The Map of Love

This book by Ahdaf Soueif was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1999. It’s many things – political, historical, romantic, adventurous, and filled with very good writing. It’s a few years before 2000; an American woman, in love with an Egyptian guy, decides to go to Egypt to see what that ancient land thinks of a new millennium. She brings with her a trunk of old letters from the turn of the century, and so we follow the story of Lady Anna, an Englishwoman in Egypt who also falls in love with an Egyptian guy. The unique part of this book is not only is it written by an Egyptian woman, but the main narrator is also an Egyptian woman; the westerners are imagined through their eyes.

The first part races along with an almost clichéd love story (imperious sheik falls for headstrong foreigner) but gets bogged down in the last section as the politics (modern and ancient) is heavily pushed. The rise of Israel from an Egyptian point of view, the fundamentalists, the push for modernisation and the modern and ancient forms of imperialism are all issues that are tackled. Nothing is easy (well, except for Anna settling into an Egyptian “hareem” without any difficulty or discomfort whatsoever) and nothing turns out particularly well. It’s the birth of a child, rather than the approaching millennium, which brings hope (and I remember the near-euphoric feeling in Australia at that time, quite different).

What’s interesting is that the women in the story are all still on the sidelines. They’re the narrators, they carry the story through the generations, and yet they are utterly powerless. Anna’s husband makes the difference in the old Egypt, Amal’s brother in the new. She can’t even approach the government, has to get an old lover to intercede. None of them are able to live life in public or in freedom; they’re trapped by love and by custom and by a sense of their own limitations. I do wonder if the writer realised this, or whether she just decided to reflect the reality of women – women in Egypt or women worldwide? – as she saw it. In any case, it’s not a particularly uplifting read, but it is fascinating.

The Penguin Book of Twentieth Century Protest

This is a collection of essays, speeches, letters and other documents of protest edited by Brian MacArthur. It’s full of famous people like Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Sylvia Pankhurst and Marie Stopes, as well as lesser-known writers; it’s a very thick book. And it’s a good record of what people were protesting about; war, women’s rights, imperialism, social justice for the poor, civil rights for black Americans, rights for gay people, the destruction of the environment. Two interesting things; there’s not a single entry protesting about the treatment of people with a disability, or disability rights; and one of Marie Stopes’ main reasons for pushing birth control is eugenics, so that the weaker and less deserving are never born. Now that’s something I bet they don’t talk about in their international society nowadays. Then again, maybe they do.

The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith

I avoided this novel by Thomas Keneally because I thought it would be worthy-but-boring. It’s not; it’s worthy, not boring, but chilling, like an Australian In Cold Blood. This Aboriginal guy gets hassled at every turn, snaps, and axes a bunch of women. He escapes through the bush with relatives, runs around Australia, meets some interesting people, dies in the end. It was written around 1971, it’s set in 1900 where the big news is Federation and the Boer War, and what is Australia, and who are Australians, and it would’ve been an explosive book back in 1971 when Aboriginal people couldn’t even vote, I don’t think.

It’s a brave book because it includes chants of the tribe that Jimmy comes from, includes lots of ideas about Aboriginal people, it’s mostly told from their perspective. It races along and thank goodness doesn’t turn the conversations into unreadable dialects of “Australianisms” – except for when Jimmy is replying to a white man, underlining the whole idea of having to put on a form of inferior language and thought just to get by in the white world. I wonder what the feminists thought of it though, because there’s a lot of the underlying bitterness towards women – the free man getting shackled by their desperate need for order and propriety, mostly – that a lot of novelists of that time put in. It’s a book with masses of food for thought, but I don’t know if I could read it again, because even thinking about that axing makes me feel sick.

Blindness

Apparently José Saramago, the author of this novel, won the Nobel prize in 1998. He’s Portuguese; I’d never heard of him. This was a good book, though. It’s like an allegory, a story where none of the characters have names. It’s very reminiscent of Kant (in fact there’s a line which is a direct reference, I’m sure, to The Trial) and it reminds me of other German writers, especially the style – no paragraphs, lots of commas, and embedded speech. It’s conversational, like you’re being told the story, but you never even notice the narrator. It draws you in, it’s intimate, without being entirely real.

A man goes blind one day. Then his doctor, his wife, a man who stole from him; it’s an epidemic. Those who are blind are herded into a disused mental hospital and if they try to leave, they’re shot. The packed mental hospital descends into chaos; a bunch of men take control of the food and force the rest to give them their possessions and then rape the women. But one woman can see. She kills one of the blind men, sets fire to the hospital, and then escapes with her husband and some others – because by then the whole country is blind, those guarding the hospital too. They forage their way through the city, which has also descended into chaos. Everything is just filthy, anything edible is food. There is no organisation any longer, there’s just nonsense.

Lots of big ideas here – how quickly society and civilisation break down, that blindness is simply not seeing, that books unread are invisible, that people may as well be nameless – no great speeches, just some good lines and the overall impression of chaotic filth. It’s a pretty amazing read altogether, leaving a strong impression behind.

Orpheus Lost

This novel by Janette Turner Hospital follows the lives of three different people; Leela, an American mathematician, Cobb, her childhood friend who is a mercenary, and Mishka, her Australian lover. It’s set now, or a bit in the future, in America. More bombings are happening. Leela’s brought in for questioning, and it turns out that Mishka actually knows the guy who blew himself up the previous day. And the guy questioning her is Cobb.

This story races along, with plenty of action interspersed with childhood flashbacks and description. All the fundamentals (such as mathematics) turn out to be false, nothing is quite what it seems. It’s about as subtle as a sledge-hammer, although there’s some disturbing undercurrents which are never resolved – like Leela being punished for her sexuality (cast out by her family, interrogated by a jealous Cobb, harassed by her professor, hassled by her secretive boyfriend). In the end the dark side redeems itself, while the real evil remains murky and unnamed, or is simply “America” or “the current political regime”.

Apparently some of this novel was published earlier as short pieces, which explains why it feels a bit piecemeal. There is something too ordinary about this novel to be powerful, too obvious, “torture is bad, terrorism is bad, people must stand up for what they believe in”. It’s powerful because it’s immediate, it’s taking the situation as is and just taking it to a new level, but without the complexity which most thinking people know are inherent. I liked this, but the way Leela was written disturbs me more than the violence, and I don’t know whether that was in any way intentional, or whether it’s actually the whole point.

Five Red Herrings

This isn’t the greatest book that Dorothy L Sayers wrote. It’s more like a mathematics exercise actually (the kind where you’re given sixty eggs, twenty boys and $1.25 a kilo and it’s all supposed to mean something). There’s one passage which is good, where she delves into some human psychology quite successfully, but the rest is not much fun to read, which is a pity, because she’s capable of profound thought.

An artist in an artist’s colony is found dead, with a picture next to him, still wet. So an artist is the murderer. We follow where each of the artists went on the fateful morning. Lord Peter Wimsy tells us in the end who did it. He also tells us that it’s not really murder because the dead bloke wasn’t very nice. Sayers doesn’t really sidetrack, just gives us an immense amount of boring data to work the sum out with, most of it (of course) consisting of red herrings. The most annoying part is that it’s set in Scotland so she has half the characters speaking broad Scots which is both patronising and incomprehensible. None of the women come across particularly well either. The problem with Sayers is that she was a snob; her worst books reveal it, her best transcend it. This isn’t one of her best.