[571] The Gift of Rain – Tan Twan Eng

” The fortune-teller, long since dead, had said I was born with the gift of rain . . . Like the rain, I had brought tragedy into many people’s lives but, more often than not, rain also brings relief, clarity, and renewal. It washes away our pain and prepares us for another day, and even another life. Now that I am old I find that rains follow me and give me comfort, like the spirits of all the people I have ever known and loved. ” (Book Two, Ch.23, p.431)

Malaysia was at once colonized by the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British. The Gift of Rain is set against the period of British Malacca, toward the end of the country’s colonization, when Japanese soldiers cut through impenetrable rainforest of Penang and took over the government. The story is told by Philip Khoo-Hutton, the son of an English father and Chinese mother who grew on the Malay island and lived through the Japanese occupation during World War II.

The novel opens about 50 years after the Japanese surrender, when Philip is an old man, still living in his childhood home redolent of painful memories—memories that are brought into sharp focus by an impromptu visitor from Japan. Michiko was the former lover of Hayato Endo, a Japanese diplomat and master of aikido that Philip befriended in the late 1930s. Endo-san became the most formative influence on Hutton’s life on the eve of war. Gradually Hutton warms to his visitor who teases out story of Hutton’s life with Endo-san.

I had gone back to many of those places in the days after the war, when in the silences of my life I missed him. I had gone hoping the places would still retain an echo of his presence, and of his passage, but I had only met with emptiness. (Book One, Ch.15, p.168)

An Eurasian, Hutton (his step-siblings were pure British from his father’s first marriage) was never fully accepted by either the Chinese or the English in Penang. Over time and since an early age he has hardened himself against the insults and whispered comments. Alienated from his community and family, the 17-year-old at last discovers a sense of belonging through an unexpected friendship with Endo, who becomes his mentor and master of martial art. The story Hutton tells is meandering, but engaging, leading from his infatuation with the sensei (teacher) to a more mature knowledge that friendship with this man with an insidious purpose on the island is a burden as well as a privilege. He has accepted the bargain: Endo’s protection for his native knowledge.

The problem is, some mistakes can be so great, so grievous, that we end up paying for them again and again, until eventually all our lives forget why we began paying in the first place. (Book One, Ch.13, p.154)

The Gift of Rain, framing its story on a little-heard-of Malaysian island with a diverse people and culture, delves into the moral ambiguity that its protagonist faces when war erupts. Hutton finds himself torn between love for his family and loyalty to his Japanese teacher and friend. Tan is not afraid to deal with such grey areas into which he puts Hutton. Both Hutton and Endo are well-etched. They are both shouldered with the duty to protect their families and have to act within the constraint of obligations. Tan’s treatment of their dilemma and emotional complexities is both nuanced and realistically ambiguous. They are capable of nobility, but also failures of the spirit and most importantly, they have to bear responsibility for evil as well as the good they do. The only drawback of this debut (nominated for Booker Prize 2007) was the excessive aikido element that sometimes teeters over into daftness. Tan’s evocative and thoughtful prose also evokes the work of Kazuo Ishiguro and Somerset Maugham.

432 pp. Weinstein Books. Paper. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]

[566] Princess Elizabeth’s Spy – Susan Elia MacNeal

“You grew up in America, after all—exactly what do you know about British aristocracy?”
“Not much beyond the historical, I’m afraid,” Maggie said.
“All right, impromptu quiz—what do you say when you meet the King and Queen?”
Maggie gave David a wry look. Frain had forgotten about royal etiquette lessons. “Hello?”
David smacked himself on the head. “Oh, my dear Eliza Doolittle — we have a long night ahead of us.” (Ch.5, p.52)

This book is Maggie Hope Mystery #2, a sequel to Mr. Churchill’s Secretary. After she has discovered and broken the hidden Nazi code that points to three specific attacks in London, Maggie Hope is no longer Winston Churchill’s secretary at Number Ten. She has proven that her scientific acumen, intelligence, problem-solving skills and ability to handle dangerous situations make her a great asset to the British war effort. The beginning of Princess Elizabeth’s Spy sees Maggie entering MI-5 school for spies. Although her grades are stellar, she doesn’t do well enough on the physical tests to be sent abroad to gather intelligence for the British front.

Maggie shook her head. A decapitated Lady-in-Waiting, rabid corgis, and a man who lives with birds? ‘I thought living in a castle would be interesting, Sir Owens,’ she said, ‘but nothing—absolutely nothing—prepared me for this. . . Maggie went back into the sitting room. She stopped by the bookcase, which was empty. She squinted at it. The dust indicated books had been there for a time and had recently been removed. Now, that’s odd, she thought. Why would someone take Lily’s books? (Ch.9, p.102-3)

Instead MI-5 finds a job for her as math tutor to Princess Elizabeth, a post as an undercover, so she can keep an eye on Elizabeth, fondly known as Lilibet, who, as heir to the throne, may be a Nazi target. Soon she realizes danger is on the prowl on castle grounds when a lady-in-waiting is murdered. Her book, removed from the shelf of her quarter, is proof of connection to another murder at the Claridge’s in London. Castle life quickly proves more dangerous and her assignment, after all, is not cushy but one that involves intrigue, kidnapping, and treason. In this novel, besides the conspiracy that places the entire royal family in peril, Maggie Hope also grapples with the loss of her boyfriend and the possible truth that her father, Edmund Hope, an expert in code and cipher at Bletchley, might have been a German spy.

As Maggie needs to discern who the German agents are that have infiltrated the castle, she races against time to save England and its heir from a most disturbing fate. Although Princess Elizabeth’s Spy is not a historical fiction, more a fictional story set in the past with real characters, the book is very well-researched. The Windsor Castle, with its grandeur and staidness, is a workplace like “living in a museum—and terribly cold in winter” during the war. The King and Queen were strict about rationing, so even the princesses were limited to one egg per week, and the rest of the restrictions the British people lived through. The castle’s dungeons were used a bomb shelter where servants and the Princesses move their beds, changes of clothes, books, kitchen utensil and furniture in to keep calm and carry on. This light mystery gives one a glimpse of what it was like to live in war-time England and the story constantly keeps one on the edge using humor and red herrings.

369 pp. Bantam Books. Paper. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]

[539] We Had It So Good – Linda Grant

” I keep thinking of all the people I’ve known in London, all these years of living here. They pass through your life and you have got old and they must have got old, but if you saw them you’d cry, because you’d understand for the first time how old you are, and that it’s all long gone and we didn’t treasure it. We thought there was no way it would not last forever, together with our hair. ” (78)

We Had It So Good is a rich, multilayered novel that spans half a century, beginning in the 1960s, and entwining three generations’ secrets and longings. Young and ambitious Stephen Newman, born and raised in a Cuban-Polish immigrant family in Los Angeles, earns his ticket to postgraduate study in Oxford on a scholarship. His father works in a cold-storage warehouse that takes care of Hollywood stars’ fur coats. Some of Stephen’s most savored and vivid memories include wearing Marilyn Monroe’s mink behind his father’s back.

There was something not entirely adult about her husband, she thought. He retained a boyishness he should have long abandoned. It was her theory that in all marriages there is one person who is the grown up and the other who is the child, and she knew which role she fulfilled in this particular partnership. (139)

His promising career in Oxford is compromised, not by the surreptitious enterprise in making narcotics in the lab, but by the deforming of a library book. At the same time, his draft papers for Vietnam arrive, so out of convenience he marries Andrea, who happens to be his girlfriend at the time. The stale and stagnant life is Oxford is replaced by one that is characterized by poverty. Andrea takes up the job as a chambermaid and he a freelance science writer. They seem to find happiness in a communal squat in spite of being poor—and they remain faithful and married—to the utter surprise of their children who, in their adulthood, have grown somewhat estranged.

She felt a dismal failure both as a mother and as a therapist that her daughter told her nothing about her life, that her teenage bounce and gusto had been replaced by a reserve and secrecy, as if she was tending to some inner flame. (213)

The novel is a scrutiny of marriage and family; and although it captures the changing times, Grant never loses sights of the everyday details that define her characters. Through thick and thin Stephen and Andrea stay married, each trying to cope with their knot of anxiety. Time passes. The bright promise of the future darkens. Stephen feels trapped in Europe and longs for a different life; Andrea ruminates the thought that she shouldn’t have run her husband’s life. Both are stricken by the apprehension of their mortality.

We Had It So Good is a book that makes one live in it. It depicts how we struggle to come to terms with the mediocrity of lives, the unfulfilled dreams, the misplaced aspirations, as age takes the gloss off our dreams. Despite some slight clunkiness and slowness, Grant is dextrous in capturing the smallest moment of a character, as births and deaths, unions and ruptures, scatter through the pages with both the intensity and the ruggedness of real life. Sometimes life is like a series of banal accidents for the characters. There exists a vague sense of moral ambiguity to the story: it’s almost as if the couple should feel guilty for how good they have had it.

344 pp. Virago UK. Paper. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]

[538] The Room of Lost Things – Stella Duffy

” Alice made friends with a dozen customers in as many years of business. Robert continued some of her friendships when he took over, and made perhaps another ten of his own. Always he stayed and they moved . . . The ones that remain he will pass on to Akeel . . . These customers are part of the shop’s legacy, Robert has meant something to them and they to him. ” (Ch.34, p.223)

Set in contemporary London, The Room of Lost Things portrays a surprising but moving friendship. Robert Sutton has run his dry-cleaning shop in Loughborough Junction for over forty years. His mother purchased the business after working there for several years. Robert has grown up in the shop which is located at the heart of a bustling community. After his mother died, he continues running the business and knows his customers well.

He takes the stains and the tears and the messy secrets and makes them go away. But Robert remembers who brings them in, the soiled articles, the broken zips, ripped dresses, old suits, he checks the pockets for lost lists and letters, and he knows what his customers are trying to hide, cover up, make good, make do and mend. (Ch.2, p.12)

At retiring age, Robert makes the first step by putting the business up on the market. The only prospective buyer is a 26-year-old young British Muslim from East London, Akeel. Born and raised in England, he feels disconnected from his Pakistani family and culture. He strives to establish manhood by launching his own business. When the old man decides to sell the business to Akeel, he does not think they have much in common. Neither of them wears his heart on the sleeves, let alone the most guarded emotions. But as the young man learns his new trade, they begin to reveal their hidden lives.

All these other people he knows too much about, he understands, keeps their secrets, and no one left to listen to his. Robert has never been lonely before, no chance to be, he went from son to husband to father with no time between, he has always lived with other people . . . (Ch.35, p.224)

As this most unusual friendship grows, the intonation decoded, the the underlying context cleared, the uncomfortable silence dissolved, Robert finds in Akeel a loyal listener to whom he will confide in and reveal his secrets. The delineation of a friendship with a surprising magnitude gives way to Robert’s unspoken past. Like the many lost things that were properly labeled and stowed away in the shop, Robert has meticulously sealed up his past: a doom marriage, a demanding, terminally ill mother, an estranged daughter, and a late affair. A book of great passion and sensitivity, The Room of Lost Things shows nuances of one’s solitude, a solitude that is measured by the vicissitude of a south London community. The quiet novel is redolent of atmospheric evocation of the place over time, and of the inconsequential lives that come and go the fixture that is a dry-cleaner shop.

312 pp. Virago UK. Paper. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]

[518] The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark

“Her prime of life. A teacher of mine, she was full of culture. She was an Edinburgh Festival all on her own. She used to give us teas at her flat and tell us about her prime. ” (Ch.2, p.26)

Early 1930s, in Edinburgh, at the staid Marcia Blaine School for Girls, a teacher named Miss Jean Brodie is truly different from the rest of the faculty. SHe is unmistakably and outspokenly in her prime. She has a passion for art and culture, proclaiming that “safety does not come first. Goodness, truth, and beauty come first.” (7) She is a preposterous woman who selects her elite group, seizes upon these docile, impressionable 12 year olds (whose parents she trusts will not lodge complaints) and influences them with her over-romanticized worldview. She spins tales about everything irrelevant to the curriculum. Her unorthodox teaching method without doubt raises many eye-brows and sets her at a disadvantage with the headmistress.

There were two exceptions on the staff, who felt neither resentment nor indifference towards Miss Brodie, but were, on the contrary, her supporters on every count. One of these was Mr. Gordon Lowther, the singing master for the whole school, Junior and Senior. The other was Mr. Teddy Lloyd, the Senior girls’ art master. They were the only men on the staff. Both were already a little in love with Miss Brodie . . . (Ch.3, p.49-50)

The six girls Miss Brodie singles out for her special pruning are known as the Brodie set. They are the most remarkable and brightest girls in spite of their aloofness. Under the calculating scheme of the headmistress, who sets her heart in breaking the set with a single stroke, the girls are assigned to different houses when they reach Senior school, for team spirit will cut across their individualism. Although these girls have little in common with each other outside their continuing friendship with Miss Brodie, later in life they would reflect that the first years with their progressive teacher have been some of the happiest time of their life.

Thus the narrative communicates back and forth in time, in sparing but brief omniscient interruptions, informing readers what will become of the Brodie girls: Mary will die young; Monica becomes a mathematician; Sandy, Miss Brodie’s betrayer, will become a nun; others will marry stolidly.

It was plain that Miss Brodie wanted Rose with her instinct to start preparing to be Teddy Lloyd’s lover, and Sandy with her insight to act as informant on the affair. (Ch.5, p.116)

Obviously Spark’s characterization is devoutly starved. Miss Brodie, outlandish and eccentric, is reduced to a collection of aphorisms throughout the novel. She is, in other words, not really known to readers, who are no more than her pupils in terms of knowing her. What they know about her—her attraction to the married art master, whom she renounces, and the affair with the bachelor music teacher, is what the headmistress craves to glean in order to discredit Miss Brodie.

This is a brilliant novel, funny and poignant at the same time. Brodie is a rebel, her influence malign. But the novel leaves the feeling that something unfulfilled and even desperate about her—for she is obviously ahead of her time and her progressiveness renders her alone. In spite of her folly, she has indubitably left her mark in the girls. Her defective sense of self-criticism has not been without its beneficient and enlarging effects.

137 pp. Harper Perennial. Paper. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]

[516] Blaming – Elizabeth Taylor

” She re-read the letter for the third time, wondering how she could decently prevent Martha from coming, who could recreate the nightmare, letting slip placenames, which must never be mentioned to her again; but she knew that she could not decently prevent her, after all that she had done. ” (Ch.6, p.52)

Paring the purely descriptive element to the bone, Blaming barely holds up a story. What takes place here looks fairly simple: Amy, whose husband Nick dies suddenly while they are on vacation in Istanbul, is helped through the practical difficulties surrounding her loss by Martha, an American novelist whom at first Amy is reluctant to contact again after the two women have gone separate ways. Once back home, in the caring hands of Ernie the butler, Gareth the doctor and her son James, Amy allows grief to run its course, knowing that bereaved people are a great burden to others.

Once reconciled to the fact that, despite delays and excuses, Martha must eventually be invited, Amy had done her best, had bought flowers, which she did not do nowadays, and arranged them carefully, had tried to see her faded, but pretty house through the eyes of a foreign stranger . . . (Ch.7, p.63)

Earlier on the trip, in which Nick, recovering from a surgery, had been trying on Amy’s patience. The intrusive Martha befriended the couple and hoped for a growing acquaintance with them. Tragic circumstance has inevitably brought her closer to Amy, who is ungratefully reluctant to maintain the friendship. Eventually Martha secures an invitation to visit. Her presence in Amy’s life is irritatingly intrusive, but a curious bond begins to form between the two women. “In a way, Martha became part of the passing time,” yet Amy continues to resent her prodigality and impulsiveness. Amy herself develops an ever-clear liaison with the family doctor Gareth Lloyd, who has been a widower, under the gaze of her son and daughter-in-law James and Maggie, altogether less endearing than their two children.

The prevailing mood of Blaming is one of subdued bleakness. Though the characters themselves—fretful and grievous Amy, restless and impulsive Martha, aggravating James and inquisitive Dora seem to forge relationships with one another through a medium of disappointed expectations, Taylor invokes through them a sense of confusion and frustration because often time human imperfections are what make of life. Taylor’s characters are all so truthful because, above all, she was a great virtuoso of dialogue. She really knew how people talk. Taylor can be unforgiving towards her characters’ behavior; but she knows exactly why they behave in such a way.

190 pp. Virago Modern Classics. Paper. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]

[514] Small Island – Andrea Levy

” I was a giant living on land no bigger than the soles of my shoes. Everywhere I turn I gazed on sea. The palm trees that tourists thought rested so beautiful on every shore were my prison bars. Horizons my tormenting borders. I envied the pelican, I envied the crow—with wings they could fly easy from this place to rest in some other. ” (Ch.18, p.173)

Small Island tells a very cracking story set, mainly, in post-war London. It follows a white couple and a black couple—men and women trying to lead ordinary lives after the war in 1948. Hortense Joseph, a haughty but well-educated young woman, arrives in London from Jamaica to meet her husband, Gilbert Joseph. A native Jamaican who served as an airman in the RAF, Gilbert returns from war expecting to be received as a hero, but finds his status as a black man in Britain to be second class. He was among thousands of West Indians who believed in the Mother Country. When Hortense arrives, aspiring to become a teacher so she can rise above her race, she is dismayed that Gilbert has set up home in a miserable bedsit in Earl’s Court, hosted by Queenie Bligh.

Luck is a funny thing. To some only a large win of money at the pools is luck . . . So let me tell you what luck is for a coloured man who is just off a boat in England. It is finding Queenie Bligh. It is seeing she has a big house and is happy to take me and a few of the boys in the lodgers. (Ch.21, p.184)

Queenie is the kind, sympathetic working-class woman who has befriended Gilbert and stuck out for him in a vicious brawl that records some of the most unpleasant racist aspects of the period in British history. Taking in coloured tenants, Queenie is single-handedly responsible for ruining an all-white neighborhood. Her husband, Bernard, has been absent for two years after the war ended and she hears no news from him. When Gilbert and Queenie are involved in a wartime incident where the US army attempts to impose a segregated seating plan in a local cinema, Bernard is involved in a mutiny in India, where the natives fight for who should have power when a new India emerges.

England had shrunk. It was smaller than the place I’d left. Streets, shops, houses bore down like crowds, stifling even the feeble light that got through. I had to stare out at the sea just to catch a breath. And behind every face I saw were trapped the rememberings of war. Guarded by a smile. Shrouded in a frown. But everyone had them. Private conflicts. (Ch.46, p.350)

As much as the novel seems to addresses race, prejudice, and identity, Small Island is far from being just a novel about racism. Whereas the black couple suffers discrimination, the white couple riles in private conflicts. Beleaguered and bewildered, Bernard returns from war feeling like he’s stumbled into someone else’s existence by mistake and is frantically trying to find his part. Mutual secrets alienate husband and wife—and the revelations, overshadowed by moral and racial considerations, challenge our convention that life is not just black or white, but exists in every shade of grey. Most importantly, they threaten to split Queenie’s world apart again.

There are some words that once spoken will split the world in two. There would be the life you breathed them and then the altered life after they’d been said. They take a long time to find, words like that. They make you hesitate. Choose with care. Hold on to them unspoken for as long as you can just so your world will stay intact. (Ch.55, p.407)

Lucy has a respectable handle on language, but she is heavy-handed on the back story. Juggling four narrative voices, she creates a style that reproduces the rhythm and content of her characters’ speech. The book is truthful about the crucial period of England in which the empire is on the exit and multiculturalism is on the rise. In a novel about barriers of racial prejudice, where mutual incomprehension seems the rule, I appreciate how characters seem unknown to each other. Hortense is not aware that she and Queenie once liked the same man. Hortense is blinded by her condescending view of Gilbert. Finally, Queenie’s apparent small-mindedness seems less evident when we find out, from her own account, of her affair with a tenant who is staying in her house while her husband is serving in the army in India.

440 pp. Picador Original. Paper. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]

[506] The Sea, the Sea – Iris Murdoch

” What shall I do with it, I asked her, what shall I do now with my love for you which you so terribly revived by reappearing in my life? Why did you come back, if you could not content me? What can I do now with the great useless machine of my love which has no wholesome work to do? . . . Perhaps when I was living alone and being everyone’s uncle like a celibate priest I would keep this fruitless love as my secret chapel. ” (456)

In his early 60s, Charles Arrowby retires from theater and pours his entire saving into a seaside brick house where he plans to live a quiet life of meditation and to write his memoir. Despite the meager amenities of the dilapidated house, he is absorbed and contented by this paradise that permits him genuine solitude—but not for too long. A series of strange events and unexpected visitors puncture this retirement regime. The novel-diary, which records his daily routine of swimming in the dangerous sea, buying groceries in the village, and making his obsessively detailed meals, becomes a continuum filled with allusions to myth and magic. The arrival of his guests subjects him to a confrontation of his own vanity, new possibility of romance, and unresolved bitterness.

You’ve lived in a hedonistic dream all your life, and you’ve got away with behaving like a cad because you always picked on women who could look after themselves. And my God you told us the score, you never committed yourself, you never said you loved us even when you did! (183)

Indeed Charles Arrowby is a cold fish with clean hands! He’s free from relationship obligations but memories of his past romances capitulate him. He pines for Lizzie, an actress whom he cares for but can only love dispossessively and platonically. Hartley, his first love from 40 years ago, is the main cause of his discontent in life. She appears in the hamlet where Charles lives, locked up in her own nightmare of a marriage. After the horrid interview with her husband, Charles sets out to rescue her in a campaign that covers long segments of the book. Hartley is haunted by her own demons, her reckless attempts to enrich her married life by adopting a son, which wound up creating only jealous suspicions in her husband’s mind about the child’s paternity She recognizes Charles’ affection for her but she believes she must remain in her marriage not because it’s right but because it defines her.

I’m not calling her a ghost. She is real, as human creatures are, but what reality she has is elsewhere. She does not coincide with your dream figure. You were not able to transform her. You must admit you tried and failed. (349)

In an important sense Charles Arrowby’s is the story of someone who violently and bullheadedly persists in all the wrong directions until time and experience—both under great pressure—and love form an unexpected quarter partially redeem him. Almost the entire novel is a derailment from his original intention—to write about his mentor with whom he had an affair. Clement, so her name was, is a shadow. Charles does not succeed in a renewed affair with Lizzie. He has deluded himself throughout by the idea of reviving a secret love all which all his relationships fail which did not exist at all. He is deeply self-deceived. He is so egotistic that he fails to conceive of a world outside his own head. This book has left me thoroughly divided. It’s as flawd and exhausting as it is exhilarating.

495 pp. Penguins Classics. Paper. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]

[505] The Stranger’s Child – Alan Hollinghurst

” It was true of course that the lyric of grief was often attended, of followed soon after, by a more prosaic little compulsion, the unseemly grasp of the chance to tell the truth—and since the person involved could no longer mind . . . There was a special tone of indulgent candour, amusing putting-straight of the record, that wandered all too easily and invisibly into settling of scores and something a bit shy of objective life. ” (Part 5, Ch.1, p.412)

Alan Hollinghurst’s first novel in seven years since The Line of Beauty is about the life and legacy of a gay war poet, a minor one who enters into common consciousness more deeply than many great masters. The book, which consists of five parts and each occupies a different era over 90 years, shows how truth is compromised by the erasures of remembrance and history. The Stranger’s Child deals with the short but dramatic life and posthumous reputation of Cecil Valance, a Georgian poet whose lyrical outpourings are given huge poignancy by the carnage of the trenches.

Freda Sawle did say that Cecil had made a terrible mess in his room, and it had sounded petty of her, to say such a thing of a poet and a hero who had won the Military Cross. She alluded, in addition, to his ‘liveliness’ and the various things he had broken—widow’s mites, again, pathetic grievances. What she couldn’t begin to say was the mess Cecil Valance had made of her children. (Part 2, Ch.7, p.144)

In the summer of 1913, George Sawle brings Cecil Valance, a classmate from Cambridge with an aristocratic root, to his family’s home outside London. Cecil has an atmosphere and appeal of the unmentionable lust. The socially confident lad soon mesmerizes the entire family, including the servant who attends to him. he is George’s lover but soon after his arrival in Two Acres, George’s sister, Daphne, is equally besotted. She longs to be in Cecil’s company, but wanders off with George to the privacy of the wood. Hints of their fumblings become known to George’s mother when a bundle of letters arrive. The attraction between George and Cecil is amplified by its illegality in a way that makes it more powerful. The entire novel, as it unfolds over the next 90 years, hinges on that one weekend when Cecil Valance visits Two Acres and composes, for Daphne, on whom he takes a shine on, a poem that, after he is killed in the Great War, elevates him to fame.

Daphne always fell for different men who couldn’t love her properly—they couldn’t give her what she wanted. (Part 4, Ch.7, p.355)
Paul pictured George with the half-naked Cecil on the roof at Corley, and smiled distantly, at a loss as to how much of this she believed or expected him to believe; and to how much she might quite willingly have forgotten. (Part 4, Ch.8, p.370)

The Stranger’s Child is elegant, erudite, but also difficult and demanding. As Cecil’s slim reputation is fought over by scholars, ex-lovers, and a mother who makes a cult of him, an ambitious biographer emerges to unearth a tragic story that is spun over time, and its truth is known only to mother, daughter and son behind the door at Two Acres. The mysteries of the story focuses instead on the delusions of people around him. The true contours of lives—how they were truly experienced, disappears into haze. Daphne’s three marriages also render the paternity of her children mysterious. Hollinghurst recreates the life of Cecil through reminiscences of family and friends. He leaves readers to fill the vague well-intentioned space between those spoken memories and imaginings of them. I find his writing on buried homosexuality very repressed; and the book gets flatter as it paces steadily toward its revelations.

435 pp. Vintage International. Paper. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]

[497] A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess

” You’ve sinned. I suppose, but your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable of only good. ” (Part Three, Ch.4, p.156)

Despite the shocker of unbearable violence and an obscure, invented lingo that takes a while to get the hang on, A Clockwork Orange is deeply philosophical. Set in the future, fifteen-year old Alex is a vicious teenager who is bent on senseless violence. He and his droogs unleash their destructive power at night, “razrezzing and giving the old in-out.” These thugs are on a spree of petty crimes, from mugging to car theft to gang fight and robbery, thinking they can get away with their alibis. What finally does him in is a break-in in which he beats an old lady to death.

You are to be made into a good boy, 6655321. Never again will you have the desire to commit acts of violence or to offend in any way whatsoever against the State’s Peace. I hope you take all that in. I hope you are absolutely clear in your own mind about that. (Part Two, Ch.3, p.95)

Released from state custody, he is subjected to treatment meant to impart goodness in him. The form of treatment involves an injection, and to arouse in him a moralistic sense through experiences of visual repulsion. Alex is shown, while handcuffed to an armchair, films that depict very tragic and atrocious violence that reminds him of his own crimes—and induces discomfort.

The pain I felt now in my belly and the headache and the thirst were terrible, and they all seemed to be coming out of the screen. So I creeched. ‘Stop the film! Please, please stop it! I can’t stand any more.’ (Part Two, Ch.4, p.105)

The premise of A Clockwork Orange is simple: the important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita also echoes this theme and goes farther since Satan is one of the characters. In this case, when the state undertakes to reform him, forcing him to to walk a tightrope of imposed goodness, they have gone too far. The government has entered a region beyond its covenant with the citizen; it has closed to its victim a whole world of non-moral goodness. What Burgess was trying to say was that it is better to be bad of one’s free will than to be good through scientific brainwashing. In other word, as a result of this reform, Alex is deprived of the ability to make an ethical choice. A human being is endowed with free will—he can use this to choose between good and evil.

The question is whether such a technique can really make a man good. Goodness comes from within, 6655321. Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man. (Part Two, Ch.1, p.83)

This lesson sticks out like a sore thumb. In the author’s own words, if a person can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange, meaning that “he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by Good or Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State.” The novel, written in a very articulate and invented lingo, has a three-pronged narrative that depicts moral progress: from the total evil to a total good rid of criminal propensities, and the ultimate reconciliation that evil and good must coexist because they justify one another. It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be completely evil.

The writing can be hard going at the beginning. But the invented lingo seems systematic in the way that words are repeatedly use to convey the same meaning. I read the edition with a chapter that was originally left out when the book was published in the United States back in 1962. The edition is also devoid of a glossary of the teenager’s language but I got a hang of the language after three chapters.

192 pp. Norton Paperback Fictions. Paper. [Read/Skim/Toss] [Buy/Borrow]