Book of the Month: To The Lighthouse

I feel self conscious reviewing "classics". I worry I'm not 'getting it' and will look ignorant. But then, I also feel that if I'm not getting it, that says something too. So, here we go. Bear with me. 

There are some spoilers in this review. But this book was published in 1927, so you've had 98 years to read it before reading my spoilers. 

What I knew before reading the book - it was written by Virginia Woolf, a female author often described as a key feminist writer. No surprise then that To The Lighthouse is written almost exclusively through the point of view of female protagonists, mainly Mrs Ramsay, the mother of eight who narrates the first chunk of the book. Male characters are given short shrift, variously described as shallow, prickly, idealistic, boastful and with sensitive egos. 

The story starts with Mr and Mrs Ramsay on holiday on the Isle of Skye with their eight children and another half dozen assorted guests plus serving staff. It's evening. One of Mrs Ramsay's sons asks her if they can go to the lighthouse the next day. Mr Ramsay says no because the weather forecast is bad. Mrs Ramsay is silently annoyed at her husband for dismissively crushing her son's hopes. 

That takes up the first sixty pages. I was beginning to suspect the title was misleading and the family weren't going to go to the lighthouse. 

There was, however, a surprise reference to Cardiff - as a venue where Mr Ramsay was going to take his lecture tour. So, it wasn't all unspoken angst between the married couple. 

Mrs Ramsay oscillates between a dark pessimism about marriage and progeny, and then expends a lot of energy engineering opportunities for her house guests to get together. There is a proposal as two people are successfully coupled, and then she is on to thinking about the next match she could make. 

I had my hackles raised by some passing references to Anna Karenina. Fortunately Mrs Ramsay stands in stark contrast to Anna. For one thing, Mrs Ramsay seems much more realistic about life and finds joy in the things around her instead of mooning away over some idea that love is "out there".

And then, just when we've got to know Mrs Ramsay, she unexpectedly dies, in a throwaway paragraph at the end of a chapter. I don't know if the author got bored of her, or what. But it's a sudden - and bold - shift in the story. 

What follows is a brief series of vignettes, as the local cleaning lady tries to maintain the holiday home over several years. In the same way that the house declines, so too, Mrs Ramsay's idealised visions of the future are shown to come to naught. One son Andrew, who was supposed to become a famous mathematician, is killed by a shell during the war. A daughter, Prue, who is supposed to grow into a true beauty, dies due to pregnancy complications. The couple who got engaged on Skye get trapped in a loveless marriage. 

The message seems to be that whatever our hopes for the future, life gets in the way. It's pessimistic in the extreme and more nihilistic than I expected. 

The book ends with the remaining members of the family returning to Skye. The kid who wanted to go to the lighthouse finally gets to go, even though by this point he is a pouting teenager who really doesn't want to go. They arrive at the lighthouse but before they get out of the boat the book ends. 

Final point - the cover art. This book was part of a set of ten 'classics' that I was given several years ago. The cover art is deeply uninspiring, although after I read the book it felt very apt. (It doesn't show a lighthouse!) Then a few days after I finished the book, I saw a copy with a very different, and much nicer, cover that makes it look like a completely different type of book! 

(I was tempted to buy it but decided that would be silly.)

Books of the Month - a trio of twentieth century novels

Recently TK Maxx has had a great selection of books available below list price. (Including several different editions of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which felt a bit odd.) Over the last couple of months I've bought some older fiction that caught my eye. I'm going to review them in chronological order, starting with the oldest.

Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway

I'd never read any Hemingway, and this might not have been the best novel to start with. However, it sounded interesting from the blurb on the back. The basic premise is that a bunch of dissolute American ex-pats living in Paris in the mid-1920s decide to go to Pamplona to see the running of the bulls and the bullfight there in the fiesta. 

It's not all bullfights and drinking. Along the way some characters go fishing. There's a deep love for angling in the writing, almost as much as there is fascination for bullfighting. Within the group of tourists there is a woman who is the object of attention for several men, including the narrator, who is carrying a war injury. It's never spelled out but the inference is his wound prevents him from functioning sexually. 

And that's about it. The various infatuated men either get with the woman or don't. The narrator seems detached from all their drama. The Spanish and French characters are just background or mainly there to be patronised. There's some antisemitism and a one character discusses a black boxer he admires using the N word to describe him. 

And fair enough, the book was published in 1927 so what else would be expected. It's an outsider's viewpoint with an ingrained superiority and yet a hollow sense that the people they are so superior to actually have more authenticity. The main characters flit through and observe, are amused by what they see, and then flit off and in the process are utterly meaningless. The fiesta would happen with or without them.

Overall it hasn't inspired me to actively seek out any more Hemingway. It had its moments. (If you like fishing, I think you'd like that chunk of the story!) But I wasn't sorry to finish reading it. 

Coming Up For Air - George Orwell

From the mid-20s to a novel published in 1939 and full of semi-prophetic foreboding about the looming war between Britain and Germany. There's a weighty inevitability to the coming conflict that is reflected throughout this novel - but it's what will come after that really terrifies the protagonist, an era of secret police and endless propaganda. 

When I read On 1984 by DJ Taylor, which was a book about how Orwell wrote that book, this novel and Homage to Catalonia were mentioned as feeding into the key ideas of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Having read both books now, I see what Taylor meant. There's a lot here about the way memories preserve things that have been otherwise obliterated by progress and how the world was going to change. 

The book is set in four parts. In part 1, George, the 45 year-old protagonist is unsettled in his life as an insurance salesman, married with kids and trapped in suburbia. In part 2, he recounts his life growing up in a little Oxfordshire village, his experience in the First World War and his subsequent career in sales,  made possible by the social upheavals caused by the war. In part 3, the hatches a plan to use some money that his wife doesn't know about to fund a trip back to the village he grew up in. And in part 4 he makes the trip which ultimately ends up in disappointment and realising that you can never truly go back. 

There is quite a bit of humour in the book, particularly George's life story. There are several vignettes that capture some true-to-life experiences and observations of people. We stray into some unprogressive views when George the protagonist (and possibly George the author) shares some negative opinions about women, although in fairness several male characters come in for a verbal bruising as well. 

Orwell is good at describing archetypal characters, like men living on faded glories, the genuinely wealthy, the penny-pinching middle-class who don't have funds to match their status, the tory-voting suburban families desperately working to pay their mortgages, and the hard-working, perpetually screwed-over poor. He has particular fun mocking the earnest young men who are various shades of communist and argue fine points of political dogma as if any of it matters. George (and probably George as well) are older and wiser than that and recognise it's all futile.

Despite that negative cast to the story, and the depressing conclusions drawn by the protagonist as his trip doesn't work out as he naively expected, I enjoyed reading this. I find Orwell a very readable author. His character's inner monologue is engaging, and while George the protagonist makes no claim to be a hero or a good person he is extraordinarily sympathetic. I might not have felt that if I had read the book when I was younger, but now I'm in my 40s and slightly horrified how long ago my school and university days are now, I get where he is coming from. 

The Stepford Wives - Ira Levin

And so this trio of reviews jumps forward to the 1970s. This is a very short book, with incredibly lean prose. A lot is left to the imagination with one sentence or a short paragraph summing up key events that move the story forward.

I knew the basic outline of this story without ever having read it or seen any of the film adaptations. The main character is Joanna Eberhard, who moves with her husband, Walter, and children to the seemingly idyllic community of Stepford. She soon notices there is something odd and docile about most of the other women in the town and the few free spirits she encounters seem to be creepily changed somehow after a few months living there. 

The basic gist is that the men of the town have a secret society and have found a way to turn their partners into "perfect" housewives. Joanna realises she needs to escape from Stepford to avoid a similar fate and the story takes a tense turn as she flees. That section was very well written and I had to keep reading to find out whether she made it out or not. 

The edition I read had an introduction by Chuck Pahlahniuk, the author of Fight Club and several other novels. I read the intro after I had read the book - to avoid spoilers. (That proved to be a good choice!) Chuck thinks The Stepford Wives is a warning of a backlash against feminism and that Levin is just illustrating a more fundamental truth - men will just find a different way of putting women in boxes. It's an interesting take and shows that even a comparatively short novel can have depth and layers to it. 

I recognised the titles of most of Levin's other novels and would like to read more of his work, which I think is the highest credit a reader can give. The Stepford Wives really captivated me and I've found myself thinking about it several times after I finished the book. 

Films about the struggle - comparing Selma and Suffragette

Selma is about the civil rights actions of Martin Luther King and his supporters in the town of Selma, Alabama. I saw it earlier this year and it has stayed with me as a powerful movie about a very unsavoury aspect of the American psyche - ingrained institutional racism.

This past week I saw Suffragette, a new film about the suffragette movement that campaigned for equal voting status for women, and wider equality in society.

Both films are naturally sympathetic to the cause of equality, and are filmed mainly from the point of view of the campaigners. Both are about giving an oppressed group in society the same level of rights as the oppressing group, and the actions of the oppressors to preserve their privilege.

What is different is the course taken. An interesting aspect to the film, Selma, is that it could not use any of Dr King's original speeches. They are all copyrighted, so the film-makers had to create ersatz copies of them, capturing the gist and thrust rather than re-voicing one of the most well-known voices of a generation. But one thing that came through time and again was the repudiation of violence, despite the brutal and terrible violence meted out by the racist police force and white redneck citizens. Dr King was arrested and humiliated, threatened and harassed, but stood firm in his commitment to the path of non-violence.

The suffragettes, as captured in the eponymous movie, spent 50 years campaigning for equality using peaceful means. However, the movie captures a time when they had given up on hope of a peaceful recourse and had turned to violence, including blowing up the Prime Minister's summer home that was under construction. They had an interesting approach to violence, targeting property, from breaking shop windows to destroying post boxes to disrupt lines of communication, rather than people. Their ultimate assault on property was against the King, with a suffragette taking down the King's race horse in the Epsom Derby, in a fatal encounter that was captured on newsreel film and became sensational.

While Selma is a study of staying true to your principles despite intense provocation, with some characters talked down from the brink of violence, Suffragette is a movie about how ordinary people can be radicalised by the struggle. The heroine, Maud, goes from a downtrodden, abused worker in a hellish laundry to an anarchist bomber over the course of the movie. It would be interesting to see the reception for this exact same plotline if it was contemporary and the lead character was a Muslim.

But this was all a long time ago and the suffragettes won, and so we assume it was all OK. And yet my Grandma in law was born when women still didn't have the vote and she is still alive. This wasn't that long ago, and the actions of the suffragettes would be branded terrorism today. Similarly, the civil rights marchers 'won', although events in Ferguson last year and the #BlackLivesMatter campaign seem to show there is a way to go for white America.

What Selma left me with, and what Suffragette has reinforced, is a sense that I'm not sure what my struggle would be. There does not seem to be an obvious cause like women's rights or racial equality. (At least not to the same degree; I know we aren't there yet.) Maybe I should count myself lucky to not live in an era and a society where I am called to put my body on the line and risk a baton to the head for my beliefs in justice and equality for all. My worry is that I am living in that era and society but I have somehow missed the call.

I also don't know what my breaking point would be. If Dr King had lived and led the movement for 50 years and had got nowhere, would he have finally given in to endorsing violence as Emmeline Pankhurst did? How long would I remain true to pacifist principles? What provocation would I endure?

These are big questions. I'm grateful to the movie-makers for making me ask them.

Fairy Hearts for sale - gendered marketing meets meat

I spotted this shopping in Asda Cardiff Bay, and am quite proud that is has since been added to the Sociological Images pointlessly gendered products pinterest board, after I tweeted the pics.

But more to the point, isn't there something deeply disturbing in encouraging little girls to eat fairy hearts? What images does that conjure up? Fairies being farmed intensively in large barns full of glittering cages, fattened up and cruelly murdered so that little human 'princesses' can gorge themselves?

It reminds me of the horrible scene in Stardust where the witches are going to murder Yvaine so they can eat her heart and have their youth restored. Is that what Asda think they are doing by selling these?

In a way, of course, that is what they will achieve. The 'princessing' of little girls is one of the most powerful programmes for infantilising and disempowering women in our culture. Making little girls eat fairy hearts is part of a much wider scheme to dress them all in pink, and limit their dreams to wishing they were pretty enough to win the heart of a prince, instead, of, you know, getting out there and kicking ass.

Even before I was a vegetarian I would never have touched processed meat garbage products like this. But sadly many parents will, and in reinforcing the cultural conditioning of princessiness, this disgusting looking meat isn't the only crap they are forcing down their daughters' throats.