Dangling Man by Saul Bellow (1944)

Posted on March 24, 2011 by Jess

Some authors strike fear into the hearts of wary readers. Faulkner. Joyce. You know the usual suspects. For me it is the White American Male literary triumvirate of the mid 20th century – Roth, Updike, Bellow – celebrated, praised, awarded and much adored, and because of this, damn intimidating. I suppose it stems from a fear of “just not getting it” and having any literary appreciation credentials stripped away and shunned from the readerly world forever. Stupid, I know. So it was with a considerable amount of trepidation that I approached Saul Bellow’s debut novel Dangling Man.

Written in a diary format, Dangling Man is the story of a moderately intelligent young man, Joseph, who has enlisted in the army but is stuck in some sort of bureaucratic purgatory while the authorities figure out what to do with him. While his colleagues go off to battle, or are stationed around the country, Joseph spends his days in a shoddy boarding house, walking around Chicago, avoiding questions about his current position, having meaningful conversations with himself, looking back over his past, and generally being a layabout little shit.

Joseph considers himself as something of an intellectual, a scholar who had previously found success in rote employment. Joseph’s self-assuredness and confrontational methods of dealing with the world and others brings Salinger’s Holden Caulfield to mind. More appropriate a comparison would be with Frank Wheeler from Revolutionary Road, who also believes that his self proclaimed intellectual ways put him above the less educated. (Although I’m thinking that, as with Caulfield, reading this book at a certain age makes one more likely to relate to Joseph’s outlook.)

As he is in most things, Joseph is conscious of a motive in his choice of clothes. It is his answer to those whose defiant principle it is to dress badly, to whom a crumpled suit is a badge of freedom. He wants to avoid the small conflicts of nonconformity so that he can give all his attention to defending his inner differences, the ones that really matter. Furthermore, he takes a sad or negative satisfaction in wearing what he calls “the uniform of the times.” In short, the less noteworthy the better, for his purposes. All the same, he manages to stand out.

For someone who declares himself intelligent beyond compare, Joseph is not only lacking an element of self-awareness that would make him more tolerable, but unforgivably misogynistic. He is unable to accept his wife Iva’s agency, constantly belittling her with his moods, unable to influence her and shape her into the well-read intellectual he wants her to be. He is given to sudden outbursts of anger and, in one scenario, a strange scene of faux-parental discipline, which are not given the same amount of consideration as the minute actions of others. His diatribes about how the world and his friends, colleagues, family are all deemed lacking and his uniqueness are tiresome and become very tedious to read. When he simply recounts his days or his past, the prose flows better, but for the most part it is difficult to empathize with Joseph and his precarious predicament. Maybe if he didn’t resort to massive generalizations about mankind (while excluding himself from those crude beasts) and unfair criticisms.

Sometimes he manages to appreciate simple serene scenes from his domestic life – such as napping with his wife after eating strawberries rolled in powdered sugar – yet, even this becomes another opportunity for a long pronouncement about … whatever, who cares by this stage. His arrogance and verbosity quickly becomes boring. And yet, though Joseph is an arrogant asshole, and irrationally horrible to those around him, it’s impossible not to feel just a small amount of sympathy with him when he gives up his dangling days and demands to be called up for duty. One is left wondering whether the discipline of army life will be beneficial to him.

So, as it turns out, my trepidations was largely unfounded. Though this is Bellow’s first novel so perhaps his later works will, whenever I get around to reading them, be somewhat more challenging. Dangling Man, while having some moments of insight, didn’t make much of an impression.

Under the Skin by Michel Faber (2000)

Posted on March 6, 2011 by Jess

From the cover and blurb of Michel Faber’s Under the Skin I was expecting some sort of psychosexual thriller about a murderous woman on the prowl for male suitors. This is not my usual tastes, but what the hell. At first, Under the Skin does appear to follow this formulaic path but quickly turns in to something much more complicated, much more compelling and deeply disturbing.

Isserley is a slightly odd woman who drives along highways in Scotland looking for physically fit male hitchhikers. Through what appear to be casual conversations she determines their drifter status and further assesses their physical suitability, and those that are found satisfactory she takes back to a secluded farm. And that, unfortunately, is as much as I am willing to reveal in this review and I apologize for the vagueness that is to follow. Under the Skin is a novel where the less you know about its premise, the greater the impact on the reader. I was, as mentioned, rather clueless and as a result was very much bewildered, frightened and intrigued by this story, carrying it with me beyond the pages.

Isserley switches the television off. More awake now, she’d remembered something she should have known from the beginning, which was that there was no point trying to orient yourself to reality with television. It only made things worse.

Isserley herself is compellingly strange, marked by an inability to understand simple concepts, unexplained debilitating aches and pains, odd turns of phrase and unfamiliar words, and a ambiguous moral attitude toward picking up the drifters that she begins to question and explore as the novel progresses. Her use of unfamiliar slang (that wordnerds may attempt to look up in a dictionary and become frustrated that it doesn’t appear there) purposely alienates the reader from immediately determining Isserley’s role. At the same time, the peculiarity of the words and images invokes the desire to uncover the truth.

Yet, as you think you’re beginning to understand something, however briefly, Faber turns those assumptions to dust. My original expectations of this book as “psychosexual thriller” in part shaped my reaction to it – everything that happened was much stranger and more disturbing than I could have anticipated. Under the Skin is an artful experience of suspense, as Faber provides just enough without seeming unclear or without direction.

That’s what lying had done to the world. All the lying that people had been doing since the dawn of time, all the lying they were doing still. The price everyone paid for it was the death of trust. It meant that no two humans, however innocent they might be, could ever approach one another like two animals. Civilization!

As well as exploring Isserley’s growing contempt for her employer and her own existence, Faber reveals Isserley’s drifters through brief glimpses of their interior monologues, and by contrasting the cruelty, callousness and sometimes kindness of these drifters with the grisly severity of their fate Faber points us towards our own humanity. The story itself suggests a larger moral implication which is readily applied to our own everyday choices without seeming didactic. However, it would be too simplistic to read Under the Skin as straight allegory, as it manages to be much more complicated than a simple folk tale.

Like a half-remembered nightmare, Under the Skin lingers long after it has ended, the gaps leaving open any number of horrific possibilities. Words like chilling, horrifying or harrowing, and vague reviews like this one, do not do this book justice.

The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson (1952)

Posted on September 1, 2010 by Jess

I haven’t fared well with crime fiction in the past, despite being easily sucked in to crime television and true crime spectacles, so I approached Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me with some degree of apprehension. Maybe not expecting much from the book made the reaction I had all the more powerful, but I am rendered slightly speechless by Thompson’s unsparing approach to his knowingly psychopathic criminal narrator.

A deputy sheriff in a small county in Texas, Lou Ford, spends his days patrolling the town with a friendly, approachable manner, spouting cliché, idioms and platitudes as advice to his colleagues. Yet behind his provincial facade, Lou is suffering what he terms “the sickness”, an uncontrollable and insatiable anger and urge to lash out violently, usually against women. When he is involved in a blackmail plot between the son of the man who possibly killed his adopted brother and a prostitute, Lou’s sickness bubbles over into reality and a chain of vicious beatings, ruthless murders and self-assured plotting follow. The less said about the actual narrative, the better – it’s a story best enjoyed through Ford’s eyes rather than mine.

I’ve loafed around the streets sometimes, leaned against a store front with my hat pushed back and one boot hooked back around the other – hell, you’ve probably seen me if you’ve ever been out this way – I’ve stood like that, looking nice and friendly and stupid, like I wouldn’t piss if my pants were on fire. And all the time I’m just laughing myself sick inside. Just watching the people.

Told in the first person, Thompson involves us from the beginning with Lou, though he is a classic unreliable narrator. We’re completely aware that he may not be always telling the truth, that his justification for murder is warped, that things are not going to work out the way he wants them to – and yet, somehow, for most of The Killer Inside Me, I wanted Lou to get away with his sickening crimes. To somehow fool everyone, to slip between the cracks of justice. The reader is never made implicit in Lou’s crimes – they’re described in so little detail that the crimes themselves are never the point of interest. Rather Lou’s acknowledgement of his image of a bumpkin sherriff as an act to cover the murderous intent and his insistence that people believe his act despite all the evidence to the contrary is compelling. Any trace of paranoia is easily dissolved by his illogical reasoning and his staunchly held belief that he is smarter than the cops trying to track down the culprit. Ford drags us, in spite of any moral objections we may hold, into his obviously deranged way of thinking.

The Killer Inside Me felt more like a curt slap in the face than a reading experience. It left me with the same sense of defiant shock, a speechless disbelief of what has happened. Ford is a character not easily forgotten, and Thompson’s narrative style is understated, yet effectively terrifying.

Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion (1970)

Posted on August 6, 2010 by Jess

On the surface Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays looks like yet another story of a beautiful, privileged woman suffering a nervous breakdown. Maria Wyeth, an actress, is going through the breakdown of her marriage to director Carter Lang. Yet, Didion’s writing avoids the typical hysteria. Her technique is sparse, the restraint she shows is purposely alienating, intent at keeping the reader at a distance from the true horror of Maria’s suffering. It protects us from the oblivion of nothingness that Maria feels, and forces us to confront it ourselves.

She could remember it all but none of it seemed to come to anything. She a sense the dream had ended and she had slept on.

To recount the plot seems futile, the narrative is built from key events seen through Maria’s eyes. Maria has been committed to some form of institution, and looks back over what happened in the lead up to, during, and after the breakdown of her marriage. There is no clear linear progression, but events, signs, symbols gradually do fall in to place. Maria has an abortion. Maria visits her ex-husband on a movie set in the desert. Maria watches her close friend commit suicide. Something as simple as a stilted telephone conversation, as momentous as an arrest in the desert, or the nightmarish hallucination of the contents of blocked drains are all told in a brutally dispassionate third-person voice.

One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.
Why, BZ would say.
Why not, I say.

The structure of the novel is interesting too, opening with single chapters told in the first person from major characters – Maria’s manic, compelling voice, Helene reflecting on her conflicted relationship with Maria, and Carter trying to pinpoint where things started going wrong. From there, most of the novel is told in this distant third-person narration, until the end where Maria’s voice is heard again. This seems to mirror the state of Maria’s internal self, beginning with rampant self-obsession, turning to looking at herself from a disconnected and distant viewpoint and finally, we hope, gaining a stronger sense of her own identity by the end. It’s bleak, but Didion’s writing is so controlled that the emotional effect of these events, and of Maria’s perception of them, doesn’t hit until after. Play It As It Lays is a novel that lingers, becoming all the more powerful as time passes.

The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain (1934)

Posted on July 28, 2010 by Jess

I really didn’t like James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, so this review is going to be a lot briefer than usual. Frank Chambers is a drifter who one day finds himself on the outskirts of Los Angeles. He wanders into the Twin Oaks Tavern, owned by Nick Papadakis, and takes a job. Intense attraction sparks between Frank and Nick’s wife, Cora, and they plot to kill Nick so they can be together, succeeding only on their second attempt. The police suspect them of wrongdoing and reveal that Nick had taken out a hefty life insurance plan after the first attempt on his life, and assume that the payout due was the pair’s motivation. In the clear after some knotty legal finagling, they decide to start their new life together but, c’mon, do you really expect a happy ending here?

“Then he came along. I took him, and so help me, I meant to stick by him. But I can’t stand it any more. God, do I look like a little white bird?”
“To me, you look more like a hell cat.”

The Postman Always Rings Twice is told in a sparse, dialogue driven prose with a quick and sharp rhythm. No time is wasted on motivation or detail, Frank’s desire and reasoning goes largely unexplained. The relationship between Frank and Cora lacks the passion to make their crimes seem convincing. If Cora was too delicate to hurt Nick’s feelings by leaving him, how does that morph into murderous intent? The pedestrian, dispassionate prose makes these characters difficult to comprehend. Where in The Maltese Falcon Hammett’s crime story was written in the stylish prose that defined the hardboiled genre, Cain’s lacks excitement, character or dense plot. Very disappointing.

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1930)

Posted on June 25, 2010 by Jess

Originally published in a serialized form in the late 1920s, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon was a highly influential precursor to the tremendously popular hardboiled fiction. It remains an exciting read with a detached, morally ambiguous detective and all the key elements of a noir mystery to be expected of the genre, but lacks the significant substance to make it truly remarkable.

When his partner is shot while on a stakeout for a new client, detective Sam Spade is drawn into a seedy world of bumbling policemen, beautiful and dangerous women, and treasure hunting criminals – all of them seeking the priceless ornament, the Maltese Falcon. The plot, circuitous as it is, is the supporting player to the noir style that Hammett is renowned for. Like with Chandler’s The Big Sleep, even if the reader becomess lost in the twists and double-crossings it doesn’t pose much of an issue. None of the characters ever seem to really know what is truth, who to believe or what is happening. Hammett is careful to never reveal the inner thoughts of those around Spade, we can only trust Spade’s professional intuition, his simmering violence and distrust of everything.

The boy spoke two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second ‘you.’
‘People lose teeth talking like that.’ Spade’s voice was still amiable though his face had become wooden. ‘If you want to hang around you’ll be polite.’
The boy repeated his two words.

Sam Spade is such a great character, described as “a blond Satan”, his motives are always ambiguous, even in the end, but he is just so effortlessly cool. He knows who to call, when to call, he knows the tricks to get the information he needs. Most importantly, he knows to trust no one. Not even the timid yet beautiful Brigid O’Shaughnessy that seeks his help. Of course, their relationship isn’t strictly business, and there are some tantalizing fade-to-black sex scenes, the saucier details ignored in favour of keeping the plot moving. Even if, at times, it feels like much of the plot involves the characters sitting in offices and apartments, smoking during lengthy discussions.

He shut his eyes and smiled complacently at an inner thought. He opened his eyes and said: ‘That was seventeen years ago. Well, sir, it took me seventeen years to locate that bird, but I did it. I wanted it, and I’m not a man that’s easily discouraged when he wants something.’ His smile grew broad. ‘I wanted it and I found it. I want it and I’m going to have it.’

It would be impossible for me to review this book without mentioning the iconic film version, the 1941 film directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart – the first major film noir. Reading Joel Cairo’s affected dialogue in the Maltese Falcon, it is impossible to not hear Peter Lorre speaking them, or to picture anyone but Sydney Greenstreet as Casper Gutman. Much of the dialogue was lifted straight from the novel for the screenplay, and it must be one of the more faithful novel-to-film adaptations.

Yet, for all its seedy hardboiled style, whipsmart protagonists, crackling dialogue and swift plotting, I can’t help but feel that The Maltese Falcon is, well, empty. Not quite the fraud the characters in the novel so desperately devote themselves to, but similarly not worth as much as we’re led to believe. A successful innovator of the style, and a cleverly plotted thriller but lacking anything beyond that to really give it any weight. It just does not have the psychological depth to push it beyond being a captivating story. Perhaps this can be attributed to the lack of insight into any of the characters, we are blind to their motives – and pure greed seems too simple an answer – and their futile and ruthless search for something which may not even exist isn’t explored in any great depth. Style is the clear winner in The Maltese Falcon, and Dashiell Hammett is a skilled master of the genre.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe (1958)

Posted on June 2, 2010 by Jess

Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is a look at the shackles and minor freedoms of 1950s English working class men, seen through the eyes of a ballsy Arthur Seaton who works all week in a factory job and spends his weekends dressed up, drinking to excess, getting into the occasional fight and hopping into the beds of married woman. With a strong focus on his rage against the Establishment and domestic life, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning has a strongly masculine voice but ultimately the sadness, hopelessness and futility of his revolt has wide appeal.

For it was Saturday night, the best and bingiest glad-time of the week, one of the fifty-two holidays in the slow-turning Big Wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a prostrate Sabbath. Piled-up passions were exploded on a Saturday night, and the effect of a week’s monotonous graft in the factory was swilled out of your system in a burst of goodwill. You followed the motto of ‘be drunk and be happy’, kept your crafty arms around female waists, and felt the beer going beneficially down into the elastic capacity of your guts.

Arthur Seaton is young, cocksure and fond of a strong drink and married women. He’s all attitude: it seems to be an insolent youthfulness in him, the feeling that nothing can touch him, he knows everything, he’s got everyone all figured out. He works a repetitive factory job, spends his weekend boozing and the rest of his free time bedding a married woman, Brenda. Arthur is surprisingly friendly with Brenda’s husband, Jack, who he works with – he sometimes worries about being found out, but at the same time is pretty certain he won’t be, or that if he is it won’t be his problem. When Brenda tells Arthur that she is pregnant with his child, Arthur’s encourages her to “take care of it.” Arthur’s attitude toward women is outdated, slightly misogynist and youthfully ignorant. He doesn’t seem to appreciate the great risks Brenda takes in order to be with him. For him it’s a lark, for Brenda it endangers everything she holds as stable.

On the evening Brenda terminates her pregnancy, Arthur sleeps with Brenda’s sister – the also married Winnie. Only Winnie’s husband isn’t as clueless as Jack, and he sets out to find Arthur and make him pay. Arthur continues his dalliances, as well as romancing a somewhat naïve girl named Doreen, until he is beaten up by two soldiers on account of his reckless affairs. After this happens, there is a more pronounced level of dissatisfaction with the world around him, with the government, the army, the work force, as he realizes he is impotent to fight against it and he too is drawn into the endless of cycle of marriage, procreation, work and boozy weekends. Perhaps his relationships with married women was a method of avoiding the responsibility of marriage, an inevitability that his relationship with Doreen seems headed toward.

He was nothing at all when people tried to tell him what he was. Not even his own name was enough, though it might be on his pay-book. What am I? he wondered. A six-foot pit-prop that wants a pint of ale. That’s what I am. And if any knowing bastard says that that’s what I am, I’m a dynamite-dealer, Stengun seller, hundred-ton tank trader, a capstan lathe operator waiting to blow the army to Kingdom Cum. I’m me and nobody else; and whatever people think I am or say I am, that’s what I’m not, because they don’t know a bloody thing about me.

Arthur’s family and home life are written with such an inviting warmth, which contrasts sharply to Arthur’s booze-fuelled weekends and shunning of domestic life. Sillietoe makes it difficult to see what exactly Arthur is so afraid of this domesticity. Arthur’s is a particularly masculine rage and disaffection that is eventually made futile by his inability to escape the routine of familial life. His only escape, such that it is, is through booze and random acts of violence – although these seem to be more of a stunted expression of his anger and disaffection than an escape from it. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning effectively captures how banal comments can escalate into brawls, how violence is always – in Arthur’s circumstances – just a brief comment or misguided look away; and how much of a role alcohol plays in such situations. Like the drunk that smashes the store window and attempts to run away only as the police arrive, Arthur too is resigned to his fate, to what he cannot fight or avoid any longer despite his staunch self-belief and anti-authoritarian attitude. There is something resoundingly sad in his resignation, his willingness to give up those beliefs he held on to so strongly so easily, out of necessity, the social world practically demands it of him.

The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark (1970)

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Jess

Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat is a short and savage character study of a woman gradually losing control of herself. Lise has worked in the same dull office job for sixteen years, and finally, she is going on holiday. However, this isn’t an idyllic retreat from the humdrum existence of her everyday life - we soon discover that Lise will be found brutally murdered by the end of the first day of her vacation.

The Driver’s Seat opens on an exchange in a store dressing room over the stain-resistant fabric of a dress. The encounter is told in an almost cyclical way, first as it happens, shifting back to what happened just before and then the original exchange is retold, with slightly different details. This technique is used often throughout the novel, a comment on perception, on the effect time has on memory – something that will become crucial and more pronounced as Lise’s steps are retraced by witnesses in the wake of her murder. As she prepares to leave for her trip she begins to gleefully lie to strangers, creating elaborate false identities and personas during her encounters. It becomes apparent through Lise’s interactions with her co-workers, shop staff and strangers that there may be something not quite right about Lise’s behaviour, whether it is the product of mental illness or just eccentricity remains to be seen.

Once the reader is informed that Lise will be found stabbed to death, everything is shadowed by a vague sense of threat, everything, even innocuous remarks, seems potentially dangerous and threatening. A man frightened by Lise’s appearance moves away from her on the airplane. A macrobiotic diet fanatic engages her in conversation and invites her to meet up with him later. Lise hides her passport in a taxi. As she wanders around the unnamed city with the elderly Mrs Fiedke, she is on the lookout for a man but she doesn’t seem to know who or where she will find him.

‘Will you feel a presence? Is that how you’ll know?’
‘Not really a presence,’ Lise says. ‘The lack of an absence, that’s what it is. I know I’ll find it. I keep making mistakes though.’

Most prominently, Lise shops endlessly. On her holiday, with our knowledge of her imminent death, the objects she buys and accumulates seem to hold great importance. It soon becomes apparent that Lise has plotted her own murder, as though her death is something as easily purchased as a lipstick, a scarf, or a silk tie. If consumer culture allows us to buy into an idea of a certain life or ideal, then surely it can also provide the ideal death? The murder scene, and the calculated approach that Lise takes to engage her murderer, is disturbing – all the threatening atmosphere and people seem harmless in comparison when Lise is the most dangerous to herself.

Ultimately, this scenario raises many more questions than it answers: why does Lise make herself so willingly visible, her clothes, her demeanour, her interactions with others, when this was her plan all along? To ensure witnesses? To ensure that someone, somewhere remembers her? To be certain that some form of story, however untrue, can be gleamed from the witness statements? The Driver’s Seat is genuinely confounding.

Borstal Boy by Brendan Behan (1958)

Posted on May 10, 2010 by Jess

In the late 1930s, at the tender age of sixteen, Brendan Behan is a junior member of the Irish Republican Army and is arrested in London with a suitcase of explosives in his possession. Borstal Boy follows his journey through the British juvenile detention system and overcoming his prejudices. While Borstal Boy is full of an infectious boyish warmth, the differences between correctional facilities then and now gives it a sense of innocence, even naiveté, that is difficult to ignore.

[...] but it was not reallly the length of the sentence that worried me–for I had always believed that if a fellow went into the I.R.A. at all he should be prepared to throw the handle after the hatchet, die dog or shite the licence–but that I’d sooner be with Charlie and Ginger and Browny in Borstal than with my own comrades and countrymen any place else. It seemed a bit disloyal to me that I should prefer to be with boys from English cities than with my own countrymen and comrades from Ireland’s hills and glens.

Considering the intentions of his crime – to bomb English shipyards – Behan’s political views are rarely spoken about. They come up in his various trials, where he prepares speeches that sound as though all the information and rhetoric has been passed down to him by his superiors, but when brought up by his fellow prisoners and his friends, his allegiance to his home country isn’t spoken about in political terms. Behan seems more concerned about the conflict between his political leanings and his Catholic faith – especially as he is excommunicated and not to attend special prison services.

The use of slang and the different dialects of the prisoners and the prison officers establishes the class and race differences effectively, without putting too much of a didactic point on it. Behan has so many charming phrases at the ready, and the rhyming slang is infectious. Brendan’s ease of relating to others, even those who presumably he should be against, gradually allows him to overcome his prejudices, but this occurs in such a subtle manner. It doesn’t come across as Brendan learning to look past differences, but of the strength and importance of his friendships with individuals from all classes. The dialects give the characters such strong voices – you can hear them perfectly in your mind. Brendan’s constant referencing and singing of songs, to himself, to and with his peers, or as part of church services, also give the text a strong, almost audible voice.

He was dead lonely; more lonely than I and with more reason. The other fellows might give me a rub about Ireland or about the bombing campaign, and that was seldom enough, and I was never short of an answer, historically informed and obscene, for them. But I was nearer to them than they would ever let Ken be. I had the same rearing as most of them; Dublin, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, London. All our mothers had all done the pawn–pledging on Monday, releasing on Saturday. We all knew the chip shop and the picture house and the fourpenny rush of a Saturday afternon, and the summer swimming in the canal and being chased along the railway by cops.
But Ken they would never accept. In a way, as the middle-class and upper-class in England spend so much money and energy in maintaining the difference between themselves and the working-class, Ken was only getting what his people paid for but, still and all, I couldn’t help being sorry for him, for he was more of a foreigner than I, and it’s a lonely thing to be a stranger in a strange land.

Borstal Boy shows us the monotony of an imprisonment, the routines and the expectations. However, Behan’s colourful turns of phrase and the heavy use of slang and dialects, as well as the surprisingly warm friendships he makes with his inmates – Charlie in particular – doesn’t turn this monotony onto the reader. As he walks around his cell, reads literature provided by the prison library, works, and finds new ways to keep warm, Behan always remains lively. The routine is lost somewhat once Brendan is sent to the Borstal Institution, as he has his friends with him and the rules seem to be considerably less strict than in detention.

Still, it’s hard not to notice the comparative innocence of it all. Surely it is unlikely that today a young boy captured with the intent to use a suitcase full of explosives would be sent to a Borstal, free to roam the grounds and mingle with others? Likewise, his friends have committed serious crimes – everything from petty theft, to rape and murder. Rather than detention or prison, the institutions Brendan finds himself in are almost camp like, not what we would expect today at all. There is even a sense of excitement about being moved to the Borstal by the sea. Is it likely that Charlie and Brendan would be kept together since their arrest? While Borstal Boy is surprisingly warm, and Brendan Behan a hugely likable character, it’s difficult to consider it as an accurate look at juvenile correctional facilities – as a period piece though, it’s definitely a gem.

Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West (1933)

Posted on April 16, 2010 by Jess

Miss Lonelyhearts is the agony aunt columnist of a newspaper, a joke to his boss, his co-workers, and mostly to himself. A barely functioning alcoholic, he aligns himself, due to his boss’ sarcastic rantings or his own self delusion, with the figure of Christ. He takes on the sufferings of the barely literate people who write to him seeking moral and spiritual guidance, but isn’t equipped to deal with the magnitude of this self-imposed responsibility. Unable to deal with the suffering, the pain and the widespread confusion and fear, Miss Lonelyhearts sinks deeper into a hallucinatory state of despair and confusion.

Miss Lonelyhearts is, clearly, not lighthearted fare. The letters Miss Lonelyhearts receives are horrifying, even today: a woman forced to provide child after child for her husband despite the great pain childbirth inflicts upon her body, a teenaged girl wonders what she has done to deserve her fate to be born without a nose – her father tells her she is paying for the sins of a past life, the sister of a disabled girl who has been raped seeks Miss Lonelyhearts’ advice. Through the careful misspellings and poor grammar of the letters, West shows us how desperate these people are. Their guidance cannot come from education, religion offers them nothing. Miss Lonelyhearts believes that salvation through Christ is the answer, but the very thought makes him ill, and eager to avoid the tauntings of his boss Shrike who compares him endlessly to the son of God.

He sat in the window thinking. Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in another. Mondolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature . . . the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth while.

Like The Dream Life of Balso Snell, Miss Lonelyhearts drifts between waking life and the main characters’ often violent dreams with religious undertones. It is an interesting technique that becomes more pronounced as Miss Lonelyhearts is driven deeper into his religious hysteria. He attempts to sleep with his Shrike’s wife, tries to rekindle his relationship with his ex-fiancée, Betty, and meets with a woman, Mrs. Doyle, who is married to an older crippled man who has written in to Miss Lonelyhearts. He also comes into contact with Mrs. Doyle’s crippled husband and is invited into their home as something of a warped marriage counsellor. A failed attempt at seduction on her part leads to an accusation of rape and a confrontation with the cripple which, as the bleak tone of the story would have it, doesn’t end well for the troubled Miss Lonelyhearts.

Prodded by his conscience, he began to generalize. Men have always fought their misery with dreams. Although dreams were once powerful, they have been made puerile by the movies, radio and newspapers. Among many betrayals, this one is the worst.

The most poignant theme of Miss Lonelyhearts seems to be why does suffering exist and why are we so ill-equipped to deal with it? The more religious themes go over my head, thanks to my secular upbringing, but the suffering West speaks of is universal. Ultimately, the failure of all outlets – religion, sex, love, pastoral living, alcohol – sends Miss Lonelyhearts into a frenzy of madness, offering the reader no hope and no redemption. Miss Lonelyhearts is bleak, despondent, with comedy blacker than the sky on a moonless night (thanks Special Agent Cooper), but not detestably so. It’s difficult, after saying all this, to explain exactly why I enjoyed it – possibly for its brutal look at the world, a refusal to sugarcoat existence – but I didn’t close Miss Lonelyhearts feeling utterly dejected.

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