My Name is Emilia del Valle by Isabel Allende

Born in San Francisco in 1866, Emilia de Valle is the daughter of Molly Walsh, an orphaned Irish immigrant who, despite being a devout novice nun, is seduced but abandoned by a handsome young Chilean from a nouveau riche family. Emilia and her mother are saved from disgrace and poverty by the kindly, too good to be true, Don Pancho Claro, who runs the small school where Molly has been teaching under his wing.

While still in the teens, Emilia begins to earn money through writing lurid “dime” novels, using salacious plots improbably suggested by her pious mother. The drawback is that she has to publish under a male pseudonym, “Brandon J. Price”. Confident and ambitious, she talks her way into writing a regular common for a newspaper, “Examiner”, soon persuading the editor to permit her not only to accompany a male work colleague, Eric Whelan, to Chile to cover the outbreak of civil war, but also to write under her own name. Her motivation is partly to learn more about the country of her father’s birth, but she has also undertaken to track him down and deliver a letter from her wronged mother, filled with bitter reproaches, including a demand that he should recognise his daughter, “restoring everything she was rightfully owed”.

Very thoroughly researched, this reads more like a memoir than a novel. A limitation is that, writing in the first person, Emilia is too often reduced to description of events where she was not present, perhaps even born. To overcome this weakness, she seems remarkably successful in obtaining interviews with influential people, up to the level of president! The narration is weighed down with details, which tend to dominate rather than serve to underpin authentic scenes. Admittedly, every digression from the main plot which I checked, turned out to be true. There really was a celebrity American belly dancer called Omene, dubbed “the Divine Odalisque”, featured in thirteen cards distributed in packets of tobacco – likewise a certain Victoria Woodhull, American leader of the movement for women’s suffrage, but also a campaigner for “free love”, which sometimes landed her in gaol.

Isabel is a prolific, best-selling, award-winning writer, regarded as the leading South American female author. It is a matter of taste, but I tend to agree with reviewers who have found the style somewhat stilted and clichéd. This may be partly due to the translation into American English. For instance, the description of Santiago refers to the “telluric energy that defines the proud, serious and stoic nature of the Chilean people” – if you look up “telluric” in the dictionary, you will probably conclude it isn’t the best word to use. Similarly, we read of former Chilean President “Balmaceda’s henchman’s prepotency” and get distracted wondering what it actually means. Dialogues often jar because they seem too modern for the nineteenth century.

Overall, I find the characters too exaggerated in some cases, two dimensional in others. More time, could have been spent, for instance, showing us the growth of a relationship between Emilia and her fellow journalist, Eric Whelan. There are too many coincidences or far-fetched situations, not least in Emilia’s final escapade.

Ironically, despite all the detail, it was hard to grasp fully how the Chilean civil war arose in 1891, and which side may have been more justified. Yet in a novel which carries one along without arousing much depth of emotion, some of the most vivid and moving writing relates to the grim battle scenes. Emilia is at her most authentic and convincing when she observes,

“How is it possible that, from the dawn of their presence on earth, men have systematically set out to murder one another? What fatal madness do we carry in our soul? That propensity toward destruction is the original sin”.

“So Late in the Day” by Claire Keegan: too little and too much…..

Published as a novella with little more than forty pages, this would seem more suited to a collection of Claire Keegan’s short stories. Told from the viewpoint of Cathal, a single man who works in a Dublin office, facts are revealed gradually for the reader to piece together impressions of the characters, of recent events, and a strong sense of place, all expressed in the author’s clear, spare prose. The details are banal, but there is the building up of tension to some crisis, which so often marks the author’s work.

Although apparently completing tasks competently, Cathal seems unsettled even depressed. In different ways, the female staff and his boss treat him warily, for some as yet unexplained reason and he appears to go out of his way to avoid them. After work, his thoughts keep returning to Sabine, a woman he has gone out with for months, to whom he’s even proposed marriage, but it is clear that they are longer together.

Despite the vivid prose like that of the opening paragraph with “the brazen sun.. reaching onto Cathal’s desk” and “when a shadow crossed….a gulp of swallows skirmishing, high up, in camaraderie”, the development of the plot lacks subtlety compared with that of Keegan’s novels, “Foster” and “Small Things like These”. Is this because the author’s strong views about misogyny and the ingrained attitudes of some Irish men have caused her to lose objectivity, and stereotype her male characters?

Yet I would still recommend this story because it is likely to promote discussion, not least about the behaviour of men in Ireland, and perhaps elsewhere, and suggestions for improving their relationships with women. Also, should we question Sabine’s actions as regards the extent to which they are premeditated, and if so, justified?

“Rubicon” by Tom Holland – History repeats itself, plus ça change, and do we ever learn? –

In 509 BCE, two and a half centuries after the foundation of Rome, King Tarquin was ousted and a republic established. Published in 2003, Tom Holland’s acclaimed account of its triumphs and ultimate chaotic decline focuses on the final century, ending with the death in old age of Augustus Caesar in 14 CE. Clearly based on deep research, although relying on a vivid imagination to cover the inevitable gaps in written records after two thousand or more years, the narrative often reads like a novel or lively colour supplement article.

The republic operated a form of democracy, with male plebeians, ordinary men allowed to vote and gain power over time, although women and slaves played no part in this. An interesting idea from the outset was that the country should be led by two consuls, elected annually, so that in theory they would constrain each other’s ambitions, and not have time to embed a dictatorship.

The Romans had to raise legions to extend the area controlled in order to defeat brilliant, ambitious rivals like the Carthaginian Hannibal from North Africa or Mithridates, King of Pontus to the east in modern Turkey. Land gained was a vital source of slaves, whose labour kept Rome going, and also of gold and tax revenue. Roman expansion triggered resistance, with barbaric cruelty on both sides. Mithridates punished an official who had levied tax too harshly by ordering liquid gold to be poured down his throat.

Despite developing a complex system, in which better off plebeians could gain office, over time Roman government became corrupted by bribery and wheeler-dealing, both flamboyant and covert. It grows increasingly hard to keep track of the key players, whose names too often start with a “C” (Crassus, Codius, Cato, Cicero, Catullus, Curio and so on), because of their shifting allegiances and unpredictable, mercurial temperaments, not to mention the continual battles and brutal reprisals.

Insights into Roman life are fascinating: fathers showed their children little affection, in the belief that this would “toughen them up”, yet the wealthy elite grew effete, scandalising the people with fads like fish farming which involved tunnelling through mountains to obtain salt water for bearded mullet kept as pets rather than for consumption. When the mania for eating exotic foods extended to dormice, this was banned. Despite being continually appalled by the excesses of the patricians, the plebs could still be seduced by displays of fights to the death, be it of enslaved gladiators, panthers, or elephants (which did reduce onlookers to tears).

The narrative is peppered with some pithy quotations, which often sound quite modern in translation. For once, I would have preferred footnotes to show the authors at the bottom of the page, rather than listed at the back, featuring in particular such names as Plutarch, Horace and the great orator Cicero.

The pace of events quickens as the Republic lapses into civil war, when Julius Caesar, of Ides of March infamy, furious at not being accepted as Consul after great success fighting in the east, crosses the Rubicon (in fact an insignificant river) to capture Rome. Not for the first time, the narrative assumes farcical proportions, as he takes time off to canoodle with Cleopatra on a Nile cruise, but eventually defeats his enemies on home ground and makes himself dictator for life. This proved a step too far, prompting his assassination, as immortalised in Shakespeare’s play. It was left to his great-nephew, Augustus Caesar, to restore a semblance of the old democracy, although his control of the military maintained his autocratic power in reality.

Overall, this is a fascinating but at times mentally exhausting read, since it covers so much. It is immersive, but at times carries one along too fast to absorb the digressive flow of facts and analysis. I would have liked at least a résumé of the final Sack of Rome by the Visigoths, to round the drama off. Probably over-detailed and verbose in places, this history is informative and thought-provoking, not least in the parallels to be drawn with the modern world, such as Trump’s second term in the US in the mid 2020s.

History repeats itself, plus ça change, and do we ever learn?

“Antarctica” by Claire Keegan: the seeds of fine writing

Published in 1999, “Antarctica” was the debut collection of fifteen short stories which brought Claire Keegan recognition as a significant modern novelist. The first story, which provides the book’s title, opens with a blatant hook: “Every time the happily married woman went away she wondered how it would feel to sleep with another man”. Although none of the rest repeats this ploy, they all have a tension which builds from the outset, with dropped clues usually culminating in a significant, often unexpected, even violent and unsettling situation.

Locations are divided between Ireland, where Keegan grew up on a farm, and the US where she studied at university. Her stories with rural Irish settings seem to me to have the strongest and most convincing sense of place and authentic dialogue, with a practical knowledge of rural life, all presumably based on experience. So the stories which I would rate most highly come in this category: “Men and Women”, “Sisters” and possibly “The Ginger Rogers Sermon.” Perhaps because they are relatively longer so there is more scope for development, they also seem to have the most subtlety and depth.

The American tales like “Ride if you Dare” or “You Can’t Be Too Careful” seemed more clichéd and contrived, and interestingly quite masculine in tone, which could be a compliment for a female writer,

Stories like “Quare Name for a Boy” stand out in resembling more closely Keegan’s later style of writing in capturing wry observation, subtlety and poignancy in a few pages – as when the writer who has returned to her home town muses that her female relatives would not recognise themselves in her fictional characters. “They don’t know the half of it. Don’t know what disguises I made for them, how I took twenty years off their hard-earned faces….How I put them in another country and changed their names. Turned them inside out like dirty old socks. The lies I’ve told.”

Having read “Foster” (2010) and “Small Things like These” (2021), which I would recommend as “near perfect” short novels, I hesitated to criticise “Antarctica”, until I found that my reservations are shared by other reviewers. Despite the dark humour, several stories read in rapid succession can make for a depressing read. In addition to the recurring sadness of too many oppressed or exploited married women and daughters, or children who have lost their mothers, the sordid, tacky side of life is laid on with a “sprong”. But then a story which doesn’t end in tragedy seems inconsequential by comparison! The tendency for everyone under pressure to resort to the bottle gets quite tedious. I also questioned the inclusion in one story of an admittedly deceased Fred West, since this seemed like bad taste, or at best too unsettling.

I also understand why some reviewers who acknowledge Keegan’s talent for writing are disappointed by what too often feel like weak endings. Of course, open or inconclusive endings which leave the reader free to draw different conclusions may encourage valuable further reflection and bring fresh insight.

Overall, I found it interesting to see how an author can improve over a quarter of a century, growing more focused on moving us with something implied, rather than daring or feeling impelled to shock.

“Period Piece – A Cambridge Childhood” by Gwen Raverat

Born in 1885, Gwen Raverat was a granddaughter of Charles Darwin and also related to the Wedgwood family of pottery fame. Although her closest relatives were scientific rather than artistic, apart from her American mother who (I believe) gave up amateur painting when she became a wife and mother, Gwen was the first female to study at the Slade School of Fine Art and became a leading wood engraver.

Gwen’s childhood was spent in Cambridge where her father was a don, and in her sixties she began to write a memoir which, apart from being very funny in places, enhanced by her line drawings, also succeeds in combining a child’s take on her world with an astute analysis from a later adult viewpoint. Published in 1952, it was an instant bestseller, and remains fascinating because of the insight it gives into a past way of life, aided by use of family correspondence going even further back to previous generations.

Coloured wood engraving “Winter Morning”. (above)

Old Silver Street Bridge Cambridge (below)

Since Fellows of colleges were only allowed to marry from 1878, Gwen belonged to the “first hatchings” of their children, and there was no social contact with other families in the town, outside this circle, with a particular fear of “the Poor”. This made her life quite privileged and exclusive, although not particularly rich in terms of material possessions, despite often being assertive on home ground, as an adolescent she was “shy and a bad mixer”, much to the despair of her sociable mother.

The chapters are themed rather than chronological, intended to be like “the spokes of a wheel from the hub” so that they can be read in any order. The downside of this is that it can be hard to keep track of Gwen’s age, as she changes from a child scared of ghosts in the dark, or engaged in wild games beside and sometimes in the river, to a bored teenager desperate to be allowed to go to boarding school like her brother, only to find that she doesn’t fit in with her frumpy appearance and shocking opinions (like not believing in Adam and Eve or the Flood).

From an early age, Gwen could see the illogicality in the system of values by which they were supposed to live. “Propriety” provided enough examples of this to justify a whole chapter: an aunt would not offer a friend a bed for a night after checking that he had lived with his wife before marrying her. A young couple could not be left alone in a room or out in public, but it was fine to deploy a child to act as a “chaperone”, a role which Gwen bitterly resented. Young boys could leap around naked at certain points in the river, but ladies and girls in passing boats had to bury their faces in parasols. Gwen, of course, managed to steal a look, and captured the scene years later in an wood engraving.

Very restricted in some ways, the children were allowed to play dangerous games, like running along nine foot walls or tying younger sister Margaret to a small cart roped to four bicycles with disastrous results when the riders decided to go different ways – but Margaret was always “only terrified but never badly hurt”. They were forced to wear what would now seem very heavy clothing, which of course maids were on hand to wash, not daring to complain when they got caked in mud. As she grew older, Gwen found it hard to manage tweed “walking skirts” which kept catching round her knees. After sewing yards of “brush braid” on the hem to collect the mud which spattered up from the roads, she had to spend hours removing it since she lacked a personal maid to do this

The most interesting chapters turned out to be those on specific issues like theories (of child rearing), education, ladies, religion, sport, clothes and society.

The chapters I enjoyed least were in the middle section (V11-X). “Ghosts and horrors” became quite tedious, although it must have inspired some of the scenes in wood engravings years later. Otherwise, these chapters focused on family members: “Aunt Etty” and some of the female relatives encountered at Charles Darwin’s Down (now Downe) House seemed either excessively eccentric or silly, perhaps as a result of having been denied the education or opportunity to achieve their potential alongside their brothers. “The Five Uncles”, hard to tell apart in a group, were clever in their fields of interest but rather bland, having grown up in their father Darwin’s shadow, in a prosperous, tolerant household where ill health, possibly fed by an encouragement of hypochondria , was the only problem. The only jarring note was struck by Uncle Lenny, President of a Eugenics Society, with his personal take on the survival of the fittest: “A man who can earn and keep money shows that he has the qualities essential to survival”, making money the only possible criterion for describing who “should be encouraged to breed”. Dull in places, this chapter arguably provides a good insight into upper middle class life at the turn of the C19.

There are few references to Gwen’s later life, which is worth looking up on line, together with examples of her work.

“Les Saules” (The Willows) by Mathilde Beaussault: a bleak tale

The setting is a rural community in Brittany during the 1980s. The body of Marie, a lovely but promiscuous seventeen-year-old is found on a riverbank under the willows of the title. When Eugène, owner of the nearby pig farm, realises that his daughter Marguerite must have been the first to come across the body, he orders her to say nothing, to avoid trouble. This is not hard for her to do, as she is remarkably quiet and withdrawn, bullied at school for seeming simple-minded, addicted to sucking the frayed cuffs of her jumpers. In fact, she is probably just neglected by her parents, working long hours to scrape a living from their stony piece of land.

The work of a prize-winning novelist born of Breton farmers, it must have been inspired by her past personal experience, although hopefully her neighbours and acquaintances were not so generally unlikeable. It proves more of a psychological drama than a crime thriller, as the short chapters gradually reveal the character and behaviour of an inward-looking, socially divided community. So we have a majority of gossipy, hard up locals who, while shocked by the murder, feel that Marie “had it coming”, while sympathy for her parents is tempered by resentment of their wealth, largely inherited by the mother from the past profits of quarryng, and of the father’s ill-founded air of superiority. Despite the fact that his pharmacy depends on local custom, he antagonises his farming neighbours by persisting in trying to enforce the environmental controls which add to their difficulties in making a living.

When local people are invited in turn to the police station for interview, the chapters consist almost entirely of their answers (printed in italics) from which we have to infer the questions. However, this begins to pall as a device to explain the characters and background situation to the reader, rather than help to identify the murderer. In fact, we are given a strong motive for Marie’s strangling in the prologue.

The hapless Marguerite is central to many chapters, since the prologue also suggests that she knows who the killer is. The constant examples of how she irritates and disgusts everyone grow rather tedious, and although she arouses our sympathy, there is the nagging thought that she may be nicer than most of the other characters since she is too stupid to be otherwise. There are a few moving moments, as when we sense brief moments of connection between Marguerite, starved of affection, and her overworked mother Chantal, herself no doubt damaged through childhood abuse. There is also the excruciating scene where the male head teacher clumsily tells Marguerite’s mother, in the girl’s presence, that her daughter must improve her hygiene and is likely to be placed in a special needs class.

As this suggests, despite flashes of wry humour, and possible beauty of the riverside willows (les saules), this is a bleak novel in which the trees overhang grim past events, and most imaginable human vices and failings get a mention. A large number of characters appear, some only briefly, but one needs to keep note of them in case they reappear later in the plot. They are all highly stereotyped to the point of caricature, portrayed in cliché-ridden incidents. Reading this with French as a second language, I was struck by the amount of slang and colloquial idioms I encountered, making it more challenging to read than a more “literary” novel.

The denouement which succeeds in being somewhat unexpected, also felt too contrived and somewhat rushed. I was left considering how the ingredients of a potentially memorable crime thriller could have been better handled. It could have been more powerful, subtle and moving if from the outset there had been a stronger development of certain characters. This would have been with a view to developing what perhaps the author wished to convey, which I have also heard expressed by others growing up in remoter French rural areas like the Vosges. This is how, in certain close-knit communities resistant to change, men may retain strong mutual bonds based on the past, even while occasionally disputing with each other; how they mistrust external institutions, and may follow their own code of justice, untroubled by any sense of guilt.

“A Flat Place” by Noreen Masud: falling a little flat…

This unusual memoir basically interweaves the contrasting descriptions of flatlands in Britain for which the author feels a particular affinity, with her memories of a troubled childhood in Lahore and its long-term effects on her.

The five areas which Noreen Masud visited are: the fens around Ely and Welney;Orford Ness in Suffolk; Morecambe Bay; some of the Orkney islands and the least remote Newcastle Moor. A chapter is devoted to each one, with descriptions which are closely observed, vivid and poetic with interesting snippets of local history and relevant literary quotations culled from her store of knowledge as an English literature graduate and university lecturer. However, the obsession with “flatness” begins to seem contrived, its value, as compared with mountains and valleys, almost ludicrously overrated, although one realises that it is being used as a means of assisting or understanding better a particular mental state.

The author’s father was a flamboyant, controlling Pakistani doctor who took his British wife to Lahore where they produced four daughters. Perhaps protesting too much, he liked to declare “My girls are my boys”, insisting they should have a good education and careers, but also confining them to the upper floor of a house with chicken wire across the windows, and often subjecting them to insensitive, even violent treatment. She describes him as a fantasist, but reports taking part in incidents which are hard to credit, such as when he used the dining room table to operate on his own father who had just suffered a heart attack, and summoned his young children to assist, with Noreen holding out a white dinner plate to catch “the cut ribbons of my grandfather’s meat”.

Two flat surfaces triggered a lasting desire to be in flat places where Masood could feel sufficiently at peace to reflect calmly and make sense of life. One was the cool flat stone floors of the family home. The other was the empty green space of the park passed on the way to school, improbably existing “in the middle of crowded, parched, shouting Lahore”.

When, aged 16, Masud found herself “disowned” along with her mother and sisters by her irrational, maverick father, she actually benefitted from the move to Britain which provided the freedom to graduate in the English literature which she loved, and opportunities to study at Oxbridge, obtain grants for creative writing and quickly win praise and awards for her published work. This makes her outbursts on, for instance, British racism and ongoing exploitation of other nations, which began under the Empire, seem somewhat ungracious and lacking in insight. After all, many white British people also suffered in the past and continue to do so, while dominant powers the world over have always exploited weaker or less developed countries, while also providing some benefits in the process.

We are told at the end that this book began as “solely, a study of encounters with flat landscapes” and it was only through discussion with her agent that Masud came to realise that “the complex trauma.. sustained… in early life was an element which could not be omitted”.

To quote:
– “cPTSD describes traumatic experience which extends over a length of time….there’s no single traumatic experience such as childhood neglect and prolonged captivity.”
– “I write that cPTSD is like a flat landscape in the sense that there is no single event to point to, there is nothing to look at or focus on and yet there’s something about not being able to look away either.”

No doubt, books about neurodivergence sell well these days, but the continual references to cPTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder) lead to excessive repetition, a tendency to woolliness and self-absorption which evaporate one’s sympathy. Her portrayal of personal awkwardness and attempts to relate “normally” to people when she really prefers objects like stones or bones, do not tally with the frequent references to “my friends” and her ability to analyse the people she observes. All this assumes, of course, that she is writing a form of autobiography rather than a fictionalised account.

This book is memorable, may encourage one to visit some of the places covered, and would provoke a good deal of not entirely uncritical discussion for a reading group.

Photos of Orford Ness and The Orkneys respectively.

“Crooked Cross” by Sally Carson: Remarkably Prescient and still a Relevant Warning

It is Christmas 1932, and the Krugers are an ordinary German family, joyfully celebrating a traditional Christmas in a small Bavarian market town near Munich beneath the “first shoulders of the Alps”. With the wisdom of hindsight, there are already ominous signs. One son, Helmy, has never succeeded in finding a job while Erich, the other, only has part-time seasonal work. A photo of Hitler, about to be appointed Chancellor, lurks on the piano.

One can still express a mixture of irritation and amusement that the church clock had been repaired to chime the Horst-Wessel-Lied Nazi anthem. Yet the mood swiftly changes, as daughter Lexa learns that her fiancé Moritz, a popular and competent young doctor, has been sacked from a clinic, ostensibly for displaying too much interest in communism by giving first aid lectures at a Munich Workers’ Guild. The real reason is that he has a Jewish name. Lexa is clearly under pressure to break her engagement, particularly since her brothers have joined the Nazi Party as a means of gaining status and employment. This is particularly painful since she has always been close to Helmy.

Published as early as 1934, this novel is remarkable in its prescience,and in being not the work of some German historian, but of an observant young English woman who happened to visit Bavaria on holidays as the Nazis gained a foothold. She was able to fictionalise real situations and comments experienced firsthand to explain how basically decent people, impoverished and resentful after losing a war, could have been so ripe for manipulation by a demogogue and ready to blame minority groups for its ills. This theme seems to have become all too relevant again today!

Although Moritz is the one at greater risk, Lexa is cast as the central character. Having resolved to remain true to Moritz, she is forced to lead a double life, deceiving even her family in the attempt to appear to carry on “as normal”. So she still manages to enjoy the beauty of the countryside in the spring, the pleasure of skiing on the upper slopes of the Nagelspitze mountain, and taking her young cousins to the swimming pool. These lighter moments make the situation for the reader more poignant, yet also more bearable. Carson also brings in a young Englishman, Michael Reader, to fill her role of the outsider, already influenced by an more critical British press and trying to understand what is going on.

I was startled by the reference to the Dachau concentration camp, to which Carson was already able to observe in 1933 that. “People had a way of suddenly disappearing, no trial, no explanation…. prisoners were half-starved, bullied, inhumanly treated”. So, the excuse of “not knowing what was going on” does not hold water…..

Admiration for Carson’s insight and effort combined with the sensitive subject matter may make us reluctant to find fault with the style of writing, but bogged down in some of the middle chapters and already quite well-informed about what led to the holocaust, I was tempted to abandon the book. Too often wordy, clunky paragraphs in need of further editing prevent this from being an unequivocal page-turner. There is a tendency to tell the reader what to think rather than be left to form one’s own conclusions. The development of some minor characters, like Lexa’s friends Hermann and Thea, is too thin.

On the other hand, the banality of some scenes is justifiable, in reflecting real family and social life. The stilted manner of speech at times is typical of British films and plays up to the 1960s, and Carson was British. The Bavarian market town of “Kranach” with its valley and the nearby Alps are portayed with a vivid sense of place. It is worth persevering to an ending which proves strong, yet subtle and not entirely predictable.

Crooked Cross was produced as a successful stage play in 1937, and Carson went on to produce two more novels to form a trilogy which has recently been rediscovered for republication. Sadly, her work was soon overshadowed, not by her tragic early death in 1941, but by competition from a more established writer, Phyllis Bottome, who by coincidence had also lived in Munich and written the bestselling novel “Mortal Storm” on a similar theme in 1937. This would seem worth reading for comparison.

Overall, the fact that Crooked Cross could have been published in 1934 is very striking.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley – “Wanting to feel something strongly”.

Published in 1932, Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future in some six centuries’ time must have been influenced by the impact of World War One and the 1929 financial crash, as well as the principles of newly established Russian communism. He imagined a highly managed global system based on the motto “Community, Identity, Stability” which has evolved a society free of disease, pain and physical ageing, in which everyone is happy and gainfully employed – but at what cost?

Human eggs are fertilised and embryos processed in the “Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre” to suit the roles needed, from a minority of Alphas destined to be managers, to Epsilon Semi-morons content to perform the most boring tasks: “Everyone works for everyone else. Even Epsilons are useful”. Mass consumption ensures work for all: “Ending is better than mending”. Women no longer need to endure pregnancy and birth, and children are reared communally, with the concept of “father” or “mother” regarded with horror.

To encourage the pursuit of happiness, young children are encouraged to take part in “erotic play”and go on to have sex with as many people as often as they wish – to avoid the mental pain of sexual jealousy or unrequited love. A drug called “soma” is freely available – in fact handed out to Epsilons at the end of a shift – to provide an escape into happy dreams, and keep depression at bay. The most popular form of entertainment is the “feelies”, undemanding tales of heroism or romance accompanied by suitable sound effects and perfumed air (this reflected Huxley’s contempt for 1930s Hollywood films). More fortunate Alphas and Betas can be transported rapidly by rocket plane to any part of the globe which catches their fancy. This still includes a few reservations inhabited by savages considered not worth civilising. The odd Alpha who may begin to question the status quo is likely to be exiled to a remote island – Iceland or The Falklands.

By chance, young John Savage, an inhabitant of one of these reservations, is introduced to this “utopian” civilisation. He is accustomed to being a misfit, being the result of an Alpha/Beta liaison in which the woman bungles her contraception and through a further mishap ends up stranded in a reservation. Self-taught through reading a battered complete works of Shakespeare, John is excited by his mother’s tales of the marvellous way of life that she has lost, which he names a “brave new world”, quoting from “The Tempest”. His experiences and reactions when he actually finds himself there build up to the novel’s climax. In Chapters 16-17 he debates the values of the “brave new world” with the pragmatic cynical Resident Controller for Western Europe, Mustapha Mond, skilled in justifying the all-embracing system. This no longer has any need for a god to punish sin or bring salvation through faith. He has been replaced by Henry Ford, pioneer of the mass production of the model T Ford car: hence the novel’s setting in A.F. 632.

Although I found the opening pages rather dry and tedious, the extent to which Huxley thought out the details of his dystopian future is impressive, with a wry sense of farce which leavens somewhat its depressing nature. The technology of his brave new world now seems dated in many respects, and he later acknowledged a “ failure of foresight” in not mentioning nuclear power, both as a source of deadly weaponry and fuel.

Yet his vision still seems very prescient in a world: driven by the need for growth via consumerism; with young people brainwashed by social media and influencers and claiming poor mental health; with the implications of AI in the hands of a few ego-driven entrepreneurs whose wealth exceeds the GDP of some countries; with the major powers dominated by autocrats employing fake news and only supporting free speech if it is in line with their views….

In the western world, we still have individuality, some freedom of choice and expression, some cultural variety and creativity, but also the threat of war, climate change and either excessive migration or too few people to sustain society. So in the possible move to a more authoritarian, undemocratic future to control all this, Huxley’s novel is a salutary warning.

“Histoire du fils” by Marie-Hélène Lafon – Family Affairs

Most family sagas covering three generations require at least a trilogy of novels, or a thousand page door-stopper volume, but Marie-Hélène Lafon has managed to cover this in less than two hundred pages. She has achieved it by selecting a dozen dates spanning the century from 1908 to 2008, each with a chapter focusing on a specific family member and a significant incident, but not in chronological order.

The most dramatic events may not be revealed until the last few lines, like a shocking accident which befalls a small boy in the first chapter, or much later, a young man learning on his wedding day the identity of the father he has never met. Some chapters are largely a flow of thoughts, as when an independent-minded woman revels in her pregnancy in the full knowledge that her much younger lover is unready and unsuited to being a father. Years later, her sweet-tempered married sister who has willingly absorbed the child into her family, reflects on the past as she knits socks for her grandson. As is probably the case with most families, there is a lot of banal detail, laced with the poignancy of situations which cast a long shadow, or are unexpectedly revealed years later.

The author grew up on a farm in the department of Cantal and subsequently studied and worked in Paris. These locations feature in the novel, giving a sense of place to some extent, particularly for the Auvergne.

Marie-Hélène Lafon is a prize-winning author and this novel has attracted mostly positive reviews. Since French is my second language, I may not be qualified to appreciate it fully, but I only persisted with this novel because it was a book group choice. I found the total lack of paragraphs with a complete lack of dialogue very off-putting. This feeling was compounded by frequent extremely long sentences, often ten, even fourteen lines in length, packed with disparate, densely packed information. As a student and later teacher of classical Latin and Greek, her “streams of consciousness” are generally expressed in formal, grammatically correct French. One has to concentrate to glean the key points and work out who the characters are, how they are connected, whether they are important. One could have done with the family tree scribbled on an envelope which is mentioned in passing near the end! At times, one feels as if buttonholed by a stranger on a train journey who pours out a life history with a stream of indistinguishable characters.

With a plot which could be summarised in a few lines, it all hangs on how the tale is revealed. The approach is completely one of “telling” the reader what to think, albeit in a rather tortuous way, repetitious but with frustrating gaps, such as the fact that we know the central character André was active in the French resistance as a very young man, but know nothing more than this. Also, what amounts to the parallel lives of two families, linked by André, proves an underdeveloped aspect – perhaps this is intentional since a much-repeated point is that he knows little about his father’s family, but perhaps fears the consequences of making a real effort to find out more.

For me, the book would have worked better as a series of short stories involving the characters over time.