Autumn: Not Transcendent, Not Inspiring, Not Worth The Read

Smith approaches prose in the same way a wood cutter might approach a log.

While I was getting ready to review Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016) I thought I should read a few online reviews. I was prepared for the usual Ali Smith fan-club slush about Autumn being a journey, one woman’s passage to self discovery, a celebration of nature even.

Most reviewers seem to have seen something in Autumn that has gone completely over my head. I’m tempted to suggest that because Smith’s work hints at greater meaning, these reviewers have mustered one out of thin air.

The story centers around the comatose nursing home resident Daniel Gluck and Elisabeth Demand, a woman who was Gluck’s neighbour years ago. Elisabeth reads to Gluck weekly, posing as his daughter for the beady-eyed nursing staff. Flashbacks are frequent, and show the friendship between Daniel and Elisabeth as the latter goes through her difficult teenage years. If the dialogue is anything to go by, the 32 year old Elisabeth seems not to have evolved from her teenage years: she is confrontational and uncompromising.

The dialogue and third person narrative style of Autumn keep the reader hovering just above surface level. Here is an exchange between Daniel and Elisabeth:

‘What are you reading?’ he’d say.

Elisabeth would hold it up.

Brave New World, she’d say.

Oh, that old thing, he’d say.

It’s new to me, she’d say.’

The New York Times writer Sarah Lyall hailed Autumn as the ‘First Great Brexit Novel.’ In reference to Elisabeth reading works like Brave New World and A Tale of Two Cities (readers open the first page of Autumn to the sentence: ‘It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.’) Lyall writes that, ‘Smith teases out big ideas so slyly and and lightly that you can miss how she goes about it.’

Literary references aside, Smith’s approaches prose the same way a wood cutter might approach a log. No love is lost on the chapter beginnings. Two of my favourites are: ‘Time lapse of a million billion flowers opening their heads,’ and, ‘It was one of the days of a week in one of the seasons in one of the years.’

Perhaps it is disingenuous to show you these chapter beginnings on their own. I wouldn’t mind them so much if they weren’t so gimmicky. Smith’s prose screams gimmick. Thoughts like ‘It’s funny to be sitting on such an uncommunal communal chair’ fall flat.

Everything pointed to this book being about nature, the beauty of it and how it relates to human life. Girl Meets Boy (2007) was bearable because of how well Smith used naturalistic imagery. I was expecting something Forster-esque, Larkin-esque from Autumn, or at least something that mirrored the intricate naturalistic imagery in Girl Meets Boy, and instead I got: ‘Time lapse of a million billion flowers.’

I felt deflated reading Autumn. Worse than anything else is Smith’s half-hearted attempts to create meaning out of her half realised imagery. While unconscious, Daniel dreams that he is on a beach, and ventures into some nearby shrubbery for coverage. Smith had the perfect opportunity to create a link between nature and the fact that Daniel is said- later on- to be nearing the end of his life. Instead, the writing is so detached from reality that the reader has to work hard to make sense of it.

Another comparison to Girl Meets Boy: I can appreciate Smith’s 2007 novel because she tackles an admirable cause: Smith reimagines one of Ovid’s metamorphosis (the myth of Iphis) and in doing so examines the complicated gender politics in modern day lesbian relationship in Scotland. In Girl Meets Boy there is triumph for a group of people who are marginalised, belittled, and stigmatised. In Autumn there is a few half-hearted references to Brexit.

Lucy Scholes, writing for The Independent, labels Smith as one of the ‘country’s foremost chroniclers, her finger firmly on the social and political pulse.’ At the first hints of immigration and Brexit, I expected Autumn to progress in much the same way Girl Meets Boy did: I thought Smith was saving herself for the denouement of the story, where she would bring all the strands of the novel together and reveal some underlying political subtext.

It must have flown over my head.

The price of of progress: homosexuality, homophobia, and melancholy in The Price of Salt (1952)

It is only when the stakes are laid bare that the couple’s affections become clearer.

Before Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (1985), Brokeback Mountain (1997), and Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (2003), there was The Price Of Salt (1952).

Patricia Highsmith’s novel follows budding set designer Therese as she works in the doll department at Frankenberg’s during the Christmas rush. Highsmith’s New York is unforgiving, and very unlike the stereotypical literary New York. Frankenberg’s is an embodiment of everything Therese hates: the anxious parents vying over a doll with real hair (or, worse, ‘do you have the dolls that wet?’), the heaving, spluttering crowds, and her co-workers. Especially her co-workers.

Therese sees her future reflected in their lined foreheads, their creaky joints, their half-dazed look and, consequently, she is frightened and disgusted by them. Poor Mrs. Robichek.

Therese reminds me of Houlden Caulfield. I ache with melancholy for her: the orphaned girl living in New York, the tag-along boyfriend she feels colder and colder towards, the department store job she resents.

Who wouldn’t, in Therese’s situation, fall for a beguiling stranger? Carol arrives at Frankenberg’s to buy a doll for her daughter Rindy, and her eyes meet Therese’s across the room. Using Carol’s delivery address to her advantage, Therese sends her a Christmas postcard.

‘Special salutations from Frankenberg’s.’

The story line creeps up on you. Before reading The Price of Salt, I knew nothing about the plot. As Therese’s visits to Carol’s country home become more and more frequent, I wondered why one or the other had not made a move, or if I was misreading the situation completely. A quick Google search told me why: Highsmith’s novel is set in the 1950’s.

It is only when the stakes are laid bare that the couple’s affections become clearer.

Deep Water (1957) is the first Highsmith novel I have read. Mel and Vic’s troubled relationship had such an impact on me that I expected a burst of violence, a psychopath, or at least a sociopath in The Price Of Salt. A crack in the facade seems imminent when, on their road trip across America, Carol’s words have an edge to them. The prospect of Therese’s romanticism crashing to the ground made me turn the pages quicker.

Highsmith railed against this kind of literary stereotyping: she even went as far as to publish The Price of Salt under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. The prospect having her own name across the cover made her wonder, ‘would I then be labelled a lesbian-book writer?’

Cracks do appear, in the form of a hole chiselled into the lovebird’s hotel room wall. Similar to Deep Water, Highsmith throws a spanner into the works in the form of a detective, hired by Carol’s ex-husband in an effort to prove her an unfit mother.

‘The characters started off so flat that a steamrolled pancake might have more depth, and the book moved at the pace of a snail.’ –Bean Delphiki, Goodreads

Bean Delphiki’s review made me laugh because it is true in a sense. The characters do seem to be 2D, pale imitations of real people. They are whisps of personalities, stuck together though the idealised view of the narrator. Carol is seen through Therese’s love struck gaze, so she is faultless, beautiful, otherworldly.

Therese’s boyfriend Richard licks at the crumbs of her affection, trailing behind her burgeoning relationship with Carol. He is therefore boring and pathetic, and the reader is confused about why he is so devoted to the increasingly cold Therese.

These characters appear to be as flat as a pancake because Therese sees them as an embodiment of their most egregious quality or flaw until the end of the novel, where 1950’s American society’s homophobia trumps her idealism. Carol returns to New York and does, in fact, have her reputation sullied by her time with Therese. Richard sends Therese a letter saying, ‘ […] now the upper-most emotion I feel toward you is one that was present from the first– disgust.’ Her money dwindles.

Therese’s story is one of the quintessential coming of age trope: realising everything is not the way it seems. Relationships crumble, road trips are cut short, life happens.

It is only towards the end of the novel that Therese discovers the true price of salt.

My overwhelming emotion while reading The Price of Salt was melancholy. On melancholy, Brady and Haappala argue that, ‘The quality of the feeling resembles and overlaps with sadness, but is more refined, involving some degree of pleasure, although not as much as bittersweet pleasure.’ I think this best sums up how I feel: there is pleasure in knowing Therese and Carol have found their soul mate in each other, and there is an overlap into sadness when the reader realises they will have to hide their affections.

Highsmith handles this melancholy well. She rejects the shame that society imposed on homosexual relationships through her depiction of Carol and Therese.

“What still strikes me now,” Nagy says of the novel, “is how radical it was in terms of its overall conception-two central figures not giving a rat’s ass about sexual identity. No one frets about being gay; others fret on their behalf.” Phyllis Nagy

Even when she loses the battle to see her daughter, Carol does not shame herself or Therese, instead carving out a nook for them to live together in New York.

In the afterword to her novel, which she would only acknowledge as hers in 1990, Highsmith wrote that, ‘The appeal of The Price of Salt was that it had a happy ending for its two main characters […] Prior to this book, homosexuals male and female in American novels had to pay for their deviation by cutting their wrists, drowning themselves in a swimming pool, or by switching to heterosexuality […].’

The Price of Salt must have been received as a beacon of hope to those in the gay community, to those who wrote to Highsmith saying, ‘We don’t all commit suicide and lots of us are doing fine.’

One modern reviewer wrote: ‘I am doomed to die an ugly death or at least to be separated from my partner, probably violently.’ She goes on to write, ‘We are all doomed, it seems, because this is the only story American media tells about queer women.’

The Price of Salt tells the true story of homosexual relationships, namely, that they are fraught with the same difficulties as heterosexual ones: jealousy abounds, love is just as intense, and there is compromise, always compromise, and a price to pay for those that cut across class, country, and family ties.

July Book Haul

I have been a slow reader this month because I have just started a 9-5. When I have bought books this month, I have gone for books with short snappy sections because of my short attention span.

The result is the prettiest book haul I have seen in a while.

Forgotten Women: The Scientists

I picked this book up at the gift shop on the way out of The Museum of Science and Industry. Zing Tsjeng has compiled ’48 unsung scientific heroes whose hugely important, yet broadly unacknowledged, discoveries have transformed our understanding of the scientific world around us.’

The book lives up to the blurb.

It caught my attention because of the art work and the quippy writing. Tsjeng’s book is far from a fact file that you have to plod through, in fact the streamlined style of dedicating a few pages and a beautiful illustration to each woman makes the book an easy read.

It is the sort of book where you can just open it up and start from any page.

‘”How could you think your questions would bother me?” she once told a nervous student. “They never will, so long as I keep my enthusiasm for biology; and that, I hope will be as long as I live.”‘

‘ […] she believed that anyone could become an inventor as long as they put their mind to it: “Every person is born with a creative mind,” she said. “Every person has that ability.”‘

‘As a medical resident, she founded Puerto Rico’s first health centre for the care of newborns, which led to a 50 per cent decrease in the infant mortality rate of children at University Hospital.’

‘In her memoirs, Payne-Gaposchkin said that she was often asked by young women for careers advice, which she was happy to give: ‘Here it is, valeat quantum. Do not undertake a scientific career for fame or money… Undertake it only if nothing else will satisfy you; for nothing else is probably what you will receive. Your reward will be the widening of the horizon as you climb. And if you achieve that reward you will ask for no other.”

The Little Book of Shakespeare

The Little Book of Shakespeare is a handy guide to every play the Bard has ever had published, and some that were forgotten in time. It reads as the paper back version of Shakespeare’s Wikipedia page: no stone has gone un-turned in the creation of this book. It is the perfect gift for someone studying Shakespeare at GCSE, A Level, or degree level. The contents page is split into three sections: The Freelance Writer (1589-1594), The Lord Chamberlain’s Man (1954-1603), and The King’s Man (1603-1613), which makes for a comprehensive guide.

Love has gone into every page. The five contributors (Stanley Wells, Anjna Chouhan, Gillian Day, John Farndon, Jake Kingsley-Smith, and Nick Walton) have included feminist readings, on screen and on stage adaptations, sources, themes and relevant quotes for each play. On top of that, the book is a beautiful read.

Of course, I made a b-line for King Lear (written 1605-1606).

Talking Heads

Bennett’s Talking Heads is a collection of his first six published monologues, as well as the six he wrote years later. I first heard about Talking Heads years ago when I watched the BBC produced The Outside Dog in a high school Literature lesson. Julie Walters plays Marjory, the wife of the man suspected of several grisly murders. I was surprised to find that a lot of Bennett’s monologues explore the difficulties that middle and old age women face, which I do in my writing.

The monologue style makes for an interesting read. In these down to Earth narratives Bennett interweaves intrigue into the most boring subjects. He gets pages and pages out of Muriel’s venture into the work canteen during her lunch hour in Soldiering On. Despite the object of the speaker’s fascination often being common place, these monologues are never boring, just relentlessly real and gripping.

In A Cream Cracker Under The Settee most of the monologue is filled with just that: after a fall in the living room Doris fixates on a cream cracker she has just discovered under the settee. Unable to get up and unable to call for help, Doris vows to tell her council appointed cleaner about it the next time she comes over.

You would be forgiven for thinking Bennett’s monologues do not focus on the big issues of today. But they do: his characters deal with death, loss, and suffering all within the short compact package of a monologue. Doris cannot accept the limits of old age, Muriel’s inflated sense of self worth is shrunk to the size of a pea next to her life threatening illness, and Marjory battles with the burden of knowledge.

LINKS

Forgotten Women: The Scientists

The Little Book of Shakespeare

Talking Heads

‘Must Read’ Books I Hate and What To Read Instead

Alternatives to the ‘must reads’ books you can’t be bothered with

Whenever I go into Waterstones or WHSmith I remember the mile long list of books that I am expected to read (I’m looking at you, Goodreads), and I am filled with the worry that a better read person might ask me if I enjoyed Thomas Hardy’s depiction of injustice in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, or Williams’ portrayal of the declining South in A Streetcar Named Desire.

For those of you who feel that the list of ‘must reads’ is just too long, I have chosen some time saving alternatives that are better than the cult classic.

Farenheit 451

Farenheit 451 (1953) follows Montag as he begins to question why he burns books for the government, and wonders what can be gained from a world without accessible knowledge. As his loyalty to his profession deteriorates, Montag becomes enlightened and despises the consumerism he sees around him: he is distainful of his wife’s devotion to the television and her acceptance of whatever the state wants.

In the foreword to Farenheit 451 Bradbury writes that ‘When the first version of the novel was finished, I hardly knew what I had done.’ And I believe him.

The plot rattles from one point to another predictably. At first Montag believes it is ‘a pleasure to burn’ literature, because he enjoys watching the flames bite away at the pages. What follows is a plot twist that anyone could have seen coming: Montag realises that the act of burning books is a way for the state to control the population, to keep them docile, and to keep them ignorant.

I lost interest in Bradbury’s jumpy plot when Montag, now secure in his belief that burning books is an abomination, visits his comrade Faber. Faber greets Montag and introduces him to the ‘audio-capsule,’ the ‘green bullet’ that allows him to communicate with Montag while he is out in the world. Faber is too afraid to join the rebellion himself, and so he will guide Montag through the ear piece.

When Faber exclaims ‘I’ve had this little item ready for months!’ despite them having only met weeks ago, it all became a bit too much for me. Bradbury portrays a man who is torn apart by his desire for enlightenment in the totalitarian world by racing from one plot point to another, not fully developing any strands, and not tying any together.

What To Read Instead:

Morning, Summer Night: The Screaming Woman

The Screaming Woman (1951) follows a young girl as she walks out of her back door only to discover a woman, buried alive and screaming, in the field behind her house. The young girl runs to her father for help. He makes her wait until he has finished his dinner, and then asks why she is so flustered. She tells him that there is a woman buried alive screaming in the back garden.

He says that he has never known a woman that wasn’t.

Bradbury’s short story is succinct and powerful: he explores social constructs far more subtly than he does with Farenheit 451, in which the protagonist’s journey from ignorance to knowledge is glaringly obvious. The Screaming Woman explores intersections between gender, familial relations, and age through Bradbury’s use of a young female protagonist who, dismissed by the masses, takes matters into her own hands.

A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (1962) follows the fifteen year old protagonist Alex as he leads a gang of criminals through totalitarian, state ruled England. Burgess’ novel is rife with violence: Alex is imprisoned for the rape of a woman and experiences yet more violence at the hands of an experimental procedure called Ludovico’s technique. In this experiment Alex is injected with a serum which makes him violently ill, and he is then forced to watch dozens of clips of murders, rapes, and assaults. The aim of this experiment is to alter his reaction to violence: he feels nauseous whenever he thinks of committing a crime.

In a 2002 interview Burgess said ‘It is not the job of the artist to propound messages […] it is merely the task of the literary creator, like the musical creator, to produce shapes, structures.’

It is this focus on shapes, elusive and undefined in the mind of the reader, and the insistence on portraying the characters as card board cut outs, imitations of real people in real situations, that made me bored of A Clockwork Orange. Like Bradbury, Burgess presents his protagonist as a figure who serves to highlight the issues within their futuristic, totalitarian societies, rather than characters in their own right. The characters are barely able to react to the situations themselves before the God-like hand of Bradbury or Burgess swoops down to remind them that they serve the purpose of acting against the state, never relaxing for one moment under the dystopian, totalitarian rule.

What To Read Instead:

Nightmares and Dreamscapes: Suffer The Little Children

Stephen King’s short story Suffer The Little Children (1972) depicts the story of Mrs Sidley, an elderly pre-school teacher who begins to believe that the children she teaches are possessed by demons. Despite King’s story being supernatural in focus, the reader is drawn to the characterisation of Sidley, and the real life aspects of mental decline in old age.

King creates tension leading up to the violence denouement of Suffer The Little Children, and it is this careful use of striking scenes that makes this short story worth a read. The ending is all the more impactful because King has not sprinkled violence throughout. The stative line ‘She killed twelve of them and would have killed them all if Mrs Crossen hadn’t come down for a package of composition paper’ shocks the reader, in that it serves to emphasise the realistic aspects of King’s story.

‘The Long Walk’: Stephen King’s Version of a Dystopian World

King’s dystopian world ‘The Long Walk’ operates on an opt-in basis.

While writers like Suzanne Collins and Margaret Atwood define their dystopian worlds by the lack of choice the characters have, Stephen King’s The Long Walk operates on an opt-in basis. In King’s vision of the future his protagonist Raymond Garraty, along with 99 other teenage boys, are chosen from a pool of applicants to participate in the annual long walk, a competition which ends with only one winner: the sole survivor.

The boys are followed by a group of armed guards who give the participants a warning if they walk slower than the stipulated four miles an hour for more than thirty seconds. Three strikes and you are out. In King’s world teens are murdered where they stand in a competition they volunteered for.

The walk is overseen by The Major, and the event is televised in major cities. Swarms of onlookers cheer as the teens become increasingly exhausted and suffer mental fatigue as they see their peers picked off one by one, fearful that it is them next. A day into the walk, Garraty is shocked and pleased to see:

a huge sign, letters with pine boughs across the front read:

GARRATY’S OUR MAN!!!

Aroostook County Parents’ Association

The reader wonders why thousands of teenage boys subject themselves to the walk, knowing that their chances of winning are infinitesimal. Unlike dystopian novels which present a moral message on the perils of treating women as a commodity (The Handmaid’s Tale), separating society into sectors (Brave New World), and banning the distribution of information (Fahrenheit 451), King does not create the walk for any other purpose than entertainment.

‘Walk or die, that’s the moral of this story.’

King’s story feeds on greed and the demand for engaging television. The boys apply for the walk because the prize is anything they desire, a stake just high enough to risk their life for. The community cheers the walkers on and watches them on television because they have been desensitised to gratuitous violence, and the American desire for more more more leads them to applaud the 100 boys for walking to their death. This twisted desire for entertainment means that Garraty is hailed as an all-American hero, ‘Maine’s own,’ willing to undertake the grueling task of dying for the sake of the public’s enjoyment.

The characters, as young as they are (Garraty is only sixteen), seem to be aware of their dire situation, which makes the premise all the more shocking. One walker asks, ‘There was a guy last year that crawled for two miles at four miles an hour after both of his feet cramped up at the same time, you remember reading about that?’ As the story goes on, King adds the arrogance of 100 teenagers to the list of why the walk was possible in the first place. The reader wonders whether anyone would have signed up to a girls only long walk.

Despite all of this, I am willing to suspend disbelief for a dystopian novel, and especially a dystopian novel as good as King’s. He fleshes out the characters and creates relationships with such realism that the reader is shocked when, having taken three warnings, Olson is murdered by the guards. The reader feels the joy of the walkers when an onlooker manages to give them watermelon without the guards intercepting it.

Like most of King’s novels, the ending is harrowing. Having outlasted his peers and won the walk, Garraty imagines that:

The dark figure beckoned, beckoned in the rain, beckoned for him to come and walk, to come and play the game. And it was time to play the game. There was still so far to walk.

The need for more continues as the delirious Garraty wanders off into the distance, unaware that he has won his prize because he cannot see past the need to go on, to strive for more in a consumerist world where even death has become a commodity that can be sold to the attentive viewer.

Colonisation, Technological Advancement, and Marriage Across A Galaxy: A Review of ‘The Book of Strange New Things’

‘The Book Of Strange New Things’ is Dutch born writer Michael Faber’s 28th book, published in 2014.

‘when sophisticated technology fails, primitive technology steps in to do the job’

In the not-so-distant future mankind transcends the barrier of space and inhabits a foreign planet. Or foreign planet(s). Faber is ambiguous about the progress of technology in his futuristic novel. The reader is aware of the enterprising space company USIC, but not of its competitors, and not of any other habitable planets. Far from the conventional Sci-Fi novel, Faber’s ‘The Book of Strange New Things’ is grounded in the relationship between Peter and Bea, the former of whom is launched further than any Christian missionary has ever ventured before.

In his mission to bring the word of God to the strange inhabitants of Oasis, Peter struggles to maintain a relationship with his spouse Bea. As the British economy collapses (which is at first foreshadowed through Bea’s message that the local Tesco has run out of tiramisu), Faber projects Peter’s anxieties about their relationship through his increasing need to be far away from the USIC base and living among the Oasans.

Incidentally, while living with the Oasans Peter is unable to communicate with Bea: the small ‘Shoot’ system they used to send messages requires electricity. Throughout this novel Faber shows both the extreme need for, and a total disinterest in, technology. Unlike the brutish depiction of aliens from traditional Sci-Fi authors such as Arthur C. Clarke, Faber’s Oasans are not intent on world domination. The Oasans have a primitive view of the world, which they refer to as ‘here,’ having not contemplated the name of their planet. Faber’s presentation of the obsequious Oasans raises the idea that he is criticizing British colonisation: in this case the inhabitants are in the early stages of civilisation, and crucially, Peter notes, have not even created the wheel.

Peter finds himself experiencing a crisis of faith as the most likeable alien (Jesus Lover Five) falls ill, and Bea’s safety becomes dubious in the abruptly changing climate of Britain. The beginning of the novel marks a progression in British technological achievement, whereas the ending questions whether or not man should use technology to inhabit other planets, and in doing so, become alien themselves.

In a desperate attempt to reconnect with Bea, Peter informs the USIC of his intentions to return home. However, this too is dubious. Faber reveals precious few facts about the USIC: they have a rigorous interviewing process, and they refuse to send any of Peter’s messages that hold negative connotations about the USIC. Faber foregrounds the struggle between technology and man as the ending to ‘The Book of Strange New Things’ reads as the beginning of an apocalyptic novel. Interestingly, the prospect of Bea and Peter being forever separated is far more devastating than the collapse of the British Empire.