Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST” by William Shakespeare (probably first written c.1595-96; first surviving publication a quarto of 1598, but possibly also published earlier in a quarto now lost)

            Dear William,

Thank you for sending me the fair copy of your manuscript for my comments and criticism. I think you should stop doing this. When you first arrived in London, it was reasonable for you to seek my opinions on how well you had patched up old plays by others or done similar hack-work. But surely by now you are reasonably well-launched in your career as playwright. You do not really need my approval any longer, do you? I do not say this in any spirit of rancour. I am always happy to read what you have yourself written (though I am glad you have never inflicted another Titus Andronicus upon me); and I am of course happy to receive your manuscript of Love’s Labour’s Lost before you hand it over to the printers. Let me say at once that in reading it, I have found it a pleasant comedy and I enjoyed at least some of the conceits of your language. Perhaps you could advise the printers to put some version of this praise on the title page when they get around to printing it.

But we must take the rough with the smooth, mustn’t we? So I am afraid that in what follows, I am going to have to say some negative things as well as some positive. I hope they are of some help to you in your further endeavours.

First, the positives. I was delighted that this time you thought up your own plot rather than running to Holinshed or North’s translation of Plutarch or an Italian novel or some such, and it is a very clever idea for a plot. The King of Navarre and three studious young men of his royal court decide they will hide away for three years and engage in nothing but study to make themselves wiser. To this end, they forswear the company of women and the distractions of love. But when the Princess of France arrives on an embassy with three ladies of her royal court, the young men are at once distracted out of their study, Love triumphs over Scholarship and by ingenious (dare I say “conceited”?) argument, Love is shown to teach more than Study does.

In a play, I do like a concept as simple and straightforward as this. Of course I thought it very convenient that the King of Navarre falls in love with the Princess of France; Berowne falls in love with Rosaline; Longaville falls in love with Maria; and Dumain falls in love with Katharine. What a bother it would have been if, say, two of the young men had fallen in love with the same woman! But I accept that you are writing a light comedy and the probabilities of real life can be ignored in this context. Besides, your concept would have been ruined if we had been distracted by rivalries between two of the male characters.

I really enjoyed the way you gave carping, witty Berowne a fitting female counterpart in witty Rosaline. Some of what they speak is much ado about nothing, but I feel this idea of a war of wits between lovers is something you could develop in some future play. How fitting that Rosaline should say of Berowne “a merrier man, / Within the limit of becoming mirth, / I never spent an hour’s talk withal”.

I congratulate you, sir, on Berowne’s excellent soliloquy at the end of Act 3, where he has to admit reluctantly to himself that he is in love, and speaks of Cupid as

“This wimpled, whining, purblind wayward Boy

This senior-junior giant dwarf, Don Cupid,

Regent of love-rhymes, Lord of folded arms,

The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans:

Liege of all loiterers and malcontents:

Dread Prince of Plackets, King of codpieces,

Sole Imperator and great general

Of trotting paritors (O my little heart)

And I to be a Corporal in his field,

And wear his colours like a tumbler’s hoop…”

Yes indeed – it is a great example of a man trying to talk himself out of something to which he is really inclined.

I delight also in your ironical conclusion, where news of the death of the French king comes, the Princess of France must break off her embassy, and the four young men must go into a year of seemly mourning – without the company of women – before they may resume their suit to the women they profess to love. This could have appeared too abrupt and unlikely an ending, but I congratulate you on giving to the Princess the speech beginning “A time, methinks, too short / To make a world-without-end bargain in…” This allows for a plausible transition from the joyful to the solemn. And might I add that for the first time, I understood the full import of your new play’s title. As for the Spring and Winter song with which you conclude the play, I believe this is the best thing you have so far done in the art of song.

As always with your work, my friend, there were many individual lines that stuck in my mind and rang true to life. I am sure many a sorry student would agree with Berowne’s complaint “Small have continual plodders ever won / Save base authority from others’ books.” When the King describes the Braggart Armado as “One, who the music of his own vain tongue, / Doth ravish like enchanting harmony”, I thought of many such a one of my own ken. And indeed one can only admit the truth of Maria’s observation that “Folly in Fools bears not so strong a note, / As fool’ry in the wise, when Wit doth dote.” While you put the words into the mouth of the Pedant Holofernes, I nevertheless recognise the wit of the line “He draweth out the thread of his verbosity, finer than the staple of his argument.”

But now, alas, let me speak of some infelicities in your design and execution. Is it not a little foolish to have Boyet – essentially the older chaperone of the French ladies – explaining, in a long speech to the ladies and to us in Act Two, how the King of Navarre has spoken, when we have ourselves just heard the reported speeches? The speech of nearly 80 lines which you give to Berowne at the end of Act Four is, in and of itself, a masterpiece of complex and conceited wit – I love your lengthy comparisons of the luminosity of women’s eyes with the illumination of true scholarship; and I love your witty paradoxes arguing that, to follow nature and foreswear an oath is not to be forsworn. Indeed I read and re-read this speech with much pleasure. But is it not a self-contained sermon rather than a dramatic speech, more suited to a chapbook than a playscript? Its lesson is already implicit in what we have seen acted out, and here the wit of Berowne becomes an oration and, for all its flashing wit, perhaps in part a display of pedantry which would fly over the heads of your impatient audience.

Speaking of pedants…

When we already have in the play a pompous pedant in the person of the Braggart Armado, is it not over-egging the pudding to introduce exactly the same sort of verbose quibbler in the form of the Pedant Holofernes? Indeed, when Holofernes converses with the foolish curate Nathaniel, we have three characters with convoluted verbal diahorrea. I understand this sort of thing keeps the lads at the Inns of Court smirking with superior laughter – especially when one of the pedants misuses Latin tags and the like – but it does try one’s patience. In small doses, misusages are funny, but give us excess of them and surfeiting the appetite is sickened, and so dies. (I do appreciate, however, your clever conceit of having the Boy Moth, and even the Clown Costard, sometimes defeating the pedants at their own verbal games.)

There is another thing that worries me about your Braggart Armado. You at first present him as a model of hypocrisy. Armado seeks to punish the Clown Costard for canoodling with the wench Jaquenetta, when the King’s edict has forbidden such behaviour. But then Armado himself hopes to seduce the same wench.  Much more, I think, could have been made of this situation than the lame matter of the two letters being delivered to the wrong recipients. Armado’s moral downfall could have been much funnier. In fact, in my mind I put together this situation with another moment in your play where the humour is forced and underdeveloped. Of course it is funny to have Berowne, himself false to his vow not to be distracted by women, hiding behind bushes to overhear the King do the same forswearing. But goodness! When both the King and Berowne hide behind bushes to hear Longaville similarly forsworn; and then when Berowne, the King and Longaville are all hidden behind bushes to hear Dumain forsworn – we feel that we have heard the same joke three times over. Might I make a suggestion? The next time you wish to expose, in comedy, a pedantic hypocrite, might I suggest you involve him in a more complex plot? Imagine what fun it would be to have a whole group of plotters hiding behind bushes to see a pompous and self-righteous fool reveal what he really was. You might build even more fun into the joke if you were to have the fool dress in something outrageous to further deflate his assumed dignity – yellow cross-garters or some such. This is just a suggestion.

In terms of structure, my main objection to your play is implicit in what I have already said. Too often the comic situations are static set-pieces overlaid with verbal banter or high poetic rhetoric, rather than comedy developing out of plot and character. I am sure that the skill of your company of players will draw laughter from the scene in which the four young men disguise themselves as Muscovites, and disport themselves before the knowing young ladies. Perhaps such skill will also make enjoyable the more ridiculous characters’ attempted pageant of the world’s great Worthies. But this is the stuff of masque – probably more diverting on the boards than it is on the page. I have said I admire the general concept of your play, but it has little forward momentum.

As for style and text, there are two main problems. Please realise the disadvantages of rhyme, even in comedy. Of course we esteem the wit of a man who, extempore, can spin witty rhymes. But speech after speech of rhyme is somewhat numbing. In your play, even the banter of Berowne and Rosaline droops from too much rhyme. Dear William, be more sparing in your future use of rhyme when it comes to playwriting.

Finally, there is that awful matter of the topicality of so many of the jests in Love’s Labour’s Lost, and the narrow audience at which so many of those jests seem pitched. We both know how unlikely it is that this merry, frivolous little farce will hold the stage for long, but if it does, its many in-jokes will rapidly become incomprehensible. They might raise knowing chuckles from courtiers and university men, who recognise your sly allusions to illustrious names from our recent French wars, and your hits at rival intellectuals. But frankly, even now, most of the wider audience will simply fail to undertand much of what is intended to raise the laugh. This is true, too, of the puns, the wordplay, the misused Latin tags.

I had a strange dream last night after I read your play. I dreamed that, by some miracle, your plays were still remembered in four hundred years’ time. I saw audiences moved or amused by the plays you have yet to write. But for this play, I saw only armies of pedantic scholars drawing up long notes and explanations of jokes that no longer made any sense. It was quite dead to new sensibilities.

I say none of this to discourage your future work, which I am sure will improve as greatly as this play is an improvement on Titus Andronicus.

As always, yours in confidence and under the seal,

Henry Garnet

 

21^st Century Footnote: After the ghost of Henry Garnet dictated the above letter to me, I chanced to take off my shelf Harold Bloom’s 750-page blockbuster Shakespeare – The Invention of the Human (1998), clearly the American critic’s attempt to say the last word sbout Shakespeare. I turned to the verbose chap’s 27-page chapter on Love’s Labour’s Lost, and found Bloom declaring that “I take more unmixed pleasure from Love’s Labour’s Lost than from any other Shakespearean play” and praising its “linguistic exuberance” and “vocal magnificence”. Like so much Shakespearean criticism, most of Bloom’s chapter consists of a synopsis raisonee, with commentary upon long quotations from the play (it fills up the pages, folks). His chief assertions appear to be (a.) that the play shows Shakespeare as a virtuoso of various styles; and (b.) that it presents a very sophisticated philosophical argument on the debate between study (Art) and love (Nature), a matter which concerned various sages and intellectuals of Shakespeare’s own time. Doubtless this is true, but the approach is all too familiar to me from much academic criticism. The idea of the play is what beguiles and enchants the critic, rather than its real dramatic impact. It is, for the critic, an intriguing intellectual artefact, and therefore worthy of inflated praise. There is also the critic’s delight in being able to tell us of obscure intellectual quarrels from Shakespeare’s time. Let us then praise Love’s Labour’s Lost, because it allows us to show our superiority to the undiscerning hoi-polloi who have not mastered such scholarship! To each his own opinion, I suppose. But I turn with relief from Harold Bloom to William Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespear’s [sic] Plays, and find Hazlitt declaring rubustly “If we were to part with any of the author’s comedies, it should be this”. Being the fair-minded man he was, Hazlitt proceeds to praise some good things in Love’s Labour’s Lost, but he does note that the play “savours more of the pedantic spirit of Shakespear’s time than of his own genius”. This is my own chief objection to Love’s Labour’s Lost. In many respects, Bloom’s critique, with its overblown claims for the play, gave me more laughs than the play itself did.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

GRUMPY OLD MAN MODE…

I feel I have the right to talk sometimes in Grumpy Old Man mode. I say this ironically, of course, because any attempt to talk about language and its current misusage is often greeted with the sneer that only Grumpy Old Men worry about such things and that therefore I must belong to that tribe.

So let me clear away the rubbish first before I get on with my peeves. I am fully aware that language changes, that neologisms are coined in every age, that the meanings of words mutate, that acceptable usage is not static and that – perhaps most important – it is everyday usage that brings about change in ideas of what is acceptable in language, not scholarship and not academe. Language cannot be frozen and language tends to change “bottom up”, not “top down”. It was, after all, a bunch of slobs a few centuries ago who began to ignore the second-person singular pronoun and use only the second-person plural, so that “thou”, “thee” and “thine” dropped out of the language.

In this process, many words acquire meanings quite different from those they used to have. A pedant once told me that properly speaking “sophisticated” meant something like “corrupted” or “decadent”. But my rebuff was that, properly speaking, the word has come to mean something like “worldly wise”, “well-informed”, “knowledgeable” or “fashionable”, and it is now fruitless to attempt to revive its former meaning, regardless of what older dictionaries may prescribe. On the other hand (and doubtless showing how inconsistent I am), I am sorry that the verb “anticipate” seems to have lost its earlier, and very useful, meaning. Once “anticipate” meant “to act before others act” as in “The enemy were going to attack but we anticipated them”. Now it appears to have become a weak synonym for “expect” as in “I anticipate he will arrive next week.” Personally I would call it a misusage, but I am waging a losing battle on that one. I do hope, however, that the useful word “decimate” does not get sophisticated (old sense), but I anticipate (new sense) that it will. Increasingly I hear news commentators – among the influential semi-literates of our age – using “decimate” as if it were a synonym for “annihilate, expunge, wipe out”. To be “decimated” means to have lost one tenth of one’s strength or power. An army that is decimated has suffered serious losses, but is still at nine-tenths its strength, and probably therefore capable (after a little re-grouping) of offering battle. This is not what “our reporter on the spot” means when she tells us that most civilians in a Syrian suburb have been “decimated” by government bombing.

In saying all this, I understand that some usages are purely a matter of preference. I believe it is sheer illiteracy to use “less” when you mean “fewer”, and I would cross the road to avoid those who do not understand that “uninterested” is not the same as “disinterested”. On the other hand, some whom I would regard as allies in the wars of linguistic propriety still insist that one must write “all right” and shun “alright” as a mere corruption of “all right”. My own view is that “alright” (= “adequate”) has now taken on a meaning quite different from “all right” (= “completely correct”) and should be accepted as the separate entity it now is.

With regret, I have to accept that some semi-literate usages have their value. Something that bursts easily into flames, or is easily inflamed, is “inflammable”; but for a number of decades now trucks carrying oil, petroleum etc. also bear a warning that their cargo is “flammable” because of the strong possibility that many people will read the prefix “in-“ as a negation. I suppose, for the sake of people not being blown up by mishandling such cargo, this misusage is a matter of public safety.

The pronunciation of words is a different matter from the misuse of words, but it will always cause disputes, especially in countries where a world language (like English) is spoken. In my own country of New Zealand, there is a large cohort of (especially young) people who no longer know how to alter the pronunciation of the definite article when it is followed by a word beginning with a vowel. When one says “the dog”, “the”  rhymes with “duh”. When one says “the apple”, “the” rhymes with “tree”. Increasingly we are getting “duh apple”. Likewise, in pronunciation, the plural of “woman” appears to be disappearing. “Women” in spoken language is often indistinguishable from “woman”, which might cause some annoyance to those second-wave feminists who for a brief period insisted on spelling it “wimmin”.

Conversely, in written language in my country, younger people appear to have forgotten how to spell the ejaculation “eh”, possibly because they don’t read much and have not seen it in print. Some months ago, to be provocative, I put the following post in Facebook:

“Dear Millennials, This is the last day of 2017, so I wish to advise you of an area of written expression in which you fall down woefully. Too many of you seem not to know how to spell "Eh". I have seen semi-literates among you write "Aye" or "Ay" when what you clearly mean is "Eh". Thus I have seen such lamentable locutions as "It's a nice day, ay?" or "Lorde's latest album was pretty crap, aye?". Allow me to advise you that "Ay" and "Aye" rhyme with "sky" "pie" and "many millennials deserve a poke in the eye". When one obeys a captain's order to swab the deck, one says "Aye-aye captain!" When one is greeted by a Scotsman, he says with his habitual courtesy and good manners "Aye, I come from Glas-gee, but I'm nae clatty or blooty, ye Sassenach f*cker". "Eh", on the other hand, rhymes with "hay", "day" and "semi-literate millennials should stay away". In the 1960s, there was a popular English play by Henry Livings called "Eh?", which exclamation is always an interrogative or an expression of bemusment or an invitation to agreement. Please drop this foolish orthographical imposture. Hope you agree with me, eh?”

Of course this received some flak along the “you’re-just-a-grumpy-old-man” lines, but that was to be expected.

Interestingly, many of those who are now most prescriptive about language regard themselves, not as conservative or traditional, but as progressive. We have the growing category of language police, evidenced in a supremely silly article in an international magazine which said that people should stop using “whom” as it was now redundant and pretentious. I appreciate (new sense) that 99 people out of 100 will now say “Who are you addressing it to?” rather than “To whom are you addressing it?”. Even so, “whom” still has its uses and I can’t help wondering whom the article was attempting to influence. More annoying are those who now insist that “their” should be used as a singular pronoun, a neo-usage in which I refuse to participate. This began as an attempt to be gender-neutral in cases where a single subject was used but both sexes were implied. “Everyone took his suitcase and left” was regarded as sexist and was now rendered as “Everyone [singular] took their [plural] suitcase and left.” In the badlands of North American academe, this foolish usage has now become part of the language wars fought by those people of indeterminate gender who want to be addressed in the singular as “they” rather than “he” or “she”.

Let me conclude with some valid quibbles on the growing number of back-formations one now sees in the guise of abstract nouns.

From the verb “abolish” comes the abstract noun “abolition”. I have seen the awful back-formation “abolishment” in print more than once, a certain sign of limited literacy. Similarly, the adjective “anxious” designates how one feels if one is suffering from “anxiety”. The illiteracy “anxiousness” is now appearing in print. In a way, I sympathise with those who try to make an abstract noun out of the adjective “sordid”, because no such abstract noun is in common use. Thus I have seen the awful  “sordidness” in print. But there is such an abstract noun, even if it has not been used widely for many a long year. The word is “sordor”, and I would be a happy man if it were duly revived.

Cannibalising myself, I end with an anecdote I used on another posting on this blog. After everything I have said here, I know it is possible to be too much the pedant in matters of language, and therefore it is possible to be hoist on one’s own petard. I once read a column by a notoriously bullying columnist who was berating common illiteracy as I have been doing here. En route he remarked that he was aware of the “evolvement” of language. Clearly he had never heard of evolution.

Something New

REMINDER - "REID"S READER" NOW APPEARS FORTNIGHTLY RATHER THAN WEEKLY.

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“MAZARINE” by Charlotte Grimshaw (Vintage, $NZ38); “A SISTER IN MY HOUSE” by Linda Olsson  (Penguin / Random House, $NZ22)

            As she has been at pains to point out, Charlotte Grimshaw has never set out to write a novel that is only a thriller or a mystery story. Sheer genre writing is not for her, and she is more interested in analysing characters, commenting (sometimes – but not always – satirically) on society at large and reflecting on the art of narration itself. And yet there is an element of mystery in some of her novels and short stories, in the sense that they often involve the process of trying to find out what has really happened, as opposed to what characters in the novel think has happened. Mysteries are presented and (sometimes) resolved. In her latest novel, Mazarine, there is even what could loosely be called a thriller element.

This novel is in a limited sense a break from Grimshaw’s earlier work. Her two collections of linked short stories Opportunity (2007) and Singularity (2009), and the novels The Night Book (2010), Soon (2012) and Starlight Peninsula (2015) - the latter two reviewed on this blog – all somehow connected the same large cast of recurring characters, especially a Dr Simon Lampton. Mazarine has an (almost) completely different cast, although one minor character, Nick Oppenheimer, did appear in Starlight Peninsula.

If it were summarised as a thriller, Mazarine would go thus: First widowed, and then having broken up acrimoniously with her boyfriend Nick Oppenheimer, the aspiring novelist Frances Sinclair is deeply upset that her young adult daughter Maya has apparently gone missing in Europe. She has received an odd text message purporting to be from her daughter, but which simply does not sound at all like the way Maya would put things. And there are no further messages. Europe is at this stage still reacting to the Charlie Hebdo attack, talk of radical Islam and terrorism is in the air, and a little research tells Frances that her daughter’s boyfriend Joe Libard comes from a Muslim family and has a brother who is a devout Muslim. Could Maya have been caught up in some Islamic terrorist activity? Frances joins force with Joe’s lesbian mother Mazarine Libard to find Maya and Joe. Using the excuse that she is researching a novel, she travels to London, trying to track her daughter down through Maya’s friends and associates. In the process, she bonds with Mazarine, who in some sense becomes her mentor but in another sense is a mysterious character in her own right. Imagery of Ariadne’s thread relates to the various clues Mazarine and Frances follow to find Maya, and it is significant that the name “Mazarine” itself refers to an elusive blue butterfly. The action continues through Paris and Buenos Aires and, for those seeking a neat resolution, it comes to a perfectly plausible conclusion about what has become of Maya. (My not-being-a-swine rule means I do not provide spoilers about this).

Apparently Frances Sinclair’s inherited world is one of bourgeois culture. Her  (adoptive) father is a judge; her (erratic) brother is an associate professor of law. Her late husband worked on the Guardian in England. As a writer, she herself is part of the literati and her daughter has connections with publishing. So there are occasional literary references, with mentions of Alice Munro and Christina Stead and E.M.Forster’s quotation about “only connecting” and somebody reading Henry James’ The Golden Bowl, not to mention Frances’ childhood memory of visiting Menton (hello Katherine Mansfield). There is also the fact that Frances is a little out of her comfort zone when it comes to the use of modern communications technology, i-phones and the like. Thinking of the people she doesn’t know about, but whom her daughter might know, she reflects her age when she says: “It made such a difference, the kids’ ability to interact with the whole world from their bedrooms.” (p.84)

So, misleadingly synopsised thus as a thriller, Mazarine is about a middle-class, middle-aged woman out of her depth as she searches for a missing daughter who might be in great danger.

All of which is a complete misrepresentation of this novel.

The fact is, Mazarine is more about the WHO than about the WHAT, and it pivots on the concept of the unreliable narrator.

The novel is narrated in the first-person by Frances Sinclair herself and she is clearly a very troubled person. While her two siblings are her parents’ biological children, she herself was adopted. Not only does she have a running psychological battle with her abrasive adoptive mother Inez, but she does not know who her biological parents were and this has a big impact on her construction of her own identity. (Charlotte Grimshaw has dealt before in her fiction with a fraught situation involving an adopted child  – notably in the novel The Night Book). Frances fears getting migraines (p.42). She has had extensive psychiatric consultations with a therapist called Werner Bismarck (! – Grimshaw had a psychotherapist called Dvorak in Starlight Peninsula. Perhaps she likes giving psychotherapists famous names). Bismarck suggests that Frances has suffered an early lack of “attachment” to her prime caregiver. Frances has uncomfortable gaps in her memory. She claims she has difficulty with face recognition. She sometimes questions her own sanity. (Eloise Hay, Grimshaw’s protagonist in Starlight Peninsula, suffered from some of the same symptoms.) En route with Mazarine, she realises how little she really knows her daughter or anyone else and she frequently questions her own judgement.

With such a person as narrator, there is always a tension between what she states as fact and how reliable we think she is. Is her daughter really in danger, or are her fears possibly paranoid fantasies?

As Frances herself considers this, and especially under Mazarine’s influence, she advances one of the novel’s main ideas – that the way we perceive others is a form of fiction. In effect we “make up” other people from our limited observations of them, which we then weave into a narrative. And in the same way we “make up” our own identity.

Take, for example, the following passage where Frances reflects on her estranged partner:

“I’d never admitted to her that I’d split up with Nick because he’d started making me uneasy when he revealed, just a couple of times, that he wasn’t the man I’d thought he was. Now I took hold of Maya’s thesis, examined it. I’d ‘invented’ Nick Oppenheimer, created a character for him, that of the safe, knowable, wholesome guy, cheerfully masculine, tough, but with a heart of gold. The invention was made possible by the fact that he was enigmatic. He was a blank space into which I poured my hopes. And, because his true nature was hidden, the disparity between the real and the invented was only gradually and subtly revealed…. I’d made him into rather a cliché, I suppose, because ambiguity and complexity would have been less reassuring.. So, to give Maya’s theory full expression: Nick Oppenheimer was the creative product of my yearning and my loneliness. And then I found out he had a real self.” (pp.44-45)

Or again, when Frances is unable to interpret the message ostensibly from her daughter, she remarks:

“I couldn’t understand it, and worse, I didn’t entirely trust my own judgement. It was my old problem, being unable to read people, never having an overall certainty about a relationship, but always scanning for evidence with each new communication…” (p.58)

Considering how her daughter Maya might not be the person she thought she was, Frances asks:

“How had I failed her? Could it be that as well as ‘inventing’ Nick Oppenheimer, I’d invented my notion of myself? I’d thought I was a good parent, that we got on brilliantly, that our relationship, Maya’s and mine, was solid, successful, normal – admittedly it was a single triumph on my interpersonal record of fuck-ups, misunderstandings and solitude, but that was why I valued it so!” (p.111)

Given that Frances is so uncertain of herself, has such an unreliable memory and so often misjudges things, I am unsure whether Charlotte Grimshaw intends us to take it at face value when Frances, about two-thirds of the way through the novel, makes a complete reassessment of herself and embarks on a new beginning in her emotional life. (Again, I carefully provide no spoilers about this.) Is this meant to be seen as some sort of epiphany? Or, given her track record, could it be seen as one more of Frances’ delusions?

If the narrator of this novel is unreliable, it could be that no fiction can be trusted as a worthwhile reflection of the world anyway. Remember, Frances is not only a worried mother. She is herself a writer. To produce novels or short stories means always making use of other people as material. Even when she is setting out in panic to find her missing daughter, Frances is thinking what novelistic use she can make of the situation:

“When my girl and I were reunited I would revert to my officially stated aim, and carry out research for the idea I’d always had: a novel set in London and Paris, my own Tale of Two Cities. I had a name for it: Self State.” (p.84)

Later, she wonders how much her fiction-writing ambition compromises her role as loving mother:

“Who was the I who yearned to hold my daughter? Did that I cohabit with a different self, the writer, who watched and waited in order to requisition everything, every secret and injury and loss for one purpose: the first novel? A self so single-minded it would turn even the rawest, most private pain into fodder…” (p.137)

It would be incredibly offensive to suggest that Charlotte Grimshaw is drawing a self-portrait here, but she does drop hints that she, as novelist, shares at least some experience with her very flawed narrator. Like Grimshaw, the fictitous Frances has written fiction set on a west Auckland peninsula. One of Frances’ memories is of a dangerous childhood expedition in the Waitakeres, similar to a semi-autobiographical story Grimshaw once wrote. Perhaps this is only to say that a real novelist writing about a fictitious novelist will inevitably do some self-reflection.

Despite its mystery story structure, Mazarine is more a character study, a commentary on the way identity is constructed and a critique of the art of writing fiction itself. It is, however, the thread of the mystery story that will probably keep most readers turning the pages.

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I am reviewing Linda Olsson’s A Sister in My House in the same posting as Charlotte Grimshaw’s Mazarine out of sheer chance. I happen to have both novels before me to review in the same week and (apart from the fact that they are both written by women resident in New Zealand) the two novels have little in common. Chalk and cheese. True – both deal in part with fraught family relationships and both have a first-person narrator. But, despite a few little hints that her narrator may occasionally be in error, Linda Olsson’s first-person narrator does not confront us with all those complex and weighty issues of narrator (un-)reliablility that Charlotte Grimshaw’s narrator presents. Instead we have the more naïve phenomenon of a narrator whose words we are implicitly meant to trust throughout.

A Sister in My House is narrated by Maria, a Swede living in a desirable sea-front residence in Catalonia. In her late forties, childless and apparently single, Maria has been estranged from her younger sister Emma for a number of years. Emma is married with children. When they meet again at their mother’s funeral in Sweden, Maria impulsively invites Emma to come and stay with her for a few days. As the time comes for Emma’s sojourn, Maria has misgivings. She does not get on with her little sister and, as soon as Emma arrives, Maria feels “that creeping shameful irritation at my sister invading my private territory.” (p.40)

What has caused the bad blood between these sisters? That is the question that A Sister in My House unravels across the six days that Maria and Emma are together.

Apparently Linda Olsson has written four previous novels, but this is the first of her works that I have read. A Swede who has become a New Zealander, Olsson seems to write her novels first in Swedish and then to translate them into English. A Sister in My House was first published in Swedish in Stockholm in 2016, and nobody is credited as translator - so presumably the author translated it herself. Maybe because of this Swedish connection, a reviewer of an earlier Olsson novel compared it with an Ingmar Bergman movie. I can see why. In its set-up, A Sister in My House is like one of those “chamber” movies Bergman often made, where a few characters (usually women; always middle class) tore at the psychological truth of one another in a few limited settings. Cries and Whispers (sisters slug it out), Autumn Sonata (mother and daughter slug it out) and their ilk, many of which I watched patiently in my years as a film reviewer.

But if it is Bergmanesque, it is only superficially so.

The hard fact is that this novel does not really develop its characters. True, as long conversations between Emma and Maria go on, and as we hear the narrator Maria’s commentary on them, we bit by bit learn more about the family background of these two women and the events that separated them – sibling rivalries; how they vied for the attention of their sister Amanda; the defects of their mother and father as parents; how they were both attached to the same guy at different times; the lesbian affair one of them had (how chic; how daring written in a novel now…); an unexpected death; and a horrible accident that left one of them feeling guilty and the other resentful. But this is simply to drip-feed us events rather than real insights. I feel that too often these events (about which, as is my wont, I scrupulously do not provide spoilers) have been with-held from us at the beginning simply to create a spurious sense of gradual discovery.

More difficult, however, is the stilted nature of the dialogue, which is often self-expository to a painful degree. Here is a specimen of such dialogue as Maria enlightens Emma about her past:

“Then I got pregnant. And my whole world fell apart. Olof was my only confidant. But this I could never share with him. Not with anybody. I knew I would never be able to make Olof understand. I had reached a point where I had to leave. So I had an abortion. And then I went to London. But you know that.” (p.100)

This is not credible dialogue – it is exposition. And when I reach the line “But you know that”, I feel like saying “So why the hell are you telling her?”

On the same level of obviousness, when past events are revealed to us, Maria makes comments upon them which are, I suppose, meant to sound like profound reflections on her life, but which are more akin to self-help manual platitudes. Thus:

“I know it wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t mine either. But as with much of what we experience in life, we are not just shaped by the incidents themselves. How we react to them is at least as important. How we deal with them afterwards. There was nothing either of us could have done about the accident. But afterwards, there were choices. And there have been choices ever since….” (pp.167-168)

I am a little intimidated in reviewing this book, because its end-pages include not only a six-page (anonymous) interview with the author, in which she explains her inspiration and motives; but also fully eight pages of extracts from laudatory reviews of Olsson’s earlier novels, written by reviewers both estimable and not-so-estimable. We are also reminded that Olsson’s novels have been big best-sellers and some of them have been translated into nearly 20 foreign languages. So who am I to disagree with all this?

But with the deepest regret, I closed A Sister in My House with the distinct impression that I had been reading soap-opera striving to be psychological revelation. 

FOOTNOTE: Subsequent to this review's appearing, the author contacted me and said the novel was written simultaneously in Swedish and English, so neither version is a translation.

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“THE CITY AND THE MOUNTAINS” by Jose Maria Eca de Queiroz (“A CIDADE E AS SERRAS” published posthumously 1901; first English language translation by Roy Campbell, published in 1955; second English language translation by Margaret Jull Costa 1998)

You may be wondering why, for the third time, I am dealing with the Portuguese novelist Jose Maria Eca de Queiroz (1845-1900), comments upon whose novels Cousin Bazilio and The Relic have already appeared on this blog. The reason is quite simple. For years, six of Eca de Queiroz’s novels have sat unread on my bookshelves, so I have set myself the task of reading them all this year. And here come my comments on The City and the Mountains, which was first published in 1901, one year after Eca de Queiroz’s death. Unlike the two novels upon which I have already commented, The City and the Mountains represents a gentler sort of satire. Apart from the odd jab, there is not the insistent anti-clericalism that is found in the other two novels; and while society is often shown to be pretentious and hypocritical, the novel’s real basis is an ancient fable.

Put simply, The City and the Mountains is a version of the ancient tale (going back at least as far as imperial Rome) of the town mouse and the country mouse. City life is contrasted with country life, the city being the one which bewitched Eca de Queiroz and his generation of Portuguese intellectuals – Paris.

Some time in the 1880s, the first-person narrator Jose Fernandes (known throughout the novel as Ze) comes back to Paris after seven years spent in rural happiness on his Portuguese estate. In Paris he links up with his old friend Jacinto, a minor aristocrat to whom Ze frequently refers as “my Prince”. Although the two of them are only in their mid-forties, they frequently converse like old buffers, and spend a great deal of time drinking wine and puffing on cigarettes or cigars.

Reacting against his anti-liberal forebears, the wealthy Jancinto is clearly a believer in “progress” and nineteenth century Positivism. The narrator says Jacinto is “…quite ready to believe that the happiness and success of individuals, or even of nations, could be obtained through the development of mechanics and erudition.” (Chapter 1). Jacinto has  devised the formula “Absolute Knowledge multiplied by Absolute Power equals Absolute Happiness”. Jacinto is completely urbanised, hating raw nature (he gets uncomfortable even going for walks in the open air) and living in a large mansion on the Champs Elysees surrounded by thousands of books and every possible labour-saving device that has yet been invented – electric lights, dictaphones, typewriters, telephones, “theatrephones”, the telegraph, phonographs, automatic slicing machines for the chef, an elevator, a dumb waiter; indeed all the things that in the 1890s would have been regarded as cutting-edge technology.

Yet it is clear that Jacinto is becoming profoundly bored with his super-civilised life. He finds it hard to take pleasure in his rides through the Bois de Boulogne, recognising the superficiality of the flaneurs and upper classes who control “civilisation”. Also, in some low comedy episodes, we are shown that the latest technology doesn’t always function. A pipe bursts, splattering Jacinto’s mansion with hot water and ruining much of his library. This circumstance becomes the subject of a gossip column in Figaro. The electric lights go spluttering out at one crucial moment. The dumb waiter jams, stranding the chief dish of a society banquet midway between floors.

Of course the narrator isn’t impressed by this advanced technology even when it is working as it should. He dreams always of the simpler country life. While others are oohing and aahing over a “theatrephone” (apparently a telephone hooked up to a theatrical performance), Ze says “I seemed to be going down a lane with my cudgel over my shoulder. And then I thought I smelt, between the silk of the curtains, the fragrance of the pine-cones cracking on the farm house hearth: felt the warmth of the cattle-corrals brought by the breeze over the high fences: and heard the sound of the murmuring, lazy watercourses.”(Chapter 4).

Sick of being smothered by books and gadgets in Jacinto’s house, Ze moves out and briefly finds solace in a love affair, which leaves him drained and empty. He goes back to Jacinto, and finds the self-declared positivist suffering from sheer anomie [in the Webster’s dictionary sense of “personal unrest, alienation, and anxiety that comes from a lack of purpose or ideals”].:

“Nothing could be more sadly instructive than the sight of this supremely gifted man of the nineteenth century in the midst of all the instruments that strengthened his organs, sharpened his perceptions, and reinforced his senses, all these wires which disciplined the Universal Forces to his service, and the fifty thousand volumes filled with the knowledge of centuries – standing there defeated, with his hands in his pockets, and reflecting visibly in his facial expression and the flabby indecision of his yawns, the boredom and trouble he experienced in merely keeping alive.” (Chapter 5). Serving Jacinto’s needs is a black servant nicknamed Cricket, who often correctly diagnoses Jacinto as suffering from “surfeit”. Too damned much of everything kills all the joys of life.

To buck Jacinto up, Ze takes him to the (still uncompleted) basilica of Sacre Coeur in Montmartre where, surveying the panoramic view of the whole city, he gives Jacinto a scornful lecture on how cities confine and corrupt people. Jacinto seems (ruefully) to agree when the two of them are joined by one Maurice de Mayolle, a social dandy who lists all the intellectual fads he has been through “Wagnerian mythology… Nietszchism… Tolstoyism… Emersonism… Diabolism… Ruskinism.” He is now seeking ultimate truth in eastern mysticism. Disgusted by this, as any sane person would be, Ze and Jacinto beat a retreat back to the city for a slap-up meal.

But Jacinto’s anomie persists. He breaks with his (married) mistress Madame Oriel and attempts to divert and revivify himself with a European tour. It doesn’t work. He comes back more pessimistic than ever, spouting the dark, despairing philosophy of Schopenhauer and desperately quoting Ecclesiastes (“vanitas vanitatum” etc.). He still goes through the motions of polite (and limited) humanitarianism and hosting lavish society dinners, but his heart is no longer in it. Increasingly he harks back to fond images of rural Portugal where (in a semi-feudal society, please note) people seem to care sincerely for one another. His books no longer solace him. Says Ze:

“Sometimes in search of a single book he would demolish a whole tower of doctrine. He leaped over problems. He trampled religions. Glancing at a line in one book, scratching at an index in another, he seemed to question all books, to find interest in none, rolling about as if completely adrift in the vast wave of books that washed around him, and whelmed in the despair of ever fuinding a single book that could interest him.” (Chapter 7).

Jacinto’s salvation begins when a letter tells him that a decaying chapel in Portugal, dedicated to his ancestors, is being restored and he must travel back to supervise it. So off he sets for Portugal with Ze. Jacinto still regards Portugal as uncivilised, undeveloped and not really part of Europe.  “It’s a very grave thing to be leaving Europe”, he says (Chapter 8) as he farewells Paris. There is much humble farce as the journey is undertaken – missed railway connections and the loss of nearly all Jacinto’s luggage, including the hundreds of books he has packed. But this has the effect of stripping him of much of his “civilisation” and making him react more spontaneously to the things around him. When they lodge in their first Portuguese country home, Jacinto is appalled by its squalid state and primitve sleeping conditions. But he rapidly acquires a taste for wholesome peasant food and soon becomes enamoured of nature.

Let me no longer keep you in killing suspense. The countryside is the moral and physical salvation of this effete city-dweller. As Ze comments: “Amidst all that ideological verbiage one truth shone forth visibly – the reconciliation of my Prince to life. His resurrection was so certain after so many years lying in a soft grave, like a mummy wrapped round and round in the endless bandages of pessimism.” (Chapter 9).  Jacinto discovers there is real poverty among the tenants of his rundown family estate and, in the Tolstoyan manner, he becomes an “improver”, setting about doing good works and thus providing a real purpose in his life. But ironically, the country mouse Ze becomes bored with country life and decides to become a town mouse. Ze returns to Paris… except that he finds the city’s superficiality, vulgarity and obscenity are simply too much for him, and goes joyfully back to rural Portugal.

Gentle reader, I will not spell out in detail how this novel’s “happy ending” is contrived (marriage, children etc.) except to note that it is not as simple as it seems. Eca de Queiroz has correctly diagnosed the world-weariness that often infects the sybaritic city-dweller, but he is no Blut und Boden propagandist. Some critics (and blurb-writers) have interpreted The City and the Mountains as a simple tale of the joys of country life. But they ignore that careful irony of the same sort that prevents The Relic from becoming a simple anti-religious satire.

In the first place, the man who is telling the story (like the first-person narrator of The Relic) is deeply flawed and not always to be trusted in his judgments. At one point in the novel, he is revealed to be a fairly selfish sensualist who exploits women. Bored with Jacinto in Paris, Ze picks up a demi-mondaine and describes their relationship thus: “I loved that creature. I loved her with Love, with every kind of Love that is composed in the word Love, divine Love, human Love, bestial Love. I loved her as Saint Anthony loved the Virgin, as Romeo loved Juliet , and as the billy-goat loves the she-goat. She was stupid, she was unhappy. Deliciously I quenched my gaiety in the ashes of her sorrow: with ineffable delight I sunk my intellect into the density of her stupidness.” (Chapter 5). Easier to make use of a woman who is “stupid” and “sad”, and not surprising that the relationship doesn’t last.

In the second place – and this is the novel’s greatest irony – once Jacinto comes to love the countryside he immediately wants to “improve” it, especially after he has seen Ze’s well-maintained estate. And this of course means modernising it. In one of the novel’s punchlines, he even has a telephone installed in his country residence. For those with eyes to see, it is clear that Eca de Queiroz is implying the rural idyll will itself be taken over by modernity in due course, and is therefore something of an ephemeral daydream.

Interestingly, the sophisticated, cosmopolitan anti-clerical Eca de Queiroz holds back on his anti-church sentiments. Of course in Paris there is the spectacle of the upper classes reducing religious observance to a fashion statement. Madame Oriel, Jacinto’s sometime mistress, celebrates Lent in style by wearing an elaborate head-dress and gown. Ze describes “this supreme creation of the luxuries of Lent. It was truly marvellous. Over the velvet, in the shades of the curly feathers, in the priceless lace fixed with a gold pin, and made of the finest jet, nestled a perfect little crown of thorns!.... Madame Oriel, with a movement and a smile that seemed to spread more aroma and light about her, set off for the Madeleine.” (Chapter 3). Thus does the churchgoer mortify her flesh. Yet when it comes to the Portuguese peasants, the author might see their religion as retrograde, but he does not mock it. Indeed in this novel he spends more time ridiculing the various intellectual substitutes for religion pursued by the urban elite. None of them, of course, are designed to challenge their own privileged position.

Mind you, within the leisured classes there is a little flirting with what would later become known as “radical chic”. At a fashionable dinner party in Paris, there is an upper-crust anarchist who says he wishes a bishop or a general were at the party so that he could throw a bomb at them. Ze comments: “And while I considered him in shocked surprise, he, drinking huge gulps of Chateau-Yquem, declared that nowadays the only sensation left which was really a fine one, would be to annihilate Civilization. Neither science nor art, nor money, nor love could any longer give real and intensive pleasure to our satiated souls. All the pleasure to be got out of creating was already outworn. The only pleasure left was the divine pleasure of destruction.” (Chapter 4).

Ah me! This was less than two decades before the First World War gave the anarchist his dearest wish.

Very sad footnote: In Chapter 9 of The City and the Mountains, the narrator advises Jacinto on how to run his estate and what trees he should plant. He says “The tree that grows fastest is the Eucalyptus, the ridiculous and ugly Eucalyptus. In six years you could have the whole of Tormes hidden in Eucalyptus.” Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Portugal planted whole forests of the exotic Australian Eucalyptus, because the trees not only grew quickly but were an excellent cash crop in the making of paper and pulp. Also they burnt well and were used for kindling by generations of peasants. Alas, the Eucalyptus became a monster, being so easily combustible. In 2017, Portugal was swept by huge forest fires which wiped out about a third of the country’s foliage. Portuguese blamed the Eucalyptus and lamented its displacement of the indigenous oak. In the long run, Ze’s advice was bad advice.