Tuesday, September 18, 2012

The Salterton Trilogy by Robertson Davies

I really, really liked these novels. The trilogy was published in 1980, and set sometime earlier than that I think, so it’s dated –contemporary but, as somebody once described it, deals with the ‘universal now’. That’s such a great term to describe the continuing relevance of character and theme. The first tells the story of an amateur theatre group in the small Canadian town of Salterton who are putting on their annual performance. It’s the lightest of the three and focuses primarily on the characters and their relationships as they struggle to produce The Tempest. Some of these characters reappear in the other two novels. The second begins with the publication of an engagement notice pertaining to two of the characters, and then explores the ripples, including law suits and family feuds, that this causes. The main character in this book is the newspaper editor, an absolute delight of a character, who abhors the pomposity and wordiness of his colleagues and all the guff and politicking that goes on in small communities. The third begins with the death of one of the characters and the subsequent establishment of a trust to support a young artist and then follows her development, a break away from Salterton really and indeed from most of the characters we knew earlier. Robertson Davies writes that sort of social satire that I love so much, but with a generosity of spirit that you don’t find in some other harsher critics. There are some truly awful people in Salterton, and he doesn’t shy away from that, but there are also people who are a real-life mix of good and really quite bad whom he treats with compassion for the human condition. While his books approach the soap opera intensity of small town gossip and intrigue, he also talks about much bigger things, touching on the spirit and art and philosophy. What might sometimes tip over into didacticism is counterbalanced by wit and and an enjoyment of the outrageous (by the standards of the 1980s of course.) So while the trilogy is long – about 800 Penguin pages – it’s a page turner as well as being thoughtful and educated, and beautifully written to book.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

My friend Kathy, who lent me this book, suggested that it was a book to be read carefully and slowly. And she was right. Every word, and every idea, counts. The narrative is about Tony, who has a half baked affair with a girl Veronica when they are at university. After they’ve broken up she takes up with his friend Adrian. The second half of the novel takes place forty years later as Tony looks back on the relationship. I’m not going to write all the detail here because if anyone happens to read it, it will spoil it. While there are a couple of truly arresting moments in the plot, the book is not as much about the detail of the story (indeed anyone reading it for the narrative alone would struggle to maintain their commitment) but more about our perceptions of the past. Early in the novel the four friends at school, smart-arsed would be intellectuals, discuss history with their teacher. Adrian describes history as ‘that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.’ And that’s what I think this book is about – Tony’s flawed memories, which inform his attitudes towards other people and his subsequent interpretations of their actions, and the inadequacy of the documentation that he spends the whole second part of the novel seeking in Adrian’s diary. It is a novel about the loss of Tony’s certainty. And what a novel. Finely crafted, sparsely populated with almost Alan Bennett-esque characters, in an almost anonymous setting. Indeed I don’t think I’ve read a novel where setting mattered less any time recently. And the language – wow. Every word matters, and every word is carefully chosen even down to the title where ‘sense’ I am sure means ‘meaning.’ You must think and you must read every sentence. Now that’s brilliant writing.

Saturday, September 1, 2012

The Citadel by AJ Cronin

This is of course a very dated book (published in 1937) and reminds me a lot of the Delderfield genre – British countryside, middle class professional, small town life, gossip and intrigue. I have a sentimental spot for books of that period though and so read this through this morning at 3.30am when I couldn’t sleep courtesy of too much rich French food last night. It’s a quick and easy bit of entertainment. The story is about a young doctor from a poor background struggling to make his way in the world, his marriage to a young schoolteacher and how he loses his ideals as he is absorbed into a medical world obsessed by wealth and status. It’s sentimental, at times almost melodramatic, but needs to be read as a period piece ie you have to suspend judgment of the sexism and other norms of that time. The BBC made a mini series out of it apparently, which probably says it all. Read it when you can’t sleep!