This week’s Best Book is Greenbanks by Dorothy Whipple!
See this link for an interesting article about this imprint, Persephone Books. I just signed up for their Book a Month subscription.
Category: books
Day 725: The Warden
The Warden was the first of Anthony Trollope’s Barchester novels, inspired by a setting and a series of Church of England preferment scandals. A chronicler of 19th century life, Trollope was interested in the intersections between practical and emotional considerations. He was a prolific writer known for complex, realistic novels.
The main character of The Warden is Mr. Harding, a kindly, well-meaning canon who is warden of a charitable hospital, sort of a retirement home for poor old men. For his care of the twelve old men’s spiritual well-being, he receives a salary of £800 a year. It is a position that involves little work and also includes a comfortable house, where he lives with his younger daughter Eleanor.
John Bold has been a friend of this house since a young boy, and Eleanor’s friends are expecting to hear of their engagement. John is a wealthy young man who doesn’t have to work for a living, so he has turned his attentions to reform. After a preferment scandal in another town, he decides to look into the will of the man who endowed the hospital. He finds that the pay of the warden has increased 25 times since the endowment 400 years ago, while the residents’ stipends have not increased, although of course the cost of their food and lodging and medical care has increased and is taken care of by the trust. In fact, the only increase the residents have had has come out of Mr. Harding’s own pocket.
Despite his sister’s advice, instead of taking this issue up with the church or the trust, John Bold brings a lawsuit on behalf of the hospital residents and takes the issue to The Jupiter, a powerful newspaper. His lawyer gets most of the elderly residents to sign a petition, rashly promising them £100 a year each. (Note how well the math works here. Even if they took all of Mr. Hardings’ salary, they wouldn’t have enough money to pay each of the residents £100 a year.)
It is Mr. Hardings’ reaction that forms the core of the novel, for he is not interested, like the lawyers and his son-in-law the archbishop, in whether the case will be won or lost but in whether the plaintiff’s point is morally correct. Although he has never given his position any thought, in fact is simply an employee of the trust, he is concerned that the intent of the original will might have been that the recipients of the charity should receive a larger share of it.
Except for his mild-mannered friend, the bishop, he cannot find anyone who will even enter into a discussion with him on this topic. And the bishop is completely dominated by his son, the archbishop Dr. Grantly. Dr. Grantly pushes aside Mr. Hardings’ concerns, which he considers weak, disregarding his wife’s ascerbic comments on how poorly he is handling her father. Soon, a newspaper article has appeared that makes poor Mr. Harding look greedy and grasping.
Not only is Trollope interested in exploring the differences between the reactions of Mr. Hardy, high-minded and feeling, and the lawyers and Dr. Grantly, all business and practicality, but he is also interested in the ramifications of reform. Although he shows there is corruption, this corruption is more of the institutional kind that has evolved over time. No one is purposefully trying to cheat anyone. On the other hand, he wants to point out that the alternatives to these entrenched systems might actually be worse.
We can predict that Mr. Harding ends up financially worse off than he started but that the hospital inhabitants do, too. Trollope’s first Barsetshire novel is quiet and slyly ironic. Trollope is not as often read these days, but he is certainly worth reading.
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Day 724: & Sons
& Sons is a novel about fathers and sons, but it is really most about sons and the effect on them of their father’s actions. It is also about the fate of a lifelong friendship.
The friendship seems to be the catalyst for events. Charles Topping has died, and his funeral is packed with people waiting to see his best friend, the reclusive novelist A. N. Dyer, give the eulogy. Dyer is noted for several excellent books, but Ampersand has become a classic about prep school life.
At the funeral, though, it becomes clear that Andrew Dyer himself isn’t quite all there. During the eulogy, he becomes upset about the whereabouts of his young son Andy and has to be removed from the podium.
The story is told by a narrator who is not at all trustworthy, Charles Toppings’ son Philip. When Andrew Dyer meets him at the funeral and finds he has split from his wife, he kindly invites him to stay.
This suits Philip, who grows more malevolent as we get to know him. He is on hand a few weeks later when the Dyers reunite at their father’s request to discuss something important. He can be there to eavesdrop and look through old papers, but generally he cannot possibly be privy to all the details of the story he tells.
Andrew Dyer has been estranged from his ex-wife and two sons since the family learned about the existence of his third son, Andy. Andy is now seventeen. Andrew has tried to avoid neglecting him, as he did his two other sons, and do a better job of bringing him up. But Andrew knows he is nearing the end and is afraid Andy will be alone. He fears Andy is just as messed up as the other sons, only in a different way. Andrew has formed another preoccupation about Andy that shows how divorced he is from reality.
Andrew’s oldest son Richard is an ex-drug addict who has stabilized his life with great difficulty. He is now a drug counselor and has a wife and two teen children. The other son Jamie is a documentary filmmaker whose films for years have dwelt on the darkest of subjects. Philip Topping has a grudge against both of them for the teasing he received as a child.
The novel is told using letters between Andrew and Charlie, passages from Ampersand, and other artifacts from Andrew’s life, as well as Philip’s testimony. We find Andrew feverishly manufacturing an “original draft” of Ampersand because he burned up the original manuscript in disgust at what he did to his old friend Charles in fiction. Now he needs one to leave with his papers.
I waited to write my review for a few days after I finished the book, and I’m still not sure how much I enjoyed the novel. It is well written and absorbing, and it provides a lot to think about.
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Day 723: Greenbanks
Best Book of the Week!
This novel begins with a large family Christmas dinner at Greenbanks, the home of Robert and Louise Ashton. It is around 1910. Louise is in her late middle age, a quiet, kind woman who delights in her housekeeping skills and her garden. Her husband, a serial philanderer, has proved a source of pain and humiliation, but she has tried to live it down.
Although the Ashtons are grandparents, three of their grown children live at home. Jim works at the family business, allowing his father to devote little time to it. Charles also purportedly works there, but he prefers to spend time fiddling with inventions, tinkling the piano, and entertaining his adoring mother. Laura is just about to engage herself to Cecil Bradfield. Rachel, the five-year-old daughter of Letty and Ambrose, is Louise’s favorite grandchild.
Robert soon dies in embarrassing circumstances. But even though the novel follows the fortunes of the family over roughly 15 years, it concentrates on the relationship between Louise and Rachel. Rachel, with a self-absorbed mother and an officious father, loves spending as much time as possible at Greenbanks with her grandmother.
The novel has overtones that are feminist for the time, as Rachel finds she has a gift for scholarship. Her father’s rigid and old-fashioned ideas about the place of an education in the lives of young women cost her a scholarship at Oxford, but she manages to continue her education despite him.
One source of disagreement in the family is Louise’s choice of companion. Louise always felt sorry for Kate Barlow when she was a child and tried to include her in family activities. When Kate was a young woman, it was rumored she became pregnant by a married man and had his child, then was thrown off by her parents. Louise meets her in town one day and begins a correspondence with the reluctant woman. After Charles leaves for South Africa and her other two children marry, she invites Kate to become her companion. But Kate never really accepts Louise’s kindness.
The story of the Ashtons is told in spare, matter-of-fact prose that makes no attempt to influence the reader. Many of the characters are flawed and some are unlikable, but there are no heroes and villains here, just a set of ordinary middle-class people. It’s difficult, then, to explain why I so much enjoyed reading this novel. Whipple is a master of style and shows us her characters in the fullness of their lives.
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Day 722: The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Don’t expect good cheer and humor from The Narrow Road to the Deep North. It is the often harrowing novel based on the experiences of Richard Flanagan’s father as a POW during World War II, one of the hundreds of thousands of Australian soldiers forced to build a railroad through Burma with not much more than their bare hands. A much-sanitized version of this story was the basis for The Bridge on the River Kwai.
Dorrigo Evans is the main character of the novel, a surgeon who ends up being in charge of the prisoners simply by virtue of not having died. We meet him first as an older man, one of Australia’s greatest war heroes, feeling no self-worth, unhappily married, and unfaithful to his wife. The novel moves back and forth in time between the days when he is waiting to be shipped overseas at the beginning of the war until his death years later. In the summer before he went to war, we learn, he fell madly in love and had an affair with his uncle’s young wife Amy.
I think it is interesting that the New York Times reviewer thought this affair was a huge flaw in the novel while the Washington Post reviewer thought it was beautiful. I agree with neither of them (although I lean more toward the Times reviewer’s opinion) but think the Times reviewer was off base in blaming the affair for keeping Dorrigo from pulling his life together after the war. It wasn’t the affair at all but the memory of the decisions Evans was forced to make during the war. At one point, he must decide whether to try to save Darky Gardiner an undeserved beating or try to save another man’s leg. Both die, and the later revelation of Darky’s true identity makes this more painful. At another point Dorrigo is made to decide which of his starving, disease-ridden men must march 100 miles north of the camp. He picks the men with boots, reasoning they might have a chance of making it alive.
Occasionally, we see the thoughts of the men’s captors, the Japanese officers or Korean guards. In all his life after, only for a moment does the Japanese Major Nakamura have the slightest doubt of his behavior during the war. To him, the Australian soldiers had shamed themselves by surrendering and were being given a chance to redeem themselves by serving the Emperor. We occasionally also get glimpses of the brutality of mind that characterizes the Japanese military.
Whether you like this book or not, it is not one you will soon forget. This novel won the Booker Prize last year. Although I preferred several of the other short- and long-listed books for the prize, I still found it compelling reading.
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Day 721: Death in Brittany
I selected this book just because of its setting, and it certainly makes an effort to impart the scenery and atmosphere of Brittany.
Commissaire Georges Dupin is originally Parisian, but he is enjoying his relocation to Brittany. He is sitting in a cafe with his morning coffee when he is summoned to Pont-Aven, where the 90-year-old owner of the Central Hotel was stabbed to death in the bar. It was Pierre-Louis Pennec’s habit to spend the evening there, sometimes with other people, sometimes alone. The death happened after the restaurant was closed.
No one at the hotel reports anything unusual. Pennec’s life revolved around the hotel, which had been in the family for generations. His grandmother had helped build Pont-Aven’s reputation as an artists’ haven by supporting artists, the most famous of whom was Gaugain. Copies of their paintings hang throughout the restaurant. The only unusual thing Dupin and his team can discover is that Pennec was told that week that he would not live long.
Under suspicion are Pennec’s son and daughter-in-law, but they seem to have no motive. Also under suspicion is Pennec’s estranged half-brother.
The night after the murder someone breaks into the restaurant. But to all appearances, nothing was taken or has changed.
I was reading an advance copy and was at first put off by the writing, which was not stellar, particularly overuse of the word “very.” But these problems may be resolved in the published version. One thing Bannelec attempts is to illustrate the beauties of Brittany. Most of this material was interesting, and I appreciated the effort, even though sometimes the novel reads like a travel guide. But I have criticized other novels for not providing a sense of the location, and this one certainly attempts to do so.
The characters aren’t particularly distinctive. I kept confusing two of Dupin’s inspectors and several of the suspects. So, overall, I would rate this novel as just average.
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Best Book of the Week!
This week’s Best Book is A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson!
Day 720: Galway Bay
Galway Bay is fiction based on the stories of Mary Pat Kelly’s great-great grandmother about leaving Ireland in the first half of the 19th century to come to America. The novel covers a lot of ground—the iniquities of Ireland’s Anglo-Irish landlords, the Great Famine, early Chicago, the American Civil War, the Fenian Brotherhood—and ends with the Chicago World’s Fair.
Honora Keeley is a young girl living in a fishing village on Galway Bay when she meets Michael Kelly and they fall in love at first sight. They want to marry, but they have to convince Honora’s family, because Michael owns nothing but his horse. However, he earns enough to marry by winning a horse race in Galway.
Honora’s sister Maire, who was married the day Honora met Michael, is soon a widow after her husband dies in a fishing accident. On Honora’s wedding night, Maire saves Honora from the landlord’s droit du seigneur by volunteering in her stead. I’ll say something about this later.
Michael is no fisherman. Honora and Michael have a tough enough time of it farming but are making out okay when the potato blight hits. The behavior of the landlords and the British government during this time is shameful, and Kelly depicts it vividly. After several years of the blight and other misfortunes, Honora finally is able to convince Michael to leave for America, to Chicago, where his outlawed brother Patrick is said to reside.
Although this novel has a fairly good story, there is something about the narrative style that bothered me. It is told in first person, but in a modern style that is not convincing. Many things happen, but I didn’t ever feel as if I understood much about the characters’ personalities. Especially early on, when we are getting to know the main characters, often opportunities for revealing dialogue turn into storytelling episodes, where we hear another Irish legend. Everyone has one or two identifying characteristics, but they don’t feel like real people. I think the novel may have been more successful in the third person.
Finally, I was highly skeptical of whether droit du seigneur would have occurred in the 19th century, as it is usually associated with Medieval times. I’m sure this event is based on family legend, but I think Kelly could have treated this one with a little skepticism, especially as the lord’s behavior is abetted by a priest. I attempted some research on the topic and was surprised to find a lot of discussion about whether it was ever actually practiced at all. But with one exception, the references were to Medieval mainland Europe, not the British Isles. That exception was a Facebook page about Ireland, but I was unable to find the actual reference on the page to see if it cited any sources. I have read several history books about Ireland and took a graduate course in Irish history, and I have never heard anything about this, although the other abuses are well known. (I have since found one source for this alleged practice, Arthur Young, the author of a book called Tour of Ireland in 1780, who stated it was commonly practiced in rural Ireland. He is listed in Wikipedia as an agriculturalist who traveled to observe agricultural practices. Still, with this little information, we have no idea if his statement is based on rumor or fact, and this report is 50 years or so before the time of this novel.)
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Day 719: To Rise Again at a Decent Hour
The descriptions I’ve read of this book in reviews and on the cover don’t really do a good job of conveying what it is like, and I’m afraid mine won’t be any better. Still, I’ll give it a try.
Paul O’Rourke is a rather neurotic New Yorker, a middle-aged dentist who loves the Red Sox. He wants to belong to something so badly that his desire has messed up his two most significant relationships. Each time, he has fallen madly for his girlfriend’s family—the first a close-knit Catholic family whom he offended by announcing he was an atheist, the second a close-knit Jewish family he tried to impress by his research into the Holocaust.
Paul feels he needs to engage more with life but instead engages less. He records and watches baseball games and eats take-out and does little else except worry about how little his patients floss. At least, that’s all he’s done since he and Connie, his office manager, broke up.
Although Paul texts, he does not use other Internet technology, so he is surprised when someone puts up a web site for his dental practice. He immediately contacts the designers of the site and asks them to take it down. Soon, someone is posting odd messages about a group called Ulm on the site and has also started a Facebook page and Twitter feed in his name.
Rather than simply working through a lawyer, Paul engages with this other “Paul” in long philosophical arguments by text. Soon Paul’s other self is trying to get him to visit his “homeland” in the Negev desert.
This novel creates a distinct personality in Paul as well as a fair amount of humor. I enjoyed it even though I thought many of the discussions were gratuitous and the plot a bit whacky.
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Day 718: A God in Ruins
Best Book of the Week!
In my opinion, Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life was absolutely the best book I read in 2013. It is the story of Ursula Todd, who dies and comes back to life until she accomplishes her goals. A God in Ruins is about her beloved brother Teddy. Atkinson describes it as a companion piece rather than a sequel.
Like Life After Life, Teddy’s story dwells on the effects on his life of World War II, during which Teddy is an RAF bomber pilot. Although the novel covers his entire life in a nonsequential, rambling order, clearly the events of the war are a major focus to which he keeps returning.
During the war he makes himself a promise that if he lives through it, he will always be kind. And he is, to his sisters, his matter-of-fact scientist wife, and his unlikable daughter Viola. When his daughter fails spectacularly at child-rearing, his home is a harbor for his two grandchildren.
Although Teddy does not have Ursula’s ability to shape her own future, during the war he flies so many missions without being killed that his comrades deem him invincible. And in later life his daughter comes to fear he will live forever.
I can’t explain why A God in Ruins is such a wonderful follow-up to Life After Life without giving too much away. Its focus is on the bombing campaign against Germany, and it explores the ethical issues of that campaign, which killed many German civilians. It also shows the waste of the young men sent to pursue it, sometimes in conditions almost guaranteeing they won’t return. And the terror of these young men.
Atkinson is deft in her depiction of believable characters and is also a beautiful, inventive writer. It’s quite possible that A God in Ruins may be my favorite book of 2015.
