Monthly Archives: October 2018

Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls: not a love story

Posted on by
6

Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls. Hamish Hamilton 2018

Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles…How the epithets pile up. We never called him any of these things; we called him the ‘butcher’.

The title of Pat Barker’s new novel, The Silence of the Girls, alludes to the psychological horrors of a different kind in The Silence of the Lambs, perhaps, but mostly to the lack of agency or voice of the women and girls in the novel. These opening words of the novel prepare us for the other story not related by Homer in The Iliad – Euripides gets closer in The Trojan Women: the terrible fate of the defeated side in the Trojan War – especially the women and girls.

Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls: front coverBarker imagines for us in painful detail the ordeal endured as a captive by Briseis, wife of King Mynes, after the sacking by Achilles and his fearsome Myrmidons and other Greek warriors, of her city, Lyrnessus (near Troy). It’s a fate shared by all the captured women.

The Silence of the Girls was a painful experience to read because of its brutal depiction of the violence perpetrated by these blood-crazed fighters, and more particularly because of the calculated, brutal subjection, humiliation and dehumanising cruelty perpetrated by them on the captive women.

As in The Iliad, the story relates how Achilles, already notorious for his volatile temper, acquires the epithet ‘rage-filled’. King Agamemnon, leader of the Greek forces, with a reputation for avoiding the dangers of the battlefield, relinquishes his own trophy sex slave when a plague that decimates the Greek camp is attributed to divine assistance on her behalf, at the behest of her priestly father. To replace her, he decides he’ll take Achilles’ prize, Briseis, as the next most beautiful and prestigious (being royal) trophy.

Achilles, insulted and furious at his king’s selfishness and weakness, takes to his tent and sulks, refusing to fight any more. This swings the balance of the war in the Trojans’ favour, so talismanic, murderously efficient and furious is he when fighting at the head of the Greek army. His close friend Patroclus (there are suggestions that the two warriors are lovers) gets him to agree to let him wear Achilles’ distinctive armour and helmet so that the Trojans will believe he’s returned to the battle. He rallies the Greek forces when he enters the fray in this disguise, the Trojans duly lose heart, but Patroclus is killed by the Trojan hero, Hector.

Now Achilles’ rage is unprecedented, augmented by guilt and grief. Supplied with magnificent new armour by his sea-goddess mother, he resumes leadership of the Greeks, and the Trojans are routed. The city is ruthlessly sacked, the citizens slaughtered. As usual, the Greeks murder everyone not to be taken as slaves. Even pregnant women are stabbed through the abdomen, in case the child being carried should turn out to be a boy and become an enemy fighter when grown up.

The highest-born and prettiest girls and women become a new set of sex slaves, subjected to the usual humiliations, treated as chattels – as Briseis is. ‘Don’t think about your previous life,’ Greek Nestor had advised her when she was first enslave. ‘Forget! This is your life now.’ But she refuses to forget: she is determined not to lose her identity, and resolves to remember, retain her voice. Even though this makes the daily indignities and cruelty more difficult to bear, at least then she won’t lose her sense of self. And she’s only nineteen…

The indignities begin when she’s paraded with the other women captives in front of the victorious Greeks after the fall of her city, and they’re inspected as potential prizes by the leaders. Briseis feels like ‘a cow, tethered and waiting to be sacrificed.’ She tries to picture her past life, her eyes closed, but she hears a roar and threatening jokes from the drunken soldiery. Achilles grips her chin and tilts her head to examine her looks. When he walks away she opens her eyes:

”Cheers, lads,” he said. “She’ll do.” And everyone, every single man in that vast arena, laughed.

A chilling echo of the heartbreaking, equally dismissed testimony of Christine Blasey Ford. Barker’s jauntily demotic “laddish” style (that also runs through much of the narrative) makes the horror all the more despicable. It’s simply normal for the men to speak and act like this.

For much of the rest of the novel we are privy to every personal indignity and sexual assault she has to endure, first under Achilles. His brusque couplings are compared at first with a soldier’s crude eagerness to try on new armour, – only this novelty is the living woman, who’s made to feel no more than a coveted commodity. His nightly sexual acts soon turn to something more personal and frenzied when she comes to bed smelling of the salt sea in which she likes to bathe and symbolically cleanse herself each evening. But Barker won’t let us find solace in this: she thus reminds him of the scent of his Nereid mother, and his passion is portrayed as disturbingly Oedipal and hence even more humiliating and degrading for Briseis. But he barely speaks to her once he’s sated; she doesn’t exist for him as a sentient human being. It’s this kind of constant misogyny in the narrative that makes it so hard to keep reading.

Briseis’ other daily ordeal involves being forced to wait on Achilles and his entourage (one of whom wears her murdered father’s tunic as a trophy that’s particularly gruesome for her to have to witness), smiling and enduring their leers and lascivious advances as she pours their wine – though none would dare go further with their general’s ‘prize of honour’. She realises she’s not being treated ‘as a thing. A slave is a thing.’

Her dread is that he’ll tire of her and she’ll be handed over to the common soldiery, without even a roof over her head – a common fate for sex slaves like her.

I struggled to the end of this harrowing, fierce novel, but can’t say I enjoyed it. The bestial cruelty meted out by the men on these reified, terrified women was almost unbearable. The vicious battle scenes were almost as hard to take – more difficult in many ways than the senseless slaughter and psychological trauma Barker depicted in her 1990s WWI Regeneration trilogy, which I read when it first came out.

I suppose I persisted to the end because of the power and contemporary resonance of her central message about gender inequalities and social injustice arising from them, and the importance of Briseis articulating her story in her own voice, against all odds. As in the earlier trilogy, soldiers are portrayed as showing their moral defects more plainly in the hurly-burly of war. It’s generally other men who tell their stories and elide their worst defects.

On the final page, when she considers what the unborn people of the future will ‘make of us’ – the silent girls – she’s certain of only one thing:

…they won’t want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. They won’t want to be told of the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won’t want to know we were living in a rape camp. No, they’ll go for something altogether softer. A love story, perhaps? I just hope they manage to work out who the lovers were.

His story. His, not mine. It ends at the grave.

 

The Trojan War imagined by Homer (or whoever produced the epic Iliad) is here reimagined, retold by one of the voices silenced by history men, and the traditional narrative takes on a decidedly different, gynocentric nature. Less soft. Not a love story.

 

 

Patricia Highsmith, Edith’s Diary

Posted on by
4

Patricia Highsmith: Edith’s Diary. VMC 2015. First published 1977

Patricia Highsmith’s psychological thrillers probe the twisted minds and lives of people who adopt an oblique approach to what most would call reality. (Carol, which I posted about last summer, is different.) In Edith’s Diary we are back in the world of disquieting mental states in a deceptively tranquil domestic setting in the nineteen sixties and seventies.

Highsmith Edith's Diary coverBrett and Edith move from the city to a sleepy Pennsylvania suburb to enable their son Cliffie to grow up in a healthier environment. Big mistake. It’s not the city that’s unhealthy. Aged eight he tries to smother the family cat. At ten he jumps off a local bridge into the river below – twice – and is fortunate to be rescued.

Sullen, contemptuous and uncommunicative, he clearly has mental health problems way beyond the usual adolescent truculence. As the novel develops Cliffie emerges as something of a psychopath, cruel and unsympathetic to those around him, and with murderous tendencies. As a boy he watches the collapse of his parents’ marriage with detached curiosity verging on pleasure: if he’s ‘not normal’, what are they?

But it’s Edith who’s at the heart of this novel. When Brett leaves her for a younger model, her own difficulties with reality worsen. The occasional entries in her eponymous diary become increasingly out of touch with the heartbreaking and often dangerous realities of her disintegrating life – and mind. One of her earliest entries sets the tone for the rest:

‘Isn’t it safer, even wiser, to believe that life has no meaning at all?’

She’d felt better after getting that down on paper. Such an attitude wasn’t phony armor, she thought, it was a fact that life had no meaning. One simply went on and on, worked on, and did one’s best.

 

Edith’s existential passivity and nullity is at odds with her apparently committed views on politics and social mores. Contemplating her husband’s unmarried elderly hypochondriac uncle, who she ends up caring for alone when Brett abandons her, she angrily wonders why he’d never married:

Edith couldn’t imagine a man thirty-five or so not getting married, if he could afford to, because it was so convenient to have a wife, he wouldn’t be here now, for instance.

Highsmith astutely handles Edith’s incongruous mixed-up thoughts in order to expose the hypocrisies and inequalities in a complacent patriarchal society which Edith lacks the strength or clarity of mind to confront head-on. It’s apparent that the newspaper she co-edits is received with either indifference or contempt in her community, and it becomes as trivial and banal in its editorials as its target audience.

Edith in her diary fabricates an alternative existence in which Cliffie goes to Princeton (he’d flunked all his exams or cheated and been exposed), and becomes a global executive in an elite engineering firm.

As the indolent young man in the nightmare real world becomes a violent alcoholic parasite, ever more antisocial and unhinged, she cranks up the perfection of this imagined world of her diary: she marries him to a trophy Wasp, gives him two adorable children and they all dote on her.

These fantasies serve to heighten the sense of foreboding and horror of what’s really going on under her roof: ‘it was pleasant and reassuring to imagine’, the narrator confides at one point as Edith invents a happy wedding for misfit loner Cliffie.

As the gap between ugly reality and her own delusions widens, Edith becomes as deranged as her obese, monstrous son. Brett had been a leftist journalist, while Edith produced a local free paper in which she could write fervently liberal anti-Vietnam War polemics – but her mental collapse is accompanied by an alarming swing to authoritarian conservatism which alienates her few friends. She loses her job as a result of her increasingly erratic behaviour.

This is an unsettling, meticulously constructed exposure of a dysfunctional family – all of whom are damaged, deluded and self-deceiving in their various ways. They could be seen as a metaphor for the disintegration of fragile liberal American values at the time. I wonder what Highsmith would have made of the present post-truth world.

It’s not possible to say it’s an enjoyable novel, given its uncomfortably disturbing subject matter, explored with unflinching forensic attention by Highsmith. But it’s gripping in a car-crash sort of way.

 

 

 

Angela Thirkell: High Rising

Posted on by
11

Angela Thirkell, High Rising. VMC 2013; first published 1933

Thirkell H Rising cover

The VMC cover demonstrates the retro charm of this frothy confection of a novel

Angela Thirkell was quite someone: a granddaughter of the Pre-Raphaelite artist Burne-Jones and goddaughter of JM Barrie, her father was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and she was related to Kipling and British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. Like her enterprising protagonist Laura in her second novel High Rising, she took to writing potboiler-middlebrow ‘rather good bad books’ about which she has ‘no illusions’ as to their literary merit, to make a living when left alone in the world:

She had considered the question carefully, and decided that, next to racing and murder, and sport, the great reading public of England (female section) likes to read about clothes.

There’s a character in this novel who reluctantly shows Laura’s publisher her novel; Laura is relieved to find she’s one of those ‘rotten’ writers who knew they couldn’t write’ – a typically self-deprecating reference that surely applies to Thirkell herself.

So Laura churns out, as often as Thirkell did, frothy romances set in the world of fashion, ‘opium’ as a friend and fan of Laura’s describes the experience of reading them. Laura is slightly embarrassed to add to the pile of what would now be derisively known as chick-lit, but happy to cash the royalties cheques. She’s level-headed, a realist who’s learned to exploit her own limited talent and the even more limited tastes of her target market. (Elizabeth Taylor does a much more witty, interesting and sophisticated job on this in Angel.)

Unlike Laura, whose husband had died (though she says he was an expensive nuisance when alive), Thirkell left her second husband; her first she divorced on the grounds of adultery. Men tend refreshingly to be portrayed as the weaker sex in this novel, and it’s the spirited, sensible women like Laura who win through – ‘excellent’ women, to borrow Barbara Pym’s phrase – a writer to whom Thirkell is often compared, but who is a far sharper, more accomplished artist.

I won’t summarise the rather predictable but amusing plot – links to other bloggers’ posts at the end supply outlines. I’ll just single out the few points that amused me in this undemanding, often saccharine entertainment. It’s ideal for a rainy day or sickbed – a guilty escapist pleasure that was a bit too much for Karen of BookerTalk, who likened it to an indigestible ‘meringue’. She craved something edgier and saltier. I know what she means, but I (mostly) enjoyed this novel. I didn’t care for the casual anti-Semitism; it’s not sufficient to put it down to the opinions of the period. Look what was going on in Germany in 1933.

Thirkell set these comedies in Trollope’s Barsetshire – a feature that appealed to me, as my recent Barsetshire posts indicate. She’s not in his league, of course, but wouldn’t claim to be.

Laura’s young son Tony divides critical opinion: to some he’s a charming, precocious chatterbox; I’m with those who found him irritating, with his obsession with trains and the patrician manners his private school encourages. But he reminded me of my grandson when he was that age. Now he’s scared of trains. Existential pre-teen angst has replaced innocent pleasure. Tony will probably become Transport Minister in a Tory government and close unprofitable country lines like the one passing through High Rising.

I preferred Laura’s cheerful maternal doting on him mixed with prevalent hatred. On several occasions she could happily kill him, our narrator tells us. She contemplates writing a book: ‘Why I Hate My Children’. Reminds me of the recent bestseller ‘Why Mummy Drinks’.

There’s a weird section in Ch. 9 just like passages in Cold Comfort Farm (published the year before, in 1932): Laura sees a handsome, swarthy rider in Hyde Park:

Rather DH Lawrence-ish, thought Laura vaguely. The sort of person who would turn into a half-caste Indian, full of black, primal secret something-or-other, and subjugate his mate.

Her reverie is ended when this hunky vision speaks in an accent so ‘healthily Cockney that the lure of the he-man vanished.’ The pastiche is almost as good as Stella Gibbons’.

There’s a well done car crash (no one is hurt) when Laura’s publisher gets drunk at a New Year party (as publishers do) and drives her home. The aftermath is a good example of Thirkell making an entertaining meal of unlikely material. The car ends on its roof, with Adrian jammed under the steering wheel, and Laura on top of him. She’s livid.

‘[The door]’s stuck, of course,’ she said coldly. ‘Do we spend the night here? It may be respectable, in view of the limited opportunities, but it’s not my idea of comfort.

Adrian manages to get out:

‘Come on, Laura,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a hand.’

‘How can I get out of a small window above my head, you soft gobbin,’ said Laura angrily. ‘I’ll never take you to a party again.’

The dressing-down she gives him when they get to her house is classic.

Farcical-theatrical set pieces like this just about redeem a lively but uneven, limited comic novel. They could easily feature in those screwball-women films of the period starring actors like Claudette Colbert.

See Jacqui’s post

Ali’s at HeavenAli

Jane’s blogging as FleurInHerWorld (now Beyond Eden Rock)

Karen’s at Booker Talk

Three books

Posted on by
17

Walking to and from the shop today (to buy soft food for Mrs TD, who has toothache and is feeling wretched; her dentist recommends root canal work – poor thing) I listened on my phone to the BBC Radio 4 podcast of their weekly book programme, ‘A Good Read’. It’s one of several literary podcasts I subscribe to (I did a piece on this and related topics a while back HERE).

This was last week’s show (link HERE). Guests were the journalist Grace Dent and comedy writer Sian Harries. All three books they chose (presenter Harriet Gilbert gets to speak about her choice each week – she has good taste) gave rise to some interesting discussion:

Lissa Evans: Crooked Heart (2015)

Max Porter: Grief is the Thing With Feathers (2015)

Barbara Pym: Excellent Women (1952)

My Virago Modern Classics copy

My Virago Modern Classics copy

I posted on the fabulous Pym’s book a couple of years ago – she’s sharp and funny. In discussing the book Dent, Harries and Harriet Gilbert speculate whether men would like this sort of novel; I can answer that – she’s one of my favourite authors. My posts the seven novels of hers that I’ve read so far can be found HERE.

I hadn’t heard of (or, more accurately, realised I’d heard of) Lissa Evans or Crooked Heart, her fourth novel for adults (she’s also written children’s books). From the account given of it in the podcast it’s definitely going on the To Read list.

According to Wikipedia she qualified as a doctor in 1983, then had a career in stand-up comedy, was a TV and radio producer and director (including the excellent Father Ted). Crooked Heart and Their Finest Hour and a Half (published 2009) were longlisted for literary prizes. The latter was filmed as Their Finest a year or two ago, and I found it ok as entertainment; maybe the novel is more substantial.

Just looked her up on Amazon and see that her novel Old Baggage, that came out in the UK this summer, is one I’ve seen in the bookshops and passed over.

I’d resisted the Max Porter partly because of the hype about it when it was published, and also because of its subject: grief and bereavement. It just didn’t appeal. Now that I’ve listened to this thoughtful trio of readers discussing it, and having read this review by Kirsty Gunn in the Guardian when it was published, I think I’ll add this title to the list, too.

I’d be pleased to hear from anyone who’s read either the Evans or the Porter novels: are they as good as this podcast suggested? As for the Pym: well, I recommend her work wholeheartedly: beneath the slight exterior (timid or anxious spinsters, vicars and jumble sales, caddish chaps, etc.) her novels are pulsing with intelligence and wit.

I’d started working on a post about Angela Thirkell, but that will have to be completed another day.

Lost at sea: Charles Quimper, In Every Wave

Posted on by
5

Charles Quimper, In Every Wave. QC Fiction, available from 1 November 2018. First published 2017 as Marée montante

In a recent interview in the online magazine Québec Reads Charles Quimper was asked:

What, if anything, would you say defines Quebec literature?

 

An inwardness of character, I think, and a complexity in the emotions they experience. There’s a toughness, a harshness of tone that’s difficult to capture or define in just a few words.

This sums up the first-person narrative – monologue – and the narrator’s tangled, indefinable sensations and emotions in Quimper’s first novel, In Every Wave.

Quimper Every Wave coverIt belongs to that sub-genre of fiction which deals with a parent’s anguish and torment at the loss of a child. Ian McEwan is the only example that comes to mind (toddler goes missing in supermarket), but I’m sure there are more I’ve forgotten about.

In the same interview the author says that it’s a novel’s ‘opening lines that grab my attention. They have to land, leave their mark. I enjoy discovering images that are still new to me, scenes made up of words that leave me in a swirl of ideas.’ Here’s the opening paragraph of his novel:

It was June when I set sail on my boat’s maiden voyage. I carried the bare essentials. A few pounds of supplies, your little pink box, a battleships game, and the endless echo of our days together.

I’m not sure ‘harshness of tone’ is what he does here, though there’s a brittle matter-of-factness masking the pain underneath. The two short, simple sentences are deceptive, their apparent confidence waylaid by the heartbreaking list of stores that’s given in that long, swirling third sentence – all addressed to the lost child. After the mundane, trivial objects, with their connotations of seafaring and childhood, we get that tortured abstract noun phrase signifying emptiness, loss, bereavement.

What follows is a poetic evocation of the father’s descent into personal hell as he tries to come to terms with the death of his little girl. The narrative is slippery and unreliable: we’re given three different accounts of how she died. It’s as if the detail is immaterial; it’s only the grim fact that she’s dead that counts. The rest is narrative.

As he builds his ship of death, then sails it on an increasingly fantastic voyage reminiscent of legendary travellers like St Brendan and Mandeville, one is invited to share all that’s happening in his head, as in Golding’s Pincher Martin. He’s in such inner turmoil he’s incapable of distinguishing the material world, which increasingly lacks definition for him, from the infernal zone he’s trapped or adrift in with memories of his equally lost, unanchored little girl.

It’s impossible to read this novella – it’s less than eighty pages long – without partaking in that parental torment. Quimper takes us to places most of us hope never to go in real life, creating a work of art out of imagined catastrophe.

The translation by Guil Lefebvre is seamless and fluent: it can’t have been easy to render this heightened language from the French, yet he’s produced a version that reads idiomatically and smoothly – the sign of a good translation is that the reader is never conscious of reading something translated.

QC Fiction continue to produce an impressively varied and consistently interesting sequence of prose fiction titles.

There are fuller accounts at the following blogs:

Stu at Winstonsdad

Tony at Tony’s Reading List

ARC courtesy of QC Fiction.