More from the Orange Prize

Property by Valerie Martin was the Orange Prize winner in 2003. This is a very different book from any I have read recently. It is set nearly 200 years ago in the south of America. The 'Property' referred to in the title is, of course, human beings. This made it quite hard to read, from a political point of view, as the author very convincingly writes from the perspective of her protagonist, Manon Gaudet, a young, unhappily married woman, who's husband runs a sugar plantation.

Within two pages I found myself cringing as Manon describes her covert observations of her husband's treatment of a group of young boys. She passes no judgement and appears quite dispassionate about their situation and possible fate. Her hopes for a happy and prosperous marriage has been tainted by her husband's financial mismanagement and his 'relationship' with her slave Sarah, by whom he has had two children. It is this strange contradictory feeling that she has towards Sarah, despising her but also in a way feeling belittled by her husband's all too obvious preference, that seems to dominate her thinking. In the background of her personal hell is the developing threat of a slave uprising, tales of escapes and the ever present fear of violence. But mostly the book has a very claustrophobic atmosphere, hardly venturing outside the closed world of her domestic concerns. The boy Walter, Sarah's son, is like a wild creature, without communication (it turns out he is deaf) and out of control. He is an ever present reminder of everything that is wrong in her life.

An epidemic of yellow fever and cholera is sweeping the locality and on hearing that her mother is ill Manon leaves for New Orleans to take care of her, taking Sarah with her, though mostly to punish her husband. The mother promptly dies but Manon is reluctant to return to her marital home. She discovers that she will inherit some small income, but despairs because she knows that her husband with have the right to control and dispose of it to his own benefit. This understanding, whilst not challenged in her mind (she has no notion of the idea that women might have property rights of their own) creates new resentments and, on hearing of a woman who has successfully divorced and kept her own property, new desires. However, this is not a story about a feminist awakening and she is much more wrapped up in her concerns about Sarah and a mysterious man she sees one night watching the house.

So she is obliged to return to the plantation and then the worst happens. News circulates about a gang of escaped slaves, and whilst preparing to protect themselves against possible attack the family are caught out, her husband is murdered and Manon herself is shot and then escapes into the marsh. Sarah meanwhile takes the husband's horse and absconds herself, taking her young baby with her. Manon's aunt arrives to care for her while she recovers and the slaves are rounded up and mostly hung by the militia. So, in spite of the huge trauma and her debilitating injury, Manon has got her wish, freedom from her unhappy marriage, but instead of relishing her new found liberty she becomes obsessed with recovering the escaped Sarah. It turns out that with the help of a free Negro who had previously wanted to buy her (and presumably free her and then marry her) she has travelled in disguise as far as New York, where the bounty hunter is obliged to kidnap her from the people aiming to get her on a boat to Europe.

This is a book about slavery. It is a story that gets right inside the experience of a young woman, sees her life without passing opinion on the rights or wrongs of the society she lives in. Although I found it hard to begin with after a while I stopped passing judgement on their society and just read the story for what it would tell me about this woman's experience. I think that the way people thought about their slaves is very different from the racism that came later. The book was obviously well researched and the author worked very hard to show something of the relationship between slave owners and their slaves. When you watch Manon with her slaves, it is not as if she thinks of them as lesser people than herself, it is more that she barely thinks of them at all. She does not consider that they have thoughts or feelings or wishes of their own. They are more like part of the furniture, or 'property' as the title says.

"The cholera has carried off over one hundred people this week, many of them negroes, at great expense to the community." (p.71)

It says something about how well the book is written that you begin to understand something of the mindset of these people. What you do get a sense of is how completely dependent they were on their slaves. Manon is utterly without skill, and utterly without occupation, appears to actually do very little. There is an interesting contrast between Sarah, who plainly desired her freedom and despised her owners, and Peek, the mother's cook, who seeks out new owners for herself after the mother dies, as she knows that Manon will not wish to keep her, and it is in her interests to find a decent situation rather than being sold and ending up with someone abusive.

(spoiler warning)

I am going to quote the final part of the book, because it captures the essence of what it is all about. Sarah has been returned and has sullenly returned to her duties but the uncle rightly points out that she has been totally changed by what has been quite an extensive experience of real freedom, and being treated by people she encountered in the north as an equal human being. she has had her eyes opened to the reality of life having other possible outcomes. She describes to Manon how she was served with tea by the people who helped her:

"I considered this image of Sarah. She was dressed in borrowed clothes, sitting stiffly at a bare wooden table while a colourless Yankee woman, her thin hair pulled into a tight bun, served her tea in a china cup. The righteous husband fetched a cushion to make their guest more comfortable. It struck me as perfectly ridiculous. What on earth did they think they were doing?" (p.209)

This story is set in 1828, quite some time before the Civil War and the subsequent emancipation of the slaves in 1865, and on reflection I think that the transformation of political and social opinions over that period is quite astounding if this book gives just an inkling of what the abolitionists were up against. This book does not try and say anything about the slaves' experience, that would be quite a different story, but it was certainly a very enlightening read. Highly recommended.

Wednesday Poetry

Today's post is devoted to Rachel Fox at her Crowd Pleasers website (or try her blog, entitled 'More About the Song' after her lovely book)

(image from her book cover, from an etching by Steph Masterson)

I found her by some mysterious process of random browsing from book bloggers to writer bloggers. On the spur of the moment I bought a copy of her book and have really loved it. She sent me a set of her wonderful poetry post cards with the book, such a lovely idea. I plan to mount them in some way and put them on the wall. The book is a quirky mix of observations on modern life. Even the 'blurb' on the back is a poem. I like poetry that makes you smile at a moment of recognition or subverts your everyday understanding.

Two examples to tempt you to discover more:

Bad Interview Technique

What is it they say?

Imagine them naked

At the job interview

And I do

But it's not bare bodies I see

It's stark naked souls

Most disturbingly

It makes me twitchy

And unlikely ever to gain employment

Significant other deceased

I wasn't ready

You're gone too soon

The kitchen's quiet

Lost its tune

I'm not prepared

No good alone

Why is it you

Who won't be home?

You're ripped to shreds

I'm picked apart

My love is gone

My love, my heart

The Believers

The Believers by Zoe Heller. We are reading this one for my next book group meeting, which is probably the only reason I might have to pick it up. While some titles, like 'Howards End is on the Landing', might get talked up in 'bookish' circles, I tend to avoid things that have the words 'The Top Ten Best Seller' scrawled across the top of the cover. I know, I'm sorry, that makes me a terrible book snob, but to be honest I don't care. I read it, and it was a pleasant enough read, but really, really nothing special. It was not "Beautifully, stunningly written" as The Guardian claimed, nor was the Times Literary Supplement more accurate with; "Hilarious, touching, unexpected, moving".

We start out with Audrey, a rather boring, unassuming young woman, trying to fade into the background at a party, encountering a self-consciously forthright American, and she decides to sleep with him. And then we abruptly jump forward 40 years to their married existence, Joel is a successful left-wing lawyer and Audrey ... well, she is now a rather boring, unassuming middled age woman, living vicariously off her husband's notoriety. They have two daughters; Karla, the unloved, neglected, now self-loathing and overweight older daughter, and Rosa, the flag waving socialist, but somewhat disillusioned, younger daughter, just returned from several years living in Cuba. Then there's Lenny, their adopted son. And this is what puts Joel into perspective I feel. Lenny's mother is a political activist/criminal who ends up with a long sentence and in a spirit of social experiment Joel decides they will adopt him and thereby transform his life. When things don't turn out quite as he planned his interest wanes and he appears to go back to his self-absorbtion. So the main part of the book begins with Joel going off to court, only to collapse having had a minor stroke, which is followed by another stroke when he gets to hospital, leaving him in a coma for the remainder of the book. It feels a bit unfair on a character, the only impression you can have of him is via other people, but I am not sure I would have liked him much better whatever happened.

The chapters hop between characters telling their separate stories. Karla is a hospital social worker, married to Mike, unhappily, as it turns out, and unsuccessfully trying to conceive. The only really moving moment in the book for me was a description of their rather stilted love making, and it left me so sad for two people so incapable of sharing ...well anything really:

"At the beginning of their marriage, Karla had found this hesitancy charming. She had attributed it to a kind of gallantry in Mike's part - a reluctance to trouble her with his base, male needs. But then one night, a few years ago, when she had turned to receive Mike's advances a little more readily than usual, she had caught him off guard, wearing a look of such intense unhappiness that she had almost cried out in sympathy. The expression has been equal parts repulsion and resignation - a sort of stoic anguish, like a child squaring up to the task of eating his spinach." (p.72)

Their efforts to adopt, after failing to conceive, become more of a barrier between them rather than something bringing them together, and she finds herself drawn into a relationship with a man at the hospital, who appears to offer her some sense of real caring and affection. Her subsequent self-denial and rejection of him, followed by the eventual abandonment of her marriage and running away into his waiting arms was just the worst of the many tedious cliches that make up the story.

Rosa meanwhile is quietly rejecting everything her parents have bought her up to believe in and is seeking some kind of meaning in her jewish heritage, but in the most extreme form of orthodoxy available. The scorn that her parents seem to heap upon her for the interest she is showing in religion is part and parcel of their general parenting technique. Rosa is thoughtful, intelligent and very politically aware, and I found her being drawn to this kind of dogmatic belief system somewhat unbelievable. The need she plainly has for some sense of 'belonging' reflects very badly on her upbringing. She was the only character that I really found even partly sympathetic.

Lenny is a stereotype drug addict, sucking life out of his family, lying to people, going through endless recovery and relapses. Towards the end of the book he goes out of the city to live for a while with Audrey's friend Jean, and appears to finally begin to pull himself together. He gets a decent sponsor through the local NA, who offers him the chance to learn carpentry and he really seems to be taking his own recovery seriously. Audrey's reaction to this is the same scorn that she heaped on Rosa, dismissing his efforts out of hand and accusing Jean of implicitly criticising her parenting by being apparently so successful at helping Lenny. It speaks volumes about her as both a parent and a person. She loved keeping Lenny dependent on her, doling out money indulgently and relishing his infantile neediness, and she just hates the idea of his putting his life back together. She gets her wish in the end though, when at Joel's funeral he is seen communing with his former girlfriend Tanya and decides to move back to the city and abandon his carpentry plans.

The other tedious cliché revolves around the appearance of a woman who claims to have had a long term relationship with Joel and has a son by him. Audrey has lived for forty years with Joel's indiscreet affairs, why would she react so violently to such an announcement. There is this strange implication that *this* affair has in some way undermined the truth of her relationship with Joel, where all the other ones didn't. What kind of strange logic is that. She was not living under any illusion that she had a devoted husband, and she can at least acknowledge that she is full of bottled up resentment over the life she has led with him. In fact her disdain and anger has become an essential part of her public persona:

"But somewhere along the way, when she hadn't been paying attention, her temper had ceased to be a beguiling party act that could be switched on and off at will. It has begun to express authentic resentments, boredom with motherhood, fury at her husband's philandering, despair at the pettiness of her domestic fate. She hadn't noticed the change at first. Like as old lady who persists in wearing the Jungle Red lipstick of her glory days, she had gone on for a long time fondly believing that the stratagems of her youth were just as appealing as they had ever been. By the time she woke up and discovered that people had taken to making faces at her behind her back - that she was no longer a sexy young woman with a charmingly short fuse but a middle-aged termagant - it was too late. Her anger had become a part of her. It was a knotted thicket in her gut, too dense to be cut down and too deeply entrenched in the loamy soil of her disappointments to be uprooted." (p.173)

I hated her through the whole book. I had no sympathy for anything about her life or the choices she had made. Her behaviour, and the way she treated her children and her friend, left me wanting to slap her (metaphorically speaking). She lurched between hysterical anger and tedious self pity. Selfish and self-absorbed hardly begin to describe the depth of her insensitivity to other people's needs and feelings. I have rarely come across a less sympathetic character.

The title is telling you this book is all about belief; be it religious, political or personal, where it comes from, how easily it can be undermined, how people create their own myths and build their lives around them. I am mainly left feeling that she didn't have anything that original to say on the subject.

To The Lighthouse

So I have fallen at the second hurdle and totally failed to read 'To The Lighthouse' for the 'Woolf in Winter' challenge. I have been so taken up with the pile of books from the library (like waiting for a bus, you wait for weeks and then four arrive at the same time); 'Howards End is on the Landing' was gobbled up in a few days and am now working on Zoe Heller's 'The Believers' as we are reading it for my next book club meeting. Added to that I started 'Pride and Prejudice' at the hospital last week and have been reading it over breakfast to try and make a bit of progress (this is a bit of a 'duty' read, to try and support my daughter doing it for her IGCSE). Then M and I started on 'Lost in a Good Book' by Jasper Fforde, a follow up to 'The Eyre Affair', which has us laughing out loud with every page. Then there is the poetry that has been very interesting in the last couple of weeks. I went to the local bookshop, that does have a decent cheap classics selection, but they only had 'Mrs Dalloway'. Dunk thought is daughter might have a copy but it turned out not. So I'm sorry, though I still plan to get around to reading it, but for anyone interested please visit over on on Emily's Blog, as she is hosting the discussion and has listed all the other participants who have reviewed the book today.

Wednesday poem

Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a colour slide or press an ear against it's hive I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out or walk inside a poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the authors name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin by beating it with a hose to find out what it really means. I found this poem whilst blog browsing (it may be a waste of many hours, but there are occasional gems to be found). I had never heard of Billy Collins, I find that he is amongst the most well loved of modern American poets, but I have requested something from the library to become better acquainted. I loved what this poem says about the way poetry is taught. I really loved the line about 'feel the walls for a light switch', it captures so wonderfully the subtleties of understanding.

'Stop that! Books are dangerous.'

I seem to have been reading about 'Howards End is on the Landing' by Susan Hill all over the place, and when I picked it up from the library I was told I would not be able to renew it as there was a waiting list. I was not entirely sure what to expect but I was not disappointed. I love the way that the cover image is self-referential, being a picture of the spine of the book itself, as if it were sitting on someone's bookshelf.

The book is subtitled 'a year of reading from home', and it is a book about books, but also a very personal memoir, about how Susan Hill fell in love with literature and all the people she met along the way. She gives the reader a tour around her house, a place that sounds like the best of second hand bookshops, as she goes in search of the books she has both loved and neglected. Some authors appear to be so important to her that they get a chapter all to themselves, and at other times whole genres are covered in a couple of pages. She sets herself a challenge to finding 40 books she could not live without and ends the book with her list (which I can see becoming a blog challenge somewhere sometime soon, except it includes the Bible, which would be quite a reading challenge by itself.) I found myself wanting to go wandering round her house, to spend a few hours browsing her bookshelves and sit in one of her comfy corners with a well thumbed copy of some classic.

The book consists in places of long lists of titles or authors that she has loved. She frequently talks about having read something or other over and over, and I was left wondering how she found the time to write all the things she has written, as I am sure it would take an entire lifetime to be as well read as she appears to be. I discovered huge holes in my own reading, people I had never heard of (which I suppose is part of the point of it all) and, much to my enjoyment, several moments of 'oh yes, I so agree' when she described her reactions to or feelings about a book. I'm kind of glad that she admitted to not 'getting' Jane Austin;

"If every other book in the house was stolen and I had to spend my year reading Jane Austin only, I would either become an ardent fan, after suddenly getting the point, or I would be the one to go mad." (p.97)

... but then I was scolded for being a snob about Enid Blyton, which I did love as a child but would never have inflicted on my own children. I think she was so right to say that developing a love of reading has to start with reading what you love, no matter if it is 'pulp' fiction, only then can you become a more discerning reader. She does love books for being wonderful objects in themselves, and relishes beautifully bound and printed works, but hates the idea of 'collectors' for whom it is ownership of the item that matters, rather than ownership of the content.

"Some people who have row upon row of leather-bound books are owners of ancestral libraries in stately homes, but, although they can be very impressive to look at, these rooms of towering shelves always seem dead. Nobody would dare turn down a corner of a page or make a mark in any margin.

The Folio Society's raison d'etre is fine binding, though of a more mass produced kind .... They look good on the shelves, and the older ones are covered in real cloth which is more pleasing to handle that the synthetic of more recent titles. Yet there is something dead about them too, something too perfect, produced for display rather than use." (p.161)

And she is unrepentant in her dismissal of 'e-books':

"No one will sign an electronic book, no one can annotate in the margin, no one can leave a love letter casually between the leaves. It is true that if I had no books but only a small, flat, grey hand-held electronic device, I would only needs a very small house and how tidy that would be with just the small, flat, grey ....." (p. 77)

She passes over young children's writing rather swiftly. I could have written a whole book just like this one when my children were young; 'Six Dinner Sid is in the sandpit: a year of reading to my children'. Browsing the library or in bookshops (when I had any money that is) for new books for them was my greatest pleasure for many years. We had a set of Beatrix Potter but I *really* hated them, I found them trite and patronising, and the main pleasure the children derived was carrying them around in the little box they came in. I guess it is just the generation gap, I think maybe the 90's was a good time for young children's publishing. I think that now the market may have become a little complacent with the early literacy obsession and when I went browsing for my brother's kids for Christmas I was sorely disappointed with what I found, and ended up buying a couple of our old favourites.

Susan goes on to muse over whether books mind who they stand next to on the shelf, but I think it's just an excuse to list even more of the books she owns. What comes across is her immense passion for literature, and it is really catching when you read her. She drops names all through the books, of famous writers, poets or publishers, some she has merely encountered, others who have become lifelong friends. It reminded me of 'Any Human Heart', in which a fictional writer lives on the fringe of 'literary society' and frequently recounts his meetings with the likes of Ernest Hemmingway. But this is not an annoying trait, in fact it makes you see how much she values being part of that world. She encountered E.M. Forster in the London Library and baby-sat for Arnold Wesker's children. She meets Ian Flemming at a party and also encounters someone who used to work for the Hogarth Press with Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and has a photograph taken of them with her daughters, so that one day they can look at it, and know that it is their connection with literary history.

It is an unashamedly self-indulgent book. You really sense her pleasure in being able to share all these books with people, never in a hectoring kind of way, never making you feel like you 'ought' to have read something, always just passing on her enthusiasm, and in truth, sparking my curiosity and making me want to seek out some of the more obscure books she talks about. Books have been not only central to, but vital to, her life, what more is there to say. I was going to list her 40 books, but I think people would have more fun trying to write their own lists. You are left with the question, what books could you not live without?

"But if the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books, as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA." (p.202)

Beautiful Singing

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett is another book from the 'Orange Prize' winners list (2002). I have come to the conclusion that slow books tend to have to be read slowly. It has taken me several weeks to read this book and when I finally closed it last night I had tears in my eyes.

I like this front cover image as this captures exactly the house where I imagined the story taking place; colonial, elegant and it's affluence in stark contrast to the poverty and deprivation surrounding it. A group of foreign dignitaries and businessmen are gathered in an unnamed central/south american country at a party for Mr Hosokawa, a Japanese businessman whom the government hopes to entice to invest. Mr Hosokawa however never had any intention of investing and has been tempted to attend only by the presence at the party of Roxane Coss, a famous opera singer. As the book opens she is ending her performance for the guests, and the lights go out, and when they come back on the party guests find themselves taken hostage by a group of terrorists, who themselves were merely hoping to kidnap the president. The president however had made his excuses earlier in the evening, or rather they had been made on his behalf, by aides who don't want it generally known that the president would rather watch his favourite soap opera than attend a state function. So the terrorists are left with something of a quandary, their intended target is absent, their plan, right from the start, has gone wrong. I guess the reader should anticipate right from the start that this is not going to end well for them. Within hours they are surrounded by government soldiers and a stalemate is established. The terrorists issue demands, that get more outrageous as time passes, and the government just refuses to negotiate. They release all the women and children, excepting Roxane, who one of the generals recognise as being important and therefore perhaps having more influence. Their needs are provided for by Messner, a Red Cross negotiator who happened to be on holiday locally, and who becomes their only contact with the outside world.

The situation quickly becomes both totally surreal and yet totally normal. The only initial drama is provided by the death of Roxane's accompanist, who is diabetic and falls quickly into a coma without his medication, and the striking of the vice-president Ruben Iglesias by one of the generals, who's healing wound leaves the only outward scar from the entire incident. The rather disparate group of hostages are held together by Gen, who is Mr Hosokawa's translator, and who becomes the official translator for the entire group, including the terrorists, and he also becomes, in my view, the book's central character. And yet you learn very little about him, because most of the words he speaks are for other people. But it is Roxane who saves them really. It is her music that entrances every person in the story. The party guests were already a little in love with the woman who can create such beauty with her voice, and the terrorists waiting in the ventilation ducts whilst she sings, waiting for their moment to attack, cannot help but be draw under her spell. And then they make the worst of their many mistakes. The priest, Father Arguedas, gets permission to phone his friend who can provide her with music so that she can practice her singing. In this quote the friend has asked if she will speak to him, just to hear the sound of her voice:

"He was paralysed by the sound of her voice, the music of speaking, the rhythmic loops of the names that passed through her lips, into the phone, and then into Miguel's ear some two miles away. The priest knew then for sure that he would survive this. That there would come a day when he would sit at Miguel's kitchen table in his small apartment cluttered with music and they would shamelessly recount the pleasure of this exact moment. He would have to live if only to have that cup of coffee with his friend. And while they would remember, try to place in order the names that she spoke, Father Arguedas would know that he had been the more fortunate of the two because it was he whom she had looked at when she spoke." (p.144)

This quote really captures the hypnotising effect Roxane seems to have over people, not just when she sings, but something very powerfully attractive about her whole personality. With the music then available she find, from amongst the other hostages, Mr Kato (another for the Japanese guests) who plays the piano, and who's quiet talent blossoms under her influence. Her singing then becomes the thing that punctuates their day and provides hope and consolation for their situation. But it also ensures that the terrorists now have no intention of killing anybody. As time passes it is as if the whole group has slipped into some kind of dream world, where they exist apart from reality, the practicalities of life barely concerning them. Most of the hostages sit anonymously in the background with only a few playing any part. The story focusses on the developing relationships between Mr Hosokawa and Roxane, and between Gen and Carmen, one of two young girls amongst the group of teenage terrorists.

"On the morning the rains ended, Gen waited until the last note had been sung and then went to stand beside Carmen. It was a particularly good time to talk without being noticed as everyone wandered around in a state of stunned confusion after Roxane let go of her final note. If anyone had thought to simply walk out the door, they might not have been stopped, but no one was thinking about leaving. When Mr Hosokawa went to get her water, Roxane stood up and followed him and then looped her arm through his arm." (p.201)

The story is about beauty, and how it can change lives. It is about how circumstances can transform your life, how something happens and you have to look again at what is really important. It is about potential unfulfilled or lost. It is about what binds human beings together and what keeps them apart. It reminded me of 'The Plague' by Albert Camus (we did 'L'Etranger' for A level and I read this one as well, but in English), in which a town is in quarantine because of the presence of a plague, and the people just have to sit and wait. A man is writing a book, and spends the whole of the story writing the first sentence, trying to get it just perfect, and he says how since you don't know how long your situation may continue there is not urgency to move on, you just live each day and focus on it entirely. This story was like that. Bel Canto lacked any atmosphere of fear, which partly seemed a bit strange given the circumstance but then as the time passed it seemed right, because then the denouement was all the more shocking.

I did not like the epilogue at all. It seemed wrong and unnecessary, I won't elaborate so as not to spoil the story. But nevertheless a beautifully written book, totally captivating, please read it.