28/4/2016 "SUNSET SONG" by LEWIS GRASSIC GIBBON

The proposer provided a detailed background to the author’s life, his relationships with his family and with the countryside in which he grew up. Born James Leslie Mitchell on 13th February 1901. He was raised in farming communities in the Howe of Mearns. The family scraped a living from the land with great difficulty and as a child he was expected to help with the endless chores. His father was strict and life was harsh. Mitchell was intelligent and thoughtful forming his own views of life, challenging traditional values and this set him apart from his family and the community of the Mearns.

He gained a place at Stonehaven’s Mackie Academy but at the age of 16 walked out following an argument with a teacher. He worked as a trainee journalist in Aberdeen between 1917-1919 and joined the ‘Scottish Farmer” in Glasgow. There followed a troubled period in his life. He was dismissed over expenses irregularities and attempted to take his own life. His family took him back in the hope that he would settle to the farming life but he could not and in order to escape the Mearns he joined the army. Although he hated life in the army, it did allow him to travel. In particular to the Middle East and Egypt, which inspired his first short stories and much of his fiction and non-fiction.

Mitchell returned to the Mearns in 1925 to marry a local girl whom he had kept in touch with throughout his years of travel. They moved to London where life was initially difficult, however, he eventually established himself as a talented writer.  From 1930 to 1934, eleven novels, two books of short stories, three anthropological books and an “ intelligent Man’s Guide to Albyn” with Hugh MacDiarmid entitled “Scottish Scene” were published under the names Mitchell and Gibbon. He died prematurely in 1935 of peritonitis brought on by a perforated ulcer.

The most important of his output is the trilogy of novels, “A Scots Quair“ published under the name Lewis Grassic Gibbon (taken from his mother’s maiden name). The “Quair” (meaning book) is a trilogy, which was published over three years as “Sunset Song” (1932), “Cloud Howe” (1933), and “Grey Granite” (1934). Sunset Song is considered to be Gibbon’s most loved work and, out of the three “Quair” novels, the most easily read as a single book.

Most members of the book group first encountered Sunset Song as a “must” read on the Scottish Higher English Syllabus. Many had moved on from the “forced reading” and revisited the novel to enjoy and more fully appreciate the qualities that have made it one of the most important Scottish novels of the twentieth century. In addition to reading the book many had seen the BBC’s 1971 serialization and some had seen Terence Davies’s film released in 2015.

The story, woven round the character of Chris Guthrie, draws on Gibbons own experiences of living and working in the Mearns. It was suggested that it is this that provides the fascinating and sometimes intimate insight into a way of life that was changing rapidly through the impact of mechanization on farming communities and the devastating effect of the war. The book ends with the end of the First World War and this heralds the end of the crofting way of life. Chris is intelligent, capable and spirited but also conflicted by what she describes as her Scottish self and her English self. Her love of the land and the rural way of life and her need to satisfy her interest in literature and more scholarly pursuits.

The novel details the challenges she faces through girlhood to being a young widow with a child. Her life is harsh and at times brutal living in a dysfunctional family, observing its disintegration and coping with the associated tragedy and loss. While Chris is the central character some of the charm of the book comes from the vivid depiction of other characters, their behavior, moods and physical attributes. It was pointed out that Kinraddie itself is a collection of farms- Blawearie, Peesie’s Knapp, Cuddiestoun, Netherhill, The Mains, Bridge End etc populated by characters that anyone from those parts can recognize. Long Rob of the Mill. Pooty the shoemaker, Chae Strachan, Mr Gibbon, Mistress Munro. The language, wit, and humour of these characterizations add hugely to the depiction of community life.

The accuracy of these descriptions and the frankness of their portrayal proved to be controversial and provoked his mother to comment that he had made the family “the speak of the Mearns”. The way that Gibbons used the custom of gossiping to depict life in Kinraddie provided both insight and amusement in equal measure and was greatly appreciated by all.

“ Aye, if it is wan’t in a rage it was fair in a stir of a scandal by postman time”

It was mentioned that at some point there is a telling passage about gossip replacing meaningful activity and it was suggested that gossip, not necessarily deliberately malicious, more a kind of recreational activity is a continual theme ripe with scandal and innuendo but funny too.

“Alec would say Damn it, you’ve hardly to look at a woman these days but she’s in the family way”

The deft admixture of gossip, spite, cruelty and blinkered prejudice that inhabited Kinraddie provided a rich source of material. The language is unique to Gibbons and initially presented a challenge to some of our group, however, all agreed that they quickly got hold of it and then began to appreciate the importance of rhythms designed to capture the local pattern of speech and the lyrical descriptive capacity which brought the landscape to life.

“ This is one of the best books I have read, describing the land, the moors, hills and stones and the essence of cultivation of the land.”

“ The vocabulary was a delight, full of colourful imagery and dialect that conjured up the world of the Mearns folk.”

All agreed with the views of one commentator that “The book’s personality is shaped by that language.” Lyrical passages are precise, evocative but also linked to the harsh reality of farm work.

“There were larks coming over that morning, Chris minded, whistling and trilling dark and unseen against the blazing of the sun, now one lark now another, till the sweetness of the trilling dizzied you and you stumbled with the heavy pails of corn-laden” the sentence ends, “and father swore at you over the red beard of him Damn’t to hell, are you fair a fool, you quean?”

Descriptive passages display a deep and sensitive appreciation of the landscape and the workings of the elements on it.

“the June moors whispered and rustled and shook their cloaks, yellow with broom and powdered faintly with purple- that was the heather but not the full passion of its colour yet…and maybe the wind would veer there in an hour or so and you’d feel the change in the life and strum of the thing, bringing a streaming coolness out of the sea”

There followed a discussion about the possibility that those book club members who were familiar with the landscape and were acquainted with aspects of the language would be more able to appreciate the quality of Gibbon’s writing. It was concluded that, while it might be easier for some to understand the nostalgic theme comprehension did not require knowledge of the precise meanings of the language used.

The simple structure of the novel was considered by the group and the majority thought that it assisted the reader and added an emphasis to Chris’s love /hate relationship with Kinraddie. The novel has a prelude “The Unfurrowed Field” which outlines the history of and introduces the characters inhabiting the Kinraddie estate, followed by four main sections, titled respectively Ploughing, Drilling, Seed-Time and Harvest. Each section begins with Chris at an important time in her life, seated at the standing stones reflecting on what has happened in the past, returning to the present time at the end of the section. There were some who felt that this approach resulted in slowing the tempo and detracted from their enjoyment of the novel.

It was concluded that this novel fully deserved to have been voted Scotland’s best novel in 2005. It was described as a work of substance, with Gibbons displaying considerable courage by controversially addressing taboo subjects in a very direct way.

All of those who had yet to read “Cloud Howe” and/or “Grey Granite” committed to doing so in order to more fully appreciate the scope of Gibbons ambition in writing “A Scots Quair.”

31/3/2016 "THE RADETZKY MARCH" by JOSEPH ROTH

The meeting was held in the residents’ lounge of Burt’s Hotel in Melrose where seven of the members were celebrating the 10th anniversary of the MBG. After an excellent lunch in a wine shop and a walk along the Tweed (for the majority, two arrived later by bike from Edinburgh) members settled down at 5.00 pm to a two hour pre-dinner session on the book. The proximity of the bar with good local Border brewery beers on tap assisted the discussion of a book with a strong alcohol presence.

The proposer opened by saying that the MBG had already considered German novels from the Twentieth Century by Franz Kafka and Gunter Grass and he wished to introduce a novel by another writer in German, Joseph Roth. The proposer was a keen student of the pre 1914 Habsburg Empire and had discovered Roth’s work as a result. Although less well known than Kafka, Grass and Thomas Mann, he considered Roth to be in that class of writer, a judgement shared by other more eminent critics.

For example, the Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century, is a list of books compiled in 1999 in which 99 prominent German authors literary critics, and scholars of German ranked the most significant German-language novels of the twentieth century.  The group brought together 33 experts from each of the three categories. Each was allowed to name three books as having been the most important of the century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century). Ranked in order, these were

    Robert Musil: The Man Without Qualities

    Franz Kafka: The Trial

    Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain

    Alfred Döblin: Berlin Alexanderplatz

    Günter Grass: The Tin Drum

    Uwe Johnson:  From the Life of Gesine Cresspahl

    Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks

    Joseph Roth: Radetzky March

    Franz Kafka: The Castle

    Thomas Mann: Doctor Faustus

The proposer further summarised some of the principal milestones in Roth’s life (1894-1939) which can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Roth.   He emphasised the influence of Jewish culture, WW1 and the fall of the Hapsburg Empire, and the rise of the third Reich on his life and writing.  He explained that Roth also considered his relationship to Catholicism very important and may even have converted. Michael Hofmann states that Roth “was said to have had two funerals, one Jewish, one Catholic.” In his last years, he moved from hotel to hotel, drinking heavily. His novella The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1939) chronicles the attempts made by an alcoholic vagrant to regain his dignity and honour a debt.

As is often the case, members discussed first what translation they had read. Two had been read: one by Michael Hoffman, Roth’s main English translator, and the other by Joachim Neugroschel who had translated the Penguin Classic version. Readers of each version were enthusiastic about their translations and a comparison of some passages revealed reassuring similarities. The proposer, however, did indicate a preference for Hoffman’s use of ‘ Habsburg’ with ’b’ rather than Neugroschel’s ‘p’. It was also noted that Hoffman had translated the name for the local schnapps as 90 rather than 180 proof which Neugroschel had used.

Comparisons were made between the translations of various passages that had impressed readers’ e.g.  the return of Carl Joseph’s love letters in Chapter 4;  the physical description of Franz Joseph at the beginning of Chapter 15; the fourth sentence of the book ‘Fate had elected him for a special deed. But he then made sure that later times lost all memory of him.’

The general response to the book was enthusiastic. It was written, translated and flowed very well. There were rich, poetic scenes both of the natural and human world. It was an elegiac, poignant novel. Comparisons with Chekhov, Hardy and Joyce were made.

There were some superb set scenes suffused by Roth’s sense of the ridiculous: Solferino; the meeting between Carl Joseph and Sergeant Slama, the husband of his mistress; the sex scenes; the gambling, duels and drinking of army life; Carl Joseph’s attempt to live as a peasant; the party during which the assassination of Franz Ferdinand is revealed; the non-heroic death of Carl Joseph.

It was a male dominated novel with women in subordinate roles and there was dispute about how well the women were portrayed.

The use of the pictures of the hero of Solferino and the Emperor Franz Joseph was well done. The similarities between the two were well brought out. The proposer said he had recently been in a restaurant in Cracow which had a picture of Franz Joseph on the wall though Cracow had left the Habsburg Empire a century ago.

There was some discussion of Roth’s treatment of Jews. Roth was a Jew at a time of growing persecution but in his writing he portrayed Jews as whatever he perceived, warts and all. Some saw the book as portraying an archaic world where duels involving honour over gambling debts or love affairs occurred. The role of the army as a unifying force within the Empire was noted. One of those present said his brother-in-law had been a member of a duelling club at a German university and had the scars to prove it! The proposer volunteered that at university he had been run through some four inches during a fencing bout.

The book was a wonderful evocation of its world. Roth was not recreating a historical account of the past, as Tolstoy did in War and Peace, but writing as one who lived it. He was obsessed with the events of his own time.

The book had a sense of the helplessness of the individual participants and the empire struggling against an inexorable fate. All the Trottas were incapable of action and were unable to form proper relationships.   Random chance had brought them to prominence and they had not adapted well to their new noble status. They were not alone in this; all the characters in the novel were locked into their roles, apart from perhaps the Polish Count Chojnicki.

The juxtaposition of borders and opposites, e.g. monarchy/revolution was perfectly expressed in the frontier between the two empires of Franz Joseph and the Tsar in Ukraine. Roth was a pessimist. He said his characters were not ‘intended to exemplify a political point of view- at most they demonstrate the old and eternal truth that the individual is always defeated in the end.’ Roth saw the old pre 1914 world as obsolete but the new post 1914 world was worse in many ways. He came to see the values in the old world as superior to the new.

The meeting concluded in general agreement that the book had been an excellent choice for the tenth anniversary and in a mellow mood adjourned to dinner and the bar.

25/2/16 DO NO HARM by HENRY MARSH

There are very few books in which professionals speak frankly and honestly about their profession. It’s a bit like magicians. They never give away the secrets of their magic, they just get on and do it. But Henry Marsh has revealed the secrets of the Magic Circle of Neurosurgeons.

Who is this man? He’s pictured inside the back cover: a genial chap, a veteran now, wearing a pale blue surgeon’s gown. He has enormous hands, or is it the camera angle that makes it seem so?

He graduated from Oxford University with a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, but later turned to medicine. Without a degree in science, the only medical school that would have him was the Royal Free Medical School, London. He is now a senior consultant neurosurgeon at St George’s Hospital in south London, specializing in brain surgery: a special style of brain surgery where the patient is merely under a local anesthetic.  That way, the surgeon or assistant can to ask his patient questions about how they feel, or find out if they can recite the alphabet. This crucial feedback is used to guide the surgeon’s knife as it seeks the right place within that most delicate of organs, the brain. Perhaps what I’ve just written is a simplification of the actual process but I’m trying to write in a simple and straightforward manner, just as the author does.

He demonstrated something of his method on TV back in 2004, for the BBC documentary Your Life in Their Hands. If I were operating on a human brain (God forbid) I think the presence of BBC camera crew would be a distraction. Apparently not in his case, as the patient survived and the programme won a prestigious gold medal.

Most chapters of the book describe a single operation to cure a particular condition, each being given its medical name and a plain English definition. There are many such conditions, and to read the book is to receive a brief medical education in this specialized area. One learns about the symptoms. The reader will doubtless wonder whether that headache he gets is caused by a tumor, and why could I not walk in a straight line after that night out? Actually, our book group didn’t discuss our personal symptoms – and in any case our medical member wasn’t present on this occasion to tell us ‘don’t worry’.

You may have often wondered how surgeons get started. Some poor soul has to be their first victim…er…I mean patient. Well, the book tells us how it’s done. Yes, it is just a little bit dodgy, and if I need surgery I’m going to plump for an older surgeon. There is also the issue of success rate. A bold and skilful surgeon will take on some of the more challenging cases, and so may have a lower success rate than a beginner, so the hapless patient should not expect to find useful data from which to judge the likely outcome of the operation.

The author recalls operations and family circumstances in great detail. Did he keep a diary like politicians do? Probably he just has a great memory, as most physicians do. Without it, they would fail all those MD and Royal College examinations. It is noteworthy that the surgeon must deal with the family as well as the patient: being a surgeon is not the same as being a technician, one has to talk to, and deal with, troubled people in their most vulnerable moments. Many of these situations are portrayed with a good deal of compassion. Sometimes it all goes wrong and the surgeon (or rather the hospital) must face a legal challenge. It’s clear that things do indeed go wrong. The author describes the shocked response of a lecture he gave on that very subject, called When Things Go Wrong.

His career has been unconventional. For example, he tells us of his time in the Ukraine. He visited the country often, helping the poorly funded Ukrainian colleagues to improve their neurosurgery. Conditions in the hospital were grim, and it was necessary to take second-hand equipment from the UK to supplement what little was available locally. He seems to have been able to move around rather freely in the Ukraine (in the 1990s), carrying out difficult operations under the most testing conditions.

He has much to say about the condition of British hospitals. A particular hobby-horse is the design of hospital buildings – he considers them often not fit-for-purpose.  Perhaps the buildings are improving, but not so the rest of the working environment. He repeatedly makes the point that the administration has become so heavy handed that his job is made harder than it was in the early part of his career. Nowadays, he sometimes has trouble finding his patient, as the sick are forever being moved from one ward to another to release beds.  Moreover, the number of operations that can be fitted into a day has decreased because of regulations on working hours, and unnecessary rules that force long breaks between operations whilst the theatre is cleaned and prepared. One of the most hilarious sections of the book is when he describes his attendance at a compulsory course given for all hospital staff on the subject of Customer Care.  It’s not Patient Care anymore. He secretly looks forward to a good sleep at the back of the room, but things do not turn out as expected. He concludes ‘how strange it is that I should be listening to a young man with a background in catering telling me that I should develop empathy..’.

Yes, surgeons are usually arrogant – they need to be self-assured – and aren’t they often charismatic? It goes with the territory. But this one is capable of laughing at his own misfortune when he himself becomes a patient and falls down the stairs, breaking a leg. Yes, it’s good to be able to chuckle at the mighty downfallen.

We were unanimous: we all loved the book. It was easy to read and fascinating. The drama of the work was totally absorbing, at least up to the last few chapters which might have been omitted – they seemed like more of the same.  We were full of admiration for our surgeon. It should be recommended reading for all young doctors. I hope he trained sufficient young doctors to carry on the good work.

28/1/2016 “THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES” by TOM WOLFE

The proposer first read “The Bonfire of the Vanities” in 1990, shortly after its publication in 1987. He loved its energy and humour. He identified with and felt sorry for Sherman McCoy, the bond salesman whose enchanted life as a master of the universe falls apart. The proposer knew three solicitors who had found themselves caught up in scandals, two of whom had committed suicide. He now wanted to revisit the book to see if it retained its contemporary relevance and comic zest.

Tom Wolfe was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1931. He majored in English at Washington and Lee, and then did post-graduate studies at Yale. He became a successful journalist, and collaborated with Truman Capote and Hunter Davies in the “New Journalism” movement in which various literary techniques were mixed with traditional even-handed reporting. He also wrote fact-based books including “The Right Stuff”, which was made into a film in the 1970s. By this time he lived in New York where he was noted for his white suits, cane and hat – all to suggest a Southern Planter.

His lengthy and polemical introduction to the novel sets out his aesthetic. He felt the American novel had lost its way around 1960, when the novel as “sublime literary game” displaced realistic depiction of society in the style of Dickens, Zola, Faulkner or Steinbeck. The traditional novel was seen as dead, and in its place came Absurdist novels, Magic Realist novels, novels of Radical Disjunction, Neo-Fabulist novels, Minimalist novels….Wolfe, however, was clear that “the future of the fictional novel would be in a highly detailed realism based on reporting, a realism more thorough than any currently being attempted, a realism that would portray the individual in intimate and inextricable relation to the society around him”.

This novel had a long gestation period. Wolfe wanted to write a novel that captured New York and its wide spectrum of society in the 1980s in the way that Dickens and Thackeray had captured nineteenth century London, and Zola had captured Paris. Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” was the novel that particularly appealed to him as a model, and is echoed in his title. And, finding he was procrastinating, he agreed with his editor to publish the novel in serial form in the best Dickensian tradition, in the hope that the magazine deadlines would impel him to apply himself . The novel was duly serialised in “Rolling Stone”, and the technique proved very successful in getting Wolfe to apply his shoulder to the wheel.

The published novel, three years later, had significant changes from the serial version, with McCoy being changed from writer to banker, and Judy’s role diminished while that of Fallows increased. Sales were very high, and, as icing on the cake, race riots and a Wall Street crash shortly followed publication. Wolfe was seen as strangely prescient.

So what did we make of it? The first issue raised was length. Your scribe’s copy runs to 741 pages, and they are big pages with small print, so it weighs in at around Dickensian length. In the Book Group’s history of nearly ten years, “Berlioz Vol.1” was the only other book of comparable length we could remember. And for some it was slow to get going and too long overall, but all of us found ourselves soon caught up in the story, which was quite a page-turner. Perhaps some of Wolfe’s detail was unnecessary or uninteresting, but the same is true of Dickens. The length of the book may be partly caused by its episodic magazine base, as with Dickens, but detail is integral to Wolfe’s realist aesthetic.

So…. (your reporter paused briefly at this point to wince at the “South Australia Shiraz” he had picked up in his haste)…..

What sort of novel is it?...( and what kind of wine do you expect for £3.99?)…

At one level it is indeed social realism, with the vast gulf between the rich of Manhattan and the poor of the Bronx starkly delineated, as is the fear of the white rich towards the black poor. And there is almost no connection between the two worlds. Wolfe has succeeded in capturing a city. Social change is recorded, as the historic roles – Irish the police, Jews the manufacturers, Italians the retailers, and the Wasps in the professions  - are breaking down. The dispossessed are getting more and more bitter, and there will be more and more explosions.

Lord Buffing, who is dying, gives a speech at a dinner which evokes Poe’s “Masque of Red Death”, with the rich trying, and failing, to escape the plague by staying in a well provisioned palace cut off from the poor. The idea that the New York rich cannot escape disaster is also echoed in the scene where Ruskin drops dead despite the gross lavishness of the restaurant where he is dining.

But, in our view, above all the novel was a satire, and a black satire at that. Wolfe does not take aim only at the glittering world of excessively rich bond brokers – the masters of the universe - and their partners. He also sets his sights on corrupt mayors and on DAs who pursue re-election rather than justice. He exposes the synthetic outrage of black community leaders who chase wealth and power, not social progress. He exposes newspapers and journalists whose interest is sales whatever the truth and whatever the cost to individuals. A world, in short, of greed, lechery, vanity, dishonesty and corruption – everyone, rich or poor, white or black, has an angle. Everyone is on the make. Everything has a price.

There are only one or two characters who have any moral scruples, and they are minor characters. The most striking is Judge Kovitsky, who, obscene and venomous as he is, actually believes in justice.

This vision is in some ways bleaker than that of Dickens, whose hypocrites, graspers and social climbers are always counterbalanced by people of integrity and human kindness. It means that many of Wolfe’s characters are caricatures, which is the nature of the satirical genre. However, some characters do develop into more rounded human beings, in particular bond salesman Sherman (“Shuman”) McCoy and Assistant District Attorney Larry Kramer, and to a lesser extent the drunken journalist Peter Fallow. Even then, Sherman and Kramer are very similar people, one of whom made a career choice that led to wealth and the other a career choice that led to relative poverty. This parallel is highlighted when Kramer uses the same flat for a sexual conquest that Sherman has used for assignations with his mistress.

Some felt that this absence of sympathetic or virtuous characters led to the inconclusive ending – neither side could be allowed to win. On the other hand, the Jarndyce v Jarndyce style gridlock at the end could be seen as further satire aimed at the American legal system.

Ah…. the second bottle turns out to be St-Georges-St-Emilion. Better!.....

The satire is not confined to the big issues of dishonesty and corruption. Wolfe is also very perceptive – and witty - about human psychology. He lays bare the day to day foibles of social one-up-manship, of drinking, of attempts to impress the opposite sex, and of vanity of all sorts. Indeed it is hard to imagine, after Wolfe’s merciless analysis of the social rituals of hostesses at New York parties, that he was ever invited to such a party again.

I’ll keep it in the brown paper bag in case anyone else wants some….

What to make of Sherman? Hero or anti-hero? Is there a clue that he is named – by a southern writer  – after the most brutal of Unionist generals? Some felt that the story is that of the redemption of Sherman through suffering. He has lost all his attachment to wealth, all of his “vanities”. On the other hand, as soon as the court case starts going his way, Wolfe shows how quickly he reverts to type, to boasting about his triumphs to any attractive woman in range. And amusingly Wall Street bond traders are said to have started imitating Sherman’s behaviour as a result of the book.

But it was difficult not to feel sympathy for “Shuman” as his world inexorably disintegrates, to be made in Kafka fashion to realise just how quickly and easily you can fall right through the floor of your comfortable existence.

You can speculate about the real people satirized in the novel – such as black community leader Al Sharpton as the model for Beaton, or Ed Koch as the model for the Mayor, or Imelda Marcos as the model for Madame Tacaya. But the amusement gleaned from trying to make these identifications disappears quickly over time (try ploughing through the footnotes to Dryden’s “Absalom and Acitophel” in search of amusement). What will make this novel appreciated for a very long time is the unerring accuracy with which human weakness is depicted, and the wit with which it is done.

Indeed the most attractive thing about the book is its humour  (which reminded some of John Kennedy Toole). The death of the husband of Foxy in a pretentious restaurant with obsequious staff (which is surely one of the funniest scenes in literature)…….. Shuman’s contortions as he is drawn into a clinch with his mistress while trying not to reveal he is concealing a tape recorder….. everybody doing the pimp roll….The “girl with the brown lips”, object of Kramer’s endless attempts to impress in order to bed her, musing that it was impossible to get laid in New York without first listening to hour after hour of male boasting…..

But, dear reader, I shall not give you 741 pages of examples. Read the book!

26/11/2015: TRAIN DREAMS by DENIS JOHNSON, plus poems by SPENDER and THOMAS

 

TRAIN DREAMS by DENIS JOHNSON

Plus two poems:

“What I expected” by STEPHEN SPENDER, and

“Do not go gently into that good night” by DYLAN THOMAS.

The Book Group meeting took place despite the unavoidable absence of the proposer of Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams”, coupled with poems by Stephen Spender and Dylan Thomas.

The absent proposer helpfully provided the meeting with his personal views on the book and the poems and the connection between them. These were read out at the start of the meeting and provided the stimulus for the ensuing discussion. His comments and observations are unashamedly plagiarized in this blog.

Poet, playwright and author, Denis Johnson was born in Munich, West Germany in 1949, and raised in Tokyo, Manila and Washington, D.C., the son of a US State Department employee. A chronicler of substance abusers living at the margins of society, Johnson himself had a substance abuse problem from an early age graduating from alcohol to hard drugs, including heroin before eventually overcoming his addiction.

He gained a Masters degree from the University of Iowa in 1974 and has received numerous literary awards including: Whiting Awards, 1986, Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts 1986, Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 1993 and the National Book Award for Fiction in 2007 for “Tree of Smoke”.

 He was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2012 for “Train Dreams” (while it was first published in 2002 as a long short story in “The Paris Review” it became eligible for a Pulitzer for the first time when it was published, as a novel, in 2012).

Controversially the Pulitzer Prize Board announced that it would award no Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2012.

Johnson is currently the first visiting professor in Boise State University, Idaho, where he is contributing to the Master of Fine Arts in creative writing programme.

“Train Dreams” is a third person historical novella describing the life of Robert Grainier, an orphan shipped by train in 1893 into the woods of the Idaho panhandle. He grows up, becomes an itinerant labourer working on logging gangs, and falls in love. He loses his wife and daughter in a particularly devastating wildfire. The story is about an ordinary man in extraordinary times, struggling to come to terms with the loss of his family, and bearing witness to the radical changes that transform his country in his lifetime.

The proposer was given the book as a birthday present and was so captivated by it that he has read it 3 times in the last 12 months. He chose it as a book group read because it is short! He hoped that this would give the group more time to think about the contents at a deeper level than has been possible with longer reads. When reading the book he found himself questioning the “purposeful” activities we all indulge in, separating what matters from what does not.

He was drawn back by the excellent lyrical quality of the writing, and the thread of understated humour. He commented that Johnson makes an extraordinary novella from an ordinary life and he suggests that this may arise from his background as a poet, perhaps even from the years of drugs and alcohol abuse.

He considered that the novel “has a real sense of place: I imagine easily I am there and I believe in the characters”. He referred to the following passage as an example of the lyrical prose to be found throughout the novella and which he thought so descriptively effective:

“Animals had returned to what was left of the forest. As Grainier drove along in the wagon behind a wide, slow sand colored mare, clusters of orange butterflies exploded off the blackish purple piles of bear sign and winked and fluttered magically like leaves without trees. More bears than people travelled the muddy road, leaving tracks straight up and down the middle of it; later in the summer they would forage in the low patches of huckleberry he already saw coming back on the blackened hillsides”

He also appreciated the humour which surfaces unexpectedly, and provides such a contrast with Grainier’s bleak and often humdrum existence, e.g. through the matter of fact exchanges of Grainier with a man shot by his dog.

“Sir, are you dead?

Who? Me? Nope. Alive.

Well I was wondering – do you feel as if you might go on?

You mean as if I might die?

Yessir.

Nope. Ain’t going to die tonight.

That’s good.

Even better for me, I’d say.”

He suggested that the contrasts drawn between the pace of the great global changes of the twentieth century and the local events that impinge on Grainier’s dull existence add pathos to his story. They reveal the passing of an age and expose the apparent mundaneness of his existence.

He described Grainger as a man who has no apparent expectation but is a man to whom things happen, and as a man who does not think deeply and creatively. He was a man of whom it might have been said, but nothing was ever said of him, that he had little to interest him.

Johnson’s summary of Grainier’s life is:

“ Grainier himself lived more than 80 years…. he’d never seen the ocean… he’d had one lover… owned one acre of property…. he’d never spoken into a telephone… he’d ridden on trains regularly, many times in automobiles and once on an aircraft… he had no idea who his parents might have been, and he left no heirs behind him… When he passed away… he lay dead in his cabin through the rest of the fall, and through the winter, and was never missed”

The use of superstition and the extraordinary add depth to the characterization of Grainier.  Examples are when he feels he has been cursed by a Chinese man who escapes from imminent lynching, when describing his search for his family, his decision to remain and resettle the land after the fire, his sole encounter with his wife’s spirit, and his later encounter with the wolf girl who he believes to be his daughter, Kate.

“Kate is it you. But it was… Kate she was, but Kate no longer”

The book group admired both the book and the proposer’s views of it. All were captivated by Johnson’s writing and hugely impressed by his ability to pack so much into so few pages. They felt that his startling descriptive power had given meaning to Grainier’s very ordinary life.

Conversation initially focused on scene setting. We noted the importance of the development of the railways in America in the 1920’s and the use of labour drawn from, both other parts of the USA and abroad, including large numbers of Chinese.

The work was hard and dangerous. Life was cheap and could be cruel. It was a hand to mouth existence. Death was an ever present, an accepted fact of life observed by Johnson in a shockingly matter of fact way. There was an acceptance of hardship and a “keep the head down” attitude seemed to be the norm.

The group marvelled at the quickening pace of change over Grainier’s life, cleverly revealed by Johnson’s references to events and to Grainier’s wonder at some of his experiences.

The discussion then strayed into a debate about change and whether or not the pace of change today is any less than over the period covered by ‘Train Dreams”.

There were differing views on this. Some thought that change accelerates over time while others argued that the pace of change is less important than its impact on individuals and civilization as a whole. It was pointed out that Grainier had lived through a period of massive change, but that his changing world had had very little practical impact on him or his way of life.

The Group was also greatly impressed by the sense of isolation achieved by Johnson and discussed the various ways that he had achieved this.

In addition to the sense of place mentioned by the proposer, we thought that Johnson’s depiction of Grainier as a self-sufficient individual was a particularly important factor in building a picture of overall isolation. Grainier, with the possible exceptions of his wife, daughter and dogs, had no other meaningful relationships in his life The fact that these characters and the relationships between them, are only superficially described, has the effect of adding to that sense of isolation and loneliness.

This depiction of Grainier as a very private and lonely person is successfully cultivated through a number of references, eg: the conversation between a widow and Grainier:

“God needs the hermit in the woods as much as he needs the man in the pulpit. Did you ever think about that?” Grainier replies:

“I don’t believe I am a hermit” but he reflects “I a hermit? Is this what a hermit is?”.

His loneliness is also reinforced by the description of his struggles to deal with “pulchritude” and with his associated self-loathing.

“His desires must be completely out of nature; he was the kind of man who might couple with a beast, --- as he’d long ago heard it phrased---jigger himself a cow.”

The group particularly admired the evocative language used by Johnson, and the remarkable power and economy of words.

His ability to convey the essence of minor characters in a few short sentences was admired by many of the group. For example, the Chinese worker, who was about to be thrown off a railroad bridge by Grainier and a group of his fellow workers, is described as “twisting like a weasel in a sack” and “weeping his gibberish”.

Finally the group considered the point made by the proposer about the purposeful activities in which we indulge, and we debated whether we engage in activities that are of any greater significance than those that occupied Grainier’s life.

The ensuing discussion was destined to reach no meaningful conclusion, but nevertheless provided interesting insights into our differing views of our respective contributions to the world or to the society in which we live.

One reviewer of “Train Dreams”, said;

“Johnson remains defined as a cult figure writer because of his early drug drenched fiction and hard boiled prose, but in Train Dreams he stakes his claim as one of the key voices in contemporary American fiction.”

He goes on to describe the work  “A small masterpiece.”

While very few members of the Book Group had read much of Johnson’s work, or indeed sufficient contemporary American fiction, to be able to endorse the reviewer’s views about Johnson’s status, the Group was able to agree to describe Train Dreams as “A small masterpiece”.

In addition to “Train Dreams” the Group considered two poems with related themes: “What I Expected”, by Stephen Spender and “Do not go gently into that good night” by Dylan Thomas.

The proposer described “ What I expected” as a poem about disillusionment with life and questions whether we should, like Grainier, simply accept “the futility and banality of it all”.

Spender suggests that one starts life with grand intentions and a hope to become strong with continual effort, but ultimately he “watches cripples pass with limbs shaped like questions”. In contrast Grainier has no ambition, no expectation and simply accepts whatever life throws at him. “Arthritis and rheumatism made simple daily chores nearly impossible”.

Spender’s disillusionment arises from expectation, “expecting always”. Grainier on the other hand is not disappointed; he has no ambition, is contented and lives in the moment.

Dylan Thomas’s famous “villanelle” in which he urges his dying father to cling to life; to resist the inevitable, despite the loss of sight, general health and strength. To fight to the end. To “burn and rave” against dying.

Granier passed away quietly, in his sleep, without fanfare:

“He lay dead in his cabin through the rest of the fall and through the winter and was never missed.”

Perhaps he did “burn and rave”, but it seems highly unlikely and there was no one there to witness it. Grainier was at peace with the world and with himself, and no doubt died content and unconcerned.

It was suggested by some of the Group that Grainier’s way was best, but others thought that the world would be a much sorrier place if individuals simply accepted their fate without question or challenge. Indeed some went as far as to propose that the human condition required individuals to adopt a more aggressive approach to life.

In his concluding paragraph the proposer cynically stated:

“These three works all put the human condition into perspective, and should cause you to pause as you go about your all-consuming and reality-denying business”.

All considered “Train Dreams”, together with the two poems, to be an inspired choice and thoroughly “purposeful” reads.

They did indeed cause us to reflect on the meaning of life, and to question the worth of what we do.

An enjoyable read, with potentially depressing consequences.

.

29/10/2015 “ASYLUM” by Patrick McGrath.

The Book Group met in the Morningside home of one of its members.

Apart from being best known as a desirable residential suburb of Edinburgh, Morningside is also home to the original Edinburgh Lunatic Asylum, established in the grounds of the estate known as “Craighouse”. Originally developed as a private clinic it opened its doors to pauper patients in 1842. It was renamed the “Royal Edinburgh Hospital” in 1922.

As treatment for mental illness developed, institutional care became less prevalent. Patients were increasingly accommodated in villas purchased in the Morningside area as annexes by the Health Board for the purpose of integrating these patients back into the community.

In addition more modern facilities were developed at a different location in the heart of Morningside leading, in 1990, to the closure of “Craighouse”. The new hospital is currently being further developed to provide all acute psychiatric and mental health services for the Lothians.

It follows that the Morningside area’s long association with mental health treatment made it a particularly fitting location to consider and discuss McGrath’s “Asylum”. Indeed it has become increasingly difficult to differentiate between the patient and the resident in the village that is Morningside.

McGrath was brought up on the Broadmoor estate: the location of a high security psychiatric hospital in England, where his father was the medical superintendent. His early experiences of listening to discussions and debates over options for the treatment of inmates left an indelible impression on him and provided him with a rich source of material for future reference.

Born in 1950 he was the oldest of four children, His parents were devout Roman Catholics and he was educated at Jesuit Boarding schools, firstly in Windsor and then Stoneyhurst.

He did not enjoy school life. He considered it repressive and at the age of 16 he ran away to London. He was not scholastic doing “dismally’ at ‘A’ levels. He failed history, and gained an “F” for French and an “A” for English.

Leaving school he attended Birmingham College of Commerce, which he described as “the last hope for dead enders like me”. On graduating his father found him a job as an Orderly at Ontario State Mental Hospital. That was in 1971 and he has lived mainly in the USA since then, only returning to the UK periodically to escape the worst of the New York summer.

He married the actor Maria Aitken in 1991 and he credits her with establishing New York as their home.

McGrath is described as a “gothic novelist”. While he dislikes this label he reluctantly admits to having a “gothic” imagination. It is about the past and focuses on “interiors”-the interior of the soul. He has written eight novels, three of which - “The Grotesque”,“Asylum” and “Spider”- have been made into films.

“Asylum” was first published in 1996 and the film, directed by David Mackenzie, was released in 2005 to very mixed reviews. The story is of a doomed love triangle where Stella, the wife of the Asylum’s Superintendent, falls in love with one of the inmates and runs away with him. It is narrated by a psychiatrist as an example of a catastrophic love affair characterized by sexual obsession.

In the absence of a blogger each of the book group members present agreed to provide a short note of their views on the book and these are faithfully reproduced below.

“One of our number indicated that at one time he had been a Home Office official with close working links with Broadmoor Special Hospital. He had known the author’s father, also Patrick McGrath, the then Superintendent, and recognized the author’s Asylum as an accurate description of Broadmoor. It was not just the topography of Broadmoor that the author had picked up as a boy and young man living there. The novel provided a very good analysis of staff relationships and tensions as well as convincing accounts of certain types of mental disorder. Edgar Stark was a good example of acute personality disorder; his attitude to his lover of the moment was convincing. Similarly his account of Stella’s behaviour and descent into mental illness was equally convincing. Again the author had drawn upon his knowledge; relations between staff and patients are not unknown and the suicide of filicidal women is very common.

“The novel was excellent. It was a page turner that was gripping and shocking.”

“I enjoyed reading the book very much. The setting initially within a psychiatric hospital in the 1960’s was intriguing, having worked for 6 months within such an establishment in the 1970’s.

“Once the scene was set, the plot developed quickly and held my attention, leading me on eagerly to find out the next stage. The style narrated by a psychiatric friend of the main character, Stella, who was also a colleague of her husband, was cleverly written and one wondered how he knew so much. It later became pretty clear.

“The main characters apart from Stella’s son were well developed. I felt that I didn’t know too much about this lad Charlie. I also wondered about Edgar’s friend Nick, who was rather a mysterious character and we never got to know his surname.

“I enjoyed reading about the management of psychopaths, sexual obsession and later Stella’s depression and disassociation disorder. Stella’s sexual infatuation was realistic and quite titillating. The story line towards the end was a little predictable and the narrator gave frequent clues about the outcome.

“It was a good read despite the somewhat morbid content.”

“ Asylum was an interesting insight into a strange world!

“On a first read it was fairly absorbing and seemed to be based on a sound knowledge of the “system” although the characters were rather stereotyped. I found the downward spiral of Stella’s life fairly shocking – her end being all too predictable.”

“The second read was disappointing as the book had lost its drive once you knew the story.”

“There are very few novels dealing with life in a mental institution. The other one we could think of was Ken Kesey’s “One Flew a Cuckoos Nest”, later adapted for the cinema by Milos Forman. Of course there are others: for example “The Bell Jar”, a semi autobiographical account by the American writer and poet Sylvia Plath, wife of Ted Hughes.

“Anyone who has visited a mental hospital may understand why these places and the people who live inside them have provided little inspiration for the writer. Psychosis is associated with irrational violence and chaotic behaviour, patterns of communication and human relationships which defy analysis. Uncontrolled and fanciful impulses or numbing depressions are hard to write about; yet most of us, at some time in our lives, will have them and quite a few of us will require treatment. Perhaps we would rather not be reminded of that fact.

“However, mental illness is one of the last taboo subjects, seldom spoken about, best left to the professionals, best kept behind closed doors. The novel opens the doors and forces us to think about two kinds of mental illness, and how they are dealt with (or not). It also demonstrates the fine lines between sanity and madness, between love and hate and between tenderness and violence. We wonder how a mother can let her child drown (The Medea Complex). We are reminded of the limitations of both psychiatry and psychiatrists – much depends on human judgement and the database of evidence, on which judgement is based, is not large.

“Despite the challenging subject matter the author manages to weave humor into his writing and this added to my enjoyment of the book.”

“While I found the book to be an enjoyable read I was rarely surprised by the twists and turns of the plot or, indeed by the actions of the main characters. It all seemed entirely predictable. This may be a product of McGrath’s device of using an “unreliable narrator” to tell the tale or alternatively it may be a consequence of living in Morningside for almost 40 years!

“Like others I found that the novel did not benefit from a second reading. While I appreciate that McGrath is regarded as a “Gothic” novelist I saw very little “Gothic” in Asylum. This categorization owes much to his earlier works, particularly “Grotesque” published in 1989. Since then his writings appear to have an increasingly diluted Gothic content.”

“His fascination with mental illness and adulterous relationships, presumably products of his early family life in Broadmoor and his experiences as a young man dealing with his demons and exploring his options, have combined with a command of English and concise writing to deliver an easy read which is both enjoyable and thought provoking.”

In summary everyone considered the novel to be a good read. More so, those reading it for the first time. Those who had read it before thought it lost the element of surprise on second reading. While everyone considered Stella’s suicide to be entirely predictable, the death of the child was unexpected, and really shocking. McGrath’s descriptive powers of place were greatly appreciated and his character development impressive.

We look forward to reading his next book, which we understand will reflect his Americanization.