Pincher Martin (1956), by William Golding

 Pincher Martin is a most disconcerting book.  First published in 1956, it was William Golding's third novel after his wildly successful debut novel Lord of the Flies (1954) and while it likewise depicts the human condition in extremis it is not, as Wikipedia describes it, merely a novel that records the thoughts of a drowning sailor.

To explain why, I need to depart from my usual practice and consider the plot, spoilers and all.  You have been warned...

BEWARE SPOILERS

I read the first few pages both enthralled and appalled: the third person narration describes the desperate struggle of a sailor fighting for his life in the cold waters of the Atlantic.  The blurb had told me that he was the sole survivor of a torpedoed destroyer and I could hardly bear to read his frantic efforts to breathe:

He was struggling in every direction, he was the centre of the writhing and kicking knot of his own body.  There was no up or down, no light and no air. He felt his mouth open of itself and the shrieked word burst out.

"Help!"

When the air had gone with the shriek, water came in to fill its place - burning water, hard in the throat and mouth as stones that hurt.  He hutched his body towards the place where air had been but now it was gone and there was nothing but black, choking welter. His body let loose its panic and his mouth strained open till the hinges of his jaw hurt.  Water thrust in, down, without mercy.  Air came with it for a moment so that he fought in what might have been the right direction.  But water reclaimed him and spun so that knowledge of where might be was erased completely. (p.1)

Even knowing from the blurb that he ends up stranded on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic didn't alleviate the power of this prose to make me think the sailor was going to drown.  (It reminded me of Richard Flanagan's Death of a River Guide where Aljaz Cosino is a river guide, trapped in The Cauldron on the Franklin River as the water rises). Christopher 'Pincher' Martin's struggle to clamber onto the rock is epic, as you can see that it would have been, if you Google the 1943 RAF photo of the rock with waves breaking over it.  (Golding himself might have seen this rock during his war service in the Royal Navy; it would be an unforgettable sight even from a distance, as I'm sure most prudent navigators would have ensured it was).  I am indebted to a reader at Goodreads for the discovery that this rock is thought to be Rockall, and to Wikipedia for its exact location between Ireland and Iceland, which makes it clear just how icy the waters would have been.

Not knowing at the time of reading just how small this rock actually is, I breathed a sigh of relief that Martin wasn't bashed to death against it.

But his troubles are just beginning.  He is badly injured from being hurled against the rock by the waves, and he is exhausted.  His clothes of course are soaked, and he is freezing.  He has to climb from where the waves have deposited him to higher ground and his hands are too cold to feel his way with handholds in the rock.  He has nothing in the way of resources, just a knife, his lifebelt and his oilskin.  He has to find some source of food and water, find something in the way of shelter, and deal with the threat of his own madness brought on by his total isolation.

And all this is utterly convincing.  Even as Martin's mind deteriorates under the stress and loneliness of his situation, Golding makes it completely real, and what's more, he sets up the reader who has to juggle empathy for Martin's ghastly predicament with the revelations through his fractured memories that he is actually a truly horrible person, guilty of dreadful crimes and utterly unrepentant even now that he fears for his life.

And then...

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

And then there is the final chapter which tells us that Martin's body is being recovered to take back to the mainland.  The text makes it clear that Martin drowned as soon as he hit the water and that there was never any hope of his survival.

Mr Campbell took his eyes away from the stretcher.

"They are wicked things, those lifebelts. They give a man hope when there is no longer any call for it. They are cruel." (p. 222)

The reader is utterly baffled by this turn of events...

Philippa Gregory in the Afterword puts it like this:

This is an afterword, rather than a foreword, because any study of this extraordinary novel has to consider the ending: the most important section in the novel.  Read at their simplest, the final pages are a 'twist in the tail' like the playful reverse of a traditional short story, but these pages are far more than this: they are a shocking revelation to the reader that the whole novel has been an illusion of the narrator Pincher Martin.  In place of illusion we suddenly see a snapshot of the real world, and a suggestion of what has really taken place.

The 'twist' is the total inversion of the story.  We readers thought that we were reading a story about survival, in which the survival of the material world, of the mind and body of a profoundly materialistic man whose very nickname, 'Pincher' implies grabbing, is the drama and chief concern.  It seems to be a novel rather like one of the earliest novels ever written: Robinson Crusoe - a novel about marooning and survival.  Shockingly, in the last pages we learn in a few brutal phrases that the story was not, as we thought, about life, but was all along about dying a death so fast that the narrator did not even have time to kick off his seaboots and swim, but was dragged down to drown, and the story which we have followed was nothing more than his last anguished thoughts, as drowning men are said to have. (p.225)

 Like Philippa Gregory, who freely confesses that it is a very puzzling novel, I found aspects of the story very confusing indeed, even as I found it utterly compelling in its vivid depictions of Martin's delusions. Like her, I found one reading inadequate, and like her, I found two were not enough.  I'd love to hear from other readers who have tackled its mysteries.

William Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983.

Author: William Golding
Title: Pincher Martin
Publisher: Faber & Faber, Faber Modern Classics edition, 2015, first published in 1956.
ISBN: 9780571322749
Review copy courtesy of Faber & Faber via Allen & Unwin Australia

© Lisa Hill

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

Peony (1948), by Pearl S Buck

 

Pearl S Buck (1892-1973) was not the first woman to win the Nobel Prize, (that honour went to Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf in 1909) but she was the first woman to win it for literature written in English.  However, as the daughter of American missionaries who spent most of her life in Zhenjiang, China  before returning to the US in 1935, she is best known for her writing about China.  The Nobel citation was "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces".  Of these I have read The Good Earth (1931) in the days before I kept a blog or a reading journal, and I've have previously reviewed her Letter from Peking, (1957).   This first part of this review of Peony, (1948) comes from my 2006 Reading Journal #11, followed by my more recent thoughts from 2020. 

***

Peony, is a deceptively simple story of star-crossed lovers divided by race, religion and class.  Written in 1948, it's an historical novel which explores the role of women in mid 19th century China.

Peony is a bondmaid in a Jewish family who lived in Kaifeng in China in the 1850s.  In the edition I read there was an Afterword*  which confirmed that there had been Jews in Kaifeng for a very long time, and that they were well-accepted by the Chinese as they never were elsewhere.  However, according to Buck, it was this assimilation which led to marrying 'out' and the gradual loss of their culture and religion.

*Probably by Wendy R. Abraham, but the book was from the library so I can't now be sure.

Although the novel is dominated by the story of Peony's doomed love for David, the son of the house of ben Ezra, it also explores Jewish beliefs and is critical of some aspects of their religion.

There is extensive dialogue about the incompatibility of the 19th century Chinese view of the world and the fundamentals of the Jewish religion.  Through the character of Kao Lien, a Chinese Jew, Buck is quite explicit about the separateness of Jews making them vulnerable to hatreds, and he tells his daughter Kueilin that she will not be happy if she marries into that family because they are a sorrowful people and they worship a cruel god.  Kung Chen, seeking to learn more about Judaism, rejects the concept of a Chosen People and tells the Rabbi that if there is a god, he would not select only The Chosen for salvation because under Heaven we are all one family. 

***

Wikipedia tells me that Buck was, in the US, a prominent advocate of the rights of women and minority groups, but I am uneasy about anything that suggests any kind of justification for anti-Semitism, or which implies that minorities are in any way responsible for the irrational hatreds of other people.  However, though it is now well-established that the German genocide targeted all Jews, whether secular or orthodox, or assimilated for generations or not, I am inclined to think that Buck was, in the immediate aftermath of WW2, searching for some kind of explanation for the Holocaust and the comparative tolerance of the Chinese.  To put it another way, her response to the horror of the Holocaust may have been to explore within the society that she knew so well, the costs and benefits of assimilation as protection against it ever happening again.

I think now that Buck in this novel was exploring the vexed question of Jewish assimilation and identity.  Hatreds that fuelled pogroms elsewhere did not occur in China because the Jews were absorbed into Chinese society, but this was at the cost of their traditions and identity.  David's mother Madame Ezra represents orthodox separatists who feared the loss of a distinctive Jewish identity, and her intransigent refusal to modify her principles even at the cost of her son's happiness, shows the strength of her determination to protect her family's faith.

Buck's interest in this issue may also have been influenced by her own experience of being in a minority faith.  She was the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, so she may also have been critiquing the contrasting worlds of restrictive religions in general, in terms of how they are incompatible with a more light-hearted, humanistic approach to life:

Pearl recalled in her memoir that she lived in "several worlds", one a "small, white, clean Presbyterian world of my parents", and the other the "big, loving merry not-too-clean Chinese world", and there was no communication between them. (Pearl Buck's page at Wikipedia, viewed 4/11/20)

I'd be interested to hear the interpretations of others who have read this book more recently...

Peony, by Pearl S Buck, first published in 1948, borrowed from Kingston Library.

© Lisa Hill

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

Paris Nocturne (2003), by Patrick Modiano, translated by Phoebe Weston-Evans

 

The original French title of Paris Nocturne is Accident nocturne, which, for me, puts a slightly different focus on the book.  Life is a series of accidental events, and in this pensive account, the unnamed narrator is looking back on an accident that he had at some unspecified time a long time ago when he was about to turn twenty-one.  This accident, and other accidental events that swirl around it, has been preying on his mind for a long time...

The book would have put me in mind of Suspended Sentences even if I hadn't known they were by the same author.  There is the same dreamy quality, that same sense of an ill-defined menace, the same hint of an oppressive presence, the same half-light and mistiness that veils the night, and that same sense of confusion that inhibits action.  And the same elusive people and places that the narrator does not and cannot ever know.

All of us, when we look back over our lives, have vague and unreliable memories of people, places and incidents, but how much more intense this fog of memory must be when the long ago was peopled by an occupying force of great menace and the shadowy figures of the Resistance.  A young adult alert to new experiences and encounters would find childhood reliabilities shattered, and be overwhelmed by huge numbers of strangers bringing menace, be made uneasy by a new order that upsets old certainties, and be confused by familiar adults no longer in charge of their own destiny... And to some extent these uncertainties also permeate the lives of the next generation, in the way that my young life was shaped in part by what my parents experienced as young adults during the war.

Patrick Modiano (b.1945) was awarded the Nobel Prize for work which evokes the most ungraspable human destinies and often explores the Nazi Occupation, an event which still lingers in Parisian memory today.  Even though this novella is set no further back in time than the 1960s, when his character is almost 21, there are still allusions which hint at the shadow of the Occupation.  The accident which sends him on the trail of the mysterious woman in the car jolts him into a new reality, one which he thinks will resolve many issues which have been troubling him.

The moment when the new reality arrives for the narrator begins with a car accident, which takes place at the Place des Pyramides (named for the Battle of the Pyramids in Egypt, a great French victory under Napoleon) as the narrator makes his way to the ironically-named Place de la Concorde which was the site where Louis XVI was guillotined in 1793 along with many others including Marie Antoinette.

Originally named Place Louis XV in 1755, the site was then rebadged as Place de la Révolution, renamed Place de la Concorde as a gesture of reconciliation in 1795, only to have the name Place Louis XV / Place Louis XVI restored under the Bourbons, and finally back to Place de la Concorde in 1830 after the July Revolution.  So the narrator is brought to his knees at the site representing France's military power, and is suspended on his way to the site that represents the foundation of French democracy, in a quiet allusion to the suspension of Liberté, égalité, fraternité (liberty, equality, fraternity) under the Occupation.

I was crossing Place des Pyramides on my way to Place de la Concorde when a car appeared suddenly out of the darkness.  At first I thought it had just grazed me, then I felt a sharp pain from my ankle to my knee.  I fell onto the pavement.  But I managed to get up again.  The car swerved and collided with one of the arcades surrounding the square in a shower of broken glass.  (p. 1)

From this moment, the novel traces the narrator's attempts to make sense of unreliable memory.  When he comes round from anaesthesia at the Mirabeau Hospital afterwards, the female driver has vanished and a thuggish man makes him sign a waiver, leaving a wad of banknotes behind and an admonition that it would be a good idea to forget all about it.   The 'report' that this man leaves behind makes no mention of the clinic and refers instead to a hotel's casualty department.  Clearly something odd is going on and the narrator mounts a search for the driver, whose name is Jacqueline Beausergent.

But this search is tied up also with his vague memories of other events in his life.  He has unfinished business with his estranged father involved in something shady, and there was a woman who ran over his dog.  He believes that encounters such as this have some meaning:

I had read that only a small numbers of encounters are the product of chance.  The same circumstances, the same faces keep coming back, like the pieces of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope, with the play of mirrors giving the illusion that the combinations are infinitely variable.  But in fact the combinations are rather limited.  (p. 21)

He acknowledges, however, that there was a kind of wilful amnesia in his relationships:

Before the accident, I'd been living for almost a year in Hôtel de la Rue de la Voie-Verte, near Porte d'Orléans.  For a long time, I wanted to forget this period of my life, or else remember only the seemingly insignificant details.

He offers glimpses of a man returning from work, and a chance meeting in a café with a travel agent that he had thought was a student...

They were always to do with people I'd come across, barely glimpsed, and who would remain as mysteries in my mind.

Like the narrator in 'Afterimage' who is haunted by tantalising image-memories of people whose identity he does not and cannot ever know, the narrator in Paris Nocturne tries to catalogue these glimpses:

I even started compiling a list, with approximate dates, of all these lost faces and places, of all those abandoned projects, like the time I tried to enrol at the faculty of medicine, but I didn't see it through.  My attempts to catalogue all those plans which never saw the light of day and which remained forever on hold, a way of searching for a breach, for vanishing points.  Because I'm reaching the age at which, little by little, life begins to close in on itself. (p.24)

This endless struggle to make sense of the past is something that bothers all of us, at both the personal and the public level.  Modiano make no pretence to resolve it, not even when his narrator meets up with the elusive Jacqueline.  Much as he wants to be comforted by her banal friendliness, in the end it only arouses more suspicion, but when he tells her that he thinks she's hiding something, her reply is abrupt: she says she has nothing to hide and that Life is far simpler than you think.'

Is it?  The answer seems to be that it's not.

Author: Patrick Modiano
Title: Paris Nocturne first published as Accident nocturne by Éditions Gallimard in 2003
Translated by Phoebe Weston- Evans
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company, 2015
ISBN: 9781925240108
Review copy courtesy of Text 

© Lisa Hill

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

 

 

 

 

My Name is Red (1998), by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Erdağ M. Göknar

My Name is Red is another book that indulges my interest in illuminated illustration.  I bought it ages ago when it won the IMPAC prize in 2003, but although Pamuk has since become one of those authors whose books I try always to read, until now I had never got round to reading the one that made him famous to ordinary readers in the Anglosphere.  It's taken me ages to read it, because I as-good-as read it twice, backtracking over the chapters as I fitted the pieces of the puzzle together but also as I formed a more coherent understanding of the principles of Ottoman art in the 16th century.   (You can read a succinct summary about it here but I made my discoveries from reading the novel).

The novel is a murder mystery in the style of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose or Iain Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost but it's also a love story and a meditation on a transitional period in Ottoman art.  At the same time it also explores one of Pamuk's central preoccupations: the contest between modernity and tradition; and between the West and Islam.  He does this through an exploration of the Islamic art of miniatures, setting his novel among master miniaturists under the leadership of Master Osman, a character based on the real life Nakkaş Osman, the chief miniaturist of the Ottoman region in the 16th century.

When I visited the Alhambra in Granada, I wasn't all that excited about Islamic art because representation of the human form was not allowed and my interest waned after a few chambers of what looked to me like endless repetitions.  But actually Ottoman art covered a vast area, and it was influenced by Persian and  Chinese art, as well as the Franks and the Venetians with whom the Ottomans were consorting as they conquered bits and pieces of Europe.  There was also a significant difference between public art, and the exquisite private artworks commissioned by successive Sultans who liked, as rulers do, to acquire self-aggrandising artworks that feature their importance.  So it's not at all surprising that when the Sultan of Pamuk's novel caught up with the idea of Renaissance portraiture from Genoa and Venice, he liked the idea of a portrait, accompanied by items significant in his life as a demonstration of his power and majesty.

However, it had to be kept secret, even from his coterie of miniaturists in the atelier that illustrated his artworks.  Because there were fundamental incompatibilities between Ottoman art and European art, which was judged impure and blasphemous.  The novel features a fundamentalist Hoja (rather like Savanarola). He denounces such wickedness as drinking coffee and storytelling that's not from the Koran, and he has a bunch of followers a bit like Hitler's Brownshirts so everyone involved in the Sultan's book has to be very discreet.

An image of musicians and dancers entertaining the crowds, (found in the Surname of 1720) shows the problem: all the faces look exactly the same except for a moustache here and there;  it doesn't conform to our ideas about perspective because all the people are the same size; and it's not signed.  Artworks, as the murderer explains to us, are supposed to be copies of what was done by the old masters of Shiraz and Herat, who drew the images as Allah would have envisaged and desired.  The picture is supposed to be seen from his viewpoint i.e. up on high. Individuals in the picture should not compete for importance, and the painter should not attempt to develop an individual style or expect recognition (i.e. or sign their work) because that is self-aggrandisement.  And pictures are also not supposed to be complete (as a Western painting is) without an accompanying story.

The un-named murderer is only one of many narrators.  There is also the hero Black recalled from exile to help with the Sultan's secret book; the unattainable lady he loves, who's called Shekura; the corpse, who turns out to be Elegant Effendi;  and Shekura's father, protecting her from Hasan, her disagreeable brother-in-law who wants to marry her since her husband hasn't come back from the war.  Then there are the artists:  Master Osman and his acolytes Olive, Butterfly and Stork, all of whom are suspected of the murder because they (a) had reason to be jealous of Elegant Effendi and (b) because they have conflicting views about the morality of working on the Sultan's book. There is Esther, a Jewish go-between, playing Hasan and Black off against each other; and there are also impersonal narrators who include a dog; a horse, a gold coin; a couple of dervishes, Death, and Satan.  It might seem confusing, but the novel is tidily chronological and this collection of narrators only adds to the fun in trying to work out who the murderer is.  Because of course, he's not the only one who's an unreliable narrator.

It is a long book at 503 pages, but I loved it.  I was fascinated by the musings of Black, reconciling his faith with 'modern' artistic trends.  I liked the cleverness of the way the book is constructed in what I understand to be classical storytelling form.  (I learned about this storytelling technique from The Storyteller of Marrakesh by Joydeep Roy Bhattacharya). I admired Pamuk's homage to the anonymous painters who suffered so grievously for their art in this period, and enjoyed learning about their style and why those lovely paintings are the way they are.  I was also pleased with myself when I recognised the patterns of three and realised that there were going to be three murders, and even more pleased with myself when I worked out whodunnit some pages before The Big Reveal!

I've read some great books this year, but this might well be one of the best.

Author: Orhan Pamuk
Title: My Name is Red
Translated by Erdağ M. Göknar
Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2001, first published 1998
ISBN: 9780571212248
Source: personal library, purchased from Readings $21.00

© Lisa Hill

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.