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Life Class by Pat Barker 

Hamish Hamilton, 2007, 253 p

This is the first book of Barker’s trilogy about alumni of the Slade Art School in the run-up to the Great War. I read the second one, Toby’s Room, before I realised it had this predecessor.

This book is more concerned with Paul Tarrant than Barker’s other two main protagonists, Elinor Brooke and Kit Neville. Paul used a small inheritance form his aunt to enrol at the Slade but the tutor, Henry Tonks, finds his work insipid and Paul begins to doubt his own talent. The slightly older Kit Neville has already had some success as an artist though. Elinor meanwhile has enough trouble dealing with being a woman in a traditionally male enterprise without both the men being attracted to her. She is initially not interested and Paul temporarily takes up with Teresa Halliday, one of the life models, who is escaping from a violent husband.

It is not until the Great War breaks out though, and its scope widens, that the book gets fully into its stride. Barker is clearly comfortable with that war as her subject (as witness her Regeneration trilogy.) Kit and Paul, turned down for war service, sign up to be ambulance drivers with the Belgian Army but are initially used as medical orderlies in field hospitals. Barker’s immersion in the minutiae of the war stands her in good stead here.

In this latter part of the novel a lot of the communication between Paul and Elinor consists of reproductions of their letters to each other. In one of these Elinor notes that the women in her circle keep quiet when men talk about the war (although they’ve not been in it) and compares that to the Iliad, where the girls whom Agamemnon and Achilles quarrel over “say nothing, not a word,” adding, “I don’t suppose men ever hear that silence.” This is a thought Barker would develop in her later Women of Troy books.

Barker’s writing is smooth, almost imperceptible. Accomplished as always.

Pedant’s corner:- Elinor’s hair style is inconsistently described as cropped, bell shaped, or tied back with a ribbon. The knee wound Paul sustains in a bombardment is also seemingly forgotten at times in later passages.

Ghosts by Paul Auster

In The New York Trilogy, faber and faber, 2004. [Ghosts, 1986, 64 p.]

I read Ghosts, the second part of Auster’s New York trilogy, in September and thought I had published my review here but I was seeking to link to it in my review of the third in his sequence and couldn’t find it when I searched the blog; so it seems I didn’t. So here it is, four months late.

In 1947 New York a man called Blue is employed by a man named White to spy on a man called Black, and write regular reports on him. Blue cancels his date with the future Mrs Blue to undertake the commission – a commission which will keep him going for months. (To the understandable frustration of his intended who when they next meet on the street berates him for the lack of contact. But by then she has moved on. Not that Blue can, though he had pondered getting in touch but decided against it on the grounds that “The man must always be the stronger one.”)

Everything has been set up for Blue with an apartment across the street from which he can monitor Black’s activities. All Black appears to do though is write. And read.

It is a curious and distancing feature of the book that except for the real life people mentioned, such as Washington Roebling and Jackie Robinson, every character’s name is a colour. As well as Blue, White and Black we also have Gray, a bartender named Red, another called Green. The only woman who is given a name here (the future Mrs Blue isn’t) is called Violet. I note that that is a first name whereas the men’s in this story are not.

Blue becomes so bogged down in his task that he wonders if White and Black are one and the same and if he himself is being followed. The paranoia of a man who is so focused on what he is doing that he loses touch with reality? This has echoes of the previous book in Auster’s trilogy, City of Glass. Eventually Blue goes beyond his remit, contacts Black and tries to find out who White is.

In a discussion of Hawthorne, Black says to Blue, “Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.” Blue replies, “Another ghost.”

The narrative is peppered with references to magazine stories, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and to the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, especially where a man took off on a whim and only years later (after being presumed dead) returned to his house and wife and knocked on the door. Whereupon the story ends. In that sense Ghosts reflects it. It doesn’t end so much as stop, albeit with being seen from a perspective of thirty years later.

What is Auster trying to do here? Is he subverting the detective story? Demonstrating the inexplicability of existence?

Ghosts is easy enough to read, and short at only 64 pages, but it all seems a bit pointless.

Babel Tower by A S Byatt

Chatto and Windus, 1996, 622 p.

I noted when Byatt died that I had only read one book by her and perhaps ought to remedy that so when I saw this in a second-hand bookshop (in Ulverston as it happens) I snapped it up. However only after I started reading it did I check her back catalogue and found this is the third novel in a sequence featuring Frederica Potter as the main character. Not that it matters because the book stands alone.

In this one, set in the nineteen sixties, Frederica is regretting marrying Nigel Reiver as she finds life in his grand home – dominated by his two sisters and his housekeeper – even with her son Leo, less than fulfilling. She had thought she might be allowed to work (she had met Nigel when she was at Cambridge – though he wasn’t – and still hankers after the intellectual life.) But Nigel is a traditional husband and though his work often takes him away for extended periods (with corresponding sexual encounters which Frederica only finds about later) thinks she should stay at home and resents any contact with her former University friends, all of them male of course. Her unhappiness turns into despair when he becomes violent towards her. He is a former soldier trained in violence and throws an axe at her when she tries to run away.

Some of the passages deal with members of Frederica’s extended family one of whom fields phone calls in a Samaritan-like service. They chat amongst themselves as they wait for calls and when questioned why the Church seems obsessed by sex a bishop says, “‘The Church has always been about sex, dear, that’s what the problem is. Religion has always been about sex. Mostly about denying sex and rooting it out.’” Apart from the odd visit later in the book to Frederica’s parental home this is a very minor strand.

Interleaved with Frederica’s story in the early stages here are extracts from a book called Babbletower, where an aristocrat leads a group of people away from their home land to a place named La Tour Bruyarde, to found a culture in which its inhabitants will be free to do as they wish without hindrance. This connects with Frederica after she finally escapes Nigel (her son Leo insisting on coming with her though he loves his father) when she gets a job – nepotistically through her old friends – as a publisher’s reader then teacher of English in the Samuel Palmer School of Art and Craft. Babbletower is one of the books she recommends for publication and its author, Jude Mason, an ill-dressed, ill-kempt and smelly individual, turns out to be a model for the life class at the School.

Byatt uses this and Frederica’s peripheral involvement with the Steerforth Committee on the teaching of English (and specifically whether grammar ought to be taught in schools) to have discussions about literature, especially E M Forster and D H Lawrence, as well as the usefulness of cut-ups in condensing meaning.

George Murphy, one of Frederica’s students, says novels are obsessed with sex and love and God and food (which he agrees most people are) but they are also obsessed by work, commodities, machines and property on which they do not lavish the contempt and loathing which novelists tend to. At one point a character realises that it is possible for human beings to spend the whole of their lives on nonsense.

From time to time the ferment of the sixties is noted parenthetically. The Lady Chatterley trial, the 1964 General Election, the abolition of the death penalty, the decriminalization of homosexuality, the Moors murders, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the beginning of colour TV transmission all get a nod.

There are two main set pieces in the novel, both describing court cases, Frederica’s divorce and Babbletower’s trial for indecency. Byatt uses these to demonstrate how the legal system distorts the truth.

In entering various liaisons after leaving Nigel, Frederica seems to be very naive in her conduct as it never once occurs to her that her husband will be having her watched.

A nice touch comes when Jude Mason opines in court – “‘The English vice is not what is said to be but, precisely, indignation. We get furiously upset about everything ….. It is indignation that has put my book on trial.’”

At 622 pages Babel Tower is something of a marathon read but it has its moments.

Pedant’s corner:- a missing end quote mark after a piece of dialogue, staunch(es) (x 2, stanch(es),) genii (the plural of genie is genies,) aureoles (areolae,) (behalves?) “Moor Murders” (Moors Murders which is used elsewhere,) “which neither of them quite understand” (neither of them understands,) “he has not read Babbletower, as a teacher, she is now” (he has not read Babbletower. As a teacher,) “marmelade skies” (marmalade.)

Beloved by Toni Morrison 

Vintage, 2010, 330 p, plus 5p Foreword.

124, the house where Sethe lives with her daughter Denver, is haunted, by her unnamed baby and by the slavery which caused the child’s death. That other daughter, who was unnamed but whose gravestone bears the description ‘Beloved’ – Sethe could not afford the extra money to have ‘Dearly’ inscribed as well – was killed by Sethe herself to prevent her being taken back to Sweet Home, the plantation from where she had escaped enslavement. Perhaps an extreme reaction but also an expression of the horrors of slavery. Sethe has the image of a tree on her back from the whippings she received in that part of her life.

The ghost is banished after Paul D, another former slave from Sweet Home, arrives at the house and takes up with Sethe. Denver resents this as she had considered the ghost as a kind of companion.

Later, a child who calls herself Beloved arrives at 124 and draws close to Sethe who comes to see her as a reincarnation of the child she killed.

There is a surreal quality to the writing here, verging on but not quite corresponding to magical realism. It is as if the fact of slavery, though not evaded, is too consuming to be confronted head on and must be approached obliquely, its legacy equally as terrible as its existence. Sethe’s act of violence is an extremity in response to an enormity, with its own repercussions on the lives of herself and her children.

Sensitivity note: a book like this, and a subject like this, cannot avoid use of the word ‘nigger’ as when the posse seeking to recapture Sethe discusses their slaves or Paul D asks Stamp Paid, “‘How much is a nigger supposed to take? Tell me. How much?’”

‘All he can,’ said Stamp Paid. ‘All he can.’

To which Paul D says, ‘Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?’”

“Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?” is as good a question to ask of slavery as there can be. Indeed, it’s the only one.

Beloved is not an easy novel to read: but it is perhaps a necessary one.

 

Pedant’s corner:- “the repellant landscape” (repellent,) “Baby Suggs’ place” (Baby Suggs’s,) “had shook the house” (‘had shaken’; but ‘had shook’ may have been slave usage,) “Lady Jones’ house-school” (Jones’s.)

Cal by Bernard Mac Laverty

Heinemann, 1988, 158 p.

The setting is Northern Ireland during the troubles. Cal spends his days lazing about as he is unemployed, having not been able to stand the job he had in the slaughterhouse where his father works. They are the only remaining Catholics in an otherwise Protestant street and subject to threats as a result. He is plagued by Crilly and Skeffington, Provisional IRA members wanting him to go on more jobs but is haunted by the memory of his part in the killing of a police officer where he drove the car they used. A new woman assistant at the local library begins to consume his attention. She is Marcella, and happens to be the wife of the man that was killed.

Being burned out of his house gives him the chance both to evade Crilly and Skeffington and to take a job at the farm where Marcella lives. He is a man living, if not a life of lies, at least one of omissions. A situation like his cannot end well.

Quite how psychologically perceptive all of this is is perhaps questionable. Not Cal’s reluctance to be drawn deeper into acts of violence but his attraction to a woman he feels he has wronged. The atmosphere of constraint though, of circumscription, is entirely credible.

Note: Mac Laverty is how the author’s surname is spelled on the book’s cover and title page but it is more usually rendered MacLaverty

Pedant’s corner:- “and how he would kiss her and touched her” (and touch her.) “‘You’re a boy without?ELSomebody might’” (I have no idea what that ‘?EL’ is about.)

Best of 2024

19 this year; 12 by men 7 by women, 4 with an SF/fantasy tinge (5 if you count Beloved,) 1 non-fiction, 1 fictionalised memoir. Not in any order; apart from of reading.

News of the Dead by James Robertson

The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng

Tomorrow by Chris Beckett

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Landmarks by Robert McFarlane

Toby’s Room by Pat Barker

Independent People by Halldór Laxness

Confessions by Jaume Cabré

Sparks of Bright Matter by Leeanne O’Donnell

Navola by Paolo Bacigalupi

The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak

Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor

Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson

Lizard Tails by Juan Marsé

Creatures of Passage by Morowa Yejidé

Xstabeth by David Keenan

Borges and Me by Jay Parini

Beloved by Toni Morrison (review to appear here soon.)

Conquest by Nina Allan

riverrun, 2023, 315 p.

Allan’s writing has always been idiosyncratic, never straightforward. While skirting the borders of Science Fiction, though absolutely acknowledging the genre’s existence, often tipping over into Fantasy, there has usually been something that sets it apart. It has never quite been full-on SF. Perhaps this is as it should be. Her writing has all the qualities the reader of literary fiction would expect and any writer would want to broaden her possible readership. So much the better then from that point of view if any Science-Fictional allusion can be taken as just that, or a manifestation of a character’s state of mind.

Such is the case here. Frank Landau imagines the Earth is engaged in an interstellar war and he is in training to be a supersoldier in that war. A friend of his is convinced that the next war will be fought against aliens, single-celled organisms and viral pathogens, biological contaminants that have been introduced into Earth’s eco-system without our realising. Which might already be here. Frank is also an enthusiast for music, especially of Bach. Indeed a fair bit of the book is given up to considerations of the merits of various recordings of differing, not necessarily classical, musical pieces – not a feature of your average SF novel it has to be said.

To give some flavour of these musings on music consider this, “I don’t think he (Bach) discovered tonality. I think tonality discovered him. Either that or he was given it. Tonality is like code – a complex programme that is all the more ingenious because it’s universally applicable. Everyone understands tonal counterpoint the moment they hear it. It’s as if the human brain is hard-wired to receive it.”

But the novel is more complicated than the above suggests. Of course it is. It’s by Nina Allan.

Frank may be the book’s driving force but the main narrative is actually concerned with Private Investigator Robin’s search for him after she is contracted to do so by his girl-friend Rachel Gabon when he disappears after meeting up in The Netherlands with a group known as LAvventura, a group whose obsession is The Tower, a 1950s SF novel as by John C Sylvester.

This book, no more than a novella really, is given us in its entirety as one of Conquest’s twelve sections, two others of which constitute a,) a review of The Tower by one Edmond De Groote, a LAvventura luminary, and b,) another review (by De Groote’s acquaintance, Jeanne-Marie Vanderlien,) of a concert at the Concertgebouw. Each of these is of course written in a different register to the rest of Conquest and each is entirely complete in itself. I note here that any dialogue in Conquest is not punctuated as such.

The plot of The Tower is important to Frank’s world view. In the future, Earth has won a gruelling war against an extraterrestrial civilisation. As a monument to human resilience and his own awesomeness, an egotistical billionaire plans to build an enormous residential tower out of a unique kind of rock mined from the alien homeworld. The rock is black and gives off a curious warmth. But what if it is also alive?

Which is fine – and arguably necessary to Allan’s creation. My problem with it is that it doesn’t actually read like a 1950s SF novella. But I suspect it’s not meant to.

LAvventura take The Tower to be an accurate prophecy of an actual forthcoming war among the stars. This is, of course, known to terrestrial governments, who have developed the secret supersoldier programme to deal with it and are probably quietly eliminating people who find out too much.

Robin’s search for Frank takes her to Scarborough to research the of a journalist who’d contacted Frank’s brother Michael about his disappearance but who died the day after the interview. There she discovers Edmund de Groote’s involvement with Frank.

There is a Scottish flavour to the book too. Ex-cop Robin’s memories of the speech of her former Chief Inspector Alec Dunbar, a man with a past to hide, and Robin’s trip to Tain, in Ross-shire, where the train’s journey through the landscape is described.

Robin has the perception that “my entire career has been focused on the dividing line between delusion and genius, which a lot of the time is barely a line at all,” and at one point begins “thinking about a story in which a private detective sets out to discover the truth behind the disappearance of a man who believes Earth stands on the brink of an interstellar war. I ask myself what might happen if the detective becomes convinced the war is real,” which prompts thoughts that maybe the book is about to disappear up its own fundament.

Then a late twist reveals Robin’s heretofore obscure and unsuspected parentage – this is perhaps another elaboration too far – before we are presented with alternative endings.

Robin is an engaging protagonist and Conquest is an accomplished and exceedingly well-written book with many strings to its bow. But is it hedging its bets?

Pedant’s corner:- cul-de-sacs (culs de sac,) “Nunc Dimitis” (Nunc Dimittis.) “De Groote” (Okay, it was the beginning of a sentence but the man’s surname was de Groote, not De Groote.)

Spiderweb by Penelope Lively

Viking, 1998, 220 p.

Stella Brentwood has retired to Somerset after her career as a social anthropologist which took her all around the world – Cardiff’s Tiger Bay interviewing Lascar seamen, the Nile Delta, Malta, Orkney.

She had a lifetime friendship with her fellow Oxford graduate Nadine. They were at University in the fifties when women students were still rare and in a sense exotic. They always had different attitudes to marriage. Nadine was keen on the idea but at the time opined, “‘Marriage is for later. The thing right now is simply – men. Here we are, surrounded by them. Spoiled for choice. The point is to make the most of it – we’re never going to have it so good again.’” To which Stella as narrator adds, “She’s right about that, at least,” though she seems never to have been short of opportunities herself. Though she later reflects, “Extraordinary process, pair bonding. Quite as arbitrary, really, among humans as among animals.” It’s mostly a question of who’s there when the time is ripe. It certainly was for Nadine whose outlook on the subject is entirely practical, saying marriage isn’t about grand passion. Looking back, Stella writes – using the past continuous tense – that, “Divorce is entirely familiar to the children of the fifties, but marriage is still viewed with disconcerting sobriety. It is seen as a permanent arrangement,” adding, “Well, they will find out.”

But Nadine is now dead and her widower Richard has surprisingly got in contact and offers help with first the move to Somerset, recommending a property in Kingston Florey, and then with lawn mowing and such.

Down the road from Stella’s cottage are the premises of T G Hiscox, Agricultural Engineers, where live Mr and Mrs Hiscox and their two sons. Mrs Hiscox is fiercely protective and controlling of her family. The boys in turn feel suffocated by her strictures and take any opportunities for petty acts of vandalism out of her sight.

Over time Stella has realised that “Most people require a support base … the ‘us’ that supplies common cause and provides opportunity for altruism and reciprocal favours and also for prejudice, insularity, racialism, xenophobia and a great deal else.” She has never had that; by choice.

Nadine had described her as detached – which is perhaps a good thing for a novelist to be – and, except perhaps for the local shopkeeper, she is disconnected from the inhabitants of Kingston Florey. An incident involving her dog makes her appreciate she is quite as alienated as the rest of them, on the outside looking in. (Richard reminds her that that was what she was trained for.)

She reflects that emotion recollected in tranquillity is more like it is recollected in clarity, without the helter-skelter feelings which accompanied that emotion in the past and feels that “It is not true that people diminish with age – it is those earlier remembered selves who are in some way pared down, depleted, like those who look out all unaware from old photographs.”

In fact Stella has had a complex of different relationships, some ongoing others not, none of which defines her. Spiderweb is in effect the tale of someone who refuses to be trapped.

Pedant’s corner:- “were able to buy honey and candles made by his bees” (candle-making bees would be an interesting sight,) “none of the army bases were nearby” (none … was nearby,) medieval (mediæval would be nice but I’d settle for mediaeval,) “what looks like the foundations” (what look like the foundations,) “to see from whence” (whence = ‘from where’ so from whence = ‘from from where’,) racialism (nowadays the word is shortened to racism,) “to hove into view” (hove is past tense; ‘to heave into view’.)

One Day by David Nicholls

Hodder, 2010 , 437p.

The novel charts the course of the on-off, but mostly off, relationship of two people, Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew, who hook up on the night of their graduation party, 15th July 1988, St Swithin’s Day as it happens, on what, for him, was meant to be a one-off but for her a long-desired outcome.

The particular conceit of the book is that it returns to view the pair on the same day in the following years as their lives go on different trajectories, so we see their friendship evolve in snapshots, their comings together and driftings apart in the interstices looked back on.

Emma gained a double first at University but Dexter only a 2:2. She is the much more competent of the two mainly because he is a bit of an idiot but it is his career which takes off as he rapidly becomes a success on late Friday night television as co-presenter of a vapid TV show. His rising without trace is emblematic of the unfairness of life. She struggles to get by with writing before finding work in a Tex-Mex restaurant and eventual success when she takes up teaching English. With his life spent in drinking and womanising, quite what she continues to see in him is a mystery.

Their friendship endures in a sporadic way, she an emotional crutch for him, he usually taking her for granted. They have relationships with other people, unsatisfactory for the most part though his short marriage to Sylvie brings a daughter Jasmine, a bright spot in his life, but he is not really mature enough to be a father.

Only the odd unfelicitous phrase mars the writing and there are some nice authorial touches. In a restaurant on a mutual holiday, “The waiter arrived with complimentary Greek brandies, the kind of drink that can only be given away.” In her early thirties “She owns a cafetiere and for the first time in her life she is considering investing in some pot-pourri.” At a restaurant there is a mild critique of culinary pretension – a tower of jenga-cut chips – all but raw – with the dish’s fish component balanced precariously on top.

Really though this is the same old often told story. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, they continue to hold a torch for each other. There seems to be an infinite number of ways to chart the vagaries of human attraction.

Pedant’s corner:- “gin and tonics” (gins and tonic,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech. “‘Someone I can rely onto stick around’” (rely on to stick,) “took a bit an upturn” (a bit of an upturn,) “as if were an” (as if it were an,) “his palette cleansed with a pail of iced Lilt” (the only stuff you can cleanse a palette with is paint-stripper, a palate though could be cleansed with Lilt. Palate was used correctly later,) “‘from the teets of cows’” (teats,) “ ‘not to go the premiere’” (not to go to the premiere,) focussed (x 2, focused,) “as the band play” (as the band plays) “‘That’s that what I meant’” (that ‘that’ isn’t needed,) “laying down again” (lying down again,) smoothes (smooths,) “aqualine features” (aquiline,) “a ball-peen hammer” (ball-pein,) “Suki Meadows’ face” (Meadows’s,) snuck (sneaked,) “a pair of booties” (bootees,) soccer (Grrrr, it’s football,) “a funeral directors” (a funeral director’s,) podiums (the Latin plural is podia.)

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Penguin, 1993, 637 p

Richard Papen was brought up in Plano in California, a place he regards as a backwater. Nevertheless, he has made it to an elite college at Hampden in Vermont. His parents were not well off and he feels the contrast between himself and other students there. At first he tries not to be found out, but such things are hard to disguise. After originally being turned down as student of Greek by its professor Julian, Richard comes into the orbit of his rather small and close-knit class cohort, Francis, Henry, Edmond (known as Bunny,) and twins Charles and Camilla. (Those last two names perhaps now have more of a frisson than they would have had when Tartt wrote the book.) Richard overhears the five arguing about a Greek translation and provides them with a neat solution which encourages them to petition Julian to accept him.

Though Julian is perhaps unorthodox as a teacher – certainly in his attitude to assessments -his reputation as being charismatic is not actually reflected in the text, where he almost seems a nebulous presence, though he is instrumental in the plot unfolding.

Only a few instances are given where Julian’s personality comes through. When struck with the thought that Bunny, due to his girlfriend Marion being Presbyterian, might be about to turn to religion Julian opines, “‘Well whatever one thinks of the Roman Church, it is a worthy and powerful foe. I could accept that sort of conversion with grace. But I shall be very disappointed indeed if we lose him to the Presbyterians.’”

So far, so campus novel; but an exchange in one of Julian’s classes foreshadows later events.

Julian says, “‘We think we have many desires but in fact we only have one. What is it?’”

‘To live,’ said Camilla.

‘To live forever,’ said Bunny.”

A sentiment like that is always a hostage to fortune, whoever utters it.

Richard is not yet fully part of the group when the incident upon which the whole structure rests takes place; a Dionysian Bacchanal at which neither Richard nor Bunny was present where the invocation of the god actually happened – or the other four believed it did, which is the same thing. During their drug induced stravaiging a neighbouring farmer was accidentally killed. Richard learns this only later but Bunny saw the blood-soaked aftermath and did not quite believe their story of running over a deer.

Bunny is a bit of a loose cannon, leaching off anyone he can but most often Henry, of whom he says to Richard, “‘I think he’s got a little bit of Jew blood.’” The incident makes his behaviour worse. At one point Henry’s refusal to indulge him provokes the outburst, “‘You make me sick, you fag, you Nazi, you dirty lousy cheapskate Jew.’” How representative this is of the attitudes of attendees of elite US colleges in the time portrayed I don’t know but perhaps they may still be common.

The group’s growing fear of Bunny’s possible betrayal of their secret, complicated by the convoluted relationships between Francis and Charles, Charles and Camilla and Camilla and Henry, and Richard’s unrequited feelings for Camilla is drastic, irrevocable and only creates further tensions between them.

The book received a lot of praise and became a best seller. While being well enough written it is also about one third as long as it needs to be. The author might argue she was providing space to develop character but that could still have been done more economically. Moreover, nearly all of the characters are unsympathetic and morally bankrupt to a greater or lesser degree. Though maybe this is true of elite US college alumni/alumnae in general. Even viewpoint character Richard is weak and easily swayed.

It’s not encouraged me to read anything else by Tartt.

Pedant’s corner:- a missing comma before a piece of dialogue (x 2,) – and at its end (x 1.) “‘If I’d of been’” (‘If I’d have been’; or, ‘If I’d’ve been’ – but it was in dialogue,) “it was the epicenter” [sic] – despite this being a British publication the text is in USian – (not ‘it was off centre’, just ‘it was the centre’,) “littered like a fairgrounds” (like a fairground. Is “fairgrounds” USian?) Gladiola (Gladioli.) “None of his things were gone” (None of his things was gone,) organdy (organdie,) a cat is first referred to as she but later as he.

 

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