This week's menu: November 19th-24th

It's time for our ninth week of exciting new fiction from all over the place,

encompassing centuries' worth of stories in multiple forms, embodying multiple themes -

get ready to broaden your literary horizons, because here's what's coming up!

The 1980s were an exciting decade in the world of fiction, with sideways forays into the exciting world of science-fiction equally matched by juicy gritty reads which took a long, hard look at the world around them. I've been looking around to find the best the decade has to offer, and my top pick comes right from the start: Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose is a medieval monastery murder mystery originally published (in Italian!) in 1980. It's also a frightfully clever work drawing together all sorts of intellectual literary techniques and fields of study. Hope you enjoy it! If you've already had a go at this famous text, why not try Alice Walker's equally influential The Color Purple (an unflinchingly explicit investigation of attitudes to African-American women in the early 20th century), or playwright Tom Stoppard's biggest 80s work, The Real Thing?

Ah, well. If this post had been up as scheduled, two weeks ago, then this one would've fallen on my birthday. Hence - celebrations! But Christmas is round the corner, so why not have our celebrations now anyway? When we think of festive writing, one writer who undoubtedly springs quickly to mind is Charles Dickens, so naturally I'll be reading him on Tuesday - not a carol, though, but a tree: A Christmas Tree. Dickens' short story is sometimes heralded as a counterpart to his more famous Christmas work, and consists of an elderly narrator reminiscing on Christmases past. Dickens has a clever thematic twist up his sleeve, as each reminiscence links to an ornament on the Christmas tree. If it's not sounding like your cup of tea, feel free to pursue AIJOSI Raczka's festive haikus in Santa Clauses, or release your inner child with David Baddiel's recent children's book Birthday Boy.

It's an interesting concept, if you think about it. Don't stories rely on interactions between characters? What happens if you remove all those other characters and just focus on the one protagonist, all alone without any help or company? I guess we'll find out, because to demonstrate the idea I'll be sampling some of Gerard Donovan's book Julius Winsome, whose protagonist lives all alone in a cabin in the woods with his dog... until one day, when he wakes up to find the dog has been shot, and Julius feels obliged to take his revenge. If that's all sounding a bit portentous, then have I got some alternative reads for you: Michelle Magorian's Goodnight Mister Tom is a kids' book with a difference, a poignant tale of WW2 evacuation, and Kashuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day which is on just about every syllabus going, and for good reason. 

I went down to the University of Oxford open day back in June, and had such a fun time in the first of their 20-minute taster lectures that I sat through the second as well. In that second lecture, they were talking about a really intriguing, not very well known medieval text called The Erl of Tolous (The Earl of Toulouse) - so we're gonna give that a go today. A traditional medieval chivalric romance which embellishes its true source material, it is a narrative about the Queen of Almayne, who is accused of adultery by the two knights whom she rejected. Her innocence is asserted by a champion, who the King later discovers to be his old enemy, the eponymous earl. Alternatively, there are a couple of good finds from the Balliol College reading list that you could sample: from opposite ends of the literary timeline, I give you that ancient classic Beowulf, and The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse.

Despite only having technically existed as a country for a century and a half, Canada has a wide-ranging, vibrant literary history and continues to churn out classics. I'll be investigating some of the country's best literature (known as 'CanLit' to you cool cats), starting with The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant. Regarded by those in the know as the country's best writer of short stories, Gallant was somewhat overlooked during the early stages of her career, as despite being from Montreal, she lived in France for much of her life. If short stories just aren't your bag, then my other options are Kathy Page's Dear Evelyn, which won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize (which celebrates the very best of Canadian literature) only last week, or Mary Novik's historical novel Conceit, which is about the 17th century London metaphysical poet John Donne's daughter Peggy.

Ah, here we go! My all-time favourite literary genre is a swirling maelstrom of imagery and symbolic ingredients - pick your favourite ones, inject a chilling dose of 'the uncanny' (Freud's term for 'the psychological experience of something as strangely familiar, rather than simply mysterious'), and you're good to go. For Saturday's festivities, we'll be diving headfirst into possibly the best known example of contemporary Gothic writing, Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. The stories aim to 'extract the latent content' from traditional fairytales, notably subverting the 'weak female' stereotype found in both fairy stories and Gothic fiction (in the sexualised form of the virginal maiden archetype in the latter). If you'd prefer something else, try William Beckford's Orient-inspired Vathek or Horace Walpole's Gothic blueprint The Castle of Otranto.

For more recommended Gothic reads, please check out last week's post on it here. I hope you enjoy this week's texts - they certainly look la creme de la creme - and I'll be back in about two weeks' time (FINGERS CROSSED!) to share my thoughts on this tasty-looking banquet of books. Until then, feel free to follow me on Twitter @Banquetofbooks for notifications and updates, and happy reading!

My thoughts on Week 8

Reading the texts of Week 8 was a lovely experience - I was cooped up in a little cottage-type arrangement in sunny Northumberland, with just a dog and a book to keep me company! We also went to Barter Books in Alnwick, which is one of my favourite bookshops (yes, I have just suddenly thought that a 'My favourite bookshops' post might be coming your way in the future...) so all in all, it was a great week. As for the actual texts themselves, Week 8 hasn't delivered any complete surprises either way, to be honest, delivering a set of impressive, high-quality reads that thoroughly entertained and interested me.

***THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR MULTIPLE TEXTS*

On Monday, I was examining literature that deals with the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which culminated in the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man was a fairly apt example of the necessity for such an enormous movement, hailed, as it is, as an evaluation of the racial injustice of African Americans. However, within the opening section the thematic spark of the story doesn't yet seem to have erupted into a full blaze; Ellison introduces the eponymous invisible man by first-person narration of his nature (he is 'not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms') and his everyday life, gradually building up layers to the character. From the beginning, the themes of neglect (illustrated by the man's invisibility, which represents African Americans' lack of civil rights and a stake in society) and oppression go hand in hand - the title character's corrective 'No, I am not a spook' implies he is accustomed to unfavourable comparisons and assumptions such as these, and only now that he is guiding the narrative can he delineate who he truly is. And who is he? Somebody who is invisible 'simply because people refuse to see me'.

The invisible man likens himself to a 'circus sideshow', but makes it explicit that others' views of him and his true nature are completely dichotomous; Ellison emphasises this through polysyllabic lexis and jargon, when the invisible man reveals his condition is not 'a matter of a biochemical accident to my epidermis'. He also invites the readers to consider the psychological effects of being ignored - although he emphasises 'I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen', suggesting a degree of complacency about his situation, the matter-of-fact manner in which he announces 'you often doubt if you really exist' is chilling in itself and echoes how African Americans pre-Montgomery and pre-civil rights movement really thought there was no end to segregation or inequality. The reader gets the feeling that, suppressed for so long, the invisible man becomes his true garrulous self as soon as he gains the spotlight, elucidating all his feelings, such as the primal 'need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world'. And in this way, Ellison adds an extra layer of heartbreak to this man's experience. A violent description of how the character attacks a man who insults him after bumping into him is portrayed as an emotional release, with the invisible man bathing in the sheer joy brought about because, in his own words, 'Oh yes, I kicked him!' - surely a further indictment of letting minority groups go undervalued and unappreciated.

The opening of Ellison's novel is a mere scene-setter, but it provides a stylishly-written character introduction which effectively subverts all contemporary readers' prejudices against African Americans to underscore how every person thinks and feels the same way, even though some suffer the curse of invisibility. The writer's sometimes chilling use of understatement foregrounds how minorities often are forced to grow accustomed to a life of inferiority and isolation, and his insight into the psychology of the invisible man, so neglected that he actually seems to believe he is invisible, laughing at how 'something in [the man who he attacks]'s thick head had sprung out and beaten him within an inch of his life', preserves in the glass case of fiction the despicable racist attitudes of early 20th-century American society, giving voice to the oppressed to effectively illuminate their woe.

And there I was, expecting nothing more than a bit of ankle! 'The first English prose pornography' is just that - beginning deceptively simply, trapped within almost Austenian confines and promising to tell the story of a young woman who moves to the city, John Cleland's Fanny Hill doesn't take long to turn smutty. Introduced by a preface promising 'Truth! stark, naked truth' and noting that 'the greatest men... will not scruple adorning their private closets with nudities, though, in compliance with vulgar prejudices, they may not think them decent decorations of the staircase', Liverpool girl Fanny's memoirs are almost unremittingly salacious and detail sexual encounters of all descriptions, as witnessed by the eponymous narrator who unwittingly becomes a London prostitute.

Written by a homodiegetic narrator whose advanced years allow her to comprehend the folly of her naivety, the story tracks 'those scandalous stages of my life' with a tone intensely critical of her 'invincible stupidity' - whilst the teenage Fanny portrayed within the narrative labels Mrs Brown the 'kindest mistress, not to say friend, that the vast world could afford', the narrator's use of the jargon of performance betrays her more enlightened present state, as she identifies Mrs Brown's actions as 'decoys' and 'cues' - befitting of a woman who subjects Fanny to 'a strict examination' with her hungry eyes before speaking to her with 'the greatest demureness'. Equally, whilst she now understands that the path to sinful behaviour begins when a young woman 'begins no longer to look on a man as a creature of prey that will eat her', the motif of feasting reoccurs throughout the novel, with Mrs Brown and one of her clients both looking as though they want to 'devour me with [their] eyes'. Led like a lamb to the slaughter, her youth dictating her naive blindness to the monstrosity of her situation, Fanny enters the metaphorical lion's den, 'pleased with my cage, and blind to the wires', and never have I seen dramatic irony so heightened - even the narrator knows how naive she was! - to the point where we as readers, and Fanny herself, are screaming for this 'simpleton' to escape.

Perhaps this self-effacing attitude is informed by Fanny's general thoughts on her role in society - undeniably, she sees herself as an inferior figure, writing the epistolary story as 'an undeniable proof of my considering your desires as indispensable orders' and recognising men as 'our sovereign judges'. In turn, this inferiority complex could be seen to be dictated by how Fanny (and the other prostitutes) are treated; they are mere objects, 'fresh goods... for the use of [Mrs Brown's] customers, and her own profit', subjected to the 'fiery, eager stare' of clients who want the honour of 'the triumph over [Fanny's] virginity' and likened to victims decked out for sacrifice. I would prefer to think that the nostalgic narrator's solemn spouting of idioms ('it is the character of lust to be impatient') and associating non-consensual sex with sin (reminiscing 'the first ideas of pollution were caught by me that night') insinuate Cleland's disapproval of the mistreatment of sex workers within the novel - whilst the story could be seen as a flimsy work of erotic fiction, it's perhaps more tempting to hope that it was written to encourage social reform in attitudes to sex workers; Cleland either discourages the practice completely, aligning more with the women's conduct literature of the time, or advocates greater tolerance - and either are pleasing interpretations.

Divorced from the security of her friend and guardian Esther, whose 'valiance' defeated 'the schemes laid for me by some of the passengers' on her way to London, the titular character Fanny Hill is catapulted into an unfamiliar world for which she simply isn't prepared. Yes, it would be far-fetched to take Cleland's novel as a didactic work preaching that children should be properly prepared for the world before being flung into it, but the incorporation of a nifty counterargument ascribing the character's maturation from naive and happy child to wiser and sadder woman to the enormous life events she has endured encourages at least a little discussion. To be honest, I'll try anything to elevate Fanny Hill beyond its status as a porn novel; disavowed by Cleland and unpublished for years, the book does have merit in ways additional to its appeal as an early work of eroticism, thanks mainly to Cleland's skilful balancing of youthful innocence and solemn wisdom within its narration - you just have to go under the surface a little to find it.

Analysing one of the most famous crime texts of all time is no easy feat, since Agatha Christie's seminal work The Murder of Roger Ackroyd relies so heavily on the kind of Golden Age crime tropes that have become embroidered onto the fabric of all crime fiction that has followed. Narrated by the King's Abbot village doctor Dr Shepard, the tale begins with the kind of forensic detail, verisimilitude and short declaratives which are now commonplace within detective works, allowing the story to be presented as a case file, albeit (interestingly) one penned by a doctor and not a detective, since Hercule Poirot himself doesn't appear until the third chapter - and in a diminished role at that, merely a minor character in the doctor's narrative. We are quickly and methodically introduced to the situation - 'Mrs Ferrars died on the night of the 16th-17th September-- a Thursday. There was nothing to be done. She had been dead some hours' - before Shepard breaks from this felonious autopsy to interject with his own feelings, revealing himself to be 'considerably upset and worried', whilst his instinct knows 'there were stirring times ahead'. Fair play to Christie for imbuing her narrator with more personality than his dual statuses as a narrator and a doctor would lead the reader to assume; Shepard is at once fairly likeable, a vivid life and sense of professionalism created around him.

To be fair, this is mainly due to the introduction of Shepard's sister Caroline, a force to be reckoned with, who allows Christie to inject a mild dose of humour into proceedings which instantly alleviates her novel beyond the ordinary confines of the crime genre. Caroline is the ultimate gossip, filled with 'great gusto' and 'amazingly expert' at constantly disseminating and collecting information, to the point where Shepard has become accustomed to keeping secrets from her, lest what he says becomes 'common knowledge all over the village within the space of an hour and a half'. With Poirot in retirement growing marrows, Caroline is the substitute sleuth, her refutation of Shepard's diagnosis of 'acute gastritis' as Mr Ferrars' cause of death being founded on the reasoning that '"You've only got to look at her"'. It's tempting to imagine that Christie is quietly satirising would-be detectives or lazy crime writers, who might have believed her work (plotting crime stories in particular) to be an easy job - sending them all up in the form of the well-intentioned but perhaps incompetent Caroline could be a quiet message to her naysayers.

Secrets are a key theme within the book, right from the beginning, establishing a tone of suspense - because why introduce a secret within the narrative if it isn't to be divulged by the end? 'As a professional man', Dr Shepard aims for discretion, but especially so in the presence of his chatterbox sister, from whom he withholds 'all information possible'. Is the implication that Shepard's work denies him true, meaningful communication with his sister, or that Caroline's personality forbids this with her brother? Either way, by depicting one of the strongest bonds (brother and sister) fraying at the edges, Christie contrasts the cosy chocolate-pot setting and populates it with mistrust, the perfect breeding ground for a viral spread of suspicion. Already the seeds are sown - Dr Shepard 'firmly' tells Caroline her ideas are 'nonsense', but that's because he 'secretly agreed with some part, at least, of what she had said'.

The portion I sampled concluded with the introduction of our first defined suspect, the housekeeper Miss Russell (another Golden Age cipher), in whose estimations Shepard falls when he tells her he doesn't have the poison curare in his possession, 'so rare as to baffle detection'. Of course, I'm sure we'll find out that rather than seeking the toxin for her own malicious ends, she is merely trying to ascertain whether the suspect she has in mind could have got it from him. Along the way, another will die (Roger Ackroyd isn't yet dead, of course), and suspicion will be cast on Miss Russell. See what I mean about it being difficult to analyse one of the most successful models of the crime genre? So many have copied Christie's formula that it's easier than it is with more arcane models to anticipate the beats of the narrative, its ebb and flow. But hey, this is the crime text, 100% proof, the original, so why not enjoy it for what it is? So far, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd establishes the perfect idyll of King's Abbot, as well as its inhabitants, who all fit W. H. Auden's famous guidelines for suitable crime suspects, and I'd wager that we're about to enjoy Christie playing with the set-up she has masterfully created. I can't wait to see what unfolds.

On Thursday I was reading all about the famous titular outlaw of A Gest of Robyn Hode; published in the late 15th century but cobbled together long before that, the simply-written ABCB medieval ballad introduces the eponymous 'gode yeman' and relates his dinner with a sad knight who is almost penniless after having to reimburse the agents of the law because his son killed two men.

Throughout the tale, the figure of Robin Hood is presented in a romanticised light; he is 'prude' (proud) to the point that 'so curteyse an outlawe as he was one/Was nevere non founde', surrounds himself with 'gode' friends, and adequately furnishes his sorrowful guest with a horse, servant, new clothes and four hundred pounds. In addition to this, he is almost greedily sociable - despite surrounding himself with his friends Little John, Scarlok and Much, he will not dine 'till that I have som bolde baron,/Or som unkouth gest'. He specially selects these guests, prizing 'a lord or sire/That may pay for the best'. Imagine having a wonderful meal in somebody else's house, only to be told at the end that you have to pay for what you've just eaten! Robin's actions amount to theft (and he is very keen to verify the knight's claim of poverty), but since he is charming and clever in fooling the richest, the lower-class original audience (this ballad was designed to be performed, probably by minstrels) would be persuaded to idolise this 'Good Outlaw'. So, too, is his virtuousness indicated by his devotion to 'Oure dere Lady:/For dout of dydly synne [fear of deadly sin],/Wolde he never do compani harme/That any woman was in', revealing the influence of the Virgin Mary on his decisions in life.

Finally, he gains favour among the lower-class audience by urging 'loke ye do no husbonde [farmer] harme,/That tilleth with his ploughe'; Robin doesn't make it explicit at this point why it is only 'these bisshoppes and these archebishoppes' who should be 'bete [beat] and bynde', although it has been argued that his targeting of religious orders derives from their abuses of authority and practice of usury, where money is lended with extortionate interest. Taking this devotion to restoring equality to the highest degree, Robin is particularly keen to exploit 'the hye sherif of Notyingham'. In this light, it is easy to interpret the poem (a ballad for children, let's not forget!) as a make-believe political fairytale whose lower-class authors vent their fury at a corrupt elite - transcending the limits of ordinary children's literature, A Gest of Robyn Hoode provokes a deep philosophical debate over societal corruption and inequality, with Robin the lower classes' fantastical idol, the charming paragon of virtue who will effect societal change one step at a time. It's not hard to see how it caught on.

My third crime text of the week was perhaps the most intriguing of them all - Truman Capote's celebrated novel In Cold Blood virtually introduced the 'non-fiction novel' genre, presenting a true crime (in this case a 1959 quadruple murder in Kansas) as if it were a normal novel. The author masterly retells 'those somber explosions that stimulated fires of mistrust in the glare of which many old neighbors viewed each other strangely, and as strangers'. Capote's dutiful research, comprising thousands of pages of interview notes over six years, is evident in the heightened sense of verisimilitude which runs through the story's veins, even extending to an acknowledgement of how 'the local accent is barbed with a prairie twang'.

After introducing the reader to the 'aimless congregation of buildings' where the action takes place, Capote opens the narrative focusing on the victims, the Clutter family. The writing is strikingly efficient, as the author cycles through each family member in turn, from the patriarch Herbert ('always certain of what he wanted from the world', he 'had in large measure obtained it') through to his ailing wife (who is ecstatic to learn that, despite being 'an on-and-off psychiatric patient the last half-dozen years', the doctors have diagnosed the malady to be spinal, rather than mental) and his accomplished daughter Nancy, each time divulging just the right amount of exposition to quickly colour in each character and allow us to form opinions on them, without ever resorting to archetypes. Instantly, for example, Herbert is protective and clings tight to his beliefs (advising his daughter to 'discontinue "seeing so much of Bobby", since he is Roman Catholic and the Clutters Methodist and so 'a parting... must eventually take place'), whilst his unimpeachable daughter fills her free time helping all the girls in the town 'with their cooking, their sewing, or their music lessons - or, as often happened, to confine'. Capote also initiates a tone of pessimism from the begin - Mr Clutter bemoans how '"an inch more of rain and this country would be paradise"' whilst in his house, 'liver-colored carpet intermittently [abolished] the glare of varnished, resounding floors'; even the structure interrupts Herbert's happy reminiscences with the description of his future killer Perry Smith having breakfast across town.

And what a killer. Capote is noted for his sensitive portrayal of Smith in particular, having befriended him when conducting research for the book, and it shows - Smith is perhaps the most relatable, thinking, feeling, human character in the book. A description of his ideal breakfast as 'three aspirin, cold root beer, and a chain of Pall Mall cigarettes' sets the tone, before Capote fires out exposition like tennis balls, each unlocking a new facet of the killer's personality; he 'was no taller than a twelve-year-old child', rarely notices the passage of time, is absolutely fascinated by his own face and knows 'how to look now ominous, now impish, now soulful; a tilt of the head, a twist of the lips, and the corrupt gypsy became the gentle romantic', dreams of holidays abroad and singing in front of an audience, and understands music and poetry in a way that his partner in crime Dick doesn't. He is seen as the almost binary opposite to Herbert: lazy, absent-minded, powerless, sensitive; Capote may have been merely writing down the details he observed in a real person, but the fascinating portrayal of Perry Smith that he gives demands the reader's interest, urges them to become emotionally invested, entices them to want to follow his tale, more effectively than a great deal many other crime books do.

Propelled by Capote's deliciously written epic prose (my favourite example is a description of Holcomb being surrounded by 'the keening hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotive whistles') and extensively substantiated by a wide research base, In Cold Blood represented a reinvigoration of crime fiction, allowing for effective blending of the fictitious and the factual. It is interesting to examine how Capote adheres to some of the genre's cliches - the 'everything is looking up for the victim' cliche springs to mind, with regards the illness of Bonnie Clutter, and the author's description of the 'haphazard hamlet' of Holcomb and its 'unnamed, unshaded, unpaved' streets so clearly establishes the isolated town as an arena for crime that one might be tempted to consider Capote guilty of a little embellishment - as if to enliven the story and clearly categorise it as a book which is as valid a piece of crime fiction as something entirely fictitious. But hey, surely every reader of crime fiction (in whatever form) is a sucker for the kind of portentous paragraph-ender like 'he headed for home and the day's work, unaware that it would be his last'? Capote may tell us that 'until one morning in mid-November, few Americans... had ever heard of Holcomb', but thanks to his beautifully-constructed account of the tragic Clutter massacre, the world will never forget it.

I finished the week off with another underwhelming text, Gabriela Adameşteanu's Wasted Morning, which tells of the elderly Vica Delcă, devoted to her work in a shop and feeling trapped between the old and new Romania. This is immediately illustrated when the character espouses her hilarious view '"Your husband should know you from the waist down"' and gets a telling-off from her scowling sister-in-law who worries that '"the boy will hear you"'. One gets the sense that Vica will have to learn the art of compromise by the end of the book - yet, compared to In Cold Blood where I can't wait to find out how Perry Smith's character develops, there's nothing in Adameşteanu's characterisation of Vica that's making me care what happens to her.

Another way in which Vica feels confined and constricted is that she is 'cooped up' with 'that mute of a man', something she feels 'would have made anyone want to put an end to their days'. That 'mute' is her husband, whose awkwardness and solitude contrast sharply with her sunny disposition; despite their personalities being binary opposites, her physical confinement with her bedridden husband represents Vica's true predicament - she cannot leave him. The reason isn't exactly given - it's most likely just because they're so elderly that there'd be no point - so they stay together in hatred, she 'mumbling fuck off back to hell where you belong' while he 'drone[s] on to his heart's content', and he believing 'you've got the devil inside you. That's why she's never really cared for him'. Even a reminiscence of the moment they met as nineteen-year-olds doesn't ignite any renewed romantic feelings - simply put, the relationship is dead in the water.

The central premise - as far as there can be said to be one - is simple enough, meaning that for Wasted Morning to pique my interest would require its central characters to be absolute belters. Unfortunately, there is nothing in the situation or the characterisation that entices me to read on - the introduction is fairly solidly written, but completely devoid of a hook. And for that reason, I'm out.

Yes, it's been a little while - I was intending to get this up last weekend, but I was whisked away on a lovely surprise weekend to Amsterdam 😀, so here we are. As school work gets busier and busier, we might have to move away from a rigid week-on-week-off structure in favour of a 'I'll do what I can when I have time' approach. Nothing too drastic - it just means I'll have more time to properly hone my reviews so they're as fine-tuned as possible by the time they reach you.

Week 8, like many of the previous weeks, hasn't been perfect (bookended, as it was, by two damp squibs), but the meaty middle section was a joy to read, comprising two thrillingly innovatives takes on the crime genre, a multifaceted approach to medieval children's literature and a sordid 1740s shocker that was an absolute hoot to read. Take a bow, Week 8 - not bad, not bad.

I'll be back asap with the Week 9 reading list - I've finalised the books, and I just need to sort all my templates out and construct the post. We'll be exploring six incredibly varied texts from all sorts of backgrounds, taking in a contemporary take on the Gothic (for more on my favourite genre, take a look at this post from last week), a premature celebration, another medieval classic, Canada's finest, and more!

In the meantime, you can follow me on Twitter @Banquetofbooks for all the latest updates and notifications, and I'll see you back here soon to kick off Week 9!

Three of the best: Gothic

Hello! Welcome to the first in a brand-new semi-regular series called Three of the best, where (as the name suggests) I'll be giving you a run-down of three of my personal favourite books in a certain category. We're starting off with a genre that's ever so close to my heart (in fact, we're gonna be taking another look at it in the coming weeks as part of the reading challenge), dealing a perfect concoction of melodrama, thrills, trauma and well-rounded characters all within the framework of a decidedly chilling atmosphere. Here are, in my humble opinion, three of the best Gothic stories!

An easy contemporary assumption to make might be that Gothic fiction is predictable, that its prevailing atmosphere will be eerie, its predominant setting crumbling and ancient, and its characters the traditional ciphers of the virginal maiden, clearly defined antagonist, etc.. Clara Reeve's 1778 work The Old English Baron is a wonderful challenge to these assumptions; dating right from the genre's genesis, this study of virtue and power transplants the contemporary cauldron of contentious new political ideas and turbulent cultural developments into a tale of the virtuous peasant youth Edmund Twyford, adopted by the titular baron Fitz-Owen, discovering his true nature and enforcing a restoration of order over the malevolent forces who would seek to disrupt it. Largely ebullient in tone and buoyed by shades of paranoid teenage envy and courtly romance, the latter a direct hangover from the classical romance style which Gothicism sought to transcend, Reeve's work coasts along at a fairly brisk pace, utilising the supernatural sparingly and only when convenient to the plot; a spectral knight haunts Edmund in the boy's secluded and disused set of bedchambers, but this moment of terror constitutes the anagnorisis where Edmund comprehends his true identity, fuelling a slightly unevenly-paced but never flagging denouement incorporating the Gothic motif of a medieval duel, a weary travel across Britain, autonomous castle gates and the heralded restoration of order. Reeve bills the work "the literary offspring of The Castle of Otranto" in reference to the novel's status as a loose rewrite of Horace Walpole's pioneering tome which kick-started the Gothic literary movement - but to merely consider it a reinterpretation of an original source work is to degrade its rapidly efficient characterisation, skilful control of the plot and effective handling of Gothic tropes. With this book, Reeve reshapes the definition of the inchoate genre, altering its parameters to jettison Otranto's wildly uneven Shakespearean comic interludes and what Reeve lamented as the overuse of the supernatural; her tale retains some of the earlier work's more material, surface-level tropes - the ciphers of the tyrant, the weak clergy, the medieval throwbacks - and masterfully holds these in a perfect balance with the supernatural and its uncanny influences, crafting a perfect formula that satisfies the domains of the imagination and of realism, without sacrificing the credibility of either.

The Old English Baron is immensely useful to a scholar wishing to investigate the early development of the Gothic genre. It might be less fondly remembered than some of its contemporaries, but as a artefact of literary interest, as well as as an engaging if insubstantial read, it excels.

Heralded as 'the most analysed short story ever written', Edgar Allan Poe's seminal work revolves around the unnamed homodiegetic narrator's visit to the house of his ailing friend Roderick Usher, whose exhaustion, nerves and heightened senses seem to be attributed to the influence of the house itself, which is also inhabited by Roderick's cataleptic twin sister Madeline. Her sudden death is just one of the story's maze of twists and turns which combine to produce an effect of overall confusion mirroring the mental states of the Usher family. Carefully controlled in its linking of elements of setting and structure to the House of Usher, The Fall of the House of Usher transcends the average Gothic tale - although many of the formula's key ingredients are present within this 1830s narrative - by its psychoanalytical bent which likens the House of Usher - that is, the physical dwelling in which Roderick and Madeline seem trapped forevermore - to the House of Usher - that is, the Usher family, whose bloodline never seems to divert from its single path, arguably passing incestuously down the generations. As the house is cracked down the middle, Roderick and Madeline represent two unbreakable halves of the same psyche. As the siblings die together, the house crumbles into the lake, echoing the denouement of The Castle of Otranto.

Thundering to a climactic conclusion that can only be described as the Gothic, distilled, Poe's short story packs its pages with psychological analysis and thematic depth, challenging its readers to diagnose the situation at hand. If the narrator is such a good friend of Usher's, then why do they barely seem to know each other? Why does Usher bury his supposedly deceased sister, when he later reveals his certainty that she is alive? Can a house really be sentient, as Usher assumes? Poe's reluctance to give these answers, whilst connecting every element to his overall themes of degradation, mental disorder and life, infuses The Fall of the House of Usher with an irresistible Gothic energy and earns it a place as one of the genre's most compelling and interesting works of fiction.

How could this list pass by without a reference to the Count himself? Powered by suspicion and paranoia and infused with doses of folklore, mysticism and horror, Bram Stoker's all-time classic novel Dracula established the blueprint for vampire fiction upon its publication in 1897. His creation of Count Dracula, inspired by tales of the Romanian ruler Vlad the Impaler, as a welcoming and cultured host who transmogrifies into a bloodsucking creature of pure evil reinvigorated the flagging Gothic genre, manifesting the palpable paranoid fear created from sensationalist stories of London serial killers (much as Jekyll and Hyde had done a decade before). Like that earlier novel, Stoker's work presents two different versions of the eponymous Count, arguably lessening the impact of his later acts - yes, he may be intent on spreading his curse to England, but he has a well-stocked library, conducts business affairs amicably, and makes a good show of affecting to be a well-natured Anglophile. To this end, it is difficult to denote Dracula's actions as entirely evil - he has been cursed with vampirism, and is it not in his supernature to want to spread the affliction?

What is incredible about Stoker's novel is that it sustains analysis from almost every corner of the literary world. As a feminist novel, it aligns with the women's conduct literature of bygone times in advocating women's repression, presenting two dichotomous representations of femininity in Lucy Westenra and Mina Murray, both of whom fall victim to Dracula in a rebuttal of the feminist movements Mina represents. As a postcolonial work, it punishes Jonathan Harker's occidental superiority over the Transylvanian peasants by way of a terrifying (and the early chapters are absolutely spine-tingling) sojourn in Castle Dracula which illustrates the naivety of his presumptions - yet, hypocritically, worries over interracial relationships in its depiction of vampiric blood-mixing rituals. As a Marxist work, it depicts disparate forces - a vampire slayer, a doctor, a solicitor, an aristocrat, a cowboy and a teacher - coming together to defeat a malevolence that terrorises them all. From the perspective of narrative theory, its wide-ranging epistolary style aligns the novel's archaic folklore background with the beating, moving real world and its multifaceted denizens.

Interestingly, although the novel's year is never specified, the epistolary style makes clear that its events span six months, ending on 6 November - not only my birthday, but also the day this post is going up! Happy Dracula Day, everyone!


There is, quite honestly, so much more I could say about all three of these texts, and many more texts besides. Gothic fiction's flexibility, whilst being anchored to an ever-changing series of common tropes, compels me to the genre and makes me love it more than I could ever adequately express. Even within this post, we see: Clara Reeve's work which, although pushing out some earlier Gothic elements as failed experiments, retains elements of a classical style; Edgar Allan Poe's more psychological take on the genre, which analogises many of its tropes with mental instabilities; and Bram Stoker's pioneering creation of a true Gothic villain which manifests in a single malevolent being the 'uncanny' undercurrent which powers all of the genre's fiction.

I could write reams and reams about my love for this genre, but that's more than enough for now. I hope you investigate these texts - previews are available on Google Books, Amazon, iOS Books app, etc. - and I'll be back sometime soon with more updates on the Banquet of Books reading challenge. Until then, feel free to follow me on Twitter @Banquetofbooks for notifications and updates. Happy reading!

Update

Hi everybody, just an update to say that, due to this week consisting of a never-ending gauntlet of things to do, I won't have time to upload my Week 8 reviews, so we'll have to move everything back a week, i.e. Week 9 will start on 12th November. I read the Week 8 books on holiday in Northumberland, which was lovely, and they've been a really interesting bunch. In the meantime, I have a few ideas for little additional supplementary posts, so I'll try to get a couple of extra things out to you over the next few weeks. Happy reading!

This week's menu: October 22nd-27th

 

Who's ready for another week of incredibly varied literature, encompassing centuries' worth of stories in multiple forms, embodying multiple themes? Week 8 of the Banquet of Books reading challenge is here to broaden your literary horizons! Will eight be great? Here's what's coming up...

The civil rights movement in America, primarily focused within the 1950s and 1960s, catalysed immense change and, like many social developments, brought about a wave of culture. My prime illustration of this will be Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, an evaluation of the racial injustice of African Americans in the early twentieth century which covers black nationalist movements and the links between civil rights movements and Marxism, appraised by TIME Magazine as 'the quintessential American picaresque of the twentieth century'. I write this a few hours after the broadcast of Malorie Blackman's incredible Doctor Who episode; her young adult novel Noughts & Crosses, posing the question 'what if Africans had made Europeans their slaves?' is one of my backup options, should you have read Invisible Man already, as is Harper Lee's highly-regarded To Kill a Mockingbird.

Yes, okay, that title is terrible (my other options were 'subdue or show off' and 'repress or express', just so you know the atrocious thought process that led to that!). On Tuesday, I'll be delving into the 18th-century, examining whether its stereotype of stuffiness really holds true. On the one hand, my alternative reads for today (such as Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded) take a didactic approach to women's conduct and attempt to encourage modesty and virtue. On the other hand, my top pick for today, John Cleland's Fanny Hill, is this blog's first ever raunchy sexfest! I hope you enjoy 'the first original English prose pornography'. Over in backup corner, it's a true Fannyfest today (stop sniggering at the back), as Fanny Burney's Evelina is an alternative option; like Pamela, it opposes Cleland's novel in its advocation of repression.

Who doesn't love the thrill of detective fiction? Aside from their varied casts of characters and furiously-maintained suspense throughout, crime stories pull you in by the brain, urging you to put the pieces together and work out 'whodunnit'. On Wednesday I'll be diving into the genre headfirst and sampling some of Agatha Christies The Murder of Roger Ackroyd; the third appearance of supersleuth Hercule Poirot constitutes the epitome of 1920s 'Golden Age' crime and was voted the best crime novel ever by the British Crime Writers' Association in 2013. If, for whatever reason, the best crime novel ever doesn't appeal to you, feel free to read the genesis of the genre (Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone) or a postmodern example (Kate Atkinson's superb When Will There Be Good News?) and think about what you've done.

The Middle Ages in Britain are generally (but please, if you're a historian don't badger me about this) regarded to have ended with the onset of the Tudor dynasty in 1485, so for Thursday's reading I'll be creeping as late into medieval literature as I dare! It's (hopefully) going to be a fun one, because I'll be sampling A Gest of Robyn Hoode. Yes, you all know the one - men in tights, steal from the rich and give to the poor. Believed to have been written around 1450 and first printed four decades later, this Middle English ballad romanticises its 'Good Outlaw' hero. Alternative options for today, if you've already read Robin Hood or just want something meatier, are Christine de Pizan's The Treasure of the City of Ladies (you can find my thoughts on her other novel The Book of the City of Ladies here) or the slightly flimsy Italian erotic romance The Tale of Two Lovers.

Far from evincing a writer's lack of original ideas, stories based on real events often successfully utilise the verisimilitude of true occurrences to catalyse action, building up layers of atmosphere around the core of a real event. I'll be investigating this phenomenon on Friday with Truman Capote's celebrated work In Cold Blood, so much based on a true story that Capote himself labelled it non-fiction; the bestseller recounts Capote's six-year-long investigation into the criminals who committed a quadruple murder in 1959. One of today's alternative choices is unintentionally based on a true story - despite living half an hour away from serial killer Ed Gein, Robert Bloch was unaware of the similarities between Gein and his antagonist Norman Bates when writing the thriller novel Psycho. You could also read Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave, the immensely moving recount of a slave's life.

Throughout this reading challenge, my visits into other countries have had fairly mixed results, so let's see what Eastern European literature has to offer. My top pick for Saturday's reading is Romanian writer Gabriela Adameşteanu's Wasted Morning, whose seventy-year-old protagonist Vica Delcă is inextricably tied to the 'old Romania' whilst living in its present; the author's use of stream-of-consciousness and realist styles allows for an examination of the country's past and present. Frequently-censored Albanian scribe Ismail Kaldare's The Fall of the Stone City satirises the irrepressible distortion of communist theology. If the heavy stuff doesn't sound like your cup of tea, try out Croatian author Ranko Marinkovic's rewriting of the Cyclops myth. To be honest, all three of my options for today sound really intriguing, so I might end up having a go at a few of these. Hope you enjoy them too!

Let's make this week a good one! I hope you have a wonderful time with these texts - they certainly look like they're going to be a whole lot of fun! - and I'll see you back here towards the tail end of next week to share all my thoughts on them. Will eight be great? See you back here next week for the answer! In the meantime, remember to follow me on Twitter @Banquetofbooks for all the latest updates and notifications on when new posts go up.

Happy reading!

My thoughts on Week 7

As with a few previous weeks of the Banquet of Books reading challenge, Week 7 has been an 'up and down' week. There's been a healthy mixture of confusion, lightheartedness and really good meaty texts to sink my teeth into. I can't say I've enjoyed everything I've read, but I've appreciated it all. Keep reading to find out what I've been up to this week!

***THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR MULTIPLE TEXTS*

The week kicked off with the first volume of Thomas Hardy's poetry, collected in 1898 as Wessex Poems. Pastoral in setting and frequently mournful in tone, these concise verses never seem to adhere to a fixed pattern of structure, voice, subject matter. Just two poems apart, Hardy introduces his reader to the astral travels of In Vision I Roamed, its 'flashing Firmament, so fierce in blazon' a backdrop for the narrator's realisation of their 'sick grief that you were far away', and creates the much simpler world of Postponement, which describes a 'fear-filled' bird wishing to have been 'born to an evergreen nesting-tree' where his nest-making efforts would go unnoticed by prying passers-by.

It could be argued that Hardy's lack of a consistent voice damages the cohesion of the volume - this can be explained by the fact that the poems, presented chronologically for the most part, span three decades of work - or, more convincingly, that it allows the poet to incorporate a wide range of themes and styles, producing an incredibly innovative collection. This ambiguity continues within individual poems themselves; in Amabel, Hardy's focus seems to be on the degradation of the titular woman's beauty - he 'sighed/That love like ours had died', and notes that 'her gown,/Once rose, now earthen brown.../was like the knell/Of Amabel' - yet an attitude of resignation is adopted in the final stanza which muddies the waters with regard to the extent of the narrator's love, as they decide to 'leave her to her fate'.

The poet is never content with linear explanations, permanently questioning conventions, as in Hap, whose narrator evaluates the mechanisms of sorrow, realising his atheism through his reasoning that if 'a Powerfuller than I/Had willed and meted me the tears I shed', then he would be contented, yet he knows that the 'purblind Doomsters' of fate and chance are to blame for '[unblooming] the best hope ever sown' rather than a transcendent omnipotent being. So, too, does Her Dilemma transform a simple white lie into a fierce rebuke of humans' conditioned desire to be loved; the female speaker has little respect for religion, noting its 'wasted carvings' and the 'dull monotones' of the church's clock, yet still worries for 'her soul' after lying to a dying man that she loves him. At a Bridal again offers a scathing questioning of fate; its narrator sees his beloved wed another man and, 'grieved that lives so matched should mis-compose', believes that if he asked nature why he was not destined to be with the woman, she will answer 'that she does not care'.

Yet, despite all of Hardy's relentless challenges to destiny (which, in all cases, is personified - perhaps reflecting how Hardy is looking for somebody to blame when really there is nobody), it was two of the more simplistic ones that I liked the most. The narrator of Neutral Tones reflects on the love lost as his relationship has flickered out like a dying flame, as Hardy throws pathetic fallacy kindling onto a chilly fire that spits out recollections that 'the smile on your mouth was the deadest thing,/Alive enough to have strength to die' and 'keen lessons that love deceives... have shaped to me your face and the god-curst Sun'. Meanwhile, the titular narrator of She at His Funeral mourns a love that must stay hidden; Hardy questions the notions of class relations and respectability - whilst the mourning woman must stay a 'stranger' due to her 'unchanged... gown of garish dye', she is his 'sweetheart', the one who knows him best of all and whose 'regret consumes like fire', as opposed to the 'sable-sad' mourners whose respect for the traditions of the funeral creates the assumption that they knew him better. Overall, I'm not too enamoured with Thomas Hardy's often dreary subject matter, but concede that he manages to employ a constant atmosphere of curiosity to sew together a volume of inconsistently -themed and -structured poetry; for me, not a particular fan of poetry, therefore, it just tips over past the 'average' line - probably not something I would return to unless I had to, but an enjoyable experience all the same.

On Tuesday I was investigating banned books and reading Toni Morrison's Beloved, whose mother and daughter protagonists Sethe and Denver are trapped within a literal experience of the past coming back to haunt them. The author's description of this torture primarily focuses on the portrayal of the house in which they live as a demonic entity. '124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom', the reader is told, in the famous opening lines, and 'by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims'. It breeds 'lively spite', is filled with 'sad' pools of 'red and undulating light' which bring grown adults to the point of inimical grief, and causes a driver outside to '[whip] his horse into the gallop local people felt necessary when they passed'.

As for the cause of the house's 'outrageous behaviour': the author is almost nonchalant in her revelation that Sethe's dead daughter's spirit haunts it. Grandma Baby Suggs, portrayed as unable to 'get interested in leaving life or living it', even reckons that 'not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead negro's grief' and implores her daughter to 'be thankful' that only one of her children is 'raising hell from the other side'. In a novel all about the bonds we make, the baby (later personified as Beloved, after the single-word inscription on her headstone) represents the broken bond trying to re-assert itself within Sethe's life. The reader is offered several hints that Sethe risks repeating her mistake by letting her mother-daughter bond with the now eighteen-year-old Denver fray; the sample I read ended in Denver's fraught confession that '"I can't live here. I don't know where to go or what to do, but I can't live here."' Much like Denver's brothers, she finds this solitary, scared life just too hard to handle. Unlike them, she tells her mother about it - although it may be susceptible to fractures, the mother-daughter relationship between Sethe and Denver is portrayed as intuitive and nurturing. Yet, due to Morrison's effective and concise character sketches, it's instantly understandable that Denver feels conflicted: change.

Throughout the opening chapters, Morrison presents a constant progression of change within the characters' relationships: pre-the beginning of the narrative, five members of the family lived in the house, but Sethe's two sons 'fled at once - the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time'. The male players out of the way, Morrison can focus on the engagingly written female characters who dominate the story, though the family relationships remain just as turbulent - from Denver's perspective, she witnesses the loss of her two brothers and her grandmother, and becomes wary of Sethe's overly friendly old acquaintance Paul D, who has reemerged into her life, all the while resisting the influence of the baby on these already fraught relationships. Stuck between despising her life where '"nobody speaks to us"' and trusting Paul D, much like the liminal space 'between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead' where Baby Suggs resided, Denver is at a crossroads. No wonder she's able to identify the spiteful ghost as '"rebuked. Lonely and rebuked."' Does Sethe risk losing Denver too, albeit in a less material way than in the case of her other daughter?

The author's use of setting and scale is another curiosity. Clearly, the anthropomorphised house is central to the novel's theme of loneliness, imprisoning its protagonists in a too-tight embrace. All of the action so far is set in the house, relaying one close-knit family's experiences, yet Sethe's mind constantly travels to other places - she thinks about the farm on which she grew up as a child, its 'shameless beauty' that 'made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too', even the 'town full of disgust' on the other side of the door. This allows the author to convey the idea of trapping a roaming spirit within the confines of a single dwelling, to link the restlessness of the mother and her deceased child. So, too, does the initial semblance of loneliness about the household betray its falseness as the plot unfolds: there is a sense of shared ideals within the black community (Baby Suggs disseminating the adage '"if a negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up"'), Baby Suggs feels so intimately connected to her children that she 'claimed she felt each one go the very day and hour', and Sethe and Denver's bond is, I suspect, impenetrable.

To provide narrative colour, Morrison deals in imagery - the house's blood-red pools of light are a perfect example of how the baby's influence spills over into the family's everyday life, whilst Paul D attributes his appearance to '"devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad"' - yet can easily whip aside this blanket of symbolism in order to shock the reader: the boys of Sethe's childhood were 'all in their twenties, minus women, fucking cows, dreaming of rape', whilst the spiteful baby 'picked up Here Boy and slammed him into the wall hard enough to break two of his legs and dislocate his eye'. Morrison's masterful melding of the explicit/implicit also conceals a gradually emerging underlying suspense; we learn quite quickly that the baby's throat was cut, and that Sethe remembers 'pulsating... baby blood that soaked her fingers like oil'. Like guilt?

The early pages of this book are spent creating an emotional battleground, lining up the pieces ready for the player - the spiteful baby ghost - to have her fun. Beloved is a book borne of urgency, coloured by fear and soaked in nostalgia. It is a story of love and relationships which guts the traditional structure of that genre and fills the carcass with spite, loneliness and indecision. A desparate attempt to connect isolation to community, to identify the slave experience with maternal guilt, to recognise love and hatred in their multifarious forms, to reconcile inextricable paradoxes. I think it's brilliant, and I can't wait to read on.

Paradiso, José Lezama Lima's only published novel, is regarded as a triumph of Latin American fiction, a 'panoramic novel of Cuban life' tracking monumental themes of self-discovery and grief in a deliberately ornate baroque style which incorporates innovative experimental narrative styles. Unfortunately, I have very little to say about it, because none of that has happened yet. Lima introduces the reader to 'desparate, dishevelled' Baldovina, who has found herself caring for an ailing five-year-old boy 'covered with welts, brightly coloured furrows'. She is alone, fighting the 'terrified urge to run away' and 'ready to believe anything' with regard to a cure. What's more, she doesn't even know why she's caring for a person she views more as 'the body' than a child - he is a burden she wishes to be rid of, all her 'attacks and counterattacks' against the welts only producing 'negligible results', yet she cares for him nonetheless. And there's the contradiction within Baldovina's character. Both her and the child, José Cemí, have something extraordinary in their characterisation; whilst she stoically battles on with the child, his '"innocence can break any spell"'.

The world in which she lives is highly ordered - everyone has their place, their responsibilities, enforced by the 'patrolling sentries' whose lanterns create 'a flickering monster'. The Colonel, 'the most secret person in the big house', who takes charge when Baldovina's master is away, is so feared that 'everything was measured against fear of [the master's] absence'. In the money-strapped cook, Juan Izquierdo, Lima presents a character who always finds himself bound to return to the established order - he 'began the week with the arrogance of a mulatto from Oriente Province... towards the end of the week, a decline would set in, with endless requests for small amounts'. Whilst not entirely oppressive, the circumstances clearly deny Baldovina many of her freedoms. On the other end of the spectrum, the most powerful character is the Colonel, who comes and goes as he pleases whilst drawing up plans 'for invasions against countries found in neither time nor space... somewhere between eternity and nothingness'. Here is a character who asserts his power just because he can.

In terms of noteworthy quirks within the prose, there is little so far to comment on besides an exceptionally meta lambasting of 'those literal-minded, portly people who read a book overnight as soon as they buy it' and a simile zoomorphising José Cemí's welts as 'animals... that could leap from the bed and crawl across her own shoulders'. Lima's frequent references to other civilisations, much like Sethe's wandering thoughts in Beloved, convey the sense of entrapment engendered by this overly regimented community, allowing the story to tentatively reach out into the wider world beyond its setting. Baldovina 'looked like a sixteenth-century flagellant', the Colonel has 'the same devotion that might have been shown a Coptic priest or an Assyrian huntsman-king' and the Galician servant Zoar picks up the child 'like St. Christopher'. Even the boy's welts exhibit 'hellish redness', and are 'the king's evil... like the red blotches of a royal Poinciana tree'.

Lima's seminal novel gets off to a slow start, balancing brilliant descriptions of welts with pointless references to ancient cultures which add little. Reading it in translation, and only the beginning at that, undoubtedly diminishes its impact, yet I still can't envisage myself enjoying the rest of this book, unless it picks up the pace considerably. I can sympathise with Baldovina's plight, and the mysterious Colonel intrigues me, but the absence of an engaging plot makes this a relatively hard sell.

The trouble with a dystopia is that it all too often seems utopian - at least in the beginning. What could possibly be wrong with 'a sterile, faultless sky'? Wouldn't we all like to be 'unclouded by the insanity of thoughts'? Hmm... enter Yevgeny Zamyatin's We.

An epistolary work presented as a series of letters (although the recipient is unclear), complete with examples and extracts purporting to be 'merely a copy, word for word, of what was published this morning in the State newspaper', We rapidly establishes its narrator as a denizen of a futuristic, all-conquering, all-powerful society. The trick is nonchalance - within the creepy anaphoric mantra '"Long live the United State! Long live the Numbers! Long live the Well-Doer!!!'" the narrator's vastly different lexicon, and its ominous capitalisation, is casually evinced. References to the Green Wall and the Two Hundred Years' War quickly create a sense of time and scale which allows Zamyatin to dive into the heart of the plot after speedily setting up the narrative's playground. That the narrator clearly buys into the apparent utopia created around them also enlightens the reader as to their status as part of a completely distinct system: their cheeks burn with pride as they swallow newspaper propaganda relating how 'one thousand years ago your heroic ancestors subjected the whole earth to the power of the United State' (this in itself evidences Zamyatin's grand sense of scale - the Integral spaceship will soon 'rise into the limitless space of the universe' - which likens the United State to other colonial powers from throughout history).

The second method by which Zamyatin establishes the futuristic setting of the novel is his narrator's superiority over our present culture and capability. We are but 'the ancients', the subject of an incredulously written history, our art ('how primitive was the taste of the ancients, since their poets were always inspired by these senseless, formless, stupidly rushing accumulations of vapour! [clouds]') mocked by our all-knowing descendants. They question whether we knew that our lives were 'actually wholesale murder, although slow murder, day by day', stand amazed at our 'prehistoric time when such things as nations, wars, commerce, different discoveries of different Americas' existed, and label our society 'a thundering, many-coloured confusion', 'so incredible, so absurd, that I lost control of myself and laughed aloud'. In the narrator's utter disbelief that such a life as ours could have been lived Zamyatin exerts a covert post-colonial arrogance which instantly engenders in the reader a dislike of the world presented to them.

The restrictive United State operates as a single gestalt, as evidenced by the first-person pronoun that forms the book's title. In this 'remarkable intersection of thoughts' where 'nobody is one, but one of', nobody can do anything without everybody else knowing about it - the perfect conditions to breed a climate of paranoia and disharmony, you would think, but that problem seems to have been sorted out within this system. Everything is ordered and chartered, from 'sexual days' to 'personal hours', when the people of the United State can merrily trot off on their 'supplementary walk'. Of course they view the Official Railroad Guide as 'the greatest of all monuments of ancient literature', representing as it does the order and regimentation which clearly overrides creativity, freedom and individuality in this utopian future. And it makes the citizens feel amazing - the narrator feels as if he had 'won a victory over the old god and the old life'. Evidently, they feel that something was wrong with our current system, and as we begin the book the United State's new regime appears to be the solution. Although perhaps the state suffers from a case of overconfidence? The one issue left to be solved, concedes the narrator, is 'the problem of happiness', but that won't stop them imposing a forced 'mathematically faultless happiness' on the beings of the other planets that they plan to 'subjugate'.

Despite the regimentation of this society, in which free will is seen as the root of misdemeanour and therefore restricted, Zamyatin wryly shows how locking up individuality and only letting it out during specified 'personal hours' is not the way to go: the narrator's hyperbolic ecstasy at the thought of '[integrating] the colossal, universal equation!' and proclamation that 'the United State is... a great divine, precise, wise line, the wisest of lines!' come off as the ramblings of a more verbose Trump. Their reckoning that their joy at the imminent launch of the 'glass, electric, fire-breathing Integral' is akin to 'what a woman probably feels when for the first time she senses within herself the pulse of a tiny, blind, human being' both conveys the extent to which the state's inhabitants are hooked into its beliefs and challenges the whole society by ludicrous comparison - as does the fact that none of its characters are named; instead, their serial numbers identify them.

The book opens an engaging debate into the value of freedom. The narrator attempts to reconcile the ancient concept of liberty with the mechanisms of the United State, noticing that 'the mechanical chisels were dancing to the melody of unheard tarantellas' in a 'mechanical ballet', linking a fluid art form with the oppressive state and its fixed system of living, before they abandon any notion of subscribing to the idea, labelling 'the state of freedom... an unorganised primitive state'. We are actively told that freedom is not in line with modern thinking, a bygone relic - as it has diminished, so has 'the instinct of non-freedom' increased. The State even retrospectively notices it as 'characteristic of human nature from ancient times' and praises 'absolute, ecstatic submission' as a state of being to strive for. Yet, as the sample of the book that I was reading concluded, the narrator breathlessly announced 'Until today everything in life seemed to me clear', intimating that a further level will be added to this ongoing debate.

We is rightly heralded as 'the inspiration for all futuristic dystopia novels', tackling totalitarianism through its satirical undercurrent and its perfectly effective portrayal of a society that has developed to the point of seeming alien. Beginning with a masterful profile of a utopian superstate, Zamyatin sets the pieces on the board, ready to analyse and satirise this society's values. I can't wait to see how he does it.

Along trundle the Middle Ages again, this time dealing the anonymous fairytale-esque Breton lay Sir Orfeo, a reworking of the ancient Greek myth which recounts a woman's abduction into a strange land and the attempts to reclaim her. Written in the medieval French romance style which encompasses the motifs of marital love, optimism and the supernatural within a construction of brevity, simplicity and conversation, the poem mitigates the source material's Hadean darkness in favour of seeing Orpheus' wife Eurydice kidnapped to the mythical Fairyland, and begins with a good twenty lines or so describing the different kinds of lays (poems) that are often read - 'some of war and some of woe/And some of joy and mirth also', etc before introducing the 'noble king' Orfeo.

Orfeo's proficiency as a musician is evidenced throughout - he 'loved the glee of harping' to the point that 'there nothing was/A better harper in no place' and that anybody who listened would think himself 'in one of the joys of Paradise'. His 'queen of excellence' Dame Eurydice lives a relaxed life swanning about in fields with her maidens, until she 'fell on sleep upon the green'; upon waking, she begins to cry out, tear at her limbs and clothes and scratch her face until 'it bled wet', before revealing that she has been ordered to come to Fairyland, a place of 'castles and towers/Rivers, forests, meadows with flowers'. Very quickly, Sir Orfeo cycles through a range of sections, its slow opening giving way to lush pastoral description, the juxtaposition of the 'merry and hot' May setting with the feverish lunacy of Eurydice's actions, the household's trauma when Eurydice is abducted and Orfeo decides that 'never again I will no woman see' and embarks on a hermitage in the wilderness, the surreality of the happy couple meeting again (when Orfeo stumbles on the cave by which Fairyland is entered) but being unable to speak, the awe of the expansive Fairyland and the horror of its corridors of corpses (or so it seems). This speedy turnaround between different settings and moods keeps the poem continually interesting whilst never compromising on the successful creation of these atmospheres.

I worry that the brevity of this review will imply that I haven't enjoyed Sir Orfeo, because I really truly have, immensely. The upshot of its decision not to focus on in-depth characterisation or complexity of plot allows it to tell a rollicking, simple, but exciting, story which I can find no faults in. Reading it in the (annotated) original Middle English, too, was a really enjoyable experience, and the ABAB lilt of the poem ensures its fairytale quality carries through into the very fabric of the poem. All in all, another successful adventure into the literary output of the Middle Ages!

I concluded the week exploring what is, without a doubt, the most fun text I've read as part of the Banquet of Books reading challenge. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, started by Jane Austen and finished off by Seth Grahame-Smith, is deliciously funny, even though its central joke repeats itself all the way through (more on that in a minute). A disclaimer before we start: I haven't actually read Austen's source material; I understand that that might have led me to enjoy the book even further, although it's encouraging that a novice to the original book can still enjoy Grahame-Smith's humorous adaptation in the near-enough knowledge of the style it is pastiching.

Blending the already slightly ludicrous upper-class jollity of Austen with a light-hearted modern tone from the very beginning ('it is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains'), Pride and Prejudice and Zombies literally reads as though the original story has simply had a horde of the undead implanted into it. We're clearly several years into the zombie invasion, to the point of nonchalance - Mr. Bennet's 'morning business' comprises 'dagger sharpening and musket polishing', and, recounting a party, the reader is told that 'apart from the attack, the evening altogether passed off pleasantly for the whole family' - and so Grahame-Smith commences the story with the perfect framework for humour. Notable is the adults' emphasis on secrecy and deception. They lie to each other about their thoughts and feelings, Mr. Bingley brings significantly fewer people to his party than at first reported, and, most significantly, they lie to themselves. This is evidenced in their reluctance to explicitly name the issue, instead settling on euphemisms; 'England's present difficulties' are the 'unfortunate scourge', 'strange plague', 'unmentionables'. No such qualms for the narrator, who frequently refers to 'zombies' and 'the living dead', as do the younger generation - that the narrator sides with the children insinuates the ridiculousness of not acknowledging the zombie plague for what it is. This dysphemistic style carries on in a description of an attack on a party, where 'Mrs. Long struggled to free herself as two female dreadfuls bit into her head, cracking her skull like a walnut, and sending a shower of dark blood spouting as high as the chandeliers'. Although describing a tragic event, the author ensures the comedic atmosphere is kept high by the incongruity of presenting this tragedy in the Austenian style with its associations of lighthearted frivolity. Turning the page to find a Ladybird-style captioned illustration of the attack was the hilarious icing on the cake.

The novel's main source of humour is the melding of Pride and Prejudice and the zombie horror subgenre, embodied in Mrs. Bennet who is keen that her girls are '"as deadly as they are fetching!"', whilst Mr. Darcy is attracted to both 'the beautiful expression of [Elizabeth's] dark eyes, and her uncommon skill with a blade'. A subset of this new regime is an increased emphasis on women to subvert their gender's expectations and, much like the women who were parachuted into men's jobs during wartime, they are propelled into a new way of living, one in which they conceal daggers in their socks and in which the Bennets' daughter Jane is 'a warrior first, and a woman second'. Through this concept, Grahame-Smith can satirise and ridicule the attitudes of the past, writing from a more enlightened time. Whilst Mrs. Bennet sees the new arrival Mr. Bingley as an attractive proposition because of his 'four or five thousand a year', her husband is more concerned about whether he can 'train them in the ways of swordsmanship and musketry' - yes, both of their priorities seem a little ridiculous, but the author's emphasis on the more practical concerns as opposed to the whole outdated system of parents wedding their children by flinging themselves at the nearest rich bachelor remains a pertinent point. This is also seen in Mr. Bennet's assertion that 'none of our girls has much to recommend them; they are all silly and ignorant like their mother, the exception being Lizzy, who has something more of the killer instinct'. So, too, does the ludicrousness of the Austen-era resignation that 'happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance, and it is better to know as little as possible of the defect of the person with whom you are to pass your life' become more prominent within the mad framework of the author's creation. In some ways, the secondary narrative function of the zombie invasion is to act as a defined subversion of both the Victorian writing style and the social conventions associated with it - like Sir Toby Belch and co ripping up the rulebook. Therefore, such an atmosphere of ludicrousness is created that any antiquated ideas referenced within it are going to stick out like a sore thumb.

Perhaps the zombie developments also compound the contemporary Victorian sexism; reacting to women's increased agency, Mr. Bennet can now shirk the idea of getting married and demand that his wife 'leave me to the defence of my estate' (the personal pronouns foregrounding an increased necessity to have something to own, given that women are now asserting themselves more). Again, Grahame-Smith satirises these ideas without saying a word; the zombies' mere presence heightens the incongruity of these misogynistic attitudes. Some Austen hallmarks remain, however, such as the brevity of description - all we are told of Mr. Darcy, for example, is that he possesses a 'fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien' - yet, on the whole, any hangovers from the Victorian era are presented to symbiotically serve the story. These antiquated views contribute to the ludicrousness of the story, and in turn the ludicrousness of the story fuels the reader's perception of them as ludicrous. Speaking of ludicrous, I'm as amazed as you probably are that I've got this much out of what is, in essence, a parody book. Time for the conclusion? I think so too!

Packing the story with humour - and there really are some good jokes ('balls are always a subject which makes a girl energetic' amazed me by being, unbelievably, a paraphrase from Austen) - and engagingly rewriting Austen in a way that makes her palatable for modern or perhaps younger audiences without compromising on the events of the original narrative, the writers of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies are truly onto a winner here. It certainly isn't perfect - a description of Mr. Bennet as 'so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and self-discipline' is our only evidence so far that he embodies any of these qualities; he and his wife are both mere ciphers at this point - but it makes no pretense at being. Rather, this story is intended as light reading, succeeding as a deliciously funny, subversive take on a literary classic. A brilliant way to close out the week!



Apologies for the lateness of this post - I'd been trying to get it done by the end of Sunday, so that I didn't go into next week. As I type this, it's about quarter to one on Monday morning, so I've just missed my deadline, but hey ho, it's probably for the best to have elucidated my thoughts on these texts properly, just slightly later than planned. Either way, it's technically finished by close of play Sunday, so don't hate me, okay?!

Week 7 hasn't been perfect, but it's been another really solid week. The Middle Ages have delighted me again with a mini-odyssey into medieval poetry, Jane Austen (of all people) has got me fighting the urge to snigger on the bus, I've been introduced to a creepy dystopian society that I'll definitely be making a return visit to, and, in Beloved, one of the most mature and beautifully-expressed stories that I've read so far on this blog has revealed itself to me. Well done Week 7, you've done yourself proud.

I'll be back asap to bring you the Week 8 reading list, which I'm finalising now - hopefully tomorrow, but I can't promise that, sorry! We'll again be tackling a wide range of texts, sampling our way through some 20th-century classics from both sides of the Atlantic and getting a little bit saucy (by 18th-century standards, that is!)

In the meantime, you can follow me on Twitter @Banquetofbooks for all the latest updates and notifications, and I'll see you back here quite soon for the Week 8 menu!