A casual, chatty hop skip jumpy style that captivated me (but I can easily imagine would aggravate others) from page one, full of sardonic asides suchA casual, chatty hop skip jumpy style that captivated me (but I can easily imagine would aggravate others) from page one, full of sardonic asides such as
Yes, here it comes, the rain, like some cheap redemptive symbol in a story
Or, describing a priest –
Timothy Batty is in his sixties and has been in this game, beg your pardon, this calling since he was a young man.
He gives us the audience a few sly digs
If Salome’s home hasn’t been mentioned before it’s because you have not asked, you didn’t care to know.
And he not so much breaks the fourth wall as climbs through it to tease the reader
His long dark body is ridged with muscle, a pink scar zigzags across his back. Some private history there, don’t know him well enough to ask.
Or when he’s telling us about a down and out guy who occupies a couple of pages –
Can’t prove it to you, but he once had a high-paying job
Which reminds me that every time an author describes a character as “a man in his late thirties” or “a woman of middling years” I want to say wait, you invented these people, you should know exactly how old they are! Stop fobbing us off with this vagueness! Do your job! Here he is deliberately goading me -
This conversation takes place in the garden behind the church. No, more likely it happens inside the church itself, in one of the pews
Ha ha, Damon Galgut, you naughty author!
So here we have a wonderful hectic pell-mell slightly deranged narrator, the like of which I only once encountered before, in another favourite novel What I Lived For by Joyce Carol Oates.
As you know there are the Bad Bookers (Vernon God Little, The Sellout, The Sense of an Ending, so many others) and the Good Bookers (Troubles, The White Tiger, Sacred Hunger, not enough others) and this one is a Good Booker, in fact a Brilliant Booker. You might say the story is not so much (decline and fall of a white South African middle class family) and the main characters we have met before (arrogant son, narcissist elder daughter, withdrawn younger daughter, faithful family maid) but this just confirms my theory that a great author can take any threadbare old rope and Rumpelstiltskinishly spin it into gold, look at what Shakespeare did to all those tatty old tragedies that no one gave the time of day to.
A sharp glinting sliver of horror not confronted, glanced at and shuddered away from, then finally grasped. Sometimes the things that are closest to yA sharp glinting sliver of horror not confronted, glanced at and shuddered away from, then finally grasped. Sometimes the things that are closest to you are hardest to see. Now I have to know more. This tiny novel is not to be missed. It will only take you 90 minutes, or less. ...more
1) After the horrible misstep of The Mark and the Void I am so happy to report that Paul Murray is BACK.Skippy Dies is one of my all time favourite n1) After the horrible misstep of The Mark and the Void I am so happy to report that Paul Murray is BACK.Skippy Dies is one of my all time favourite novels and I knew it couldn’t be a one-off, and here is the proof.
2) Paul Murray has a rare, exquisite gift for writing about kids and the way they think and talk without looking like your dad in a nightclub. Poor PJ (aged 12) – we agonise along with him so much as he overthinks and applies way too much logic to his life. And he is like a tiny but just as annoying Bill Bryson - did you know that the human body contains two litres of non-human bacteria? No, me neither. Thanks PJ.
3) The Victorians had an excuse for writing freaking long novels, there was nothing else to do but read back then, it was either novels or catch smallpox or polish something or clean a mountain of shoes. They couldn’t even phone each other back then! But these days when I am frequently told TikTok and Instagram have destroyed modern attention spans and no one can concentrate for more than 23 seconds authors constantly deliver unto us enormous beasts like this one, 646 pages, what happened Hamish Hamilton, did all your editors die? This novel is more than somewhat too long.
4 ) It’s Flashback City. Paul Murray concocts some very excruciating situations for his colourful cast of characters - say for example a Big Decision – your character will be streaming their consciousness as they drive in their car (a lot of driving) towards the Big Decision and they will be forever flashbacking to the various bits of the story that led up to this moment (which we have already been through once). And this finally started to get on my nerves, I have to admit. Stop blathering about The Past all the time! I was heard to howl. Just get on with it! Please! This once! In fact one character berates another for doing just that, but actually, they all do it. And do they ever get on with doing the thing we've been waiting for them to do for the last 100 pages? Nope, this lot, they are the wild procrastinators, they never get on with it, never reveal feelings, never admit stuff, never leave, never explain except in their own minds where they explain and mull and ruminate about that thing that happened and that wedding day or that car crash. It wears you down.
5) I hate these fucking places, Caleb says. Everyone’s so self-congratulatory. Acting like they’re Che Guevara because they’re wearing their mam’s earrings? He looks round at the crowd and scowls. I bet you a million euro that when they’re not here performing their category, ninety percent of these people work for some tech firm that runs on tax evasion and Chinese labour camps.
Modern novels that are set in contemporary times have this perpetual tendency to turn into bitter black-humored sociological commentary – it seems to be inescapable. Bret Easton Ellis and Edward St Aubyn do it all the time, and it’s all over such novels as The Slap, The Ask, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Animals, Dietland and a trillion that I haven’t read.
6) This book is full of things that don’t happen. And it makes you think that your own life is also full of things that didn’t happen. Some of which we should be very glad about.
7) Two favourite quotes :
She’d opened the door and found him there and got a shock – though really it was more the shape of a shock, without the feeling, like the postman bringing you a letter with nothing inside it.
The girls are scrolling through a dating app and saying stuff like OMG that is literally the most terrifying man I’ve ever seen. "Have my own business with van” – great, perfect for disposing of your body
Then :
That’s a nice dog though. I would actually date that dog. Me too, they should have an app for available dogs.
8) If it wasn’t for all the flashbacking which makes your neck ache, being yanked this way and that way, and the one hundred pages too many, this is a 4.5 star novel.
This is a family saga. There’s this guy, he gets married, she's really fat, anyway she dies, it’s kind of sad. Or more like I knew I was supposed to fThis is a family saga. There’s this guy, he gets married, she's really fat, anyway she dies, it’s kind of sad. Or more like I knew I was supposed to feel sad. Their kid is what the book is about. Anyway she gets adopted and grows up and some other people die and get married, this and that. She gets married too and wouldn’t you know, he dies. It’s kind of funny, no really, it was. But really he was a jerk so she was better off. Then she married her father – hah, not really. It was a Woody Allen type situation. Nowadays I’m sure somebody from child services would have been involved but back then you could pretty much marry anybody. Look at Jerry Lee Lewis. Anyway her and Woody have some kids, everybody grows up and some people die. One of her friends shags a lot of guys, I remember that bit. 54. People get divorced quite a lot. She writes about flowers for a local rag, this goes on for years, and when she gets let go she is like to want to shoot the head off the editor. But she doesn’t, that was kind of disappointing. Not that I am a proponent of gun violence. I am not. But this story could of done with a plane crash or a family massacre to keep up the interest. Or somebody doing something. I know you might be thinking well instead of reading The Stone Diaries you should of been spending your time watching Tokyo Gore Police or House of 1000 Corpses. Well, I guess you may have a point at that.
4 stars rounded down to three because the last 3 sections sucked like a brand new vacuum cleaner
Patrick Melrose is 42, a London barrister (= pretty rich), married with 2 sons, and has a terrible time of things. This is a feel-bad novel, which youPatrick Melrose is 42, a London barrister (= pretty rich), married with 2 sons, and has a terrible time of things. This is a feel-bad novel, which you already knew it would be if you read any of the previous Patrick Melrose novels. He is not the cheery poster boy for embracing life and loving it, he is the ex heroin addict with a horrible past and a nearly unbearable present.
Edward St Aubyn fritters away his great gifts as a brilliant prose stylist and sculptor of boilingly icy dialogue on a whole lot of tired old stuff we have read a million novels about already : psychological observations of the married middleclass male, his struggles with fatherhood, his struggles with alcohol, his struggles with his penis, his adultery, his mid life crisis thing – and just to gain the reader’s total sympathy, Patrick’s main problem in this book is how his mother has given away the family chateau in France to some new age charitable foundation dedicated to drum banging and past life retrieval and fiddling about with people’s souls which is run by a dippy Irishman who is not at all as dim as he looks.
(As well as new age fads, Patrick/Edward spends his big vocabulary trashing other easy targets, like fat Americans, rich Americans, American motels – all this is tiresome. )
A lot of Mother’s Milk is taken up by intensely detailed accounts of infancy, and once again, we have kind of had this a lot before. Although his device of making the five year old talk like a thirtyfive year old is kinda funny.
But this is really the father’s story. Patrick Melrose writhes in great spasms of disappointment the whole time. I would guess that none of this is something us readers will be shedding big jewel-like tears over. Oh oh oh, this huge French house should be mine, mine mine - I mean ours, dear. He is already rich enough, on what planet should he be even richer?
We have to read Mother’s Milk for something other than an interesting plot or engaging sympathetic characters or unusual subjects. It’s the last place you would look.
Instead we get unremitting and highly, highly entertaining nastiness. Reviewers call this novel venomous, caustic, sardonic, scathing and ascerbic, and I do not disagree. Untrammeled self-loathing male arrogance has rarely been more elegantly spewed forth :
He could live without her as long as he knew that she couldn’t live without him. That was the deal the furiously weak made between their permanent disappointment and their temporary consolation.
If he had one thing to say to the world, it was this : never, never have a child without first getting a reliable mistress.
He envied the male spider who was eaten straight after fertilizing the female, rather than consumed bit by bit like his human counterpart.
Very occasionally our author allows Patrick’s wife one of these one-liners. They are staying in a motel and she is thinking about its delights :
And a machine down the corridor whose shuddering ejaculations of ice reminded her unwillingly of the state of her marriage
It’s a shame we didn’t get to the part where she kicks out this drunken motormouth Olympic gold standard self-pitier.
3.5 stars for all the great you-can’t-say-that! moments....more
This review discusses the whole plot, so SPOILERS all the way.
*
The Bible is full of tremendous soundbites that don’t stand up to much scrutiny.
Judge This review discusses the whole plot, so SPOILERS all the way.
*
The Bible is full of tremendous soundbites that don’t stand up to much scrutiny.
Judge not, lest ye be judged.
Well, there goes one entire branch of government. In Disgrace everybody gets very harshly judged. The main guy in whose loathsome mind we are trapped for the whole journey is a supercilious condescending white professor. You will already know we are in post-Apartheid South Africa so race is central to everything that happens. This guy David Lurie has a sense of entitlement the size of Table Mountain, especially when it comes to women. He’s 52 and up to now he’s been a self-satisfied sexual barracuda, women fall for him right and left. And he judges them, each and every one.
He reminded me of an English Literature professor version of Jack Donaghy from 30 Rock who one day barks an order to his assistant about an older female member of staff
Fire her. And don’t ever make me talk to a woman that old again.
Prof Lurie loves to swoop down on one of his 30-years-younger students and impress them into sex by waving his big hard professorship in front of them.
He letches after the 20 year old charms of Melanie Isaacs. The reader is not sure if this girl is black or white, it’s left ambiguous. (In the movie she was played by a light skinned black actress.) He coerces her into sex a few times. Looking back, he realises that she wasn’t really into him, how sad. But no, he didn’t force himself, he thinks :
Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core.
This is queasy stuff. If it was undesired to the core, then, er, wasn’t it rape? This whole novel is about queasy stuff, written in a cool swift style.
Melanie complains to the university authorities about his sexual harassment of her. They request him to appear before a panel of judges. Professor Lurie hates to be judged. He should do the judging, not them. They ask him oh so respectfully about the nature of his relationship with Miss Isaacs. Well, he thinks, even if it was a bit rapey, that’s my nature. I was overtaken by Eros. Beautiful women don’t own their beauty. It’s for everyone, especially 52 year old white guys. Yes, he really thinks that. He thinks you can’t legislate people into being untrue to their natures. You might just as well command a frog to become a wombat or a lion to stop biting those young soft gazelles. He is an essentialist.
So he refuses to apologise and he is fired out of the university. He goes off to stay with his lesbian daughter Lucy who lives way out in the countryside on a tiny farm looking after dogs and growing flowers, all jolly and bucolic until the big disaster happens.
Three black guys saunter by the farm one day and break in and beat up the professor & set him on fire (sounds worse than it was) and gang rape Lucy (just as bad as it sounds). She then decides not to tell the cops about the rape. Later, the youngest of the home invaders appears as a house guest in her black next door neighbour’s house. And she still doesn’t want to say anything. And she’s pregnant.
Her passivity and decision to stay at her farm alone and in danger, a total capitulation to the perpetrators, a disgraceful thing, you might say, is incomprehensible to many readers and seems only to make sense if it’s read symbolically.
Because the symbolic meaning of all this hot mess is reasonably clear. The white people are now living under a different dispensation, and they better get used to their new subservient role. David complains bitterly, and daughter Lucy meekly accepts this transfer of power in a spirit of reparation. (We notice that both of them in different ways chose not to defend themselves.)
That seems to be the jist of the thing, and if so, it’s brutal, and it’s not surprising that the ANC denounced this novel as racist in April 2000. (When JM Coetzee won the Nobel Prize three years later they retreated somewhat and embraced him as a great South African.)
I confess I couldn’t stop reading this but I found I did not love it like so many people have. I mean the whole thing is like staring at a nasty traffic accident.
Ten large bags of BLANDNESS 14 kg of EVASION 27 litres of VAGUENESS A bucket or two of INSINUATIONS A generous grating of DARKThe recipe for this novel is
Ten large bags of BLANDNESS 14 kg of EVASION 27 litres of VAGUENESS A bucket or two of INSINUATIONS A generous grating of DARK HINTS Mix well with five enormous slabs of CRUSHING CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS Sprinkle with DISCONCERTINGLY INCOMPLETE SELF-DECEPTION
Serve ice cold
***
Everyone talks in stilted formal plum-in-mouth style :
It was the greatest impertinence to come here like this and disturb your afternoon.
Excuse me for mentioning this to you, Father. No doubt, it would have already occurred to you.
We at our office are at something of a loss as to the most appropriate way of showing our respect.
And all the dialogue in the entire book plus a great deal of the mournful meanderings that is the rest of it is like this. So this short book does need some patience. It will be hard for a modern reader not to be doing some furious eyerolling, pencil tapping and/or knee twitching during the reading of this book.
Oh, and there is a plot, I guess, but you’ll have to find it with a magnifying glass and get an expert to check if it really can be classed as a plot.
And plus, this book, as every review rightly points out, is THE EXACT SAME STORY as his very next novel The Remains of the Day which is a stone classic and way better than this one. (The story being that old farts after World War Two uneasily contemplate being on the wrong side during the war.)
If you like the sound of all this, give it a whirl. I hope I have not put you off.
My driving instructor used to say that he wanted me to drive in such a manner that if there was a cup of tea sitting on the roof of the car there woulMy driving instructor used to say that he wanted me to drive in such a manner that if there was a cup of tea sitting on the roof of the car there wouldn’t be a drop spilled by the time we came back, and this novel does just that. Its hardcore gentleness is a mask for a melancholy swandive into the grim realities of being old and useless and lonely and on the way out.
These four old codgers in London in the 1970s, none of them have any family or friends, they work together in an office doing virtually nothing for an unnamed organisation while a fine layer of dust sifts gently over their lives and having completed their waxing decades ago, if they ever did wax, they are for sure waning now. The two women retire partway through the story and the whole thing is about all the things they then don’t do, and just a few tiny things they do. We are very familiar with this kind of soft, hushed comedy here in Britain. It turns up (beautifully) in Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor, (not so beautifully) in How it All Began by Penelope Lively, and more recently in The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling (that one modulates from gentle to less gentle comedy and finally to lurid tragedy. But it starts in Barbara Pym territory). And it can be seen in a zillion sitcoms. And in the funnier films of Mike Leigh.
Also, Barbara Pym very deliberately turns this novel into a repository of cliched, worn-out, tedious, tiresome well known English phrases and sayings – her characters have their whole lives been prisoners of convention in deed and in thought, so they come out endlessly with stuff like
That’s about the size of it Beggars can’t be choosers Pushing the boat out Nice work if you can get it They’ll hardly thank us for that Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb It’s almost like old times One is at a slight disadvantage Thank you for nothing And so on, and on.
I like my comedy to have a little more grit, bite, nastiness and and bile than this, but I will say that the sense of teetering on the edge of eternity, the uneasy apprehension of the thin membrane that separates sanity from chaotic horror, drifts through these unremarkable scenes like poison gas. ...more
There were too many sentences in this book. This is a hefty 436 page very long very autobiographical novel which tells a straightforwardly miserable sThere were too many sentences in this book. This is a hefty 436 page very long very autobiographical novel which tells a straightforwardly miserable story about an alcoholic mother and her youngest son. It’s the Shuggie and Agnes Show but there are no laughs and any dancing is a pure embarrassment. Instead there is a whole lot of effing and blinding and throwing things, and enough tears to float a flock of geese. Not only is nobody laughing, the only smiling is of that ghastly fake sort when Agnes is trying to pretend she’s sober.
This is Glasgow in the 80s and 90s, wall to wall unemployment and life lived through a thick fog of cigarette smoke and Stella Artois. All the welfare benefit payments dished out to Agnes go swirling down her throat and the two kids she has left have to find their own food. Leek, Shuggie’s older brother, has only one word of advice to him – leave as soon as you can.
The heartbreak is that Shuggie loves his fall down drunk mother to distraction, and as is the way these things go sometimes, between the age of 10 and 15 he becomes her parent, and finds himself having to do a lot of nasty stuff that no kid should ever have to do for his mother. All of which we get in great detail.
Since this book gets nothing but 4 and 5 stars and as you know it won the big bad Booker Prize it’s clear that readers appreciated the banquet of human unhappiness that is this forlorn relationship. After his brother and sister escape, Shuggie is on his own with his terrible mother. If this was a movie, a Lowest Point would be reached but then some glint of light would appear in the form of a decent man, finally, after all the drunken one night stands. He would find Agnes sparked out on the floor and discover there was no food in the house (“What’s this? Nothing to eat all day Shuggie?”) and he would stick around and some tiny unextinguished spark of humanity would begin to grow in Agnes’ mind.
But this is no movie script so that doesn’t happen. There are hundreds of pages in this novel where not only do things not get any better, they never even look for a minute as if they could possibly get better, and Shuggie Bain turned into johnny one-note.
Just like a great song uses the exact same five or six chords every other ordinary song has previously used and creates magic, this guy Donal Ryan doeJust like a great song uses the exact same five or six chords every other ordinary song has previously used and creates magic, this guy Donal Ryan does nothing at all we haven’t seen or read a hundred times before, the same kind of human disasters, and yet he creates magic. In a small Irish town a whole lot of people are leading variously unhappy lives and tiny chapter by tiny chapter they tell you direct-to-camera about what’s on their mind. That’s all there is to it. There ain’t much plot. There are a couple of incidents. I did count 62 characters in these 156 pages but it’s okay, you only have to remember 16 really.
All the characters of course speak in their beautiful wry Irish vernacular –
He’d have gotten some hop if I’d left him off out thinking he was the boy his mother told him he was.
He’s the pure solid cut head off of his father.
I don’t like the sound of getting made little of from pillar to post.
She smoked fags into my face and got the world of ash on my lovely clean carpet.
There are rakes of men around here that have called to me, I’ve had years of eyes at my door.
There was something wrong with his heart, it wouldn’t stay beating.
This last was about a premature baby, the saddest line in the whole book.
The big thing about The God of Small Things is the prose, it’s quite something. To be more specific, it’s phosphorescent, forensic, moist, listopian, The big thing about The God of Small Things is the prose, it’s quite something. To be more specific, it’s phosphorescent, forensic, moist, listopian, inflammable, jubilant, childlike, zygotic, hierophantic, susurrant, daemonical, yeasty, garrulous, exact, oleaginous, quaggy, kleptomaniacal, newlyminted, refulgent, blinding, xenogamic, wounding, vulpine, uncanny and taxonomical but allegedly never aleatory.
Buried under and squirreled away in the middle of this great mass of mostly (beautiful, confounding) child-eye-vision noticing and describing is a knot of connected violence (random and intended), the engorged heart of the matter, that throws various lives round as you might expect. Readers have to be patient, this is not about plot, it’s about how a writer can arrive out of nowhere and at age 35 publish a first novel that creates a bidding war then knocks everyone out and then wins the Booker Prize.
After that, by the way, there was (fictional) silence .
SOME AUTHORS WHO TOOK A WHILE TO FOLLOW UP THEIR SUCCESSFUL FIRST NOVEL
Joseph Heller – 13 Years (Catch-22 1961 to Something Happened 1974) Marilyn Robinson – 24 years (Housekeeping 1980 to Gilead 2004)
And the champ
Henry Roth – 60 years (Call It Sleep 1934 to Mercy of a Rude Stream 1994)
Ms Roy is in the middle, she only took 20 years to follow up The God of Small Things with The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.
But back to this extraordinary book. Here’s a flavour of what you are going to get. First a description of how one character descends into muteness:
Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory; dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there.
But a whole lot of this book, maybe most, is seen through the eyes of two children aged seven, so we have a lot of almost Joycean weirdness like this:
Estha saw how Baby Kochamma’s neckmole licked its chops and throbbed with delicious anticipation. Der-Dboom, Der-Dboom. It changed color like a chameleon. Der-green, der-blueblack, dermustardyellow. Twins for tea It would bea.
And we have many, many little lists too :
Then the policemen looked around and saw the grass mat. The pots and pans. The inflatable goose. The Qantas koala with loosened button eyes. The ballpoint pens with London’s streets in them. Socks with separate colored toes. Yellow-rimmed red plastic sunglasses. A watch with the time painted on it.
SIMILEWATCH
As usual I like to spot the funny similes that authors love to heap up, it’s like some of ‘em think similes are what writing a novel is for. Here are some favorites (my own little list) :
Like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant Like substandard mattress-stuffing Like shining beads on an abacus Like a room in a hospital after the nurse had just been Like lumpy knitting Like hairy cannonballs Like an unfriendly jewelled bear Like sub-tropical flying-flowers Like an absurd corbelled monument that commemorated nothing Like a press of eager natives petitioning an English magistrate
INDIAN WRITERS
For me they divide into the plain
R K Narayan Rohinton Mistry Adiga Aravind Sunjeev Sahota Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
And the flowery
Salman Rushdie Nadeem Aslam Kiran Desai And Arundhati Roy
Which is not to say that the plain can’t turn a delightful phrase or the flowery can’t think up a decent story.
I CONFESS I AM A LITTLE SURPRISED
That The God of Small Things gets so much readerlove as it does. It’s eccentric and often confusing, maddeningly detailed and slow-burning and I can imagine it won’t be everybody’s bright green mocktail with a paper umbrella. The 336 pages can read like 500 at times, because there’s an intricate (disrupted, fractured) sequence of events and understandings to be fitted together, and the author takes her own time.
So, I know it won the Booker Prize, but don’t let that put you off....more
Whatever novel I read after Middlemarch was going to have a hard time. It was a rare thing to inhabit the mind of George Eliot for two weeks, nothing Whatever novel I read after Middlemarch was going to have a hard time. It was a rare thing to inhabit the mind of George Eliot for two weeks, nothing after that was going to be even half as good, probably. Anita Desai drew the short straw and she won’t be happy about that. Sorry, Anita. Your novel is okay-ish, that is, it’s not terrible, but er… well… hmmm….
Actually, between you and me, I didn’t think it was up to much. It gets a lot of Goodreads love but I could have done without it. I can’t think I would ever bitterly regret not having read this novel. Four middle-class kids grow up in Delhi, the parents are distant bridge-playing don’t bother me I’m busy types. The kids are frankly kind of cliched – arrogant son who expects sisters to obey his every whim, older plain Jane sister at war with everybody & taking all responsibility, younger pretty sister something of an airhead, youngest brother mentally impaired. He is obsessed with an old wind-up gramophone. He plays the same bunch of 78s over and over. That would get on your nerves. I like “Lili Marlene” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” as much as the next guy but I couldn’t take them every day of the week. And I thought the number of times Anita Desai detailed this obsessive behaviour was verging on the obsessive itself.
Half the book is set in the present where the family has disintegrated – cue much moping and maundering about the past, the past oh the past and how the house needs repainting now and wasn’t it sad when the cow fell in the well; and the other half is in 1947 just before Partition when fortunately for this family they avoid all the mayhem.
One of the major conflicts in the story is when Bim (older sister) is trying to decide whether to sell the shares in their father’s insurance company. I mean, it’s not Dostoyevsky, is it.
I saw that in 2004 the Sunday Times played a sneaky trick on the book world. They sent off the opening chapters of three Booker Prize winners to some I saw that in 2004 the Sunday Times played a sneaky trick on the book world. They sent off the opening chapters of three Booker Prize winners to some agents and publishers pretending they were new unpublished novels, to see if a) they were recognised, and b) if they weren’t recognised, if their excerpts would get any attention. Only one of their victims wanted to see more of the work. The three novels they used were In a Free State by V S Naipaul, The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer, and this one, Holiday by Stanley Middleton.
The other thing I saw is that this guy Stanley Middleton wrote 44 novels and pretty much nobody reads him any more. Well, a lot of writers have written 44 novels that nobody reads no more but the idea makes me feel so tired. All that clack clacking on a typewriter. Miles and miles of ribbon.
Holiday is like Mr Phillips by John Lanchester. In that one a middle class nobody has lost his job but doesn’t tell his family so he leaves the house pretending to go to work and mooches about all day and the novel is what’s going on in his head. In Holiday a different middle class nobody has left his wife and gone on holiday and mooches about all day and the novel is what’s going on in his head.
Cue ten thousand gloomy, piquant, self-loathing observations about English life.
But right now I’m done with English self-loathing. You can have too much of a good thing....more
Firstly, I am informed that you died in 2000 at the age of 83, but I feel this should not mean that I am unable to write to you, aDear Miss Fitzgerald
Firstly, I am informed that you died in 2000 at the age of 83, but I feel this should not mean that I am unable to write to you, although I do realise an answer may not be forthcoming as soon as I might wish.
I recently finished your novel Offshore. It was a pleasant contrast to the previous novel I read, which was Crime and Punishment. From lengthy Russian existential horror to slight English whimsy! Like lying down in a sunlit meadow after being involved in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
But I do have a complaint to make, hence this letter. Your novel is set in 1962, there are dates and ages of characters provided to establish that, plus Martha the 12 year old girl loves Elvis and Cliff Richard. So that’s clear. But then on p137 a teenage boy from Austria pipes up and says
I am very much looking forward to seeing Swinging London
Miss Fitzgerald, he could not have said that in 1962 as London had not started swinging yet. You might say the swinging began around 1964/5 with the advent of the Mods but as far as I know the term was first used by Time Magazine in April 1966. So this appears to be an anachronism in your novel.
The error is continued and compounded when Martha and this Austrian lad visit boutiques which are described just like they would have been in 1967:
Heinrich and Martha went in and out of one boutique after another, Dressing Down, Wearwithal, Wearabouts, Virtuous Heroin, Legs, Rags, Bags, A paradise for children, a riot of misrule, the queer looking shops reversed every fixed idea in the venerable history of commerce. Sellers, dressed in brilliant colours, outshone the purchasers, and instead of welcoming them, either ignored them or were so rude that they could only have hoped to drive them away.
What a glittering description of the Kings Road boutiques five years after your novel was set! I was wondering if this was some deliberate alienation device or if you just had some kind of major brain fade when you wrote this, and no one, agents, editors, reviewers, nobody noticed. Or if they did they did not think it worth mentioning.
But I did.
Otherwise, Offshore was the perfect antidote to Dostoyevsky, who, in turn, is the perfect antidote to novels like Offshore.
Hoping you are having a reasonable time in the afterlife,
1) Western writers on British India seem a bit obsessed with sex between English women and Indian men. There was A Passage to India by Forster in 19241) Western writers on British India seem a bit obsessed with sex between English women and Indian men. There was A Passage to India by Forster in 1924 – the plot turns round a charge of rape of an English woman by an Indian man. Then The Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott in 1966 – another charge of rape of an English woman by an Indian man. Then Heat and Dust in 1975 which gives us the shocking tale of an English woman who elopes with an Indian man.
2) This novel is another of those very melancholy drooping meandering quiet humble softly despairing everything under the surface not really a plot at all books like Hotel Du Lac and Staying On and The Remains of the Day. They can be brilliant – Remains of the Day is really great – but sometimes you want to light a jumping jack under their arses. Heat and Dust was just eurghhhhhhh.
3) 1975 must have been a dire year if this won the Booker Prize....more
Roddy Doyle is a wonderful comic writer - The Commitments and The Snapper are both Recommended - but this one is off-the-scale irritating. People who Roddy Doyle is a wonderful comic writer - The Commitments and The Snapper are both Recommended - but this one is off-the-scale irritating. People who finish it and even actually like it clearly love kids way more than I do....more
“What’s this? Three measly stars for a book by a writer Mr Robert McCrum called “the greatest living writer of English prose” and said A Bend in the R“What’s this? Three measly stars for a book by a writer Mr Robert McCrum called “the greatest living writer of English prose” and said A Bend in the River was his masterpiece. And he includes it in his list of the 100 best novels EVER. Like, EVER.”
“Well, you know, a cat may look at a king and blah blah…”
“So what was the problem this time? Or maybe you just don’t like novels anymore? Ever thought of that?”
“Well I guess I thought that VS Naipaul was Johnny One Note. You’ll remember him :
Johnny could only sing one note And the note he sang was this:
Everything’s going to hell in a hand basket, especially in Africa.”
“That’s it? 300 pages of everything’s going to hell?”
“Well, yeah, kind of. Salim the narrator is totally depressed and almost sleepwalks through the whole thing, except the part where he beats up his girlfriend ('I used my foot on her then'), he sparks into life for that bit. Oh, and the girlfriend says she didn’t mind.
Do you want me to come back? The road is quite empty. I can be back in twenty minutes. Oh, Salim. I look dreadful. My face is in an awful state. I will have to hide for days.
This girlfriend also says this famous quote :
Women are stupid. But if women weren’t stupid the world wouldn’t go round.”
“Ah, I am detecting another snowflakey response here…”
“It’s just the usual thing – it would be infantile to think the author is nasty like his own characters – but it does seem the beating up of the girlfriend was something the author actually did do at least once, according to the authorised biography.”
“But I think it’s a well known fact that VS Naipaul was not going to win a prize for selling the most gingerbread cookies on behalf of the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association, he was pretty much a professional curmudgeon. So none of this is hold the front page.”
“Well, I acknowledge that to be quite true. But I’m a bit bemused by how much praise this miserable novel gets. A Bend in the River is an equal opportunities slagfest, everybody gets it in the neck, Africa, Europe, the USA, there’s a general all-purpose sneer and despairing shrug that can feel stifling for a poor reader. Like, come on, VS, don’t you have a good word for anything? No? But the book itself is a complicated case.”
“How so?”
“Well the author was from an Indian Hindu family but he was born in Trinidad then moved to England. This novel is about life in Zaire, as it was then, under the unpredictable great ruler Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga who had a baffling way of describing his politics : “neither left nor right, nor even centre”. So this is a post-colonial country and Naipaul the outsider is writing about Salim, another outsider. For pages and pages we get generalisations about Africa flung about like confetti and the strong implication is that Mobutu, and by extension other African dictators, are making a terrible job of running the country. But Salim is such a passive whiner – everything is mildewed, my shop is going down the drain, I hate all my friends, I’m rotting away here in the back of beyond which I volunteered to come to. Oh me, oh my. It's impossible to drum up much sympathy for his sorry ass.
Everyone had become more greedy and desperate. There was this feeling of everything running down very fast, of a great chaos coming
and so forth....”
“So to counter the bracing misanthropy of Sir VS Naipaul, Nobel laureate, (you see how the establishment loved this guy) you should probably read Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane next, or perhaps The Little House on the Prairie."