Well, it was nearly curtains for this blog. When I went to start this post, the 'revert to legacy blogger' link had disappeared, and the new Blogger interface doesn't seem to work for me at all - it gives me no way to add either images or text (just a title). Come on Blogger - sort it out.
Half
of A Yellow Sun, by Ngozi Adichie.
Years ago, I read Wild Swans, by Jung Chang. I finished it quite incredulous that something
so enormous could have happened without my knowing antthing about it. Not that I hadn’t heard of the Communist
Revolution in China, but I was completely unaware of what it involved for
ordinary people. I remember saying to my
mother, ‘it was terrible thing: they starved’, and she was like, ‘no. They didn’t’.
Then she read the book: ‘Oh, yes they did.’
I felt much the same after reading this
book. I suppose I am aware that Africa
has seen a lot of violence and civil war – and that it is, in large part, an inheritance
of white colonial rule, specifically that of the British – but I don’t know
anything at all about Nigeria. This is a
work of fiction, but it’s based in the real events of the Nigerian civil
war. I spent most of the book thinking
that Biafra was a fictional construct…
It’s ridiculous really, what I didn’t know.
So this starts off as a story about a group
of people – based around twin sisters, Olanna and the rather cooler,
Kainene. Don’t read anything into the
‘twin’ bit: it’s not a book which plays two sisters off against each
other. It was another book on which I
made no notes at all: I can’t say I liked the sisters at all times, but I was
completely drawn in by the story.
Anyway, on the political front, Nigeria is
described as a country put together by the British, who encourage distrust and
discontent between the different groups subsumed within it on a sort of ‘divide
and rule’ basis. At one point, Nigerians
in the North suddenly start attacking one particular group – the Igbo –
even where these people are their neighbours and friends. In
response to this, the predominantly Igbo area in the east of Nigeria breaks away, and forms a
separatist state – Biafra. The Nigerians
try to bring them back, hence the civil war, eventually won by the Nigerians.
The books starts off describing the lives
and relationships of these sisters but becomes a very tense, in-depth account
of what happens to them throughout the war.
They come from an upper middle class family (a group I seem to have read
a lot about lately) but it doesn’t protect them against what are effectively
racist attacks. I’d highly recommend it
as an informative book about Nigeria, but actually, I liked the way Adichie
writes about people too – particularly women.
It’s not, topically, a feminist book, but her female protagonists are
far from being stereotypes. She has
written two nonfiction books – Dear
Ijeawele, Or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions and We Should All Be Feminists – both of
which I would like to read.
This
is Shakespeare: How to Read the World’s Greatest Playwright, by Emma Smith.
I heard this recommended by Val McDermid on
Radio 4’s ‘A Good Read’. It was
interesting. I think perhaps I haven’t
read enough literary criticism to be able to appreciate it properly – and
perhaps, I haven’t seen enough of Shakespeare’s plays. Having said that, some of the chapters I most
enjoyed concerned those plays I haven’t seen, or can barely remember. For example, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (with the discovery of one school party
that actually, this isn’t really a play for children); and 1 Henry IV (I’ve heard of Falstaff lots of times before but never
knew where he came from); Much Ado About
Nothing and Measure for Measure
(in both of which, Shakespeare seems to have something interesting to say about
women); Anthony and Cleopatra (with
moments of comedy amid the tragedy); and Coriolanus
(‘Shakespeare’s terrifying depiction of a hero so battle-hardened that he can
scarcely operate in civilian society’ (p.271) – although it sounds like that
description might be more exciting than the play itself).
I liked the fact that Smith pays particular
attention to the contemporary circumstances in which the plays were written and
performed. She says for example, on
p.69-70, that to contemporary audiences, originality in a play wasn’t
necessarily a good thing; indeed, they might have been quite suspicious of
such. Rather, people valued the rewriting
and reworking of stories, and liked to be able to recognize similarities to
other plays. In another example, in her discussion of Anthony and Cleopatra, she points out
that Cleopatra has a line where she bemoans the fact that she might be
represented in a play in the future by a boy – ‘I shall see some squeaking
Cleopatra boy my greatness I’th’ posture of a whore’ (p.261) – whereas, in
fact, in Shakespeare’s era, Cleopatra would have been played by a man, as would
all the roles. Presumably this would
have invoked a slightly more humorous reaction than many modern performances.
In other ways too, the book provided
different perspectives on the plays. In
her analysis of, A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, for example, she suggests we have ‘neutered a much darker, sexier
play’. Of Titania and Bottom – the guy
with the ass’s head, she says ‘Titania instructs her fairies… “lead him to my
bower”… So she can stroke his ears? Come
off it!’ (p.90). I think I probably saw
one of the ‘schoolroom versions’ of this play when I was younger – I remember a
local, open-air production – but I don’t recall finding it shocking. It was clearly just two people, one of them
wearing a paper mache donkey’s head. (A
failure of imagination on my part, perhaps, but I was only about ten years old.)
So too, she talks about different versions
of Macbeth and how, in Shakespeare’s
original source material (collected by Raphael Hollinshed in 1578), the story
depicts a rough world where Duncan gains the throne by violence, and Macbeth
effectively does the same – and, is in fact, a good king himself until he too
is deposed by someone else. There is
apparently a modern television adaption of the play from 1997, ‘Macbeth on the
Estate’, which shows the story from this point of view. Shakespeare himself though, says Smith, was
required to show respect for King James I and the hereditary monarchy, and so
may well have been constrained from depicting such a dog-eat-dog system. (p.245-6)
So yes – interesting, and funny, and
informative – and a prod to go and see more of Shakespeare’s plays, although
there’s a fat chance right now.
(P.S.
And although it is supposed to apply especially to literature, I can
think of many occasions when the word ‘bathos’ would have been particularly apt
and useful, had I known it before now: ‘an effect of anticlimax created by an
unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous.’)
Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson.
I enjoyed this. In some ways it’s quite a gentle book,
narrated by an old man, a preacher, much given to abstract contemplation. On the other hand, it did build up quite an
air of menace somewhere in the middle. Be warned, if you haven't read this book and are planning to, you might not want to read this yet (spoiler alert).
The book is written in the form of a letter
that the narrator writes to his young son.
They live in the town of Gilead, somewhere in the American mid-west
(Iowa?) on the edge of the prairie. The
narrator’s father and grandfather were preachers in the same town before him,
and the town itself has a distinctive history.
It was, in origin, an abolitionist town, assisting people fleeing
slavery. The narrator’s grandfather
fought in the Civil War and, at its
height, preached in a bloodstained shirt with a pistol in his belt. At any rate, evidently things changed. At some point, someone started a fire at the
Negro church, and the black population gradually left. The narrator regrets this, but does not make
much of it (just a small fire); but it comes to seem more significant later on.
Anyway, much is made of the narrator’s
history in the area. Then Jack, the son
of his best friend – a man he grew up with – returns home. He’s a sardonic, almost malign, character. He hangs around the narrator’s wife – who is
much younger than the narrator; closer to Jack’s age – and the narrator,
although clearly troubled by this in some way, just seems too old and tired to
be able to address the issue. There’s a long build up where he makes passing
references to something unpleasant Jack once did, and wonders whether he should
speak to his wife about it, and warn her of what this young man is capable.
Eventually it transpires that he once got a
girl pregnant. She was obviously quite
young (at one point, the narrator describes her and her baby daughter as two
children) but there is a disconcerting (but probably historically accurate),
lack of emphasis on her age. Everyone
was much more concerned by the fact that she was 'from the wrong side of the
tracks'.
Although a difficult situation, this
doesn’t seem particularly unusual – but the sense of menace continues to
develop. The way that Jack keeps coming
round to the narrator’s house; the way he calls him ‘papa’; the way he sits
next to the narrator’s wife in the congregation and smiles at him while he’s
preaching; the stories about the pranks and minor thefts he apparently
committed against the narrator as a boy – these all make it sound as if there
is some particular resentment between the two of them that the narrator does
not quite perceive.
At any rate, there is a denouement of
sorts, a final reckoning between them which seems redemptive for the narrator
himself, but at this point, the focus of the story shifted slightly for me: it
became about Jack himself – growing up as a misfit in what had clearly – from
revolutionary roots – become a conservative, and heavily religious, town. His early, troubled years tell on him, and he
never quite manages to find his way.
Indeed, by the end of the book, although the narrator finds some level
of peace, Jack is still caught in the middle of a nightmare. As a reader, you are sort of insulated from
this though, because you are obviously tied to the narrator.
I found it quite a picturesque book. Both this and Robinson’s first book, Housekeeping, have a very strong sense
of the vastness and wildness of large parts of America – not wild meaning 'unpopulated', necessarily, but rather in the sense of communities being isolated and
therefore unaccountable for their own prejudices and peculiaries.
It is quite thoughtful too. The narrator is old, and contemplative –
having spend much of his life writing heart-felt sermons – and well-read. For example, he recommends Ludwig Feuerbach
(see The Essence of Christianity) on
the subject of joy and (like Kate Atkinson) is a fan of John Donne. On p.166, he writes – in a sentence which
seems to be true not just of faith, but of other ways of understanding too –
that ‘people of any degree of religious sensitivity are always vulnerable to
the accusation that their consciousness or their understanding does not attain
to the highest standards of faith, because that is always true of
everyone. St Paul is eloquent on this
subject.’ I did laugh when he spoke
about waltzing, with his heart condition, and said ‘I have thought I might have
a book ready at hand to clutch if I begin to experience unusual pain, so that
it would have an especial recommendation from being found in my hands. That seemed theatrical, on consideration, and
it might have the perverse effect of burdening the book with unpleasant
association.’ (p.131)
It struck me, reading this, that one of the
things that used to put me off novels (I spent a good ten years reading no fiction
at all) was a dislike of finding myself with an unreliable protagonist – one
who was implicated in the drama, but unable to see this; giving his own side of
the story, when the truth was rather different.
Studying history, as I did, complicates this way of thinking by
emphasizing that everything is subjective and political. And I think depression, anxiety, those kinds
of problems, make it personal again: one comes to feel as though your own subjectivity
disbars you from seeing things the way everyone else sees them.
I thought that what made the protagonist’s
subjectivity bearable in this case was, firstly, that the drama through the
central part of the novel turns out to be a massive misdirection, and the
protagonist’s peculiar culpability illusory.
Secondly, being old and thoughtful, he does not respond, except in
private print, to the sense of threat he feels from Jack, so the misconception
does minimal damage.
Is this important? To me, I think yes. The character of the protagonist manages to
be both troublesomely subjective and also very balanced and patient – outwardly
objective, you might say – at the same time, which I found that quite reassuring.
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