It’s the Easter holidays - at last! - and I’ve just spent a week in sunny Malta (of which more will come later) where I’ve been able to enjoy getting properly stuck in a book. The Spring term at school is always short but intense - mock exams and frantic last drafts of coursework require endless marking as well as plenty of counselling and coaching of stressed-out students - and this also coincided with the school production I’ve been working on since October. Time for personal reading and blogging over the past few weeks has therefore been virtually non-existent, so a reasonably long plane journey (3 hours), chilling in sunny spots and early nights has been a real balm for my reading-deprived soul. Luckily, I thoroughly enjoyed every book I took with me, and I’ve been inspired by each of them to explore their subject matters and authors further. So, quite the win!
Before I went on holiday, I’d been reading The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis with glacial slowness, managing 15 or 20 minutes before bed before drifting off to sleep. I’d never read anything by Martin Amis before, and was inspired to read this by the recent film of the same name (which is only very loosely based on the film, from what I can gather - I’ve not watched it yet). I finally finished it over Easter weekend, and while I can’t deny that it’s clever, and shocking, and thought-provoking, I’m not sure it worked for me. Amis sets the novel in ‘Kat Zet’ - the soldiers’ slang for the concentration camp - in the later days of the war. It is split between three male perspectives: the cynical Thomsen, an official who does clerical work for the company providing the concentration camps with slave labour, and who is untouchable due to being the nephew of Hitler’s Private Secretary; Paul Doll, the deluded, narcissistic and cruel commander of the camp, and Szmul, one of the prisoners, who is in charge of the disposal of his fellow inmates’ bodies. The novel is not really about the war, or the concentration camp at all; this is all just incidental in the battle between Thomsen and Doll for the affections of Hannah, Doll’s wife. The camp provides a series of administrative and practical problems that need to be continuously argued over by the comically useless Doll and his lackeys, undermined by the increasingly jaded Thomsen, and silently endured by the defeated Szmul. The detail of what happens in the camps is merely hinted at, and often couched in euphemism. The fact that the novel is focused on one man’s love for another man’s wife against the background of them all living on the doorstep of a concentration camp is what makes this an interesting and daring piece of fiction, and worth reading. I wouldn’t say the writing or the structure does. You can feel him trying to be clever with every sentence he writes, and the prose felt painfully artificial to me as a result. I also found the constant use of conversation in German and complex German terminology for the names of soldiers and organisations and so on alienating and unnecessary - adopting this approach without providing a glossary to enable people to understand what they’re reading I found to be deliberately exclusive and arrogant. In short, this was my first and will be my last Martin Amis. There is a good story in here - but it needed to be teased out by someone more interested in communicating that story rather than their own perception of their brilliance.
In contrast, what a joy it was to start reading George Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter on the plane. His second novel, it tells the story of downtrodden Dorothy, the spinster daughter of an elderly, selfish, parsimonious snob, who has absolutely no interest in helping anyone other than himself. She is worked to the bone running his house and doing all of the work of their rural parish that he should be doing, yet her simple, fervent faith gives her a sense of purpose amidst the drudgery of her day-to-day life. One day, however, after a night spent at the local roué’s house, where she has been lured under false pretences, Dorothy wakes up on the streets of London, wearing someone else’s clothes and with no idea who she is or how she got there. She is swiftly picked up by a band of tramps heading off to Kent to pick hops, and Dorothy enters a world in which back breaking work all day is rewarded by laughter and song around the campfire at night, and any thought of self or situation is obliterated by sheer exhaustion. It is only after seeing her face in a newspaper, where she is said to be missing, assumed to have run off with the man she was last seen with, that she remembers who she is. Overcome with shame at what the village must believe of her, Dorothy writes to her father for help - she knows she can’t go home, but she also has no money to support herself. Receiving no response, she goes back to London and faces a nightmare life on the streets before her father’s class-conscious cousin is able to give her a helping hand into a job at a very second-rate private school, where her meagre board and lodgings and harridan of a boss merely echo the life she had left behind at her father’s.
Orwell’s prose is always a pleasure to read, and it was fascinating to read such an early piece of his work, and see his socialist preoccupations and interest in the lives of the poor and working class coming together in this story of a genteel woman down on her luck who eventually comes to choose duty and routine over independence and struggle, because the former is easier. There is plenty he finds to critique about the petty bourgeois sensibilities of 1930s England, and the lack of support available to those who fall through the cracks, but Orwell’s skill as a novelist means that this never tips into didacticism - certainly not for me, anyway, though I can see that some readers may disagree - and I found his exploration of Dorothy’s psyche - particularly her loss of faith and how this fractures her sense of worth and purpose - sensitive and utterly convincing. He permits himself some artistic experimentation here, too, suggestive of being interested in modernism, and the fantastic - there is a strange verbatim theatre style chapter that didn’t quite work for me, and the mystery of Dorothy’s appearance in London is never explained - we just have to accept it as a piece of narrative sleight of hand - all of which makes this not your run-of-the-mill Orwell novel. I thoroughly enjoyed it, even though it is not a book you could call uplifting, by any means, and am very glad that Simon chose it for our next Tea or Books? episode - so do tune in when it’s live to hear more on our thoughts.
Carrying on the Orwell theme, I then picked up Wifedom by Anna Funder, which is a genre-bending biography enhanced with fiction of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, Orwell’s first wife, who, as Funder argues, was written very successfully out of Orwell’s life and writing by both him and his biographers, and she is determined to right that wrong. I’ve not quite finished yet, but I am absolutely loving it. Funder is not saying anything new in terms of her exploration of the patriarchy and the hidden, unpaid ‘wifework’ of women that has gone on since time immemorial to enable the public, paid work of men. However, her determination to demonstrate how Eileen was fundamental to Orwell being able to write the work he did has uncovered the obfuscations, omissions and downright lies of those keen to perpetuate a certain image of Orwell - and deny the contribution of Eileen to his work - over the decades since he died, is nothing short of revelatory. She goes back to the sources of Orwell’s biographers and finds examples where words have been changed, information withheld, damning evidence wilfully reinterpreted, all to ensure that Orwell’s problematic behaviours and often shameful treatment of his wife was kept hidden from view. In the process, Eileen’s life and phenomenal achievements were erased. Orwell barely mentions her in Homage to Catalonia - but she was the one risking her life running the operations of the POUM militia in Barcelona, keeping the communication lines open between the front and the various agents throughout Spain and beyond, hiding incriminating documentation in her hotel room, dodging sniper bullets and risking arrest to procure passports - I could go on. It was Eileen who was really wanted for arrest by the regime - not her husband. He was just an accessory - that was how important she was. But in Orwell’s version of events - she was just there to make the tea. I could go on - but you simply must read the book. Eileen’s story is a perfect example of what patriarchy has done and continues to do to women’s lives, and I am delighted that Funder had the determination and tenacity to dig through the archives to bring Eileen’s achievements back into the light.
Finally, one of my reading goals for this year is to read more classics I’ve never got around to, and I did just that while lazing around the pool. I finally read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which requires no introduction from me, I’m sure, suffice to say that I found it utterly absorbing, totally mad, and nothing like anything I would usually read, and I absolutely loved it. I am now a convert to magical realism, after believing for a long time it wasn’t for me, and look forward to reading more of his work. It was the number one book I wanted to get to on my list, and after this success, I very much hope I will find the others just as worth the wait.
If you like magical realism, you might also like the early works of Isabel Allende.
I felt pretty meh about Zone of Interest when I read it. I conceded that it probably would make a better movie.