My ever-increasing must-read list had several books that I’d been putting off because they were three-volume sets (not much science fiction/fantasy, either: those trilogies tend to be five or more volumes). This month, I decided to read only trilogies. If I were participating in one of those "read 52 books in a year without blinking" challenges, we could have a discussion over whether this month’s post is about seven books or 21; fortunately, I read so much that I don’t care about volume challenges.
A Terrible Thing to Waste: Studs Lonigan (Young Lonigan, The Young Adulthood of Studs Lonigan, Judgment Day) by James Farrell :
The crowd was steadily enlarged by people of all ages who displayed the signs of hasty arousal from sleep; men with trousers and coats pulled on over pajamas, kids with touseled hair and sleep still in their eyes, surprised and half-dressed women. There was much talk and speculation, and amongst them there was a general consensus that the bomb had been placed there through the machinations of real-estate people who desired that Abraham Clarkson, the leading colored banker of Chicago, should sell his property and cease living in a white man’s neighborhood. Most of the excited and gaping people present also eyed the wreckage with approval, wishing that it would have a proper and fearful effect. But they knew that the bomb would teach no lessons and inspire no fear. For Abraham Clarkson had been bombed before, and he had stated defiantly that he would move from his home to another one only in a casket. It was nerve for the nigger to say that and go on ruining a white man’s neighborhood, living amongst people who didn’t want him. Secretly, many of those present wished that he had been killed. Some of the Catholics wished that it had only wounded him, un-mortally, for didn’t he always give Father Gilhooley a hundred dollars in the annual Easter and Christmas collections. The crowd increased. After about three quarters of an hour of gaping, it slowly dispersed. Red Kelly walked off arguing with Tommy Doyle, Red insisting that it was the fifth time the jigg had been bombed, Tommy contending that it was only the fourth time.
This one hurt to read. It tells the story of the protagonist’s life from early adolescence to an early death at around age 30. At the time I was reading it, I was also playing a little online game called Alter Ego (http://www.playalterego.com/alterego ), a sort of choose-your-own-adventure text game that takes an ordinary life from cradle to grave, and choices you make affect your stats, leading to opened or closed doors, happiness or misery. Studs’s life is full of such moments, and he tends to make the unfortunate choices. You can just see his health, happiness, money, etc., declining as he loses educational, romantic, career, trustworthiness, intelligence points. He spends most of the third book of the trilogy, in his 20s, already thinking like an old man, reviewing the past with regrets and thinking, if only he had done the other thing, while his life points continue to go down with a lot of help from Studs himself. Early on, I figured this was going to be the tale of a good boy gone wrong, who would have a dramatic rise and fall in the Al Capone underworld, going out in a blaze of police bullets as a warning to the young of the day, but Studs doesn’t even get that far. He dies with bankrupt parents who outlive him, and a second-choice pregnant sweetheart fighting with the parents and lamenting the sheer pointlessness of it all.
The book is also well worth reading as a presumably accurate study of Irish working class life in the Chicago of WWI, the gangster era, and the Depression. I was especially torn by the segments describing the transformation of the South Side from an Irish to a black neighborhood. On the one hand, the blatant racism against blacks and Jews alike is shocking; on the other hand, the working class Irish aren’t the ones who made the rules, and they suffer from the (largely protestant, actually) realtors and banks who lower the value of their property out of prejudice, forcing yet another oppressed minority further down the socio-economic ladder, and encouraging the groups to hate one another instead of the powers that be. I tend to be loyal to my own people, but several times I wanted to reach into the book and shake people out of their chauvinism.
A strong, well-told story of modern urban history, that both encourages compassion for those who don’t make it, and warns against behavior that leads down their path. Well recommended.
Kiwi Eleison: The Autobiography of Janet Frame (To the Is-Land, An Angel at my Table, The Envoy from Mirror City) :
I repeat that my writing saved me. I had seen in the ward office the list of those ‘down for a leucotomy’, with my name on the list, and other names being crossed off as the operation was performed. My ‘turn’ must have been very close when one evening the superintendent of the hospital, Dr. Blake Palmer, made an unusual visit to the ward. He spoke to me—to the amazement of everyone.
As it was my first chance to discuss with anyone, apart from those who had persuaded me, the prospect of my operation, I said urgently, "Dr. Blake Palmer, what do you think?"
He pointed to the newspaper in his hand.
"About the prize?"
I was bewildered. What prize? "No", I said, "about the leucotomy."
He looked stern. "I’ve decided that you should stay as you are. I don’t want you changed." He unfolded his newspaper. "Have you seen the Stop Press in tonight’s Star?"
A ridiculous question to ask in a back ward where there was no reading matter; surely he knew?
"You’ve won the Hubert Church Award for the best prose. Your book, The Lagoon.
I knew nothing about the Hubert Church Award. Winning it was obviously something to be pleased about.
I smiled. "Have I?"
"Yes. And we’re moving you out of this ward. And no leucotomy."
The triple autobiography by the author of Owls Don’t Cry, about childhood in New Zealand, institutionalization and redemption, and travels in Europe as a new author.
The second book, An Angel At My Table, is where the real meat is. Somewhere there is a tortured emo teenager, the back of her hand pressed against her forehead, Tori Amos on the stereo, fantasizing about the nightmare-blessing that really happened to Frame: misdiagnosed, locked up, denounced as insane, mistreated by family members and doctors who don’t understand her...and then redeemed and vindicated by the discovery that—yes, she has talent!
Much dreariness and much tragedy. Most of her family is either not very nice, or dead at an early age, or both. Many of the chapters are little rambling anecdotes that don’t go anywhere. It’s not quite clear to me where the misdiagnosis actually came from or what symptoms or behavior led to the drastic steps of being placed in hospitals so many times. By the third book, Frame is taking turns being that cheerfully batty lady with the funny hat who everybody likes and sort of blending in with the ochre walls.
Noir Clouds on the Skyline: The New York Trilogy (City of Glass, Ghosts, Locked Room), by Paul Auster :
Blue agrees to take the job, and they shake hands on it. To show his good faith, White even gives Blue an advance of ten fifty dollar bills.
That's how it begins, then. The young Blue and a man named White, who is obviously not the man he appears to be. It doesn't matter, Blue says to himself after White has left. I'm sure he has his reasons. And besides, it's not my problem. The only thing I have to worry about is doing my job.
It is February 3, 1947. Little does Blue know, of course, that this case will go on for years. But the present is no less dark than the past, and its mystery is equal to anything the future might hold. Such is the way of the world: one step at a time, one word and then the next. There are certain things that Blue cannot possibly know at this point. For knowledge comes slowly, and when it comes, it is often at great personal expense.
It’s a good thing I like detective books, or this one would have tested my limits on surreal fiction. It takes the hard boiled private eye genre and cliches and goes with them, into the realm not of crime but of existential nightmare. The first two books involve ordinary men with not much of a life, not even private investigators, who get hired to put someone under surveillance. Both guys spend ridiculous amounts of time—years of their lives—just watching their target, losing what lives they had in the process, doing strange things to relieve the boredom, and finding that both the person who hired them and the person they’re watching speaks a lot of Mad Hatterese. The last one, Locked Room, is almost the opposite. In that one, the protagonist with not much of a life pretty much has someone else’s life dropped on him when he inherits the spouse and unpublished profitable manuscripts of an old friend who had abruptly disappeared, and becomes obsessed with tracking down the old friend before he becomes him entirely.
Blurbs tell me that Paul Auster is some sort of literary wunderkind, or at least that he was in the 1980s when he wrote the trilogy. Seemed to me, he spent a lot of time trying to be clever and profound and little time being actually interesting. In City of Glass, a large part of just about every chapter consists of a digression—a stream of consciousness monologue from a Kaspar Hauser figure; an article read by the protagonist; a memory of baseball; theological insights on the Tower of Babel. If he was trying to make a point about modern NY life being as alienating and uncommunicative as the Tower of Babel, I was too tired to explore the point much. Some of the atmosphere and technique reminded me of The Singing Detective, which I saw on TV once when I was too young to understand what it was about, and another time when I was older and found it weird, but interesting. Give me Chandler and MacDonald over Auster any day.
Seasons of the Family Tree: The Forsyte Saga (The Man of Property, In Chancery, To Let), by John Galsworthy :
Soames bought the paper. There it was in the Stop Press. His first thought was: "The Boers are committing suicide!" His second: "Is there anything still I opught to sell?" If so, he had missed the chance--there would certainly be a slump in the city tomorrow. He swallowed this thought with a nod of defiance. That ultimatum was insolent--sooner than let it pass he was prepared to lose money. They wanted a lesson and they would get it; but it would take three months at least to bring them to heel. There weren't the troops out there; always behind time, the government! Confound those newspaper rats! What was the use of waking everybody up? Breakfast tomorrow was quite soon enough.
I cheated a little on this one. I had already read The Man of Property last year (Book Post, February 2009), which ended on such an ugly note that I didn’t feel like continuing just then. I should have stuck to it; the latter two volumes, and a couple of "interlude" stories in between, become much more my cup of tea..
I get so much more satisfaction out of stories in which the villain manages to find redemption and prove capable of doing some good at the end (think Scrooge, Darth Vader, even Javert) to the violent comeuppance by death or suffering that is more common. The redemption reaffirms my fundamental hope that there is a core of at least potential goodness in all of us, while the necessity for harsh punishments is, at best, a regrettable necessity; I find it hard to see it as cause for rejoicing. Evil in people shows that people are capable of evil, and I mourn for those times when the evil in someone wins out over the good.
Soames Forsyte, who begins as an odious marital rapist who treats his dependents like property, becomes more of a complex character as The Forsyte Saga continues. In In Chancery, we see that he has given himself a psychological wound almost as deep as what he has inflicted on his estranged wife, who goes on to have the best revenge by living well without him. As the ten original Forsyte ancestors die one by one of old age, the next generation’s wounds are scarred over and heal only with the passage of time, and Soames’s redemption through his relationship with his daughter Fleur (who pretty much steals the book as far as I’m concerned, being as irrepressible and energetic as Anne of Green Gables) is subtle but very effective. Those who clamor for justice against Soames will be disappointed, but those who like a shot of redemption will be pleased.
Pompous blurb notes celebrate the Forsytes as the most famous and enduring literary family of the early 20th Century. Seems to me the Woosters, Joads, Compsons and Buddenbrooks would get that honor first, but your mileage may vary.
Zorba the Italian: The Abruzzo Trilogy (Fontamara, Bread and Wine, The Seed Beneath the Snow), by Ignazio Silone :
The schoolmistress flushed, grew flustered, and there was general confusion. Then she had a brilliant idea, imposed silence, and, while you could hear a pin drop, she announced, "The rural revolution has saved the country from the communist menace!"
"Who are the communists?" said Grascia.
The schoolmistress was safe. She had no more need to think. "I've told you before, but I'll tell you again," she said. "The communists are wicked people who choose to meet at night in town sewers. To become a communist you have to trample on the crucifix, spit in Christ's face, and promise to eat meat on Friday."
"Where do they get meat from?" Sciatap wanted to know. "Do they get it for nothing or do they have to pay for it?"
"I don't know", the schoolmistress said.
"So what it boils down to is that, as usual, you don't know the most important thing," said Grascia.
In the time of Mussolini, there were parts of rural Italy where there was still no electrification, donkeys and carts were the primary means of transportation, and the status hierarchy was described as: The Prince; the prince’s guards; the prince’s guard dogs; nothing at all; nothing at all; nothing at all; and then the peasants. Silone was an outcast antifascist who returned to Italy after he had become disillusioned with communism, and Mussolini had fallen. The Abruzzo trilogy is his work about the lives of these peasants who, valued at less than the least of nothing at all, have their lives impacted by the national police state.
The first book, Fontamara, is a short novel of little more than absurdist pain and suffering, as an illiterate hill community several miles from nowhere has their only source of water diverted by the state, and their attempts to seek redress are met by corrupt bureaucratic barriers that would be comic but for the misery that ensues. Unlike the classic Kafka scenario where absurdist nonsense is the nightmare of the day, the impression here is of very real petty government crooks who resort to the rhetoric of nonsense as a convenient way to contemptuously confuse and get rid of unsophisticated rural people and their pesky demands for relief.
The second two books introduce the semiautobiographical populist agitator Pietro Spina, who hides from the authorities disguised as a priest, and who has encounters with the many, many characters of the peasant, low merchant, and hired overseer class who see him as a real spiritual guide. These encounters range from the exchange of blasphemously satirical peasant parables (such as the one in which Christ wants to give a gift to the peasants that will not displease the authorities, and the Pope suggests a plague of lice that will take the peasants’ minds off of their hunger) to tragic anecdotes of pathos (such as the woman who desperately saves her lover by yielding her body to the soldiers who are searching for him, only to have the lover later reject her as a harlot), to touching examples of folk wisdom, courage and endurance (such as the act of sheltering a once-hated enemy from the authorities). Eventually, Spina becomes something of a Christ-figure himself, relieving the peasants of considerable pain, and observing and learning from the pain he cannot save them from. Highly recommended, especially the middle book, which can be read alone.
M*A*S*H 22: The Regeneration Trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, The Ghost Road) by Pat Barker :
"I think that should go in the HYDRA."
"No."
"Why not?"
"a. It’s not good enough. B. Editors shouldn’t publish their own work."
"a. I’m a better judge of that than you are. At the moment. b. Rubbish. And c." Sassoon leant across and snatched his own poem back. "If you don’t publish THAT, you can’t have this."
Owen seemed to be contemplating a counter-attack.
"d. I’m bigger than you are."
"All right, I’ll print it." He took Sassoon’s poem back. "Anonymously."
"Cheat."
Pat Barker is an answer to people who say that great-book novels have been gone since Hemingway and Faulkner. Regeneration and its sequels were published in the 1990s, and in content and style might as well be rubbing elbows with Remarque and Hasek concerning the WWI antiwar novel. Except that it builds on those books and adds new dimensions to the theme.
Regeneration takes place in and around the Craiglockhart War Hospital, where the actual poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen really were treated by the actual psychologist William Rivers, and where Barker dramatizes what their therapy might have been like and adds wholly fictional characters like Prior and Burns, whose repressed traumatic experiences from the Western Front manifest in odd psychosomatic conditions. Sassoon, a proven hero who turned against the war, agonizes over real concerns of loyalty and courage as he wrestles with his newfound conscientious objector feelings. Rivers, whose job it is to buck Sassoon up and send him back to the front, wrestles with his own feelings about the senselessness of the war.
The Eye in the Door, to me by far the best of the three, takes Prior and others into the world outside the hospital, with a particularly harsh spotlight on domestic spying programs on the country’s own citizens (thank God we’re all civilized now, and such things could never happen in modern America!) and the persecution of pacifists and homosexuals, particularly the conviction of a woman for alleged treason based on the testimony of a low agent who was well paid for his evidence. The Ghost Road explores Rivers’s memories of an earlier time when he lived on a South Sea island with a tribe of not quite former headhunters, whose senseless, brutal, primitive death-worship is contrasted with the advanced and praiseworthy British Empire’s best and brightest in the trenches during the final push to Germany.
It’s heavy stuff, like Joseph Heller without the sugar coating of humor to it. There are coarsely described scenes of sex without love, of nasty things that happen to living and decomposing human bodies during battles, of graphic horrors that haunt the minds of the insane. The language, the philosophy and the characters are all very rich food for thought, but you will need a healthy stomach to digest it. Well recommended, but not for the timid.
Nineteen Forty-Eight: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength, by C.S. Lewis :
It was only many days later that Ransom discovered how to deal with these sudden losses of confidence. They arose when the rationality of the hross tempted you to think of it as a man. Then it became abominable--a man seven feet high, with a snaky body, covered, face and all, with thick, black animal hair, and whiskered like a cat. But starting from the other end you had an animal with everything an animal ought to have--glossy coat, liquid eye, sweet breath and whitest teeth--and added to all these, as though Paradise had never been lost and earliest dreams were true, the charm of speech and reason. Nothing could be more disgusting than the one view; nothing more delightful than the other. It all depended on the point of view
The only theological writer to have ever actually moved my spirit tackles space sci-fi, and wins. Lewis wins because, as I figured out while reading this trilogy, he's not really talking about religion so much as using it as a metaphor for something actually good. Something larger than ourselves that is not some big, jealous, child-abusing "God", but is a system of ethics and civilization directly opposed to those things advocated by most human "religious leaders" today.
Barker and Frame's trilogies are marked by outstanding middle volumes; by far the best of Lewis's trilogy is the last volume. The first two, while they do have many food-for-thought passages like the one quoted above, are mere variants on the old theme of xenophobic people going to planets and being surprised to find that the inhabitants are more advanced than humans. The plot and characters of Perelandra, a long stretch of Adam-and-Eve navel gazing, are almost too abstract to be memorable. Even if you find the first two books tire you, I suggest you still try That Hideous Strength, which is a masterpiece so different from the first two that it isn't until about 2/3 of the way through that it's even made apparent how they are related.
That Hideous Strength takes place in and around a small city in northern Britain, where amoral scientists and professors are working to bring about "advances in human progress" that look suspiciously like a planned police state. Although Lewis wrote the book some time in the aftermath of WWII, readers who have worked in a modern corporation, or who have even read "Dilbert", may be surprised at how ahead of his time Lewis is. One of the horrors displayed by the central dystopian corporation is the willingness to casually break what was seen in those days as a sacred trust, the duty of mutual loyalty between employers and their (white collar, anyway) employees. The revelation of dishonesty in media propaganda, too, is presented as almost too shocking to contemplate; Americans accustomed to FOX "news" may shrug in a "yeah, so?" sort of way and wonder why the newspaper readers in the book are gullible enough to believe what they see in print.
Central to the story is a married couple, Mark and Jane, who find themselves through miscommunication and coincidence, to be at opposite sides of the struggle for England's soul. As with the beleaguered family in Orson Scott Card's amazing Lost Boys, I found that one of the best features of the book was the author's insights as to what the members of a truly loving couple can and must do, both in behavior and in simple being, to live a good marriage and to weather adversity and challenges both epic and mundane. Very high recommendations.