Good evening!
I have, once again, been very busy editing my PhD but I did manage to get some reading done this week. I’ve mainly been battling with Brontë’s Shirley, a truly bonkers novel when you start digging into it -- certainly not one that you can reach satisfying conclusions with because it’s so ambivalent. Tbf that might have something to do with how all of her remaining siblings died while she was writing about it.
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What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
Last weekend I read my first novel by Elizabeth Taylor (not that one), and it certainly will not be my last. A lot of people whose taste I respect love Taylor, and I’m kind of mad at myself that it took so long for me to read her. I read A View of the Harbour (1947) in two days; on Sunday, I woke up genuinely very excited to get back to it.
A View of the Harbour has a small cast of characters living in an anonymous English seaside town just after the war has finished. Most of the people own businesses that cater to seasonal out-of-towners, meaning that this is not a wealthy corner of the world -- instead it’s full of anxieties and tensions. A would-be painter, Bertram Hemingway, has taken residence in one of the pub’s rooms to work on a coastal scene, but he finds that the locals are more interesting than the hobby he has picked up during his retirement from sailing. The narrative focus skips between the town’s residents, such as the disabled Mrs Bracey and her two adults daughters who own a second-hand clothes shop, Beth Cazabon, a novelist who takes little notice of the things happening in her daily life, and her childhood friend Tory, who has recently divorced after her husband ran off with a woman officer in the war. The characters are incredibly distinct from one another, but all of their stories intermingle and bounce off of one another, as usually happens in small, insular communities.
Bertram acts as the outsider going into the community as a kind of conduit for the reader, but he is not a placid, neutral character, as is usually the case with this kind of figure. He’s incredibly self-important, and his actions cause divisions that he can’t, and won’t, see. I actually kind of hated him in an enjoyable way -- a kind of ‘oh here’s that guy again’ type of feeling that becomes funny. As well as being the outsider who comes in, he also acts as a force that works against this very set group of people, revealing to themselves their own shortcomings in varying ways.
This is a very quiet novel, one of those where somebody could argue that ‘nothing happens’, but it is so expertly wrought that it really needs to be read to be believed. Taylor is so astute in her observations about daily life that she puts a new light on pretty normal behaviours. What I think works so successfully in the novel is her presentation of loneliness and how it can manifest in a number of ways. Despite this being about community, every person in it feels, to some degree, extremely isolated. Taylor presents this as both a universal feeling, and also a specific hangover from the war, when the threat of it starting again was still real, and everyone was still adjusting to things going back to normal after it had all been so wrecked in the previous years. A truly magnificent novel, with an ending that I loved -- it really made a statement about how things just, quite simply, keep happening.
I’m now reading Oxblood by Tom Benn (2022), and I have to say, I’m not completely enchanté with it. The premise is something I would usually be extremely into; it is about a crime family in Manchester between the 60s and 90s, primarily told from the perspective of its women. These women are not themselves criminals, but rather accessories to things that their husbands, sons, fathers and brothers do, and they are complicit in much more complicated and nuanced ways. What I like about it is that Benn has gone some lengths to not have this as a ‘men are doing things and women are sad about it’ type of crime novel -- rather, he presents them as much more rounded people.
I’ve felt a vague sense of unease while reading this, and I think I can pinpoint why -- despite his characters being pretty well-rounded, it does still rely on tropes about women, especially those in crime/ gangster media. There’s the matriarch of the family, who is of course fat, wears a lot of gold jewellery, is a good cook and gives food and board to anyone who needs it. There is the middle-aged sad mum who isn’t paying attention to her kids and is living in the past. There is the teen mum, who is acting out (mostly sexually). There is the sexualised mistress, who all the men can’t get enough of. The factory girls, the brassy mums, and so on. He is writing about a specific place and so some of these women do make sense, but it does feel incredibly informed by other texts of the genre, and not really in a good way.
Last note about this -- I flicked to the acknowledgements at the beginning (I usually do this), and Benn states that it took him 8 years to write. Unfortunately there are moments where you can, because the prose seems incredibly laboured and too thought-out. There are also random bits of experimental prose that don’t really add anything, and doesn’t mesh well with the standard prose that makes up the majority of the text.
Books on my radar
I remembered about ‘public libraries’ this week, and this is where I got Oxblood from. I also took out In Memoriam by Alice Winn (2023), The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer (1962), The Queens of Sarmiento Park (2022) and The New Life by Tom Crewe (2023)