"The Turn Of The Screw"

The Turn Of The Screw by Henry James

How did I not know this was a ghost story? I never read ghost stories. They're dark and creepy and I don't want or need all that creepiness bouncing around in my head weeks after I've finished reading the book. Serves me right for choosing a book without reading anything about it first.

It was, indeed, creepy, but there was so much melodrama that it became almost comical. Almost. You won't actually be laughing, especially as the story ends. Fortunately it was a short book; any more histrionics would have been too much.

Another thing that became almost too much was the awkward way Henry James puts sentences together. Has any writer ever used more commas? Take a look at these:

"When later, by the schoolroom fire, I was served with tea by the usual maid, I indulged, on the article of my other pupil, in no inquiry whatever."

"She passed that night, by the most tacit, and I should add, were not the word such a grotesque false note, the happiest of arrangements, with Mrs. Grose."

"I could only get on at all by taking 'nature' into my confidence and my account by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue,"

There were hundreds of sentences like that, some of them so complex I had to re-read them a few times to be sure I understood what he was saying. Not that I want any authour's writing to be particularly easy to read, but sometimes it seemed like James was working hard to make things more complicated than necessary.

All in all, I did enjoy this creepy, comma-coma inducing book, but I am hoping for a little more plot, and a little less punctuation, from the next James novel I read.

"The Kite Runner"

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

I was surprised by this book. I shouldn't have been because everything I read about it was positive, glowing even. I've been looking at it on my shelf for a few years but hesitated to read it because of the setting. I knew it was about Afghanistan in the years leading up to the revolution and it seems to me that every story I read, or watch, set in that part of the world sooner or later ends in some kind of torture scene and, frankly, I can't take any more. I can't take reading it, watching it or hearing the screams. Who ever decided that torture was good entertainment? I hate it and I'm done. Fortunately, a friend read this and told me how good it was so I took the plunge. She was right; it's an incredible story, strong and gritty, but beautiful, and no torture scenes.

     Amir grew up in Kabul in comfortable circumstances with a successful father and a nice home. On the property was a small hut where their servants, Ali and his son Hassan, lived. Hassan and Amir were boys together and became the best of friends, as far as their positions in society would allow. It is the story of their relationship that sets the stage for everything else that happens.

When the revolution comes, Amir and his father escape to America with only what they can carry and must begin to adjust to a completely different kind of life. Amir grows into manhood, gets an education and establishes a life of his own, but everything he does is overshadowed by events that happened when he and Hassan were boys. In time, a situation arises requiring Amir to make the dangerous trip back. There he will come face to face with his past and perhaps, as a friend says, find "a way to be good again."

This is a powerfully touching story. It's beautiful and heartbreaking, sad and hopeful, a story of betrayal and redemption that I don't think I'll ever forget. I couldn't recommend it more highly.   

"Peter Pan"

Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie

Starting out as a play in 1904, Peter Pan didn't become a book until 1911 when it bore the title of "Peter And Wendy". Since then it's gone through many re-creations as musicals, movies and sanitized "Golden Book" versions for young children that don't include killing, being killed or being eaten by a crocodile.

When my book club chose it as one of this year's selections I thought I was familiar with the story. When I was going through the list to see which ones I had read before I didn't even pause over Peter Pan. Of course I've read it. Who hasn't read Peter Pan? I remember Julia Roberts as Tinkerbell. Oh. Wait. That was a movie. All I could really remember about the book was that it was thin, hard covered and had lots of colourful pictures with a line or two of words on each page. No, I had never actually read Peter Pan.

The bones of the story are the same however you experience it, but the book - the real book - has a lot more flesh on those bones. And it isn't all sweetness and charm. You have children killing pirates, Peter being horribly self-centered, and childhood being exposed as "heartless". Not the cleaned up version I'd read to my kids.

Biographers write that J.M. Barrie himself had a hard time leaving childhood behind. He befriended little boys (we're conditioned now to see that as creepy, but try to read only innocent fun into it) and was happiest when he was telling them stories and playing games with them. He once wrote: "It is as if long after writing Peter Pan, it's true meaning came to me - Desperate attempt to grow up but can't."

I've read that Barrie was expressing concerns about the position of men in society in the character of Mr. Darling. In the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution more men worked in factories and offices and he feared they were losing their individuality, their manliness. Mr. Darling struggles to maintain an authourity in the home which he no longer has in the world. Much of the book is written tongue-in-cheek, but you can find a hint of more serious things between the lines. It sounds ridiculous that Mr. & Mrs. Darling were adding up their bills to see if they could afford to keep Wendy. It's just one more absurdity in a fantastic tale told to children. And yet in that period men were leaving the fields to work in cities and instead of raising the meat for the family's table they worked for wages determined by someone else. They were more limited in what they could provide for their families so the number of children they could support was probably becoming a very real issue.

Another major theme in the book is the value of women in society: important in the home for cleaning, darning socks and taking care of everybody but clearly inferior to men. When Peter and the boys went out for adventures, Wendy stayed home to mind the hearth. In the great battle on the ship, Wendy is the damsel in distress that needs rescuing by the boys. A remark made early in the book about male children being a cause for greater celebration than female children pretty much says it all. Some suggest that this issue may also have been a response to the times. Women were beginning to take some of those factory and office jobs leaving their children, for periods of time, "motherless".

Neverland, is a place where you don't have to grow up or assume responsibility, where you can fill up on imaginary dinners, and where if you believe you can fly, then you can. You can even pluck a new mother out of an upstairs window and bring her back as your own. You can follow your own desires not thinking about others. You can kill and no one will hold you to account.

That's how we like to fantasize childhood. We tell ourselves it's all about being innocent and carefree but that is, in the end, just a fantasy. In truth children are fairly selfish creatures wrapped up in their own needs and desires, seldom thinking of others. If it were not so there would be no tantrums. We want to tell children they can do anything they set their minds to but that, too, is fantasy. The truth is they have limits and are never going to fly. As one critic so succinctly put it: "Neverland as it's very name suggests is an impossibility, an idealization of what never was."

Having at long last read the "real" book, I do recommend it. Everybody should be able to say they've read Peter Pan. Who the heck hasn't read Peter Pan?

"Animal Farm"

Animal Farm by George Orwell

I had a lot of flashbacks to "1984" when I was reading this...just replace the city with a farm and the people with animals. It was written as a satire on totalitarian government and as one web site said: "...to serve as a cautionary tale about Stalinism." The various animals in the story are meant to represent specific people in Soviet society/government.

It was a very easy book to read, written much like a fairy tale really, but terribly disheartening. Orwell believed that every form of government is doomed to degenerate into totalitarianism. After the animals rebelled against the humans and won control of the farm, and theoretically their freedom, it was agreed the pigs should be the leaders because they were the most intelligent of all the animals. The corruption began with a small thing: the pigs decided to keep the apples and milk for themselves because they needed the good food to keep them fit for the mental stress of leadership. They didn't need it, in fact they needed it less than the physical workers, but they say it's for the greater good and they are believed.

The greed and power-grabbing grow as the pigs grant themselves more honor and benefits while the rest must work harder and consume less. It wasn't long before I wanted somebody to stand up and say "Enough!" It's so much easier to see it happening in a little book than it is over time in the actual course of history. Of course nobody stood up and the separation between the leadership and the workers continued to widen until in the end their leaders in the "free" state became indistinguishable from the human tyrant they had served before.

Ultimately, Orwell's view is without hope. He believes it is inevitable that every society will end this way, so even if the workers revolt against their own kind as they did the humans and win, then the same thing would happen. A new group would set themselves apart and use their superior intelligence to deceive and cheat everybody else into believing they are working for the "greater good".

It's all rather depressing. I felt the same reading "1984". In both stories the leaders rewrite history to support whatever greedy new plan they want to implement next. It's infuriating and what makes these books so sad is the authour believed we are all doomed to live in this kind of world. Freedom, he felt, was not achievable.

Another common thread in the two books is the coercing of confessions to crime from the accused suspects and then executing them without knowing or caring if they were guilty. I came away from both books a little more cynical about everything I hear from government. I don't live under a totalitarian regime and I'm grateful for that, but I'm aware that what they tell us is carefully crafted to sway public thinking and accomplish their own agendas, and that truth-skirting is an accepted tool for getting things done. I have a lot of freedoms here though and I believe that people can live freely within necessary boundaries. I value the freedoms to think, speak and choose which Orwell believed were not possible. But I also think I see some of those freedoms beginning to quietly erode and I wonder if it's just a matter of time and if Orwell may prove to be right.

You won't have to invest much time reading this book (if there actually is anybody left who hasn't read it) because it's short, but you will get more out of it if you do a bit of research while you're reading. Orwell may have been a pessimist but he was a brilliant one and is worth studying. I love this book. I hate this book. Any book that can make you feel like that must be good. 

"I'll Never Be French"

I'll Never Be French (no matter what I do) by Mark Greenside

Mark Greenside was living with his girlfriend in New York when out of the blue she said to him: "Honey, let's go to France". He had been in France years earlier and it had not been a good experience, and he didn't speak French, so he wasn't thrilled with the idea. But she had answers for all his arguments and eventually she wore him down. They went to France - Brittany - for the summer. This is the story of how he fell in love with the country, bought a house and became a permanent part-time resident.

The title is what attracted me. He sounds so desperate to fit in. The fact that it's about France didn't hurt either, since I can't seem to turn down anything in writing that is set there or even mentions it a few times. There's a quote on the cover from the Detroit Free Press suggesting we all "run, do not walk, to the nearest copy of I'll Never Be French." They call it a  "funny, funny book". I'm less enthusiastic. I think one "funny" is enough and walking is fine.

It's possible I've read too many of these stories and they just don't impress me that much anymore. I don't want that to be true but I don't know how else to explain my lack of excitement about this one. The writing is decent, the stories are interesting enough, his honesty about the helplessness he felt is (at least one) funny and the setting is perfect. I can't figure out why I was disappointed.

Greenside's experience was a little different than some I've read where trying to buy a house or a car turns into a nightmare. In this case people seemed to bend over backwards to help him and make it easy. What he did find difficult were the small things, like finding a locker at an airport or figuring out how to stand in line at a bakery. In his words: "It's extraordinary, really, the number of ways France finds to make daily life a difficulty."

Well I don't care. Great book or not, difficult daily life or not, I still want to go to France. As for the book, I'd give it maybe a 5 or 6, depending on my mood, out of 10. As Randy Jackson likes to say...it was just ok for me.

"Middlemarch"

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Set in the fictional village of Middlemarch in 1830's England, this book has as many plots and characters as any real life village where dozens of stories are lived out simultaneously and where each person's choices affect the lives of many others. There is Dorothea, an idealist who marries an older intellectual with the hope of assisting him in his life's work and finds that life doesn't always deliver what it promises. Complicating her life is a man of questionable character who has become attracted to her and doesn't seem to know when to back off. Then there is the young doctor with fresh ideas about medicine who sets up practice in Middlemarch and meets with resistance from a community that is content with the way things have always been done and does not see any need to change. Another character is Fred Vincy, a young man who has yet to develop a work ethic or a sense of responsibility. He has put all his hopes in the mere possibility of an inheritance and his recklessness with money gets him into trouble with his own family and with that of the girl he hopes one day to marry. Throughout and around their stories are those of  family members, local clergy and politicians, and of course, the neighbours.

Though there are some lighter moments, the overall tone of the novel is resigned, almost melancholy. Eliot has a sober outlook on life, marriage and a woman's place in both.  She says of Dorothea: "It had been easier ever since to quell emotion than incur the consequences of venting it.", a truth for many but sad nevertheless. The lot of women in society is a major theme, with Eliot questioning the barriers and restraints placed on them through her female characters. Those who speak up and take some control in their relationships are the ones who end up happiest in the story.

The authour's views on marriage are more realistic than pessimistic. Whereas many romantic novels end with the marriage of the main characters and an assumed happily ever after, Eliot takes us beyond that into the daily reality of married life and doesn't allow us to deceive ourselves about the difficulties and disappointments. The marriages in the novel aren't perfect by any means, but it does say something that as the novel ends, all of the long married couples still have deep affection for one another.

I enjoyed Eliot's characters because they are flawed like us, and their lives, like ours, are a messy mix of happiness and misery. One writer summed it up this way: "Her ambition was to create a portrait of the complexity of ordinary human life, quiet tragedy, petty character failings, small triumphs and quiet moments of dignity." She wanted to give her readers a story that resembled real life rather than just another fairy tale.

There were times when I found the writing tedious, like in Chapter 45 where one sentence alone had more than 100 words, 8 commas and 2 semi-colons. But then she would say something like this: "...concealment had been the habit of his life, and the impulse to confession had no power against the dread of a deeper humiliation.", and I'd be captivated again by her ability to express such a large concept in so few words. I love the language; it's elegant and intelligent and sometimes deeply moving, like this beautifully crafted sentence: "this was the consciousness that Bulstrode was withering under while he made his preparations for departing from Middlemarch, and going to end his stricken life in that sad refuge, the indifference of new faces". And besides all that, I'd much rather be a person "whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations" than just somebody who's easily led astray. I love Eliot's writing and find it pure joy to read.

Eliot expresses her views on society in the thoughts and dialogue of her characters, but there are times when she silences them completely and speaks directly to the reader as herself, and she doesn't pull any punches:

• "As it is, the quickest of us walk about well padded with stupidity."

• "Sane people did what their neighbors did so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them."

• " ...the critical strictness of persons whose celestial intimacies seemed not to improve their domestic manners..."

After recounting in the story the many failings of Mrs. Cadwallader, she turns directly to the reader and says: "Let any lady who is inclined to be hard on Mrs. Cadwallader inquire into the comprehensiveness of her own beautiful views, and be quite sure that they afford accommodation for all the lives which have the honor to coexist with hers." Keeping in mind that it was she who painted the unkind picture of the woman in the first place, one wonders if she holds the reader to a higher standard than she does herself. Hmmm.

I was quite happy to find the "Finale" at the end. It would have been too disappointing to spend so much time with these characters, watching their stories unfold day by day, then simply turn away not knowing if any happiness was achieved in their lives. Eliot saves us from that by giving us a quick summary of where they go from here.

The final paragraph was a good summary of the whole point of the novel: nobody has a great life all the time, but the bit of good each one can do in the small space they occupy is worth something and does make a difference. And maybe Eliot is justifying her novel here. Maybe she's saying that the ordinary stories are worth telling, especially if they strengthen our inclination to do good in our own time and place. It was, I think, the perfect ending to a perfectly wonderful book.