Something New

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

“STAKES – Dracula and the secret to happiness” by Noelle McCarthy   (Penguin $NZ40)

Before I get to the reviewing part I have to say that Stakes is an excellent and very readable book. Noelle McCarthy writes with gusto and she has a unique way of expressing herself – dare I say it’s a very Irish way with some of the country’s patois. She’s no damned fool either. When it comes to writing about 19^th century books she has done her research and she is right about the way women were treated – often badly. But there was one thing that confused me. In her first book Grand – Becoming My Mother’s Daughter [reviewed on this blog] she told us about her alcoholism and coming out of it and settling in New Zealand, Auckland. She also told us about her time working on New Zealand Radio. But when we come to Stakes, we are not sure where and when these events were. This is a very little gripe.

So to the tale itself.

When she was a young teenager, living in Cork, she read Gothic stories and she became obsessed with Dracula. Indeed she saw Dracula as romantic. She left her window open and dreamed that Dracula might one night ravish her. She has very romantic ideas as when she says: [Pg 24]. “I stared at the path from the top of the rock to the sun hanging over the edge of the horizon, and I felt a longing so strong, it filled my mouth with saliva. I wanted to walk that golden track, out over the smooth water right up into the sunshine and be transformed by it, turned by something magical. I didn’t care what, a mermaid, a see beast,  a flying angel. I wanted to be taken from this body, this version of myself, into the free thing I always should have been.”  This was of course hormones buzzing and youthful desire. A little further on, she got on with boys and more or less looked for sex. She read more Gothic stories. Much snogging, much petting, many details about almost loosing knickers and she heard about girl friends who had had sex [or could it be bravado?].  Somewhere around 15-years-of-age she lost her virginity apparently with a fellow called Daniel. [N.B. An author’s note tells us that, apart from her husband, all the men in Noelle’s book are ”composites”.] She is not overwhelmed by this first swive. [Pg.53] “I have a moment to think, why am I not as moved as moved him? Why am I not on the edge of crying? I lie in the dark with my eyes closed, taking in the new sensations of being next to someone I’ve just had sex with. This is going to happen with other people, the thought comes to me. Boys from college I haven’t even met yet. I will have sex and lie in the dark, and I’ll hear them breathing next to me. And then I push the thought from my mind, appalled by my own disloyalty.” When she goes to university she parties a lot and she has sex with a number of young men. She breaks up with Daniel. But she is serious in her study. She is interested in a lecture about how women were treated in 19^th century novels – almost seen as angels, though often seen as waiting to be ravished. She takes some time off to visit her friend Bernadette who is working in London [as a barmaid]. She picks up another boyfriend called Michael and they cohabit… and then she goes back to see her mother, who drinks a lot just as Noelle does. She learns about how her mother was a nurse and how she used to work in a psychiatric ward. And she is more aware that there is much about her mother’s life that she does not know.

She finishes her university time, having done very well. She writes about 19^th century Ireland. She is still interested in Gothic literature… and Dracula. When she goes to London she links up with friends and enjoys walking around with them around the streets where Jack the Ripper did his work. She works at a counter for a while… and she decides that she wants to leave Ireland.

Noelle first goes to Australia then moves to New Zealand, settling in Auckland. She has an affair with a guy, “Eric”, who is married. She finds a number of jobs in Auckland, but she loses many jobs because she is often drunk and hungover. The alcohol has caught up with her. So at last, with the help of others, she slowly gives up the booze. But there is loneliness now that she has dropped “Eric”. (Pg. 140]. She thinks “My life is small, manageable, contained. It is not so much that I like sobriety as that it is working. Nobody cares that I’ve stopped drinking. It doesn’t make one bit of difference to anyone else.” There is still the temptation to go back to drinking But she also says (Pg. 143] “ I have no problem coming back to the idea of the sinfulness I was born with. I am an alcoholic, inherently flawed, inherently weak. I am powerless over drinking, over the cavernous screaming want inside me.”… But she does still manage to be dry. She decides to go back to Ireland for a while; and there she is able to get work as a free-lance journalist. Still in awe of Dracula, she begins to write her own Gothic novel about vampires. She is very earnest about it and speaks to friends about it… but gradually she understands that it is not working and she lets it go. Even so she goes with some of her family – mother and father etc. – to places where Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, had lived and been interested in ancient castles and ruins. When she goes to Dublin, looking at all the places where Stoker lived and worked, she is more aware that Stoker was not really Irish but rather “Anglo-Irish”, meaning those English who had taken over parts of Ireland.

She is still interested in the ancient times of Ireland. With an archaeologist examining barbaric medieval things, she learns about the way children were mistreated and buried. At the same time she becomes more disenchanted by the Anglo-Irish writers who wrote about the Irish as if they were an inferior species … and she goes back to New Zealand. So she is now back doing work on New Zealand Radio… and she writes articles, including one about how young women want to be models: but they are often exploited and misused by photographers who want sex. She thinks about her life now that she has John and they have a baby and there is responsibility. She is now in her forties. And on the whole she no longer sees vampires as glamorous. They were really versions of men who exploited young women. She thinks about Ireland as it now is. It has changed considerably. There was a referendum in favour of making abortion legal which was once unthinkable in Ireland. There was the scandal when, under the supervision by nuns, many girls and young women were kept in the “homes” until they died. Even worse were “homes” that were run by nuns who took in “illegitimate” new-born children… and research recently showed that many hundreds of new-borns died early and were buried without names. The status of the church plummeted.

And Noelle looks once again at her mother. She now knows that her mother was deprived of her real training as a nurse. She now also knows that – before Noelle was born – her mother had a child out of wedlock, and the baby was adopted out. Noelle feels that she has missed having a sister; and she diligently went though the records to find out where this sister now was. She finally finds her. Her name is Janet. Janet dies . She writes [Pg. 260] “I do not know that I really believed in Dracula, a long pale man with no refection and gleaming teeth. I don’t know that I believed if I left the bedroom window open, he’d actually come in. I believe in death though, the photos on my dresser: Mammy with her dahlia, and Janet grinning in the café the last time I met her.”

Footnote: My wife, who is of distant Irish descent, has already told me off for just giving you a synopsis rather than passing judgment in detail. Sorry for that. Must admit though that Noelle’s teenage and young adult life almost seems like Molly Bloom or Edna O’Brien. Are all Irish girls like that? And once again, Noelle has written a great book.

 

 

 

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 year or two ago. 

JOURNAL D’UN CURE DE CAMPAGNE by Georges Bernanos [First published in 1936] First published in English in 1937 as The Diary of a Country Priest.

 

There is no doubt that Journal D’un Cure de Campagne is the most widely read of all Bernanos’s novels. As soon as it was published, it was seen as Bernanos’s masterpiece. He was awarded the Grand Prix de l’Academie Francaise and the novel is still being published, not only in French but in many languages. Years after Bernanos died, Journal D’un Cure de Campagne was made into a film by Robert Bresson, very true to the novel but of course missing much of the priest’s thoughts. As the title tells us, this novel is written in the first person. What we read is what the priest thinks and writes. He has decided to write his diary during one year. This means a degree of artificial language presented by the priest when he gives us verbatim accounts of conversations he has had, but this is a common way of presenting conversations in novels. An alert reader will also be aware that the novel was written after the First World War, when many French people had memories of great loss.

 

The priest [who is not given a name] is a young man, about thirty-years-old. He has been directed to Ambricourt to be in charge of a parish. His church is a small church that was built in the 15^th century. We are aware from the beginning of the novel that the young priest is in poor health. Is he perhaps suffering from tuberculosis or some other complaint? He has been in a sanatorium. His opening words are “My parish is just like all the rest. They are all alike. Those of today I mean… good and evil are probably evenly distributed…”  He is aware that priests are not frivolous, but he is sometimes annoyed when priests are being too interested in pointless anecdotes. Some older priests see him as naïve.  He soon knows that the land he has been sent to is flat and the surrounding fields are usually wet. He makes it clear that he himself came from peasant stock and he was not used to the upper classes. In fact his father owned a rather shabby pub and he often heard fights going on. When he was quite young he had read and admired Maxim Gorky’s account of his impoverished childhood. He has little money to feed himself but sometimes his Aunt Philomene sends him some money. His superior, who often speaks to him, is the Cure de Torcy who seems very worldly and at first the young priest thinks the Cure de Torcy is too interested in keeping order rather than looking after his flock. But he soon understands that his superior knows more than he thought. The Cure de Torcy talks about the decay of the church, how fewer people go to mass and some people go to confession only as a formality. But he also makes it clear that his mission is to look after people, even if they are rough, even if they are uncouth. Referring to the Nativity, the Cure de Torcy says “Bring down fresh straw for the ox, give the ass a rub down”. The message is that nobody is to be looked down upon, even the poorest … and at the same time, the wealthy have to be looked after in a different way. Later the Cure de Torcy gives to the young priest the most compelling lecture about poverty and their duty to always look after the poor. The young priest seems at first not to know how most people get their food. So the young priest writes in his diary “I have undertaken to visit each family once every three months at least. My colleagues consider this excessive, and indeed such a promise will be hard to keep, since first and foremost I must not neglect a single duty. People who set themselves up to judge us from some remote distance, sitting in a comfortable office where they do the same routine tasks every day, cannot begin to realize how ‘untidy’, how scattered our daily work can be. We can barely manage our ordinary parochial round, the kind of thing which – when it is strictly carried out – makes a superior to exclaim ‘That’s a nice well-kept parish!’ There remains the unforeseen. And the unforeseen is never negligible. Am I where Our Lord would have me be? Twenty times a day I ask this question..”

 

The young priest naturally has to deal with mundane things which are part of his work. He has to teach children the catechism… but they are often disrupted by an annoying little girl called Seraphita who learns her lessons very well but who often makes fun of him for the amusement of other children…. Yet much later in the novel it is annoying Seraphita who helps him when he is nearly lost. Of course he says mass regularly even if few are there; and he hears confession. There are other things that he does not fully understand. The Dean of Blangermont tells him off for not keeping accounts properly. He also tells him that he should not ridicule the rich and the middle-classes as they are also the backbone of the country.

Which brings us to that matter of the wealthy. The young priest has to deal with the people who live in the Chateau and he visits them.  Mlle. Louse is the governess at the Chateau. M. le Comte owns many farms… and he is apparently promiscuous… yet he gets on well enough with most priests … though the young priest sees him as shallow. Mlle. Chantal  - a young girl – hates her mother because she thinks her mother is the cause of the death of her brother. And Mlle. la Comtesse worries about both her husband and her daughter. The young priest has a hard time trying to speak with them.

The young priest becomes very sick and it is a Dr. Delbende who examines him. Dr. Delbende is a man who likes shooting in the fields. He explains why he is not a Christian – he is an atheist. He talks about unnecessary pain and gives the priest some pain-killing drugs. This does ease the priest for some time, and he is told that he should eat more as he has almost been starving himself… And then Dr. Delbende is found dead in the fields where he is said to have had his gun caught in a bush and it killed him. Surprisingly Dr. Delbende was a good friend of the  Cure de Torcy. The young priest suggests that the doctor might have committed suicide. The Cure de Torcy says “God is the sole judge” and says Dr. Delbende was “a just man”. At the very least, it is a warning about underrating people instead of being charitable. It leads the young priest to reflect on his own flaws. “No, I have not lost my faith. The cruelty of this test, its devastation, like a thunderbolt, and so inexplicable, may have shattered  my reason and my nerves, may have withered suddenly within me the joy of prayer – perhaps for ever, who can tell? – may have filled me to the very brim with a dark, more terrible resignation with the worst convulsions of despair… but my faith is still whole for I can feel it….” This is a stage when the young priest has doubts about his calling… and he is sent an  anonymous letter telling him to leave the parish. It could be anyone. Maybe  it could be a very angry woman called Mm. Ferrand who thinks something has been stolen from her… but it could be anyone. He is aware of evil in human beings.

At the Chateau, Mlle. Chantal continues to hate her mother. She believes that Mlle. la Comtesse was the source of her brother’s death and she therefore always sides with her father. Whenever the young priest visits the Chateau to talk with her mother, Chantal tries to eavesdrop on their conversation.  The young priest takes it upon himself to have a long conversation with the Comtesse. She has lost her faith in God. Although he is essentially a peasant and she is an aristocrat, he is able to get her to accept her daughter and understand her daughter’s anguish, right or wrong. She also again understands the workings of God. This is the longest conversation in the novel and it is very persuading. The young priest has spoken carefully and the old Comtesse also speaks carefully and intelligently. At first he thinks he has done something brilliant… and then he understands that pride is eating him up. His duty is to help and guide people, not to admire himself. More prayer is needed.

There is more trouble ahead. The old Comtesse dies. The Canon [the superior of the priests] says that M. le Comte wants the young priest to write an account of his conversation with the Comtesse. After all, it was only a conversation; not the hearing of confession. But the young priest cannot do it. He regards the conversation as personal and almost the same as  confession. The Comte is angry because he had hoped the priest would have heard about how much money the Comtesse had; and he was also annoyed because the priest has spoken to his angry daughter. Chantal has tried to compromise the priest, but it did not work.…There are always problems with the rich.

Later, showing how difficult a priest’s life can be, the young priest has a conversation with a peasant who says that many people think he is too precise and fancy in his work; and warns him that he does not eat enough and he is fading away. Once again the Cure de Torcy  tells him about what is needed to be a priest. On his own, the young priest thinks “We’re all called to the priesthood, I agree, but not always in the same way. So to get things straight I start off my taking each one of us back where he belonged in Holy Writ. It makes us a couple o’ thousand years younger, but what of it? Time does not worry our Lord, He sees right the way through. I tell myself that long before we were born – from a human point of view – Jesus met us somewhere, in Bethlehem, or perhaps Nazareth, or along the road to Galilee – anywhere. And one day among all the other days, His eyes happened to rest upon you and me, and so we were called, each in his own particular way… This isn’t theology I’m preaching… It’s simply my own imagination … it amounts to this: if the unforgetting soul in us, which remembers us eternally…” and here the young priest falls into thinks of his own situation.

He is more and more aware of his sickness. His nose is often bleeding  As he walks though the forest he thirsts for a drink of water. It is Seraphita who gives it to him. She has matured… or is he realising that there is good even in people who are flawed. He thinks about the way he prays. “Of course I am ‘praying better’ . But I no longer recognize my prayers.”

He now has to go to Lille to be seen by a Dr. Lavigne. On his way there, a young soldier gives him a ride and he has very different attitudes from those of the priest. The young soldier is annoyed with the Church as it is not as strong as it used to be and it is not as nationalistic as it used to be. He pines for the likes of Joan of Arc. He is not aggressive when he talks with the priest, but he believes that the Church has collapsed… and when the drive ends, the young soldier is courteous. [ Here I think Georges Bernanos is giving a warning about those who confuse Christianity with nationality. As a priest should know, nationalism is not his calling.]

Dr. Lavigne examines him.  Dr. Lavigne was once a morphine addict. He is an atheist as many doctors are; but nevertheless he is a very good doctor. He is able to show that the priest is not suffering from tuberculosis. What is slowly killing him is cancer of the gut… And now the priest has to consider what he can do in what will be his last days. One of the last people he speaks to is a poor working woman who says she is getting on even if she has little. He considers what he has done in his one year. Most of his parishioners have scorned him or have ignored him. His growing pain is slowly killing him. Yet something inside him says that he has seen good people, those who have helped him even if they weren’t really Christians; those who were growing; and he knows that he has done some good. Before he dies, his last words are “Grace is everywhere”. Nobody is to be scorned

Something Thougthful

  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.   

          WHERE CAN I FIND A SECOND-HAND BOOK SHOP? [or shouldn’t I bother?]

In days of old (by which I mean about twenty years ago) I was addicted to buying second-hand books. Very well, I am a bibliophile and about a quarter of the books I have on my shelves are books that I have bought from second-hand-book shops. But I was very choosy and bought only books that meant something. I made it a law to avoid the latest “best-sellers” which are usually trite. So, back then, when the week’s work was over and it was Saturday, I would catch a bus from the North Shore and go to central Auckland. In those days there were about five second-hand-book shops in central Auckland, so I would wander around those shops. They were just off  Queen’s Street. Then there was Ponsonby where there was an excellent second-hand-book shop run by a thoughtful man called Bryan Harold. I bought quite a number books from him. And very, very occasionally I would hop into my car and go to Onehunga, where there was another very good second-hand-book shop. And once or twice I went to Devonport where there were two competing second-hand-book shops. There where an abundant number of second-hand-book shops in Auckland .

And then one day I went into Bryan Harold’s shop and he was very gloomy. The rates had been raised so high that he could not pay them, and he had to close shop. He went down south, very far away from Auckland. And then the people who ran the Onehunga second-hand-book shop also had to close-up… but the priests who ran St. Benedict’s church allowed them to set up a second-hand-book shop in rooms where nuns had once taught children. For a number of years it worked. But bit by bit, second-hand-book shops disappeared in central Auckland. Yes, you can find small second-hand-book shops in some suburbs but they are mainly short of stock. In central Auckland there are some traders who offer very expensive first editions, which really can be bought only by the rich. So what is left if you are a bibliophile in Auckland looking for old but thoughtful books? You have to go the Book Mark in Devonport. I hasten to note that it is a very good second-hand-book shop and I usually have a good chat with the owner.  … At which point I have to admit that, as well as buying old books sometimes, I also sell new books to owners of second-hand-book shops. If you read this blog at all, you will be aware that I review new books – some of which are just off the print – but I do so very rarely.

But here is another problem.  Devonport is a charming place, but there is one difficulty. There is only one main road that leads to Devonport; and sometimes, every so often, when one drives back home, there maybe a long traffic jam. some visitors curse that they had gone there at all.

Meanwhile, second-hand-books shops thrive in other parts of New Zealand – especially in Wellington and Dunedin but also in smaller cities. My wife’s cousin Michael O’Leary runs a second-hand-books shop near to Wellington and I am glad to hear that Bryan Harold now runs a second-hand-books shop in the South Island.

Footnote: Many people have told me that Aucklanders prefer to buy their second-hand-books by getting them on line… you send the money and the book is sent to you. But this takes away the delight of being able to walk around a real second-hand-books shop and discover books that you had never heard of. And it’s a good place to chat with other bibliophiles.