family saga – Kate Macdonald

A House Full of Daughters, by Juliet Nicolson

I was in two minds about this book all the way through, and I’m still unclear how I feel about it. It’s certainly compelling, but it is three stories bundled into one narrative, and sold under the bookshelf-friendly title of yet another memoir from the Sackville-West / Nicolson dynasty. (The full title, A House Full of Daughters. Seven Generations. One Extraordinary Family rather forces this aspect on the reader.) It uses the Nicolson surname to suggest that the author is a literary personality (this memoir is her fourth publication) who wants her life to be interesting to the public, like that of her father Nigel Nicolson, the former Member of Parliament and co-founder of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and possibly also of her brother Adam Nicolson the historian, about whose books I have written here, and here. A House Full of Daughters is also a personal memoir, of the callousness of the English upper-classes when they are really selfish. Thus if you are looking for Bloomsbury spin-off material you’ll be disappointed, though it is rich in Sissinghurstiana, and unhappy rich people’s lives.

The three intertwined stories are: (1) yet more details from the Sackville-West / Nicolson history, (2) the chilly upbringing and tragic life of the author’s mother, Philippa Tennyson d’Eyncourt, and (3) Nicolson’s own story of how she and her mother both battled loneliness and alcoholism in their otherwise comfortable lives. The subtitle tells us that the memoir is about seven generations: Catalina, Pepita, Victoria, Vita, then Vita’s daughter-in-law Philippa, and her daughter Juliet, and Juliet’s two daughters. As an act of recovery of women’s lives in the twentieth century this book is undeniably interesting, but the lives of Catalina Duran and Pepita de Oliva in nineteenth-century Spain have been covered already, as Vita Sackville-West’s forebears, and Victoria and Vita Sackville-West are well-studied figures. The views and experiences of the seventh generation, Juliet’s two daughters, are barely mentioned, and they do not fit into the rather artificial framework that Nicolson creates around what she calls the ‘bargains’ that the six earlier women made with their husbands or fathers to gain the lives they wanted.

These ‘bargains’ are hardly a new phenomenon: women living in a patriarchy have always had to bargain with their bodies and domestic service to make their lives work out as best they can. For this memoir, access to surviving documentation is the real value (though I’d like to know where Nicolson found the intimate thoughts and feelings of her otherwise totally obscure Spanish great-great-great grandmother). The very private family documents that Nicolson quotes from, for example, that reveal the details of her great-grandparents’ exuberant sex life, are indeed a privilege to read, because Nicolson (with her brother) is the administrator of the estate. By using her access to reveal more of the Sackville-West / Nicolson story, Juliet Nicolson does an excellent job of conveying the human predicament of an Edwardian first-time mother determined never to be pregnant again, and of the ‘sexual desertion’ of the young husband suddenly denied access to his wife in every way.

Two generations later, Nicolson deals with her appalling grandparents, Sir Gervaise and Lady Tennyson-D’Eyncourt, most impressively. They were rich, with several homes, but wealth and comfort do not improve a naturally cold temperament. Nicolson describes her grandmother judiciously as unloving: ‘disapproval and contempt were Pamela’s default settings … She was wholly unhuggable and in her own way just as unmaternal as Vita’. I don’t agree that Nicolson’s mother Philippa was born ‘at a bad time to be a daughter’, since millions of other girls her age had wonderful lives. It’s obvious that Philippa was born into a family that didn’t want a daughter, and she suffered accordingly, expected to exist until marriage like every other girl of her class. It was Love in a Cold Climate in real life, but without the loving support of friends and a large family: after she finished school, the poor girl was completely isolated, and seems to have had no inner resources of her own. Philippa then had the additional bad luck of marrying the charmingly selfish Nigel Nicolson MP who wanted a wife to keep his parliamentary constituents happy, and didn’t have any other use for her. When a daughter writes so critically of her parents, and of her grandparents (Harold Nicolson seems to have been the only grandparent of the four who knew how to be nice to people), the effect is startling. The accounts of Philippa’s miseries, and of the scourge of tuberculosis in her life and in her mother’s life also, reflect horrible English class cruelties deriving completely from their privileged setting.

The last story is the very personal one of Juliet Nicolson’s life to date, and dwells on her loving relationship with her father (who seems to have manipulated her just as he did her mother) and her rejection of her mother in favour of the Sissinghurst connection. It is heartfelt, and not comfortable reading. I am also uncomfortable with the way Nicolson joins her own life’s details to the historically documented and well-published accounts of her forebears’ lives, since one will automatically expect comparable accomplishments and achievements, not just a connection by birth. But Nicolson does not inform us about any of her own writing, we hear almost nothing about her professional life, and far too much about her emotional travails, which have meaning only for her personal circle.

The value of this strand of the narrative is in how Nicolson’s life’s trajectory was similar to and yet differed from that of her mother, and how they both dealt with feelings of inadequacy and rejection through alcohol. This story doesn’t depend on who the protagonists are: it would be equally compelling as the story of total unknowns. Their story is about strength of character, the efforts of friends and family that did and did not help them, and why one woman died by her wilful destruction of her liver, and the other decided to survive after a final intervention that made a difference. We don’t need names, or family privilege, or the earlier, celebrated generations, to value this part of the memoir as it deserves. The effect is a patchwork of biography, that reduces its impact of its most meaningful aspects.

Juliet Nicolson, A House Full of Daughters. Seven Generations. One Extraordinary Family (Vintage 2015), ISBN 978-0-099-59803-9, £9.99

Now posting on Vulpes Libris: Frank O’Connor’s autobiographies

I posted a double review of Frank O’Connor’s autobiographies over on Vulpes Libris: An Only Child, and My Father’s Son. I learned a lot about Irish history, Irish literature, Irish convents and army pensions.

Alan Garner’s The Stone Book Quartet

Garner 1 I found these four short novels with a squeal of triumph in an Aberdeen second-hand bookshop, and bought them for £3. That’s right: the four books that are one of Garner’s greatest creative accomplishments, in a pristine box set, for barely more than they cost the original buyer in the late 1970s. I could barely contain my excitement, and gobbled all four stories over the next two evenings.

The Stone Book, Tom Fobble’s Day, Granny Reardun and The Aimer Gate were originally sold as children’s books. I know I read Granny Reardun as a child because I never forgot the image of the mother scrubbing the floor, moving backwards on her knees towards the door for the last time, where the rest of the family were waiting in their loaded cart to move somewhere they didn’t want to go. Trouble is, I couldn’t remember the title, and wondered for years where that story had come from. It came from Cheshire, Alan Garner’s ancestral county, and the Allman family were put out of their cottage because it was built of the last dimension stone in the county, and the vicar’s wife wanted it for her garden wall. This cruelty and injustice is a mere detail in the novel, since the main plot is about Joseph deciding that he does not want to be a stonemason like his grandfather, and how he is drawn to the forge as if he belongs there instead. Mark Edmonds wrote about Granny Reardun in an essay in the Alan Garner festschrift First Light: ‘It is only when [Joseph] sees their connection, in chisel mark and weathercock, that he fully understands. Metal is not asking him to turn his back; it just wants him to know where and how he fits’ (76).

Garner 2 Joseph is Mary’s son, and she is the stout-hearted daughter of Robert, the stone mason of The Stone Book. She climbs a ladder all the way to the top of Saint Philip’s steeple, carrying her father’s baggin in a knotted cloth between her teeth. Once she’s got over the dizziness she’s quite happy, and climbs the weathercock to be whizzed round and round by her delighted father. She wants to learn to read, but the squire doesn’t like his kitchen-maids to read, so Robert tools and knaps her a prayer-book from green flint, with a fossil fern on the back. There is also one more wonder in the story, that only Mary can see: she’s the bravest of all the characters in this quartet.

Joseph comes back in Tom Fobble’s Day, when his grandson William is learning how to stand up to the bullying Allman boy over the loan of his sledge. Joseph builds a sledge that carries William from the top of the top field past the dangerous rough ground near the gate, right through to the bottom field, well past the sledge graveyard where all the smashed ruins of homemade sledges end up. William’s sledge, much better than the shrapnel that rains from the sky as German bombers pass overhead, unregarded, is Joseph’s best and last job. Edmonds again: ‘The frame and rails are a composite of the forge that Joseph had stepped back from, and the loom used by William’s namesake many years before’ (78).

Garner 3 We go back in time to uncover that awkward bit between the fields, in The Aimer Gate, in which young Robert is put to work to move the stones and rubble by his uncle Charlie, back from France on leave in the First World War. Charlie is a sniper, his leave nearly up, and he has the shadow of death around him. Faddock Allman is the legless Boer War veteran now breaking stones in the road, sitting in his trolley. Charlie treats Faddock kindly, and with respect, one soldier to another. Faddock was the boy who threw stones through his own cottage window when he was working for the team who broke it up for the vicar’s wife’s garden wall, which is why Robert’s father William won’t speak to him. The ruins of the Allmans’ cottage make the ridge in the field boundary that smashes the unwary sledges, and will blunt the scythes of Charlie and the Leah brothers if young Robert doesn’t clear it out. Charlie’s last job is to shoot the rabbits and other creatures escaping from the field portion ever shrinking beneath the scythes. His sniping skill is his route out of farming, and stonework, and metal crafting, but his own plans may include something more drastic than that.

Alan Garner find There’s a photograph of the Garners in First Light, with Joseph and Charlie and Mary and old Robert. We don’t really need to know that all the stories are true, or near enough. They are marvellous. Harry Lupton, again in First Light, said it best: ‘They are of such a distilled precision, they are so layered, so finely observed, so pregnant with what lies under their surfaces’. They wear like stone, with stories in every layer.

Fantasies of the undefeated South: Owen Wister’s Lady Baltimore

Lady Baltimore, by Owen Wister, is an extraordinary novel. It wasn’t written as a historical novel, but it certainly is one now: a 1905 depiction of the American South at the turn of the twentieth century, on how life would have been so much better if the South hadn’t lost the Civil War.

I had to do some research on Owen Wister, though I’ve been rereading this novel, and his most famous one, The Virginian, for over twenty years. I knew he was a close friend of President Theodore Roosevelt, because my 1928 edition of Lady Baltimore reproduces a couple of long letters between them on the subject of race, on which I have something to say in a minute. I had already realised that Wister was keen on the idea of the natural aristocrat, the idea that some people are simply innately better than others, by their ‘breeding’ and their natural gifts. This is how he makes the eponymous protagonist of The Virginian such a hero, persuading the reader to accept his superiority by his actions, and by giving him outrageously attractive virtues. But the idea of natural aristocracy never sounded very democratic to me, so I was confused about how Wister felt about the American ideal that all men and women are created equal.

In Lady Baltimore we see substantial evidence that Wister, or his narrative persona, did not think that all men and women were created equal, since he is firmly (though always with gentlemanly regret) against any suggestion that men and women with black skins might be equal to those with white. The easy urbanity and simple persuasiveness with which the narrator of Lady Baltimore sets out just how impossible it is that black slaves and their descendants can be anything but dependent and lower than the whites, are horribly alluring. It’s the tone that does it. The novel is written as if Mark Twain and Edith Wharton were acting out a script by Jane Austen. It uses a dangerously familiar set of literary echoes, and so we assume we know what we are going to be reading. Jane Austen may have tacitly condoned slavery in Mansfield Park, but she doesn’t say anything about it directly. Edith Wharton was not known for her pro-slavery views, as was not Mark Twain: these are authors on the righteous side of history. We simply don’t expect to fall into the trap of going along with openly racist views in a novel that follows such great literary voices so faithfully.

Lady Baltimore is about the attempts of New York society girl Hortense Rieppe to persuade impoverished Southern gentleman John Mayrant to stay in love with her. He met her in romantic circumstances, there was an idyll and an engagement, he returned home to prepare for their marriage. She followed to make sure that he did not come to his senses, because he is quite unlike her usual beaux, although, regrettably, poor. And her usual beaux are incredulous that she allowed things to progress this far. Hortense’s pursuit is set in Charleston at the end of the nineteenth century when the New Rich of Newport were becoming a horrifying byword for vulgarity and philistinism for traditional Southerners. I can’t find much online about this novel, which makes me think that its subject matter has persuaded scholars to avoid it. I can’t find any reprints except in a Southern Classics series from 1992, and the admirable Librivox have done an audio book version. Tellingly, the blurb for 1992 edition describes Lady Baltimore as a ‘classic novel of post-Civil War Charleston life’. It talks about the theme of North and South becoming reconciled, but says nothing at all about the other major theme, of how the black American should never attain equality with the white. This is a novel that needs investigation, because of its manipulation of the reader. There is something very strange about the process of reading, and loving, I mean absolutely loving, a novel in all its aspects, and then being stopped in one’s tracks by the narrator’s assumption that something we know is utterly wrong is desirable, and that all the readers will agree with this. An analogy might be as if one were reading a great German novel of the 1930s, being totally wowed by it, and then finding out, too late, that it and its author were seriously pro-Nazi. It’s a kick to the intellect.

So that is today’s conundrum: how can you deeply admire a novel for narrative technique, emotional satisfaction, artistry, pacing, etc, even though it is appallingly wrong in so many ways? Have any great modern classics been in the same category? We know Virginia Woolf was a vile anti-Semitic snob and an unkind person from her private diaries and letters, so why does that not affect our appreciation of her novels? D H Lawrence had some seriously odd ideas about women’s relationship to men – apparently he tried to beat up his wife because she was not ‘suitably reverential to his maleness’ – yet he has been an unassailable modern classic in English literature teaching for decades. (Though I did hear a colleague remark some years ago that she could not believe Lawrence was seriously taught these days, so perhaps fashions are changing.) Among the lesser politically right-wing writers, personal views no longer thought of as socially acceptable are more likely to make us disapprove of their work. I can’t read ‘Sapper’ because his views poison his prose. I get enough stick about John Buchan to know that people feel the same away about him. Ditto Dornford Yates. Maybe not so much about Angela Thirkell, but the more I worked on her writing, the less I would have liked to have met her. The emotional satisfaction we get from their novels is tightly bound up with our approval of the ethics or moral values implicit in the narratives.

Going back to Lady Baltimore, I have to repeat: it is an eminently satisfying novel. The first-person narrator, a Northerner called Augustus, is sent to Charleston by his Aunt Carola, who wants him to find archival evidence that he is connected by blood to the crowned heads of Europe. This is a delightfully satirical sub-plot we needn’t think about much, but it brings Augustus to Charleston, and gives him letters of introduction to the old families of the town who approve, in a superior way, of his task. He himself has no great interest in being royally related, but he is a dutiful nephew, and can see that this task gives him the entrée into a society that he is soon longing to penetrate. He meets Miss Eliza La Heu, the daughter of a plantation family working, in a ladylike way, at the Woman’s Exchange, selling cake and light lunches to the upper classes. He also meets John Mayrant, first introduced as an out of breath young gentleman, who arrives at the Woman’s Exchange while Augustus is taking his first lunch there, to order a wedding cake for the following Wednesday: the ‘Lady Baltimore’ of the title.

Augustus finds out from elliptical, ladylike gossip-mongers that John Mayrant’s fiancée is a beautiful young woman, but she has no background, her father ran away from his post at the Battle of Chattanooga, and her Newport friends give her no respectability in the eyes of Mr Mayrant’s elderly aunts. Worse, Mr Mayrant is definitely going off the boil, and Hortense is playing fast and loose with a very wealthy banker from nowhere called Charley. But which one will she marry, and which one does she love? And if John Mayrant is realising that he no longer loves her, and in fact would run a mile rather than have anything to do with her so-called friends, how is he, as a very correct Southern gentleman, going to get out of the engagement?

We need to recollect that Southern manners at the turn of the century were definitely pre-Civil War in origin. It is the pride of the Southern ladies whom Augustus formally visits that they control all gossip and discussion by these antediluvian standards. So Augustus’s progress, and ours, in understanding all the ins and outs is severely constrained by what he can winkle out without being guilty of a lapse in manners.

I found all this completely delightful. When the Displacers – as Hortenses’s set is named by Augustus – arrive in Charleston in their vulgar automobile, and inadvertently run over Miss Eliza’s dog, and offer her money as a compensation because they think from her modest dress that she is a servant or peasant, we can see this is going to be a deeply felt enactment of the manners of the New Rich versus those of the Old Poor.

But I have not forgotten the racism. It begins casually, with a loyal ex-slave called Daddy Ben offering formal sympathy to John Mayrant over his appalling predicament of having a black man appointed as a superior official over him in his job in the Custom House. That’s a bit of a shock. Then Augustus goes looking for a carpenter to make him up a box for posting some fragile items, in the area of Charleston where the black population lives. This is described indelicately, and the black men who do not subscribe to Daddy Ben’s point of view are all categorised as filthy, violent and drunkards. The long discussions between very endearing and admirable characters over the utter impossibility of a black man ever being equal to a white are simply astounding. They should be read against modern fiction by Alice Walker or Maya Angelou, because Wister is so genuine and unconscious, so utterly of his time, and yet so appalling to read now. The complete lack of nuance in these sections is breath-taking, so much so that it seems a different novel. But perhaps, after all, Lady Baltimore is like Mansfield Park, and Jane Eyre, both excellent novels admired for their literary perfection, but with silent elements we do not consider or even notice until we come across them in a post-colonial literature class.

Lady Baltimore is deeply rewarding for the marvellous storytelling, the fun of the extraordinary social entanglements, the clever wit, and for the enjoyment of seeing the New Rich routed, as is traditional for this kind of American novel in the Edith Wharton style. Read it also for a very sobering piece of evidence that 12 Years A Slave was not made up in hindsight.

Negroland, by Margo Jefferson

Negroland is a memoir of growing up in the 1950s and 1960s as an upper-class black girl in Chicago. It’s about race, class, position, white socks, prejudice, hair oil and its stains, integration, politics, fabulous clothes, architecture, representation, style, standards and history. Jefferson mixes poetry and lyrics with historical extracts and retellings of events from daily and national life. It’s not an easy read, though it is extremely absorbing as a subject, because Jefferson’s prose is challenging; the readers are not let off lightly, and have to work to be told what we want to know.

Reading this had a peculiar effect on me, digging back into my past life. I grew up in a white monoculture in north-east Scotland. I hope I grew up free from racial prejudice because there was nothing in place to teach it. I do know that I was utterly ignorant about black lives, until I went to school in Wilmington, North Carolina, at the age of 9 (my scientist father was working at the oceanographical research station for 6 months, so we moved to the US). I noticed over time that all the children in my fourth-grade class who were noticeably, worrying slow at reading were black: that was how I worked out that economic deprivation and not having books at home could also be based on race. My mother volunteered in a day centre for children with learning difficulties, autism, physical and developmental problems, all jumbled in together in a large room in which she was the only white face. My American smallpox vaccination certificate has a ticked box to signify that I wasn’t black. Living in the USA in 1973 was an other-worldly experience. I visited North Carolina again seven years ago, and the smell of the pines and the quality of the heat and dampness in the air came back to me instantly, like a thump of recognition. Jefferson’s book had the same effect on me, in the stories she tells about the segregation her forebears endured, and the heroic toil of black women to make things a little better for the next generation of women.

Negroland 2 — Jefferson’s parents on their engagement

Because Jefferson’s mother was an beautiful, fashionable woman, knowledgeable about style and design, much of this memoir is about clothes. She describes her mother’s elegant, cultured female society, her clubs and sororities, the passionate identification she and her sister had for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Marian Anderson, and Audrey Hepburn, and the race politics they learned by watching them in their roles, learning their lyrics, understanding that Dandridge would never get the Hepburn parts, and why she refused to take the servant’s role as well. Jefferson and her sister had to shine under crushing rules for girls’ behaviour, for black behaviour, for ladies’ behaviour, all at the same time

However, as well as the images of smiling black girls wearing white socks standing by their father’s cruiser on the lake, Negroland is fascinating for the details of the practical politics of integration, of learning the power of refusal against those who choose to accept you when it suits them. Jefferson writes about the interstices, the period when integration was being worked out at pavement level, how neighbourhoods changed for the new black neighbours and how the black middle-classes moved in, held their own, established their own culture, but always had prejudice waiting for them, in the unsafe areas and the states and counties still segregated in all but name. All this is largely unknown to foreigners like me, the black history that can’t be taught in schools, the details that need to be explained or acted out in film scripts, the daily details that made Black Power possible as a movement.

Negroland 3 — Jefferson, centre back row, senior cheerleader

Negroland was an enlightening memoir to read in the week when the extraordinary interview of Rachel Dolezal by Ijeoma Oluo was published. It was a rebuke and a magisterial stare across the colour bar that whites had established, with the oppressive, empowering weight of history behind it. Dolezal chooses to self-identify as black, but no black woman or man can choose to self-identify as white, unless (as in Jefferson’s memoir) they have the genes for fair skin and obedient hair to ‘pass’, should they want to. For Jefferson’s aunts and uncles it was only ever ‘passing’, temporary whiteness on sufferance because it was economically and socially convenient, and no white person should forget that, or presume to travel in the opposite direction.

Negroland by Margo Jefferson was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2016, and was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. (Granta Books, 2015), ISBN 078-1-78378-339-7, £8.99

Ernest Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream

Hem 1 This Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up is about Ernest Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream. He is a giant of American literature, and of masculine writing. He wrote men’s books about manly subjects: war, bullfighting, deep sea fishing. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. Islands in the Stream was published after his death, in 1970. It was put together from three fragments of novels found in his bank vault in Havana after his death. They were intended by Hemingway to form a larger work, but his widow and literary executor put the pieces together. You’d never think it was cobbled together at all. It’s a stupendous novel, and I loved it.

Hem 2 It’s also chillingly tense. Hemingway’s narrative style is famous: he called it the iceberg technique, or something like that, because all the work was done below the surface of the words. So we have plain, pared-down prose, no words wasted, nothing exuberant or decorative, which gives the rare instances of enthusiasm, passion, pleasure, etc, real power, because they stand alone without fuss. The effect is similar to encountering a large rock in the middle of a desert plain. It gives the impression of being bigger than anything else around, because it’s the only one of its kind, but if it were surrounded by equally large-sized rocks, we wouldn’t pay it any particular attention. The effect of such restraint in the writing is that we really feel the undercurrents of emotion. More importantly, we can feel the stuff that’s not being said, and the approach of terrible things a long way off. The tension mounts, and it just keeps on mounting. But because Hemingway’s writing is so controlled, you can feel sure that the catastrophe won’t be sprung on you out of the blue. There will be warnings, and you will have to wait for the warning to happen for the awful, or dangerous, or risky thing to happen. When it does happen, it’s a relief, because now we can get on with it, and not sit there imagining ‘he’s going to kill them’, or ‘they’re going to be washed overboard’, and so on.

Hem 3 Tension is a peculiar thing in a novel. If you think about it rationally, the reader can put a book down at any time during a tense-making episode, and it will wait for you. Nothing will change the outcome on the page. You can change how you respond to the outcome by being in a different frame of mind, or wait to have the right kind of time to devote to reading it. You can go to sleep and read the resolution of the tension with a clear mind and full attention on a different day. So what is it that makes us succumb to the tyranny of the plot and keep reading past midnight, or miss a bus stop, in thrall to the story? In Hemingway, I think it’s the hypnosis of the small plain words and the steady encroachment of story and character in tiny, incremental steps. He likes the character, and we like the character, so we don’t want anything bad to happen to that person. Emotional investment in a character binds us to their fate. The more an author encourages us to feel good about a person, the less we are likely to not be too bothered if that person does something horrible, or has something horrible happen to them. So it’s in an author’s interests to make the readers feel invested in some way – good or bad – in the characters so the book will be read. This will work for the situation too, if the situation is bigger or more interesting that the people.

Hem 4 So, back to the novel. Only one of the characters in Islands in the Stream populates all three of its parts: Thomas Hudson, a famous artist, a former habitué of 1920s Paris, where he lived with his first wife and son Tom. Now he lives on Bimini, an island of the Bahamas, 50 miles off Florida. He paints, and he drinks. This is apparently not too much, but the amount he and some of the other men sink daily, often starting at breakfast, made me blench. I’m not a spirits drinker, but they certainly were. Hemingway wrote this novel in 1950-51, and it certainly has a feel of Ian Fleming about it, with the details of men’s lives, and how they saw women. Hemingway and Fleming wrote with detailed precision about what their characters ate and wore, and the drinks descriptions are basically recipes without quantities. Thomas Hudson – and here’s an interesting thing, which I’m sure Hemingway critics have explained to their own satisfaction, but it was new to me – Thomas Hudson, when referred to by the narrative voice, is always called ‘Thomas Hudson’. Not Thomas, not Hudson, always the two names together. When he’s referred to by characters, its Hudson or Tom or Tommy, but the narrative voice sets itself apart with the formality of the full name. There is another Tom, his son, called Young Tom or Tommy at different times, but often just Tom. But the painter is given his full name, as if he were a brand of rum.

Hem 5 Thomas Hudson lives on Bimini in his house. He has a cook / major-domo / housekeeper and trusted friend and native Biminian called Eddy, and a houseboy called Joseph. The novel opens when Thomas Hudson has finished work for the day, and spends the evening drinking with friends on the quay, where things get a little out of hand, and there’s a fight. His friend Roger Davis, a novelist and screenwriter, comes back to Hudson’s house to gets his wounds doctored and to sleep, and to stay, since he needs to find quiet to start writing again. And, of course, the boys are coming: Hudson’s three sons, Tom, and David and Andrew, by his second wife. The five of them have a wonderful summer on the beach and in and out of the water. This novel is apparently praised for its nature descriptions: it certainly has tremendous descriptions of fishing, sharks, and eating. Some visitors to the island arrive, one of them being a girl who’s come to find Roger, which he is very glad about. That’s the last we see of him, because he takes her off to Hudson’s ranch in Idaho, to start writing again.

Hem 6 This is set a few years later in wartime, in Cuba, which isn’t very far south of the Bahamas, in Hudson’s house in the countryside outside Havana. There he has a vast number of cats and dogs, and three or four staff to keep the place running in his absence. He is absent a fair bit, because he’s converted his boat into a survey vessel for the US Navy, and he’s scouring the Caribbean coastline looking for U-boats. When this episode opens he’s just come back from an exhausting trip, and his favourite cat, Boise, is ecstatic at Hudson being home again. Hudson spends most of this section of the novel drinking, or fretting about whether the cats are eating enough. Boise eats fried eggs, and accepts a little champagne. Hudson tells stories in a bar to Honest Lil, an old prostitute friend, and allows himself to recall some very exciting episodes from his past with a princess on a boat going through the Corinth Canal. This is Lil’s ploy to make him forget a recent sadness, and to get him warmed up by recalling the princess’s sexual appetites. But out of the blue, a woman no-one expected to see walks into the bar, and Hudson and she have an ecstatic reunion, which fills Hudson’s slightly fuzzy mind with unfettered joy. It probably isn’t joyful for Honest Lil, because we don’t see her again. The drinking in Havana is prodigious, I lost count of the frozen double daiquiris that Hudson consumed. But just as we’re thinking, at last, he can be happy again, just for a bit, Hudson gets an emergency summons from the Navy and he has to go back to sea.

Hem 7 The third part of the novel is spent largely at sea, hunting for some German seamen who escaped their wrecked U-boat, and made the mistake of massacring some islanders when they stole their turtle boat. Hudson’s ship has a crew of irregular sailors, mainly smugglers and fishermen and a discharged Marine, as well as a Navy man who has been given to Hudson to make sure his ship stays in radio contact with naval authorities on Havana. This is one of the thin threads attaching the third part of the novel to the war: another thread concerns Tommy the younger, and other people in Hudson’s life who are also serving in the war. I did wonder when reading this section, why did Thomas Hudson not go straight into the army or navy? Why did he become an irregular pirate for hire? Could any of this stuff have really happened? It’s plausible enough as a novel for me to not want to bother checking out the history: the romance of the plot is quite satisfying enough.

I can’t see this free-living and hard-drinking artist and big-game fisherman submitting to uniform and military rules, and possibly he was too old as well. Instead, we get a truly exotic idea of Cuba and the Floridian islands, the Bahamas, all of the Caribbean, as a modern refuge for terrible pirates who prey on the locals and kill ruthlessly. Islands in the Stream is very Dr No, very sun-kissed and hard-drinking, and very, very hard-man American hero. It reminded me strongly of the Commando comic books I read as a child, where the war was simply a setting for personal heroics and dramatic tension involving guns and the occasional guttural swear word. As a story of eight men cooped up in a boat together in the heat, getting frustrated by not being able to catch their prey, and feeling just a little bit edgy about one or two of the others, this last part of the novel should glue you to the very last page, no matter what else you should be attending to.

Three disappointments for the dud pile

I’ve had a bad run of books I didn’t like and books read for work rather than pleasure recently, so all I can offer this week are these three pallid specimens. I’ll try to crank up my enthusiasm next week. It’s the end of term, holiday reading is beckoning, I have hopes of something marvellous waiting for me when I pick up the very next book from the pile.

Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

I love Karen Russell’s short stories, in St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised By Wolves, and Vampires in the Lemon Grove, which I reviewed here, so I bought Swamplandia!, her novel, and have been putting off reading it for over a year. I took it all the way to Hawaii and brought it back unread. Not a good sign. So I went and put myself on a train with nothing but this to read and made myself get through it. It’s not great. Her imagination is stupendous, and her eye for compelling detail creates marvels, but this novel is a short story that has grown beyond its natural capacity for wonder. And I was not entranced: I was bored by halfway through. The central premise of an alligator park in a Florida swamp is solid; Ossie’s romance with a ghost is extremely odd; the story of Louis’ swamp-sailing life in the 1920s is a beautiful short short that might have been published somewhere else first, it is so polished and self-contained. I was completely unconvinced by the Chief’s obsession with keeping the park on, and by Kiwi’s passive endurance. Ava the narrator is of course a star, but the red Seth is unused and wasted, like a glowing ember snuffed out by Gothic monstrosity. Too many details, not enough story.

Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

Another novel I put off reading until I absolutely had no choice. I inherited a Modern Scottish Fiction course from a departing colleague, and so I inherited all the novels he had carefully chosen and a course outline he had refined over the years. Miss Jean Brodie, A Disaffection, Morvern Callar, Lanark, Keep Breathing, they’re all there. And lurking like a malignant toad at the back, was Trainspotting. I read the first half in a gobble of desperation, like a really bad medicine, and felt ill. It vastly enlarged my vocabulary for drug addiction and a truly astonishing collection of words pertaining to the body and its functions, humours, liquids and solids, but did I enjoy it? No. I hated it. I admire its technique and innovation, but I was counting the hours until I could put it back on the high shelf. I wrote my class notes. Reread bits. Cautiously took a peek here and there through the remainder of the novel and read some of the shorter chapters. Revised my class notes. Took the class through the first seminar of the week, and felt some hope. They liked the novel, some of them really liked it, so they did more of the talking than usual. Emboldened, I finished the chapters I’d not read, and we tore through the second session. I had had the brainwave of getting the class to put the book on trial, and my obliging lawyer sister found me Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986. That went down well, with some strong defences of its scatology, misogyny and the glamorisation of violence. Now I never need read the bloody thing again.

Larry Niven, Ringworld

I’ve been meaning to read Larry Niven for years, so I scooped up a copy of Ringworld, hoping for technological wonders. Foolish me. I’d forgotten that the only Niven story I’ve read was ‘Cloak of Anarchy’, which had the futuristic technology I craved, and the slightly dystopic enclosed society, and also the naked girl walking through a park with her cloak hovering behind her, unafraid of sexual assault because of the police surveillance. And then the surveillance stopped, and oh look, assault begins. Ringworld (as far as I read) doesn’t have the assault, but it does seem to revolve around an old man’s seedy, leering gaze on a very young woman’s body in and out of various anonymous and uninteresting parties, and frankly I could not be bothered. Several alien characters, who seemed like tedious blokes in alien suits for all the difference they exhibited in their behaviour or perceptions, exasperated my tolerance for tired 1970s fantasies until I just had to fling Ringworld on the floor. It went to Age Concern last week, and they’re welcome to it.

Category: family saga

Alan Garner’s The Stone Book Quartet

Ernest Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream

Three disappointments for the dud pile

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