Intimidating books

My plans to start the new year with a flurry of exercise and administrative efficiency have been hampered somewhat by a stinking cold. I thought I'd done well to avoid it as my family fell one by one but, just as I was congratulating myself on my immunity, I too have succumbed.

But it could be worse. I have a huge stock of reading material to keep me occupied. You might remember that I was hankering after a fine cloth bound edition of Les Miserables. Well, I was not disappointed on that or many other counts. My intention was to read it before watching the film that is to released mid January. Now I have the book in my hands I realise the flaw in my thinking. With 1232 pages of tiny print it is, quite frankly, massive.

Now I'm not easily intimidated by a book, but weighty tomes like this do fill me with a certain sense of dread. Yet with the inclement weather and another week off work, I have girded my loins and taken the plunge. And what a treat it is too! Clearly my year of studying the nineteenth century novel has paid dividends. What does it matter that it has taken the first seventy pages to establish that the Bishop of Digne is both generous and open minded? And then, just when I thought we had an inciting incident in the arrival of the ex-convict Jean Valjean, we have another diversion into his backstory and the injustices of French society. Perhaps it's just the luxury of sustained spells of reading, but I am really having a ball.

It might even be the time to tackle my other bête noire - Mary Warnock's Existentialism. I find this combination of big ideas and academic writing quite intimidating. My husband's gift of 'The Existentialist's Guide to Death, the Universe and Nothingness' might be more accessible. Certainly it started well over a hot chocolate in Caffe Nero, but then I started scratching my head over the distinction between 'being-for-itself' and 'being-of-itself'. Perhaps that's one to pursue another day.

North and South - a northern Pride and Prejudice?

This was my first book for The Classics Club Challenge.

First published in twenty weekly episodes in Dickens' Household Words in 1854, this was Gaskell's second 'industrial' novel.  Perhaps it was this connection with Dickens that led me to expect something, well, more Dickensian.  North and South appeared in the periodical directly after Dickens' Hard Times. Both novels, set in the industrial north, deal with the conditions of workers and strikers in the cotton industry.

My first mistake, I think, was to think that any other writer could be like Dickens. Who could imitate his theatrical style, grand scope and memorable characters?  I've yet to read Hard Times, but North and South surprised me by being as much a romance as it is a social commentary.

Elizabeth Gaskell

With her father's break from the church, Margaret Hale finds herself uprooted from country life and transplanted to the grim mill town of Milton in Darkshire. After the open fields of her native Helstone she finds the northern town oppressive. She is equally unimpressed by the northern merchants, particularly one Mr Thornton, a wealthy mill owner and her father's student:

"With such an expression of resolution and power, no face, however plain in feature, could be either vulgar or common. I should not like to have to bargain with him; he looks very inflexible. Altogether a man who seems made for his niche, mamma; sagacious, and strong, as becomes a great tradesman."

It is the 'tradesman' part that Margaret looks down on, for despite her own reduced circumstances, she considers herself of a higher class and better educated than he. For his part, Thornton finds Margaret haughty and proud though, as is the way with these stories, he finds herself attracted to her nonetheless.

There is more to the conflict between Margaret and Thornton than just perceived differences in class. Margaret dislikes Thornton's authoritarian attitude to his workers, whilst he considers her naive in her views on worker/master relations. It is only through the strike and Margaret's friendship with the poor Higgins family that the two begin to reconcile their views. Margaret's own family difficulties lead her into a compromising position and she discovers that she doesn't own the moral high ground after all.

Elizabeth Gaskell was in a good position to understand the hardships of the cotton workers. Having grown up, like Margaret, in the countryside, she married the minister William Gaskell and settled in Manchester where William was Minister at the Cross Street Unitarian Chapel. In addition to her writing career, she worked hard to improve the lives of the people living in the slums of Manchester.

The book considers the differences between lives of the workers in the industrial north and those living in the rural south. Margaret comes to appreciate that one is not intrinsically better than the other:

'I suppose each mode of life produces its own trials and its own temptations. The dweller in towns must find it as difficult to be patient and calm, as the country-bred man must find it to be active, and equal to unwonted emergencies. Both must find it hard to realize a future of any kind; the one because the present is so living and hurrying close around him; the other because his life tempts him to revel in the mere sense of animal existence, not knowing of, and consequently not caring for any pungency of pleasure for the attainment of which he can plan, and deny himself and look forward.'

North and South is interesting too for the way in which it explores masculine and feminine roles in Victorian society. For the most part, the female characters are limp and ineffective. There's Edith, Margaret's beautiful but spoilt cousin. She is a shallow, frivolous creature who has no sense of the world beyond her own privileged home. Margaret's mother never overcomes the shock of the move to the industrial north.  Through all the adversities heaped on the Hale family, it is Margaret that holds the family together. Guided by her own sense of right and wrong, she steps beyond the conventional boundaries of the 'feminine' sphere, first to defend Thornton against the striking workers and later in support of the cotton worker Higgins. She deals too with matters legal, working in defence of her brother who is exiled overseas. Thornton's mother is the only other strong female character, but she is fierce and judgemental. It is only Margaret who combines strength of character with real compassion for her fellow man and woman. As a modern woman reading this book, its easy to underestimate Margaret's remarkable achievements.

To be sure, despite the pride and prejudices of the two central characters, Thornton is not a romantic hero in the mould of Darcy, and nor does Gaskell's writing have the acuity and wit of Austen.  Yet the more I reflect on North and South, the more I appreciate the scope of book that has so much to say about life in Victorian England.

Life in a northern town

Reading the opening chapters of Gaskell's North and South, it struck me how few books I've read about life in a northern town.

So many of the books I've read, either classic or contemporary, are set in London or the Home Counties. Yet as a born and bred northern lass, I want to read more about the north. In North and South, Margaret's first impressions of Milton in Darkshire are inauspicious:

'For several miles before they reached Milton, they saw a deep lead-coloured cloud hanging over the horizon in the direction in which it lay. It was all the darker from contrast with the pale gray-blue of the wintry sky; for in Heston there had been the earliest signs of frost. Nearer to the town, the air had a faint taste and smell of smoke; perhaps, after all, more a loss of the fragrance of grass and herbage than any positive taste or smell. Quick they were whirled over long, straight, hopeless streets of regularly-built houses, all small and of brick. Here and there a great oblong many-windowed factory stood up, like a hen among her chickens, puffing out black 'unparliamentary' smoke, and sufficiently accounting for the cloud which Margaret had taken to foretell rain.'

Before I first visited Lancashire, I had an impression of grim landscapes dominated by 'dark satanic mills' and whilst there are undoubtedly many old textile mills here, most of the ones I know are on canal sides, their hard edges softened over time by trees and water. The mills didn't only shape the landscape but also the social structure of the region. Whereas in the North East of England, men's industries such as coal-mining, steelworks and shipbuilding dominated and a woman's place was in the home, in the North West women had more freedom and could work in the mills. This is a huge simplification of course, but you get the idea. I was always impressed by my friend's mother's ability to lip-read - a skill she'd learnt in her youth working in a textile mill.

So, back to books. I'm tempted to drop my Classics Club choice A Tale of Two Cities, in favour of Dickens' Hard Times. It's setting, Coketown, is said to be based on Preston, just half an hour down the motorway from here. I once worked for a textile company in Manchester and, even with the more modern looms, the noise and the atmosphere was something to behold.

I've added Pat Barker's first novel Union Street to my wish list. Following the impoverished lives of seven working class women in a northern town, I suspect it will be a compelling, if harrowing, read.

If all this northern doom and gloom gets too much for me, I can always return to the wonderfully funny Billy Liar. His disastrous turn at the local working men's club makes me chuckle every time I think of it.

Can you recommend any northern reads?

Nineteenth century Oscars

With two days to go to my exam, my head is more tightly packed than a teenage girl's suitcase.

So, for a bit of light relief, my nineteenth century Oscar winners are:

1. Best female character: Jane Eyre
2. Best male character: Lydgate in Middlemarch
3. Best scene: tough one this, but I'm going for Jane Eyre's first wedding day
4. Best villain: Count Fosco in The Woman in White
5. Best sense of place: the mine, Le Voreux, in Germinal
6. Best seduction/sex scene: Sergeant Troy's swordplay in Far From the Madding Crowd
7. The book I wish I'd written: Jane Eyre

Feel free to add your own...

Heart of Darkness

He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—"The horror! The horror!"

The Roi des Belges, the steamboat
commanded by Conrad on the Congo in 1889

Twenty six years ago I began my A Level English Literature studies with Heart of Darkness.  As soon as I'd finished the book I turned back to the start and read it all over again.

Now it's the final text of my English Literature degree. I've reread it several times over the years since, as a novella, it's just the right length for a Sunday afternoon indulgence. Each time I read it, I find more to admire.

Marlow, the narrator for most of the book, recounts his journey as the captain of a steamboat down the Congo into the 'heart of darkness' in search of the infamous Mr Kurtz.  Conrad's vivid descriptions are based on his own experiences of the Congo and I'm never sure what is most terrifying, the oppressive jungle or the assortment of macabre colonists he meets on the way.  From the old women knitting ominously in the company office, to the immaculate Accountant or the horror of Kurtz himself, we see that the darkness is spiritual just as much as physical.  These are the 'hollow men' that inspired T.S. Eliot's poem.

The Nigerian author Chinua Achebe attacked the book as racist. Whilst Conrad is critical of European colonialism, Africans in the book are dehumanized and, at best, described as noble savages.

I can't disagree with Achebe's criticism, but as a work of immense power and a vivid account of the effects of colonialism, I can't think of a better read.

Far from the Madding Crowd

Through the summer I ticked the books off my reading list until only two remained.  The first, Dombey and Son, daunted by its size.  The second was Far from the Madding Crowd.  At seventeen I read Tess of the d'Urbervilles and hated every word.  Dull, dull, dull.  At forty-two, I pushed Hardy further down the pile until I couldn't ignore it any more.

Far from the Madding Crowd, first published in 1874, is the story of Bathsheba Everdene and her three suitors, Gabriel Oak, Farmer Boldwood and the dashing Sergeant Troy. Set in Hardy's fictitious Wessex, we follow Bathsheba's progress towards self-knowledge and emotional maturity.  The book has an episodic quality, with key events closely linked to the shepherd's calendar.  Hardy describes key scenes with an artist's eye, as in this scene where Gabriel Oak fights a fire on Bathsheba's farm:

'This before Gabriel's eyes was a rick of straw, loosely put together, and the flames darted into it with lightning swiftness.  It glowed on the windward side, rising and falling in intensity like the coal of a cigar.  Then a superincumbent bundle rolled down, with a whisking noise, flames elongated and bent themselves about with a quiet roar, but no crackle.  Banks of smoke went off horizontally at the back like passing clouds, and behind these burned hidden pyres, illuminating the semi-transparent sheet of smoke to a lustrous yellow uniformity.  Individual straws in the foreground were consumed in a creeping movement of ruddy heat, as if they were knots of red worms, and above shone imaginary fiery faces, tongues hanging from lips, glaring eyes, and other impish forms, from which at intervals sparks flew in clusters like birds from a nest.'


I won't give the story away, but there are other dramas too: the coffin scene and Troy's reappearance to name but two.  And then there's sex.  Or at least, as close as you could get in a Victorian novel intended for the general public.  In a chapter suggestively entitled 'The Hollow amid the Ferns', Troy seduces Bathsheba with his sword skills:

'He flourished the sword by way of introduction number two, and the next thing of which she was conscious was that the point and blade of the sword were darting with a gleam towards her left side just above her hip; then of their reappearance on her right side, emerging as it were from between her ribs, having apparently passed through her body...
   'Oh!' she cried out in affright, pressing her hand to her side. 'Have you run me through? - no, you have not! Whatever have you done!'
    'I have not touched you,' said Troy. 'It was mere sleight of hand.  The sword passed behind you.  Now you are not afraid, are you?  Because if you are I can't perform.  I give my word that I will not only not hurt you, but not once touch you.'
   'I don't think I am afraid.  You are quite sure that you will not hurt me?'
   'Quite sure-'
   'Is the sword very sharp?'


Steamy stuff indeed.

Germinal

'He squatted down inside one of the tubs with his workmates, it plunged down again, then, barely four minutes later, it surged back up again, ready to swallow down another load of men. For half an hour the pit gulped down these meals, in more or less greedy mouthfuls, depending on the depth of the level they were bound for, but without ever stopping, always hungry, its giant bowels capable of digesting a nation. It filled and filled again, and the dark depths remained silent as the cage rose up from the void, silently opening its gaping jaws.'

Germinal is set in a mining village in northern France in the 1860s.   When the 'Company' cuts the wages of the already impoverished miners, a strike is called, fuelled by the idealism of the young outsider Etienne.  As the days turn into weeks and then months, the miners are driven to desperate measures and a series of appalling events is set in motion.

Germinal is the thirteenth in Zola's twenty volume series depicting the life of ordinary people during the second French empire.   It pulls no punches in its description of conditions down the pit, or of the poverty and promiscuity of the mining community. His writing was driven by his belief in naturalism and the desire to portray, in a scientific fashion, the effects of heredity and environment on individuals and their community.  His description of the miners' life is detailed and convincing, but his powerful prose goes beyond observation into the realms of myth.

From time to time, in the course of my literary studies, I come across a book that leaves a lasting impression.  Germinal has moved and disturbed me as much as anything I have ever read.