June in Open Letters Monthly

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It’s the first of the month, and that means the new issue of Open Letters Monthly has just appeared, all bright and shiny like a new penny! As always, the Table of Contents is as eclectic and inviting as we could make it. Some highlights:

Steve Donoghue marks Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee with a look at three new biographies of the woman who remains, despite all the attention, remarkably opaque to outsiders.

Greg Waldmann reviews Steve Coll’s grimly disturbing look at the reach and power of Exxon Mobil.

John Cotter does a “Peer Review” feature on Toni Morrison’s Home, reviewing first the reviewers then the novel itself.

In our two “Second Glance” features this month, Robert Latona revisits The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Álvaro Mutis, while Joshua Lustig shows that David Halberstam’s Vietnam War classic The Best and the Brightest is as relevant as ever.

Steve Danziger looks at the “Voltaire of science fiction,” Robert Sheckley.

I explore the failure that is George Eliot’s Romola and wonder whether success isn’t sometimes overrated in our measures of literary greatness.

All this plus Alien, Diablo III, Irma Heldman’s ‘It’s a Mystery’ column, and more–including more from me on George  Eliot (this time, Felix Holt) in our selection of pieces from the OLM archives. Come on over and read for a while!

Alaa Al Aswany, The Yacoubian Building

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yacoubianI didn’t realize until I finished The Yacoubian Building how its characters and stories had caught me up emotionally. The consistently flat narration–I’m not sure if this is a function of the translation or a genuine reflection of Al Aswany’s style–and the dispersal of our attention across multiple plots conspired against any strong feelings except curiosity for much of the novel. But by the end I found that curiosity had turned into concern, even care, about how each person’s story would end, and each ending was, in its own way, deeply moving. Some stories (Souad, Taha, Hatim especially) are heartrending; others (Abaskharon and Malak) wryly comic; others (Busayna and Zaki) are surprisingly beautiful and hopeful.

The Yacoubian Building (and the Yacoubian Building) is a microcosm of a world that comes across as chaotic, risky, bleak, yet shot through with a kind of wistful longing for dignity and love, the two things all of the characters are ultimately in search of. Even as you watch their mistakes, their compromises, their sacrifices, their sins, it’s hard to sit in judgment, because the medium they move in is so relentlessly corrupt. The conviction that there’s no winning against this system may account for the matter-of-fact tone and the absence of authorial commentary about even the novel’s most depressing sequences, such as Taha’s descent into extremism–inaugurated not by religious fanaticism or political commitment but by the injustice and prejudice of a bureaucracy that blocks him from his honorable dream–or the disastrous conclusion of Hatim’s affair with Abd Rabbuh, for whose shame, guilt and resentment Hatim’s sad love proves an unequal match. “I’m sure that Our Lord will forgive us because we don’t do anyone any harm,” Hatim reassures his lover; “We just love one another.” If only that belief were reflected in the world around them.

Al Aswany’s storytelling is so inexorable it feels fatalistic. But against the backdrop of cynicism and despair, Al Aswany sets the unlikely, unforeseeable–the “strange and unexpected”– love story of Busayna and Zaki: “little by little, raising his arms aloft amid the joyful laughter and cries of the others, he joined her in the dance.”

The Yacoubian Building is this month’s reading for The Slaves of Golconda: check out the group’s website for other posts, and feel free to join in the discussion on the Forum.

Middlemarch for Book Clubs: Update

Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

I have started building the ‘Middlemarch for Book Clubs’ site I boldly promised to create in response to the whole ‘Middlemarch kills book clubs’ story that got so much linkage a week or so ago. Here is a list of the pages and subpages I’ve set up so far. Let me know if you think they look sensible, and also if (based on your experience either as a reader or as a member of a book club) you think I should include something else or go in a different direction altogether. As part of my preparation, I’ve been looking around at other online book club guides, and Amateur Reader is right that the Faulkner site for Oprah’s Book Club is pretty nice. (The ‘How to Read Faulkner’ section is actually fairly similar in spirit and even in some specifics to the ‘top 10 tips’ I posted before, some of which, of course, will show up on the new site.) My own instinct is that the tone of such a site will be at least as important as the content, and then after that what matters most is the organization: after all, it’ s not hard to find information on all of these topics on your own if you go looking. So my goal is not to create original content so much as an atmosphere that’s inviting and a structure that’s useful. That’s a project that plays to my strengths, at least based on my recent course evaluations: apparently I am both conspicuously enthusiastic and unusually well organized.

Middlemarch for Book Clubs: A Preliminary Outline

Welcome

Getting Started

Tips for Success

Choosing an Edition

George Eliot

Life

Ideas

Contexts

Politics

Religion

The ‘Woman Question’

Discussion Questions

The Big Picture

One Book at a Time

Forum

Links

Electronic Editions of Middlemarch

Other Writing by George Eliot

Writing About George Eliot and Middlemarch

Other Related Resources

 

Madame Bovary II: The Doctors and Their Wives

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

It’s difficult to compare two books that are very, very good at what they do but that do very different things.

Must such a comparison be evaluative, hierarchical? Of course not. Does it often end up that way? Of course. We’re only human! We like different things, for reasons that often say more about us than about the objects of our inquiry. Is it a cheap dodge, though, to hide behind the unassailable (because ultimately indefensible) assertion of taste when you strongly prefer one great novel to another? Yes, probably. Maybe it’s better not to go there, then, but to stick with “these books do two very different things”–with the what, the fact of the matter, the precise depiction, and leave the rest unsaid, implicit.

It would be ironic for me to do that when comparing Madame Bovary and Middlemarch, though, because when I try to fix on what it is that I didn’t like about reading Madame Bovary, what I come up with is the way that novel is so relentlessly about the ‘what.’ There are a lot of things the novel just doesn’t do, things Flaubert just won’t do. To quote Lydia Davis’s introduction again, “his technique is to present the material without comment.” There’s nothing trivial or superficial about his “painstaking objective description,” which is often devastatingly perceptive, but “without comment,” it felt somehow unmoored to me. The ‘what’ is very meticulously rendered, but Madame Bovary is not a novel that deals very much in the ‘why?’ (broadly conceived), or the ‘what about it, then?’ Things and people in the novel are what they are in themselves: they are intensely specific, and it’s only indirectly, if at all, that the novel attaches them to anything general, from historical context to moral or philosophical ideas.

Middlemarch, by contrast, is fundamentally about connecting the specific to the general, about seeing the particular in as broad and varied a context as possible. Middlemarch “without comment” is all but inconceivable: how depleted, how deflated, it would be! The wisdom of Middlemarch–the excellence of Middlemarch–resides in its comments. The excellence of Madame Bovary lies (perforce) somewhere else: in its perfect realization of its own concept, perhaps? G. H. Lewes famously called Jane Austen “the greatest artist who ever lived” because she displayed, he thought, “the most perfect mastery over the means to her ends”: that seems true of Flaubert as well, at least in this case, and at least as far as I understand his ends and means. Where, though, is the wisdom of Madame Bovary? The novel itself makes this question seem foolish, misguided, naive. Nobody in the novel really learns anything, after all: “Since the events that are about to be recounted here, nothing … has changed in Yonville.” If you don’t think anybody can learn anything, no wonder you refrain from commenting. What would be the point? Middlemarch, in contrast, is profoundly pedagogical, and so its narrator balances wry awareness of her students’ inadequacies and limits with utter commitment to helping them understand and grow. This is not work that can be done by keeping out of the way.

Different means serving different ends: different visions, different aesthetics, different novels. And the reason it is so obvious how different the two novels are is that they have so much in common. There’s the basic premise: both are about ‘provincial life’ (and both, I think, see its limitations and defects in quite similar ways). Both also take a doctor and his discontented wife as main characters, a plot parallel that nicely sets me up to illustrate the authors’ contrasting approaches.

Doctoral Education

Charles Bovary

It would be impossible by now for any of us to recall a thing about him. He was a boy of even temperament, who played at recess, worked in study hall, listening in class, sleeping well in the dormitory, eating well in the dining hall. He had as local guardian a wholesale hardware dealer in the rue Ganterie, who would take him out once a month, on a Sunday, after his shop was closed, send him off to walk along the harbor looking at the boats, then return him to school by seven o’clock, before supper. In the evening, every Thursday, he would write a long letter to his mother, with red ink and three pats of sealing wax; then he would review his history notebooks or read an old volume of Anacharsis that was lying around in the study hall. Out walking, he would talk to the servant, who, like him, was from the country.

By dint of applying himself, he stayed somewhere in the middle of the class; once he even earned a first honorable mention in natural history. But at the end of his third year, his parents withdrew him from the school in order to have him study medicine, convinced that he would be able to go on alone to the baccalaureate. . . .

The curriculum, which he read on the notice board, made his head swim: a course in anatomy, a course in pathology, a course in physiology, a course in pharmacy, a course in chemistry, and one in botany, and one in clinical practice and one in therapeutics, not to mention hygiene and materia medica, names with unfamiliar etymologies that were like so many doors to sanctuaries filled with solemn shadows.

He understood none of it; though he listened, he did not grasp it. He worked, nonetheless, he possessed bound notebooks, he attended all the lectures, he never missed a hospital round. He accomplished his little daily task like a mill horse, which walks in circles with its eyes covered, not knowing what it is grinding. (Part I, Chapter  1)

Tertius Lydgate

He had been left an orphan when he was fresh from a public school. His father, a military man, had made but little provision for three children, and when the boy Tertius asked to have a medical education, it seemed easier to his guardians to grant his request by apprenticing him to a country practitioner than to make any objections on the score of family dignity. He was one of the rare lads who early get a decided bent and make up their minds that there is something particular in life which they would like to do for its own sake, and not because their fathers did it. Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love. Something of that sort happened to Lydgate. . . . one vacation, a wet day sent him to the small home library to hunt once more for a book which might have some freshness for him: in vain! unless, indeed, he took down a dusty row of volumes with grey-paper backs and dingy-labels — the volumes of an old Cyclopaedia which he had never disturbed. It would at least be a novelty to disturb them. They were on the highest shelf, and he stood on a chair to get them down. But he opened the volume which he first took from the shelf: somehow, one is apt to read in a makeshift attitude, just where it might seem inconvenient to do so. The page he opened on was under the heading of Anatomy, and the first passage that drew his eyes was on the valves of the heart. He was not much acquainted with valves of any sort, but he knew that valvae were folding doors, and through this crevice came a sudden light startling him with his first vivid notion of finely adjusted mechanism in the human frame. A liberal education had of course left him free to read the indecent passages in the school classics, but beyond a general sense of secrecy and obscenity in connection with his internal structure, had left his imagination quite unbiassed, so that for anything he knew his brains lay in small bags at his temples, and he had no more thought of representing to himself how his blood circulated than how paper served instead of gold. But the moment of vocation had come, and before he got down from his chair, the world was made new to him by a presentiment of endless processes filling the vast spaces planked out of his sight by that wordy ignorance which he had supposed to be knowledge. From that hour Lydgate felt the growth of an intellectual passion.

We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her. Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we are never weary of describing what King James called a woman’s “makdon and her fairnesse”, never weary of listening to the twanging of the old Troubadour strings, and are comparatively uninterested in that other kind of “makdom and fairnesse” which must be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires? In the story of this passion, too, the development varies: sometimes it is the glorious marriage, sometimes frustration and final parting. And not seldom the catastrophe is bound up with the other passion, sung by the Troubadours. For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardour of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly; you and I may have sent some of our breath towards infecting them, when we uttered our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions: or perhaps it came with the vibrations from a woman’s glance. (Book II, Chapter 15)

Romantic Dreams

Emma Bovary

Then she recalled the heroines of the books she had read, and this lyrical throng of adulterous women began to sing in her memory with sisterly voices that enchanted her. She herself was in some way becoming an actual part of those imaginings and was fulfilling the long daydream of her youth, by seeing herself as this type of amorous woman she had so much envied. Besides, Emma was experiencing the satisfaction of revenge. Hadn’t she suffered enough? But now she was triumphing, and love, so long contained, was springing forth whole, with joyful effervescence. She savored it without remorse, without uneasiness, without distress. (Part II, Chapter 9)

Rosamond Lydgate

[T]his result, which she took to be a mutual impression, called falling in love, was just what Rosamond had contemplated beforehand. Ever since that important new arrival in Middlemarch she had woven a little future, of which something like this scene was the necessary beginning. Strangers, whether wrecked and clinging to a raft, or duly escorted and accompanied by portmanteaus, have always had a circumstantial fascination for the virgin mind, against which native merit has urged itself in vain. And a stranger was absolutely necessary to Rosamond’s social romance . . . . Now that she and the stranger had met, reality proved much more moving than anticipation, and Rosamond could not doubt that this was the great epoch of her life. She judged of her own symptoms as those of awakening love, and she held it still more natural that Mr. Lydgate should have fallen in love at first sight of her. These things happened so often at balls, and why not by the morning light, when the complexion showed all the better for it? (Book I, Chapter 12)

Desperate Housewives*

Emma Bovary

Meanwhile, acting upon theories that she believed to be sound, she kept trying to experience love. By moonlight, in the garden, she would recite all the passionate rhymes she knew by heart and would sing melancholy songs to him, with a sigh; but she would find that she was as calm afterward as she had been before, and Charles seemed neither more loving nor more deeply moved.

When in this way she had made some attempt to strike the tinder against her heart without causing a single spark to fly from it, incapable, in any case, of understanding something she was not experiencing herself, just as she was incapable of believing in anything that did not manifest itself in a conventional form, she easily persuaded herself that Charles’s passion was no longer extraordinary. (Part I, Chapter 7)

So now they were going to continue one after another like this, always the same, innumerable, bringing nothing! Other people’s lives, however dull they were, had at least the possibility that something would happen. A chance occurrence would sometimes lead to an infinite number of sudden shifts, and the setting would change. But for her, nothing happened. God had willed it! The future was a dark corridor, with the door at its end firmly closed. (Part I, Chapter 9)

Rosamond Lydgate

Poor Rosamund for months had begun to associate her husband with feelings of disappointment, and the terribly inflexible relation of marriage had lost its charm of encouraging delightful dreams. It had freed her from the disagreeables of her father’s house, but it had not given her everything that she had wished and hoped. The Lydgate with whom she had been in love had been a group of airy conditions for her, most of which had disappeared, while their place had been taken by everyday details which must be lived through slowly from hour to hour, not floated through with a rapid selection of favourable aspects. The habits of Lydgate’s profession, his home preoccupation with scientific subjects, which seemed to her almost like a morbid vampire’s taste, his peculiar views of things which had never entered into the dialogue of courtship — all these continually-alienating influences, even without the fact of his having placed himself at a disadvantage in the town, and without that first shock of revelation about Dover’s debt, would have made his presence dull to her. There was another presence which ever since the early days of her marriage, until four months ago, had been an agreeable excitement, but that was gone: Rosamond would not confess to herself how much the consequent blank had to do with her utter ennui. . . (Book VII, Chapter 64)

 [Will] would have made, she thought, a much more suitable husband for her than she had found in Lydgate. No notion could have been falser than this, for Rosamond’s discontent in her marriage was due to the conditions of marriage itself, to its demand for self-suppression and tolerance, and not to the nature of her husband; but the easy conception of an unreal Better had a sentimental charm which diverted her ennui. She constructed a little romance which was to vary the flatness of her life: Will Ladislaw was always to be a bachelor and live near her, always to be at her command, and have an understood though never fully expressed passion for her, which would be sending out lambent flames every now and then in interesting scenes. His departure had been a proportionate disappointment, and had sadly increased her weariness of Middlemarch; but at first she had the alternative dream of pleasures in store from her intercourse with the family at Quallingham. Since then the troubles of her married life had deepened, and the absence of other relief encouraged her regretful rumination over that thin romance which she had once fed on. Men and women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their vague uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion, and oftener still for a mighty love. (Book VIII, Chapter 75)

These examples aren’t offered in a tendentious spirit. They all display, I think, mastery as Lewes defines it. Yet I can’t imagine ever loving one novel as I love the other. Sorry, Gustave: it’s not you, it’s me! But I’m looking forward to the discussion that I hope these juxtapositions provoke.

*Don’t blame me! If the blurb for the Davis translation can call Emma “the original desperate housewife,” how am I supposed to resist?

May Day!

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It’s a spectacular May day here in Halifax, perfect for the Bluenose Marathon (no, I didn’t participate, but we cheered on a lot of the runners and walkers as they came down our street towards the 38K marker). It’s supposed to be nice again tomorrow, which is lovely as this is the Victoria Day long weekend so we can all enjoy the sunshine. Winters in Halifax, though not as cold or as snowy as winters in many other parts of Canada, are plenty long and dreary, and for someone raised on the more temperate west coast, they can be hard to take. Harder still is the late arrival of spring. As of today, though, there’s no doubt that spring has sprung here, and I have a few photos to prove it from a beautiful walk Maddie and I took in the Public Gardens, my favorite spot in the city (as documented in some detail in this earlier post). I am thinking lots of serious thoughts about Madame Bovary for my next post, and I have also begun a little construction work on the “Middlemarch for Book Clubs” I so boldly promised in my previous post, about which more later too, but for now, here are a few pictures of beautiful trees and flowers. Grim thoughts of adultery and arsenic can wait!

 

 

 

 

(The photos open up bigger if you click on them.)

Your Book Club Wants to Read Middlemarch? Great Idea!

Rohan Maitzen24 Comments

OUPMmA stupid article about how Middlemarch is the kiss of death for book clubs has been getting a disappointing amount of linkage in the past couple of days, including from sites you’d expect to be above that kind of pandering to the lowest common denominator (I’m looking at you, New Yorker!). I’d like to think at least some of that is ironic linkage: the entire article is so anti-intellectual and so condescending to book clubs, not to mention to Middlemarch, that maybe people are linking to it in the same spirit that they’d rubberneck when passing a traffic accident. Or maybe they think it’s from The Onion. You’ll notice that I’m not linking to any of its iterations: it doesn’t deserve any more attention. Maybe it doesn’t deserve any reply, either, but it’s frustrating to see something like that circulating so widely, and I absolutely hate the thought that people might actually decide not to read Middlemarch because of it!*

I’ve decided, therefore, to put together an online site to encourage and support reading Middlemarch–whether in book clubs or on your own. I’ll be thinking a lot about what to put on the site, and I’d welcome suggestions. I should say that I think there’s something uncomfortable about implying that you can’t just read Middlemarch on your own and have a great experience. The first time I read it, I was eighteen and backpacking across Europe. I loved it. I read it differently then than I do now, but I did not find it dry, long, confusing, boring, or in any way the kiss of death for my reading pleasure, and at that time I had no special qualifications beyond having been a bookworm ever since I learned to read with Robert the Rose Horse when I was about five. I wasn’t even intending to be an English major. When I read Middlemarch again for a course on the 19th-century novel, I loved it again, so much that I decided to write my Honours thesis on it, and eventually it also made up part of my Ph.D. thesis, and now I teach it in my own courses as often as I can. It’s the kind of novel that rewards that kind of long-term relationship: it’s rich with ideas and characters and it’s brilliantly constructed and includes passages of such extraordinary intelligence that it can leave me breathless, as well as passages of great pathos, sly hilarity, and even unashamed melodrama and romance. It’s long and, in some ways, intricate, but there’s no reason why it should be singled out as the book of all books that people can’t read if they want to, with or without someone else’s help–especially people who love reading enough to be in book clubs in the first place.

Why put together any kind of reading guide for Middlemarch, then? Why not just let people take their chances with it? Good question. Is there really a need for such a thing? Is there any demand for it? I’m not sure, though I guess I’ll find out about the demand part at least, when I get the site up and running. It is certainly common to include guides and discussion questions for book clubs in contemporary novels, though I often think they don’t promote very thoughtful discussion of the book itself (and sometimes, as with the question set included with my edition of The Siege of Krishnapur, the questions are just plain odd.) As a teacher, I have found that students both appreciate and benefit from having some context provided and some suggestions for things to think about when they read: if you’re going to talk about a book, especially a long and complex book, the conversation will be better (more focused, more specific, less impressionistic) if you have some common starting points. Also, if you are reading something for the first time, it can be challenging to sort out all the details you are taking in. ‘One cannot read a book, one can only reread it,’ Nabokov famously pronounced, but if you don’t have time to do a thorough rereading yourself, it can help a lot for another, more experienced reader to give you some ideas about patterns and problems to be alert to. Indeed, if I didn’t think it was possible for there to be some “value added” to people’s reading experience, I would have a hard time showing up for work every day.

So I’ll putter away at the site for a bit and then make it public and solicit feedback on whether it strikes the right note and seems useful. I know there are lots of literature guides online already, many aimed at the high school and college market. I hope to do something a bit different–though exactly what, I’m still thinking about.

In the meantime, here are my top ten tips for any book clubs that have had the great idea to read Middlemarch.

  1. Yes, do! Why would anyone want to talk you out of it?
  2. Remember: it’s just a novel. It’s a great novel, and a long novel, and a Victorian novel, but these are not reasons to approach it with the preconception that it is difficult or inaccessible, an obstacle to be overcome like some kind of fictional Mount Everest. Novels are for reading–Victorian novels more than most! It’s also a very funny novel, though its humor is rarely of the knee-slapping kind. Just because it’s a “classic” doesn’t mean it’s dead serious, or that you have to be.
  3. Don’t rush it. It was originally published in installments; consider reading it this way, one or two books at a time, over several meetings. Every page has its share of details to savor.
  4. Mark it up! You’ll want to be able to find the good bits later. I think that what actually kills a book group–or at least makes it a lot less worthwhile than it could be–is people airing unsubstantiated opinions and gesturing vaguely towards the whole book as “evidence” (or insisting “that’s just my opinion”). Talk about the actual book–the words on the page–as specifically as you can. The longer the book, the more challenging that is, for sure, but you chose Middlemarch, after all. So do your best to learn your way around it, and leave yourself a helpful trail of crumbs. I’m a big fan of the Post-It for this purpose (here’s what my teaching copy looks like), but do what works for you. E-books allow highlighting and bookmarking; for some people, an old Penguin paperback and a pencil in hand is all they need or want.
  5. You don’t have to read up on George Eliot to appreciate Middlemarch, but she was a remarkable woman who lived a truly unconventional life. She also had strong ideas about the role of fiction in our lives. Consider finding out about her–just don’t start with Brenda Maddox’s terrible George Eliot in Love. The Victorian Web has some useful material.
  6. Middlemarch is a “multi-plot” novel–though, as you’ll discover, eventually the various plots converge around a shared crisis, and along the way there are many points of intersection. Still, there are a lot of people to keep track of! Consider making your own list of dramatis personae as you go along.  I actually think it’s fun to construct family trees, especially of the Vincy-Garth-Featherstone-Bulstrode connections (not to mention the Casaubon-Ladislaw-XXX connection–I’ve avoided a bit of a spoiler there!). Just as useful is to think about things the different plots have in common: what themes or problems do the characters share, across the various storylines? Why, for instance, do Dorothea and Dr. Lydgate belong in the same book although for most of it they spend very little time in the same plot?
  7. As you read, keep in mind that one of the most important ideas behind both the plot and the form of Middlemarch is that things look different from different points of view. (A great early example is the number of different perspectives we get on Mr. Casaubon.) This is a simple enough idea but it has significant consequences for the novels’ characters (who often aren’t very good at imagining how the world looks to other people), for us as readers (and as human beings), and for the form of the novel: once you take this idea really seriously, you’ll stop asking why the novel is so long and start thinking that it should have been even longer.
  8. Another thing to keep an eye on is the novel’s chronology. Because you aren’t rushing, you will notice the many times the story backtracks and brings us up to the same moment from a different starting point or following a different character.  I talk about Eliot’s manipulation of chronology a lot when I teach the novel, because it’s technically impressive as well as closely related to the issue of seeing things from different points of view (see, for instance, this post).
  9. Persist! Any long book–really, any book at all–may occasionally lose its grip on you, and then you start setting it aside in favor of other things to read, and the next thing you know you’ve lost all your momentum, which in turn becomes a reason not to pick it up again. The best way out of that slump is to pick the book up, settle yourself in your most comfortable chair, and read for a solid hour until you are back in the groove. Often (though of course not always) focusing thoughtfully on a book will really improve your relationship with it: you will find the rhythm of its language, and regain your traction with its plot and characters. The external motivation of reading for a class or a book club is good for inertia too. (I’m speaking from experience here. I’ve just finished Madame Bovary. I started it two years ago and put it aside “just for a while,” and only came back to it this month because my book club chose it for our next read. I didn’t end up loving the book, but I’m very glad I read it: reading is not all about my personal taste, after all, and that taste is also not immutable. But I had to get myself to focus. Needing to put a little discipline in your reading is not a sign that the book is a failure.)
  10. Watch the BBC adaptation if you want to. The article-which-shall-not-be-linked-to warns strongly against watching film versions, apparently because the author thinks you are lazy children who will always look for the easiest option. Of course you don’t want to end up talking about the adaptation and the book as if they’re interchangeable, or talking exclusively about the film–it’s a book club, right? But you can handle that. In my opinion, the BBC Middlemarch is not a great adaptation, though it’s a good effort. It does a decent job at putting together the main plot lines, and some of the casting is perfect (Mr. Brooke and Mr. Casaubon especially), so it might help animate the story lines for you, or help you remember who people are. (I usually show some clips to my classes, mostly for this reason.) The novel has a lot more to offer than the adaptation, though, as you’ll quickly realize if you have been listening to the narrator, thinking about point of view, or puzzling over chronology while you read. The film version is very linear and also very literal: it has nothing like the structural complexity and interest of the original, and thus does nothing to get us thinking about the larger problems raised in the novel about interpretation, point of view, sympathy, or morality–not to mention science, or aesthetics, or history… The major loss, though, really is the narrator–a loss it has in common with pretty much all film adaptations of Victorian novels. They always send me back to the original novels with renewed appreciation for the novel as an art form.

Those of you who have already read Middlemarch, or who are in book groups (or both!): please add any further tips  in the comments!

*I realize the original article is at least partly tongue-in-cheek, or at any rate mildly satirical. But still!

Madame Bovary I: “in all of Flaubert there is not a single beautiful metaphor”

Rohan Maitzen16 Comments

It’s odd reading a very famous novel for the first time. It’s like meeting a celebrity in person (or so I imagine). It is intensely familiar and yet strange at the same time: it is exactly what it always appeared to be, and yet it is no longer an idea of something but the thing itself. And so it has been for me with Madame Bovary–it is exactly what I thought it would be, and yet it is more than that, and also, less than that.

What did I know about Madame Bovary before I read it? Well, the basic plot, of course. So, no surprises there. And that it is celebrated as the perfection of a very particular idea of what a novel should be. I’m tempted to say that the idea is for a novel to be nothing like Middlemarch, except that would be anachronistic, and also, much as Madame Bovary is not like Middlemarch, it is also very similar to Middlemarch (or at least to particular subplots in Middlemarch) in ways that inevitably provoke me to comparison. But I’m going to save that for my next post on Madame Bovary (provisionally entitled “The Doctors’ Wives”). Tonight I have a more modest agenda, which is simply to remark on and quote some of Flaubert’s metaphors. Overall, you see, I didn’t like Madame Bovary very much at all. The pending comparative post will go into my reasons for that, and it will all get very thorny. But I was delighted with Flaubert’s language. (I am relying on Lydia Davis’s translation of Flaubert, but, and I am sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong, details so concrete and specific seem likely to translate quite precisely.)

I should qualify that statement: I was delighted with Flaubert’s figurative language. “Flaubert’s aim,” Davis writes in her introduction, “was to write the novel ‘objectively,’ leaving the author out of it. . . . his technique is to present the material without comment, though occasionally a comment does slip in. To report the facts objectively, to give a painstaking objective description . . . should be comment enough.” Davis goes on to note that “in keeping with his plain, almost clinical approach to the material, he schooled himself to be very sparing with his metaphors,” and indeed he is. Davis cites Proust regretting the consequences and complaining “that in all of Flaubert there is not a single beautiful metaphor”–which Davis promptly rebuts with a very beautiful metaphor indeed. There’s not much beautiful about Madame Bovary or its language most of the time, though: Flaubert is both unsentimental and unsparing. “They had to lift her head a little,” he tells us, as the women dress Emma’s corpse for her funeral, “and at that a stream of black liquid ran out of her mouth like vomit.” An extreme example? Maybe, but it epitomizes Flaubert’s ruthlessness. (The entire death scene, in fact, is unrelentingly awful, and then as if the bile isn’t bad enough, Homais punctures her temples several times while cutting Bovary a lock of her hair. That detail, surely, is gratuitous! It’s a cruel book, to us as well as to its characters.)

Apparently, though, for Flaubert, part of being painstakingly objective is finding just the right metaphor to make sure we see (or feel, or hear) the novel’s details exactly. “Beautiful metaphors” are not really the point: his metaphors aren’t decorative but informative. But they are also little spaces for Flaubert to have some fun, to play. Davis tells us Flaubert had a “tendency to wax lyrical and effusive” and that in writing Madame Bovary he very deliberately wrote “against his own natural inclinations.” It is certainly an astonishingly controlled book, claustrophobic and oppressive (qualities that not only suit his aesthetic agenda but reflect his social critique). I think that’s why it was such a relief every time he let loose just a little bit. Sometimes his images are ironic, sometimes poetic, sometimes comical, sometimes just so apt they induce a tiny shiver of appreciation. They tend to reflect the tone or attitude of a particular character, as Flaubert (like George Eliot, though to different ends) relies heavily on free indirect discourse. Emma, unsurprisingly, tends to think in the romantic clichés of sentimental fiction.

A few examples:

he would ride along ruminating on his happiness, like a man continuing to chew, after dinner, the taste of the truffles he is digesting.

the incendiary glow that had reddened her pale sky was covered over in shadow and by degrees faded away . . . her passion burned itself to ashes . . . and she remained lost in a terrible, piercing cold.

It was the first time Emma had heard such things said to her; and her pride, like a person relaxing in a steam bath, stretched out languidly in the warmth of the words.

She recalled all her natural fondness for luxury, all the privations of her soul, the sordid details of marriage, housekeeping, her dreams falling in the mud like wounded swallows . . .

Emma was like all other mistresses; and the charm of novelty, slipping off gradually like a piece of clothing, revealed in its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and uses the same language.

Hers was a sort of idiotic attachment full of admiration for him, of sensual pleasure for her, a bliss that numbed her; and her soul sank into this intoxication and drowned in it, shriveled like the Duke of Clarence in his butt of malmsey.

She would undress roughly, tearing the thin string of her corset, which would whistle around her hips like a slithering snake.

All that her mind contained of memories and thoughts was pouring out at once, in a single burst, like the thousand parts of a firework.

Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

It’s hard to spot similarities between Virginia Woolf and the Somerville novelists I’ve been looking at if you focus on Woolf’s fiction. Winifred Holtby wrote a book about Woolf, and as I noted in my post about Testament of Friendship, she did so deliberately because she knew Woolf was such a different novelist: “I took my courage and curiosity in both hands and chose the writer whose art seemed most of all removed from anything I could ever attempt, and whose experience was most alien to my own.”

A Room of One’s Own, with its framing focus on women’s education and particularly on the material differences between women’s colleges and their male counterparts, brings out an important point of convergence, if also another distinction, as unlike Holtby and Brittain and Kennedy and Sayers, Woolf did not go to university herself. It’s in Three Guineas, though, as I have just (belatedly, I know) discovered, that Woolf really shows herself their contemporary, as the issues she focuses on are very much those that dominate their non-fiction as well. Woolf’s arguments offer nothing like the sharp direct hits of Holtby and Brittain’s social and political journalism: as in A Room of One’s Own, she is indirect, circuitous, ironic; she ventriloquizes both questioners and audiences, sets up targets only to slyly destroy them, hypothesizes, imagines, projects. Her conclusions are not single and direct but layered and proliferating. I have taught A Room of One’s Own several times. Once, in a course evaluation, a student raged that it made her “want to gouge [her] eyes out with an ice pick.” Ridiculous! A Room of One’s Own  is a (arguably, the) great work of non-fiction prose. But at the same time, if you go to books like these expecting the orderly presentation of an argument that proposes and then supports a straightforward thesis, well, I can see how you  might end up a little frustrated. But what a trip it is when you follow her along those byways of her thought–not as exhilarating, perhaps, as her literary essays, but with the same effect of provoking surprise and argument and active thought as you go.

In this case what I tripped across most often was her careful restriction of her arguments to “the daughters of educated men,” a class specificity for which she makes some careful arguments (mostly in the notes) but which I think raises a lot of questions about the economics of the ideals she holds out in the book. She is ruthless about the moral corruption of writing for money, for instance (poor Mrs. Oliphant, who “sold her brain, her very admirable brain, prostituted her culture and enslaved her intellectual liberty in order that she might earn her living and educate her children” – the underlying point is that she ought not to have to sell herself in this way, but isn’t there another version of this story by which writing is a good enough way to make a living? and in Mrs. Oliphant’s case at least, do we really imagine that freed of the need to make money she would have turned her “intellectual liberty” in some particularly brilliant direction?). By and large Woolf seems to characterize money as weakening to the moral fiber–though at the same time she is passionate about the need, the right, to be economically independent. You should want enough to sustain yourself, I think is the idea, but not otherwise pursue financial reward, as all too quickly then you will interest yourself in what pays best rather than what is best.

There’s lot more to be considered about the economics of Three Guineas (its whole conceit, after all, is “where shall I bestow these three precious coins?”). Given that I’m reading it as part of my “Summer of Sommerville,” though, I am particularly interested in ways it resonates with the other things I’ve been reading. On women’s education, she offers a curt history but also a trenchant commentary on the investment women across the centuries have made in the education of their brothers:

For have not the daughters of educated men paid into Arthur’s Education Fund* from the year 1262 to the year 1870 all the money that was needed to educate themselves…? Have they not paid with their own education for Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge, and all the great schools and universities on the continenent…? Have they not paid so generously and lavishly if so indirectly, that when at last, in the nineteenth century, they won the right to some paid-for education for themselves, there was not a single woman who had received enough  paid-for education to be able to teach them?

She is similarly pointed on women’s enthusiasm for the first World War:

So profound was her unconscious loathing for the education of the private house with its cruelty, its poverty, its hypocrisy, its immorality, its inanity that she would undertake any task however menial, exercise any fascination however fatal that enabled her to escape. Thus consciously she desired ‘our splendid Empire’; unconsciously she desired our splendid war.

The support rests, then, not on patriotism, but on rebellion, and in fact a continuing theme of the book is women’s very different relationship to the country that expects their loyalty and service:

She will find that she has no good reason to ask her brother to fight on her behalf to protect ‘our’ country. ‘ “Our country,” ‘ she will say, ‘throughout the greater part of its history has treated me as a slave; it has denied me education or any share in its possessions. “Our” country still ceases to be mine if I marry a foreigner. “Our” country denies me the means of protecting myself, forces me to pay others a very large sum annually to protect me, and is so little able, even so, to protect me that Air Raid precautions are written on the wall. Therefore if you [men] insist on fighting to protect me, or “our” country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share; but not to gratify my instincts, or to protect either myself of my country. For,’ the outsider will say, ‘in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.’

For Woolf, as for Holtby, it’s not so much the military-industrial complex that is a threat to her freedom as the military-patriarchy complex: both writers make a strenuous case for recognizing the links between the masculine will to power (which Woolf analyzes in one section of Three Guineas, with stinging condescension, as “infantile fixation”) with Fascism. In Holtby’s 1934 essay “Black Words for Women Only” she observes that Nazism has rolled back all the progress made by women between 1918 and 1933:

There is little hope for ambitious young women in Nazi Germany, where the brightest contribution of constructive economic thought towards the solution of the unemployment problem appears to have been the expulsion of large sections of the community from paid work, as a penalty for being women, Socialists or Jews, and their replacement by unobjectionable loyal male Aryans. Individual women have protested against this mass campaign to restore their economic dependence and drive them back to the kitchen. . . .

Throughout history, whenever society has tried to curtail the opportunities, interests and powers of women, it has done so in the sacred names of marriage and maternity. Exalting women’s sex until it dominated her whole life, the State then used it as an excuse for political or economic disability. . . . Today, whenever women hear political leaders call their sex important, they grow suspicious. In the importance of the sex too often has lain the unimportance of the citizen, the worker and the human being. The ‘normal’ woman knows that, given freedom and equality before the law, she can be trusted to safeguard her own interests as wife, mother, daughter, or what you will.

Pondering the contaminated “atmosphere” created by the unwanted intrusion of women into professional life (“it is likely that a name to which ‘Miss’ is attached will, because of this odour, circle in the lower spheres where the salaries are small rather than mount to the higher spheres where the salaries are substantial”) Woolf demands, in her turn, “is not the woman who has to breathe that poison and to fight that insect, secretly and without arms, in her office, fighting the Fascist or the Nazi as surely as those who fight him with arms in the limelight of publicity?” The Fascist dictator is simply the oppressive patriarch gone national:

He has widened his scope. He is interfering now with your liberty; he is dictating how you shall live; he is making distinctions not merely between the sexes but between the races. You are feeling in your own persons what your mothers felt when they were shut out, when they were shut up, because they were women. Now you are being shut out, you are being shut up, because you are Jews, because you are democrats, because of race, because of religion. It is not a photograph that you look upon any longer; there you go, trapesing along in the procession yourself. And that makes a difference. The whole iniquity of dictatorship, whether in Oxford or Cambridge, in Whitehall or Downing Street, against Jews or against women, in England, or in Germany, in Italy or in Spain is now apparent to you.

The dictator is only the extreme version of “Man himself, the quintessence of virility, the perfect type of which all the others are imperfect adumbrations”: “He is called in German and Italian Führer or Duce; in our own language Tyrant or Dictator. And behind him lie ruined houses and dead bodies – men, women, and children.”

The key lesson of Three Guineas is “that the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; that the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.” But from this connection Woolf draws hope, and a recipe for social and political transformation:

It suggests that we cannot dissociate ourselves from that figure but are ourselves that figure. It suggests that we are not passive spectators doomed to unresisting obedience but by our thoughts and actions can ourselves change that figure. A common interest unites us; it is one world, one life. How essential it is that we should realize that unity the dead bodies, the ruined houses prove. For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstrations forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual world, for they are inseparably connected.

I think that this desire for men and women to recognize and stand together in a united front (“now we are fighting together. The daughters and sons of educated men are fighting side by side”) lies behind her rejection of the word “feminism” (“a vicious and corrupt word that has done much harm in its day and is now obsolete”), though this was another of the things I stumbled against, reading along. Given her insistence precisely on women’s “outsider” status, and on the particularities of their experiences and perspectives, why oppose language that identifies their cause as sex-specific? “They [those called ‘feminists’] were fighting the same enemy that you are fighting and for the same reasons,” she says; “They were fighting the tyranny of the Fascist state.” But that rather erases that until the rise of the Fascist state, and indeed for those not living in a Fascist state, different groups in fact have different antagonists. She wants to make a distinction between men as private people (she is eloquent, for instance, about the excellent relationships of brothers and sisters in private life) and men as social beings: “we look upon societies as conspiracies that sink the private brother, whom many of us have reason to respect, and inflate in his stead a monstrous male, loud of voice, hard of fist . . . [who] enjoys the dubious pleasures of powers and dominion.” But men and brothers, and societies, do not exist in the abstract, and as her own examples of the ‘infantile fixation” of fathers with controlling their daughters show, the tyranny actual individual women fought was very much the tyranny of their own families, a fact that no analogy or extension to Hitler and Mussolini should erase.

But that’s what Woolf does: she provokes argument even as she compells you with the intelligence and elegance of her writing. I know she met Holtby but did not warm to her (actually, she was quite snooty about her in her letters), but I don’t know if she met Brittain (she read Testament of Youth “with extreme greed”). Do you remember the old TV show “Meeting of Minds,” hosted by Steve Allen? An episode featuring these three would absolutely bristle with intellectual excitement, political commitment, and aesthetic contrasts.

*The explanation for this is in my favorite line of the book: “You, who have read Pendennis, will remember how the mysterious letters A.E.F. figured in the household ledger.” OK, fine, Virginia, I will read Pendennis this summer!

Recent Reading Round-Up: Cohen, Donoghue, Knox

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

I  have some serious reading to do for my two book clubs this month — Madame Bovary for the local one and The Yacoubian Building for Slaves of Golconda. I’ve actually started both of them, though I started The Yacoubian Building so long ago that I think I’ll just start it over again. But at the same time I’ve been flitting around among a lot of different books for my light reading, so I thought I’d catch up on some of them here.

On the advice of Amateur Reader, I looked up Paula Marantz Cohen’s Jane Austen spin-offs, Jane Austen in Boca and Jane Austen in Scarsdale; or, Love, Death, and the S.A.T.s. Both are intelligent, entertaining, satirical, and romantic without being sentimental. I thought  Jane Austen in Boca was unevenly constructed: the set-up was too long and the resolution too quick. I also thought the introduction of the college film crew was extraneous to the novel’s needs: it wasn’t even used as a device to resolve the romantic conflict. But that was OK: I enjoyed the quirky people and the milieu (both of which I envisioned looking exactly like the retirement community part of In Her Shoes) and the literary chit-chat, and especially the Austen seminar, from which AR has already quoted the best bits. I liked Jane Austen in Scarsdale better overall, and not just because it’s based on Persuasion rather than Pride and Prejudice. I thought the shifting of the Elliots’ class anxiety from Austen’s context to the context of status-obsessed parents angling to get their kids into the “best” colleges was really smart, and though I can imagine Cohen’s extended satire on the whole process seeming too extended to some readers, I found it very funny. Changing the Wentworth figure from a naval hero to a travel writer was also clever: how else could he have travelled the world and come back, not broke, but rich, after all? The bit that didn’t work as well, I thought, was the “giving him up on the advice of family” part, which just seemed really unlikely for modern characters. But maybe I just move in the wrong (or right!) circles.

Following the enthusiastic recommendations of Jessica at Read React Review and Liz at Something More, I picked up Ride with Me (continuing my intrepid explorations of Romance-land!) and, like both of them, quite enjoyed it. I’m not a biker, but I liked the premise because of the excuse it gave for lots of descriptions of the landscape, and also because travel narratives are always effective devices for character development and (in this case at least) relationships. I got a bit tired of the appreciative voyeurism–how interesting can it be for us to be told repeatedly how great someone looks, after all? And the really, really rich guy trope (experts: does this count as a trope?) is a bit annoying because it’s kind of like waving a magic wand over the story: I prefer an HEA that isn’t so imbalanced. I had lunch today with Sycorax Pine and we talked a bit about ideology and contemporary romance, and particularly about whether period romances may sometimes do a better job complicating things like gender roles and economic issues precisely because in looking back, we are able or willing to see more critically. No doubt, as a beginner, I should not generalize, but in this specific case and a couple of other romances I’ve read recently (like Julie James’s About That Night), it has bothered me that part of the happy ending is the implication that “money perfects everything.” But overall Ride with Me was a lot of fun, and even funny (like Jessica, I particularly enjoyed the hot sauce contest).

I guess it isn’t right to include Emma Donoghue’s Room as light reading, though it was certainly a very fast read. I avoided it for a long time: the premise made me uncomfortable, and I didn’t particularly love the other Donoghue novels I read. But it was hard not to be curious, given how much hype and acclaim it got, so when the e-book went on sale for $5 I couldn’t resist. For the first 50 or so pages I was captivated and really impressed: Jack’s voice is pitch-perfect given the concept, and Donoghue very effectively balances us on a knife-edge between innocence and evil because we can’t help but understand everything so very differently from Jack. Though the narrative conceit started to wear on me after a while, I also got very caught up in the suspense of their escape attempts. Unlike litlove, though (whose reading of the novel is wonderful), I tired quickly of the second half. After the initial shock of being introduced to the rest of the world, Jack began to seem to me too much of a device to show us the world as it seems to an outsider. His voice faltered too, I thought: though we were set up for his advanced vocabulary by the ‘parrot’ game he and his mother play and his otherwise hyper-developed skills, still, some of the comments he made seemed artificially pointed while at other times he seemed much more babyish than he ever did while in “Room.” The setting up of his new life felt laborious, too. Clearly, readers differ on this!  I’m very interested in litlove’s proposal that something more generalized comes out of the novel about childhood innocence and the difficulties we all have growing out of it, but I’m not comfortable reading the novel in a way that conflates Jack’s childhood, founded in trauma and built through artifice, with childhood in general–unless we want his mother’s relationship with Old Nick to stand in for marriage generally too, but nothing about Room gave me the sense that Donoghue intended it as an allegory overall. So for me, the novel works best at the more specific level, an experiment in perspective and psychology. I think the strengths of sticking to Jack’s point of view–including that it’s unexpected and often very poignant seeing as he sees–also become the novel’s weakness; I would have liked to switch to his mother’s point of view for the second half, perhaps, because it’s not that hard to get the idea that everything seems very strange to Jack, so instead of giving us a tour of everything as he gets around to it (a coffee shop! a toy store! a playground!) some of the realities of their captivity as well as of their re-adjustment could have been explored from a more sophisticated point of view.

J. G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

The Siege of Krishnapur is the second in Farrell’s ‘Empire trilogy’ – the first is Troubles, which I read last summer. Because I had read Troubles, I wasn’t as taken by surprise by The Siege of Krishnapur as I might have been: I anticipated going in that it would be both horrifying and funny, and it was. Siege is set during the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny, and it tells the story of one particular British garrison town, “the center of administration for a large district.” As if hindsight isn’t enough for us to know that this center cannot hold, the novel begins by walking us through what a contemporary traveler would see – the deserted town “merely a melancholy cluster of white domes and planes,” only “the creaking of loose shutters and the sighing of the wind in the tall grass.” This Krishnapur is a ghost town, so when we meet its inhabitants in 1857 they already have the surreal quality of animated corpses or figments of a creepy imagination.

And yet the Krishnapur of 1857 is a bustling place at first, with poetry readings and dinners and dances as well as the extensive bureaucratic business of empire. The one sign of trouble is (and I long to know if this detail is fact or just a sign of Farrell’s bizarre genius) “a mysterious distribution of chapatis” which start appearing in dispatch boxes and doorways, or on the Collector’s desk “neatly arranged beside some papers.” How can chapatis be ominous? What can they mean? The absurdity of chapatis as harbingers of doom is exactly the right starting point for this book, which makes empire itself, ultimately, seem absurd. The things people have done (the things people do!) in the name of “civilization”! Among the most cherished possessions of Mr. Hopkins, the Collector, is The Spirit of Science Conquers Ignorance and Prejudice: this “bas-relief in marble” epitomizes the perverse blend of violence and idealism that in this novel defines British imperialism:

it was here [by the window] that the angle of the light gave most life to the brutish expression of Ignorance at the moment of being disembowelled by Truth’s sabre, and yet emphasized at the same time how hopelessly Prejudice, on the point of throwing a net over Truth, had become enmeshed in its own toils.

One of the most memorable and suggestive images of the siege is of the giant marble heads of Plato and Socrates, once crowning ornaments of the great banqueting hall, prised off the roof to serve as shelters for the British gunners. The attacking sepoys are startled to see, through the chaos and dust, “two vast, white faces, calmly gazing towards them with expressions of perfect wisdom, understanding, and compassion.” Much later, when conventional ammunition has run out, marble fragments from The Spirit of Science Conquers Ignorance and Prejudice replace cannon shot, and later still, the heads of the Collector’s prized “electro-metal figures”:

of the heads, perhaps not surprisingly, the most effective of all had been Shakespeare’s; it had scythed its way through a whole astonished platoon of sepoys advancing in single file through the jungle. The Collector suspected that the Bard’s success in this respect might have a great deal to do with the ballistic advantages stemming from his baldness. The head of Keats, for example, wildly festooned with metal locks which it had proved impossible to file smooth had flown very erratically indeed, killing only a fat money-lender and a camel standing at some distance from the field of action.

You can’t really get any more literal about imposing your culture on another than shooting people dead with the heads of your most famous poets! So much for the Collector’s belief in “the ennobling powers of literature.”

But Siege wouldn’t be as complicated and interesting as it is if it were nothing more than an indictment of imperialism. Didactic moralizing is really not Farrell’s game. For one thing, in some respects the British really do have the ‘spirit of science’ on their side. A key example is the flooding plains, which the native landowners are convinced can be protected “by the sacrifice of a black goat” on the banks of the rivers. ‘But that doesn’t work,’ remonstrates the Magistrate, Mr. Willoughby;

‘You’ve tried it before. Every year the floods are worse.’

The landowners remained silent out of polite amazement that anybody could be so stupid as to doubt the efficacy of a sacrifice when properly performed by Brahmins. They were torn between amusement and distress at such obtuseness.

As the great cholera debate shows, though, neither side has a monopoly on obtuseness or unscientific thinking, or, as we discover, on superstition (or, as some characters consider it, religion). The British are, by and large, racist, xenophobic, and self-satisfied, but the attacking Sepoys are hardly depicted as heroic freedom fighters–though we do see them exclusively from a British point of view, so the way they appear reflects at least as much on the observers than it does on them. There are pro-British Indians, too, who are as absurd in their pomposity and pretension as the British themselves – the Maharajah’s son Hari, for instance, whom we first encounter sitting “on a chair constructed entirely of antlers, eating a boiled egg and reading Blackwood’s Magazine.” I think my favorite detail about Hari (who, sadly, is treated as badly by the British during the siege as if he’d never read a page of Blackwood’s Magazine) is that whenever he meets Mr. Hopkins without Mrs. Hopkins along, he calls him “Mr. Hopkin” – singular, you see!

As in Troubles the collapsing hotel becomes symbolic of the collapse of British control over Ireland (as well as of the rotten foundations of that control), so the the besieged British of Krishnapur become symbolic of Britain’s faltering grip on its empire there. The Collector directs the construction of earthworks as defenses, but when the rains come they turn to mud and dissolve; the Collector’s single-minded efforts to build them up again are an absurd microcosmic example of the way control becomes an end in itself. Like a weird reversal of the Great Exhibition, which Mr. Hopkins has idealized as the ultimate demonstration of human ingenuity and accomplishment, he orders the emptying out of Krishnapur:

The furniture was the first to go. He strode about the Residency and the banqueting hall, followed by those men who were still strong enough to lift heavy objects. Every now and again, without a word, he would point at some object, a chair perhaps, or a sideboard or a marquetry table . . . More than one unwary member of the garrison found that his bed had vanished while he had been defending the rampart against a sepoy assault. Sometimes a person would arrive just as the divan on which he had been sleeping was dragged away.

Sofas and tables, beds, chests, dressers and hatstands were thrown on to, or upended along, the ramparts, but still their strange haemophilia continued. Now the Collector’s finger was pointing at other objects, including even those belonging to himself. Statues were pointed at and the shattered grand piano from the drawing room in the hope that they might help, if only a little, to shore up the weakest banks of soil. . . .

But although a great deal of solid matter had soon accumulated on one or other side of the ramparts and sometimes on both, it had little or no effect. It was like trying to shore up a wall of quicksand. . . . So in the end he took to pointing at the last and most precious of ‘the possessions’ . . . tiger-skins, bookcases full of elevating and instructional volumes, embroidered samplers, teasets of bone china, humidors and candlesticks, mounted elephants’ feet, and rowing-oars with names of college eights inscribed in gilt paint.

Eventually even Mr. Hopkins has “come to entertain serious doubts” about the Exhibition – “he should have thought a great deal more about what lay behind the exhibits.” I think that curiosity about what lies behind things is what makes Farrell such an unusual historical novelist. Siege is very much a novel of ideas, and a novel about ideas and what people do because of them. It’s full of people arguing about ideas, too. The Sepoy Mutiny wasn’t the end of British India, but Farrell sets it up as exemplary of something beyond that particular story: it’s an opportunity for him to interrogate the whole concept of progress, the very meaning of ‘civilization.’ Yet the novel is intensely historically specific.

I wasn’t surprised to see Siege on the list of Hilary Mantel’s ‘five favorite historical fictions.’ It has the total lack of sentimentality shown in both Wolf Hall and A Place of Greater Safety (quite unlike the surfeit of sentiment to be found in my collection of Richard III novels!) and, also like Mantel’s historical fiction, it is grimly violent. But Farrell’s humor is like nothing else I’m familiar with. It’s quite disturbing, actually, how funny the battle scenes are, right up to the horrific last stand of the defenders inside the Residency itself. And grave-digging: hilarious! It’s often not so much the situation itself as Farrell’s wry, unexpected style that startled me into laughter:

[The Collector] realized with a shock how much his own faith in the Church’s authority, or in the Christian view of the world in which he had hitherto lived his life, had diminished since he last inspected them. From the farmyard in which his certitudes perched like fat chickens, every night of the siege, one or two were carried off in the jaws of rationalism and despair.