At Home, A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson

AT HOME, A SHORT HISTORY OF PRIVATE LIFE by Bill Bryson

Book Quote:

“On one occasion in the 1890s, Lord Charles Beresford, a well-known rake, let himself into what he believed was his mistress’s bedroom. With a lusty cry of ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ he leapt into the bed – only to discover that it was occupied by the Bishop of Chester and his wife.”

What would the world do without Bill Bryson? One simply wants to sit at his knee with a huge grin and listen interminably. I’m an irredeemable skinflint and get all my reading material from the library, but At Home is one book I would seriously like to buy for myself. Considering I have almost no books apart from reference books, my Complete Shakespeare and a Bible I once found in a discard pile somewhere, that’s saying quite a lot.

The volume is in essence a long and amiable discourse on the marvel that was the Victorian era. It’s loosely based around (and supposedly inspired by) the Victorian rectory Bryson lives in. The chapters have titles like: “The Hall,” “The Kitchen,” and so on. The theory is that “houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.” However, apart from in the early chapters (notably “The Hall”) there’s little talk about anything prior to the Victorians. It’s the speed of change and the immeasurable vigor with which so many Victorians pursued their eccentricities and interests that really fascinates Bryson, and he re-tells it at the top of his engaging best.

The downside of the book may perhaps be that it has little structure. It is a little like swimming through thick soup, but oh such good soup! It’s the perfect book for sitting companionably of an evening. The urge to exclaim “Listen to this one!” and regale anybody within earshot with the latest snippet of fascinating information Mr. Bryson has dredged out of history for you, probably occurs about once every fifteen minutes. Which, incidentally, is the perfect interval for this sort of activity: any less and it’s startling, any more and it gets annoying.

The best thing about it is that it’s simply so shockingly knowledgeable. The bibliography alone goes on for 25 pages of dense text, with a further note at the bottom: “for Notes and Sources, please go to www.billbryson.co.uk/athome .”

Despite this, there are a number of curious little niches which harbour the oddest throw-away statements. Like the one that claims the dining room really came about because of the advent of upholstery, with the Victorians not really wanting people smearing greasy chicken over their expensive sofas. What on earth were all those Medieval dining halls doing, then, one wonders briefly? Or the later Elizabethan private dining rooms? Oh Billy, one thinks – but it’s such a lovely idea that a specialised room should be invented because people couldn’t quite envisage a table napkin that one quite forgives it.

These little anomalies only seem to add to the charm: they’re like “Easter eggs” in a computer game. The vast majority of the time, one is overwhelmed with gratitude at the sheer volume of reading and dredging that has been done to winkle these pearls of Victoriana from dusty obscurity. They range from the obscure (why forks usually have three tines: actually it’s never quite explained but apparently people have experimented with other numbers and it’s never quite right) to the monumentally important (such as the discovery of the sources of cholera and scurvy). Electricity holds sway over a whole chapter in “The Fuse Box,” and seems to hold a particular fascination for Bryson, as the “characters” who feature here pop up throughout the book. Perhaps it is not surprising, as without electricity so much of further development would simply not have been possible.

I would recommend this unreservedly to anybody, but actively prescribe it if you are feeling glum. Perhaps that’s why I’d like it on my shelf permanently. It’s cheering for three reasons. The unquenchable amiable spirit it’s written in, along with the sheer love of language and words that beams through the pages are two of these reasons – but any Bryson fan will already be familiar with these. The third is that the book will immerse you entirely in the day-to-day reality of Being Victorian. Which includes carrying 40 bucket loads of hot water upstairs nightly for a bath, having to take clothes apart and re-stitch them together for the laundry, refrigerating food (if one were so lucky) with ice brought over from lakes in the States, and countless other inconveniences and checks to daily living that we would simply never consider possible. The writing is so engrossing one’s arms almost ache with the weight of the water-buckets… only to look up and find that: joy! One can just turn the hot water on instead. If you think you’re bogged down with a tedious job or an unrewarding existence or poor working conditions, just read this. You’ll be skipping in no time.

(First published in Mostly Fiction Book Reviews, 2011)

ALL IS FORGOTTEN, NOTHING IS LOST by Lan Samantha Chang

ALL IS FORGOTTEN, NOTHING IS LOST by Lan Samantha Chang

Book Quote:

“I am imprinting this upon my memory,” she said. “The southern exposure of a winter morning light, the sounds of thaw, water dripping off the eaves, the squirrels…Sometimes I seem to know, in the split of a second of a moment, that it will be a moment I’ll want to keep.”

This is a beautiful book. If you want to read something that has the same effect as gazing at a vast and perfect ink-wash painting, calming and yet utterly absorbing, reach for this. Like the tiniest haze of seeping ink will be skillful enough to convey a distant village nestling in the hills, or the flight of a crane; there is not a word misplaced in this small and lovely work. Its theme is poetry, and indeed the exquisite style does full justice to the subject.

The plot follows the lives of a handful of graduate poetry students and their teacher. The initial focus is on their interactions and early relationships during university years, but as the story progresses the camera lens zooms with painful precision on subsequent pinpoints of time.

The technique of the writing is such that it leaves one with an impression of overlapping layers rather than a well-woven tapestry, the latter of which is the more usual impression in a well-plotted novel. Life depicted here is more a palimpsest than a continuous narrative. There’s an almost fatalistic crystallisation of the view of the past seeping into the present (or the ongoing) that’s highly peculiar, and entirely seductive.

It’s even more astonishing to find such alluring excellence in a book that is essentially about writing. Generally, tomes ranting away about the torment of literary endeavours and the social inadequacies of their perpetrators are best put out of their misery immediately by means of a swift bonfire. But rather than wallow first-hand in the self-absorption and uncertainty as so many of these efforts tend to, Chang depicts a view onto these same themes that’s as unnervingly detached as a high-resolution spy satellite picture: taken from space, but accurate enough to read the print on a newspaper. The style is formal, bordering on the stilted, the tone even and quiet.

Two of the central characters are the poetry student friends Roman and Bernard. Roman is driven, moderately gifted, insistently handsome and, eventually, inordinately successful. Bernard is his counterpart, with caricature-like introversion, religious torment and more than a hint of obsessive compulsive disorder born out in poverty, and the novel makes no bones about his role in the narrative as the “traditional” poet.

These extreme stereotypes should be flat shadows by rights. Instead they’re almost luminous, depicted by refraction, like a painter using the space that is not to denote the presence of an object. These two characters vie with each other, in their peculiar way, for the attentions of their teacher Miranda Sturgis, the acclaimed and established poet. Their differing approaches, viewpoints and degree of success in gaining her approval and attention are at the core of the novel.

Along with the much-debated question of “why write poetry,” the novel explores facets of the role of the teacher (or mentor), the relationship of the mentor with the recipient, and the progression of the student in turn becoming mentor. The development here is linked structurally and thematically to the ageing process, which gives the novel as a whole a feeling of natural evolution; something organic and inevitable. Perhaps this is why I can’t remember reading anything with so little a sense of contrivance. Despite, or perhaps because of, the meticulous precision with which it’s put together.

The character reveal is also atypical. It’s not so much a reader discovering an already-formed entity but the entity and the reader making the discovery together. Again, the sense of extreme detachment fused with extreme intimacy is slightly dizzying.

If you read action thrillers exclusively, then I suppose this book is not for you. Apart from that I’d recommend it to anybody. You don’t need to know about writing or poetry, just be ready to think about why art is necessary for life. And read a jolly good story in the meantime, complete with romance, betrayal, suspense and verve. It’s quiet, but it’s a page-turner.

(First published in Mostly Fiction Book Reviews, 2011)

The Days of the King by Filip Florian

THE DAYS OF THE KING by Filip Florian

Book Quote:

“Having burnt their lips and their peace of mind on a soup of Brussels sprouts, the four – General Nicolae Golescu, minister of the interior and of foreign affairs under Bibescu Voda, member of the 1848 revolutionary committee, the provisional government, and the first Princely Lieutenancy; Lascar Catargiu, with his wolflike senses, honed until then only in appointments as prefect and en famille; Colonel Nicolae Haralamb, landowner, son of a court victualler from Craiova; and Ion Ghika, bizarre Turkophile revolutionary of 1848, longtime Bey of Samos – were now so prudent that they would have blown even on a bowl of yoghurt before tasting it.”

It’s 1886, and the dentist Joseph Strauss follows Karl Ludwig of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen from Prussia to Bucharest, where the latter is crowned King Carol I of Romania. Carol’s relationship with Joseph strays beyond the dental boundaries and they develop a certain camaraderie, particularly when Joseph arranges for the services of a blind prostitute to be made available (in strictest secret) to the politically beleaguered king. It is precisely the intimate nature of the knowledge Joseph carries which eventually leads to the king’s deliberate distancing of himself from the dentist. However, when the three-year-old Princess Maria dies of scarlet fever, and no further heirs seem forthcoming, Joseph wonders whether the King ought to be informed that the blind whore now has a son with a suspiciously aristocratic nose.

Filip Florian is a highly regarded Romanian author, and his first novel, Little Fingers  won numerous awards.

Now, how can I put this. I have an off-hand familiarity with the Continental predilection for convoluted language in both fiction and non-fiction. The ability to twist thirteen sentences into one contortionist-like knot and still somehow come out grammatically on top is often regarded as a sign of intellectual and linguistic brilliance. It’s little wonder in that case that Florian’s work has won high regard.

Sentences in this novel are frequently one and a half pages long (well, on Kindle at least). Subject is violently sundered from object, blown apart by sub-structures and interjections to make the reader’s mind dark with confusion. Why use one adjective when you could use twenty three, interspersed with thirteen sub-clauses and twelve asides? There is certainly nothing wrong with the translator’s (and I suspect Florian’s) grammar or vocabulary. After parsing the first two sentences out, though, I found it far too wearisome to follow the exact meaning of the text, and had to rely on intuition and guessing to struggle on, or risk going mad.

One advantage to these verbal acrobatics was, admittedly, the revival of several infrequently-used adjectives. It was refreshing to see some of the recesses of the rich English language being taken out and dusted off: I hadn’t used “nacreous” in quite a while and as for “canicular,” never. (“Having the quality of mother-of-pearl” and, in this application, “referring to the dog-days” respectively, in case you were wondering.)

The off-putting garb of tortured sentence structure which Florian of necessity wears is, however, doubly unfortunate because there is a highly talented writer lurking under there. Somewhere. It’s noticeable when the narrative narrows down to a point of excitement, or when rapid action takes place. He can’t help allowing sentences out in short breaths, and suddenly the scene springs to life. The characters start gasping for breath, their gags and restraints momentarily loosened. Unfortunately the action inevitably comes to an end. Then it’s time for either narrative, or asides, or observations and descriptions – all of which would be interesting and vivid were they cut up and served decently rather than being thrown at one’s face like a giant custard tart. Techniques of delivering backstory through dialogue or implication are obviously frowned on in Romania.

Much as I’d like to, I can’t say I would recommend this book to anyone who doesn’t know the sort of things Continental writing can get up to in its spare time. I am left wondering whether Florian will consider aiming his writing more at an English-speaking audience, but I’d guess that’s (sadly) unlikely. It’s a bit much to ask a nation to change its accepted linguistic style so that we can enjoy a few more decent translations. In the meantime poor Mr Florian might be doomed to languish in the obscure corners of the English translation pond.

(First published in Mostly Fiction Book Reviews, 2011)

JULIET by Anne Fortier

JULIET by Anne Fortier

Book Quote:

“How far did I fall? I feel like saying that I fell through time itself, through lives, deaths, and centuries past, but in terms of actual measurement the drop was no more than twenty feet. At least, that is what they say. They also say that, fortunately for me, it was neither rocks nor demons that caught me as I came tumbling into the underworld. It was the ancient river that wakes you from dreams, and which few people have ever been allowed to find.

Her name is Diana.”

Hands up anyone who doesn’t know the story of Romeo and Juliet. No-one? Thought not. Chances are you cut your literary teeth on it, and it probably holds some special associations for you. That’s why it’s such a good subject for a modern/historical parallel romance story with sinister overtones.

Julie Jacobs is the quasi-eponymous heroin of the novel. Orphaned as a very young child, she has been brought up by her Great-Aunt Rose along with her twin sister Janice… who is as like to Julie as a marble is to a strawberry. Great-Aunt Rose has brought the sisters up in the States, but when they are in their mid-twenties she ups and dies, leaving Janice the estate and Julie (rather inconveniently) merely a letter and the address of a banker in Sienna. A heartbroken and down-at-heel Julie makes the best of a bad deal and packs her unfashionable bags for Sienna.

Matters get complicated almost immediately with a chance befriending by the glamorous Eva Maria Salimbeni – and that’s before Julie ever even reaches Sienna. The narrative rapidly develops distinct fairy-tale colours, which grow richer by the page. Julie soon discovers that few things really happen by chance in this neck of the woods. What with Julie’s historical trouble with the Italian police (don’t ask) and Eva Maria’s handsome nephew Alessandro being Captain Santini of the Sienna police, a certain amount of intrigue becomes inevitable from the word go.

The mystery trail of the letter leads from the bank, to a box, to clues, to the Pallio, to museums and clan rivalries, to subterranean passages and clean through to the 14th century. Sienna, it seems, not Verona, is the original location for the historical characters that inspired Shakespeare’s tragedy: a story already two hundred years old and re-told countless times by the time he got to it. To gain the treasure that the historical Romeo and Juliet supposedly left behind, Julie must immerse herself into her own past, which extends far beyond what one would think reasonable in chronological terms.

Fortier displays brilliant craftsmanship in weaving the multi-faceted timelines of her story into a cohesive narrative. She intersperses new mystery, romance and violence at a pace which will leave no reader able to resist the next page. But above all, she really loves her Shakespeare. This work has obviously arisen from a love of the original text. The imagery of warring opposites, fire and ice, danger and beauty that characterize Shakespeare’s work have given birth here to whole neighbourhoods, new characters and impassioned landscapes. This is no half-baked, ill-fadged limping mess that so many supposedly more straightforward “historical” novels fall into. It’s an inspired work of art with a backbone not only of research but of understanding, one could almost say sympathetic resonance. It’s so clever one wishes it were true.

However, not everyone will like it. Readers often divide into camps between the two sisters Julie and Janice: some finding the latter two-dimensional, many considering the former mawkish and generally kickable. The main plot is pretty easy to guess from the start, which is perhaps not ideal for a mystery. I didn’t find this a problem at all, as there were so many details in between A and B that just because one knows the outcome it doesn’t make the journey any less pleasurable.

Possibly its main detraction for many might be that it’s essentially chick lit. Let me qualify this swiftly: I don’t read chick lit and I found Juliet thrilling. It’s the sort of thing you put down with a glow and wonder whom to tell about it first; and then possibly consider that boys might not be so keen on it. I hate to say it, but with 80% of serious readers being female, I still think it’s got a pretty good market. Chick lit it may be, but very good chick lit. As I read it, I was taking notes on structure and tactics, thinking, “if only I could write more like this.” I’m not sure what higher form of admiration one could offer.

If you like your stories well-written, exciting, properly researched, and you have a tendency towards things pre-1400s with a dash of the paranormal and several cask-fulls of romance, don’t delay in reading this especially now that it is available in paperback.

(First published in Mostly Fiction Book Reviews, 2011)

THE DANTE CLUB by Matthew Pearl

THE DANTE CLUB by Matthew Pearl

Book Quote:

“I’m afraid, Doctor, that while Mr. Fields knows what people read, he shall never quite understand why.”

You could classify The Dante Club loosely as historical fiction. Or perhaps, try historical-fantasy-fiction-literary-murder-mystery. It’s definitely a work to be enjoyed by “literary types,” but also by thrill-seekers, detective buffs, psychological and social analysts and in fact anyone who enjoys a good read.

The setting is Boston in 1865, the main protagonists include the real-life characters of a group of poets. At the time of the action they are unified by the project of translating into English (for the first time in America) Inferno by Dante. They include Oliver Wendell Holmes (poet, author and medical doctor), J.T. Fields (notable publisher), James Russell Lowell (poet, professor and editor), George Washington Green (historian and minister), and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (poet). When a series of spectacularly grisly murders hit the sleepy crime scene in Boston, they start to become aware that the crimes are copy-cat renderings of some of the punishments meted out to sinners in the very Inferno they are working on. As only a handful of people have any knowledge of the work in question, the list of suspects is effectively pared down to members of the club, and a few others. Rumbling in the background are the after-shocks and repercussions of the recent Civil War.

Already, some readers have probably been put off by the list of heavy-duty literary characters. They shouldn’t be. You don’t need to know anything about the protagonists further than what is given to you on the page, and their personalities are not only lively but jumping out of the book with individuality. As a murder mystery the piece is perfectly balanced. The focus of possibility of guilt moves continually, silently – the reader is never left idle for speculation. The action is vivid, the murders horrific and bizarre. There are no spurious red-herrings thrown in for the sake of it. The denouement is thoroughly satisfying in every way.

The rounded sub-plots are almost all instrumental to the dual purpose of further fleshing out the characters and in revolving the possible finger or guilt. Holmes’s fear of loss of literary fame and his lack of empathy with his son, Longfellow’s grief for the loss of his wife, Lowell’s embattlement with the Harvard authorities over the validity of teaching Dante (and modern language works in general), as well as his suicidal tendencies. Patrolman Rey (Boston’s first Black police officer) and his difficulties as a figure of authority in a racially divided society, and Augustus Manning’s maniacal obsession of bringing the University and press under his control. They are all brought together in an extremely solid framework where the reader will step firmly, even if the territory is unfamiliar.

But what relevance, I hear a myriad silent voices quizzing, are either Boston in the 1860s or the works of a 14th century poet? The core thread to both the Boston story and Pearl’s central theme lies in the work of the Inferno itself.

It is an undisputable fact that everyone who has the slightest knowledge of Inferno finds it at the very least memorable – probably on a level they don’t even realise. And Inferno is exceedingly well known. My own most vivid recollections of other works derivative of Dante’s Hell are the 1995 film “Se7en” and the 2005 TV drama “Messiah: the Harrowing,” but the briefest search on Wiki for “Dante and his Divine Comedy in Popular Culture” throws up page after page of references. Dante has made his way into the TV series “Angel” and into “Futurama.” He’s in video games, art and sculpture, music – and of course, literature. In this sense, The Dante Club is not in the least an esoteric book.

Why are we so fond of Dante? Certainly, the punishments in Inferno are grim, and there is no age throughout history in which we have not derived a macabre thrill from pure and bloody spectacle. This is not the cause of its popularity. If it were, we would all be reading torture accounts from the Spanish Inquisition instead. The appeal is in the precise reason it was written: a yearning for justice. Any class or race of human has an inbuilt auto-response system to the myriad of inevitable injustices, great or small, to themselves or to others. “That’s not fair!” is often chased fast by the thought “This is how it should be.” It is the meting out of punishments in an appropriate way (Dante’s contrapasso) that is irresistible to the human psyche. And it is precisely this that is Pearl’s theme. The series of murders are for a long period incomprehensible, but through the key of Dante they are shown to be composed from an almost autistically accurate logic. It is perhaps no coincidence that after graduating from Harvard in English and American Literature, Pearl went straight on to take a Law degree at Yale Law School.

There are some disconcerting aspects to the book. These mainly stem from the dichotomy between extremely well-researched, knowledgeable, fact-based fiction on the one hand and the occasional (but crucial) forgery here and there. It throws the reader off balance a little. Pearl knows his literary characters very well, and their behaviour rings true to what one would expect. The scene is Boston is extremely convincing and is no doubt based on intimate knowledge of the place and its history. However, the notion of the characters in question being involved in this type of criminal investigation is nothing short of preposterous, and the concepts of applied psychology and forensic logic which are brought to play are completely anachronistic. We are left teetering a little at the realisation that the writer is assuming we don’t need to be told what’s fact and what’s fiction: we’re grown-ups and understand that we’re listening to a story that simply uses these vehicles.

So far, we’ve established that it’s a good story, relevant to today, and accessible to a non-literary audience. Now for the caveat. You will enjoy this book ten times more if you are familiar with Inferno on some reasonably detailed textual level. The greatest strength of The Dante Club is the incredible interweaving of the plot on both the levels of the Boston scene and Dante’s exiled imaginings. Quite a number of reviews state that the book “starts off slowly” – this despite the first murder being mentioned on page 1, the first maggoty corpse discovered on page 8, and the first suicide leaping to a gory death on page 28. What they mean is, you don’t understand what’s going on for a good while. This is true, on a plot level. On a metatextual level, the plot is progressing at breakneck speed. The skill and accuracy of quotations and resonances between the two works, within the framework of immaculate modern prose, is the true delight of this novel.

This facet of Pearl’s craft reaches a jaw-dropping peak in a passage late on in the work. The poet-investigators chase after one of the “printer’s devils” in the dead of winter, across a frozen lake. The scene of Lowell grabbing the nearly-submerged “devil” by his curly red locks and demanding explanation brings the 9th circle of hell possibly more vividly to life than Dante did himself, as it is a palimpsest of not only several related scenes in Inferno but the Boston scene as well. The union of all the references and implications in the context of the narrative left me frankly queasy with admiration. Pearl has tried to disambiguate by introducing this particular point in Dante’s narrative just before the incident (there is, literally, a lecture on it), and it is followed up shortly after by another, even plainer rendering on the same theme. Hopefully non-Danteans will pick up on the superficial reference, but I fear a great deal of the force of the words will melt unless aided by a little more knowledge. Pearl himself is a kind of opposite to Patrolman Rey, who hears a piece of Dante quoted to him but cannot understand it, only endure the apprehension of knowing its grave importance. “He remembered the whisperer’s grip stretch across his skull. He could hear the words form so distinctly, but was without the power to repeat any of them.” Pearl by contrast cannot help but repeat them, through the medium of his story.

This extreme marriage between the two texts, or rather the bond between Pearl himself and the text of the Comedia (for his work on which he won the 1998 Dante Prize from the Dante Society of America) is perhaps more apparent than even the author realises. Pearl’s prose is without exception polished, educated and perfectly presented. However it is always in the scenes that refer (in whatever way) back to Dante that are extraordinary in their skill. If you don’t know your Dante, it’s a very accurate way of guessing which parts are alluding to Inferno. If you read a sentence and think “wow that’s vivid” or “what a strange way to put things” – it’s probably echoing Dante. This is not in any way to belittle Pearl’s own words or to suggest excessive reliance on another work. It is merely very evident that the true inspiration for the work are the words of Dante, and it is these that ignite Pearl’s own words as if suddenly doused in petrol when they hit the page with the force of his empathy.

For anyone unfamiliar with Inferno, here are some brief pointers (much more is explained within the book). Dante is journeying through Hell on a sort of tourist visa, and passes through the ante-hell and nine circles of it, which are arranged according to the punishments awarded various types of sinners. The outer circles are for lesser sins, the ninth circle is reserved for traitors and Satan himself, along with Judas Iscariot. In The Dante Club, by a certain arbitrary process only some of the circles are dealt with. Unfortunately, detailing the sins and their punishments here would only spoil (both) books for the reader. It will have to suffice to compare yet another Dante-related work: Milton’s Paradise Lost. If Milton tries to “justify the ways of God to Man,” and Dante might be said on some level to justify the ways of Man to God, Pearl is perhaps trying to justify the ways of Man to Man. The question: what can turn decent people into unspeakable torturers, is one that is as pertinent to this day as it was in the 14th century, and will continue to be so long after we are gone.

(First published in Mostly Fiction Book Reviews, 2011)