini Pen Cae and Catrin Jane from Lower Lane to the Asylum.

Later there will be the tragic shunning by the parson of an unmarried mother (the female adulterer); grief as young men of the village disappear off to war and are killed; a marriage foundering on the husband's absence at sea and the wife consequently left dependent on the parish; a dramatic suicide, witnessed by the narrator himself, and in the school toilets of all places; and finally the mental disintegration of the narrator's own mother. 

What sends people 'out of their minds' - an apparent everyday fact of their lives - is, as in that first paragraph, very much at issue. The young boy answers Huw's mother: 

What village folk out of their minds? It's not us that's driving them out of their minds, it's them that are going out of their minds themselves.

 At one point in the latter part of the novel the two young boys seriously discuss the issue. Huw asks:

...I wonder why Will Ellis Porter [the epilepsy sufferer] killed himself?

He'd gone out of his mind, for sure, I said.

Why do people go out of their minds, d'you think?

They lose control of themselves, you know.

 What makes them lose control?

Oh, all kinds of things. Just like you and me get mad sometimes, except they go madder.

They go on to propose various causes, such as Will Ellis Porter's epilepsy, and the drunkenness of others. The real cause, of course, implied though never stated outright in this novel, is the oppression of religion and the conditions imposed by the chiefly English quarry owners - the latter perhaps one reason for the slow uptake of this book in England.

The moon, featured of course in the title, is traditionally associated with madness. At the end of the first chapter the young boy is in bed but can't sleep for the light of the full moon and gets up and watches as the clouds race across it, and it runs as an image throughout the book.

However, to explain the narrator's action as one of madness seemed to all of us a stretch, and I suggested, to the agreement of others, that the problem was that the chirpiness and seeming objectivity (if naivety) of the boy's voice seems to set him apart from everything he observes, at least up to the point that, at the age of ten, he loses his mother to the asylum, and there is no subsequent narrative portrayal of any mental disintegration before his seemingly uncharacteristic act. At the start there seems to be a clear implication that the so-called madness of the people of this village is caused by the social circumstances: the 'madness' of the woman who has shut herself screaming in the coalhouse can be seen as grief and protest at being evicted because she can't pay her rent; little Jini Pen Cae is carted off to the asylum after being sexually abused by the schoolmaster. But when the narrator himself flips so uncharacteristically into what can only be seen as an act of madness, the book seems simply to tip towards the madness it had seemed previously to critique. 

The young boy's voice and character lead Jan Morris to find this a 'sweet-natured' book, which she feels explains its greater popularity than the work of Caradog Evans. Niall Griffiths in his Foreword compares the characters to the 'oddballs' of Dylan Thomas's Under Milkwood and sees some of their antics as 'hugely funny in a League of Gentlemen kind of way'. My own feeling, I told the group, was much more uncomfortable: I felt that the depiction of the characters on the one hand and the high-flown poetic interjections on the other made the book in danger of reinforcing two opposing Welsh stereotypes: the quaintly primitive and the poetically fanciful.

Reading towards the end of the novel before our discussion, I began to realise that as the narrator walks and relates, he is indeed now older - though it wasn't clear to me how much older - and, as a result of the persistent sameness of the voice, this came as a surprise. My main experience of the novel was indeed the 'mistiness' of which Jan Morris writes: 'Sometimes he is one age, sometimes another, and it is both as a boy and as a man that he recalls the tragic circumstances of his childhood... How much is real in the narrative, and how much is hallucinatory we never discover.' We wondered similarly: is he really mad? Did he really commit the act he says he did? Or did he imagine it - and does that in itself indicate madness? At the end of the book, Jan Morris says:

...how old he is, whether he is free or incarcerated, whether he is mad or sane, just about to enter an abyss or recently escaped from one - all these questions are left so mistily unresolved that we wonder whether the author himself ... ever knew the answers.

In other words, she is ready to believe that the author was not in control of his material, but forgives this for 'the sweet pity of it all.'

Having read that Afterword, and settling to write about the novel and our discussion here, I looked more closely and analytically for the points in the novel where these apparent confusions arise. The first chapter consists chiefly of an address to Huw's mother describing what the two boys had got up to the day before. This appears to place us, and the narrator as he speaks, in the time-level of the following day. However, there is already something disorientating, as indicated perhaps by Jan Morris stating, wrongly, that 'where the two were yesterday is to be the ostensible plot of the book', and that 'as the boy wanders the town that day he remembers the events of his life' (my italics). In fact, it is in the 'now' of the following day that the reminiscences begin. Apparently in response to Huw's mother's refusal to let Huw go out to play with him, the narrator begins the next chapter with:

Alright, I'll go for a stroll up Post Lane as far as Stables Bridge to see if I can see Moi [a third boy, their friend].

As he walks up Post Lane, he sees a poster that reminds him of another in the past, prompting the first reminiscence. Yet if we assume that this second day is our framing narrative time level we immediately come up against inconsistencies, which I have to say that on my first reading I didn't notice specifically beyond a slight sense of disorientation. In Chapter One, the boy speaker is living with his mother but here, on the second page of Chapter Two, he refers to her in the past tense: 'Dew, Mam had a good voice.' In Chapter One his mother has 'gone to do the washing at the Vicarage', but in Chapter Two, apparently still walking to look for Moi, he sees the light on in the Vicarage and thinks: 'I used to like going to the Vicarage after school to help Mam with the washing all those years ago.' (my italics.) It is Azariah Jenkins who occupies the Vicarage now, he says, who was preceded by the parson Hughes, who was preceded in turn by the Canon. Later in the book, and on the walk, we will learn that once the Canon died his mother stopped doing the washing at the Vicarage. This places the incidents of the first chapter in the time of the Canon, and thus way in the past, and the only conclusion is that the framing narrative time-level is many years later and the framing consciousness that of the narrator when he is grown. Yet it is hard as one reads to register this, since  at the end of Chapter Two he says:

No point bothering to go over Stables Bridge, even though it is moonlight. There's no sign of Moi and there's no light on in the house

bringing the present-tense voice back to the day after the encounter with Huw's mother. Later we will learn that as a child the narrator, afraid of spirits, always whistled when he went past Stables Bridge, and here he does indeed do that:

I'd better whistle as I pass Stables Bridge, and I'd better keep to Post Lane.

And keep to Post Lane he does, as the entire narrative of reminiscences then takes place over that one walk and, according to the title, on the one moonlit night, along Post Lane.

However, taking this night as that night in childhood is just not possible. Most of what the narrator remembers took place later - the death of Moi from TB, the narrator's mother's descent into madness, his leaving school at the age of fourteen, and his attempt, after his final act, to leave and avoid having to go to work in the quarry. Towards the end of the novel there are hints that a long time has passed. 'This is Robin David's Field,' begins Chapter 10, 'the one on the right here that runs all the way down to the Riverbank.' He recalls incidents that happened there, a near-drowning, a circus and a football match played against an away team. These are described in the lively voice with which the novel began, yet the chapter ends with a sudden change of pace, and a dying fall: 'There's no one playing football on Robin David's field now. Only cattle grazing.' At the end of the book, and the end of Post Lane, the narrator reaches Black Lake. He says. 'Streuth, Black Lake at last. Someone must have pulled this wall down, cos I used to have to climb on top of it to see Black Lake, and now it only comes up to my knees.' It is easy, however, to fail to grasp these shifts, as the overall voice hasn't changed: the narrator appears to continue to speak with the voice of the young boy.

In the course of the novel we learn a lot about the character of Emyr, Little Owen the Coal's Big Brother - more, it struck me when I came to look at the novel again, than I had realised first time round. Emyr is the man whose body has been brought home from the asylum in Chapter One. His mother invites the boys in to view the body, and, although they seem to take much of the grotesquery around them for granted, they are somewhat unnerved by the sight of him. Emyr, the narrator's reminiscences will reveal, is strangely socially maladjusted, rushing indoors if he sees the boys passing the house; he has been seen wearing women's clothes. He sometimes goes missing, and on one of these occasions was found trying to hang himself. One night the boys follow a search party looking for him. To begin with, this is just a bit of an adventure for them, but when they witness him shuffling along Post Lane like a woman, there is something about it that makes them want to hide behind a wall and then go home without telling the search party. Emyr will later be found on his knees in the mud beside Black Lake at the end of Post Lane, his shoes off, and crying for his mother. The boys talk next day about the fact that Emyr was known to interfere, like the schoolmaster, with little girls, and that while he was missing in the night, Little Jini Pen Cae was missing too and next morning was found lying asleep in the wood. It is after this that Emyr is taken to the asylum.

It was on my second look at the book that the significance of Emyr's walk to the Black Lake struck me. As he talks to us, the narrator is in fact following in his footsteps. When he gets to the corner where the boys hid to watch Emyr pass, he says to himself:

Good God, watch yourself in case there are any little devils behind that bank round the corner, watching you and thinking you're going out of your mind (my italics).

He speculates then about what Emyr was seeing as he walked, and, as he too walks, he sees the same view. He wonders if Emyr could hear the Voice - that is, the voice of The Holy Ghost which the narrator's mother told him people heard during the Welsh Christian Revival when she was young. And then - I realised on my second reading - that, although it's not at all immediately clear, since several reminiscences and three chapters intervene, he hears the Voice for himself.

Is this the Voice, I wonder? Or is it just the wind blowing through Adwy'r Nant?

And what he hears is not simply the conventional voice of the Holy Ghost, but a Celtic lament, the lament of Snowdon, of the land and its people 'squirm[ing] beneath the boot of the oppressor.' This is no deus ex machina after all: it comes from the mind of the narrator. And it is a mind oppressed and deranged: the narrator is paralleling Emyr, not simply in his walk along Post Lane, but in his mental disintegration. At Black Lake, like Emyr, he gets down onto his knees and takes off his shoes. His mental breakdown becomes apparent: looking down at the lake he says,

They might be all down there, for all I know. Huw and Moi and Em and Gran and Ceri and everybody. Ah, a wonderful thing it would be if I saw Mam coming up out of the lake now and shouting: Come here you little monkey. Been up to mischief with that old Huw again.

And like, Emyr, he calls on his mother.

Just prior to this, in a kind of rushed ending to his reminiscences, we have learnt that the final act he made as a fourteen-year-old before trying and failing to leave the town involved Little Jini Pen Cae, just as did Emyr's before he was incarcerated in the asylum. Once the parallels are mapped, it is hard to ignore the implication: we are listening to someone who has been incarcerated, who indeed, due to the nature of that act, is likely still to be incarcerated, and making those parallels for himself, so that the 'present' walk up Post Lane is taking place in his own fevered brain.

This would explain those 'misty' slips between time levels: they are the confusions of a disordered mind. I am sure, having looked closely at the novel, that they are consciously calculated by the author to link the young boy of the beginning to his grim fate of disintegration. (I think our group did have some intuition of this, as both Ann and Doug and I said that we hadn't found the set-piece episodes, such as a boxing match, as funny as other commentators have.) After all, the imagery of madness and confusion is in fact planted at the end of the first chapter. As the boy looks out from his bedroom window:

...the moon was zooming through the sky over Pen Foel Garnedd. / No, you silly fool, I said to myself, it's the clouds that are moving, not the moon... 

And that address that begins the novel, 'O Queen of the Black Lake', made apparently to Huw's Mam and apparently with quaint boyish cheekiness,  is in fact the internal cry of an agonised protagonist who will kneel shoeless by the lake and once more hear the Voice. It is now the voice of the Queen of the Black Lake, and her pronouncements are  interspersed by snippets of his mother's voice - Pass me that pot from under the bed . The lament has turned darker: 'My kingdom is the grievous waters that lie beyond the ultimate sorrow'. 

The structure, therefore, is not formless after all as I thought, and the overall voice, rather than simply that of a naive young boy as it has been taken, is a highly sophisticated one, a complex of voices taking place within the memory and imagination of the grown and mentally disturbed protagonist. A clue to this is perhaps the fact that no speech marks are used for the dialogue: the speeches are not meant as replications of what was actually once said, but they are voices remembered and alchemised within the narrator's head. 

'It was a moonlit night just like tonight,' he says of the night the boys saw Emyr shuffling up Post Lane. But although there seem to be several moonlit nights slipping at times one into another - that night of the search for Emyr, the night after the day the two young boys roam the town together, the following night when the narrator goes looking for Moi after being turned away by Huw's mother, and another night long afterwards - they are all encompassed, as the title indicates, by the one moonlit night on which he remembers and imagines it all.

The problem is that all of this is not immediately obvious: there are not enough clues for readers to know how to read this novel and separate the narrator's confusions and loss of control from the intention and control of the author. And even if we see it, there is still I think a problem of credibility. The dominance and persistence throughout of the light, lively and sympathetic voice of a young boy may be meant as an illustration of infantilisation through oppression, but, along with the lack of any portrayal of mental breakdown between the incarceration of the narrator's mother and his terrible act at the age of fourteen, it makes it is hard to believe in the act. Nevertheless, in spite of our lack of grasp of it all, Ann said firmly that she was very glad to have read it, and everyone in the room agreed.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here 

Reading group: What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

Here's the last of my three belated reading group reports:

Doug suggested this short novel which comes garlanded with huge praise and has won several prizes One day the unnamed American male narrator, cruising in the bathrooms of the National Palace of Culture in Sofia, comes across the compelling hustler Mitka, and there follows a tale of unrequited sexual obsession, of overwhelming desire met by hard-headed manipulation, all told in the incantatory prose which has earned the book such admiration.

Unfortunately, our group was not so captivated. Doug began with a slightly  apologetic air (presumably for having suggested the book), immediately referring to the narrator as 'self-pitying', and almost everyone else nodded in agreement. I wouldn't call the narrator self-pitying, but I did agree that the emotion that came over was not so much the narrator's obsession with Mitka as the narrator's obsession with himself. It was in fact hard to see what is attractive about Mitka: he's thoroughly amoral and self-centred, and is clearly using the narrator's obsession with him to get what he can; we are treated to physical descriptions of him and of their sexual encounters, but these seem plainly, even sometimes mechanistically told: there is little imagistic or metaphorical element in these descriptions to create any emotional dimension the reader can share. Yet the prose otherwise rings with a deep emptiness of yearning, and the overall focus is the narrator's own more general emotional state. 

While there was an initial tendency in the group to dismiss the novel for this, people became more positive as we turned our attention to the second of the three parts, which begins when the narrator's English class at the American College is interrupted by news from home. This prompts an agonised avalanche of memories of a rejecting, homophobic background: the scenes are horrifying and deeply moving, and I for one was in tears as I read. It's clear from now on that what is propelling the narrator's yearnings and his emotional entrapment in a destructive relationship, and perhaps accounting for any self-obsession, is huge, unquenchable grief.

There is no doubt for me that the prose of this book is brilliant, so I was a bit shocked when Mark complained about its long sentences and lack of paragraphing - there can be pages and pages unbroken by paragraphs. Clare and I hotly objected that this formally encodes the unrelenting obsessiveness of the narrator's mentality, allowing the reader to read in such a way that draws them in to share that mentality. Mark stuck to his guns, pointing out that in Lolita, for instance, another book about sexual obsession, there are paragraphs and sentences of decent length. We said that that was because the sensibility of the narrator in that book is cool and calculated (for most of the book): the prose of any first-person narrator - the language, rhythm and cadence created by those technical structures of paragraphing and punctuation - necessarily reflects their mentality. Mark however insisted that this book was unnecessarily too difficult a read.

There does seem to be a current prejudice against long sentences, possibly affected by the culture of soundbites, but this book I'd say is a great illustration of the power of long sentences. Take this sentence at the very beginning of this book:

Even as I descended the stairs I heard his voice, which like the rest of him was too large for those subterranean rooms, spilling out of them as if to climb back into the bright afternoon that, though it was mid-October, had nothing autumnal about it; the grapes that hung from vines throughout the city burst warm in one's mouth.

There might be a temptation here, for the sake of immediate clarity and ease of reading, to separate this into two sentences, ending the first after the word 'afternoon' and making the description of the afternoon a separate sentence. But the fact that the author does not do this creates a special alchemy: because he doesn't, the October afternoon becomes more closely linked with Mitka, and its apparent promise (its warmth) yet its deceptiveness with him. And there is a clear sexual note to that final image of the grapes bursting in the mouth, linked to the earlier sentence and Mitka by a semicolon, rather than separated with a full stop.

Having begun the meeting on a somewhat negative note, most of the room ended up vigorously defending this book for its wonderful prose.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here 

Reading Group: A Thousand Moons by Sebastian Barry

In February we met at Clare's to discuss this book of her suggestion. It is one of several novels by Barry about the McNultys and the Dunnes inspired by tales of his own Irish family history, and this book is a sequel to the prize-winning Days Without End. The earlier book features Thomas McNulty and John Cole, who meet in America as exiled young men and form a loving relationship while working as cross-dressing entertainers, but then join the US Army and are caught up in the violence of the Indian Wars and the American Civil War. A Thousand Moons takes place when they are much older, after the end of the civil war, but when the defeated confederates are agitating again. It is related by Winona, the young Native American woman the two men adopted as a child after the desecration of her tribe, the Lakota, in which they took part, and who has been brought up and educated by them tenderly and thoughtfully in a loving home. Caught between that old world of nature and the seasons and the world of structures and words (she works as a clerk for the local lawyer), Winona is both lost and saved - 'They both gave me the wound and healed it, which is a hard fact in its way' and has thus the power to tell her own story in a prose that is both imbued with lyrical depictions of nature and straightforwardly colloquial.

Such paradoxes are at the heart of Barry's fiction, and what he is interested in are the complex subtleties and  fluidity of human nature and identity. His ability to ventriloquise a young Native American woman is a supreme case in point, though right at the start of the novel the colonisation of such an approach is acknowledged. 'I am Winona,' she begins the novel by saying, and then goes on to explain that this is not her original name, which was Ojinjintka (meaning 'rose'): the two men couldn't pronounce it, so they called her by her the name of her sister who was killed, Winona. In this way the men have culturally colonised her, but the naming is a remnant and thus acknowledgement of the genocide in which they took part and for which the way they have cared for her is an atonement.

Their household, composed of an ageing homosexual male couple, a young Native American woman and two freed black slaves, Rosalee and her brother Tennyson, is a microcosm of the blended, accepting society against which the factional world around them is set. That factional world soon encroaches: Winona is raped, possibly by Jas, the young white man who wants to marry her (in spite of social disapproval - 'I was just the cinders of an Indian fire in the eyes of the town'), and as the consequences of this unfold, Tennyson is attacked and left brain-damaged. Dressed as a boy for self-protection, Winona sets out on an aborted mission to avenge him, but in the process meets and falls in love with another young Native American woman. Eventually, Jas is found murdered and the innocent Winona is charged and sentenced to death, and the question of how this will end for her makes the final pages thrillingly tense. 

Like others in the group, I couldn't put this book down, and for me it was less for the plot than for Barry's wonderfully lyrical and astute prose, his empathy and insight into all of the characters. Even the most violent characters have their humane moments, providing a moving and unsettling portrayal of the complexity of human cruelty. As for the plot, we found the final revelation, like that in Barry's The Secret Scripture, manipulated and unconvincing, but again this did not spoil our overall admiration. There was only one dissenter: Ann, who surprised the rest of us by saying she hadn't engaged with the book at all, that she wouldn't have finished it if she hadn't had to for the meeting, and that she found it 'wordy'.

I did have one other caveat. The basic message of the book is that love conquers all. Much as I loved the book, and that message, in the light of Tommy Orange's There There which we read previously and which portrays the ongoing legacy of devastation in the lives of Native Americans to this day, I couldn't escape an uncomfortable feeling that to create this one (probably unusual) instance of atonement and redemption made the book potentially unrealistic, even possibly sentimental, and self-justifying. 

We ended with a discussion about the issue of cultural appropriation in fiction raised by this novel. We strongly felt that if it's done well, with respect and empathy, it is acceptable to step into the shoes of others whose experience is outside one's own. After all, the moral potential of fiction lies in its power as an act of empathy (which this book most supremely is). Speaking as someone who has written plays, I would also point out that it would be impossible for a playwright to write simply from their own experience and identity - a playwright just has to put themself in other people's shoes (and minds and emotions). And, as someone commented, if we stuck to our own experience in writing, historical novels couldn't be allowed: Hilary Mantel, after all, wasn't personally at the Tudor court, and her novels set there would have to be cancelled.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here 

Reading group: Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout

Continuing family matters and catching up with my novel-in-progress after almost two months of illness have gone on keeping me from other things, including the reports of our reading group discussions. I am pleased to say that I have now got to the end of the first, handwritten draft of my novel (I always do the first draft by hand), and now I have a bit of a breather in which to let the whole thing settle in my mind before typing the next (I hope final) draft. This means that at last I can turn to those reports, though I'm afraid that after all this time my memory of the discussions will not be the most detailed, and the reports will therefore probably be brief.

At the end of January we met at Mark's to discuss this new novel by Elizabeth Strout, suggested by Ann. We had all very much liked My Name is Lucy Barton, another concerning the same first-person protagonist (Lucy Barton), and were therefore keen to read this. (In fact Oh William! is the third in the series, which most of us hadn't realised when we chose the book, although it didn't in fact matter that we hadn't read the second.) We were by no means disappointed; in fact we liked and admired this novel even more: we were full of unanimous praise.

In this book, Laura Barton recounts how, while grieving the death of her second husband, she becomes involved in a crisis being experienced by William, her first husband. William's current wife leaves him at the same time that, through family history research, he uncovers an alarming and unsuspected, indeed unlikely-seeming truth about his own mother. This prompts him to feel the need to travel back to Maine, from where his mother came, and Lucy agrees to accompany him. Over the course of these events we are treated to Lucy's reminiscences and meditations, and while little happens in the present time level - although it all leads to a revelation that turns much on its head - the history of Lucy's relationships with both husbands, with her daughters and with William's mother unfolds. And while Lucy's own difficult origins are presented more glancingly than in the previous books, they still movingly underpin the whole novel.

Once again, the thing that most struck us was the way that the plain, easy prose manages to convey huge complexities of emotion and of relationships, to deeply moving effect. The whole experience of reading the book is of being spoken to intimately by someone revealing their deepest reminiscences and thoughts in a conversational, sometimes casually stream-of consciousness manner: 

I think I have mentioned the business about my father because as I was packing for Maine, I thought of William's father...

And another quote: 

I think I have to mention this, although I have said I would not talk about David [her second husband], but I think you should know...

And another: 

I have written about [my own mother] and I really do not want to write anything else about her. But I understand one might need to know a few things for this story.

 However, in spite of this almost rambling, naive-seeming style, the novel is in fact very tightly structured, and the final revelation pulls everything together, bringing all the previously planted clues and indictors into a focussed pattern.

The whole thing seemed so emotionally truthful that some of us felt sure that it must be autobiographical, and this seems to be corroborated by the fact that towards the end there is a discussion between Lucy and another character about the two preceding real-life novels - which in the novel are written by Lucy Barton - and whether she will include the character in her next. However, Clare was sure that it was not autobiographical, and a glance at Elizabeth Strout's biography shows that she did not share the deprived and poverty-stricken background of Lucy's that provides the basic pulse of these novels. Ann made a very interesting and astute suggestion, which was that it is autobiographical in that Lucy Barton is an alter ego for the author. I must say that as a writer that really struck a chord for me: autobiography need not necessarily be characterised by verifiable facts, but can operate on an emotional and psychological level.

In any case, the whole thing seemed extremely real to all of us, and although Mark did then start cavilling about the ending, which he found somehow artificial, no one else agreed with him, and we were very glad to have read the book.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here 

Reading Group: Lean Fall Stand by Jon McGregor

Having read together both Jon McGregor's first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things and in particular his magnificent Reservoir 13, our group have been fans of his work, and were eager to read this novel when Mark suggested it. There, sure enough, was the wonderful prose - lean yet vivid - which we all very much appreciated and enjoyed; overall, however, we were a little disappointed.

The book is divided into three parts. The first, and most distinct from the others, Lean, was inspired by a 2004 trip McGregor made to the Antarctic, as part of a Writers and Artists Programme run by the British Antarctic Survey. Set in the Antarctic, it deals with a tragedy that occurs when two novice Antarctic researchers and their experienced leader 'Doc' all become separated from each other in a sudden snowstorm and Doc suffers a stroke that renders him incapable of saving the situation. The second and longest part, Fall, deals with Doc's painful recovery back home in the UK, and chiefly takes the viewpoint of the wife who has lived to some extent independently from a husband spending several months of every year away in the Antarctic, but must now make sacrifices in her academic career to care for him. The third, Stand, consists mainly of scenes from the Aphasia Group they attend as Doc reaches back for the language he has lost.

There was no doubt amongst us that the most compelling section was the first. Many have pointed out that this section has the tension of an adventure story. There is a sense of dire urgency as the two young researchers try to make contact through a failing radio system, short separate sections formally embodying their separation. There is impending doom in the flashback moments, as in this section describing the comings and goings of researchers over the years:

... The bodies came, and they went... The ice slipped and broke into the water... The daylight was silence... The bodies breathed in their narrow wooden shelter. The weather closed in again... There was movement in the water, and the sky darkened above the glacier.

The descriptions of the Antarctic landscape are stunning:

The night-time was no such thing. The continent kept its face towards the sun and the ice slowly softened. The mountains climbed sharply away from the valley and the glaciers tongued down towards the sea. In the crevasses that ran across the lower mountain slopes the light fell bluely down, dimming towards the depths.

While everyone in our group agreed that the book was a very quick read, the change to a different kind of tension - that of Doc's slow recovery and his wife's adjustment to her new situation - was a good deal less compelling, certainly by comparison, and the scenes with the Aphasia Group were repetitive, if necessarily so due to the nature of the members' language problems. John said that partly what had made the book a quick read for him was that he had found himself skipping these latter sections. The prose itself in the latter two sections embodies a loss of tension: it becomes much more conventional, indeed in the last section somewhat workaday, and thus less emotive. One problem for me, I said, was that it was hard to become invested in Doc's recovery since he had come over in the first section as a not particularly attractive character - fogeyish and self-centred - and indeed, it was his irresponsibility and maybe hubris that paved the way for the tragedy. Others agreed. His stroke occurring during the ensuing crisis detracts from his culpability, and his resulting loss of language is a protection for him against the truth coming out. It was hard as a result not to feel that he was unfairly getting away with it all - especially as the first section had established our sympathies firmly with the young men in dire trouble. Towards the end of the book, the members of the Aphasia Group stage a show for relatives, with Doc's situation, which had begun so dramatically in such dramatic surroundings, as the finale; Doug said he expected Doc, having regained some language facility, to make a dramatic public confession - and others said the same - but no such thing happens. 

The thing we so admire in Remarkable Things and Reservoir 13 is McGregor's ability to create a framing panoramic view of a community while homing in on the personal viewpoints of its members, creating an effect we find very moving. In this book, however, we found no such unifying principle, and felt that, as Mark said, it fell apart into its three sections, and it was hard to tell what it was really about. Was  it about Antarctica? No, we soon leave Antarctica behind. (I said that I thought there was a hugely missed opportunity in Antarctica as a symbol for the freezing of language - or at least, I didn't find any consciousness of that in the novel.) Is it about Doc's recovery? But then the viewpoint in the second section is chiefly that of his wife Anna: is it about Anna's personal drama? But then she too comes across as unsympathetic - as detached as her children once or twice accuse her of being. Is it about aphasia in general, as the last section seems to be? This last section is the only point at which the novel deals like McGregor's previous novels with anything like a community, but the viewpoints we share here, apart from that of the observing Anna, are those of the course leader and the language therapist, and those very briefly. While in the first section we enter the newly traumatised head of Doc and share his language confusion (which is cleverly and empathically done), in the last section we are simply objective observers of aphasia sufferers, and the scope for empathy is much less. McGregor's ability to switch viewpoints is used to brilliant effect in his previous novels, but I felt that here for much of the time it seemed random and contributed to our sense of lack of focus. In fact, I said, even in the first section, in which the narrative enters alternately the minds of the men in danger, I found it hard to quite fully engage with them, due to not knowing anything much about them before we are in the thick of their crisis.

Ann said that she found unbelievable that the leaders of teams in the Antarctic should act with such irresponsibility (there is another incident of even greater irresponsibility in the past, in which one of Doc's colleagues died): she felt sure that in such extreme conditions things would be much stricter.  Finally, Doug commented that McGregor's technique of seeming to begin with one kind of story - in Reservoir 13 a conventional murder story and here an adventure story - and then confounding the reader's expectations by turning it into another, more serious kind of story, had worked brilliantly in the former novel, but hadn't worked here. Of all of us, Clare was the most positive towards the book, saying that she had read it in one sitting and had in fact quite enjoyed it, though adding that she had been in the mood for a quick and perhaps not too serious read. 

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

Reading group: As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

John, who had suggested this book, and had read it more than once before, said that he thought it was a truly great book (in the sense of its literary stature), but that he both loved and hated it.

It is the story of the Bundrens, a family of poor farmers of the deep American south, exeriencing the death of their wife and mother Addie, and then taking an arduous journey to bury her, according to her wishes, in Jefferson from where she came. They are delayed by various difficulties including floods and a fire, and the body in the coffin on the wagon begins to rot as vultures wheel overhead. The whole expedition - and the family rivalries and the characters' various additional ulterior motives for taking the journey - is conveyed in a series of multiple vernacular interior monologues: the thoughts, observations and memories of the family members and others they encounter.

Clearly a landmark book in the advent of Modernism in the early twentieth-century, it thus eschews entirely the prop of an objective narrator, and relies on the characters revealing themselves and each other through their inner stream-of-consciousness thoughts, often unreliable and incomplete in understanding, and leaving readers having to piece together the story and its implications for themselves.

John said he loved this experimentalism and in particular the stress on psychology, which is rendered with such searing insight, but it was certainly a novel that worked the reader hard, both for the reason stated above and because the southern vernacular was very hard to penetrate, particularly before you got used to it. As Doug and I interjected, some of the sentences seem at first impenetrable, even unfinished, until you attune to their logic, particularly as part of Faulker's project here is to render with veracity the way our thoughts can be sometimes muddled, incomplete and inconsistent. It took me a second reading to understand these sentences from the only section in the voice of the (more literate, ex-schoolteacher) Addie:

'I knew that [the word] fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride who never had the pride. I knew that it had been, not that they [ie the schoolchildren she had taught] had dirty noses, but that we had used one another by words like spiders dangling by their mouths from a beam, swinging and twisting and never touching.' 

Addie's preoccupation in this whole section is, significantly, about the uselessness of words, and their inability truly to represent experience, or, as the second sentence conveys, to create connections between people. (At one point there is a gap in the text illustrating the impossibility for her of expressing one particular feeling). For this reason, having initially thought that the beginning of the second sentence was referring back to the previous sentence ('it' being fear or pride or both), I then thought I was reading an unfinished sentence, as apparently indicated by that comma, interrupted by a new thought about the schoolchildren. Only after a double-take did I realise that 'it' in the second sentence referred to the reason (for her hating the children and beating them), which wasn't, as she had once thought, their dirty noses, but because she couldn't connect with them through the impossibility of words.

Everyone agreed that the book was hard work, so that no one could say they had actually enjoyed it, but all found it extremely interesting. We all felt we really needed to read it again, sure that we would get a lot more out of it a second time. (There were plot points about which some of us were still unclear, and ironies that, having resolved them in our discussion, we felt we could relish better a second time around; John said he'd enjoyed the book best on this his third or so reading.) Another thing that made the going harder for the reader at the start was the sheer number of characters (fifteen I think in all), most of them speaking early on. We all agreed that the early part of the book, as these characters are allowed to establish themselves, was slow, and that it was later that the book really got going with some pace. (Doug said that he had started the book years ago but had not got past the early part, and I, who thought I had read the book before, must have done the same, as I had absolutely no recognition of the more dramatic events of the rest of the novel.)

Someone suggested that another problem was that the voices weren't all that distinct from each other, and our initial reaction was to agree, but when we talked about it, it seemed that perhaps we were seeing them too much through their vernacular, and that within it there were indeed distinctions: Addie, as I have commented, is more literate and speaks/thinks in more abstract terms, as do the doctor, Peabody, and the Whitfield the priest. The language of Darl, the second of Addie's five children, more insightful, observant and imaginative than the rest and given the greatest number of sections, often takes a poetic turn; Cash, her first-born, a carpenter who has made her coffin, is distinguished (before the end of the novel) by being a man of few words, his only two early sections consisting of a short list and a single paragraph respectively; the youngest, Vardaman, the only non adult of the children, is strikingly distinct in his muddled thought and language. Those of the only girl, Dewey Dell, begin as fairly straightforward, but turn convoluted and disconnected as she becomes emotionally desperate. Anse, the feckless father, is distinguished by his repetitive self-justifications and whining manipulations, contrasting with the down-to-earth voices of the farmers who help the family out on their travels. (Jewel, the most different of Addie's children, taller than the rest and filled with a distinctive vicious streak, is given no monologue of his own and thus remains to the reader the outsider that the plot will reveal he is within the family.)

We had a fairly intense discussion about the fact that, although the characters speak chiefly in the vernacular, and although a main point seems to be the difficulty for them of articulating their private reality, they quite frequently come out with sophisticated concepts and insights expressed in abstract Latinate vocabulary that was unusual even to us. Darl describes the motion of the wagon as they travel as 'so dreamlike as to be uninferent of progress' and Dewey Dell as 'watchful and repudient' (my italics). Even Dewey Dell, whose outlook is simpler, calls the cow's breathing 'stertorous'. Most people felt that this detracted from the authenticity of the voices, Doug in particular finding that it jarred, and that although it can perhaps be accepted as poetic/novelistic licence in a novel so groundbreaking at the time of its publication, it wouldn't be accepted in a novel written today - the voices would be expected to be much more accurately realistic. Mark objected that he didn't see how Faulker could have done it any other way: if such characters don't have the language to express their own feelings, then the author has to provide it. Doug and I said, But that doesn't work in interior monologue mode, since an interior monologue is meant to replicate a character's thought (and language) - it just makes it feel inauthentic, and brings in for the reader a sense of the author telling the story, after all. Mark said again that he didn't see how it could be done otherwise. Personally, I think it can be done, although it is one of the hardest things to do in writing, and I thought there was an instance in the book that illustrated how: Addie talks of how, trapped in her unhappy premarital life, she lay in bed and heard 'the wild geese going north and their honking coming faint and high and wild out of the wild darkness'. This is a concrete visceral image/symbol that left me with a far more vivid and lasting sense of her longing and feelings of being trapped, left behind and cut off, than any of the abstract musings of her section could or did.

Quite often, the text will break suddenly for a short space into italics, and Doug said he hadn't been able to work out the point of this. I said I'd noticed that in the cases of Vardaman and Dewey Dell, the italics tended to represent troubling thoughts that kept recurring to them, often in a non sequitur way. Doug agreed, but pointed out rightly that there wasn't consistency throughout the novel over this, and that it wasn't clear what the point was in Darl's sections, for instance.  

Much of the commentary we have come across finds the book fundamentally tragi-comic, but none of us found much in it to laugh at. We did all find funny the moment where the neighbouring farmer Tull tells how the Bundrens laid Addie the wrong way round in the coffin so that they could splay out her dress in the wider space meant for her shoulders, and I and others found funny the self-justifying section of the priest, Whitfield, who has felt that he should confess a sin to the Bundrens but argues himself out of the need for it now that Addie is dead. And the very ending of the book - the last sentence - is very funny as well as grim, and, we all agreed, quite brilliant. Mostly, however, we found the situation of the family gruellingly tragic. 

All in all, although most of us said that we probably wouldn't have taken up this novel out of choice, we were all really glad to have read it and found it very interesting indeed.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here 

Reading group: Turbulence by David Szalay

This book of linked episodes won the Edge Hill Prize for short stories, and as one of the three judges that year (along with Sam Jordison and Tessa Hadley) I of course admire it greatly and was eager to share it with the group.

It takes a large cast of characters connected by flights, each section dealing with a character only briefly or loosely connected with the character in the previous section. It's a short book, and the sections are fairly brief, but manages to convey huge psychological complexity, and to make the situation of each character moving. One thing that really moved me was the way the book portrayed the paradox of the interconnectedness of this global world - and of us all to each other - and our simultaneous aloneness with our personal dilemmas. Another thing I found very moving was the changes in viewpoint and perspective, the difference between how characters are seen by others on the one hand, and their inner lives and personal reality on the other. An early instance of this concerns a pilot: in the section dedicated to him we learn, as he flies a cargo plane from Dakar to Sao Paulo, of the death of his sister when they were children, and the way that, clearly, it has affected him for good, and see his vulnerability and his sensitivity. The next episode opens with the viewpoint of a young female journalist about to take an important flight to Toronto and desperate to get rid of the man with whom she had a one-night stand the night before - a desperation we are made to share along with her anxieties about her commission. It is a moment before we realise - and a little shock when we do - that this is the pilot we came to know in the previous section, seen through her eyes as a piece of inconvenient meat she needs to get out of her bed. 

Doug, Mark and John very much agreed with me, Mark in particular saying he found the book quite brilliant (and not, he said, just because of his past career as a flight attendant). John said he didn't understand how Szalay managed to make the characters, so briefly dealt with in terms of physical space in the book, so  convincing and moving. I said I'd noticed that often when we share a character's point of view here, that character is not named, which makes for psychological veracity - people don't name themselves when they are lost in their inner thoughts, and so it's distancing to name them (which a lot of authors don't seem to have noticed!) The main thing that makes the book so moving, I think, is the way Szalay adopts the techniques of both short stories and novels (the book has in fact been marketed as each, at different times). It uses the short story techniques of economy: implication rather than explication, and omissions and jumps that create moving juxtapositions (connections and contrasts), while also embracing a novelistic overall story arc and forward motion, culminating in a satisfying novelistic link to the beginning.

Doug did say however that the one thing he found unconvincing about the book was that ending, which he found artificial and forced. I have to say that on this, my third or fourth reading of the book, it did strike me that there was a psychological element missing from the last section, which did have the potential for making it seem a little manipulated (I won't say what it is, in order not to plot-spoil), but I must also say that the first two or three times I read the book it never occurred to me, and, apart from that psychological aspect, I still found moving the way the general direction was steered back to the beginning, underlining the theme of our disconnectedness yet surprising connectedness. Mark and John I think felt the same.

Our only real dissenter was Ann, who I'm afraid had found the whole thing too schematic. She had guessed right from the start that the book was going to take us in flights around the world back to the same point (and had quickly flicked through to see that this was the case) and couldn't read it without a sense of the sketched plan Szalay must have drawn up to follow, with all the obvious representative characters ticked off, right down to the Syrian refugee. None of the rest of us had had this reaction. Personally, I couldn't see anything wrong with an author having such a scheme: I saw it merely as the openly disclosed framework for something much more subtle in terms of themes and narrative surprises.

Doug said he didn't think it was a novel, though, as you could read the stories entirely in isolation. Someone else disagreed that that was the case: the stories were much richer if read in sequence through the prisms of the previous stories, which of course is how you read a novel.  Doug said however it didn't have the feel of a novel, it felt like something else. I commented that the novel has always been subject to change and innovation, its very name meaning new. In any case, as with Tove Jansson's Summer Book, which we read earlier this year, I thought that, apart from the pressures of marketing, from a literary point of view there was no need to categorise the book: it was what it was, very successfully in the view of most of us.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here  

Reading Group: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

There seem to be two schools of thought about Wallace Stegner, who founded the creative writing school at Stanford University (1946) and taught many well-known American novelists. One is that he himself is somewhat minor as a novelist, and another is that he is in fact one of the greatest American writers and unjustly overlooked, partly or mainly because he is a novelist of the American west (rather than the fashionable east coast) with an environmentalist stress on landscape. 

Perhaps as a result of this schism no one in our group had heard of him, I think, apart from Mark who a few years ago had read this, Stegner's final novel, and remembered enjoying it. Acknowledged to be semi-autobiographical, it is the story of the lifelong friendship between two couples, narrator Larry Morgan and his wife Sally, and Sid and Charity Lang. The novel begins in 1972 near the end of this journey, with Larry and Sally waking in the Vermont compound where over many years they spent summers hosted by Charity and her family, and where Charity is now clearly dying. Then in flashback we follow the story from the beginning in 1938, as Larry and Sally arrive in Wisconsin for Larry to begin teaching in the English Department at the university, where Sid is already on the staff. It is Charity who immediately befriends the new couple, swiftly visiting Sally in their basement flat, the pregnancies of both women forming an instant bond between them. It is clear from the start that Charity is a woman of force. Although Larry and Sally are much poorer and lack the family connections the Langs enjoy, the Langs are very keen to take them under their wing and to form a close friendship with them, quickly inviting them to dinner and then constantly arriving on their doorstep to whisk them away to picnics etc., and the Morgans are clearly flattered. The Langs then spend many years helping the Morgans out both socially and financially.

Very soon there is no doubt that Charity is controlling. She is determined that she and Sid will have a prominent role in Wisconsin academia. Larry rapidly achieves success as a short story writer for prestigious magazines and soon also gets his first novel accepted for publication, but although eventually Charity will enthusiastically engineer a publishing job for Larry through a family connection, bent on an academic career for Sid, she discourages Sid from the writing he would like to do and thus ultimately destroys his prospects as a writer. An incident in which she is particularly controlling is one that will end in tragedy for Sally and Larry. On one of their stays in Vermont, the two couples take a walking trip with a packhorse (leaving their children behind with the hired carers). It begins with an embarrassing confrontation when, just as they are due to set off, Charity demeans Sid by publicly insisting that he unpack and repack to be sure that the matches he said he packed are really in there. Once they set out she insists that the four walk by the compass, leading them into bogs and other impediments. By the end of the trip, Sally has come down with polio, which will disable her for life, and, although it is not stated, there is a between-the-lines implication that Charity's behaviour is responsible. Now, in 1972, it will turn out, Charity has orchestrated a scenario for her own death in which she has commanded everyone to be present - although in fact Larry and Sally have not seen her for some years - and has even drawn up a list of women of her own choice as potential marriage partners for Sid after she is gone.  

Objectively for the reader therefore Charity is something of a monster. In her Introduction to the 2013 Penguin edition, Jane Smiley states that '...it is clear early in the novel that Charity rubs Larry the wrong way, and that probably the two of them would never be friends without Sid ... and Sally, who loves Charity.' However, most of us in the group felt that there was much more narrative ambivalence towards Charity than this implies. Larry is initially almost, if not quite, as bowled over by her as Sally: 'All right. I admitted it: a charming woman, a woman we couldn't help liking on sight. She raised the pulse and the spirits, she made Madison a different town, she brought life and anticipation and excitement into a year we had been expecting to endure stoically.' The 'all right' and the 'I admitted it' do indicate some prior doubts, but the rest of the statement serves to sweep them away. As the novel progresses, Charity is revealed as more and more controlling; meanwhile, there is more and more insistence on the fact that the Morgans loved Charity, and the dichotomy becomes stronger. Several admiring critics have seen this as a subtle portrayal of the paradoxical complications of friendship, but it did not strike most of us in our group like that: most of us found it simply inconsistent and were left with a strong sense of disingenuousness, and consequently the sense that  Larry was prepared to swallow any flaws for what Charity could offer him and Sally (the social and financial 'safety' of the title perhaps). Most strongly betraying disingenuousness and insincerity, perhaps, however, is the prose: two or three people in our group commented that there appears to be to be no authorial irony in the depiction of Larry - narrator and author seem very close - and for much of the narration there is a telling coyness and sentimentality. He describes the Vermont compound:

A happy, orderly, lively corner of Eden, as hushed as a hospital at quiet times, jumping with activity as soon as the social bell sounded ... Sid over the barbecue, Lyle and I over the firewood; Aunt Emily, Aunt Heather, and the hired girls over the smaller children...

a passage that goes on for several pages.

Some of us found it hard to understand why otherwise Larry and Sally would have anything more to do with the other pair after the first dinner party, when Charity uses a police whistle to marshal people into dances and songs, and when, much worse, there is antisemitism in the air as a clearly uneasy Jewish couple, who do not know the dances and songs, are made out to be ungracious, jealous and downright wet blankets.

But no, after the party the Morgans and Langs walk together wrapped in the burnooses provided by the Langs and 'fell into a four-ply laughing hug, we were so glad to know one another and so glad that the trillion chances in the universe had brought us to the same university at the same time', a sentiment later cemented in the fact that, once their daughter is born very soon after, Larry and Sally call her after the other two, Lang. And it is hard to see past one of the early, establishing sentences of the novel, describing Charity's compound:

There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.

But then it is Larry himself who seems most strongly to express the antisemitic attitude. 'And there sat the impossible Erlichs.' he says, 'smiling and smiling, with their useless book open on their laps and their mouths shut, hating what they envied.'  He describes the atmosphere after the pair, the Erlichs, have summarily left the party in angry disgrace:

Altogether a lovely scene. I felt guilty and triumphant. There we were, still in the warmth and light and grace of that room, while those who didn't belong, those who hated and envied, those who were offensive to Athena, went out into the chilly darkness. I knew how they felt, and I hated it for their sakes. But I also knew how I felt. I felt wonderful. [My bolds.]

'I hated it for their sakes,' he says, and 'I knew how they felt', but one would hope for a stronger self-condemnation, and the passage is in any case haloed by his earlier reaction to the Erlichs: Marvin Erlich, he says, is

'...one of the high-crotch, baggy-tweed contingent ... loading his pipe and scattering tobacco crumbs all over my desk... I had reacted to him as if he were ragweed, and I was not especially happy to see him now... His wife (I reconstruct this without charity, small c) gave us a smile that I thought curiously flat in so plump a face. It struck me then, and strikes me again now, how instantly mutual dislike can make itself evident. Or was I only reacting to their indifference? They did not appear to value me, so the hell with them.' 

Post 1972, narrator Larry does wonder more generously how the Erlichs, among others, fared in life, but in the light of this quite vividly portrayed distaste, the later sentiment and the above comment on his own lack of charity do seem disingenuous. And the last sentence of the last-quoted paragraph indeed strikes me as particularly self-centred. Now, as he recounts the party incident, he muses: 'Maybe we were all anti-Semitic in some sneaky residual way,' but then immediately lets himself off the hook: 'but I don't think so.'

For me there is a lot of disingenuousness and self-centredness surrounding the issue of the comparative literary fates of Larry and Sid. Narrator Larry portrays himself as sympathetic to Sid's difficulty and embarrassed about his own success in comparison with Sid's failure, but the narrative stress on his own success and on the admiration of others, including Charity and Sid, seems to me to belie this. One of Larry's short stories is accepted by the prestigious Atlantic. On a walk on the same day, Sid reveals that as an undergraduate he published poems in small (lesser) magazines, and Larry asks him to recite one:

But he won't... He would be overcome with embarrassment to expose them to a real writer, one with the Atlantic's letter in his pocket.

While we can take this as a replication of Sid's attitude - ie Larry assumes that Sid thinks of him as the real writer of the two, and indeed goes on to protest and tell Sid that he shouldn't let outside pressures stop him writing - for the whole of this book there is the sense for this reader that that's Larry's view too, so his sympathy with Sid's dashed promise came across to me as disingenuous and patronising, and his bashfulness about his own success as humblebrag.

John was shocked too by the self-centredness, finding it even in the first chapter, which others of us, including me, hadn't. Larry rises early, before Sally, and walks in the compound, relishing the surroundings: '...a road I have walked hundreds of times, a lovely lost tunnel through the trees, busy this morning with birds and little shy rustling things, my favourite road anywhere.' Looking back in the context of the whole novel, however, I can see what John's bullshit detector lit on:

We didn't come back to Battell Pond this time for pleasure... But I can't feel sombre now... Quite the reverse. I wonder if I have ever felt more alive, more competent in my mind and more at ease with myself and the world.

In other words, it's not really about nature, about the beautiful surroundings, or his disabled wife lying asleep back in the lodge, helpless should she wake, or the sombre reason for their visit, it's all about him.

John was shocked too by the sexism. When Larry's first novel is accepted for publication he throws an impromptu party to celebrate. During the evening, Sally, heavily pregnant, indeed about to give birth, has to retire to the bedroom of their basement flat, while beyond the wall Larry relishes being kissed by two women: 'I am flooded with a Turkish feeling of being surrounded by desirable, affectionate women... More kisses. Smooch, mm.' (Though of course, true to form, he denies there is anything sexual in it: 'both delightful, charming sisters I wish I had'). Larry is quite happy to have Sally, whose face he says is the picture he wants to carry beyond the grave (or words to that effect - I can't find the quote), spend her whole time typing and editing his manuscripts before she is disabled. Narrator Larry says:

Nowadays, people might wonder how my marriage lasted. It lasted fine. It throve, partly because I was as industrious as an ant-eater in a termite mound and wouldn't have noticed anything short of a walkout, but more because Sally was completely supportive and never thought of herself as a neglected wife - 'thesis widows', we used to call them in graduate school.

There is acknowledgement here of course of the outdated patriarchy of the situation, but the tone is complacent and somewhat offhand ('It lasted fine'). (And there is of course complete ignorance of unraised consciousness, along with self-justification, in the excuse that 'Sally never thought of herself as a neglected wife'.) This is one of the very few comments on their marriage, and most in our group agreed that Sally is nothing more than a cipher in the novel.

People wondered why, in a semi-autobiographical novel, the author should have made the non-autobiographical choice to make the narrator's wife disabled, noting that it sent her to the sidelines of the action. We never get any sense of any involvement of Larry with her care (they employ a woman for that) even though at the end of the novel Larry is able to bask in Sid's congratulation for carrying the burden. In one scene, Larry holds her up to watch a procession she is excited by. 'Anything she was enchanted by she was entitled to', he says, but then there is laughable stress on the discomfort it's causing him: 

My feet were getting cold, and were punctured by the gravel embedded in the roof ... 'Sure you're not cold?' [he asks her] ...then her hand went up and down my back, pressing the cold cloth of my pajamas to my skin. 'But you are! You're freezing!'

Others remarked on the constant references to servants, including the girl employed full-time to look after their baby, as 'our girl' or 'the girl'. Clare pointed out in disgust that at one point one of the nanny helpers is compared to a cow. Someone noted that there is nothing in the novel of the Morgans' years with a growing child (we never ever get to know Lang, their only child). The attitude to children and childcare was to me laughably shocking. John picked out the fact that Larry, trying to hug Sally over her pregnant bump, refers to the baby as an 'intruder', and the attitude is carried over once the baby is born. Taking a sailing trip on the lake, the two couples are caught in squally weather and the boat overturns. Although their lives seem to be in danger, there is not one thought of the baby at home with the minder, and once Larry and Sally arrive home they refuse to take the baby screaming for its long overdue breast feed and demand that the minder girl holding her pour them a steaming bath:

Ellen came out of the bathroom with Lang purple-faced and unappeasable on her shoulder. We crowded past them into the steam and shut the door.

Once Sally does take Lang, there is a certain distaste in Larry's attitude to her:

Burly, fat-faced, obviously overnourished at Sally's expense, she did not get my sympathy.

One period in the later past life of Larry and Sally that is dwelt on in detail is the year they spend with the Langs in Florence on Guggenheim Fellowships, once their daughter has departed for university. While narrator Larry states that the four were excitedly and humbly aware of their luck and keen to learn, John, agreed with by others, couldn't help feeling that they were in fact horribly pleased with themselves for being there, the prose being particularly coy in this section, this paragraph perhaps encapsulating an underlying arrogance and patronisation:

While buying gas [at Gubbio], [we] heard a passionate crie de coeur from the girl who manned the pump. She said she was trapped in this medieval prison of a town. She turned her lips inside out when we protested that it was the most picturesque town we had ever seen... if we had wanted a maid, a driver, a cook, a sarta, a concubine, a faithful follower until the first better opportunity showed, we could have had that girl for a thousand lire a day ...We regretted afterwards that we hadn't asked her. It would have been interesting to see her expression when she found herself expected to stand respectfully before the Della Robbia lunettes in the Pazzi chapel, or asked to wait with the car outside Santa Maria Novella.

'We were once again four in Eden', he says, a reference back to an earlier and apparently unironically self-aggrandising comment about the four in Vermont:

Two Adams and two Eves, an improvement on God's plan, and one I recommend to Him next time He makes a world.

Mark, who in spite of enjoying the book in the past found he couldn't even read it this time around, defended it however from criticisms of sexism and snobbery by saying that it was of its time, and suggested that it was no more sexist than Updike or Roth. Most in the group didn't find that any excuse. The book was first published in 1987 when many writers were writing with very different attitudes. Ann commented rightly that these things often overlap in the development of artistic trends, and we agreed that it was in fact an old-fashioned book for its time in terms of both attitudes and prose style.

Clare was irritated by the constant lists of plants, which struck her not so much as appreciation of nature as showing off a knowledge of taxonomy. I noted that, although Stegner has been lauded as a writer of the American landscape, there has also been objection to the fact that he overlooks completely the role of Native Americans in its history. The only references to Native Americans in this book are the moment when the young Larry, arriving for the first time at the Vermont compound, comes upon Charity's mother reading Hiawatha to a group of children, and the couple of occasions when Larry makes a jokey stereotype parody of Native American speech which made me distinctly uncomfortable. Most people were also irritated (and bored) by the way the characters constantly quoted, sometimes at length, from poetry, and some thought it pretentious (on the part of both the characters and the author). 

However, although we so thoroughly demolished this book, Ann, John and I had to say that we were fascinated by it, Ann because the situation with Charity's family echoed some of her own American family history, John because the attitudes of the two couples reminded him of the parental distance and snobbery of his own childhood, and he and I because we simply couldn't believe it and kept looking for the savage irony we expected but didn't find.

Jenny had been quiet all this time and she now spoke up, saying that she had enjoyed the book and that she found our criticisms totally unnecessary and indeed 'sour'. She thought it completely wrong that we brought the author into our discussions, and didn't just attend to the story, which she thought was a really good one - the story of how two couples ended up being friends for so many years. Mark replied that it was potentially a really good story, and an unusual one, but that we hadn't liked the treatment. Jenny however would not be moved. She strongly disagreed that there was no irony in the narration, and, apparently disgusted with us, said we would just have to agree to disagree on that. 

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here 

Reading group: Candide by Voltaire

We haven't read many real classics for this reading group, and our usual lit-crit mode of discussion seemed hardly appropriate for a book (suggested by John) that is considered a staple of the Western canon, and indeed one of the most influential books of all time. Published in 1759 and the most famous of Voltaire's works, it is the picaresque tale of an ingenue, Candide, who has been schooled by his tutor Pangloss in the Leibnitzian philosophy of Optimism - the idea that, since God made this world He must have sufficient reason for its shortcomings, and that therefore it is 'the best of all possible worlds'. Ejected from the comfort of his royal home after being found paying sexual attention to the princess of the castle, Guneconde, Candide embarks on a series of travels and adventures that open his eyes to the horrors of the world and turn him against such a philosophy. An attack thus on Optimism, the book is a satirical takedown of all the established institutions and belief systems of society, most notably organised religion, but many others, including rank, the army, money systems and slavery.

Some of us had already read it, others hadn't; Doug had read it in the original French for A-level. John was pleased to experience again its biting and sometimes laugh-out-loud comedy; Jenny, who hadn't read it before said she was very glad that she now had, although she wouldn't have appreciated it properly had her edition not had an explanatory Introduction that also delineated the real-life historical events to which the novel was referring. Everyone said, however, how pertinent the satire nevertheless is to the present day, and everyone had enjoyed it. We relished reading the phrases coined in this novel that have become common currency, such as pour encourager des autres (the satirical reference here is to the 1757 court-martial and execution of Admiral Byng for failing to prevent the French from capturing a British stronghold on Minorca) and 'cultivating one's garden' (which Candide and his companions decide is the only sensible alternative to trying to make sense of a cruel, mad world). We did find that it took a bit of reading, that although it is a short work it seemed longer, which I thought was partly due to the picaresque form, which strings events out in a linear fashion (and, I find, makes it easy to forget them). Ann commented that since the book had actually been banned after its (secret) publication, one wonders how many people actually got to read it at the time, which makes it all the more impressive that it has had such an impact (which goes to show, perhaps, not just its wit and profundity, but also the unintended consequences of banning books, or maybe the power of reading elites, or both).

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here 

Reading group: Nora Webster by Colm Toibin

Another universally praised book, suggested by Jenny, (by the author of Brooklyn, which we discussed here), but which I'm afraid didn't get universal acclaim from our group. Another novel set in the author's home town of Enniscorthy , it is the story of a widow's struggle in the late sixties-early seventies to carry on as a mother in the aftermath of the untimely death of her schoolteacher husband. Jenny, who had been attracted to the book by the scenario of a grieving widow, was its champion, identifying strongly with Nora's situation, and it seemed that those most favourable to the book in our group were bringing personal experience to its reading, although John, whose father died when he was fifteen, was one of those who were least favourable.

One complaint was that for much of this pretty lengthy novel nothing actually seems to happen. Things do in fact happen: necessity forces Nora to sell the family holiday home and to be railroaded by her own relatives into returning to work in the office from which she was freed by her marriage. Here she must suffer the vengeful management of a woman whom the young Nora and her friend once despised and laughed at. She visits and is visited by relatives and friends who pressure her with their expectations. Eventually, taken under another woman's wing, and through the intercessions of a nun, she begins to find new ways of relating to the world: she helps out at a distant pub quiz night, she joins the local music society and is taught to sing, she decides to redecorate the house. She goes abroad on holiday with an aunt, and finds the courage to get herself a separate room when the aunt's snores keep her awake. She manages to make a stand when her younger son is unfairly moved to a lower class in school, and to get the decision reversed. Towards the end of the novel, Nora's university-student daughter becomes involved in Bloody Sunday, and finally Nora experiences being visited by her dead husband Maurice. While much of this might seem inconsequentially minor and domestic, there is potential for plot here, but Toibin is famed for eschewing plot, and also for his restrained prose, and his way of representing this series of events is indeed undramatic. On several occasions a situation promised a drama or crisis but ended without either. When Nora and her new friend run the quiz night, there is a strange rising confrontational hostility on the part of some male locals, but no confrontation ever happens. The potential for drama when Nora's daughter goes missing after Bloody Sunday is quickly dissipated when in no time at all - as far as the space and attention the novel gives to it goes - she is discovered to be fine, and the whole subject is summarily dropped from both the novel, and, it seems, from Nora's preoccupation. Textually, the episode is given not much more weight than her decision to redecorate the house. This lack of plotting or shaping resulted for us readers in a sense of a lack of forward motion, and almost all of us said that we were shocked to suddenly realise towards the end of the novel that three years had passed. 

Toibin is also routinely praised for his empathic portraits of women, but a more major problem for some of us was that, as with the character of Eilish in Brooklyn - in fact even more so - we found it very hard to get to grips with the character of Nora. The whole novel purports to be located in Nora's viewpoint, but is written in an objective third person that allows for withdrawal from direct - or even indirect - portrayal of Nora's emotions or even thoughts, and once again we found that too much is consequently left unsaid, unillustrated or unaddressed, or is even glossed over, so that it was difficult to assess Nora's precise emotions and motivations at too many given moments. For instance: Donal, the elder of the two children she still has at home (two boys) has a stammer that he developed during an extended stay at an aunt's while his mother attended to his dying father. Wondering what must have happened to occasion it, she visits the aunt only to be roundly told that the stammer was the effect of Nora never having visited or contacted the boys the whole time they were there. Nora's emotional reaction to this is neither spelled out nor illustrated with indications of her demeanour, nor implied symbolically (eg via her perceptions of her surroundings). (Did she feel it was unfair? Did she feel guilty?) Several reviewers, seeing the novel as a woman's struggle for autonomy in a repressive society, have chosen to interpret this as an example of the unfair pressures on Nora, but the fact is that it is very hard with a close reading to know her precise emotional reaction, and the possibility arises that she was simply unaffected, and that therefore her lack of attention to the boys at the time of their stay had indeed amounted to inexcusable neglect. For much of the novel it seemed to me that it was indeed intended as a sympathetic portrayal of a woman struggling heroically against societal pressure, but there were moments when I felt that this couldn't be the case. In particular, there is a moment, late in the novel, when it strikes Nora that she has not so far considered the happiness or unhappiness of the boys in the aftermath of their father's death. I have read reviews that have called this moment 'moving' and an example of the complexity of Toibin's character portrayal, and Doug, who didn't attend the meeting, wrote too that he found it moving, an illustration of the difficulty of dealing with enormous grief, Toibin's portrayal of which he found 'very real'. Jenny also defended this moment of Nora's revelation as realistic, saying that the grief of a widow can be so overwhelming that there is just no room emotionally for others, even children. However, because by then I was still feeling outside of Nora's whole emotional experience, I was simply alienated. I had a similar reaction to her response once her politically involved daughter Aine is discovered to be safe: having bothered to travel to Dublin with her elder daughter Fiona and Fiona's boyfriend to look for Aine, on hearing from another party that Aine is safe, Nora simply announces that she will now go back home and promptly does so without even seeing or speaking to Aine. There is no indication of her feelings or motivations in the moment she makes this decision, (and from this point on we hear no more of the matter), and so for me my own feelings about such a situation came to the fore (I wouldn't have just rushed back home so coolly and promptly!) and I was once again alienated from Nora. There are other hints from other characters that Nora is recognised in her family as a difficult, prickly or perhaps cold character, and my experience of all this in the reading (and that of others in the group) was of cognitive dissonance rather than character complexity. (It was interesting, we thought, that this novel more or less begins with an appearance by the mother of Eilish, the protagonist of Brooklyn, in which, seemingly out of the blue, she explains to Nora her motives in the episode at the end of that earlier novel, motives about which our group was unsure and divided, and which we couldn't solve by reference to the text of Brooklyn.) 

It is well recognised that Toibin is an autobiographical writer and that this novel in particular relates to his own childhood experience. His own schoolteacher father died when he was twelve and like the boys in this novel he was sent elsewhere to be cared for while his father was dying. Like Donal he emerged with a stammer. Crucially, his mother was distant, and his writings are consequently full of cold and neglectful mothers. This novel is clearly intended to redress the balance and present the mother's point of view. Looking at it from a writer's perspective, it seems to me that the project, though admirable, is not entirely successful, not simply because we are kept at such a distance from Nora's emotions, but also because  in those moments that I experience as dissonant the author's feelings of hurt come to the fore, disrupting the empathic intention.

The novel has been seen as a magnificent portrait of grief, and Doug wrote that 'the pain and dignity of loss, and the need to persevere, but not really succeeding, are really well conveyed in the early section of the book.' However, both Ann and I found it hard to share Nora's grief, since, as Ann pointed out, there was no real sense of what had been lost. Grief surely is characterised by a preoccupation with what has been lost, and since we are taking Nora's viewpoint we could expect some more vivid sense of Maurice as a person and Nora's relationship with him than is provided. We are told that Nora had always agreed with him politically, and it is implied that this was simply a result of her being subsumed by him.  People in our group had come away with different impressions of him as a person, some feeling, because of this, that he was somewhat stiffly patriarchal, others noting that at one point Nora thinks to herself how amusing and charming he was, while Nora is constantly presented by the members of the community with eulogies about his worth and kindness as a teacher. Although we are constantly with Nora throughout the book, we are not party to her surely inevitable dramatised memories of Maurice to corroborate any of this. It is stated that a deep pain for her is having to move from the status 'we' to that of 'I', and Doug found this 'brilliantly portrayed', but Ann and I would have liked a more visceral sense of this than the brief moment when Nora wonders if she is going to have to say more now in political discussions. It seemed to us too that the potential implication that what Nora was really grieving was the status that marriage had given her made her rather shallow, but Jenny robustly defended this as a real matter of concern and unhappiness for many widows.

Mark and John were the strongest in their criticisms. John found the prose - which others have found careful and judicious - bland (rendering the whole situation bland) (although he did admit that there was something about the prose that to his surprise kept him reading). Both he and Mark criticised the lack of a story arc and the dogged linearity, with unconnected events appearing one after the other. They found especially tedious the many longeurs describing, for instance, the totting up exercise Nora has to undertake on the first day of her employment, or the nights she has to suffer the aunt's snoring on holiday. Ann commented that this last - the holiday - seemed somehow extraneous, and said that she had very much got the impression that Toibin had been compelled to write down everything that his own mother had experienced, at the expense of a story arc (always a potential danger in autobiographical writing).

Doug too, in spite of his praise, had some criticisms: he also found the office episodes unsatisfactory, lacking in tension and, although drawn out, seemingly there merely as a device to illustrate Nora's return to the world. On the whole he was less enamoured with the second half of the book - 'Lots of minor characters flitting in and out without much purpose. The moment on the beach with the nun just seemed corny' - and he found the later stages of Nora's recovery 'a bit saccharine and contrived.' Jenny had an opposite reaction: she liked the second half better, as that was when the book started to 'gallop'. Clare, arriving late, said she had enjoyed the book, but she did see what we meant about not being able to get to grips with Nora's character. Mark ended the evening by saying that if it hadn't been for two of us women expressing the same opinion he wouldn't have dared to say what he felt, which was that this novel doesn't really display a deep understanding of women.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here