The Sound and the Fury

I haven't read many experimental novels before, which is what this story by William Faulkner really is. It's told in 4 parts - the first part is the stream of consciousness of a man with an intellectual disability, the second his brother on the day he kills himself, the third his other brother who is a real bastard, and the last is told in the limited 3rd person from the perspective of one of the house servants. It's apparently an indictment of the wealthy southern families at the turn of the century - something which doesn't exactly have much emotional resonance with me. The problem with stream of consciousness/experimental novels is that they distance you, basically because they're incomprehensible. You'd think that they'd bring the reader closer to the action, but the inside of someone else's head is such a strange place it actually sets you far far away. This is probably why the genre hasn't really lasted. I didn't mind Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, but that's about it. This book is well-written, draws you into the characters to a certain extent, and is certainly powerful - but it's also boring and a hard slog to read and, for me, not worth it at the end. I can't imagine reading this for pleasure, and while I suppose not all reading is exactly pleasurable - some of it is horrible, e.g. Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago - the reader should feel more at the end than sheer relief.

Resurrection

This is the last novel that Tolstoy wrote, and it covers his philosophies on land ownership, relationships, personal morality, religion and the state. It’s also an extremely accessible story. Basically, a prostitute is accused of murder, and one of the jurors at the trial turns out to be the man who initially seduced her, got her pregnant and thrown out of her home and in short set her on her way. He’s a wealthy but weak man who is horrified at what he has done. Through his attempts to help her, he discovers an entire world he never realised existed, and he begins to see his own world in a different way. The resurrection is a personal one, even though the reader is left to wonder whether it is permanent.

Tolstoy is rightly a household name, one of the most famous writers ever. He writes a clear, convincing and powerful prose. His characters are balanced and human and fascinating. The details of the prison and judicial systems are obviously well-researched and thoroughly believable. He doesn’t try to be subtle – his beliefs are very clearly stated in this book – and yet he doesn’t come across as unreasonable.

How strange that all of this – the unfairness of the courts, the bitter cruelties towards prisoners – is before the Russian Revolution! And yet, why not? It’s the basis of the KGB and the gulags to come. Solzhenitsyn argues that it was much kinder than the system of his day – if so, how terrible, how inhumanely terrible! His main argument is that there is nothing, nothing more important than human compassion – and that once this is forgotten there is no cruelty that cannot be justified.

The Long Goodbye

What a sense of pleasure and relief it is to read a good book after a mediocre one. Forget the Pulitzer prize - Raymond Chandler deserved the Nobel prize. This subtle story is a tragedy, a set of tragedies, and like all his books is a moral fable. It's about a man who takes the fall for someone else and dies. Not a particularly good man, but an ordinary guy who noone - but Marlowe - seems to miss. The long goodbye is his goodbye to this man, in a way, because it gets mixed up with another murder and another murderer. I think one unsolved mystery is why Marlowe has such a sharp iron sense of morality. Anyway, at the end, he loses his friend not to death but to his sense of right and wrong. And there's the tragedy. What a wonderful piece of writing.

March

Geraldine Brooks has concocted a story about the American Civil War, slavery, pacifist beliefs, and a whole lot of other things from the missing tale of the father in Little Women, and has won the Pulitzer prize for it. She took a lot from L.M. Alcott’s father’s story, mixed it up with other readings and ideas which she came across, and developed this novel. It’s good – it’s full of facts and ideas – but in the hands of a real writer it could have been great. And I must say after the last few Pulitzer prize winners that I've read that I have no respect for that particular award. Whether it’s Brooke's journalistic background or something else, she has a very ordinary style – it’s the same from beginning to end. The characters speak in the same way. You don’t ever have to guess what someone’s thinking – it’s made so very clear. Maybe it’s the constant use of first person? Funnily enough, an interview at the end deals with something I was thinking about – the difficulty of creating a reality from a set of little details – and she scoffs at it (scoffs at Henry James’ disdain of historical fiction, actually). Well, I think his quote is valid, to an extent. Surely you can’t put a modern mind into the past with old clothes and funny words and expect it to really reflect reality? That’s what this feels like – your average modern person dressed up. Still, it’s a good enough read. I think you could have written a whole book just with the detail of Henry Thoreau being the inventor of pencils, and maybe that’s another flaw, too much information and not enough depth. Imagine what Ondaatje would have done with this! Well, if he’s not going to write about it, it’s all right if Geraldine Brooks has a go.

The Slave Girl

This novel by Buchi Emecheta is a straightforward story of a girl's life in Nigeria in the early 20th century. It's simply told, in a manner reminiscent of a children's story. It's not a subtle tale - the idea is that being a woman is being a slave, no matter what the legal status - but it's interesting in the details of life there, from the village to the town to the slowly emerging middle class. The foreign influences through trade, war, and religion are also well-covered. It's an interesting tale, not from a literary point of view particularly, but in the details it covers.

The Heart of the Matter

I was too young for Graham Greene when I tried him at 19; now I think I'm too old. This novel has all the Greene hallmarks - Catholics, morally dubious situations, strange landscapes and characters - and of course, exceptional writing. It's about a British policeman in a West African colony during WW2, who commits adultry, comes under the power of a bad man, and ends up by getting his servant killed. His main angst is that he takes communion when he hasn't been absolved. In the end he can't handle all the pain he is causing everyone else in his life, so he kills himself. In a typically Greene ending, the parish priest assures everyone that God is merciful and will forgive him; but in that case, the reader wonders, why was taking communion such a death sentence in the first place.