Reading Diary: Trollope, O'Connor, O'Brien, O'Connor again, Henry James

Since bombing my way through Death Comes to Pemberley I've been reading a rather electrifying cluster of other things ... which I will now proceed to summarise in blog-style, semi-bitesize fashion.


1. Anthony Trollope, The Warden

I had a few friends at university, and one boyfriend, who were big Trollope fans, but our tutor didn't get us to read any during the eight short weeks we 'did' Victorian literature, and, already lumbered with the bricks that were Bleak House and Middlemarch and Our Mutual Friend and so on, I left him well alone. I think it is a combination of having moved to the country and a dip back into Thomas Hardy that raised the idea of reading some Trollope in my mind, so I bought The Warden in a spanking new, very elegant Penguin edition with lovely stripes on the spine and the back. This is the first of the Barchester novels, and is also very short, so I thought it might be a good place to start.

The Warden follows the moral crisis of a quiet, cello-playing clergyman who, through generations of complacency and inflation, receives a huge income as the warden of a lodging house for poor, retired men of the parish. The sum was originally meant to give the warden a comfortable living and provide for the men's board, but whilst the warden's portion has increased, the men's daily allowance has remained the same. A young doctor, burning with the flames of righteousness, decides to stoke up the residents into signing a petition asking for their fair share, which throws the poor warden, Septimus Harding, into shock and disorientation.

Like Tolstoy and indeed Hardy, Trollope has such enormous compassion for nearly all his characters -- perhaps with the exception of Dr Grantly, the archdeacon -- that you can't help becoming rather passionate about what could be described as a dated Anglican quibble. Mr Harding tends to mime cello-playing behind his back during uncomfortable conversations, and, if things get too troubling, on his lapels -- much to the bewilderment of his interlocutors. This is a brilliant touch which encapsulates his preferment of music and emotional fulfilment rather than intellectual or public triumph. From this one gesture, you can see in an instant how the rest of the book will pan out.

Choosing an argument about the wealth of the Church, however, has larger echoes that it is important to remember when reading The Warden today. Henry VIII justified the dissolution of the monasteries partly by pointing to the vast and questionable incomes enjoyed by many abbots, and the privileges enjoyed by bishops, such as seats in the Lords, could form a modern parallel if someone were to take up the issue today. Which is not to say that Trollope is 'taking up' the issue as such. He is certainly exploring it, and also shining a light on the border between being in the right and appearing to be so -- Jeremy Hunt, take note -- but my lasting impression was not of the greed and self-satisfaction of the church; it was of the quiet anguish of the warden himself. The fact that the book is entitled The Warden, rather than, say, Those Avaricious Archdeacons, seems to indicate Trollope's intention here.


2. Short stories -- Frank O'Connor, Edna O'Brien, Flannery O'Connor.

Yes, the sudden cluster of 'O'...' in the author's names does signify a move towards Irish writing. I finally got around to reading Ulysses. A guy I was at university with was surprised I hadn't read it before -- and, frankly, so was I. But I finally did it. And it's BRILLIANT. (See the poll on your right -- if you can take a couple of seconds to vote before the end of October that would be fab!) And the gentleness, the recognisable 'Irishness' of it, pushed me to explore Irish writing a little more.

I bought a great book called The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story -- which I mentioned in my post about Colm Toibin -- which contains thirty-one stories, along with a great introduction by Anne Enright. 'The Mad Lomasneys' by Frank O'Connor and 'Sister Imelda' by Edna O'Brien are particularly brilliant, and I've since gone out and bought a collection of Frank O'Connor stories. They're gentle, uncomplicated, and then, suddenly, more heartbreaking than you might think it reasonable to expect from such a short form.

Edna O'Brien is the next on my list to explore. She has just published an autobiography, Country Girl, and thus has been in the press and on Open Book and so on. Her story 'Sister Imelda' seems to be one of her most famous, and captures exquisitely the desperation pupils have to please their teachers, and what happens if the teacher finds herself a little too keen to be pleased. "I looked into her eyes, which seemed fathomless, and saw that she was willing me to be calm and obliging me to be master of my fears, and I little knew that one day she would have to do the same as regards the swoop of my feelings for her." Without the word "swoop," this sentence would be unremarkable -- with it, it's stunning.

Flannery O'Connor -- as you might have been muttering indignantly to yourself -- was not Irish, but was born in Georgia, USA, in 1925, and died there of lupus at the age of 39. The introduction to her Complete Stories, by her publisher Robert Giroux, paints her as an extraordinarily humble, painstaking writer, but one who knew exactly what she was trying to do -- a conviction strengthened by her Christian faith. Her stories are extremely sharp and tough, and Evelyn Waugh is reported to have said, when sent the proofs of her first story collection, "If these stories are in fact the work of a young lady, they are indeed remarkable." Whether or not you'd expect this level gaze, frequently directed at men and their pretensions and prejudices, from a female writer (if you need to be angry today, go here), I think it's fair to say you might not expect it from a writer in her early twenties, as O'Connor was when she wrote, say, 'The Geranium'. Her precocity was really exceptional.


3. Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

My experience of Henry James so far had only really encompassed The Turn of the Screw, Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady. But I reread the latter earlier this year, and was struck with how lucidly and civilly and minutely he dissects the relationships between his characters, even two acquaintances striking up a conversation in a drawing room, tracing who seizes tiny advantages and triumphs over the other.

I chose The Wings of the Dove for a couple of very banal reasons. The first is that I've somehow ended up with two copies of it, so it kept thrusting itself into my field of vision -- a bit like a painting whose eyes follow you around the room. Secondly, one edition of it is a lovely Penguin classics copy -- the expensive black ones, not the cheap beige/green ones, which has a very nice font in a good size. I'm happy to admit to being susceptible to print size as a consideration given how much reading I do.

And I'm glad I gave myself a break on that score, because Wings is really quite dense and tough-going in many places. It was published nearly 20 years after The Portrait of a Lady, and James has become even more unremittingly abstract in his descriptions of relationships. Check out this passage, from the very first chapter, on the subject of Kate Croy's relationship with her father:

Yet if there was much she neither knew nor dreamed of it passed between them at this very moment that he was quite familiar with himself as the subject of such quandaries. If he recognized his younger daughter's happy aspect as a tangible value, he had from the first still more exactly appraised every point of his own. The great wonder was not that in spite of everything these points had helped him; the great wonder was that they hadn't helped him more. However, it was, to its eternal recurrent tune, helping him all the while; her drop into patience with him showed how it was helping him at this moment.

It's the kind of writing that rewards slow, thoughtful reading. Once you've got your head round what the hell he's talking about, it's brilliant. But slow really does mean slow -- no eyeslip, no skimming, none of the normal approaches I take with easier stuff. This is not, I admit, a speed I like very much, because I like to feel the thickness of the pages increase in my left hand and decrease in my right hand as I get further into a book. (This is one reason why ebooks don't do it for me.) But it makes more and more sense to me these days to slow down, to commit to writers who have clearly pumped so much time and brainpower into their work that to read it at pretty much any speed feels ungenerous. Sitting and staring at the neat ranks of books I intend to read very soon doesn't help me remember that the main thing is the actual reading of the books -- but Henry James does.



Running my eye back up the pictures of books, this does look like an advert for Penguin -- but they are on a seemingly eternal roll with their book designs, and their fonts have always been gorgeous, so if I've got the choice, it's Penguin almost every time. Other publishers are available. (But sometimes they might as well not be.)

PD James vs. Amateur Fanfiction: Place Your Bets Now!

Who would win in a literary contest between a renowned, nonagenarian crime novelist and a bunch of (mostly) female, unpublished, scribbling fantasists? Or so I characterised in my head the comparison between PD James's Death Comes to Pemberley (DCTP) and the immense amount of online fanfiction I've read over the years.

Like many (should I perhaps say 'many women'?), I've read Pride and Prejudice a good four or five times, and have seen the two modern adaptations frequently enough to have a pretty thorough knowledge of the plot and characters. So when I heard about James's genre-shifting homage to Austen, I was intrigued. I had never read any of James's work, but I knew her name through contacts I've had with Faber and Faber, her publishers. It also made me think of EL James, the author of the Fifty Shades trilogy, which started out as a Twilight-based fanfiction, but had to be rewritten for publication for copyright reasons. PD James, of course, didn't have this problem, what with Austen having been dead for nearly 200 years.

PD did, however, have a different difficulty, one which, to my mind, stuck out a mile. Amateur fanfiction writers -- whether they're basing their stories on Harry Potter, Twilight, or, slightly amusingly, Fifty Shades -- can pretty safely assume that their readers know the 'canon', the original texts they're writing from. Thus a Harry Potter fanfiction beginning with Severus Snape storming into his classroom will probably not follow with "Snape was the Potions Master at Hogwarts, but was rumoured to desperately want the Defence Against the Dark Arts post." Readers will almost always know all this. They've come to this category because they've already read, and liked, the canon, and they want to understand or imagine more about this world, these characters.


PD James can't make this assumption. There may be readers who are huge fan of crime writing in general and PD James in particular who have never read or seen Pride and Prejudice. They might have a general idea of the plot in a 'common knowledge' way, have read Bridget Jones' Diary, or even found the clip of Colin Firth in his wet shirt on YouTube. But PD James needs more from her readers than this. She needs them to have a detailed understanding of the plot, characters, and even back story to be able to follow what happens.

She therefore begins the novel with a rather long synopsis of the events of Pride and Prejudice, from the point of view of an omniscient narrator. Sample sentence: "It was hardly unexpected; Mr Bingley's admiration for Jane had been apparent from their first meeting at an assembly ball." Put it in the present tense and it practically becomes a paragraph from SparkNotes, albeit rather better written. If James's editor/publisher had been slightly conversant with the conventions of fanfiction, s/he might have been sensible enough to suggest that this synopsis be included as a prologue explicitly aimed at people who hadn't read Pride and Prejudice. As prologues, especially of crime novels, I was emphatically not hooked.

Whilst we're mentioning the genre again, it would be unfair of me to ignore it as a work of crime fiction. But even here, I wasn't satisfied. I'd worked out much of the solution quite early on, and then when the big 'reveal' did happen, it was too soon, leaving a lot of explanation to fill the last fifty or so pages, which was not only obvious but frequently repetitious. There were no really 'thrilling' moments, and too much imparting of information was done through quite clunky dialogue.

I also, unexpectedly, found the characters very two-dimensional. I wondered whether this was because they were not PD James's own characters, and thus she had not thought to develop them: Bingley, Jane, Darcy and Elizabeth all seem to rest on the characterisation Austen herself did in P&P, and little is added. (In fairness, Colonel Fitzwilliam and Mr Wickham are more interesting, though they are not the protagonists.) Even the new characters seem to be little more than mouthpieces with one or two broad adjectives. Whether this is typical of PD James I don't know, but for someone who claims that "the greatest writing pleasure for me is in the creation of original characters" (in the afterword to the book, no less), she doesn't exactly back up that claim here.

The book ends with a sickening epilogue in which Darcy suddenly decides to explain his motives for doing a bunch of things back in the old days when Austen was deciding who did what. This is implausible (they've been married SIX years now), unnecessary and, frankly, poorly written. Sample sentence: "How could I have been so unfeeling, so presumptuous, as to seek to separate Bingley from Jane?" This is meant to be Darcy speaking. He drones on, repeating stretches of plot just in case we'd forgotten AGAIN about how much Elizabeth used to hate him, and how justified she was -- and it just doesn't sound like the way Darcy, or indeed anyone, would really speak. The epilogue to the last Harry Potter book was better, and those who've read it will know that's saying a lot.

A P&P-based 'fangirl' creation ...

The last scene, and indeed quite a few chunks of the book, read like 'fangirl' fanfiction: aiming mainly to flag up the writer's love and knowledge of the canon text. I actually found this sentence which apparently runs through Elizabeth's thoughts towards the beginning: "If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?" YAWN-VOMIT-YAWN. We get it, PD. You think Jane Austen's a brilliant novelist. Why don't you just write "Elizabeth thought again about how complex a character she used to be, and how comparatively uninteresting she was now"?

There is a lot of fanfiction out there on the internet -- I've written a few pieces myself -- and the best of it aims to go far beyond the canon texts, bringing a couple of minor characters together, unpicking strange moments or gaps in the plot, and often dispensing with original time-frames altogether. I've read stories where a relatively two-dimensional character (for instance, Professor McGonagall) suddenly gains secrets desires, a dark past, a building tension with another character. This then enriches the original texts by forcing you to ask certain questions, to consider how much deeper the world can go, when you reread them. Why would the Death Eaters, who apparently love torturing people, only have one torture spell? Wouldn't this get boring for everyone? Wouldn't they employ some sadistic spell-writer to create a specialist repertoire for them? You can end up so far from the canon that it becomes merely a speck in the distance, the place you've travelled from. This should be the joy of writing and reading fanfiction.

There are one or two moments when PD James does this in DCTP -- she gives us a plausible and wryly-described marriage for Mary Bennet, for example -- but most of her time is spent hammering through the plot, rather than exploring quirks and idioms of characters. I rarely say this, but it could have done with being a hundred or so pages longer, with the extra wordage spent on giving texture to the characters, making them actually seem real. The book made me long to go and read Pride and Prejudice, for the detail, the minute dramas of the conversations, the vivid sense that these are concrete lives being lived. I can forgive PD James -- she has a long and distinguished career, and is over 90 -- but I find it hard to forgive the reviewers who gush praise on the book jacket. They should go and have a good long look on fanfiction.net and marvel at the ingenuity and resourcefulness of some of its members. As should you, my dear readers.