Jim Grimsley

I’d never have thought to give a mere three stars to a Virginia Woolf book, or to write about its charming qualities, its cuteness, its rather sentimental portrait of dogs, their owners, and poets with strange ailments who languish in their bedrooms; but there you go. This book was an amusement made delightful by its contrast to the serious-literature quality of nearly everything else I’ve read by Woolf, whom I admire to distraction. What English major could resist the biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog as told by one of the pre-eminent authors of any possible canon of literature? Here is Woolf having, of all things, some fun with her writing. The appeal of this, however, does fade as the book goes on, as Flush jealously guards his mistress from other animals, from suitors, from one suitor in particular; as Flush escapes from the Barrett household with the happy poet couple of Browning and Browning; as Flush adventures in Italy in search of love. It is both a statement of the book’s strengths and weaknesses to state that this alone among Woolf’s work would be suitable, and even recommendable, as a Disney property. An animated story in which Elizabeth becomes the next Disney princess, perhaps, and Flush her faithful dog companion. My tongue is where it ought to be for such a statement, but nevertheless that would be a cartoon worth watching.

When I first encountered Elizabeth Gaskell (Wives and Daughters) I thought that she was one of those writers who ought to get more attention; later I realized my response was indicative of my own ignorance, which is so often the case. Cranford has, after all, been adapted to television with one of the best casts to be found, and I have watched the series almost as often as I have read the book. In her other works, Gaskell is concerned with social problems and issues of her time; in this book she is largely concerned with recording the lives of strong spinsters and widows in a small, old-fashioned community that sees itself as a bulwark against change. The charm of this book is the women whose stories she tells, with such particular attention to their intersections, their spats, their gossip, their mores and customs, and the changes they endure. In this regard, especially when the railroad comes to Cranford, Gaskell’s social analysis merges with her incomparable ability to draw meaning out of what for lack of a better word I would call the ordinary. She is one of those writers who reminds that there are no small lives, no ordinary people, but only the particular and the real. These writings are not intended as stories so much as portraits, “vignettes” as they are often termed, but they are as delightful as they are incisive. (I will forever see Miss Mattie as Judy Dench, Eileen Atkins as Miss Deborah, and Imelda Staunton as Miss Pole. What has that to do with the book? Actors bring their best to material that they love.)

This book is the closing volume of the Beulah Quintet, which I see mentioned on Goodreads as Settle’s best known work. The incidents that are narrated in this novel are mentioned in the introductions to all the previous volumes, the shock of something in the past – presumably in Settle’s past – that incited the search for the roots of what she terms American freedom. Let me state that I have admired the first four books in the series especially for the quality of the writing, but have been at times troubled by the content, as I have detailed in posts on volumes one through four. Settle is a remarkable writer of historical works, delving into the characters and depicting them as they were in the era, however uncomfortable that might be for modern readers, given that the books are populated by slaveholders, slaves, First Nations peoples, and a wealth of others. She has an eerie ability to enter into the modes of thinking of her creations, and this is often disconcerting, for she understands that these people of the past are alien to modern readers, but she forges ahead with her work, convinced of its purpose. What has convinced her of this purpose is what she writes about in this last volume of the set. The protagonist of the book is the writer of the Beulah Quintet, and so one is justified in relating her as Settle. So I will not make much distinction between the two in my response. It is utterly disappointing to find that the impetus for this long historical delve is the death of her brother, Johnny, and we are somehow to see his figure as tragic, when he appears to be more or less a wastrel, a drunk, and a dog. Exactly how he gets himself killed is less important than the aftermath of his death, when all his friends (who are of course of the best families in Beulah and environs) mourn him and search for the meaning of his wasted life. In Settles’s vision, Johnny is as much a victim of the past as are all the descendants of slaves, all the poor people who worked in his ancestor’s coal mines – I won’t belabor this as I have nothing to say about the conceit except that it borders on lunacy for me. This book is emptier and less appealing. But I don’t feel that I wasted my time in reading this book, and certainly not in reading its predecessors. What is interesting in it is the theory of the novel, that suddenly we can meet the author of the previous four and read her as a fictional character. There are some vivid episodes throughout the text. But there is a presumption of the importance of the rich and their history – they are the people who matter most, and it is in them we find the core of history. For me, this is a deal-breaker.

Remembering Babylon by David Malouf
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This novel approaches its subject, the return of a white man raised by indigenous Australians to his community of origin, with a succinctness that almost renders the story slight. But the beauty of the prose and the deftness of the Malouf’s choices make the book a surprise. There is a hint of Omensetter’s Luck in the shape of the tale though Malouf is very much clearer in his prose than Gass. For me clarity is a plus. There is a story that emerges, and it has Gemmy at its center, but it ranges afield into the vivid others who surround him, question him, presume to know him, who once shared kinship with him, but who find him strange and dangerous in his return. The story is important, the depiction of the original peoples of Australia, though scant, is pure, though it has elements of the magical other. As if wiser, nearly invisible elves moved amongst the white settlers. There are moments of the fantastical in the effect of these people on Gemmy, in the way their culture has aligned him to different ideas of the world. This part of the book is unerring and really wonderful. For the first half of the novel I felt as thought I had stumbled on a treasure, though Malouf is, of course, well known. But the latter part of the book whimpers and fades. There is an odd choice to have Gemmy simply dissolve out of the book and the passage of time to take the place of the culmination one expects. I admired this as a choice but am sorry that the book did not end in some stronger way.

No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The title of this novel is curious, encapsulating the pervasive discomfort of the most modern period of Africa in Achebe’s trilogy. Obi Okonkwo, descendant of the protagonist of the first novel, has been sent to England to be educated in the Western manner so that he can join the bureaucracy in Nigeria; the people who sent him are the members of an Igbo social club who have organized to retain their collective identity in their new urban surroundings. They have pooled their money for Obi’s education and look on him as an investment for their own future, a sign that their people can cope with the new order as well as their neighbors have. This is a parallel to Ezeulu sending his own son to be educated in Christian ways in Arrow of God, and in the same way as the earlier novel the end result is not predictable or simple. Obi learns too much in his sojourn in England and is no longer quite of his people when he returns. He joins the civil service but sees its corruption, officials taking bribes at every turn. In fact the book begins with Obi’s arrest and conviction for taking a bribe himself, so that his downfall is already complete at the start, and the novel backtracks to show the disintegration that preceded his crime. He never intends to be dishonest but his moral character is not strong. As is usual with Achebe, the novel does not depict these events in a didactic or heavy-handed manner; we simply witness Obi’s life as though we were perched on his shoulder. The book is skillful but much less engaging than the earlier novels because it is a study of weakness and uncertainty; Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart may be caught up in his own blindness but he has great purpose, bent as it is; and Ezeulu in the second novel is a pillar of surety. Obi, by contrast, has lost his sense of who he is and his trajectory is downward. This kind of novel suffers from Achebe’s detachment. He is meticulous in cataloguing Obi’s small and continuous failures without creating much sense of empathy. In this kind of novel it would be better to offer more of his feelings, his interior, which was never necessary in the earlier books. It is nevertheless a fine book, but not a fine read. But it is a true depiction of what has been implied from the beginning of the cycle by the changes that overtake the Ten Towns and Nigeria through contact with Britain.