Magic Maugham

Back to Somerset Maugham for good storytelling, well defined boundaries, relief from anything remotely post-modern, and just plain good writing. I’ve read most of his famous novels, so I picked up ‘The Narrow Corner’, published first in 1932.  Never heard of it.

It’s quite unlike anything else by him that I’ve read.  Yes, it’s a bit of a seafaring yarn; the locale is exotic and the characters are odd and idiosyncratic.  But the action is slow, and the main character is fascinating in a mostly passive way.  What he doesn’t do is more interesting than what he actually does. Another important character is quite funny and quaint.  But what distinguishes the book for me is its consistent focus on ideas, on approaches to life and the consequences thereof.  It’s almost Maugham’s ‘Magic Mountain’, though it’s not nearly as long or pedantic.  Take these passages, for example:

“Do you really want to know? I believe in nothing but myself and my experience. The world consists of me and my thoughts and my feelings; and everything else is mere fancy. Life is a dream in which I create the objects that come before me. Everything knowable, every object of experience, is an idea in my mind, and without my mind it does not exist. There is no possibility and no necessity to postulate anything outside myself. Dream and reality are one. Life is a connected and consistent dream, and when I cease to dream, the world, with its beauty, its pain and sorrow, its unimaginable variety, will cease to be.”

Another character responds, “You’re content to wallow in the gutter.”

“I get a certain amount of fun watching the antics of the other creatures that dwell there.”

And later, “I have acquired resignation by the help of an unfailing sense of the ridiculous.”

And the very last sentence of the novel:

 “He sighed a little, for whatever it was, if the richest dreams the imagination offered came true, in the end it remained nothing but illusion.”

Those are not exactly traditional British (or even Western) views.  The novel takes place in the South Seas where Western and Eastern cultures collide and mix in interesting ways.  The ideas are downright subversive for the time.  It’s interesting to compare this work to Hesse’s ‘Siddhartha’. Both books attempt to present non-Western approaches to life in the guise of a Western novel.  It’s not an easy thing to bring off, and as a novel I’m not sure this one is entirely successful.  The plot has some dull stretches, and at times Maugham uncomfortably stretches our credulity.  Characters sometimes act in ways that don’t seem quite real or believable.  But they do so to make a point.  Indeed a few minor characters seem to exist only to represent opposing viewpoints in the larger debate about how to live life.

All this may not make the most compelling novel, but it does raise lots of interesting questions.  Is it really possible to be resigned to the circumstances and happenings that life presents, or is that a luxury reserved for those that can afford it? Does a strong moral imperative inevitably lead to disappointment and heartbreak? Are strong feelings necessarily self-defeating?  Is it easier to be resigned from the outset to whatever is and never take up the fight to make a difference?  What if everyone took that approach?  How would society function?  What does that mean about capitalism?  What does it mean for religion? Does it help anyone or anything to truly attempt to be good? To love strongly and fully?

[As we approach commencement season, it strikes me that these are not the ideas we’ll hear in those commencement speeches.  No encouragement here for those graduates. There can be no real success, so why even try?]

Well, there is some fine writing.  My favorite passage is one in which the main character (Dr. Saunders) sees a glimmer of something deep in another character, a young man who so far had seemed uninteresting:

“Perhaps it was his good looks that deceived him, perhaps it was due to the companionship of Eric Christessen, but at that moment he felt that there was in the lad a strain of something he had never suspected. Perhaps there was there the dim groping beginning of a soul. The thought faintly amused Dr. Saunders. It gave him just that little shock of surprise that one feels when what looked like a twig on a branch suddenly opens wings and flies away.”

Yes, “faintly amused’.  That about sums up Maugham’s approach here.  Sit back, relax, watch carefully, and accept what happens.  Perhaps the best one can hope for is to be ‘faintly amused’ or perhaps a ‘little shock of surprise’. Getting ruffled and agitated or having strong feelings of any kind never seem to get anyone anywhere here. Interesting to remember that writers like Faulkner, Mann, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf were gaining critical acclaim at this time. Though Maugham’s voice is by comparison traditional, at least some of the ideas are not.

The Birth of Media Power?

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I had no idea what to expect when picking up ‘Arthur andGeorge’, by Julian Barnes.  I’d read ‘The Sense of an Ending’, and was very impressed with the sensitivity of the writing, the subtlety of thought and feeling, the integrity of the writer.  A collection of short stories also impressed me.  I just glanced through the Barnes section at Kepler’s, and picked it up.  It's a very well reviewed work (finalist for the Booker).  If acclaimed and by Julian Barnes, I couldn’t go wrong, right? I half-expected it to be a book about a gay almost-couple, but really had no idea.

Turns out to be historical fiction.  Arthur is none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes).  George is George Edalji, a modest first-generation Brit wrongly convicted of heinous crimes.  Arthur takes up the case after the fact, and does manage to have the stain erased, though the full correction sought is not achieved.  Yes, this really did happen.  It’s a pleasure to be so skillfully led into the world of England around 1900.  What a fascinating time; the empire is starting to crumble, and ethnic tensions are brewing at home.  Old-fashioned concepts of honor, duty, and faith are upheld, but the stresses and strains are all too evident.  The London of Monica Ali’s 'Brick Lane' is well in sight.

George Edalji

The book is an admirable performance, but I’m not sure that historical fiction is Barnes’s optimal genre. Barnes is capable of expressing more direct and striking insight into the human condition, but that's just not the primary aim of this book. The first third of the book is structured in short chapters that alternate between the early history of Arthur and that of George.  Both depictions are compelling and fascinating in their way, and are probably my favorite parts of the book. But the constant alternation and short chapters created (for me) an annoying rhythm that I wasn’t comfortable with.  I kept wishing that Barnes would stay with one story for longer and get to a deeper level.

But then the chapters do indeed get longer, and alas I was not entirely happy then either.  The narrative drive just didn't have the strength to push the prose through longer segments.  This is a true story and Barnes is constrained by the facts; a more satisfying but fictional conclusion is not available. I felt set up for a ‘Holmes’ satisfying ending, but real life intervened.  Unfortunately that means that the novel is also similarly constrained.  Not a fatal flaw.  To bring these two historical characters to life is admirable.  I’m sitting here in California in 2013, and having read the book I have a better appreciation of the unusual transitional state of Britain around 1900.  That is a testament to the novel’s success. And the has-to-be-intentional contrast between real-life legal/criminal entanglements and the literary convenience of the Sherlock Holmes stories is striking and apt.

There really is quite a bit to be learned here.  Consider the America of 2013.: tensions over immigration,  gun policies, racial issues.  It’s not all that different.  If we could see ourselves through that lens we could save ourselves a lot of trouble.  But no, we’re human.  That’s the good news and the bad.

Bravo to Mr. Barnes, but also a caution:  The raw literary talent clearly evidenced by Mr. Barnes in other works is significantly hemmed in here.  But given the task he set for himself, Barnes has succeeded.  I’m not overwhelmed by the result, but I have great respect for both the task and the effort required.

Schtick

Take a bunch of current literary mannerisms, add a good portion of sitcom talent, a more modest portion of literary talent, and a modicum of ambition and ego: you get Maria Semple’s ‘Where’d You Go,Bernadette?’  It’s quick, funny, witty, and ultimately a bit disappointing.  But it’s a fast read and well worth a few hours of relaxed time.  Take it to the beach, or to that place where you need an escape from more serious matters.  There are very, very funny paragraphs.  Stand-ups will drool in envy over the laughs-out-loud from some passages.

But enduring literature?  I think not.  The clock gets wound very tight in interesting ways.  The first two-thirds of the book bubble along promisingly.  The last third tries to deliver, but isn't quite up to the task.  It’s a lot easier to get those lovers into the grandfather clocks (an opera reference) than it is to get them out in a convincing and satisfying way.

I’m not sure that we need worry about the particulars here.  She’s talented, but don’t expect a consistently satisfying experience. 

Have ya heard the one about the . . .

Harvest

I once made the mistake of recommending Jim Crace’s ‘Being Dead’ to a new acquaintance.  She came across as an avid and inquisitive reader, and Crace’s award winning novel is among the most inventive and curiously moving books I’ve ever read.  The next (and I think last) time I saw her she returned my copy to me, grimaced, and remarked ‘Why would anyone want to read a book like that?’  Since then I’ve been much more careful in recommending Crace.

His latest novel, ‘Harvest’ did not disappoint me.  Both ‘Being Dead’ and ‘The Pesthouse’ focus on destruction and disintegration.  Crace’s special gift is to reflect multiple layers of beauty and emotion in  the dismantling of what humans have spent lifetimes building.  He manages this partly by investing so much meaning in the physical world, both natural and human crafted.  Buildings, animals, objects, plants, tools, clothes . . . they’re all described simply but poignantly in ways that immediately communicate their history, uses, and significance.  So when they are lost, mutilated, or destroyed (as so much is in a Crace novel) we sense the history and we experience both love and grief.  It’s uncanny that a writer can focus so unrelentingly on destruction but have such a profoundly positive message.

‘Harvest’ is the story of the destruction of a medieval English village.  The agents of change include strangers from the outside world, the forces of economic ‘progress’, and human nature itself.  The main character (first-person narration throughout) has spent parts of his life in different economic and social segments of the medieval world, and at the end he is forced to move on yet again.  The depiction of the peasants’ intimate (and perhaps shortsighted) connection to the land is quite beautiful.  So much of the power of the book comes from intimate representations of ‘things’.  We get to know what life feels like by learning about many of the physical details of daily life.  It all starts to go downhill when an outsider is brought in to map the land in an effort to convert the primitive and risky farm economy into a more advanced commodity based system.  But it’s almost as if the mapping effort itself, creating a representation which is a step removed from the physical reality, is the beginning of the end.  For Crace so much of the beauty and meaning resides in the immediacy of the physical world.

At the conclusion the main character departs, alone, somewhat broken, but also with hope for a new life in parts unknown.  He brings with him just a few necessities.  The one non-essential item he brings with him is a piece of blank vellum that he had made himself for the mapmaker.  The map was never completed, but the blank vellum had been painstakingly prepared.  It’s a symbol of the next story, his new life yet undiscovered, but also of the failed attempt to ‘lift’ the peasants one step up from their difficult and risky lives as more-or-less subsistence farmers.

Indeed the path of ‘progress’ is a difficult one, and it’s often true that we must first destroy what we have in order to be free to move on to something at least potentially better.  We’ve invested so much in what we have, so much history, so much meaning.  But in that destruction there is not just pain and regret; at the same time there is also beauty and much potential.  That seems to be the lesson that Crace teaches us over and over again in his books.  The human experience incorporates a kind of large-scale seasonal aspect that includes winters of destruction and springs of renewal.  And much of the harshness and the beauty of nature’s seasons can be found in man’s cyclical histories as well. We seem to have no choice but to build and invest, only to destroy so that we can build again.

Not every reader will appreciate Crace’s focus on the destruction.  I won’t make the mistake of recommending him to just anyone.  But you, reader, might want to give it a try.

The Not-So-Way-Back Machine

OK, well maybe now I get it.  Just finished ‘CivilWarLand in Bad Decline’, the first George Saunders short story collection (1996).  I raved about the latest highly lauded collection ‘Tenth of December’ (2012), and I wondered where I had been to have missed him totally for so many years.  Now I understand that while the Saunders of 2012 has lots in common with the Saunders of 1996, there are also striking differences that put his recent work squarely in the mainstream, whereas the earlier collection sits closer to the fringe.

Yes, there are many similarities, many common strands.  But the earlier work relies more heavily on futuristic sci-fi post-apocalyptic scenarios, and those earlier stories downplay the straightforward human aspects in favor of a more narrowly focused hard-edged view.  The later stories feel softer and exhibit more ambiguous empathy for multiple viewpoints within a single story; they are more deeply rooted in a more universal world of human emotion.  The earlier stories are more insistently ‘out there’, more experimental, more cynical, and for the most part less rewarding.

Nonetheless in the early collection there is much memorable writing.  Some pages are stunning, indeed.  Some made me laugh out loud, and in others I just plain delighted in Saunders' virtuosic command. I particularly enjoyed ‘The 400-Pound CEO’.  It’s heart-breaking, and I savored that.  But no single story in the early collection matches the emotional breadth shown in almost every story of the later collection.

So the trend is promising, indeed.  What next?

Mostly Cloudy

‘Cloud Atlas’ so impressed me that I’ve pledged to read everything that David Mitchell has published.  ‘The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet’ is his most recent novel.  Some of the literary virtuosity that produced ‘Cloud Atlas’ is on display here, but this is at heart a much more traditional novel.  It’s well researched and skillfully written historical fiction.  The underlying message is similar to that of ‘Cloud Atlas’.  Greed and self-interest are at the center of most human interaction.  Simple selfishness motivates most of our actions.  Evil is common as the ultimate expression of that selfishness.  Compassion and empathy are rare, perhaps temporarily self-promoting, but ultimately self-effacing.  Beauty matters to those that perceive it, but it rarely plays more than an incidental role in the larger historical procession.  And that’s OK.  It’s just the way that it is.

The chronology is straightforward.  There is only one story here, though there are subplots and threads that keep the reader engaged.  Dialect is not nearly so prominent an issue as in ‘Cloud Atlas’.  This is a more unified, less risky, less ambitious, and perhaps more wholesome book.  It’s a good read, even if it lacks the high-wire literary thrills that characterize ‘Cloud Atlas’.

The movie ‘Cloud Atlas’ was IMHO extraordinarily beautiful, and the writers and directors did a masterful job of translating literary wizardry into cinematic magic.  I’ve never seen a more creative and far-reaching film adaptation of a novel.  ‘Jacob de Zoet’ would be a much easier transition to film.  The characters are striking, the plot has dramatic turns, the language is straightforward enough to work on the screen.  I’d see it in a heartbeat.  Just please don’t sentimentalize the ending.

I’m not completely ignorant of history, but I knew only the simplest facts about Japan circa 1800.  The colonial rivalries and complex interactions with traditional Japanese society are fascinating and are portrayed with no axes-a-grinding.  History is indeed messy, and human nature is at the root of much of the disarray.  But there are individuals of real merit, and Mitchell portrays them as everyday heroes.  He seems to have a profoundly pessimistic view of our innermost tendencies and our ultimate fate, and his specialty may turn out to be spinning out that destiny in engaging narratives which include a few truly admirable characters, a few fascinating evil ones, and even more simple folk that live without much of a plan or purpose.  It’s a worldview that on most days I can subscribe to, though I do have days imbued with more optimism and hope.  I’d like to believe that our own nature does not doom us to unhappiness and the obligation to inflict suffering on others.  Maybe the bright spots outshine the gloom?

But maybe not.

Meta: When It Works

‘Disgrace’ blew me away when I first read it years ago, but some of Coetzee’s later works have left me a little cold.  Hadn’t read him a quite a while, and was pleased to find a pristine and inexpensive copy of ‘Slow Man’ at a used bookstore in Lincoln, Nebraska.  (Rather a large store with a big fiction section where there was not one book by Philip Roth.  So much for New Jersey Jews in Nebraska.)

He did win the Nobel, after all.

‘Slow Man’, like ‘The Fourth Hand’, centers on a main character that experiences severe injury from a disabling accident.  In both novels the devastation is significant, but the loss is also a spur to human and psychological growth.  The disability is sudden and shocking, and recovery takes time.  In both cases the characters do not return to their pre-accident states, but move forward (in ways both uncertain and complex) to new more complete and true modes of being.  Interesting parallels.

 So happy to reconnect with Coetzee’s prose style.  Very direct, almost terse, quite masculine, but at the same time curiously graceful without being the least bit self-conscious or ‘poetic’ in a forced way.  Not a common combination.

But for me the most appealing aspect of the book is Elizabeth Costello, a character that appears in many of Coetzee’s works.  Here she materializes from nowhere to poke and prod Paul (the injured man) into significant movement away from his customary reclusive and passive habits.  Costello is an author, and Paul is her character.  She’s somehow stuck with him.  She doesn’t know what to do with him.  She has to wait for him to act.  She makes many suggestions about what he might do, but she can’t make decisions for him.  He has to figure it out for himself.  Coetzee manages all of this with a very light touch.  It’s both humorous and serious.  It’s real and it’s not.  Reminded me of the gods in Banville’s ‘The Infinities’.  They do their best to direct human affairs, but their influence is limited and they are preoccupied with their own all-too-human concerns amongst themselves.  Here Costello too has her own needs which play into the action, especially at the end. I’m really not sure how Coetzee brings it off with such grace.  It doesn’t feel like science fiction, and it doesn’t have a preachy modern meta-literature (“Watch me do something really cool here”) feel about it either.  It’s playful, fun, and telling.

There’s also much here about the differences between love and care, about the concept of home, and about family connections.  Lots of food for thought.  Ultimately we do have the power to revise our own rules and definitions as we choose.  We are our own authors.  But as authors we have to work with the human material we have.  We can reconsider, make suggestions, cheerlead, wag a finger, or cajole.  We can hope that our characters reward us with complexity, change, humanity, and insight.  Sometimes we are pleased with the result, sometimes not.  But we can always try just one more draft.  Maybe this will be the one?