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Great reviews, BBB...I loved the Mantel books and really appreciated her take on Cromwell, too. 

 

 

............... There is a deep vein of humour, some of which ought not to be funny.

 

Love this ^^^^! :D

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Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

It’s a while since I read Wolf Hall, but Mantel does a good job of filling in gaps in my memory...... Historical fiction at its best.

9 out of 10

 

 

A great reminder, thank you. I absolutely loved Wolf Hall, which went straight onto my all-time favourites list, and can't imagine why I haven't got stuck into this yet: I have a hardback copy sitting on my shelves waiting to be read.

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Thank you Willoyd and pontalba

Memoirs of an Infantry Officer

This is the second of Siegfried Sassoon’s trilogy of autobiographical war novels. It covers the period from 1915 to 1917; Sassoon’s time on the front line, the Battle of the Somme, his time recuperating from wounds, his protest about the war and ends with him being sent to Craiglockart, the psychiatric hospital for those with shellshock.

Sassoon continues to be self-deprecating and tries to capture his feelings throughout, which were often contradictory. Other characters pop up thinly disguised. David Cromlech is Robert Graves, who plays a significant role which Sassoon clearly has mixed feelings about. In real life Sassoon wrote to The Times denouncing the aims and conduct of the war. In the novel he does it slightly differently, but to similar effect. There was a period of time when Sassoon thought he was going to be court-martialled and shot and this was a serious possibility. He details his worries about whether he has done the right thing and whether his views are correct and how ambivalent he feels. This is a long way from the rather foolish young man of three years earlier who only really wanted to hunt and ride horses and had very little political thought in his head. He also describes throwing his Military Cross into a river; another thing that indicated how much he had changed. Cromlech (Graves) went to the military board that was hearing the case to persuade them that Sassoon was suffering from shellshock and needed help not punishment (without Sassoon’s knowledge). It isn’t clear from this book whether Sassoon believed he had shellshock; he may not have been sure himself. He was certainly having nightmares and he describes alternating feelings of despair and elation. His stay in hospital is described in the last of the trilogy.

Sassoon is very good at describing the ordinary life of a platoon, most of which was very boring and uncomfortable. The actual action was interspersed between these periods of boredom. Sassoon does not preach or bully he just tells the tale and explains how he underwent change. One example is his anger when he sees people in London eating at expensive restaurants and hotels and remembers what he and the troops have been eating for the last months.

Sassoon has been criticised by some reviewers for pulling his punches and not being as realistic as people like Graves and others. I wonder whether I was reading the same book. Here are a couple of examples;

As I stepped over one of the Germans an impulse made me lift him up from the miserable ditch. Propped against the bank, his blond face was undisfigured, except by the mud which I wiped from his eyes and mouth with my coat sleeve. He'd evidently been killed while digging, for his tunic was knotted loosely about his shoulders. He didn't look to be more than 18. Hoisting him a little higher, I thought what a gentle face he had, and remembered that this was the first time I'd ever touched one of our enemies with my hands. Perhaps I had some dim sense of the futility which had put an end to this good-looking youth. Anyway I hadn't expected the battle of the Somme to be quite like this.”

 

And at the height of the Battle of the Somme

“I can remember a pair of hands (nationality unknown) which protruded from the soaked ashen soil like the roots of a tree turned upside down; one hand seemed to be pointing at the sky with an accusing gesture. Each time I passed that place the protest of those fingers became more expressive of an appeal to God in defiance of those who made the War. Who made the War? I laughed hysterically as the thought passed through my mud-stained mind. But I only laughed mentally, for my box of Stokes gun ammunition left me no breath to spare for an angry guffaw. And the dead were the dead; this was no time to be pitying them or asking silly questions about their outraged lives. Such sights must be taken for granted, I thought, as I gasped and slithered and stumbled with my disconsolate crew. Floating on the surface of the flooded trench was the mask of a human face which had detached itself from the skull.”

It speaks volumes that Sassoon ends the chapter there with no further comment and he clearly did go on to ask the “silly questions”.

For me this was better than the first in the trilogy as it deals with the contradictory feelings within one person at the front and what it took for him to make one of the most potent anti-war statements of the period, even though he wasn’t sure of himself and what he was doing. Again there is humour in the descriptions of the futility and I suspect that the writers of Blackadder had read this. One of the better war memoirs and I found Sassoon a good deal more engaging than Graves in “Goodbye to All That”.

9 out of 10

Starting the last in the trilogy Sherston's Progress

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The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer

I must admit I haven’t read anything by Mortimer before and on the evidence of this book I should have. It is about a woman in a downward spiral and is an acerbic and humorous (in a very bleak way) comment on marriage, gender relations and being a woman being controlled by men (husbands and assorted professionals, mainly medical).  Mortimer writes in rather a sparse way leaving the reader to do some of the work, making one feel much more involved in the main character’s disintegration.

The protagonist is known only by her married name, Mrs Armitage. She is on her fourth marriage and has numerous children (eight I think) and would like another one (her husband doesn’t). Her husband Jake is a successful screenwriter and they have been married for over ten years. Jake has a temper and is serially unfaithful. They are building a glass tower in the country as a rural retreat. The couple are rich enough to employ servants to do everything. There may be an element of autobiography here as Mortimer was married three times and had six children. Her relationship with her third husband, the barrister John Mortimer, was notoriously turbulent.

The description of disintegration, depression, a pretty much enforced abortion and sterilisation, a complete loss of role and reason to exist are powerfully written. All of the male characters are deeply unlikeable and manipulative. It was written in 1962 and there has been some debate about whether it can be classed as a feminist novel. I think that misses the point; the whole description of depression and breakdown leading to a sort of acceptance is the author asking the question: Is this it? Is this all there is? Does it have to be this way? There are no answers provided, you are just left to feel the raw pain of a woman who society feels has everything, but who is utterly lost.  

It’s a powerful book which is still worth looking out for. There are a couple of examples of lazy writing about race, but apart from that it held my attention and made me ask questions about my attitudes. I also would now like to see the film which came out in 1964. The script is by Pinter and it stars Anne Bancroft and Peter Finch, so it ought to be good!

8 and a half out of 10

Starting The Dark Jester by Wilson Harris

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I agree with books that the novel is very good but definitely off-beat 60s style. More so the movie, wide screen b/w, Pinter in his prime, Bancroft and Finch terrific, so too Richard Johnson as the man who comes between. I always remember the line (not sure if it is from the book) Bancroft at the hairdressers, mother of an army of kids, telling her friends, to their amazement "my life is an empty place".

Edited by ethan
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Thanks Pontalba and Ethan

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

 

 

A monumental novel in the Great Russian tradition which has been rightly compared with War and Peace. It focuses on the Battle of Stalingrad, but covers a Science Institute, various prison camps and a concentration camp. The list of characters is vast and the dramatis personae in my edition was well used.

Grossman was a journalist who covered the Battle of Stalingrad from the front line and his experience shows. However this is, like War and Peace, very much not just a war novel. Its scope is broad and it provides a penetrating analysis of the Soviet system and Stalinism in particular. As you would expect the plot is interwoven with numerous themes. Grossman was a Jew and Jewish identity is explored through one of the main characters, the scientist Victor Shtrum. The description of the gas chamber is a very powerful piece of writing, focussing as it does on a child and an unrelated woman who provides comfort.

Her eyes—which have read Homer, Izvestia, Huckleberry Finn and Mayne Reid, that had looked at good people and bad people, that had seen the geese in the green meadows of Kursk, the stars above the observatory at Pulkovo, the glitter of surgical steel, the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, tomatoes and turnips in the bins at market, the blue water of Issyk-Kul—her eyes were no longer of any use to her. If someone had blinded her, she would have felt no sense of loss.
…Sofya Levinton felt the boy’s body subside in her arms. …This boy, with his slight, bird-like body, has left before her. “I’ve become a mother,” she thought. That was her last thought.
Her heart, however, still had life in it: it contracted, ached, and felt pity for all of you, both living and dead; Sofya Osipovna felt a wave of nausea. She pressed David, now a doll, to herself; she became dead, a doll.”
 

 Grossman, despite the horrors he describes, clearly still believes in the fundamental goodness of humanity.

One of the main focuses of the book is the criticism of Stalinism, the sheer pointless stupidity of a totalitarian regime. A number of the characters in the novel are old Bolsheviks who are struggling to come to terms with Stalin’s regime and especially with the mass arrests of 1937. We see a number of them in camps and prisons trying to create some meaning in their situation.

The comparisons with War and Peace have some limitations. Tolstoy was looking back; Grossman was actually there and his journalistic training shines through. He is able to compare the regimes of Hitler and Stalin and note the similarities.

This is a great novel which takes you along with its sheer power and the magnificence of the writing. The canvas may sometimes be like a Breughel but Grossman’s writing is suffused with optimism about humanity despite it all.

9 out of 10

Starting The Tunnel by William Gass

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Four Dreamers and Emily by Stevie Davies

It’s always a pleasure and surprise to discover an author you didn’t know, who turns out to be rather good. I also feel a little guilty because Stevie Davies had not crossed my horizons before. She is a novelist, historian and Bronte scholar.

Here she combines two of the above because this is a comic novel about Bronte enthusiasts. It focuses on a conference about Emily Bronte meeting in Haworth and four characters in particular. Marianne is the conference organiser, a struggling academic with three rowdy young children and a useless husband; Timothy is an elderly widower with a serious heart condition who is sustained by his correspondence with Marianne and nocturnal visits from Emily Bronte’s ghost; Eileen, an obsessive amateur Bronte enthusiast and finally Sharon, a waitress who is there somewhat accidentally. The novel follows them through the conference with various other assorted Bronte types (deconstructionists, semi-colonists and uterine feminists amongst others). There are a number of comedic highlights, with two characters getting locked in the parsonage overnight being one of them.

It is wickedly funny and satirical, but there is affection rather than malice and it is rather well written; which helps a great deal. There is also wisdom in the comedy and there is a marked contrast between the inner lives and hopes of the characters and their rather messy real lives; much of the comedy lies in their attempts to bring the two together.

Wuthering Heights is the backdrop and there are lots of jokes for Bronte enthusiasts; some of which I spotted, I suspect I missed most of them. The ending follows those at the conference a year later and is rather touching; hope of change and resolution.

I bought this in a local shop stuffed full of books and various antiques/junk. When I got home I made a rather serendipitous discovery; it is inscribed by the author to the former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion. Not sure why he gave it away; I wouldn’t have! I have had a look at some of Davies’s other works and want to read more. I have already ordered Unbridled Spirits: Women of the English Revolution, 1640-1660 as it looks very good.

8 and a half out of 10

Starting The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter.

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Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

 

A monumental novel in the Great Russian tradition which has been rightly compared with War and Peace.....

This is a great novel which takes you along with its sheer power and the magnificence of the writing. The canvas may sometimes be like a Breughel but Grossman’s writing is suffused with optimism about humanity despite it all.

9 out of 10

 

I have this on my shortlist to read early in the New Year, so am delighted it made such a positive impact.  Glad also to read such an interesting review, which makes me all the more intrigued to read it for myself. 

 

That's two in barely a fortnight where you've prompted me!  On the converse side, I've never previously even heard of Four Dreamers and Emily but that looks very promising from your review.  I'm also looking forward to your thoughts on Angela Carter, an author I've always meant to try but not yet got round to.  Thank you for such an interesting thread!

Edited by willoyd
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Thank you Willoyd; hope you enjoy Life and Fate!

The Sandcastle by Iris Murdoch

This is Iris Murdoch’s third novel. It revolves around Bill Mor, a middle-aged teacher in a minor public school. He has a wife (Nan) and two children (Donald and Felicity). He also has some political ambitions; to stand as a Labour Candidate in a local parliamentary seat. He hasn’t yet had the courage to tell his wife as she will be opposed to this and generally gets her own way. Into this situation comes Rain Carter; a talented painter almost half Bill’s age. She is there to paint a portrait of the former headmaster. Rain and Bill fall in love with each other and Bill is then torn between his family and the prospect of happiness and a different life with Rain. There are twists, turns and workings out. There are elements of tragedy and comedy in fairly equal measure and Murdoch rather expertly makes it difficult for the reader to see where one ends and the other starts.

There are a number of oddities in this; I am no expert in the nature of human attraction, but it was not immediately obvious why Rain fell for Mor. He was indecisive and rather lacking in personal charisma; both are also quite unworldly and Mor seeks to avoid confrontations (mostly with his wife). Murdoch uses a number of literary devices to move the story along and to provoke thought; letters being read by those not meant to read them, accidental encounters and the mysterious tramp/gypsy whose appearance seems to be a precursor to trouble.

The characterisation is good and although the plot may be slow, it is never dull. The sandcastle of the title may be symbolic of the impermanence of hopes and dreams. All of the characters have lost something by the end, had some hope or other dashed. Murdoch does a very good job of illuminating the everyday hopes and despairs of ordinary people in a subtle and understated way. A good novel which reminds me that I must read more Murdoch.

8 and a half out of 10

Starting Printers Devil Court by Susan Hill

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Printer's Devil Court by Susan Hill

I like to read a good ghost story at Christmas. Unfortunately this wasn’t really it. It is a novella, almost a short story and easily readable in one sitting.

It revolves around four medical students who share digs. The story is written my one of them and is found by his family after he dies many years later. Two of the group are interested in experimentation with the end of life and bringing back the dead. They have the truly daft idea of capturing the last breath, which they think has potency, and using it to bring someone else back to life.

It takes a while to get going, isn’t really scary as a good story in this genre should be and the ending is truly silly. Not up to Hill’s usual standard. Back to M R James I suppose. There were also a couple of silly typos.

4 out of 10

Starting The Orchard on Fire by Shena Mackay

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In Parenthesis by David Jones

 

This is another one of the reads related to the First World War and one of the better ones. It is also one of the most difficult to define. Its author, David Jones was a painter, poet, designer and wood engraver. His father was Welsh and he was strongly influenced by the Welsh literary tradition. It   is effectively a prose poem, using both mediums following Private John Ball (In this work there are many layers of meaning, John Ball was a Lollard priest and one of the leaders of the Peasant’s Revolt) over a period of seven months from England to France and finally to the Battle of the Somme, more specifically Mametz Wood.

There are copious notes and these are necessary as the references to other works are numerous and I think very few would come close to getting them all. There are numerous Shakespearean references, especially Henry V, Lewis Carroll, Coleridge’s poems, The Song of Roland, Malory (especially Morte D’Arthur). The Bible (especially Revelation) and two Welsh texts in particular. The Gododdin, the Mabinogion and the sixth century poem Preiddeu Annwn (The Harrowing of Hell). There are also lots of references to popular songs from the music hall and Jones makes good use of soldiers’ slang.

Jones was influenced by Eliot, Pound and Joyce and they are his starting points. This was published in 1937 to immediate critical acclaim. Eliot, in his introduction called it a “work of genius”. W H Auden went further; he also felt it was a masterpiece and was the “greatest book about the First World War”. Auden went further and felt in terms of greatness and quality it was comparable to Homer and Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Jones also includes an archetype of the universal soldier; here a Welshman called Dai Greatcoat who has fought in all wars:

 

“This Dai Adjusts his slipping shoulder-straps, wraps close his misfit outsize greatcoat – he articulates his English with alien care.

            My fathers were with the Black Prince of Wales

At the passion of

the blind Bohemian king.

They served in these fields,

It is in the histories that you can read it, Corporal – boys

Gower, they were – it is writ down – yes.

Wot about Methuselem Taffy?

I was with Abel when his brother found him,

Under the green tree.”

 

Some critics have argued that Jones romanticises war; however that is really only a surface interpretation. He parallels and compares the Somme with Camlan and Catraeth (both actual battles suffused with legend where the Celtic/Briton cause was defeated by the invading Angles and Saxons). Fussell has argued there is a deep conservatism here; however I think what Jones is doing is trying to ennoble those who have been lost. This is best illustrated by a remarkable passage from near the end of the book where most of John Ball’s comrades have fallen in Mametz Wood; men we have been with throughout the book. The Queen of the Woods is acknowledging the fallen:

 

“The Queen of the Woods has cut bright boughs of various flowering.

These knew her influential eyes. Her awarding hands can pluck for each their fragile prize.

She speaks to them according to precedence. She knows what’s due to this elect society. She can chose twelve gentle-men. She knows who is most lord between the high trees and on the open down.

Some she gives white berries

            some she gives brown

Emil has a curious crown it’s

            made of golden saxifrage

Fatty wears sweet briar,

he will reign with her for a thousand years.

For Balder she reaches high to fetch his.

Ulrich smiles for his myrtle wand.

That swine Lillywhite has daises to his chain – you’d hardly credit it

She plaits torques of equal splendour for Mr Jenkins and Billy Crower.

Hansel with Gronwy share dog-violets for a palm, where they lie in serious embrace beneath the twisted tripod.

Sion gets St. John’s Wort – that’s fair enough.

Dai Greatcoat, she can’t find him anywhere – she calls both high and low, she had a very special one for him.

Among this July noblesse she is mindful of December wood – when the trees of the forest beat against each other because of him.

She carries to Aneirin-in-the-nullah a rowan sprig, for the glory of Guenedota. You couldn’t hear what she said to him, because she was careful for the Disciplines of the Wars. “

 

The reference at the end relates to a Welsh Bard and is also a direct reference to Henry V and the Welsh officer Fluellen.

The language is sublime but you cannot get aware from the senselessness of the slaughter as friends and comrades “sink limply to a heap”.  Jones adds to the feel and sense of his work with illustration and painting. It is easy to forget he was primarily a painter and illustrator. The frontispiece of the original edition (painted by Jones) has been reproduced in the Folio edition that I have. The best description of it is one I found by a blogger called Alex Preston and I can’t better it, so won’t try.

 

The soldier, staring out of blank eyes, hangs crucified against the background of broken trees. Rats scuttle through the barbed wire that trains up his body towards his shrunken genitals – symbols of his emasculation in his final moments. Tiny figures reminiscent of C. R. W. Nevinson or Wyndham Lewis struggle with enormous guns in the background as the night sky smudges into a riot of stars.

 

This is not a work that is sentimental or romantic about war. Jones has taken on board the lessons of Eliot and Pound about the presence of the past and the whole work weaves the past and the present together. It is important to stress the Welshness of the work. The lead character is John Ball, not John Bull. Ball and his comrades are portrayed throughout as being done unto by those in power and authority. They were ordinary men and Jones as I argued earlier ennobles them to mythical levels. Jones portrays the realities and brutalities of the Battle of the Somme and warfare in general in a way that we are not used to, and with a modernist twist. It may be that one of the reasons this work is not as well-known as it should be is that is not so easily accessible as other works and poetry. The description of Lt. Jenkins dying as a result of gassing is every bit as powerful as Wilfred Owen’s description in “Dulce et Decorum est”.

The most interesting critical account I came across was written by Joseph Cohen in a magazine called Poetry Wales where he makes use of the term simultaneity (simultaneous action) to describe Jones’s work. It is a term he borrows from relativity theory and he argues that it is the key to understanding In Parenthesis. Jones juxtaposes various events and Cohen argues that this is justified by drawing together the commonality of military experience with the commonality of “the futility of sacrifice and the suffering in combat”. Cohen goes on to say that simultaneous occurrences and simultaneity make these juxtapositions explicable. This means, he argues the bare structure of In Parenthesis is very similar to Lowry’s Under the Volcano and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.

Cohen sums up the argument as follows;

 

Simultaneous occurrence is the key to structural coherence. The relativity theory, as literary people employ it, concentrates on the principles of simultaneity and uncertainty, and the invalidation of the principle of causality. Modern combat, where simultaneous action closes in on the participant, provides us, microcosmically, with one of our most convincing demonstrations of multiplicity, or clutter, in the universe; of the futility of planning actions based upon previously acquired temporal and spatial measurements; and of the breakdown between cause and effect. Causes are generated and set into motion, only to collide with one another, modifying effects. This was the nature of the Western Front though we have been slow to recognize it. In Parenthesis is authentic in its reflection of Jones' distillation of that experience.”

 

The task of the poet here is to bring order out of chaos and Jones does that. It is a remarkable work which should be one of the standard works. It is challenging and not easy to read and is well worth the effort. I think it is one of the greatest works ever written about war.

10 out of 10

Starting Love among the butterflies by Margaret Fountaine

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Sherston's Progress by Siegfried Sassoon

This is the third of Sassoon’s wartime trilogy. It takes the reader from Sassoon’s admission to Craiglockhart for shell shock to the end of the war. After Craiglockhart Sassoon spends some time recuperating in Ireland before being posted to Palestine. From there he is sent back to France, to the trenches. His war ends in July 1918 when he is shot in the head returning from patrol by an overzealous member of his own side.

I felt that this was somewhat weaker than the other two parts of the trilogy. Sassoon feels lost and taken along with events in this volume. He spends time with Dr Rivers talking about his protest and ends up deciding to return to the front line. He still feels the same about the war, but it is as though he is drawn back despite himself and Sassoon periodically examines his motives and seems as puzzled as the reader in explaining them.

The use of the word Progress in the title is obviously reminiscent of Bunyan and Pilgrim’s Progress, although I think in this case the Celestial City which is longed for is in the past; an England of cricket and country pursuits which has gone forever (and probably never really existed). This makes the destination in this novel rather hazy and there is an aimlessness about it. The war has taken over Sassoon and he can conceive of doing nothing else. Once in France Sassoon reverts to his previous recklessness and seems to court death on a number of occasions. I felt that towards the end of the book that Sassoon’s mental health really was rather fragile at this time; hardly a surprise given his experiences. I think this is a good illustration of the way the machine of war ground down those who were caught up in it, no matter how much they fought it.

7 and a half out of 10

Starting Unbridled Spirits; Women of the English Revolution 1640-1660 by Stevie Davies

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