The story is overwhelmed by the personality of the mysterious wig-maker, who becomes obsessed with Marion's hair (its white-blonde shade is the rarest and he covets it). He is an unpleasant, amoral character, but Chidgey makes him interestingly devilish. I found myself skipping over some of the narrative, wanting to get back to the terrible, but enthralling, Goulet.
The story does fall apart a bit towards the end, but what I particularly liked about this novel is that, unlike too many historical novels, it is not held together by a lame 'romance' plot. Chidgey has clearly done bags of research for the background to the novel, but not to the extent where I felt I was on the receiving end of a history lesson. Marion and Rafael never quite come to life quite as strikingly as does Goulet, but this is definitely a cut above most of the historical novels I've been reading lately.
Catherine of Aragon comes across as a woman with a good deal of backbone, happier during times of conflict than during peacetime. Starkey explodes some common misconceptions about all the wives (for example, that Katherine Parr was an inoffensive little woman and essentially Henry's nursemaid). Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleves are dealt with briefly (Jane died shortly after the birth of a son, and the marriage to Anne of Cleves never really got off the ground, although Starkey provides evidence that she remained on largely friendly terms with the king).
My one quibble with the first section of the book is that the detailing of the process by which Henry divorced Catherine are given in extraordinary detail, to the point where it becomes difficult to understand exactly what was going on. Similarly, throughout the book Starkey rather over-indulges himself with blow-by-blow descriptions of every procession and ceremony.
Nevertheless I think this is an excellent book for anyone who wants a relatively succinct account of Henry VIII's marriages, where the emphasis is very much on the personalities and strengths (and weaknesses) of the women themselves, rather than on the king.
Pearsall also has some eyebrow-raising things to say about homosexuality, viz, that anal intercourse among gay men 'is not believed to be very common'. Uh? Says who? He relies rather too heavily on the findings of the Kinsey report, and uses this to compare sexual behaviour 'today' with that experienced in the Victorian age.
When discussing bachelors, he clearly sympathises with men who preferred to pursue other matters than courtship (although he's happy to generalise that 'The solitary life tends to bring in its train nervous disorders'). When it comes to spinsters, though, his view seems to be that if women didn't marry it was because they were either suffering from a 'constitutional weakness' or were too unattractive to receive any offers of marriage. In other words, according to Pearsall, men naturally shy away from the married state (there are always whores...), whilst woman's 'natural inclinations' were towards marriage.
Overall, The Worm in the Bud is a useful resource to dip in to. It's very readable, and there is interesting material presented in bite-sized pieces, but Pearsall's tone will likely grate if, like me, you're a 21st century feminist :-)
This is the second time I’ve read this short but disturbing novel. I honestly never imagined I’d read it again, as first time around I found it extremely harrowing, but having read more of Barker’s work, I decided I wanted to re-read this, her second novel.
The novel is set in a small town in the north of England at a time when a serial killer targeting prostitutes is on the loose (hard not to think of the so-called ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ killings). The main characters of the novel are all prostitutes. Not high-end escorts, just ordinary women who turn to prostitution out of pragmatism. For uneducated women, the only other significant employer in the area is a chicken factory, where the work is unpleasant. Prostitution might be as mind-deadening as gutting chickens, but it offers better rates of pay and flexible hours, which is important as several of the women have young children.
Highlighted throughout the novel is the camaraderie between the women and their support of each other. These aren’t tarts with hearts of gold, just ordinary working class women getting by as best they can. One of the women sets out to find the killer herself, as the police seem powerless, using the prostitutes simply as bait to catch him.
For me, the least successful part of the novel is the final one, which focuses on an attack on Maggie, who is not a prostitute. She survives the attack (ironically, the only person to come to her aid is Brenda, one of the prostitutes). I’m not quite clear what Barker is trying to say in this final part of the story. Although Maggie survives the attack, she struggles to regain her confidence and decides to give up her job and stay at home, where she is tended by her husband. He is a genuinely good man, but one wonders what message Barker ultimately conveys in ending the novel with Maggie giving up her independence.
If you know Brookner's work, you know what to expect: lonely, disappointed people leading materially comfortable but somehow diminished or uneventful lives.
This novel features a male central character and unlike many Brookner novels this one has a 'wow!' moment. After the double tragedy in Alan's life I had to put the book down, a little breathless. For this is a deeply sad story of a man beguiled by Sarah, a woman not so much cruel as neglectful, who is indifferent to Alan and the effect she has on him. Alan finds himself steered into marriage with Angela, unsuitable in very different ways, a rather prim young woman with a wholly unrealistic and virginal idea of marriage. Frightened of men, her romantic fantasy soon turns sour.
When she is unhappily six months pregnant, Alan searches the wet streets of Paris for the ever-elusive Sarah. Whilst he's away, planning an infidelity that never happens, he learns that his wife has lost their baby.
After the death of the wife he never loved, Alan's life is to all intents and purposes over - he knows it, accepts it, almost revels in his own perceived dullness. The novel up to this point is uncharacteristically fizzy. The second part of the novel is much slower, reflecting the change in Alan.
Brookner's central characters are always lonely. Alan's tragedy is ordinary enough in some ways, yet never banal. I'm sometimes irritated with the self-indulgence of many of Brookner's characters. But for Alan's plight - his guilt, the waste of it all - I simply felt profoundly sad.
Labyrinthine historical novel (opening in 1819), written simply but engagingly.
My only puzzle is why the book is titled 'The American Boy'. Although the boy, Edgar Allan Poe, features in the story and is crucial to some of the plot developments, as a character he is rather colourless. The story is very much that of the narrator, tutor Thomas Shield, thrown by accident (via Poe's best friend Charlie) into a world of intrigue, corruption, family secrets and murder. Unprepared but dogged, Shield retains his integrity in spite of his massive reversals of fortune - rags to (relative) riches and back to rags again.
I found the Appendix slightly irritating. I'm not a big fan of bits being tacked on to novels purporting to explain or contextualise the main narrative, especially when (as in this case) the appendix is written by someone other than the narrator. It feels false, and a cheat, but most of all anticlimactic. It is also unnecessary to an understanding or enjoyment of the novel.
The book isn't wholly successful. For example, the late revelation regarding Flora's relationship with her father doesn't quite square with the Flora in the rest of the novel - the revelation comes out of nowhere, with no foreshadowing that I can recall. The story is a little over-elaborate in places, and some of the scenes seem inconsequential, but even so the twists and turns of this novel kept me reading quite happily for all of its 500-odd pages.
Nicholson, the grand-daughter of Vanessa Bell, makes it clear that her intention in this book is not to write a scholarly book about that slippery artistic country known as Bohemia, but rather to hold "a magnifying glass over the habits and domestic lives of artists and writers in this country [i.e. Britain] for the forty-odd years before the Second World war".
Many of the people who feature in the book are well known (Augustus John, Dylan Thomas, Robert Graves, etc). Many others suffered for their art without making much of a mark on posterity. Some of them were financially well off, but many others were poor. Roy Campbell and his wife Mary moved to Wales. We are told that 'They had no earnings at all', but in fact Roy's father eventually provided the couple with a minimal allowance. I like the fact that, in spite of their very real poverty, 'books accounted for half of [their monthly] budget'.
Many artists and writers gravitated to France, not just because it seemed like a romantic, arty place to live, but also simply because "with the post-war exchange rate at its most favourable for years, the exodus to the Mediterranean was irresistible, because you could live in the sunshine for half what it cost to live in England". It has always been tempting to conjure up the image of the artist starving in a garret, but in practice it was no fun at all, as painter Mark Gertler wrote to Lytton Strachey: "To paint good pictures one must have a comfortable studio and good food...Let no person come and tell me that poverty is good for an artist!"
Nicholson then moves from poverty to sex. Clearly one mark of Bohemianism was the non-nuclear nature of the families and relationships they established. Primitive new forms of contraception took some of the practical worry out of non-marital sex, and the ideal of 'truthful loving' was a commendable ideal, even if it didn't work out quite as ideally in practice. I do feel, however, that Nicholson entirely glosses over the question of Eric Gill's incestuous relationships with his daughters, to a degree that makes me very uncomfortable. Her conclusion that Gill was "guiltlessly in love with the sheer wonder and beauty of sex and the human body" sits badly with me. This was a man who, as a Catholic, condemned birth control and homosexuality, yet "indulged in incest, troilism - and bestiality"!
Nicholson then turns her attention to the offspring of Bohemian parents such as Augustus John (who seems to have impregnated just about every woman he ever met). Many Bohemians had high ideals regarding the education (or non-education) of their children, but of course, as every parent knows, whatever you do will probably be wrong. Whether the children were educated at progressive boarding schools, at home, or a mixture, it's the girls who come off worst. Nicolette Macnamara's father, like many, didn't believe in educating girls, whose job its was to look beautiful and take care of their menfolk. As a result, she didn't learn to read until she was twelve, and remained bitter about her lack of formal education: "The wastage of time for a person ignorant of the methods of learning is quite appalling".
There are interesting chapters on Bohemian interior decor, clothing, and attitudes to food (in a nutshell, they rebelled against boring and bland British stodge, but often found themselves living off boiled eggs due to lack of money).
Nicholson also gives the reader an insight into the domestic arrangements of Bohemian women. Even into the early 20th century, most middle-class woman would employ at least one servant. Because servants were paid a pittance, you had to be very poor indeed not to be able to afford staff. Many Bohemians, however, rebelled against the stuffy bourgeois manner of running a house. Many of them decided that housework was a waste of painting time and were quite content to live in squalor.
Others, particularly girls from conservative middle-class backgrounds who were used to a different way of doing things - or whose male partners expected a certain level of housewifely devotion - soon found themselves unequal to the battle of reconciling back-breaking housework with their own artistic ambitions. Inevitably, it was art that suffered. As Stella Bowen (living with novelist Ford Madox Ford) noted, 'Pursuing an art is not just a matter of finding the time - it is a matter of having a free spirit to bring to it.' As Nicholson notes, this is an issue that 'is still relevant, still unresolved'.
The book ends on a melancholy note as, one by one, these larger-than-life characters succumb to alcoholism, suicide, or simply - but arguably, perhaps, worst of all - boring old age. The legacy of these artists who defied convention is still with us, in our more relaxed attitudes towards appearance, behaviour, sex, art itself. Nevertheless, the message seems to be that Bohemianism is for the young. Only the young, after all, believe they are immortal.
Arnold Bennett has never been particularly fashionable; Virginia Woolf hadn't much time for him (the feeling was mutual) and French critic George Lafourcade describes Anna of the Five Towns as tending to 'dullness complete and unrelieved'. DH Lawrence also responded negatively to the novel, but then again he dismissed 'all the modern stuff since Flaubert'. Margaret Drabble comes closer to my own view of it: she describes Anna as 'much more spirited [than Balzac's Eugenie Grandet], more modern, more subtle. In fact, she is much more real.'
It is Anna herself who makes this novel come alive. Early on, Anna learns that her coming-of-age inheritance from her mother makes her a very wealthy young woman. However, the money makes no real difference to her life - it is tied up in stocks, shares and businesses and remains under the control of her tyranical father. The world of finance is utterly alien to Anna. She becomes, on her father's advice, the 'sleeping partner' in the firm owned by Henry Mynors, her soon-to-be fiance. Men, it seems, are destined to hold Anna's pursestrings. On the whole, she doesn't mind: modest Anna's wants are few.
Anna is very much her own person, though. She shows this quietly, often with difficulty, such as when she refuses to speak the words 'I am for Christ', which she knows would make Henry and Mrs Sutton (wife of prosperous Alderman Sutton) very happy, because she doesn't feel them in her heart. She risks her father's wrath when she burns the forged document that could have ruined Willie Price, and indeed Anna's father is furious when the deed is discovered, and cannot forgive her.
She and Henry are basically 'good' people - quietly so, without ostentation - and there is no reason to suppose that their marriage will be a miserable one, even though Anna realises that she doesn't love Henry and does love the departing (for Australia) Willie Price. If this is, as DH Lawrence claims, a novel about 'resignation', it's a form of resignation that is easy to identify with. Anna is not heroic (except in small, quiet ways); she is a decent, likeable young woman who will make the best of what life throws at her. I find her wholly admirable.
"Who can tell another person what to endure - how much, and for how long?"
I read with no preconceptions about the book or its author but almost immediately it swept me up, took me in, began to resonate and haunt. The main character, who narrates much of the novel, is Matthias, named by his mother "after the disciple who replaced Judas Iscariot". He works as an academic archivist, and one of the plots revolves around Matt's relationship with Roberta, a poet and student who wants to see the library's collection of letters written by TS Eliot to a woman correspondent, Emily Hale, even though she knows the letters have been sequestered until 2020.
"I saw myself then, and still do, as inheritor of a rich tradition, one that straddles the line between mind and spirit. The great librarians have all been religious men - monks, priests, rabbis - and the stewardship of books is an act of homage and faith."
Throughout the novel runs a set of parallels. Between Matt's dead wife, Judith, and Roberta - both Jewish, both poets. Between Matt and Judith's marriage and the troubled relationship of TS Eliot and his wife Vivienne (both wives spending periods of time in mental institutions). This is a book in which the past is always present, unhelpfully so. Matt broods on his relationship with his wife, who committed suicide in a mental hospital. Roberta, too, broods - on the problematic (for her) fact that her parents raised her without telling her that they'd converted from Judaism to Christianity when they escaped from Germany. Roberta feels betrayed, choosing to identify as Jewish when she finds out about her past and that her grandparents had died in a camp. Judith feels many betrayals, and it is perhaps the weight of them that results in her taking her life: she feels betrayed many times over by Matt; she blames him for her incarceration in the mental hospital; blames him for destroying her own 'archive', a file of newspaper cuttings that Matt considers 'morbid', and which contained material about Jews who survived the War. She also feels betrayed by her parents, who died when she was a baby. She feels doubly betrayed when she later learns from her aunt and uncle who brought her up that her parents died not in a car accident, as she'd always been told, but had been shot by anti-Communists in southern Russia. Judith is simply unable to move on from her own past and from the past generally - the weight of history, the fact that so many people looked the other way as so many of the Jewish people were systematically disposed of. "The war wasn't somewhere else, at some other time. It was irrevocably present for her. The terrible things that had been done, not randomly but under unimaginably well-organized circumstances - these were realities her psyche couldn't encompass or deflect. Europe's crisis set her adrift. It became impossible for her to distinguish between the world's darkness and her own."
There are so many layers to this novel, so many connections that weave in and out, that it's almost impossible to review it without doing more than skimming the surface. The major themes are betrayal, of course, and also the concept of truths and lies. It also deals with the question of faith and religion. Matt's mother was a Presbyterian with strong religious beliefs (she was also deeply unhappy). "My mother lived with a barely suppressed anxiety about her status with respect to the life to come. The good acts she might perform would never, she believed, fully counterbalance her various sins. The roots of my mother's faith somehow managed not to encounter sustaining soil, the come-what-may of forgiveness."
Matt realises, finally, that Judith "never wanted me to save her, only to love her as she was." He tries to help Roberta towards a sense of perspective regarding her parents before it's too late and her mother is dead - '"While they fled, saving themselves, their parents stayed and were doomed. And how could they tell you that? How?" I gestured toward Eliot's poems. 'After such knowledge, what forgiveness?'' He tells Roberta about Judith: "I did what her family had done, what most people did - what most people always do - I tried to conceal the terrifying things, to keep quiet about them...She'd always believed I'd resist silence - that I was capable of resistance. And I wasn't."
In a final act of trust, Matt allows Roberta to see not the Emily Hale letters but the draft poems contained amongst the letters. Finally, he burns the Emily Hale letters, which he believes Eliot had never wanted other eyes to see - "Poetry was what he left us. It was all that mattered. The rest is not our business."
Allan Wrentmore takes his wealthy cousin's name (Allan Armadale) as a condition of inheriting his wealth. Armadale has a son of his own, but the son is in disgrace and Armadale thus decides not to leave his money and property to him. From the introduction: "In Armadale it is for once the men, rather than the women, who struggle to identify themselves - to themselves as well as to others - in relation to the name." Additionally, "The idea of property, of possession and dispossession, is intimately connected with this theme of identity." Traditionally women found status through marriage and the assumption of someone else's name. However, in this novel it is a woman - Lydia Gwilt - who defiantly keeps her original name. She "stands out as the character with a steady identity" (from the Introduction). She is also "connected with every aspect of the Armadale fortunes". Her rival for Allan, Eleanor Milroy, is known by a nickname, Neelie. She explains to Allan that, 'There are some unfortunate people in this world, whose names are...Misfits. Mine is a Misfit.' She thinks Lydia's surname 'dreadfully unpoetical'.
The son of the original Allan Armadale returns under the assumed name of Fergus Ingleby. He ingratiates himself with the man who has taken his name (and his father's fortune), tries to poison him, and marries the woman Allan wanted. He is facilitated in his short reign of evil by a maid, who forges a letter from Allan's mother - 'Woe betide the people who trust her!' Ingleby tries to escape, but the ship he's on founders. Allan boards the ship and murders Ingleby. In a letter to his infant son (also an Allan Armadale), Allan tells him that he must avoid, all his life, the other Allan Armadale - the posthumous child of Fergus Ingleby and his wife.
A man with the 'ugly' name of Ozias Midwinter turns up in Allan's village. Allan's mother dies shortly after a visit from her former maid. Both of Allan's cousins, and his uncle, die (the deaths precipitated by a woman's attempted suicide leap), leaving Allan heir to the estate of Thorpe-Ambrose. It becomes clear that Ozias Midwinter is really the son of Fergus Ingleby. A key event in the book is Allan's dream, featuring the 'Shadow of a Woman' and the 'Shadow of a Man'. Ozias is convinced that the shadow of a man is himself, and the shadow of a woman the former maid who forged the letter to Allan Snr's mother. The dream is interpreted rationally by the doctor, Mr Hawbury, in a manner that makes "narrative patterns from events encountered in the waking world", but it convinces neither Midwinter nor the reader. "In Armadale the 'shadow of a man' is interpreted by Ozias as himself; the 'other' dark-skinned, alient, 'primitive' Armadale". Lydia, the 'shadow of a woman', "prefigures certain of the less benign aspects of Jung's 'anima', or soul-image". "Collins's terms embody a startling anticipation of Jung's theories of 'the shadow', the dark part of a personality that is repressed from consciousness, but which must be recognised if self-knowledge is to be acquired."
Lydia Gwilt is first mentioned by name on page 189, in a letter to her from a Mrs Maria Oldershaw, who is based upon a real-life person, Rachel Leverson, whose cosmetics and beauty treatments shop provided a cover for her criminal activities. Oldershaw is yet another character who uses a pseudonym - she does so in order to provide a fraudulent reference for Lydia. In her real name she shares her premises with those of Dr Downward, a 'ladies' medical man' (an abortionist, presumably). We learn that Lydia is thirty-five and 'hates women'. Maria encourages Lydia to marry Allan, and suggests a plan whereby Lydia could become governess to the 16-year-old daughter of Allan's new tenants, Major and Mrs Milroy. ["The figure of the governess, in fiction and in the popular imagination, was changing from that of the downtrodden victim to a more ambiguous, attractive, and dangerous image." - from the Introduction. As Allan puts it, "A governess is a lady who is not rich...and a duchess is a lady who is not poor"]. There is no doubt but that Lydia is pure poison - "I want a husband to vex, or a child to beat, or something of that sort. Do you ever like to see the summer insects kill themselves in the candle? I do, sometimes."
Allan and Lydia finally come face to face on page 322. We learn that Lydia is a redhead (she refers to her 'horrid red hair'). Ozias is lulled into a false sense of security because Mr Brock, who had been spying on Lydia, has been tricked into believing that Maria's maid is the 'real' Miss Gwilt. Brock isn't the only spy in the novel - in fact they are everywhere, professionally employed or otherwise. "Spying is an attempt to usurp another person's freedom of action and autonomy, literally his or her self-possession" (from the introduction). Lydia spies on Allan and Neelie, and employs poor besotted Bashwood to spy on things at Thorpe-Ambrose. Pedgift Snr sets a spy on Lydia, but again Lydia is canny enough to see through it.
Allan thinks he's in love with Lydia, but Ozias really is. Although Ozias had tried to convince himself that he was being superstitious in setting so much store by Allan's dream, his illusion is shattered when he and Allan argue about Lydia (who has easily persuaded Ozias to believe in her innocence): "The rain drove slanting over flower-bed and lawn, and pattered heavily against the glass; and the two Armadales stood by the window, as the two Shadows had stood in the second Vision of the Dream, with the wreck of the image [the Statuette] between them." Ozias is fascinated by Lydia, who has beguiled him absolutely. He realises the danger he is in: "I believe that if the fascination you have for me draws me back to you, fatal consequences will come of it to the man whose life has been so strangely mingled with mine..." He cannot fight her. Not only does he propose to her, he also tells her who he really is. We have a hint, from Lydia's diary, of the reasons why she is the way she is, when she reads some old "letters of the man for whom I once sacrificed and suffered everything; the man who has made me what I am." The truth of her past comes out via Bashwood's son, who works at a Private Inquiry Office. Lydia had been tried for the murder of her first husband, but the guilty verdict was overturned by the Home Secretary. She did, however, serve two years for robbery. Captain Manuel was the man with whom she was in love, and who fleeced her of all her money, married her bigamously, then disappeared from her life.
Lydia's attempts to murder Allan are compromised by her love for Ozias. The scene of the final confrontation is a Sanatorium, presided over by the former Dr Downward, now calling himself Dr Le Doux. The madhouse is of course "the Victorian equivalent of the gothic castle, or convent, a place of terrifying incarceration from which there seems to be no escape" (from the Introduction). Lydia's error is in putting poison gas into the room in which Ozias sleeps rather than into Allan's room. She realises her error, makes sure Ozias lives, then decides her only course ("Even my wickedness has one merit...I have never been a happy woman") is to kill herself. All ends well: Lydia is dead, Armadale and Neelie marry, and Ozias preserves the secret of the two Allans. However, "though the active female principle may once again have been subjugated and destroyed, Armadale is Lydia Gwilt's book, and it is she who dominates the story to the end" (from the Introduction)
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