My first Anne Tyler, and possibly an idiosyncratic one. This is the tale of Evie Drake, an outwardly placid girl who commits a bizarre act: after deveMy first Anne Tyler, and possibly an idiosyncratic one. This is the tale of Evie Drake, an outwardly placid girl who commits a bizarre act: after developing what initially seems to be a mild interest in local musician Drum Casey, she carves his name into her forehead. I was reeled in by the drama of this and the mystery that surrounds it � even Evie herself doesn’t seem quite sure why she’s done it. The early scenes, with Evie and her friend Violet sneaking into a nightclub to watch Drum performing, are so captivating. The rest of the novel is quiet; a story of unfulfilled lives that doesn’t live up to its first few chapters. The title is taken from Drum’s description of himself: ‘I ain’t but nineteen years old and already living a slipping-down life.� Even in this early novel, Tyler has a great line in character sketches, for example Drum’s bandmate, to whom a nickname refuses to stick because ‘he was the kind who slid out from under [them]. He was not light-minded enough.� Not really a book for me, yet so different from my usual reading that there seemed something special about it anyway....more
In early 1960s Germany, two siblings have conflicting political views: Elisabeth is passionately devoted to the GDR, while her brother Uli means to deIn early 1960s Germany, two siblings have conflicting political views: Elisabeth is passionately devoted to the GDR, while her brother Uli means to defect to the West. An argument over this frames the narrative, with plenty of flashbacks filling in the family’s history, including the fact that the siblings� older brother has already defected. It’s an interesting perspective on this moment in history, but the characters remain flat and the story is disjointed. It doesn’t feel like enough time is devoted to the core dilemma. A long episode in the middle, in which Elisabeth clashes with an older painter, is more engaging than the main plot....more
Liked this, but found it significantly not as advertised. Even if I tilt my head, squint and think very hard, it’s still difficult to perceive this boLiked this, but found it significantly not as advertised. Even if I tilt my head, squint and think very hard, it’s still difficult to perceive this book as a ‘gothic fantasy�. Bezill follows an inept young tutor working at the country house of the title; he struggles to connect with his solemn pupil, Herbert, while maintaining infatuations with both Herbert’s mother and a taciturn maid. Yes, there’s a big old house, and an off-limits room in the tower, and oddball characters with disturbing hobbies. But the blurb makes all these things sound sinister when, in the book, they are invariably positioned as humorous. The story is stuffed full of innuendos and never truly feels serious. It’s very funny at points � though I started to find the humour too samey after a while � but I think I’d have enjoyed it more if I’d known it was a comedy going in. (Also, upon finishing it I was extremely relieved to realise I’m unlikely to come across the phrase ‘as cold as an ice lolly� ever again.)...more
Refreshing how little this seems to have aged compared to (some) other SF from the same era. It lost me a bit during the massive infodump sections, buRefreshing how little this seems to have aged compared to (some) other SF from the same era. It lost me a bit during the massive infodump sections, but the story proper is both original and gripping, especially the opening scenes....more
Picnic at Hanging Rock is set in Australia in 1900, and centres on the disappearance of three schoolgirls and a teacher during a picnic at the titularPicnic at Hanging Rock is set in Australia in 1900, and centres on the disappearance of three schoolgirls and a teacher during a picnic at the titular Rock. The mystery is nebulous and open-ended. In many ways, the book isn't really about that; it's about loss and yearning and change, about being aware that youth, beauty and happiness are transient states. More than anything, it reminded me of Le Grand Meaulnes, evoking the same feelings of nostalgia and unbearable longing. The sun-soaked, verdant setting is alive and lush on the page. Despite the subject matter, the main impression I've taken away from this is a hazy vision of an enchanted moment in time.
A very brief Japanese novella (novelette?) about Rikio, also known as Richie, a successful young actor who is ambivalent about the prizes of fame. StaA very brief Japanese novella (novelette?) about Rikio, also known as Richie, a successful young actor who is ambivalent about the prizes of fame. Star was originally published in 1961; this is the first English translation. The author, who also worked as an actor and model, wrote it shortly after playing the lead in a yazuka film.
Many readers will be familiar with the sensation of simultaneously craving and loathing attention: in Rikio’s case it’s exaggerated to extremes. He is adored by fans, and � as he tells us at the beginning � loves to see them lining up, dressed in the style he has popularised. Yet at times, the crowds disgust him so much he is driven to violent fantasies:
I was exhausted. The girls could scream their way to hell for all I cared. Their shrill voices splashed over me like rancid oil. If only I could line them up and march them all into the mouth of an incinerator. Only they’d probably crawl out of the ashes gawking at me. First I’d have to pluck their eyes out.
Rikio is cut off from most of the world. He maintains a sexual relationship with his make-up artist, Kayo, an older woman whom he finds ugly. When she organises a birthday party for him, he knows from the beginning that he won’t attend: ‘showing up is for second-rate actors who have lost their edge�. Only while filming does he come alive, ‘in the surge of imaginary time�, where reality is temporarily suspended. ‘Only there could I breathe easy, talk of death without fear, and die without suffering.�
The last 20 or so pages lack the laser focus of the rest, and the story ends abruptly � but not without a note of its own brand of cinematic horror. Rikio’s despair leaves the reader with a sense of dread that’s difficult to dispel.
This is one of those books so short I’m unconvinced it really needs to be published as a standalone, but there’s no denying it’s a striking piece of work, sharp and ruthlessly honest. Having been unfamiliar with Yukio Mishima’s work prior to this, I found it an excellent introduction.
I received an advance review copy of Star from the publisher through .
I have read these Faber reissues of Aickman’s books out of order, so this � his first solo collection, dating from 1964 � is, for me, the last, and twI have read these Faber reissues of Aickman’s books out of order, so this � his first solo collection, dating from 1964 � is, for me, the last, and two of the stories (‘Ringing the Changes� and ‘Bind Your Hair�) were not new to me. It always seems that Aickman’s fiction shows the limitations of rating books out of five stars: I enjoyed this more than some of the other collections; here, he has not yet honed his ability to make the reader profoundly uncomfortable. But I don’t feel it is necessarily as significant as, say, Cold Hand in Mine.
Dark Entries contains just six stories. They tend towards the strange and disquieting rather than the more explicitly disturbing themes that appear in some of Aickman’s later work. My favourites were ‘The School Friend� and ‘Ringing the Changes�, with ‘The View� in close contention.
I liked ‘The School Friend� straight away, and it proved to be my favourite story from the book. A writer, Mel, returns to her home town, and discovers her old friend Sally � once a precocious and brilliant student � has done the same. It quickly becomes clear that something is very wrong with Sally, or at least something is very wrong with her house. This is a gripping tale, replete with the sense of foreboding I associate with Aickman.
I have retained an impression of ‘Ringing the Changes� as a real classic, and it was a pleasure to revisit it. A recently married couple, Gerald and Phrynne, take their honeymoon in a small town on the Norfolk coast. From the beginning, they find Holyhaven an odd and unwelcoming place. When a cacophony of bell-ringing � apparently an annual custom � strikes up, Gerald becomes increasingly convinced they must leave. The strange local ritual builds to a horrifying climax which seems to leave the couple divided in unspoken ways.
The story is both intensely unsettling and one of Aickman’s funniest. Rereading it also gave me an excuse to reread ‘A Change of Scene�, the even-better sequel Nina Allan wrote for the anthology Aickman’s Heirs (and then I ended up reading the rest of the anthology too).
For me, ‘Choice of Weapons� was a dud: messy and overlong, seeming to veer all over the place without ever reaching any sort of... point. It is, as a number of Aickman stories are, about a man suddenly falling in love with a beautiful woman and becoming embroiled in dubious situations in his pursuit of her. Some of it is quite entertaining; Fenville’s encounters with Dr Bermuda are pleasingly absurd. The climax and ending are unsatisfying, failing to justify the length.
‘The Waiting Room� is a fairly typical ghost story, more traditional than anything else I have read by Aickman. A man named Pendlebury falls asleep on a train and ends up at the last stop, where he has no option but to spend the night in the waiting room. You can probably guess how that goes. The atmosphere of the setting is the story’s biggest asset; the room really does feel charged with terror.
‘The View� is similar, at first glance, to ‘Choice of Weapons�, and is presumably the original of its type; it was first published in the 1951 collection We Are For the Dark, which Aickman co-authored with Elizabeth Jane Howard. A man, Carfax, is on a ferry to ‘the Island� when he meets an enigmatic woman named Ariel; she invites him to stay at her home, Fleet. Although he falls in love with Ariel and finds the house idyllic, he notices some strange things about the place, in particular a number of inexplicable alterations to the landscape. While it is more wistful than unnerving, ‘The View� is evocative, intriguing and memorable.
Unfashionably middle-class and northern, Clara longs to escape her depressing hometown and dour mother. At university in London, she pursues a friendsUnfashionably middle-class and northern, Clara longs to escape her depressing hometown and dour mother. At university in London, she pursues a friendship with Clelia Denham, a charismatic girl from a wealthy, bohemian family, and proceeds to fall in love with Clelia’s married brother Gabriel. Jerusalem the Golden is a novel that captures class anxiety, the tenuous and rapidly shifting nature of ‘freedom� for young women in the 1960s, and the longing for something beyond one’s existing experience. Yet I found the characters difficult to parse: aside from the symbolic nature of her yearning for ‘beautiful things�, which seems to entirely dominate her personality, who is Clara, really? There’s some great period detail, but also a sense of narrative distance/detachment that left me a little cold....more
Somewhere between Rodion Raskalnikov and Patrick Bateman, there's Joe Beckett: office clerk, nihilist, chauvinist, sleaze, stumbling numbly through sqSomewhere between Rodion Raskalnikov and Patrick Bateman, there's Joe Beckett: office clerk, nihilist, chauvinist, sleaze, stumbling numbly through squalid neighbourhoods of London in the early 1960s, churning joylessly through jobs, parties and women, and sleeping in a shabby bedsit � the 'furnished room'.
He considered the animal in himself. In congested streets, he daydreamed of mowing down the slowmoving crowds with a machine gun. If he saw a fat woman waddling across a zebra, or an old man tottering off the kerb, he longed to be a maniac killer driver. When he passed the children's playground in Kensington Gardens he tried to see the knickers of the little girls who stood on the swings. If others could read his thoughts like tickertape across his forehead he would be a social outcast. Yet in actuality his behaviour was decent enough.
Sooner or later, Joe thinks within the first few pages of the book, he would commit a violent crime. He was certain of it. It was only a matter of time. And indeed, almost as if he has willed it, his aimless, drifting lifestyle inevitably brings him into contact with some dubious characters who lead him down such a path. There's the splendidly named Captain Dick Dyce, and the rather less salubrious Jacko, who starts trailing Joe around like some physical manifestation of those dark thoughts he keeps having. When Joe becomes embroiled in a murder plot, he treats it primarily as an interesting moral dilemma.
This extraordinary novel appears to be a bit of a hidden gem. It was made into a film, West 11, in 1963, and it's fun to imagine the characters speaking in the plummy tones of sixties Brit actors � in fact, the dialogue makes more sense when you consider it like that. Del-Rivo portrays the mindset of her dissolute young antihero so effectively that I had to double-check the name wasn't a male writer's pseudonym (it isn't). A darkly compelling depiction of amorality and alienation in a turbulent, disintegrating city, The Furnished Room is a fascinating book and well worth seeking out.
--- Some other miscellaneous bits I liked:
'Happy? No, she doesn't make me happy. Another person can make you unhappy, but can't make you happy. Happiness has nothing to do with other people. Sometimes, for instance, I know I'm a god and that everything is good. It's a feeling of certainty and affirmation. But this feeling comes when I'm alone.' 'Do you often feel like that?' 'No, on the contrary, generally I feel only a paralysing despair. It settles on everything like grey dust.' 'Can't you decide which of the two is right?' 'It's not a question of one being right. They are just states which occur.'
The objects in the room had an oppressive life of their own, like the atmosphere before a thunderstorm.
When she had left him for another man he had felt miserable on one level but on another level utterly indifferent.
Her eyes were untrustworthy, and cool as fishes, and he felt that she was one woman promising all women.
He knew that he would pursue Ilsa determinedly; but that even as he redoubled his efforts to win her, there would be a cold mocking voice inside him telling him that he did not really want her. He experienced, simultaneously, raging desire for her and the knowledge that he did not really care.
The picture was a standard reproduction and he had seen it before; Christ parting his robe to display an embarrassing heart which bled crimson glycerine.
Walking alone through a crowded fairground was his nearest approach to feeling a member of humanity.
'It's only because I am superior.' He said it as a joke, and then realised that he meant it. He had always had a conviction of his superiority; a conviction so basic that it was hardly conscious.
He thought: no prizes in life. Only mirages that disappear when you arrive at them. Freedom from sexual desire results from gratifying it. But there must be another sort of freedom. Not just a passive lack, an emptiness, but an active, positive freedom.
If you don't read the biggest book in your house while your country's in lockdown, when will you? So it was that I finally came to read In the First CIf you don't read the biggest book in your house while your country's in lockdown, when will you? So it was that I finally came to read In the First Circle: The First Uncensored Edition. It's an unwieldy physical object: almost 750 pages of thick paper, with annoying deckled edges that make it really difficult to keep flipping back to the cast of characters � and what with there being 60 of them (and that's just the 'notable' ones), you will definitely need to consult the cast of characters.
In the First Circle was originally published as The First Circle in 1968, with nine chapters expurgated from the original manuscript; they are restored here. It's an epic, polyphonic story of life in the Soviet Union which unfolds across a few days in December 1949. It particularly (though by no means exclusively) focuses on the inmates of the Marfino sharashka in the suburbs of Moscow. 'Sharashka' was the common term for a type of 'special prison' which also operated as a research institute. Inmates, or zeks, were assigned to work on research projects for the state (the zeks in this novel are charged with finding a way to identify individuals from recordings of their voices). In return for this work, they received much better treatment than prisoners in labour camps. There are several references to a 'first circle' within the novel, but arguably the most significant is when one of the zeks tells a new arrival, referring to the sharashka: 'You are still in hell, only you've ascended to its highest and best circle—the first'.
This edition has been packaged to look like a Cold War thriller. The entire back cover is given over to a dramatic bit of dialogue which occurs in the first chapter, when diplomat Innokenty Volodin attempts to call the American Embassy to warn them that progress has been made on the development of a Soviet atomic bomb. This plot gives the novel the loosest sense of a throughline � it's Volodin's voice the zeks will ultimately try to decode � but is in no way its driving force. We spend a lot of time with the zeks, who are always having lengthy philosophical conversations, and regardless of their importance, no character is left without an extensive backstory. To give you an idea of the pace, a rendezvous agreed on page 68 is not resolved � or even mentioned again � until page 654. Fast-moving it is not.
I'm glad I read In the First Circle; for one thing, it's something of an education (Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned in the Marfino sharashka, and as with much of his work, he wrote this novel based on his own experiences. And even having studied Russian history, I didn't really know anything about the sharashkas). But in being so sprawling, it lost me at times. I came to the end of it both a little exhausted and filled with admiration for Solzhenitsyn's writing.
As with many classics (cult or otherwise), I find myself with less to say about this than other books; it feels like everything that could have been sAs with many classics (cult or otherwise), I find myself with less to say about this than other books; it feels like everything that could have been said has already been said, somehow. It's an absurd philosophical romp, at times threatening to tip over into incomprehensibility but never quite doing so; the narrator's attempts to understand his surreal circumstances keep the reader grounded. It is oddly gripping for something so nonsensical, though I think I might have liked the lengthy de Selby footnotes most out of everything. There are unforgettable details/scenes, unforgettable largely because of the way the narrator reacts to and feels about them: the malevolent figure of Mathers in the dark house, the carved chests within carved chests, the underground infinity chamber, all related with both wonder and dread. And the ending is a masterful flourish.
This short, airless, downbeat novel was written around the same time as Ice, and the two books share some key elements: both involve a girl, her husbaThis short, airless, downbeat novel was written around the same time as Ice, and the two books share some key elements: both involve a girl, her husband, an overseer of sorts, and a man who seeks to free her, most of whom are not given names, and both take place within an oppressive climate. In Who Are You? the ever-present weather is brutally hot. 'The girl' and her older husband, 'Mr Dog Head' (a derisive nickname invented by the locals), are English and have recently come to live in a bare, seemingly isolated home in a tropical climate. The naive, introverted girl is desperately unhappy. The arrival of a neighbour, 'Suede Boots', offers a potential reprieve, but both live in fear of her vicious husband.
By all accounts, Who Are You? is semi-autobiographical � based on Kavan's marriage to Donald Ferguson � making it likely that the 'remote, tropical hell' (per the blurb) of the setting is Myanmar, or Burma as it was then. The title describes the monotonous call of the 'brain-fever birds' common in the country, 'an infuriating mechanical sound... uttered simply to madden the hearer'. (It helped to look up , since for me, 'who are you' more readily brings to mind . In doing so I also discovered that 'brain-fever bird' is a widely used name for the common hawk-cuckoo and not, as I initially thought, an invention of Kavan's.)
The setting is depicted as the backdrop to a nightmare: unbearable heat, constant noise, an empty house plagued by mosquitoes and rats, surrounded by dirt tracks and swamps. Kavan's writing is most effective when she describes the extremes of the landscape, with the lucid language recalling the vivid imagery of Sleep Has His House. On a day when it becomes 'almost too hot to live', 'the red-hot earth seethes like an immense cauldron in the eerie thunderlight of an eclipse, electric tremors vibrating in the breathless air'. The darkness of night, meanwhile, is 'a black asphyxiating tank, bubbling and steaming'.
The blurb tells us that the characters 'live through the same situations twice', suggesting an experimental, uncategorisable piece of fiction in the vein of Ice. In fact, this doubling does not take place until the final pages of the novel, and really there is little difference between the accounts. The notion of a divided self is intrinsic to much of Kavan's work, yet here the girl's own awareness of her potential paths seems more significant than the narrative device. 'Who are you?' is a question that echoes throughout the story, but it is destined to go unanswered.
1. The characters of Ice cross frozen dreamscapes in pursuit of a nameless, fragile girl who keeps coming apart and being put back together again. Drac1. The characters of Ice cross frozen dreamscapes in pursuit of a nameless, fragile girl who keeps coming apart and being put back together again. Draconian government forces and militaristic laws characterise this bleak, ice-filled world in which nothing is reliable and boundaries are mutable. The fractured and surreal story can be interpreted in any number of ways: a depiction of the inner conflicts involved in love/relationships, a political allegory (the Cold War?), a record of encroaching madness, a metaphor for the author's own heroin addiction. Nothing is real, or everything is. The narrator chases the girl he is obsessed with, an obsession he admits is inexplicable even to him and which focuses on objectification, ownership and control rather than love, with a goal that can never be achieved even when he captures her, but does she exist? Is she alive? Is she composed of fragments of his own character? And the same questions can be asked about his companion/rival/reflection, the charismatic, violent 'warden'. The shifting perspective of the all-seeing narrator moves through dreams, fantasies and flashbacks and constantly, relentlessly impresses the presence of a 'sense of unreality'. Urgent and hallucinatory, abstract to the last, Ice is a brilliant phantasmagoria, with meanings as multi-faceted and elusive as the narrator's quarry.
2. Unreality. '[From] The unreality of the outer world appeared to be an extension of my own disturbed state of mind... [to] My sense of unreality became overwhelming.... [to] All this was real, it was really happening, but with a quality of the unreal; it was reality happening in quite a different way.' Rainbow walls of ice. Slow (or snow) apocalypse. 'The moon's dead eye watching the death of our world.' There are no official sources of information. 'Certain sources of possible information were still available. Hairdressers. Clerks who kept records of transport bookings. Those fringe characters.' No signposts. Characters merging and dividing. 'She was like a part of me... I suddenly had a curious sense of contact with him, almost as though some personal link existed between us... I began to wonder if there were two of us... I seemed to be looking at my own reflexion. Suddenly I was entangled in utmost confusion, not sure which of us was which. We were like halves of one being, joined in some mysterious symbiosis. I fought to retain my identity, but all my efforts failed to keep us apart. I continually found I was not myself, but him.' Dilapidated buildings, everything destroyed. Past, present and future collapsing into each other. 'I had assumed he would remember me, but he appeared not to know who I was.' Nothing is certain. Violence and victimhood. 'Something in her demanded victimization and terror... With one arm I warmed and supported her: the other arm was the executioner's... It was impossible to distinguish between the violent and the victims.' Obsession as an end in itself. 'Between the two of us she was reduced to nothing; her only function might have been to link us together.' Red carnations. 'The edge of the forest was always in sight.' Singing lemurs. Dead planet. Repeated militaristic threat, yet all is easily transcended and escaped. 'It could have been any town, in any country.' Snow obliterating everything. Nihilistic essence. 'The past had vanished and become nothing; the future was the inconceivable nothingness of annihilation.'
'Afterwards [I] did not know what had happened, or if anything had.'
3. There is so much to examine here, but I don't have the time or energy to manage it right now, and the book has been dissected so thoroughly and effectively elsewhere - look at almost all of the top reviews on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, for a start. Needless to say, I will read this book again. (I don't really know what possessed me to read it at this particular time when I'm working on loads of other things and don't have time to assess it properly; it definitely deserves a deeper evaluation.) Needless to say pt. II, I am fascinated by Kavan: a novelist who radically changed her style and renamed herself after one of her own fictional characters following a suicide attempt and psychiatric treatment, she was a lifelong heroin addict; suffered from depression, and was treated at various clinics throughout her life; a painter and interior designer who bred bulldogs; a traveller who lived at various points in Europe, the US, Burma and New Zealand; and was fascinated by fast cars, which appear as motifs in many of her stories and novels, including Ice.
The foreword by Christopher Priest categorises Ice as slipstream fiction, but it transcends even that. The vast range of interpretations of the novel seen in just a sample of reviews shows how multifarious it really is. Its uniqueness lies in more than just a sense of notional 'otherness'.
Bulgakov's 'theatrical novel' Black Snow introduces the reader to the unfortunate Maxudov, whose efforts to publish a book, and later to turn that samBulgakov's 'theatrical novel' Black Snow introduces the reader to the unfortunate Maxudov, whose efforts to publish a book, and later to turn that same book (based on his own suicide attempt) into a play, are met with varying degrees of contempt, incompetence and unhelpful interference from the literary contingent of Moscow. It's a typically Russian novel: it feels more modern than it has any right to, brims with sarcastic wit, and is often morbid. It's years since I read The Master and Margarita, and I'd forgotten how exuberant and funny Bulgakov was. It's amusing in its own right, but also works as a biting satirical take on Soviet censorship: Maxudov finds his work altered beyond recognition, then stifled by endless rehearsals which go nowhere, leading, ultimately, to a tragic conclusion. But Black Snow was unfinished at the time of the author's death, and feels like it, with an abrupt and unsatisfying ending. The book I read felt like the bones of a greater Black Snow that was never written. ...more
The Collector has been on my to-read list for about six years. It’s one of those books I always knew I would love, but somehow didn't get around to unThe Collector has been on my to-read list for about six years. It’s one of those books I always knew I would love, but somehow didn't get around to until now. It has exactly the kind of transgressive subject matter that is catnip to me when done right (and disastrously awful if done wrong, but this book is generally so well-respected that I wasn’t particularly worried about that). The premise is simple: a lonely young man, Frederick, has a crush on Miranda, a pretty girl in his town who is, in just about every possible sense, out of his league. She leaves to study in London, and it seems unlikely he will ever encounter her again. But then Frederick wins the pools and is able to buy a house and a van. He begins to make painstaking plans to kidnap Miranda and keep her in the cellar of his cottage. He doesn’t really believe he’s going to go through with it, until he does.
The first half of the book is told from Frederick’s point of view. He’s a familiar sort of evil, a seething mass of insecurities wearing a meticulous, dull mask. He is a butterfly collector, and applies the same impulses that drive his hobby to his pursuit of Miranda: a distaste for the messy business of living, a preference for beauty as something static to pin down and admire.
After that, we get Miranda’s side of the story in the form of a diary written on pages she hides beneath her mattress. Miranda is, I think, about 20 or 21, but in many ways (and perhaps this is particularly noticeable to a modern reader) she has the mentality of an even younger person, a teenager who has just started learning how to rebel and is passionately determined to never succumb to the banalities of the adult world. This is underscored by her relationship with G.P., an older artist whom she writes obsessively about. It’s clear she is in love with him, though unwilling to directly admit to this. G.P. has impressed various beliefs upon her � a mixture of tiresome platitudes and cleverly worded snobbery designed to flatter her ego � and from these she has extracted a sort of philosophy for living. As immature as it is, she clings to this ever-more desperately as her imprisonment stretches on.
Somehow I wasn’t expecting The Collector to be so gripping. When I first sat down with it, I read part 1 � about 100 pages � in a sitting. I just found it addictive; I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough. Excepting some archaic slang and the absence of certain technologies, it hasn’t aged a day.
I also wasn’t expecting the story to be so emphatically about social class. The dichotomy between lower-middle-class Frederick and upper-class Miranda quickly proves to be the strongest dynamic in the book, perhaps defining their ‘relationship� even more than the fact of Miranda’s imprisonment. I had a strong emotional reaction to the class element of The Collector; at times it provoked the troubling sense that I sympathised more with captor than victim. As time goes on it becomes clear exactly how much both characters have been shaped by the society they live in. What’s depressing is that 55 years later, attitudes have changed very little.
She often went on about how she hated class distinction, but she never took me in. It’s the way people speak that gives them away, not what they say. You only had to see her dainty ways to see how she was brought up... You could see it when she got sarcastic and impatient with me because I couldn’t explain myself or I did things wrong. Stop thinking about class, she’d say. Like a rich man telling a poor man to stop thinking about money. (Frederick, p. 41)
I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and resentful. I hate the crabbed and the mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren’t ashamed of being dull and little. I hate what G.P. calls the New People, the new-class people with their cars and their money and their tellies and their stupid vulgarities and their stupid crawling imitation of the bourgeoisie. (Miranda, p. 207)
Some see the book’s structure, with the same events described from two perspectives, as a weakness, but I found it fascinating to flip back and forth between Frederick and Miranda, comparing their reactions and thoughts. (I wonder how different the experience of the book might’ve been if I’d been presented with Miranda’s story first.)
To sum up, I don’t really need to say much more than this: The Collector is deservedly a modern classic. It got under my skin, it’s so cleverly written and constructed, and I loved it.
Seeing everything through the eyes of Mary Katherine Blackwood (aka Merricat), we first learn that she, her older sister Constance and their elderly, Seeing everything through the eyes of Mary Katherine Blackwood (aka Merricat), we first learn that she, her older sister Constance and their elderly, wheelchair-bound Uncle Julian live in what appears to be near-isolation in the old family farmhouse, mysteriously ostracised from the rest of their community. Through Merricat's observations, Constance's behaviour and Julian's confused ramblings, the reader slowly comes to understand that the other members of the family died in strange circumstances some years before - generating a significant amount of controversy and suspicion amongst the locals, who now avoid the Blackwood house and openly mock the two girls. Later, the household's peaceful, if odd, equilibrium is disturbed by the arrival of a long-lost cousin, Charles, who sets about trying to change their self-contained world, much to Merricat's horror.
Upon starting the book, I was thrown by various things about the setting - the small-town American feel, the absence of a literal castle - and didn't immediately feel 'into' it, despite how short it is. The opening is pretty unremarkable and I did find myself wondering if anything interesting was actually going to happen, as the story didn't seem to have the intriguing feel I'd expected. However, the more I read, the more I found myself being increasingly sucked in and captivated by the constantly escalating weirdness of the plot and the ever-more-apparent madness of the narrator.
I'm very glad I didn't read the Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ description for this edition before starting - it basically tells you everything - and I don't want to say much more about the details of the plot; it's the sort of story best read with little idea of what will happen. The unfolding revelations are delicious, creepy, shocking, and full of pitch-black humour. I didn't anticipate the dramatic climax of the plot, or the unconventional ending, both of which were as brilliant as they were unexpected. Fascinating, dark and multi-layered, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a twisted fairytale that sticks in the memory....more
Loading...
