This is my review of The Foundling’s War by Michel Déon.

Enjoyment of Michel Déon’s French take on Tom Jones, a rambling account of the foundling boy Jean Arnaud’s adventures, which end mid-stream with his departure for the Front on the outbreak of WW2, in the company of conman Palfy, gave me sufficient enthusiasm to start on the sequel – but this proved a disappointment, with all the shortcomings of the first novel magnified in spades. Déon has been praised and honoured for his straightforward prose style as opposed to Sartre’s intellectual existentialism, but the novel is far too sprawling and long-drawn-out.

The thin plot is dominated by Jean’s infatuation with Claude, a beautiful young married woman with a small child and mysterious absent husband. Portrayed as pure and virtuous, she effectively strings Jean along, accepting his moral support, claiming to love him, even letting him into her bed, but for a long time denying him sexual intercourse. Perhaps fulfilling the male author’s fantasy, Jean “has his cake and eats it” by enjoying in parallel a “no strings attached” physical relationship with film actress Nelly Tristan, transformed in his company from a foul-mouthed, tippling social embarrassment into a sensitive declaimer of sentimental French poetry.

The weak storyline is padded out with lengthy recollections of events from the previous novel or with tedious scenes which often seem quite pointless. Déon’s claim that it is possible to understand this sequel without reading the first book is a little misleading: those taking him at his word are likely to become confused over details of Jean’s parentage and his first loves, like Chantal.

Whereas some interesting characters were developed in the first book, like Jean’s restless grandfather Antoine and the village curate, the sequel is dominated by too many exaggerated and generally unappealing caricatures: Palfy, with his network of louche friends and lack of compunction over fraternising with Nazis; the “ultra-respectable” brothel keeper Madame Michette with her bizarre mix of gullibility and guile, and fantasies of being a spy; Jesus, the Spanish painter with the irritating lisp who is prepared to sell his artistic soul for money and avoid commitment until his sudden falling for “enemy German” Laura, or La Garenne, the crooked dealer in art porn. The lesser characters are mainly bland ciphers. There is little sense of place, like the lure of the South of France for Antoine in his Bugatti (previous novel).

In the first book, Déon sometimes revealed himself as an intrusive narrator, over-anxious to reveal future events. In the sequel, this tendency has run out of control, as he even destroys the tension of the two most dramatic, all too rare, incidents by digressing into what lies in store. He keeps giving us potted histories, often in the form of letters, rather than taking the trouble to develop characters and weave events into the plot. This seems like lazy writing. He consistently “tells” rather than “shows”, bludgeoning us into what we should think, with often heavy-handed philosophising, rather than let us experience events directly and form our own judgements.

Just occasionally, there are flickers of insight, as when the narrator (better still if it could have been a character) observes how the isolation caused by war blunts the impact of a tragic event through the delay in receiving it. At one point, Jean actually reflects on the contrast between the simple, honest couple who are sheltering him, and the “artificial et brilliant” life he has been leading.

Handsome, charming, easy-going Jean has always tended to consort with raffish characters, but it is troubling to see him frittering away his time in the company of wheeler-dealer Nazis and collaborators on the make. Although a contrast to many WW2 novels, perhaps in some ways more realistic to see the Occupation of France from this viewpoint, I felt uneasy about the shallow, cynical gloss over the hardship of those who refused to or could not profit from the Occupation, the suffering and risk taken by members of the Resistance and the mistreatment of French Jews, as at the Vel d’Hiv.

Apart from providing a means of practising my French, the novel often bored me, and since it seems to me have to been still further weakened in translation, I have only given 2 stars for the English version.

⭐⭐ 2 Stars

 

This is my review of Vinegar Girl: The Taming of the Shrew Retold by Anne Tyler.

In this modern take on Shakepeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew”, having been thrown out of university for insulting her professor, spiky, forthright Kate Battista has spent the past decade in a dead-end job as preschool assistant, whilst trying to act as a mother-substitute for her flirty, far from dumb blonde, adolescent sister Bunny, and keeping house for her impractical academic and frankly control-freak father. When his selfishness leads him to overstep the mark, by trying to manipulate Kate into marrying his brilliant East European research assistant Pyotr, so that he can stay in the States after his visa has run out, Kate understandably rebels.

This is the basis of an often very funny, shrewdly observed novel, superficially lightweight with an ending sewn up a little too neatly for my taste, yet suggesting darker currents beneath the surface. Even minor characters are given some depth, with a mixture of good points and human failings. I must have enjoyed the book since I sat up to 2 a.m to finish it in one sitting, but had a few reservations, which I suppose at least have the merit of provoking discussion.

Is it, for instance, likely, that a strong-minded, independent young woman with the intellect to study science at university would have put up for so long with the constrained world of the Little People’s School, or have avoided being sacked long ago for her lack of “tact, restraint and diplomacy”? By the same token, would she have accepted for so long her father’s rules about cooking meat mash to last a week and not emptying dishwashers in the interest of his theories on health and efficiency? Is her outspokenness not so much a sign of independence, but rather the result of a lack of socialisation into “social norms”, owing to a depressed, prematurely deceased mother (driven to despair by her incompatible husband?) and an often absent father with inadequate parenting skills?

A minor point is that Kate’s four-year-old charges seem rather advanced for their age, but since Anne Tyler has clearly observed children very closely, perhaps she has struck the right note.

When Kate suggests at one point that men are at a disadvantage compared to women because “they think they should be in charge, in control; they don’t dare show their feelings” this reminds me of the “behind every successful man there’s a strong woman” unfeminist twisting of arguments with which I was brought up in the pre-equality past. Kate’s argument that a woman should let a man into her more “empathic country” to give them both space to be themselves, sounds somewhat patronising and smacks of self-justification. Does Anne Tyler mean us to accept this at face value, or to take it with a pinch of cynicism? Still, I believe that Shakespeare’s Kate was initially simply too stroppy to make a “good wife”, and never meant to be a feminist, as we understand the term, at all.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje.

Having left Sri Lanka to train in the West, forensic anthropologist Anil Tissera has been selected by an international human rights group to investigate possible atrocities committed by the Sri Lankan government in its attempt to control insurgents in the north and separatist guerrillas in the south. This involves working with Sarath Diyesena, the enigmatic archaeologist whom she is unsure how far to trust, because one of his relatives may be a government minister. For whatever reason, he discourages her from reading too much into the skeleton nicknamed “Sailor”, which she is convinced belongs to a recent victim, hidden amongst older human remains at a site not open to the public. Admittedly, there are some grounds for Sarath’s cynicism over short-term visitors from the West who, based in luxury hotel rooms, make casual assumptions about the country, distorted by “false empathy and blame”. “I’d believe your arguments more if you lived here,” he tells her. “You can’t just slip in, make a discovery and leave”.

The opening chapters led me to expect a political thriller in the mould of Graham Greene, but since the author is in fact more of a poet than a novelist, the narrative drive, which has a low priority for him, soon splinters into a disjointed, sometimes dreamlike sequence, swerving back and forth in time, between different viewpoints. These include: Sarath’s brother Gamini who has become obsessed with caring for war casualties, high on the drugs he needs to keep himself going; Ananda, sometime painter of eyes on the face of carved Buddhas; Palipani, translator of ancient scripts and rock graffiti who seems to have ruined his reputation by fabricating a text, when in practice perhaps he had found “hidden histories intentionally lost”, a parallel for the suppression of truth in the recent history of Sri Lanka.

I appreciate that a stream of consciousness may reveal more about the complex interweaving of culture and individual relations in the real-life struggles of a war-torn country than a straightforward documentary approach, but I found this book hard-going, mainly because of the written style. I assume that Ondaatje undertook impressive reseach of, for instance, forensics and medical practice, but this tends either to be presented in rather unnatural dialogue and passages of condensed information, like the notes for a novel rather than the work itself, or through grim scenes of death and treatment of hospital patients which tend to drift into inappropriate sentimentality.

Perhaps the weakest aspects of the story are the flashbacks to Anil’s unsatisfactory relationships with a married American writer called Cullis and a female former work colleague called Leaf. Their sketchiness and irrelevance to the drama of Sri Lanka may of course be intentional, suggesting the disjunction between Anil’s westernised persona and her native roots.

Although Ondaatje is clearly capable of writing realistic dialogue, too often it does not ring true. The wording of sentences often jars, as if written by someone with an imperfect grasp of English, but the author has spent most of his life in England and Canada. Many incidents verge on the implausible or ludicrous, such as the verging on necrophilic scenes involving the skeleton Sailor who is at various points laid out to communicate with the stars, danced with, or his former occupation deduced from the most tenuous evidence.

Despite its huge potential and originality, there is in general a self-indulgent, rambling, pretentious quality to the novel which grates on me. I accept that this view is a question of taste, and many readers may be entranced by, say, the flash forward images of Palipana’s niece honouring his death:

“She had already cut one of his phrases into the rock…which she had held onto like a raft in her years of fear. She had chiselled it where the horizon of water was, so that depending on tide and pull of the moon, the words in the rock would submerge or hang above their reflection or be revealed in both elements. Now she stood waist deep in the water cutting the Sinhala letters….He had once shown her such runes, finding them even in his blindness, and their marginalia of ducks, for eternity….In the tank at Kaludiya Pokuna the yard-long sentence still appears and disappears..” and so on in Kubla Khanish vein. Except that Coleridge did not mix up his romantic poetry with the exposure of political corruption and the rootless alienation of a young woman caught between different cultures, in an infusion that fails to coalesce.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars