My thoughts on Week 2

Hello everybody! I completed the second week of my Banquet of Books Reading Challenge last week (16th-21st July), and was able to sample some cracking reads spanning over four and a half centuries - so let's dive in with my thoughts!

***THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR MULTIPLE TEXTS***

Well, Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies only went and surprised me, didn't it? You might remember that when introducing this week's menu, I related how to me, medieval fiction has never had quite that vibrancy of modern fiction, occupied with the narrative at the expense of the character - de Pizan's work is almost a reversal of that. True, it does use its opening chapters to set up its central premise of an allegorical 'city of ladies' created by the first-person narrator to prove to herself the value of women in society, but it is also a fabulous study of women's oppression in the medieval era, with its depiction of a woman who is so certain that women are lower creatures because she 'could find no evidence from my own experience to bear out such a negative view of female nature and habits' speaking volumes about patriarchal oppression of women, who are made to feel so degraded and neglected by arrogant male counterparts. In fact, de Pizan's reasoning that 'I had to accept their unfavourable opinion of women since it was unlikely that so many learned men, who seemed to be endowed with such great intelligence and insight into all things, could possibly have lied on so many different occasions' glows with faux-naivety, in an attempt to flag up this callous, entrenched oppression for what it is. De Pizan's superfluous celebration of 'learned' men with 'great' intelligence 'into all things' verges on mockery, because of course men cannot know about 'all' things - by extension, of course this protagonist knows that these 'philosophers, poets and orators too numerous to mention' are wrong; this book will be expected to conclusively prove that fact. Since men have given only 'one simple argument', de Pizan feels entitled to retaliate with hers.
               From the very start, the writing challenges the patriarchal appraisal of womankind, confounding expectations in her presentation of a female protagonist 'surrounded by many books of different kids, for it has long been my habit to engage in the pursuit of knowledge', who indeed is so renowned for her reading that 'a pile of [books]... had been placed in my safe-keeping'. In a world where Matheolus' book, 'unlike many other works... said to be written in praise of women', is so sexist, de Pizan's protagonist, far more logical than the male thinkers imbued with blind hatred, seeks the ability to 'judge in all fairness and without prejudice' whether the patriarchy is true; as I finished previewing the book, she was beginning to construct the allegorical city, drawing on famous examples of women throughout history, and if the rest of the work is as compellingly original as the opening, I'm sure de Pizan will make a very convincing argument that it is not. And, of course, she has God on her side; in de Pizan's greatest move, she allows readers to assume that her 'lament to God' and its 'foolish words' are merely a product of the female stereotype of sensitivity, intended to denigrate women's heightened emotions - but immediately afterwards, as if her prayers have been answered, arrive 'three ladies, crowned and of majestic appearance', encouraging her to preach equality. And that is what she will do. Excellent stuff.

Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit has remained popular for over thirty years since its publication, and it's not difficult to see why - easy to read, endearingly written and directed by an astute and comprehensive homodiegetic narrator, the early chapters trundle along merrily, taking their time to craft a set of engaging characters to play with later. Jeanette's mother 'had never heard of mixed feelings', quizzes her daughter on Biblical matters and has a 'complete conviction that she was the only person in our house who would tell a saucepan from a piano'. Jeanette refers to her adopted father as '[her mother's] husband'; he is described merely as 'an easy-going man' before the focus returns again to the mother figure who clearly dominated Jeanette's childhood (this being a semi-autobiographical novel). At the end of the sample chapter I was reading, the first hints of the breaking of the (relatively) stable family atmosphere are broken, when Jeanette befriends a lesbian couple who run the paper shop, to the disgust of her mother, and I can confidently say that I'll be putting Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit straight onto my reading list to find out how this develops. A final word, however, on the introduction. I'm reading the Vintage Books edition (the cover photograph can be seen to the right), where Winterson has contributed the most glorious introduction to a book that I've ever read; the prose feels sparky and alive, it tastes like honey, and it soothes you as it washes over you, perfectly encapsulating all my feelings about a good book. Instantly quotable, Winterson asks 'what is the point of being a fiction writer if you can't make things up?' whilst fabricating the very quote which forms the book's title, offers the advice of 'read what you don't know. Reading is an adventure. Adventures about the unknown', and expounds on her idea that 'books read us back to ourselves', which I personally find fascinating. I'd highly recommend seeking out this mini-essay, if nothing else, as it evidences Winterson's beautiful mastery of prose; I can only hope that the eloquence with which she translates her feelings to the page holds throughout the rest of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.

When introducing Baby Island during this week's menu, I used the term 'Robinsonade', which sprang up to define the 'desert island castaway' subgenre of survival fiction which sprung up in the early 19th century following the publication of its inspiration Robinson Crusoe. I didn't expect Baby Island to be so blatant about it, though! Mary, the twelve-year-old protagonist at this stage entreats her anxious younger sister Jean, '"do you suppose that Robinson Crusoe cried?"', underlining that this book is, at its core, an explicitly child-friendly recast of the original. Beginning with an ocean liner sinking, our young protagonists find themselves in the lifeboat with their three infant siblings, as well as a family friend's baby, and so the adventure begins. The most intriguing thing is the portrayal of Mary; despite being just twelve, she handles herself 'very coolly and deliberately', '[takes a baby] under each arm, and, staggering under their combined weight, made her way up on deck', and '[settles] down with her usual patience and good sense', even in a situation of immense panic. Arguably it's an unrealistic portrayal of a child, but I can admire Brink for this engagingly different protagonist, at least. Truth be told, Baby Island works as a piece of children's fiction. It's not particularly clever or original, but by no means has a requirement to be. It succeeds by having protagonists of a similar age to its readers and by tapping into a sense of jeopardy with its frightening Titanic-style opening. However, for those of us older than the target audience, there's very little to draw us in.

He's got me. I *think* Shakespeare's got me. As I said when setting out this week's menu, my prior Shakespearean experience extends to the polar opposites of Macbeth and Twelfth Night, and as such, I felt that I hadn't properly understood what the Immortal Bard can do. Richard II, much more akin to the former play and categorised as a tragedic history, has opened my eyes a little more. I've only read the first of five Acts so far, but Shakespeare has quickly and efficiently introduced a varied set of characters and a suitably intriguing plot, focusing on the eponymous king's inability to adequately resolve a conflict between his cousin Henry Bolingbroke and the Lord Thomas Mowbray.  The former is presented as a friend to the 'common people' (and 'did seem to dive into their hearts'), but is more vehement and vitriolic in his attacks on the latter, the 'pale trembling coward', who is keener to maintain his 'spotless reputation'. Meanwhile, King Richard II is clearly a weak ruler, his chief flaws being his debilitating kindness ('Deep malice makes too deep incision;/Forget, forgive; conclude and be agreed'), which tends to nepotism, despite his protestations to the contrary ('by my sceptre's awe, I make a vow,/Such neighbour nearness to our sacred blood/Should nothing privilege him'); whilst the king decides to exile Henry for just ten years, reduced to six on the advice of his father and Richard's uncle, Mowbray is condemned to the 'heavier doom' of a lifetime of exile. Richard, too, is too divided to rule strongly - whilst the battle between Henry and Mowbray is presented in a very formal manner, the king interrupts it at the last minute to halt the duel. He gives no reason for his unequal treatment of the combatants, apart from nepotistic sentimentality, and as such is being set up for an overthrow later. Special mention, too, for the slippery John of Gaunt, who negotiates the reduction in Henry's exile by pointing out that he may be dead in a decade, before confessing to Henry that 'six winters... are quickly gone'; coming just after Richard has asserted his power by stopping the duel, John of Gaunt reminds him that his power is finite, further feeding into the depiction of Richard as a weak king. The characters really are the strong point in the first act of Richard II, and I look forward to seeing what else Shakespeare can offer as the story unfolds.

Hmm. I really don't know what to make of Graham Greene's 1930s murder thriller Brighton Rock, but whatever happens, I'm forced to study it for another year, so I'm prepared to give it wider than usual leeway. Opening with an engaging conceit ('Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him'), the resulting action, involving a reporter being stalked by gangsters along the promenades and back streets of the seaside resort, unfolds in a confused, confusing way - starting in medias res has an unsettling effect (one which I'm not completely sure is deliberate), and the succeeding story, with its odd decisions to devote paragraphs to trivia, skip over important plot elements and cut out the backstory, has an odd effect on me as a consequence. Hale is characterised as proud, and I know that because Greene does not shut up about it - Hale has 'a little flare of pride... when he thought of the long pilgrimage behind him', 'in his little cynical framework of bone, pride bobbed up', 'the old desperate pride persisted, a pride of intellect', and 'common pride... remained overpoweringly strong', whilst 'his pride was only in his profession'. Pride pride pride pride pride! More effective, however, is the depiction of a man clearly out of his depth, his life controlled by others - despite the fact that 'from childhood he loved secrecy', Hale's employers send him on a 'widely advertised sentry-go'. He feels 'condemned by his higher pay', unable to visit 'the piers, the peepshows' which 'pulled at his heart'. As he is stalked through the streets, 'Hale knew exactly what [Cubitt] would do... he'd simply link his arm with Hale's and draw him on where he wanted him to go'. This depiction of the powerlessness of Hale (the gangster following him is even compared to 'a hunter searching through the jungle') is perhaps Greene's greatest triumph. So far, Brighton Rock is a little unconventional in tone, yet has moments of interest, chiefly in the portrayals of Hale and in the cynical descriptions of Brighton (it takes 'immense labour and immense patience' to 'extricate from the long day the grain of pleasure', yet the trains come 'every five minutes', full of holidaymakers). My instinct is that I wouldn't choose to continue reading this book if I wasn't obliged to for my A Level study, but as I'm condemned to it, I'll be sure to update you with my thoughts on the whole thing when I've finished it.

Written at a pivotal time in the history of Russia, a communist revolution having just been thwarted, Maxim Gorky's excellent diatribe against capitalism, Mother, conveys, in a series of perfectly-crafted words, the reasons why the socialists felt the need to rebel. The opening passage is an agonising description of how 'the factory whistle bellowed forth its shrill, roaring, trembling noises into the smoke-begrimed and greasy atmosphere of the workingmen's suburb' - Gorky overloads the text with adjectives to allow an atmosphere of 'lurking malice' to rear up at the reader; his brutally realised depiction of an oppressive state whose people are 'like frightened roaches... muscles stiff from insufficient sleep' invites sympathy for the workers just by the way that his beautiful prose represents an ugly society. Their oppressors don't warrant a mention, because in a way it doesn't matter who they are - there is no humanity behind a factory which 'sucked out of men's muscles as much vigour as it needed' before it 'ejected its people like burned-out ashes'. When Gorky relates how 'to welcome the people, deafening sounds floated about', his juxtaposition not only conveys the cruelty of this hellish atmosphere, but it also contributes to the sense of the elite's absolute power over their subjects. To this end, the workers behave like animals, beating their wives and shouting 'irritated, peevish, abusive language' - one, Vlasov, is even described as resembling 'a beast'. Gorky's two-pronged portrayal of how capitalism strips the workers of that which makes them human extends to a staggeringly effective depiction of the 'wearisome monotony' of their free time, when they 'thought only of matters closely and manifestly connected with their work'. Throughout, the tone is one of helplessness - there is no immediate solution, no way out of this backwards society and its toxic atmosphere.

As the exposition-led opening transitions into the main narrative, Gorky narrows his focus to just his central characters - Vlasov's wife and her son Pavel. It appears initially that the wheel will keep on turning - Pavel tries 'to live like the rest' - yet as the boy grows up, he provides the book's first challenge to the capitalist system. He thinks his friends are 'like a machine', linking the people to the factory which controls them, and begins to explore a more inclusive way of living - communism, in all but name. Communism is presented as vibrant and invigorating - when Pavel speaks about it, 'his eyes [burn] with a beautiful radiance' and he becomes 'so new and wise' in his mother's estimation - and Gorky makes his socialist intentions clear, yet it is clearly presented as a dangerous ideology to hold (Pavel's mother finds that 'breathing suddenly became difficult for her' when she hears that her son is an adherent). Perhaps unknowingly and unwittingly, there are hints that communism won't work as a societal structure - this community is one where everybody treads the same path yet 'desires in some way, however small, to appear more important than his neighbour'. The novelist is suggesting that by no means will the path to a socialist society be an easy one - hopefully, the book will continue to explore questions such as this.

Although its title suggests that family is a key theme of Mother, I would argue that, more specifically, the key themes are connections and relationships. After all, Pavel's mother and father were married, yet she 'had remained unnoticed' in their house - of three! In a world where the men fight each other under false pretences just for something to do, the first genuine connection we learn about is between Pavel and his mother. Her 'heart became more and more sharply troubled' when 'her son's strangeness was not clarified with time', and we are told that his eyes are 'blue and large like his mother's'. True, this connection becomes strained when Pavel starts reading communist books, to the extreme that his mother and he 'spoke infrequently and saw each other very little', but to my mind, this is less of a suggestion that communism divides families than a representation of how Pavel identifies his mother with the current regime from which he wants to distance himself. This idea is compounded by the fact that Pavel's separation from his mother is actually because he is 'desiring to avoid his father', who truly represents the fighting, swearing, drinking, brainless troglodyte created by capitalism.

So, the first connection that we learn about is between Pavel and his mother. The second? Pavel and communism. He is entranced by this new ideology, proclaiming that its thinkers '"the best people on earth!"', which leads to the situation of the (unnamed) mother being caught between the motherly instinct to protect her son (who concedes that he '"will be put in prison because I want to know the truth"'), and the desire to let him live his new enlightened life. Communism allows the mother to see her son in a new light (indeed, it '[awakens] in her... an almost extinct feeling of rebellion'), but surely she is aware of the dangers of this (pardon the pun) revolutionary new belief system. With any luck, this kind of human drama will be the core of Mother as it unfolds - and yes, of course this one is going on my reading list!

Rich with effective descriptive work, yet packed with intriguing human drama as well, Gorky's novel has gripped me in its first few chapters and become possibly my favourite of all twelve of the books that I've read so far as part of this challenge, concluding a week of surprises, which has seen Shakespeare and the Middle Ages stunning me with their challenging, thought-provoking and well-written texts, whilst I've also sampled rather hardboiled crime fiction, an enjoyable child-tailored spin-off from a literary classic, and all the joys of reading, finally translated into prose by the inestimable Jeanette Winterson.

I'll be bringing you next week's menu over the weekend, but until then you can follow me on Twitter (@Banquetofbooks) for all the latest updates. I'll see you with next week's menu - until then, thanks for putting up with my ramblings for this long!