Author: Rohan Maitzen

“Doubtful Against the Gulf”: Rumer Godden, Black Narcissus

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The flimsy walls did not shut out the world but made a sounding box for it; through every crack the smell of the world crept in, the smell of rain and sun and earth and the deodar trees and a wind strangely scented with tea. Here the bell did not command, it sounded doubtful against the gulf; the wind took the notes away and yet it brought the sound of the bells at Goontu very strongly; pagan temple bells. And everywhere in front of them was that far horizon and the eagles in the gulf below the snow.

My interest was piqued in Rumer Godden’s fiction by Margaret Drabble’s discussion in the TLS a few months back. Until then I really only knew her for her children’s Christmas story “The Story of Holly and Ivy,” which we had in this edition with its bright, beautiful illustrations by Barbara Cooney. Drabble’s discussion of China Court is not itself very encouraging, and yet she still made it, and Godden, sound interesting: “the novel is irredeemably quaint, an unlikely romance in a Cornish setting of china clay pits and wild moorland and dismal graveyards.” Yes, please! In her piece, Drabble mentioned Black Narcissus, which I then looked up, and in doing so I discovered that Virago was reissuing a number of Godden’s novels, and then there some of them were in Bookmark, and we all know how that kind of thing turns out. 😉

In her introduction to the new edition of Black Narcissus, Amanda Coe describes it as a “perfect novel” that “has the atmosphere and self-sufficiency of a dream.” It belongs to the genre of the “nun novel,” if there is such a thing (there’s The Corner That Held Them, of course, and Matrix, and Stoneyard Devotional, just for starters), but it also belongs to the broader category of novels about struggles between faith and feeling, or desire and duty, and it is a novel about empire, and about Englishwomen abroad.

The nuns in this case have traveled to India to set up shop in what was previously St Saviour’s School, run by “the Brotherhood,” but which earlier had been known as “the House of Women,” meaning women with very different roles and habits (!) than those under the leadership of the staunch and upright Sister Clodagh. As they make their way to their new establishment, one of them, Sister Ruth, comments that she would like to know “why the Brothers went away so soon.” Sister Clodagh cannot give a direct answer, and she keeps her own doubts to herself: “she had lain awake thinking that they should not have come.”

They begin their mission full of confidence and “a kind of ecstasy” at the beauty of the setting:

They woke in the late October mornings before the sun had reached the hills, and saw its light travel down from snow and cloud over the hills, until it reached the other clouds that lay like curds in the bottom of the valley. The mountain stood out, glittering into the air.

About China Court, which I have not read, Drabble says “the tone is too floral, not to say florid”; I did not think that at all about Black Narcissus, which has a lot of vividly descriptive language that is typically, as in this example, held in check by a note of unease or discomfort (“curds” is a jarring simile here!). Also, it seems essential to the underlying conflicts in Black Narcissus that the landscape be sensual as well as strange—that we feel something of the same push and pull it creates in the nuns, who find the sheer drama of the views from their new home distracting:

At recreation they walked on the terrace and sat on the block to watch the views, but that was not enough. Sister Honey would stop with a needle in one hand and the cotton in the other, gaping out of the window, and sometimes Sister Philippa would find that it had taken her an hour to pick the cosmos for the altar vases. She was standing in the flowers, red and clove pink and ivory as high as her breast, and her hands were empty.

‘Even in my thoughts I’m discourteous and ungrateful,’ she sighed. ‘We came here to work for God and here I am already neglecting the smallest things I have to do for him.’

‘I think you can see too far,’ Sister Philippa says;

‘I look across there, and then I can’t see the potato I’m planting and it doesn’t seem to matter whether I plant it or not.’

There are also human distractions. Chief among them is Mr. Dean, the agent of the General whose property their new home is. Mr. Dean, with his “charming dissipated face” and too much skin showing through the tatters of his shirt, embodies the slide into dissolute sensuality that threatens the nuns’ holy intentions. He helps the nuns, but also warns them: “It’s no place to put a nunnery.” His presence stirs up memories in Sister Clodagh of a lost love, and more immediate feelings in some of the other sisters that become the main engine of the novel’s plot, along with the disruptive presence of a beautiful young girl and the General’s handsome nephew Dilip Rai, who (in spite of their misgivings) joins the nuns as a pupil. “Won’t you be letting a cuckoo into your nest,” asks Mr. Dean, which is both stating the obvious and a sign that he knows better than the nuns do that they may not be strong enough to resist the instincts they have chosen to deny. Once all these plot pieces are in place, the story plays out with a kind of inevitability that still manages to be surprising in its details—which I won’t give away, except to say that the novel’s structure is elegant, bringing us back to where we began with a powerful awareness of what has changed, and perhaps been learned, in the meantime.

There are lots of interesting aspects to Black Narcissus. It trades in some familiar tropes around the “exotic east,” but I basically agree with Coe that Godden seems very in control of these, aware and critical of rather than acquiescent in them:

Godden, who grew up in India at the beginning of the twentieth century, is unflinchingly contemptuous of the knee-jerk assertions of colonial superiority espoused by Clodagh and her nuns. Her sympathies clearly lie with the would-be colonised, who have no desire to be taught or interfered with.

In this respect the novel reminded me of A Passage to India, which I think takes a similar risk in appearing to indulge while really undermining its English characters’ world views.

I  was particularly struck by Mr. Dean’s criticisms of the nuns’ version of religion, which he explicitly finds (pun intended!) cloistered and stifling. When he sees the plans for their new chapel, to be built on the exact model of the Order’s English chapel, including imported stalls and carpets and tiles and reproductions of the stained glass windows, he is disdainful and makes them an alternative design, open to the air and sky, “made so that the path comes right through it, and the people are going and coming through it all day long.” “A chapel shouldn’t be sacred,” he yells, when they dismiss his plan as inappropriate, “but as free and as useful as the path I put it on.” It’s not just that their English chapel is an imposition but that it fundamentally misrepresents what he thinks religion should be. His chapel, in contrast, will be “‘for all life. All life,’ he repeated, reverently, ‘which is God.'”

I really liked Black Narcissus, enough that now I want to read  another of Godden’s nun novels, In This House of Brede: “Bruised by tragedy,” says the Virago blurb,

Philippa Talbot leaves behind a successful career with the civil service for a new calling: to join an enclosed order of Benedictine nuns. In this small community of fewer than one hundred women, she soon discovers all the human frailties: jealousy, love, despair. But each crisis of heart and conscience is guided by the compassion and intelligence of the Abbess and by the Sisters’ shared bond of faith and ritual. Away from the world, and yet at one with it, Philippa must learn to forgive and forget her past . . .

How great does that sound? Unfortunately (or not), Bookmark is closed today, but they’ll be open again tomorrow!

Meet Fred!

Rohan Maitzen8 Comments

I had barely recovered from my jet lag after my recent trip to Vancouver when I got caught up in another big distraction: I have adopted a cat! Her name is Fred, short for Winifred (she happily acknowledges either Winifred Holtby or Winifred Burkle as her namesake—or both), she’s approximately two years old, she’s tiny, she’s sweet, and she’s a bit of a pest in the wee hours of the morning.

I had thought for a long time about getting a cat. I had one growing up, an elegant Siamese named Bothwell—I was in a big Mary, Queen of Scots phase when he joined the household. (Maybe Fred should consider herself lucky?) He was a great companion: loyal, eccentric, and independent, so basically a lot like me. During my marriage having a cat wasn’t an option, as my ex-husband is allergic; so too is my daughter, but only to some cats, and she encouraged me to take a chance. (So far, so good: she has visited Fred a few times and even held her, without any noticeable reaction.) I am extremely good at overthinking things, and I also don’t much like making decisions when I can’t clearly foresee the outcome, which is obviously the case when taking on a pet that is going to have her own personality and needs. I just could not get the pro / con list to be decisive either way! Then while I was away I missed out on an opportunity to adopt what sounded like the perfect cat for me, a ragdoll in sudden need of re-homing. My disappointment at not getting her clarified that I did want a cat in my life, and after an unsuccessful visit to a local shelter where the cat I went to meet first threw up at my feet then hid so I really could not get to know him, I got lucky with some help from Cat Rescue Maritimes . . . and here I am, and here we are.

I admit I do feel somewhat overwhelmed at the moment, both at the change to my routines and by my new responsibilities. Also, pet stores have a bewildering array of options now, and the online cat-care debates are already making me crazy. The sleep deprivation definitely adds to this! (Don’t worry: I have set up an appointment with a vet and will try to follow only evidence-based advice rather than random Redditors’.) But Fred is a sweet and incredibly affectionate and trusting little cat. I was cautioned that she would probably just hide somewhere for the first few days, but she immediately explored all the available space, spent a lot of time watching out the windows, then settled on her favorite places to nap. She loves to be held and stroked and purrs like mad when you scritch her head and around her ears—just what Bothwell liked best too. I’m hopeful that we will get better at our nighttime routines. I mean, if she can sleep in this position, surely she can also figure out how to sleep more or less when I do, right? RIGHT?! 🙂

Frogs in a Saucepan: John Ironmonger, ‘The Wager and the Bear’

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We are frogs in a saucepan. All of us. We never noticed the water getting warmer and warmer. And now it’s almost too late to jump out. We tolerate the slow erosion of our climate the way a frog in a pan tolerates the rising heat. This year, we lose one percent of our coral reefs. Never mind. We can live with that. Next year, we lose another one percent. Hey. Never mind. And then another. And another. And in a hundred years they’re gone and we never noticed it happening.
“Frogs are smarter than we imagine,” John Ironmonger reveals in the notes at the end of his novel The Wager and the Bear, “and will escape from the saucepan if they can.” Frogs, that is, are smarter than we are. After all, not only can they not be blamed for starting the fire or putting the pot on to boil in the first place, but given a chance, they overcome their inertia. We, in contrast, just keep denying either that there’s a problem or that we can do anything about it. By “we” I don’t mean each of us individually, of course. I mean society, nations, governments, humanity collectively. Lots of people keep trying to make better choices, but our individual efforts (recycling! giving up plastic straws! taking shorter showers!) feel increasingly pointless in the absence of the kind of massive reforms that can happen only with total commitment from the people in power across the globe. How hot will our pot have to get before enough people agree that it’s intolerable? I’m writing this with Halifax under a heat warning; it’s worse elsewhere and it’s only June. And, as Ironmonger’s protagonist Tom Horsmith explains angrily to a political operative accusing him of pessimism, it’s not as if we only just learned about the looming climate crisis:

We’ve known about global warming for decades. The first COP conference was in 1995, for God’s sake. Way before I was born. Al Gore made a big deal about it in 2006. Remember him? . . . We’re on a rowing boat heading towards a massive waterfall, and the people in the front of the boat are yelling for us to stop, but the people rowing the boat are all facing backwards, and they can’t see the falls.

For both principled and personal reasons, Tom is determined to fight as hard as he can for change, but even he can’t help but wonder if it’s worth it:

And if all the people who give a shit about the planet manage to change anything, maybe they’ll get us all to slow the climate collapse down by ten years or so. But what’s the point of that? If humanity hangs on, it will be a miserable shitty existence for the next hundred thousand generations. What does ten years matter either way?

The Wager and the Bear is not, thankfully, just speeches or rants of this kind strung together, and Tom is more than a device to deliver this kind of bad news. The instigation for the novel’s plot is an encounter in a pub between Tom and another (better off, less popular) resident of his Cornish town, Monty Causley, who has become an MP. They get into an argument about climate change in which Tom shows up Monty’s ignorance. “You shouldn’t try to argue if you don’t understand the science,” Tom concludes—or should have concluded, except that he has been drinking and is enjoying the appreciative audience. So he bets Monty that in 50 years he won’t be able to sit in his front room without drowning. Riled up, Monty counters with a “real wager”: in 50 years, either he will sit for an hour in his front room at high tide and drown . . . or Tom must “walk into the sea and drown.” It’s a ridiculous wager, but as happens these days, it is captured on video and goes viral. As a result, Tom and Monty’s lives are linked in various ways over the years until (and this is not a spoiler, as it’s on the back cover!) they end up on “an iceberg with a ravenous polar bear”—and even this is not quite the end of their adventures! Ironmonger’s challenge is to sustain the drama and humanize his characters while keeping the novel’s underlying polemic vivid and urgent. This is really what interested me the most about the novel, and one of the reasons I was curious to read it: I think Ironmonger was trying to create what I might call a “condition of the planet” novel, akin to the 19thC “condition of England” novels I have read and taught so often. He even uses some of the same tools as Dickens and Gaskell: melodrama, coincidence, suspense, symbolism (yes, it’s an actual polar bear, but what ensues when it joins our antagonists on their floating ice carries more than literal resonance, I thought). Where Gaskell’s task was to help her middle-class readers really grasp the nature of urban poverty, Ironmonger’s is to make us frogs feel the heat and think about the costs, especially to the not-us. He lavishes his attention (and his best writing) on the ice-world of the Arctic:

It was a seascape of unimaginable, ethereal beauty. The flat ocean was a patchwork of swirling blues, some areas dark, and some pale, and some almost green, or turquoise, as if an artist had splashed every blue from a watercolour paintbox onto a pure white canvas, and crusted the surface with pack ice. The backdrop was the great precipice of the glacier, and behind it, a horizon of white mountains fading into a clear blue sky. Only the cracks and pops of the glacier disturbed the majestic solitude of it.

When I commented on Bluesky that The Wager and the Bear had left me feeling bleak, Ironmonger himself showed up in my mentions and said he was sorry about that. I don’t think he should be. I have talked so often with my students about the value of dissatisfaction. What is there left for us to do at the end of Pride and Prejudice? But the end of Middlemarch leaves us asking precisely Dorothea’s question: what can we do, what should we do? It is dispiriting to know that we aren’t making and probably won’t make the kinds of decisions that could cool things down. We seem condemned to boil in a pot and on a stove of our own making. Ironmonger does leave us with a better vision, though, or a mission statement:

We owe this to our children. To our grandchildren. To protect the meadows, the woodlands, the jungles, the savannahs, the oceans, and the ice caps. We owe our children the pristine world we were given. It is our duty. It should be right at the top of every action list we write. It should also be our joy.

“Dear reader!” exclaims Dickens at the end of his most overtly didactic novel, Hard Times; “It rests with you and me, whether, in our two fields of action, similar things shall be or not.  Let them be!” The Wager and the Bear is a good read—suspenseful, emotional, neatly structured in episodes that carry us across generations—but the Victorianist in me especially appreciated its unabashed sense of purpose.

Moving Away: Carys Davies, Clear

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Into her mind a picture came of this vast emptying-out—a long, gray, and never-ending procession of tiny figures snaking their way through the country. She saw them moving away with quiet resignation, leading animals and small children, carrying tools and furniture and differently sized bundles, and when at last they disappeared she saw the low houses they’d left behind, roofless hearths open to the rain and the wind and the ghosts of the departed while sheep nosed between the stonework, quietly grazing.

I really liked Clear. It’s a slight book in a way, not very long, not very dense. The small personal story it tells, though, is like the visible tip of an iceberg, three people whose options and choices are very much functions of much larger social contexts. Davies’s author’s note explains that the novel takes place in 1843, during the “Great Disruption” that led to the formation of the Free Church of Scotland and also during the ongoing “Clearances,” during which landlords removed tenant farmers, driving them off the land to clear it for more profitable uses—profitable, that is, to the landlords, but with devastating consequences for those displaced from their homes and their ways of life.

The plot of Clear is very simple: John Ferguson, part of the new Free Church, is having trouble making ends meet so his brother-in-law pulls some strings and John is assigned to do a bit of work for a local landowner, traveling to a remote island to “clear” it of its one remaining inhabitant, a man named Ivar. We move between John’s point of view and Ivar’s, getting to know John and learning about Ivar’s solitary but full life. We see the two men’s stories converge: John falls off a cliff soon after landing, and Ivar discovers him and nurses him back to health. Ivar does not suspect the real reason for John’s visit; John does not have the words to tell him even if he wanted to, which he doesn’t.

Davies gives a lot of attention to the importance of language, first as a barrier and then, as John laboriously gains some ability to speak Ivar’s language (a version, Davies’s note explains, of “Norn,” which died out in most areas after the Shetlands passed from Danish to Scottish control), a means of halting but profound understanding. “Before the arrival of John Ferguson,” Ivar reflects,

he’d never really thought of the things he saw or heard or touched or felt as words . . . He wondered . . . if there was a word in John Ferguson’s language for the excitement he felt when he ran his finger down the line between the two columns of words, which seemed to him to connect their lives in the strongest possible way—words for ‘milk’ and ‘stream’ and the flightless blue-winged beetle that lived in the hill pasture; words for ‘halibut’ and ‘byre’ and the overhand knot he used in the cow’s tether; words for ‘house’ and ‘butter,’ for ‘heather’ and ‘whey,’ for ‘sea wrack’ and ‘chicken.’

It was as if he’d never fully understood his solitude until now—as if, with the arrival of John Ferguson, he had been turned into something he’d never been or hadn’t been for a long time: part brother and part sister, part son and part daughter, part mother and part father, part husband and part wife.

Those last words have a bit more significance than they might initially seem to when they land just as part of that long list of vocabulary. By the end of Clear John and Ivar, and then John and Ivar and John’s wife Mary (who has bravely come to find him, worried that he has been sent unknowingly into a more dangerous situation than he suspected) have to rethink their relationships, their commitments—but I will leave the details to be discovered.

There was a moment in the novel when I thought Davies had given in to melodrama—a gunshot rings out, and I thought . . . well, I won’t say what I thought, again so that you can discover the moment for yourself if you want to. If things had gone the way it seemed at first, it would have cheapened the novel, which I think finds its beauty in its simplicity, which is not to say it ignores complexity, just that it takes us through its chosen scenario with a kind of quiet well suited to its people and its setting. Overall Clear reminded me of Emma Donoghue’s Haven, which is also about remoteness, isolation, essentials. Haven is a plottier novel, but both books trade in the imaginative appeal of clearing away the noise and demands and expectations of an uncongenial modernity. At the same time, neither novel romanticizes its setting. In both, it’s togetherness that leads to grace, if any such as possible.

No Good Way: Yiyun Li, Things In Nature Merely Grow

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There is no good way to say this—when the police arrive, they inevitably preface the bad news with that sentence, as though their presence had not been ominous enough . . .

There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged before I go on with this book. My husband and I had two children and lost them both . . .

I wrote a little bit about Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End, first in 2019, when I could only imagine, and again in 2022, when I no longer had to. I didn’t actually say much myself either time. “Some books,” I said in 2019, “are hard to write about. Imagine how hard this one was to write.”

When I reread it, it was because I was still looking for and sometimes finding comfort in what seemed like the right words. I didn’t bring my critical self to the book, and I can’t bring it to Things In Nature Merely Grow either. Well, I probably could, but I don’t want to: sometimes, what I want from words is to let them do to the work. I appreciate the work Li has done with her words here, again. Her experience is not exactly my own: she is herself; her sons are themselves; she has lost them both. Loss may be universal but every loss is intensely specific. There are also ways in which I don’t actually find Li that congenial a writer, or a thinker. We are not the same person, the same kind of person, at all, I don’t think.

Still, she says things in this hard, painful, honest book that I completely understood and was glad to have articulated. Some of them are things that, for various reasons, I have not been able to say, or not wanted to say, myself. It turns out that there are good ways to say them: unadorned, unapologetic.

As before, then, excerpts.

1.

I did not feel any anger when Vincent died—not at him, not at life either. But I did feel baffled and wounded by life. That a mother could do all things humanly possible and sensible for a child but still could not keep him alive—this was the fact that I would have to live with, I thought, every single day, for the rest of my life. It was Vincent’s death that made me begin to use that phrase, “every single day, for the rest of my life.”

2.

I don’t want an end point to my sorrow. The death of a child is not a heat wave or a snowstorm, nor an obstacle race to rush through and win, nor an acute or chronic illness to recover from. What is grief but a word, a shortcut, a simplification of something much larger than that word?

Thinking about my children is like air, like time. Thinking about them will only end when I reach the end of my life.

The only passage in which grief appears in its truest meaning is from King John, when Constance speaks eloquently of a grief that is called madness by others in the play.

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form:
Then, I have I reason to be fond of grief?

3.

That a mother can do all things humanly possible for a child, and yet she can never understand the incommunicable vastness and strangeness of the world felt by that child; that a mother cannot make the world just a little more welcoming so the child feels less alone; that a mother cannot keep that child alive—these are facts I have to live with now, every single day, for the rest of my life.

4.

We like to set our hearts on a finish line, hoping to take the right actions so that we can reach that finish line fast and with the least hassle and pain. Perhaps this urge reflects a desire to mark time in a different way: to harness time for gain. And yet in life, time cannot be harnessed.

Marking time after a child’s death is not about overcoming grief or coming out of a dark tunnel—all those bad words sound to me as though bereaved parents are expected to put in a period of hard mental work and then clap their hands and say, I’m no longer heartbroken for my dead child, and I’m one of you normal people again, so now we can go on living as though nothing had happened and you don’t have to feel awkward around me.

How often we return to the problem of time, as we go on living, eventually learning—at whatever cost—to seem “normal” again. (“Children die,” Li repeats throughout the book, “and parents go on living—this too is a fact that defies all adjectives.”) “Until the end of time” is also what A. S. Byatt said about her son: “He is dead . . . that will go on and on till the end of time.”

Recent Reading: Time, Murder, and Mayhem

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Here’s a round-up of some of my recent reading, including some recent titles that had been on my radar for a while and finally popped up at the public library.

Time

One of these was Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, which I got interested in because Bradley was a brilliant guest on Backlisted. She was talking about Monkey King: Journey to the West—this was another instance in which I ended up more interested in the guest’s book than the book under discussion! I mostly enjoyed The Ministry of Time, until towards the end I got confused by the intricacies of its time travel plot and felt that I would have enjoyed a straight-up historical novel about the Franklin expedition more.

Reading Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (Vol. I) for my book club last week I decided that for now I have reached my limit for novels that mess with time—I found Balle’s novel beautiful, meditative, and thought-provoking, but also annoying as I puzzled over the logistics and tried not to let what seemed like the improvisational or ad hoc nature of its underlying “theory” get in the way of what else it had to offer. At least Balle’s novel is deliberately anti-plot, which made it easier to let the metaphysics slide. Its focus on repetition and the consequences, especially psychological and emotional, of not being able to get back into time also made me think, often very sadly, of Denise Riley’s Time Lived, Without Its Flow, and my own struggle to fully re-enter time since Owen died.

Murder

Paradoxically, perhaps, given how regularly I teach our mystery & detective fiction course, I don’t read a lot of crime fiction these days, but I am always scouting for recent titles that might be useful for updating my reading list. This was part of what drew me to Kevin Powers’s A Line in the Sand, which sounded like a good combination of crime and politics—which it is. It’s a pretty good read, fast-paced and character driven. It turns on an attempt to cover up a massacre by private military contractors in Iraq: one of the witnesses was a former interpreter now in America who finds himself pursued by those who need that past erased to secure a massive new contract. So we get both the scary world of the shady companies profiteering from war and the interconnected (and also scary and shady) world of the politicians and military leaders who are also complicit. Most of the other main characters are also in one way or another suffering because of the Iraq war; its far-reaching consequences for those who fought and for those on the home front are among the novel’s themes. I thought it was a solid crime novel, if a bit too much of a thriller for my own personal taste: by the end the bodies have piled up, and the deaths are grim and violent, and the solution is action-driven rather than ratiocinative. If this is your kind of crime novel, I recommend it as a good example of the kind!

Mayhem

Anders Lustgarten’s Three Burials is also quite violent and action-driven, but underlying it is a less cynical or discouraging vision than I felt was at the core of A Line in the Sand. Its Thelma and Louise-style plot (a connection made explicit in the novel itself) focuses on Cherry, a nurse who happens upon the body of a murdered refugee (we already know him as Omar) on a British beach. Cherry is carrying a lot of grief and trauma, including her wrenching memories of the worst of the COVID pandemic (people currently downplaying the severity of the crisis and restricting access to the vaccines that have helped us get to a better place would benefit from the terse but powerful treatment it gets here). She is also grieving her son’s death by suicide, and the resemblance of the dead man to her son adds to her determination to somehow get his body to the young woman whose photo he was clutching when he died.

There are a lot of moving parts to Three Burials, including Omar’s story; the story of the two cops on patrol with an outfit called “Defenders of the Realm” to intercept refugees’ boats, one of whom is, as we know from the beginning, Omar’s murderer; and the story of Cherry’s husband and daughter, also mourning and now trying to figure out what to do when Cherry ends up on the run with Omar’s body, with one cop (initially recalcitrant, eventually repentant) in her car and the other, angry and violent, giving chase. It’s a zany plot; what I liked about it was that it is a kind of cri de coeur, not just on Cherry’s behalf but on ours, collectively. What is a person of conscience and compassion even supposed to do in a world full of so much ignorance, hate, mismanagement, suspicion, and malice? Why are we scapegoating people instead of helping them, turning them away instead of welcoming them, making things worse instead of making things better? Why is the world apparently trying to forget what we (could have) learned from COVID instead of applying its lessons? The weird thing about Thelma and Louise is that despite its tragic ending, there is something joyful about it; Cherry’s wild ride has something of the same quality as she is driven forward by despair but also by a hope she refuses to give up that there must be something she can do, some difference she can still make, no matter how small.

Metallic Thoughts: Helen Garner, The Spare Room

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A huge wave of fatigue rinsed me from head to foot. I was afraid I would slide off the bench and measure my length among the cut roses. At the same time a chain of metallic thoughts went clanking through my mind, like the first dropping of an anchor. Death will not be denied. To try is grandiose. It drives madness into the soul. It leaches out virtue. It injects poison into friendship, and makes a mockery of love.

I was not prepared for The Spare Room. It sounds like the kind of book that is sad but uplifting: one friend, dying of cancer, comes to stay with another friend, who has a spare room and lives nearer the treatment center. We know this story, right? We have cried over variations on it in many films and novels, finishing them wrung out but also restored. Death is terrible, but friendship (or family, or love) is strong. Death always wins, of course, but that harsh truth can at least be reassuring cushioned with sentiment—I think (I know!) that is part of the appeal.

The Spare Room is about the strength of friendship, but not one harsh truth is cushioned with any softer emotion in Garner’s gut-punch of a novel. Helen’s good intentions towards her terribly ill friend Nicola are tested from the moment Nicola appears at the airport, “staggering like a crone.” “How long had she been this bad,” Helen wonders, after managing with great struggle to get Nicola into her nightgown and then into bed; “Why hadn’t someone warned me?”

It turns out that worse even than Nicola’s phases of debilitating weakness is her adamant refusal to acknowledge reality. The treatment she has come for is obvious quackery, a scam perpetrated on the desperate. The “medical” staff at the clinic are unqualified, uncaring, rapacious—and even their notes in Nicola’s file show that they know she is a terminal case, though this does not stop them from taking her money for their fraudulent services. What is a friend to do, in these circumstances, when the only honest path forward is to insist on the futility of hope?

And taking care of her is so much work! Nicola is beautiful, charming, extravagant, and in complete denial, including about the burden her visit is placing on Helen, who has to change her bedding repeatedly when she sweats through it or worse; tend to her through nights of wakefulness caused by intense pain Nicola insists on believe is caused by her treatments ‘driving out’ the cancer’; drive her to appointments, wrangle medications, struggle to find food she can tolerate. What kind of life is this, for either of them? “Death was in my house,” says Helen, but Nicola will not see it.

Helen gets some help when Nicola’s niece Iris and her boyfriend come to stay for a while. The logistical assistance is welcome but even more bracing for Helen is the reassurance that she is not a terrible friend, that Nicola’s demands and expectations are truly outrageous, that the rage Helen is feeling is a perfectly reasonable response to the combination of extreme pressure and Nicola’s relentless denial of reality. “Want to hear my theory?” Iris asks;

There’s a lot of horribleness that Nicola refuses to countenance. But it won’t just go away. It can’t, because it exists. So somebody else has to sort of live it. It’s in the air around her. Like static. I felt it when she walked into the house tonight. It was like I suddenly had a temperature. My heart rate went up.

I stared at her. “You mean it’s not just me?”

It turns out that being a real friend means doing something incredibly hard and, in a way, unkind: confronting Nicola with the truth. “Wake up,” Helen finally says; “You’ve got to get ready.”

The Spare Room still does not take the easy path: there are tears, but there is no epiphany, no bedside reconciliation or moment of grace.  Or not ‘on camera,’ as it were—not while Nicola is still in the spare room, not before Helen draws the line when Nicola proposes staying even longer while she has and then recovers from surgery:

“Will you fucking listen to me?” I said shrilly. “I. Can’t. Do. It. . . . I’m worn out. I can’t go on.”

Can you even say that, to anyone, much less to your beloved friend who is the one who literally can’t go on? Can you admit that she has asked for too much, that you have no more to give? Does telling her that make you a bad friend, or, worse, a bad person? Garner brings in, proleptically, a glimpse of the future that helps us answer this question kindly, thanks in part to some unexpected generosity from Nicola—who does not die in Helen’s spare room (as I’m sure the Hollywood version would want) but later, after Helen has taken her back to the airport and “left [her] place at Nicola’s side.” “It was the end of my watch,” Helen says; “and I handed her over.” After all they and we have been through, that seems like enough.

I haven’t read Garner before. I picked up The Spare Room at the library after listening to Claire Lowdon talk about her recently published diaries on the TLS podcast (which I always enjoy a lot). Lowdon confessed herself not a huge fan of Garner’s fiction, but she singled out The Spare Room as exceptional. I can see why. If any of you are Garner enthusiasts, which novel would you recommend I try next?

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A Wobble: Gail Godwin, Getting to Know Death

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

You decide to water the little tree. You plan what is to be done. Take your walking cane for extrabalance security when you reach the ground cover and the rocks between the gravel and the faucet for the house. Then out the door, down the stone steps, turn right on the gravel, walk with cane thirty to forty feet to the spot at the corner of the house . . . 

Done. Then cross over carefully, still with cane, and bend down to grasp the faucet. Twist to the right.

Now for the retreat. Stepping cautiously backward through the thicket of vinca, avoiding the rocks.

You muster resolve. Gravel lies in front of you. Step into it with cane, and turn right towards the little dogwood tree.

A wavering pause. A doubt, a loss of nerve. A wobble through space, and you’re falling forward.

On June 6, 2022, novelist Gail Godwin, then 85 years old, went carefully out to her garden to do a mundane chore: watering a small dogwood tree. Wisely, she was using her cane for extra stability; unfortunately, her cane proved insufficient to save her from a fall. She landed face-first and broke her neck.

Godwin was not paralyzed: that was the good news. But a broken neck is still a significant injury, especially for someone at an age where bones are less likely to heal. She wore a neck brace for months, went through months of rehab, including a stint in a live-in facility, and eventually also had surgery. This was all, as you might imagine, extremely challenging not only physically but also psychologically and existentially.

Getting to Know Death is a record of Godwin’s experiences and thoughts as a result of her accident, though as its subtitle, A Meditation, signals, it is not a straightforward memoir. It is more episodic than unified, including recollections of the illness and eventual death of Godwin’s good friend Pat, of the deaths by suicide of her father and brother, and of the death of her husband Robert. It includes thoughts on writers and writing, incidents from her time in rehab, diary entries about her daily life—in other words, it is kind of miscellaneous.  I found the book interesting, because Godwin herself is interesting and—at least as important—interested, in what is happening to her and in other people and what happens to them. I am not entirely convinced of its substance or depth, though. Can you ask, about book like this, whether it deserved publication, whether it is or does enough to deserve that, to deserve our attention? Is that a fair question? It seems almost rude, given what the book is about and how personal it is. I am not sure of my own answer, although because I was reading them at the same time it is hard not to compare Getting to Know Death to Woolf’s diaries, which were never intended for publication and yet, cumulatively at least, seem richer or more resonant.

One thing from Getting to Know Death that I will carry with me from now on is the idea of the “year’s mind,” a term I had not encountered before:

Too many ideas to catch and hold. This is the countdown to April 22, Robert’s “year’s mind.” It will now be twenty-two years here by myself in this house. “Year’s mind” went out of popular use five centuries ago, but the phrase still survives in the Episcopal Liturgy. “We remember Robert Starer, whose year’s mind falls on this day” (April 22) . . .

“Year’s mind” means the day of one’s death.

“Anniversary” has always felt like the wrong word to mark the day of someone’s death, which is a day of remembrance, not ceremony or celebration; now I have a better one for the day that will be here again all too soon.

“Almost Motionless”: 1917

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

Sunday 9 September

An almost motionless day; no blue sky; almost like a winter day, save for the heat. Very quiet. Over to picnic at Firle in the afternoon. Nessa & 5 children came after we had done; sat outside the trees. Walked home over the downs. Red sky over the sea. Woods almost as thin as winter, but very little colour in them.

Woolf’s diaries start up again in August, 1917, after the long recovery from her breakdown in February 1915. “For long time,” the editor notes, “there was no question of her writing at all, and then she was rationed, as it was thought to excite her.” (Readers of “The Yellow Wallpaper” are familiar with this theory—and with its debilitating effects.) This edition includes, as an Appendix, the “Asheham Diary,” briefer daily records covering some of the same period as her ‘real’ diary, where the entries also begin as quite brief, almost perfunctory logs of mostly mundane things: the weather, walks, mushrooming, taking letters to the post. Yet it’s still Woolf writing, with her observer’s eye:

We meant to have a picnic at Firle, but rain started, as we were ready, & so we went to post at Beddingham instead. Left my macintosh in the hedge, so it came down hard, & we were very wet. [I love that “so” there, as if—as we all probably feel sometimes—she had jinxed the weather by going without her raincoat.] It rained hard & steadily the whole evening & was raining violently when we went to bed. This is the first bad day we have had; even so, the morning was fine. The high wind of the last few days has broken leaves off, although only a few of the trees have begun to turn. Swallows flying in great numbers very low & swift in the field. The wind has brought down some walnuts, but they are unripe; the wasps eat holes in the plums, so we shall have to pick them. My watch stopped.

And so it goes until they move back to Richmond in October. At that point, the length and especially the energy of the entries picks up again, along with the Woolfs’ social life. On October 14 she reports “much argument . . . old arguments,” which the footnote explains “concerned VW’s thirst for social life and LW’s anxiety lest she should over-strain or excite herself.” What if the very thing that sustains you also exacts a price?

At first I was thinking that not much was really happening in this section, but then it struck me that of course there is a war on, as we are reminded by several passing references to German prisoners working on the nearby farms: “To picnic near Firle,” she reports on August 11, for example, “with Bells &c. Passed German prisoners, cutting wheat with hooks.” Also during this period Leonard is called up to military service, and their efforts to have him excused on medical grounds are repeatedly mentioned. Once they are back at Richmond, they are constantly on edge about air raids: on December 6, she is “wakened by L. to a most instant sense of guns: as if one’s faculties jumped up fully dressed.” They retreat to the kitchen passage then go back to bed when the danger seems passed, only to be once again roused by “guns apparently at Kew.” The raid, the papers tell her the next day, “was the work of 25 Gothas, attacking in 5 squadrons, and 2 were brought down.”

In the midst of this, the Woolfs are setting up their press and beginning to print. It is amusing to follow their frustrations with the apprentice they take on to “help” them with this work. “Our apprentice weighs rather heavily upon us,” Woolf notes, wondering if the discomfort she induces is because of her youth, or “something highly polished so as to reflect without depth about her.” She is “nice, considerate,” but not good at her job:

Today has been spent by L. in the futile misery of trying to print from one of her pages which wont lock up. As the other page had to be entirely taken down & re-set, her work amounts to nil; less than nil, considering L.’s time wasted.

The Woolfs also acquire and then lose a dog, Tinker, who goes missing the same day Leonard gets his papers stating he is “permanently and totally disabled,” so their relief at his security is “rather dashed by the loss of the spaniel whom we had come to like.”

The intermingling of different kinds of events and preoccupations—war and picnics, air raids and printing presses, soldiers and servants, book reviews and mushrooming—is one of the most interesting features of the diaries so far. In itself it is not, of course, surprising or unusual: we all live that way, after all, in the midst of events much larger than ourselves that affect us both directly and indirectly; whatever else is going on, we still somehow mostly keep up whatever counts for us as ordinary life. Sometimes we rise to the occasion, meeting history as best we can on our own terms, and other times we recede into pettiness. It’s reassuring to see that this is true for geniuses too. “I must again register my complaint that people wont write to me,” Woolf mopes on November 13; ‘I dont write to them, but how can one?” Fair! Especially if “one” is so busily writing one’s diaries. 🙂

Playing Us: Richard Powers, Playground

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

Where does it come from, all the fire and ice, the subtle wisdom and the unearned kindness? Every mechanical algorithm has vanished in compassion and empathy. You grasp irony better than I ever did. How did you learn about reefs and referenda, free will and forgiveness? From us, I guess. From everything we ever said and did and wrote and believed. You’ve read a million novels, many of them plagiarized. You’ve watched us play. And now you’re playing us.

If you are the sort of reader who prefers to avoid spoilers (or grumpiness), you should not read any further. 🙂

Richard Powers’s Playground pretends to be a novel about oceans, but it’s really a novel about AI: surprise! OK, it can be (and is) about both, but for me anyway, the twist at the end of the novel that exposes its artifice sucked the life out of the ocean parts for me. I wanted to say “duplicity” instead of “artifice” even though I realize that these are both kind of strange words to use about fiction. My negative reaction to the game Powers turned out to be playing reminded me of my frustration with Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins, which similarly undermined its own storytelling with some trickery at the end, even though that too was arguably (and my colleagues at Open Letters and I did argue about it during edits!) an unreasonable objection. The difference is that Atkinson had effectively “played on my emotions” before betraying her trick, while Powers’s novel never really engaged me, so I was annoyed both at the gimmick and at the novel’s own dullness. (Maybe that was part of the gimmick, to show that AI-generated fiction can do many things but not spark that kind of connection with its readers? If so, I think we needed a bit of a signal, to be quite sure we would not mistake AI’s failings for Powers’s own.)

The twist made Playground more intellectually interesting, in a “hey it’s actually a kind of metafiction” way, and maybe if I had been loving the novel to that point I would have felt less irritation at it. Unfortunately, by the time we got to the big reveal I was pretty tired of how plodding the whole exercise seemed, like a concept being executed under deadline, with very little life to it. The most energy Playground has is in the descriptions of underwater life we get from oceanographer Evelyne Beaulieu, whose experiences as a rare woman in a typically male-dominated scientific field make up one strand of Powers’s interwoven narratives:

At times she treaded in place, swarmed by the wildest assortment of Dr. Seuss creations—indigo, orange, silver, every color in the spectrum from piebald nudibranchs to bright, bone-white snails sporting forests of spines. The sea buoyed her, like warm silk on her bare arms and legs. She hung suspended in the middle of reefs that mounded up in pinnacles, domes, turrets, and terraces. She was a powerless angel hovering above a metropolis built by billions of architects almost too small to see. At night, with underwater lights, when the coral polyps came out to feed, the reef boiled over with surreal purpose, a billion different psychedelic missions, all dependent on each other.

This kind of stuff is fun just on its merits: due credit to Powers for his pictorial skills, for making these infodumps vivid in a way that the novel’s plot and people are not. Evelyne herself never came alive to me as a character: again, she seemed more like an animated concept—raising again, given the final twist, the possibility that this is a deliberate failure of characterization. Even if that were true, though, it would not make up for the deadening experience of plodding through her story.

Worse, and not theoretically excusable on the same “AI can’t actually write good fiction” grounds, is the first-person narrative of Todd Keane, the genius mastermind of the whole tedious exercise. It couldn’t have read (to me, YMMV, etc.) more like a writer with a deadline going through the motions in order to get done what he had planned for his novel. Or maybe the flatness of Todd’s voice is also meant as a symptom of his deficiencies? It’s his friend Rafi, after all, who is the poet, though Rafi came across to me as the worst cliché of all, his exchanges with Todd sounding almost excruciatingly inauthentic. Is this also Todd’s fault? How many “maybe it’s actually really clever” excuses am I supposed to come up with on Playground‘s behalf?

As you can tell, I’m not going to walk through the plot of the novel or even do a more patient inquiry into how its different parts do or do not add up to something meaningful about modernity, climate change, capitalism, or artificial intelligence. If you are interested in any of these themes, you may well find Playground worth reading. Many readers seem to have found it powerful in ways I simply did not. I was so disappointed. I thought Bewilderment was extraordinary. I didn’t like Playground at all, and it has put paid to any lingering desire I had to read The Overstory.