The Road

 

There are quite a few apocalyptic stories: On the Beach, I Am Legend, The Stand, Oryx and Crake, Station Eleven; the list goes on. In them, the world parishes by nuclear fallout, disease, climate disaster; it burns, it drowns, it bakes, it starves. It matters not, in this genus, how it dies that fascinates; it is how we cope during its dying.

This one, Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel, The Road, is fascinating in that regard. It details the journey of a father and son, unnamed, travelling south to the sea. Where they began their journey is as undisclosed as their names. So too is the method by which the world is dying. All we know is that their world is by all accounts dead, burned and blackened, adrift in black soot that shifts underfoot, its sky as grey and colourless as the bleached buildings they pass. It’s perpetually twilight. Choking. Dust, kicked up, takes its good time settling. Perpetually astir. No amount of rain cleans the air. It remains acrid and gritty, regardless how much falls from the relentless blanket of clouds that all but block out the sun and moon. The man coughs, despite his always wearing a rag mask to filter out the soot, its inner face as bloody from his breath as the outer is black by what it can never wholly hope to filter. The boy fares better; perhaps because the man tends to his every want and need, abstaining his own comfort and safety, even his own sustenance, in hope that his child will survive, even if he, himself, may already be doomed. Food is scarce, starvation always mere days away. Far more immediately dangerous, however, are the gangs of murderous maneaters roaming the same roads they do.

Have I enticed you to read this masterpiece? Probably not. How can you read something like that, you ask? But you should. McCarthy paints a far more vivid picture than any other who’ve approached the same canvas. J.G. Ballard attempted a similar desperate world in The Drought, albeit his was as sunburnt and dry as McCarthy’s is duskish and wet. But where both depict desperation in what appears to be the end-of-days, Ballard’s prose does not reek of it like McCarthy’s does. Cannibalism is hinted at in The Drought, whereas in The Road it is held up to the light. In The Drought, the cast of characters retain the semblance of civilisation, despite their need. Their presumed cannibalism does not horrify; indeed, one character has grown fat on it, yet remains altogether amiable to its protagonist. Not so in The Road. Predatory humans prowl the road, armed with homemade mediaeval weapons. Their slaves haul waggons, are locked in cellars, their amputated limbs cauterised to keep the meat alive for perhaps weeks of judicious paring. The victims are as dehumanised as their wardens. It’s all terribly horrifying. Yet our glimpse of these horrors is sparing. The true horror remains the landscape, the environment, and impending starvation. The man and the boy subsist on what can be scavenged: canned food, scrapings of seeds and flour and cornmeal, all of it suspect until ingested. The fatigue of hunger looms over them. As does injury and infection. Perhaps the greatest horror of all, though, is the hopelessness of their seemingly pointless journey.

Why are they headed south? The man tells the boy that it will be better down there. It will be warmer. He does not outwardly suggest that there will be more food – he knows that there won’t be. It is implied, however. How can there be? The world is burnt, after all. It remains unchanged, no matter how many miles and months they travel. If anything, it gets darked. Colder. Snowier. And wetter. I suspect the only reason they are headed south is because all hope had been depleted from wherever it is they began from, and to give the boy hope.

I will leave their fate undisclosed. Being a McCarthy novel, it is as painful and uncertain as all his are. But, it's a beautiful book, nonetheless, despite its bleak narrative. It is striking in its style. Its prose is as terse as Hemingway’s, succinct, sharp. Its grammar is explicitly McCarthy’s. His use of contractions is not what I would call conventional. He disdains dialogue punctuation. Dialogue is terse, seemingly pointless, yet pregnant with emotion. There is stream of consciousness. Sentence fragments. It does take a moment to get accustomed to, but it is always clear, as Faulkner’s (similarly stylistic, to my eye) rarely is to me.

This might be McCarthy’s best novel (I’ve not read them all, so take this with a grain of salt). I’m not saying this because The Road won the Pulitzer Prize, I’m saying this because I found it the most horrifying and emotionally gripping of all his that I’ve read.

The Drought

 

“He looked at the craft beached around him. Shadowless in the vertical sunlight, their rounded forms seemed to have been eroded of all but a faint residue of their original identities, like ghosts in a distant universe where drained images lay in the shallows of some lost time.” ― J.G. Ballard, The Drought

For someone who’s taken pride in my love of SF, I must humbly admit that I was wholly ignorant of the works of J.G. Ballard, until recently. For shame, some may say. In my defence, I might mention that my choice of reading material, living in Northern Ontario, might have been described as limited. To be fair, we did/do have a bookstore, albeit a chain. We even had an independent bookstore, for a while, too. Neither was all that large. Neither was small either – I’ve been in used bookstores whose selection beggared both combined. So, it goes without saying, before the internet, what we saw was what they had. And that was what we knew, that and word of mouth, and those lists of titles available from the publisher we might find in the paperbacks purchased. We, here, also live in the American sphere of influence, further limiting what might be had – its America-centric, but I guess you figured that out (indeed, even Canadian authors are not as widely known here in Canada as they ought to be). So, it comes as no surprise then that British authors would/could be somewhat unknown to us/me.

That’s no excuse, you might say, citing it’s been a long time since the internet made titles and authors once largely unknown in that foggy, mythical land of Before available. All true. But tastes and interests migrate. And it’s only now, in these years of nostalgia, that I’ve been looking back, revisiting old loves, and discovering new ones along the way.

I can’t say that I’m all that familiar with Mr. Ballard, even now. I know of a number of books that he wrote, that he’s a celebrated member of the New Wave of science-fiction, and that his Empire of the Sun is autobiographical. I also know that Crash was adapted to the screen, a Cronenberg film that baffled me then, and confuses me still. Perhaps that’s why it’s taken me some time to read Ballard. But Ballard kept coming up in YouTube videos I was watching, largely praising this, to me, unknown master of speculative fiction. It was their praise that convinced me to give him a try, despite my tepid dislike of Crash.

Was The Drought (1965, originally published in the UK as The Burning World, 1964) my first Ballard? It was not. That was The Drowned World (1962). Both are part of Ballard’s apocalyptic tetralogy, beginning with The Wind from Where (1961), culminating in The Crystal World (1966). In each, the world as we know it has come to an end (or is in the process of) from destructive winds, from solar disturbances that melt the ice caps, from industrial pollution bringing an end to rain over landmasses, or by the crystallisation of the world. Each stand alone. One need not read them in order, or in total, either.

I can’t comment on the first and last, but the middle two are good. Some might refer to them as masterpieces. I preferred The Drowned World, personally. I found The Drought to be a little uneven; indeed, I found the main character of The Drought to be less a protagonist than an observer. He barely plays a part in even his own narrative. Granted, he’s in shock; and despite his being a doctor, his skills are in limited use, considering the lack of materials and facilities available to him as society brakes down and the populace is in a destructive, predatory, self-preservation, downward spiral. Relationships are largely disposable, understandably, each out for themselves, for the most part; but this is a novel, and narrative arcs are what hold a story together. Story ought not to drift, as the characters here would be expected to do, unearthing water sources and food supplies. As they understandably would. There ought to be an actual plot beyond mere survival. That said, the horror of surviving in this dying world is only hinted at, glossed over, even comic in its portrayal; unlike how vivid those horrors are depicted in Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Ballard's survivors are far less horriying in their loss of humanity as are McCarthy's. I expect that is why McCarthy's apocolyptic world is the greater and more famous of the two.

The Drought, by Criss Foss

I might add that I was somewhat distracted by the world itself. It is imaginary. Though British, Ballard’s Burning World is not England. It is not the continent, either. The characters all have English names. They travel hundreds of miles south to the sea (a ludicrous direction on an island nation), leading me to believe that this book must take place in a fictional North America, and that the riverbed they follow must be the Mississippi (otherwise why not head north to the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence, or east towards the coast). Yet the book is replete with English jargon, leaving me wondering from time to time, what the hell is a…. So too flora and fauna. We have precious few rooks here in North America, for instance. He was obviously writing for his English audience and peppering his books with things he and they would recognise.

I did enjoy it, however, despite my grievances. In fact, I'm glad I've found him and his voice. Ballard reminds me of Ray Bradbury and John Wyndham, insofar as his stories are not really about tech or even how the world came to drown or burn, his books are about how people would be affected by what if happening to them, on how they might cope with their new paradigm: altruistically, predatorily, or even catatonically. Perhaps that is why J.G. Ballard remains popular, decades after his death.

I recommend you have a dictionary hand while reading Ballard, or a search engine, just so that you can translate his Britishisms, if you are not familiar with his vernacular. Don’t be put off by that, either; the British have likely had the same criticisms of American vernacular, too.

 

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

 

I have to wonder of this was a prophetic read, however old this book may be. That sounds bleak, doesn’t it. And polarising, depending on your politics. I have hopes, though, that things are not as they were in 1934; and that the panic I sometimes feel, when consuming 24-hour diatribes on our “news” networks, is merely a natural reaction to their bid for Neilson ratings, and not the imminent rise of the end of days. That is neither here nor there, here.

What’s germane here is my sense of accomplishment at having finally read this brick that has loomed over my bookshelves for many a year, William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. When I say year, I mean decades. I mean that literally. I bought this tome back in the Eighties, and after a rather lackluster first stab at its nearly 1500 pages of fairly fine print (my attention span was, shall we say, shorter then), I set it aside for lighter reading, daunted by its heft, believing that it would take as many months to complete as that long ago war waged. Little did I know how long it would remain perched on my shelves. Indeed, it would remain on those shelves even after a move, even after those selves were upgraded to larger, loftier, units. Before long, I wondered if I ever would read it cover-to-cover; always telling myself… someday….

One day, rather recently (in relation to the length of my not-too-short life), in a lock-down, far, far away, I decided, I would finally give Shirer’s epic history its long-awaited go. And give it a go I did. This is not to say I succeeded. I did manage far more pages than I did in that first attempt, but I did not plow through Rise and Fall… as I had intended. I did not fail, entirely, though. I managed to not set Shirer’s history back on the shelf, merely burying it under “more pressing” volumes on my end table. After a time, I picked it up again, sure that this time was indeed the time I would riffle through it. This time, I decided, I would not fail; that I would have a strategy: I would read ten pages a day, every day, whilst I read other books. I succeeded in this. And before long, as I watched my bookmark inch along the spine, those 10 pages grew to 20. And, before I knew it (not as quickly as this sounds, however), I found myself very near the end. And then, finally, I did come to the end. I felt like I’d scaled the Matterhorn!

Was it worth it? Yes. Very much so! It’s a remarkable work, as detailed and as insightful as only someone who lived through those dark days could expound.

It is dated, though. It’s a work of its time: a top-down history. Today, most histories are bottom-up. What’s the difference? Top-down is fact and event oriented. It may contain excerpts from letters and diaries, but only insofar as those entries add detail to the events related. Bottom-up is far more personal. More immersion. Letters and diaries entries are integral to giving the reader what feels like firsthand experience to the events as they unfold. A great many bottom-up histories will follow only a few “diarists,” so as to give the most dramatic experience possible, allowing the reader to empathise with those living through the events related. Shirer, however, has no wish for us to empathise with his diarists. His were the generals and the architects of the Third Reich. Even hapless conspirators who professed to end Hitler’s reign, if doing nothing. Or failing. His intent is to unveil that heinous regime in all its horror, for what it was, and not, in any way, apologise for their actions. He does that with great skill.

I will not detail the events within this weighty tome. Most people alive are already well acquainted with the events of the Second World War and all its horrors. Or should I say, I hope they are. I do wonder, at times, though. If they are not, I would wish this book were required reading. For everyone. It is still, I believe, one of the best histories of the War. But it is Reich-sentric. Let’s be clear about that. What happens outside Germany is merely mentioned, only insofar as it is relevant to what is unfolding within the Reich. Thus, the United States does not loom large here; indeed, it is barely mentioned until it begins its convoys to beleaguered Britain. Britain and the Soviet Union are far larger players in the Reich’s narrative; probably because they were of greater concern to Nazi Germany than even it's allies, Mussolini’s Italy, and Imperial Japan (which hardly factors in, at all). What is of greatest weight is Shirer’s firsthand accounts: He was an American journalist within the Reich, until he had to exit from there upon America’s entrance in the war. His “Berlin Diary” is as important to this work as it is in its own right; as is his having reported on the Nuremberg Trials. It was these writings that allowed this work to be as personal as it is. And as insightful. No one else (then, anyway) could have given us the book he did.

I obviously recommend this book, however daunting it may appear; but if the reader is not well versed with the overall history of WW2, I would recommend they look elsewhere first, overarching documentaries, perhaps, before diving in.

So, why would I say this book is prophetic? Because, to my mind, anyway, there are worrisome parallels today around the world to those early days before Weimar Germany became Nazi Germany. Is it just fearmongering? Is it that we, as humans, find patterns everywhere, even if there are none? Perhaps. I do hope, though, that no country finds itself travelling down the road of autocratic totalitarianism ever again. Or that anyone should ever have to experience such horrors as the people then did. Or those who do now do.

Not to belabour the point, but,

“No class or group or party in Germany could escape its share of responsibility for the abandonment of the democratic Republic and the advent of Adolf Hitler. The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it.” ― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

Regardless my polemic, William Shirer’s spic history is likely one of the most important contemporary histories ever written, I would wish that everyone read it.

Piranesi

 

“The House is valuable because it is the House. It is enough in and of Itself. It is not the means to an end.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

Second books are hard. Especially if the first was a massive success. They must live up to a high standard, even more so than as they ought to – all books ought to meet high standards, to my mind – because, let’s face facts, they have big shoes to fill. Piranesi was one such.

I confess that I did not purchase this sophomore effort when it was first published. I read its blurb and found it less inspiring than Susanna Clarke’s first effort, the celebrated Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. How could this slim volume compare with a work ten years in the writing, I wondered.

Long story short, having recently consumed a number of videos in which reviewers praised it, some even declaring Piranesi better than Ms Clarke’s much lauded “masterpiece,” I finally bit the bullet and read it.

What did I think? I think it’s good; but I do not believe it anywhere near as good as Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. My opinion. But, to be fair, they are very different experiences. JS&MN is epic in scope (some might find it daunting, in length, in style, and in pace); it’s Georgian, and Dickensian. Piranesi, on the other hand, is contemporary. JS&MN is replete with myth, and indeed history; Piranesi lacks this. That said, it is evocative of other works: Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s prints, “Imaginary Prisons”; Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”; with allusions to C.S. Lewis’ Narnia. This is not to say that it lacks style. It positively radiates this. But given its narration style, Piranesi is lacking in that we, the reader, never truly understand how Piranesi’s world came into being.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s “Imaginary Prisons”

Piranesi’s world is a labyrinth of rooms, each lined with statues: of animals, and lovers and kings, and monsters of every imagining. It’s hinted that these rooms were possibly dreamed into being. That’s all well and good; but one wonders how flocks of birds and schools of fish find their way into a universe dreamt into existence by humans, if indeed we did do just that. There are tides, and seasons, and night and day; but no inhabitants other than our limited cast of players. Though interesting, I did not find myself convinced of its existence, regardless that it does indeed exist.

What I did find intriguing was Piranesi, himself, his having been altered by his world. Why is he called Piranesi? That is explained – a little; but not completely; suffice it to say that he is christened that by the only other soul he knows. One must work a little, reading outside this work for greater illumination. Speaking of that other person, I was also intrigued by the cast of players within this morality play. Far too many spoilers would be risked by discussing them in any detail here. Suffice it to say, I was left questioning most of their motivations. Why do they do what they do? To what end? Enough on that.

I was, however, most pleasantly surprised by the novel’s denouement, if not its conclusion, for reasons left unsaid – sit would be criminal to spoil the experience. It is most profound.

Piranesi is worth a read. More so, I believe, if you haven’t read JS&MN. Even if you have. As already noted, they are very different experiences. But each is as surreal as the other. I, personally, found Ms Clarke’s first effort a far more immersive and satisfying one. Perhaps this novel is as deep, and tightened to only its essential elements, but I still prefer her weightier tome. That said, I’m still pleased to have finally read Susanna’s sophomore effort.

 

“Perhaps even people you like and admire immensely can make you see the World in ways you would rather not.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

A Short Stay in Hell

Cover design by Matt Page

Know your audience. That’s good advice; and I ought to listen to that voice in my head that tells me not to venture where I’m sure to embark when I’m about to open my mouth and gush forth to someone I already know will not appreciate (or perhaps even tolerate) the subject raised. But sometimes enthusiasm and the desire to share overwhelms that wisdom and I find myself doing just what it warns me not to.

Point in case: I’ve mentioned my having read the novella “A Short Stay in Hell” to two souls outside my household. One was a reader. He, I already knew from past discussions, read widely, and wished to read more widely still. He had, it turned out, already read Steven L. Peck’s novella of 2009 and was wildly enthusiastic it, telling me that he had found himself spiritually disconnected from himself after having completed this short work. The other, not a reader, was instantly dismissive of both it (which he declared, before hearing me out, stupid) and me, inferring – my projection – that I was crazy to have even wanted to read such a thing; or anything at all, I imagine.

I ought to have never broached the subject with the second person in question: He (who’ve I been acquainted with for decades), to my mind, has never been a deep thinker: he professes to enjoy SF, but has never read science fiction – indeed, he could not name a single SF author to save his life; he watches science documentaries, but never ponders anything beyond the mere facts he’s consumed. Am I being dismissive of this individual? I suppose I am. But one wonders how someone can not ponder what eternity truly means in context of the human experience if come face to face with the very question. Or am I unique in this?

I mention this because this short work, this novella in question, does exactly that. It explores how we, finite beings with limited perspective, might weather eons of existence.

Illustration by Erik Desmazieres

The premise: a devout Morman passes away, and discovers that he is being sent to Hell because he is not a disciple the true faith. What faith, do you ask, as he does, is the true faith? Zoroastrianism. The protagonist had never even heard of Zoroastrianism. Neither had those others seated before the surprisingly amicable demon who was processing them. The demon looks horrific, but is amicable, and quite apologetic concerning their fate. But he is also businesslike in the application of his task. Each is whisked off to their individual hell without much delay. But before their dispatch the demon mentions that, unlike Christianity’s dire eternal damnation, Zoroastrianism’s hell is only temporary, merely a short stay while the soul earns its redemption for not believing what it ought to have. Our protagonist, our amicable demon notes, was an avid reader in lie, and so decides he knows the exact sort of destination that should suit him.

Dis, by Stradanus

Soren (our protagonist) suddenly finds himself next to an unimaginably vast bookshelf, a hell apparently modelled after Jorge Borges’ Library of Babel, one decidedly and horrifically similar to Dante’s City of Dis, that appears to stretch unto eternity, up, down, left and right. Across a not overly wide chasm is another identical wall of shelves, where, like those culturally similar souls he finds himself among (all American, all Caucasian, all in their peak of youth and fitness), innumerable other souls mill about, as he must, searching for a selection of volumes describing their personal life story, detailed to second. This will be no quick or easy task, given that the library contains every possible book, even those comprising gibberish, random symbols, books of all As, all Bs, books where the text of “War and Peace” has every second letter an A, or B, or asterisk, or ellipsis. One wonders how long our protagonist might have to search such a library to find his biography?

The book is essentially an exploration on how this might affect a human intellect, or soul, as it were, should it find itself in such a hell. How the monotony experienced might drive one to eons of depression. Or to madness. Or cruelty.

What it truly terrifying is how countless eons, innumerable billions of years, the lifespans of consecutive universes, are only a sliver of eternity. How short is a short stay in hell when compared with eternity?

This book is indeed philosophy. It is also heartbreaking and horrific.

Its intent was lost of the second soul I spoke with; but he also has no interest in faith or philosophy. Or deep thought of any kind, I imagine.

Its meaning was not lost on the first. Or on me.

Wide Sargasso Sea

 

I made mention earlier that Jean Rhys wrote a parallel novel to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. I also made mention that it is a worthy edition to Charlotte’s deeper narrative within her Gothic romance. (At its heart, Jane Eyre is just that, regardless its explorations of class, sexuality, religion, and feminism, wrapped within its bildungsroman format.)

So too is Wide Sargasso Sea; but where JE is rather melodramatic at times (especially in regard to its romantic exchanges), WSS is anything but. Hers is powerfully visceral in the modern sense where Charlotte Bronte’s novel is steeped in its Victorian sensibilities. Indeed, it is extremely modern in its bald-faced condemnation of what passed as normal at the dawn of the Victorian Age.

Georgian and Victorian novels rarely make mention of the British Empire’s practice of slavery on its West Indian plantations. Readers have to come to that realisation themselves. If they do. (I wonder how many do, really, as the narratives of novels of the day focus instead on how dashing the bourgeoisie were on their home shores, merely making mention that Mr. ___ make 20,000 pounds a year, and not how they made such a princely sum.) One need not guess in WSS. Edward Rochester (never named) is sent to Jamaica to land the wife of his family’s choosing, whose plantations were once explicitly called out for that practice. The family he marries into, although not slave-owning then, had history of just that prior to the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, whose enacting impoverished the long-standing affluent Creole family.

The novel is largely not Edward’s story, however. It is Bertha’s, Edward’s mad wife discovered in Edward Rochester’s Thornfield attic in Jane Eyre, long since hidden away so as to bury what would surely have been a family scandal. Or should I say that it is Antoinette Cosway’s …. 

Let’s back up. Bertha Mason? Antoinette Cosway? They are one and the same. Jean Rhys had to do a little smoothing out in her rewriting our madwoman’s story. She has right to. Jean Rhys, a 4^th generation Creole of Welsh and Scottish descent, was a Dominican born (that’s the island of Dominica and not the Dominical Republic) British writer, who grew up in the West Indies. As she might thus know a thing or two about the West Indies, Jean Rhys can make some minor adjustments to Charlotte Bronte’s tale that do not meet her understanding of the islands.

Her decisions bring this novel to life. We learn a thing or two about West Indies history, about the culture there in the 19^th Century, about the stratums of race and society and poverty, and about the lingering hatred of the West Indian Blacks for the Creoles who owned them and oversaw the plantations. We’re treated to sights and sounds and smells, to dense forests, crashing seas, blinding days and humid nights aflutter with moths and abuzz with the cacophony of the unseen, and of the corruption of sickly-sweet orchids. Just enough to inform us that this is not an English novel; this is a Creole novel.

We follow Antoinette, not long after the collapse of Coulibri, the now impoverished sugar plantation she grows up on. Antoinette’s mother is forced to remarry, and their family’s return to affluence enrages those “native” blacks who once toiled under their oppression. Antoinette’s (simple-minded) younger brother perishes as Coulibri burns; her mother is driven mad by the loss. Antoinette is eventually “sold off” to an English aristocrat, who ultimately learns that his bride’s family is plagued by feeblemindedness and madness. He ceases to love her, and Antoinette’s precarious emotional state collapses, lending credence to the lies he’s heard concerning her family.

The story unfolds as we expect, its plot ultimately dictated by Charlotte Bronte’s classic Gothic novel.

The two novels are as similar as they are wildly different. As they must be. Charlotte Bronte’s novel is rooted in the English countryside she knew and understood. In Gentry and Aristocracy, in country manors and in charity boarding schools (otherwise known as orphanages). Her heroine is a governess, a calling she understood all too well. Charlotte knew little of the West Indies, a likely mythic land told of by few she knew and far between by those who very likely had interests there (sugar) but likely never set foot there personally. Hearsay, we shall say. Jean Rhys knew that world intimately from personal experience. I can only imagine how shocked and betrayed she must have felt coming “face-to-face” with Bertha Mason, that dark-skinned, animalistic, “madwoman in the attic,” and how she became compelled to humanise that unsympathetic, homicidal villain.

She did. Antoinette Cosway is as human and sympathetic as Bertha Mason can not be. I, personally, did grieve for Bertha, shut up as she was, under lock and key, denied sympathetic companionship and any pretense of humane compassion. Is it any wonder that she was mad? Were she not before being entombed, she must surely have been driven to be after years of confinement. 

I must say that I’m very happy to have read this on the heels of Jane Eyre. I wasn’t sure if I would be. I expected it to merely be a feminist rant against Charlotte’s novel. It is, I suppose. But it is so mush more, as well. One should not read one without the other, to my mind, because, in the end, both Jane Eyre and Antoinette Cosway are both remarkable characters. Jane is strong and pragmatic. She has a certain autonomy, ingrained in her by her boarding school upbringing. She is independent when women then could rarely claim to be. She is lucky in that regard because Antoinette was never given the opportunity to become what Jane could. She never had independence, never had control of her inheritance, no money, no marketable skills – no future; and she paid the price for that.

Jane Eyre

 

In my thoughts on Wuthering Heights, I gave Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre faint praise, which is rather unfortunate. It does not deserve it. Indeed, Jane Eyre may be as beloved as Emily’s presumably darker tale.

Is Wuthering Heights indeed darker? I do wonder about that on reflection. In many ways Charlotte’s debut novel is as dark as Emily’s sole novel, both published in 1847. That said, Wuthering Heights, despite its intermittent unreliable narration, is a far more straightforward tale, however coloured by Heathcliff’s earlier abuse and latter brutality. (If you have not read it, I highly recommend it to you.) Jane Eyre, on the other hand, was notable for its social commentary (not that Wuthering Heights does pull punches in that regard) seen through rather Calvinistic Jane’s eyes.

One should not diminish Jane, however. She is a strong female character, written at a time I expect this was a rare thing. She endures prejudice, exclusion, “banishment,” loneliness, and uncertainty. She also radiates strength, overcoming all these setbacks, and decides to make her way in the world.

It is when she accepts a position as a governess at Thornfield Hall that this novel truly begins and becomes the Gothic tale it is probably most noted as. Things are not as they seem in Thornfield Hall. Not that we are aware of this to begin. Jane settles in, and eventually catches the eye of dark, strong, and stern Edward Rochester. One wonders about the attention he directs towards her. He ought not to; he’s her employer, after all…. Things progress.

But as I mentioned earlier, all is not as it seems. 

 

I can’t not spoil this novel if I’m to do it justice.

Beware below if you haven’t read this novel and don’t want the story ruined. 

 

What lies beneath (on in this case, locked in the attic) is the darkness that shadows Rochester: Bertha. Rochester has a dark past, one rooted in the sunny Caribbean. Rochester, a 2^nd son, was sent to Jamaica to marry an heiress. He does. While there, his father and his elder brother pass away, and he becomes lord of the hall, twice over rich now.

But Bertha’s family has a history of madness, one she herself can’t escape. She goes mad, and Rochester decides to take her away from the West Indies back with him to England, where he hides her away, his marriage secret.

This explains Rochester’s sullen nature, and why he spends so little time at his ancestral seat, preferring to spend his time in London and on the continent, flirting much, but never marrying, gaining the reputation of a philanderer while at it, one imagines.

Rochester returns to Thornfield, becomes smitten with Jane. Our story unfolds.

It is dark indeed. 

It’s quite a tale. I found Charlotte’s prose less engaging than Emily’s. I also thought the dialogue that passes between Jane and Edward wooden. To be fair, the novel is over 200 years old. And I wonder how much experience she herself had with romantic love. Charlotte was a governess, and only married years after this novel was published. Take that as you will.

I might note that another novel is linked to this one: Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys. Published in 1966, Ms. Rhys sought to tell the tale of the mad woman in the attic, fleshing her out, humanising her. It is defiantly a feminist take on what lies before and beneath Charlotte’s classic novel, but a believable one, a decidedly powerful one.

I’ll speak on this later.

Wuthering Heights

 

Is this one of English literature’s greatest achievements? It might be. It is certainly a much beloved classic.

It did take me some time to come to it, however. I expect that may be because, like most males, I’d come to the conclusion, without ever having read it, that it was a girl’s novel – chic lit, as it were.

Why then did I finally read it? Because I’d decided that I ought to read what I had not when I was younger: important classics. What was I reading then? SF and horror originally; then Fantasy once I’d been introduced to D&D. Some thrillers. Then Can Lit (that’s Canadian Literature). One might imagine that I inched my way towards better literature as I aged. That is true, but it is also pejorative. Who says that any form of literature is better than another? (I do, to some extent, if I’m being honest; I always have, and likely always will.) Read what you like. But I encourage one and all to challenge themselves to read outside their comfort zone.

Which brings me to Wuthering Heights. I was pleasantly surprised by what I found betwixt its covers. It’s a frame narrative: the “narrator” is a man who tells a story about a woman who tells him a story. Both might be considered unreliable narrators. The man, Mr. Lockwood, pays a visit to his landlord, Heathcliff, and finds a sullen and inhospitable household. Snowed in, he reads a diary by a Catherine Earnshaw he finds in the room he’s shown to. Lockwood later returns to the house he is renting (Thrushcross Grange), falls ill, and while recovering his housekeeper, Nelly Dean, tells the tale of how Wuthering Heights came to be as it is now. Nelly tells a captivating tale, presumed accurate and reliable, but her story is coloured by her recollections, her love of the people involved, and her prejudices against what they’ve done to one another. One then must parse her praises and condemnations by what we learn in the narrative, and come to one’s own conclusions on what she speaks on. In time, Nelly’s tale brings us up to the current date. And in time, Mr. Lockwood leaves, only to return months later, and we discover how their story resolves.

I will not tell you how it ends. Indeed, I will not tell you how the plot plays out at all. Either you already the book and know already or you haven’t and don’t. If you don’t, my telling you will spoil the tale if you’ve a mind to read it.

I do this a lot, don’t I? Not tell the tale. That’s by design. I want you to read the classic books that have stood the test of time. They’ve endured for a reason. They’re good. They’re excellent, in fact. That’s why they survive. Perhaps that’s because they are more than their mere narrative. Sometimes they are parables, sometimes retellings of far older tales, suffused with biblical and poetic themes. Often they are highly moral tales, cautionary tales, with complex, conflicted characters who do not always do the right thing.

This tale is one of those.

Despite that, and despite its age (Emily Bronte published this, her single work of fiction – she was also a poet – in 1847), its prose is quite modern, and not at all difficult as some of her contemporaries might be (I point my finger at you Edgar Allan Poe, whose works I love, but whose prose I find daunting to my somewhat dyslexic mind). It is considered the best of the Bronte sisters’ novels. I cannot claim to judge whether this is true, as, to date, the only other I’ve read is Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, which I’ve only just completed. Both were good – that sounds like faint praise: both were excellent – but I believe Emily’s work is the superior of the two. This is not to say that Charlotte’s most famous work is not also phenomenal, in its way. It most certainly is! But I found Emily’s prose far more accessible, however. Maybe that’s why I, personally, place hers above her sister’s.

Long story short, I really do believe that Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is truly one of English literature’s greatest achievements, and that, if you have not read this – regardless your sex – you ought to.

The Count of Monte Cristo

 

I’m on a bit of a mission, of late. I’ve hitherto neglected reading a great any of the classics. This is not to say that I do not own them – I do – this is to say that some of them have been left languishing upon my bookshelves, gathering dust, sometimes for years, if not decades. I decided, upon reflection, that this is unacceptable. I will finally read them – now. I’m approaching 60 and, let’s be frank, time is sorter than it once was.

That sounds rather melodramatic, doesn’t it? It ought to, because it is. Which brings me to this tome, this melodramatic tale of betrayal and revenge by Alexandre Dumas, this lengthy, weighty tome. It’s long, so long that the thought of tackling it is daunting, even for those who read quickly – and I do not.

Did I tackle it? I did. And complete it? I did. In fits and starts.

What do I think of it? Did I like it? I did. Then I didn’t. Then I did, with reservation. Why? Because it was long. Staggeringly long. And unapologizingly melodramatic. But mostly because I found Edmond Dantes implausible. Not at the novel’s onset. Then I found him exceedingly naïve. And melodramatic. Indeed, I found his story riveting then. I found myself frustrated and anxious for him, as circumstance rose up against him and he found himself betrayed by a litany of self-interested ne’er-do-wells and incarcerated in the infamous Chateau d’If, left to rot when he'd committed no crime, to hide others' treason.

What I found frustrating was the middle “bit,” years after Dantes escaped from this inescapable prison, indescribably rich having inherited a long-lost treasure, and having somehow become an expert in EVERYTHING! That is what caused me to set the book aside for a time: his miraculous erudition, gleaned from the then deceased Abbe Faria, Italian priest and sage and the source of Dantes’ bequeathed fortune, who taught him everything under the sun: culture, art, politics, rhetoric, whatever…. I suppose Dantes’ years travelling in the east might also be cited for his vast knowledge, his intricate plans. But that reasoning fell flat to my mind. To elucidate, Dantes can detect a forgery at mere glance at any work of art, etc. It was then that I put the book down in disgust.

I vowed I would finish it, though. I decided to read a chapter a day. Just one. It would take some time to complete at that pace, but I’ve never been one to abandon a book.

I’m glad I did. Once I set aside my reservations and accepted the implausibility of Dantes’ encyclopedic knowledge, and the intricacies of his elaborate revenge plot, Alexandre Dumas’ masterful skill at what was once referred to as “Romance” drew me in. This is an intricately plotted story, with twists and turns, with no page unnecessary. It was still insanely implausible, to my mind. But I forgive it this.

To lavish praise and not merely complain, Dumas’ characters are well realised, his heroes and villains have concrete reasons why they do what they did. I empathize with them, but do not forgive their villainy. That said, I came to realise as I read on and Dantes’ revenge plots began to bear fruit, that he is the true villain of this story and not those who nearly succeeded in destroying his life. One might argue that they deserve what they got, but Dantes cared not a whit who suffered as he exacted his revenge.

Do I recommend this lengthy adventure? I do. But I also recommend patience with its page count. Forgive Dantes his unlikely encyclopedic knowledge, his possibly impossibly vast network of spies, informants, and debtors; gloss over Monsieur Noirtier’s miraculous ability to be understood after his paralysing stroke; and just enjoy this novel’s vast cast of characters whose tales are woven into an intricate web of twists and turns that make the journey worthwhile.

Because it is.

The Secret History

Every so often a novel comes along that astonishes the reader in me. It’s been a while since one captivated me as this one did, the last being House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski. This is not to say that I have not read some truly wonderful works, because I have, most notably Wuthering Heights, and The Meaning of Night, by Michael Cox, among others. (I should put down my thoughts about them too, and perhaps I will later.) This work by Danna Tartt, published in 1992, drew me in far more thoroughly, though, much like HoL did.

This was a first reading for me of Donna Tartt’s debut novel, which surprises me. Maybe not, given my preferences and prejudices throughout the years. I was aware of it when it was released – who could not have been, considering the fanfare with which it was heralded – but did not pick it up then – I’ve no idea why, given that at that time I was turning away from the Fantasy novels I had hitherto been reading with far too much abandon, and doing so with rapid passion. Fantasy had lost its luster for me by then, it had become banal, no longer the philosophical parables that Michael Moorcock and his like had created, devolving instead into the shallow bloodletting spectacles that appalled me. I was by then far more interested in novels like Generation X, by Douglas Coupland, and its like. So, it does come as a surprise to me now that I did not purchase this book when it was released. Perhaps it was because it revolved around university students, and I was no longer that age. I didn’t want to read about young adults when I wasn’t one anymore. Go figure. Did I mention my proclivity towards prejudice?

I have since set that reticence aside, if reticence it was – which it obviously was. Why? For a number of reasons. I was somewhat surprised to discover it was not set in the 1990s at all (its contemporary time) but almost a decade prior to its publication. One wonders then if I was newly drawn to it for nostalgic reasons, a desire to revisit the 1980s, which could not possibly be, not realising that at time of purchase. I did so because, all these decades later, the novel has a certain zeitgeist with the Dark Academia subculture. (What is Dark Academia? That’s another discussion.) Why were they so captivated by it, I wondered? Inquiring minds want to know.

I picked the book up. And Thank God I did. It is wonderful. A page turner. Its prose flows. Almost poetically. That said, it is literary. And complex. So very complex. There’s a great deal going on betwixt the covers, perhaps more than most readers might realise on first reading. Indeed, one must read carefully to divine the subtext suffused in what is said, both in the narrator’s remembrances, and the dialogue between the characters. Indeed, he is a bit of an unreliable narrator at first, a necessity in a novel that is a bit of a mystery, about events disclosed nearly a decade after their happening. It’s something of a Confession, a literary style that seems less in favour now than it once was. Richard wishes to paint himself in a good light, but also a highly critical one, confessing that he has “a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.” He is also tortured by guilt, declaring that “I might have had any number of stories, but now there is only one. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.” That is all terribly dramatic, but other than in this confessional form, he could never possibly tell it to anyone, could he. To do so would land him in prison.

That's dire, isn't it? What then did he do that is so terrible? What is The Secret History about? Murder. But it is so much more. There is a great deal of Greek philosophy and theatrical play woven within: most notably Euripides’ Bacchae, and Plato, which is no surprise, given our cast of characters’ major, the Classics. There are also innumerable references to modern classic literature too: Gatsby, T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, etc... Donna Tartt was an English Lit major, so it’s not surprising that there would be. Write what you know, as they say.

I am not giving anything away when I tell you the novel begins with a group of student murdering one of their classmates. That's the issue, isn’t it, when deciding what to reveal when discussing a novel: what to reveal. To discuss what lies within invites spoilers; too much revelation soils the enjoyment of the experience. It’s a conundrum. I want to speak at length on this book, I want to give my insights. I do have them, some I’d arrived at on my own, others I’d gleaned from what had been written about it by others prior, and explorations made on the vast number of YouTube reviews posted online (read and viewed after completing the book, I should add). I won’t though. You can dive down that rabbit hole on you’re own, should you wish to, if you haven't already. Suffice it to say that Donna Tartt’s debut novel is not a who-done-it, but a why-done it, played out by a brilliant cast of characters.

That personae dramatis are as follows:

Richard Papen, a Californian of modest means who transfers to Hampden University (Barrington University), Vermont, to escape the life he was born to: poverty, toil, drudgery.

Henry Winter, the unofficial leader of Richards very small community of Julian Morrow’s exclusive students. He’s brilliant by any standard, and horribly naïve and ill-informed outside his interests.

Fransis Abernathy, old money, the supposed ideal of confidence and generosity.

Charles and Camilla Macauley, the charming orphaned fraternal twins that Richard is most drawn to from the outset.

Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran, the dyslexic jokester who ultimately facilitates Richard’s invitation to this exclusive cadre of select students. Also, our victim of murder.

And finally, Julian Morrow, the eccentric professor who teaches out small, select group of acolytes. One might wonder why I bother to include Julian here; he appears to barely appear in the book, but while his presence is indeed sparse, he is always present – in fact, one might say that the story begins and ends with him, he’s everywhere, and our main cast more often than not ask “What would Julian think” throughout the story.

There are others, but these are the most important. Richard is drawn to these select “freaks,” as his fellow Hampden students refer to them. They are attractive, brilliant, cultured, suave, charismatic. He will do anything, in fact, to be counted among them.

But nothing as it seems. To disclose why would be to deny you enjoyment of this brilliant work. It’s funny. Sometimes awkward. Always surprising.

 

This book was very much a nostalgic trip for me. I could very much empathise with Richard. Indeed, I could have been Richard. I did not grow up poor, but neither did he, not really. His father owns a garage. He’s working class. But he aspires for more. Thus, university. Sadly, being working class, his parents (then) do not see the value of education. Thus, he has to make his own way without their support, personal or financial. 

As to his hopeless longing for the picturesque, I shared it. I soon found myself embraced by tweed and overcoats after attending college (while, actually, if tentatively). They were paired with Doc Martens, not brogues, topped by baseball caps (most notably the Detroit Tigers then – D for David). I read a great deal – SF, mostly; not classics then (that would follow, beginning with Dickens). Few I knew read as I did, and I imagined myself more literate than most in my neck of the woods. I suppose I started down a more literary path when introduced to Hemingway. 

I'm getting away from what is germane here: You don’t have to have a working knowledge of Greek philosophy to enjoy this book. Nor do you have to have a love of Dickens or Gatsby or Hemingway, or Homer, although you will have a greater appreciation of what lies within if you do read the Classics, Greek and Modern. All you really have to have is a love of reading. It is a journey well worth your time. I do hope you spend it here. Donna Tartt is a treasure to experience.

House of Leaves

 “Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing.”

― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

Once you reach a certain age, modern media can appear pale compared to the panoply of the rose-coloured array of what came before, be it film, tv, whatever. Even books. You’ve experience so much! What can possibly compare to your first viewing of Star Wars? Your first reading of Lord of the Rings?

It comes as a surprise, then, when something exceeds your expectations. It comes to even further surprise when something “blows your mind”!

I’ve recently had such an experience. House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski.

How can I describe this book? That’s a hard task. At its heart, it is a novel. Is it Fantasy? One might make a case for that. It’s Horror, too. So too a – dare I say it? – a Love Story. It’s presented as erudite non-fiction. Epistolary, in places. A multiple frame narrative. It’s so many things at once. If it’s so indescribable, so lacking in genera appeal, why am I drawing your attention to Mr. Danielewski’s debut work? Because I believe it is worth your time, and your extreme effort. It’s going to take extreme effort to read it! It ought to; he spent 10 years of his life perfecting it before publication.

It has unusual formatting, at times, and personalised fonts clambering for attention and leading you down unexpected paths. The text itself can be a maze, directing you to appendices, and to pages far forward of where you happen to be reading, sometimes even back to the beginning of the chapter, to collages, to exhibits, and to an altogether perplexing index.

Have I scared you off? I hope not. That’s not my intent.

I hope you have the curiosity to read on: The novel is about a young man who finds and compiles a dissertation by a blind old man concerning a supposed documentary detailing the altogether horrific experiences of a family who buys a house on Ash Tree Lane that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, a house that contains an infinite and eternally altering labyrinth that suddenly appears within it, a dark, cold, and almost featureless maze that attacks and warps the psyche of all those who enter it.

Does this description intrigue? The book obviously left a colossal imprint on my psyche. I experienced the dizzying thrill I once did delving in those first labyrinths of my first foray into Dungeons & Dragons, all those years ago. It is altogether different, however. Our protagonists do not face down monsters within that malleable maze. What they face is far more disturbing. They face something altogether surreal, a Lovecraftian, non-Euclidean universe. The maze shifts, never the same twice. But it can be traversed repeatedly. Certain features can, and will, be visited, time and again, so long as the explorers stays a path threaded by a line that never breaks however many times the passages twist and shift, regardless whether doors appear and disappear; because perhaps the maze WANTS them to find the central staircase that spirals down into its depths, a stairwell sometimes only fifty feet across, sometimes a hundred, and at other times five hundred feet across. Where it may be a mere one hundred feet deep once, it may descend a staggering thousands of feet another, even miles, thousands upon thousands of miles. And all the while they wander within, a growl stalks them. Like the Minotaur.

“Little solace comes

to those who grieve

when thoughts keep drifting

as walls keep shifting

and this great blue world of ours

seems a house of leaves

moments before the wind.”

― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

Is it real? Figuratively speaking? The Labyrinth? The House? That depends on your interpretation: Do you believe the tale Johnny Truant tells us about Blind Zampano’s book about a film that was supposedly in wide release, but no one has ever heart of? Zampano added hundreds of footnotes. As did Johnny. As did the later Editors. The footnotes even have footnotes. (They are hilarious, BTW. Some critiques have called them a parody of literary criticism - which they most surely are.) Some of the books referenced are even real (not many, but those few lend credence to the body as a whole, itself an absurdist maze). The thing is, Johnny declares early on that he spins tales to entertain, calling question that everything that follows. He admits to changing Zampano’s text, further eroding our faith in him. Johnny is a liar. Or is he?

Johnny’s mother, Pelafina, is institutionalised. Certified. That calls Johnny’s state of mind into question, to say nothing of his tragic, and heartbreaking, tale. Johnny is also perplexingly omniscient. One wonders how he could be, given the life story he relates to us. Does Johnny even exist or is he himself an elaborate fiction? Zampano too, our Historian of “The Navidson Record,” is also called into question as his hinted at history somewhat mimics that of Fellini’s Zampano in “La Strada.”

Questions arise: Who actually wrote House of Leaves? Zampano? Or Johnny? The book is a case study of Echoes. Phrases repeat, in Johnny’s life story, in Zamano’s text, and even more importantly, in Pelafina’s letters to her son, calling into question everything you’ve read. Is this all a confession, steeped in metaphor and myth? In the subtext of Echo, Error, the Minotaur and his Labyrinth? And in Yggdrasil, the ash tree that spans planes of existence?  

It’s altogether dizzying.

The book defies description, and categorising.

But it may also be one of the most extraordinary works you will ever have the good fortune to have undertaken.

It is thrilling, horrifying, and heartbreaking too. I’ll leave it to you to decide.

“Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.”

― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

Moby Dick

"And I only am escaped alone to tell ye." Job

That's done, then. After three attempts throughout my life, I have finally read Melville's epic tale to completion.

I will say that I’ve been of mixed mind about it while at it. I pondered, as I plodded through, that I must be in error in my opinion; greater minds than mine, Harold Bloom's for instance, extoll the virtues of this American masterpiece. But despite repeated rereading I found the prose to be perplexing, inscrutable, and exhaustingly difficult, and passages, if not whole chapters, unfathomable. Just words. There were, to my mind, a great number of inexplicably pointless chapters, at the end of each, I've paused and wondered what I'd just read. Descriptions of paintings, erroneous exclamations on anatomy and history, pontification, passages describing the hunt, the tools of the trade, the skinning the whales, none of which I could actually picture by means of the text.

Yet, there are passages that are fluid, truly brilliant: The rift and struggle between Ahab and Starbuck, for instance. Yet these are widely spaced by those inexplicable chapters noted above that have nothing to do with the narrative of the tale.

There are aspects of its being a masterpiece, which I cannot deny: It's positively Shakespearian in its scope and its climax. Indeed, it's replete with soliloquies towards the end, Ahab's, Starbuck's, Stubb's, even Pip's; but none from Ishmael, not a one.

My criticism, if I may be so presumptuous, is in its voice: Ishmael is its initial narrator, and he remains as much, mostly; yet there are whole passages where he could never be; and by the novel's end, Ishmael is but an afterthought, the voice having passed to third-person omnipotence. Ishmael and Queequeg, who loomed so large in the first 150 pages are all but abandoned for the greater and decidedly more important tale: Ahab's blind obsession, and Starbuck's opposition to it.

How would I, in my hubris, have imagined this epic saga? I'd have kept Ishmael's voice and woven the tale of Ahab's obsession and his seduction of the crew as it unfolds from Starbuck's whaling boat and crew, seeing that Ishmael was Starbuck's oarsman, and Queequeg, Starbuck's harpooner. Why should Starbuck confide in so lowly an oarsman? Because Ishmael is a New Yorker, an educated man by all accounts, and he would appear worldly to a Nantucketer. Thus, we are given insight into Starbuck's views, just as we experience Ahab's monomaniacal obsession from afar, looming large and increasingly shadowing their limited macrocosmic view of the world, that of the microcosmic deck of the ship.

Shall I revisit this American masterpiece? I shall. Immediately, in fact, albeit more slowly, even if this rereading takes a year (although, I doubt that will be the case). I've only done this once before, with Falkner's "As I Lay Dying," which I found as equally incomprehensible as this book until its very end. Then, as now, I plumbed the final chapter, closed the covers, and then cracked them again, at the beginning, with an understanding that enlightens the text that was altogether shrouded in its initial unfolding.