AS Byatt, Babel Tower

I've read this rather long novel, the third in Byatt's Frederica Quartet, twice now. The protagonist, Frederica Potter (=, more or less, Antonia Byatt), last seen in Still Life shortly after the sudden death of her sister Stephanie, is now married with a son, although her choice of husband (Nigel Reiver) has turned out to be an unwise one. Nigel is manipulative, violent and chauvinist, refusing to let Frederica put her prodigious mental capacities to use in any kind of paid work. He resents her for having mainly male friends (a natural consequence of being at Cambridge in the 1950s), and is deeply suspicious of books. So when Frederica decides to leave for London, and her son Leo decides quite firmly he's coming with her, it's no surprise that Nigel is desperate for her to return, and even more desperate to regain custody of their child. A lawsuit ensues.

Meanwhile, Frederica gets involved in the world around the Samuel Palmer School of Art, teaching literature classes there (and also extra-mural ones). Through this she meets Jude Mason, a repellent, troubled and charismatic writer whose book, Babbletower, is published and then immediately prosecuted for obscenity. It's a pivotal, symbolic event, with the memory of the Lady Chatterley trial still fresh, and in the midst of debates about the teaching and value of language and literature in schools (intersecting with the traumatic bullying at a fictional boys' public school, presumably Eton), as well as the rapidly diverging discourses of science and art. Frederica battles like a wildcat to stay connected to the intellectual arenas where she feels most comfortable, to sustain connections to her family, and to try to forge new friendships and relationships as a single mother in London.

AS Byatt has always been great at portraying the intellectual life. I read somewhere that it's impossible to create a character who is cleverer or better-educated than you are, and if that's true then Byatt must have a phenomenal mind and have read and remembered sheer mountains of books. Yet she's never, ever cold: the characters are deeply and fiercely emotional, sexual, physical beings, and I always come out the other end of a Byatt novel (for it is a tunnel-like experience) desperate to read more, write more, and talk more to people I love. The second novel in the series, Still Life, made me cry like a child, and Babel Tower wasn't far from achieving the same effect.

The book was published in 1996, and is set in the 60s, and there are some parts of it that either haven't dated well (this is certainly true of the first in the series, The Virgin in the Garden) or were slightly monochrome to begin with. Nigel, his sisters and his housekeeper are all really loathsome upper-class idiots, and I did wish at times that Byatt could be more impartial. As a consideration of the emergence of postmodern discourse in the 60s, it is sporadically successful and a bit irritating: in one rather "look-at-me-i'm-being-all-meta-now" passage, Frederica cuts up a lawyer's letter and rearranges it, pace Burroughs, to form a new and disorientating nonsense-text.

But for me the overwhelming impressions is of a novel about people who enjoy thinking deeply and passionately about life and art. One of the cover-quotes uses the word "heady", and that seems accurate to me -- the book sweeps you into a world where everyone can quote Rilke in German, if they want, or effortlessly write Tolkien-esque novels for their children. It's not quite realist, but it's exciting, and heart-rending, and that's what I read Byatt for.

Vladimir Nabokov, Despair; Ali Smith, How To Be Both; Muriel Spark, The Driver's Seat

It's been a while since I posted, but it's the beginning of Lent and I'm trying to replace Facebook with  reading, so I thought it'd be a good time to start blogging again.

Vladimir Nabokov, Despair

A set text for the 'Ludic Literature' module I'm taking this semester, this short novel is narrated by Hermann Hermann, a Russian émigré businessman in Berlin who unexpectedly meets a man who appears to be his perfect doppelgänger. He concocts an elaborate plan to secure him and his wife financially, the details of which gradually emerge as he tells his story.

Hermann is a forceful narrator, rhetorically persuasive and severely deluded, much like Lolita's Humbert Humbert, and much of our discussion in class centred around the nature of his delusion. We theorised that he, like Humbert, has tried to use his life as an aesthetic 'laboratory', rather than confining his experiments more appropriately to the page. I wondered if there was a connection between the repeated name and the delusion that he has managed to unify life and art; but perhaps this is far-fetched.

As with several other Nabokov novels, there's a lot of exploration of mirrors, doubling, self-splitting and so on. There's a fair amount of narratorial misogyny. It's a very funny novel, and readable, though not the thing to read if you want to be emotionally gripped. It's not as engrossing as Lolita, nor as dazzling as Pale Fire, but an enjoyable read nonetheless.

Ali Smith, How To Be Both

My mum and I have been great fans of Ali Smith for six or seven years, and this wonderful novel was a reminder of why: her warmth, her playfulness, her fearlessness when it comes to fictional innovation. Sometimes I worry that British literary fiction is too safe, that a vacuum in the highbrow zone is being filled with decidedly middlebrow writing. Ali Smith is a great antidote to this. Her plots can usually be summarised in a few bullet points; the drama is all mental, intellectual, emotional, creative. 

This latest novel was shortlisted for the Booker (her third shortlist -- she's surely due a win soon ...) and won the Goldsmiths Prize, the Costa Novel Award and the Saltire Society Literary Book of the Year Award in 2014. It's in two sections, each titled 'One', and is famously available in two versions, with the two sections in different orders. In my version, the first section focuses around George, a grieving, intellectual teenager in the twenty-first century, and the second on a renaissance painter struggling to establish a reputation despite various (some unexpected) hindrances. The stories intertwine both thematically and, sort of, dramatically, with a healthy dose of magical realism.

My mum and I both agreed that reading the sections in the opposite order would probably have been extremely confusing, so I wonder how successful the conceit of two equal, non-ordered sections really is. (No point in trying to re-read them in the opposite order, of course, now my ignorance has been destroyed.) I also think one section is more emotionally involving than the other, although the other section makes up for this in the way it analyses creative and artistic processes. But there are some wonderful passages in both -- funny, defamiliarising, shocking and thoughtful by turns. Her favourite issues -- art, gender, sexuality -- come up again, though in pleasingly new and ambiguous ways, and there are some others too: the ubiquity of pornography; bereavement and memory; sibling relationships; and so on. 

The prose is not always easy; indeed, sometimes it's not always prose. Read it slowly, sure, but read it all the same.

Muriel Spark, The Driver's Seat

Although Penguin cheekily charge £8.99 for this book, it's really a novella rather than a novel, padded out to just over 100 pages by an elegantly large font (not that I was protesting -- my eyes slid through the prose with grateful ease). A woman, Lise, leaves the office to go on holiday, meets a couple of people on the plane, arrives in a 'southern' city where there seem to be a lot of Fiats, befriends an old woman at the hotel who's waiting for her nephew, insists she's searching for her 'boy-friend', assesses who is and isn't her 'type', and eventually reaches a sticky end.

This isn't a spoiler: you're told this very early on. Spark shifts the question from 'What will happen?' to 'Who will do it?' and 'Why?' and, most often, 'Is this woman a complete lunatic?' It's told in a third-person impersonal narrator, in the present tense, as if we're a camera following Lise about, semi-analysing her movements at times, but mostly just watching. We've no idea what she's thinking. Details at the beginning gain their relevance by the end, so she clearly has some kind of plan, but not a rational or sane one. It's disorientating, frustrating, and fascinating. As John Lanchester's introduction points out, we can tell easily enough that she's mad, but then what? It doesn't seem to help us much.

Coincidentally, this week I've been reading about 'poetics of indeterminacy' -- specifically with reference to Rimbaud and John Ashbery, but pretty useful generally -- the idea that a text has no internal coherence, wants to be suggestive rather than cohesive, resists interpretation and simply enjoys its own play. As with Rimbaud and Ashbery poems, individual sentences of The Driver's Seat, or paragraphs, or even whole scenes, seem to make sense, but are almost immediately cancelled out by the next thing. Details that seem to have great symbolic significance, like whether her mouth is closed or open, appear not to resolve into an overall pattern. It's great fun trying to puzzle out what she's planning, whether she cares, what's in her head, and there's a certain amount of pleasure in the knowledge that you probably won't find out. 

For readers who don't like this so much, there are some exceptionally beautiful and comic descriptions -- for instance:

She switches on the central light which is encased in a mottled glass globe; the light flicks on, then immediately flickers out as if, having served a long succession of clients without complaint, Lise is suddenly too much for it.

And, at a brief 106 pages, there's almost no excuse not to read it. I pretty much polished this off in an evening and was left bewildered and excited by it. Highly recommended.