A duo of dispatches. Of Questionable Class.

Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James

E.L. James with her book

I had heard mostly derisive stuff about Fifty Shades of Grey. I picked it up at a whim, from the boy at the Haji Ali crossing in Mumbai, the one who sells glossies and photocopied novels wrapped in cellophane, the same one who had the Ken Starr report out even before we could drive to work, log on to Reuters, and drink in the salacious shenanigans of a beleaguered American President.

Fifty Shades of Grey has few literary pretensions, but I did not expect it to be so poorly written. The heroine of the Mills and Boon variety of romance novels, is transplanted into the twenty first century between the pages of this book. But whereas Anne Mather et al, wrote dreamily of hopelessly helpless damsels landing Mr. Right, the protagonists were depicted as coherent, even articulate in their expression. Whereas the 50 shades heroine mucking around in the potentially dangerous world of BDSM is trite as trite. She is supposedly interested in literary fiction but her inner monologue cannot get past “Holy cow! He is so hot!” and ‘Holy shit! He was coming for her now.’ However she has the usual identifying features of the romance novel heroine, including above average but unspectacular looks, lack of poise, a tendency to blush, virginity and importantly, a go with the flow attitude. Our damsel is chased by her hero Mr. Grey, and the graphic action takes off from here, for Mr. Grey is no Mr. Right but deals in Bondage and Dominance.

It gets racier but the writing does not get any better. I could give you meme theories and marketing success stories, but you have to hand it, no product, no readership. My points in favor of the book—

It is graphic but less so than mainstream pulp writers like Irving Wallace and the later day Harold Robbins—am I dated and located by my reading?—E.L James has kept the content from tipping over the abysmal edge. There are no ad-nauseum descriptions of a woman’s anatomy. Or for that matter a man’s. If you don’t count, “He is so hot.”

Once you reconcile yourself to her irritating holy cows, and get past the distressing fact that a BDSM Non-Disclosure Agreement does not freak her out, (and temptation is a mitigating factor here,) the heroine is actually credible.

In terms of the politics of the book, the heroine is weaker, poorer, less regarded by the world, than her weird boyfriend. She does not wish to submit, but her hormones, her compassion, her curiosity, her gushing mates, her approving parents, her otherwise powerless, lonely condition, are all pushing her under his thumb. Will she or won’t she stand up for herself? Will it or won’t it work out? These are universal themes; to negotiate unequal power relationships is not a theoretical exercise for women the world over.  

Women have been much too repressed. There is a dearth of graphic literature that works well for women.

Why is Grey the way he is?  Women have a biological interest in nurture, in seeing how children shape up. E.L. James has handled the suspense well, and she has ammunition in the form of back stories to last her a sequel or two. Will I pick them up? Umm, no. Too many books to read, too little time.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

A good looking couple, uprooted from New York City living in the Midwest.  There is something strange going on between the two when the novel opens and soon, the girl is gone. That is, we are in Part one proper of the book—Boy loses Girl. Part two follows—Boy Meets Girl. The concluding part is the reassuringly titled— Boy Gets Girl Back (and vice versa).  It seems a rather neat way to describe Gone Girl, and all credit should go to Gillian Flynn, the author of this year’s runaway bestseller sensation.

The book is in the form of real time accounts of the ‘boy’—the thirtysomething Nick Dunne who has been accused of 'disappearing' his wife Amy. Interspersed with his account is Amy’s version of events. So, the book is not only a first class thriller but also, because of its narrative structure, a peek into a modern marriage.  We are Aunt Abby as Nick and Amy take turns crying on our shoulder, giving us their viewpoints and their excuses. And like most people who try to make peace between warring couples, we realize soon enough that we are the fools dancing to the tunes of two unreliable narrators. But just like in real life, this too adds to our fascination, this desire to apportion blame, making the suspense in the story—who is the baddie?—that much more unbearable. We may have taken sides, and although Flynn manages a few surprises, at some point, it becomes not so much of a mystery as a thriller—we want our side to prevail. That keeps us turning the pages although like most thrillers, Gone Girl deteriorates as it moves closer to the end, relying on over the top climactic events to rescue the plot from the corner it has been painted into.  It is all tied up neatly in the last chapters though not everyone will be satisfied —I was not— but hey, isn’t this the era of the sequel? Will I read it? I might.

And the reason is that Gillian Flynn is a writer of enormous talent, with a gimlet eye for the ridiculous and everything else. Take this, from Nick Dunne: ‘We named the bar The Bar. “People will think we are ironic instead of creatively bankrupt”, my sister reasoned.  Yes, we thought we were being clever New Yorkers, that the name was a joke no one would get like we did. Not meta-get. We pictured the locals scrunching their noses: Why’d you name it The Bar? But our first customer, a gray haired woman in bifocals and a pink jogging suit, said, “I like the name. Like in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Audrey Hepburn’s cat was named Cat.”’

Give me a writer who can weave something like that into a regular thriller; along with observations of a town going bust, of homeless people living in deserted malls, of tamed husbands shown off as trophies, of the media circus that crime reportage has become. Gone Girl has all this and more and if Gillian Flynn channeled her social satirist more and her latent Hadley Chase or Ruth Rendell less, I would have been happier, but we cannot ask for everything.

Read it on the beach, in a plane. Do not pick it up when you have stuff to do. 

The Yacoubian Building - Alaa Al Aswany

The Yacoubian Building stands in downtown Cairo, a handsome Art Deco building, housing offices and some old time residents. The author, a dentist by occupation opened his first clinic here.

A building bearing the same name and perhaps modeled on the original, is the setting for the novel. 

Originally written in Arabic, it traces the lives of the various building residents. They pursue different professions, profess differing allegiances, swing different ways, but they are all united in their subjection to the Egyptian condition. That is how the book started to appear after I had gotten through a third of it—initially I thought it was a pretty, slice-of-life narrative that would affirm some fuzzy-warm, feel-good aspect of humanity. I expected an Egyptian R.K. Narayan as I took in the various characters and their back-stories, but at some point I got rather startled by the sheer carnality of the book.  I wondered among other things, about the author's attitude towards homosexuality. He implies a character turned homosexual after being abused as a child, and seems a little too fixated on the actual act. No R.K. Narayan this. It is almost as if the sexual exploitation of the poor young by the established wrinkled is the thread that binds the stories, with a few accounts of lust making in happier circumstances standing out. Tad depressing. However, the writer has a mesmeric voice and despite the all- too aggressive male gaze that informs his observations, he tells his stories with a touch of understanding and compassion. It is just enough to keep the book from becoming either a political rant or a piece for the prurient. Also, Al Aswany manages to sew up a lot of Egyptian history, politics and culture in his novel, giving one a snapshot picture of modern Cairo society. 

The book made me understand how the latest revolution had come about. Clearly even the middle classes—the ones willing to work hard and keep their head down, if only they had some prospects—had become disaffected in Egypt. In India, which is not exactly behind in the exploitation and corruption parameters, there has been some trickle down to the middle layer. Does one attribute that to democracy or press freedom or both?

 The book reads very well and the translation is superb. I love the Arabic cadence and the switch to present tense for descriptions – a West and South Asian conceit that I am much partial to.  It is important to me that the book was a runaway bestseller in the Arab world. It reminded me too much of Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk, and the resonance suggests that truth is reflected in the stories of the Yacoubian Building. I can only hope the author, in his zeal had not given thought to the fact that so many shocking but perfectly conceivable stories cannot take place at once. It is a bit like ‘A Fine Balance’- almost everything bad that can happen in India happens to the four likeable protagonists of Rohington Mistry’s novel.

Yet unlike Mistry’s book, the Yacoubian building does not end in despair. It shows people acting out their wants, and at some level reconciling to their situation. They do not get a great resolution, but it could be worse.

Definitely go for the book. It speaks the truth, is racy but not a rag. And great if you want an introduction to contemporary Arab literature.

Disgrace by JM Coetzee

In order to truly discuss a book, one has to presume prior knowledge on the part of the reader. Disgrace is such a book. I could not begin to give you the infinite twists and turns in the plot of a Satanic Verses or a Master and Margarita, but Disgrace has a straightforward narrative. To discuss the book may mean letting the story out of the bag.

JM Coetzee

Disgrace won JM Coetzee his second Booker. His Nobel thereafter, catapulted him to iconic status. The power packed economy of his writing is valuable in this busy world of low attention spans, where people want to get a million things done and contemplate the life, the universe and everything. Disgrace allows you to do just that – read a thought provoking, deep and complex novel, in the course of a short haul flight. To the plot then, and for people avoiding spoilers, they are in italics. I mean the spoilers are in italics. Mostly.

The opening:

“For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.”

‘He’ is David Lurie, a white man in post apartheid South Africa, a scholar and Professor, paid to teach communication when he would rather be discussing poetry. His ‘solution’ is Soraya from an escort agency. His Sorayan trysts end one day, owing to circumstances of his own making. He then starts a relationship with a young student, who nearly comes undone by the affair. An inquiry follows - Lurie refuses to apologize and is forced to resign. Footloose and fancy free, he serves up at his daughter’s small-holding where horror awaits. They are attacked in their house, his daughter Lucy is gang-raped. They do not expect justice, but it appears Lucy must make peace with her attackers, actually submit to them in a manner of speaking, if she wishes to keep her land and be safe in the new South Africa. Lurie is unable to help an increasingly remote Lucy. At the same time he begins to be drawn to the voiceless and the helpless. He helps out at an animal shelter, working hard to dispose of slaughtered stray dogs in a manner that dignifies them, he shifts the focus of his work from Byron, to Byron’s long forgotten, perhaps ridiculed mistress. He persists thus, despite a suspicion that his efforts are almost ludicrous in the context of the injustices of this world. The book comes to an end.

You would not want to read such a depressing book, but it is a real page-turner. The settings are perfectly etched, the characters credible even if their actions are at odds with one’s reasoning. We are swiftly sucked into the story and from there we ponder the themes and characters of the book-

The Problem of Sex: As a married woman maybe I have little right to judge the plight of a single man, but I come from a land where child widows had to go about with shaven heads lest they tempted someone to tempt them, if that makes sense. The western analogue-  the spinster stereotype, old, virginal, unattractive, was no less pathetic. I have felt a residue of sadness for Jane Austen and my late physically handicapped uncle who never married, but I can’t bring myself to sympathise with Lurie’s predicament. Why is he unable to take himself in hand, why does lack of ‘action’ make him go to pieces, spur him to act increasingly audaciously? Lurie’s excuse is that it is his nature, that one cannot fight one’s nature. Is that the fault of the South African experiment, to ascribe immutable natures to different people? Apartheid society failed to civilise a man like David Lurie, post-apartheid society is failing in the same way. Is that Coetzee’s point?

The book makes me think of the legitimacy of 'nature' as an argument. Are men's needs more legitimate? I wonder at the ad clip for the ethical porn site come4.org. A defiant voice-over, a rush of erotic images, mostly women, the camera finally zooming to the speaker, a wheelchair bound MAN. The site claims to support a pluralistic sexuality and is against subjugating our sexuality to marketing standards. I doubt the ad clip can reel in the women gritting their teeth on abstinence. Not, I think, with the male-centric ad, the too hip project team. If they could, they would be laughing their way to the bank – ask E.L.James.

Is David Lurie reprehensible? I did not mind David Lurie so much. First off I have the protagonist syndrome, thanks to Coetzee’s third person Lurie POV narrative. Lurie is a reliable narrator, and I am susceptible to a sensible and sensitive perspective, however flawed. That probably makes me a loser in the power stakes (it’s all about establishing one’s perspective over others, and presumption is a pre-requisite, is it not?)

No, but I get the code David Lurie lives by - the exercise of free will. If he gets carried away, it is owing to his passions, and please bear with my definition of passion: His passion makes him follow Soraya, unwanted, unasked, into her home-ground, it is his passion that makes him lose his head over Melanie. But then, his high strung nature acts as a check. I do not see him enjoying the exercise of brute force, or profiting by manipulating others. Just as his attractiveness (up until now), and the predominance of his race (up until now, which no doubt, added to his attraction-up until now), did not teach him to deal with sexual rejection, so is he incapable of going against the societal framework that has served him so well all these years. As I see it, his main fault is his ignorance of powerlessness.

My mother wonders at Soraya, a family woman leading a double life. What if she were frightened, or neurotic or otherwise stressed when Lurie calls her? He was coming close to unravelling someone’s life, playing with the life of her children. My rejoinder is that he does leave her alone in the end. More importantly he is sensitive to every subtle shift in his relationship with Soraya; and that is less aggressive and more lover-like.

David Lurie reminds me of Tony Webster, the protagonist of Julian Barnes’s Sense of an Ending – both men have the same smug air of self-sufficiency. There is a further parallel in their having to face up to their past deeds, although Coetzee is harsher with Lurie than Barnes is with Webster. Lurie gets everything back a thousand fold. If he is predatory in his relationships, his daughter gets raped, if he blames his nature, his daughter is raped by Pollux who can’t help his mental deficiency! But Lurie shows character in adversity. His apology to Melanie’s family is a counterpoint to his refusal to abase himself before the inquiry committee. By the way, I admire his attitude with the committee. I prefer arrogance to hypocrisy.

And yes he finds Melanie’s sister attractive and he disapproves of unattractive women, but come on, I will not find fault with what people think inside their heads. We can allow their nature that much! He is not a Humbert Humbert either, Melanie is much older than Lolita. And remember Lurie’s ex-wife is a friend. In fact, my heart goes out to Lurie, singing for Byron’s forgotten mistress, to a three-legged dog. I wish I could tell him it is not comic, the tinny banjo strain. There is a key line in the book, a part of Lurie’s inner monologue – he (Lurie) can, if he concentrates, if he loses himself, be there, be the men, inhabit them, fill the men with the ghost of himself. The question is does he have it in him to be the woman? My verdict is that Coetzee can be the aggressor through Lurie, only up to a point. To the women then.  

Melanie’s inexplicable behaviour: Melanie comes from a provincial family, she is inexperienced and possibly in awe of her professor, maybe she even crushed on Lurie- he first finds her dawdling in his path, she has spoken of him to her family. While her father speaks in stock phrases (we put our children in your hands, nest of vipers, so help me God, how the mighty have fallen, break bread with us), Lurie’s terse apology, contains one exquisite line, the confession that ‘he lacked the lyrical. (Of course he continues to lack the lyrical, to intrude, disturb, explain, demand indulgence. The lyrical would require him to be silent.) But Lurie's  sophistication and sensitivity must be attractive to Melanie. His lifestyle, his books, his erudition, his experience of the world must be glamorous, even heady. The rub is that she finds him physically unattractive. 

But does she like his company? Does she end up accepting that the cost of his company, this introduction to a rarefied life, or let us take a different scenario, the cost of obtaining refuge from her own complicated or banal life, is to agree to have sex with him? And does that capitulation undo her? And him too? For lacking the lyrical?

I left IIT after two months because I lacked the vocabulary to tell my father I was really happy at the Institute, that I thought that if I worked hard I could get into the coveted engineering program. I felt no legitimacy in my arguments, it seemed spoilt of me to refuse a seat in the medical college. Moreover I was worried about the Electrical Circuits Test. Why was that? Because when my father arrived at my hostel to take me back to Chennai where the medical college awaited me, I wasted five minutes bursting into tears. Then I remembered that my professor had threatened to mark us as absent if we were more than five minutes late, so I missed the entire class, which I decided would surely set me back in the coming test, which meant I had even less of a leg to stand on if my plan was to get a branch change. So I advanced no sensible arguments, only threw a super tantrum, hoping my father would say Amrish-Puri-like , “Ja Simran ja, yeh KGP jaise koi tere ko khush nai rakh saktha, ja, apni zindagi jee”. (Go Simran, go. No one can keep you happy like KGP does. Go live your life) My nod to that silly movie DDLJ. In the movie it is  Raj not KGP. Check out the link below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0Zc5m0w6gA

My father did nothing of that sort, instead he kept asking me what I wanted!

Sorry for that autobiographical dose, but the point is that those five minutes became a missed test, which made me believe that my career in IIT was finished and that I had to go elsewhere. We make decisions for the vaguest of reasons in our youth and our folly. Maybe Melanie wanted to get away from her boyfriend, maybe she felt let down by Lurie, maybe the missed test became a big deal, to the point where she became confused within and buffeted by all without. Melanie Isaacs is out of her depth from the beginning, but it is Lurie’s fault in not grasping that her problems could become his problem. 

Melanie is probably 'Coloured'. I don’t know much of South African society but if Lurie, a poor professor, represents a certain world, then the hard working petit bourgeois Isaacs household with their pickles and cumin flavoured chicken stew must come from somewhere else. And not just that, the overt religiosity, the bombast that reflects a limited vocabulary, Desiree’s  now-now, the Chinese features of both the sisters, Isaacs’s hairless skin, the dark hair, the dark eyes, Ryan the boyfriend’s warning to Lurie – stay with your own kind - I am sure of it. I will not even go into the play on Melanie’s name.

Disgrace was made into a movie starring John Malkovich as David Lurie. Good Casting!

Lucy’s inexplicable behaviour: It is clear that both Lucy and Melanie are unhappy with the sexual advantage that has been taken of them, yet they acquiesce to it in a most troubling way. I think Coetzee has inhabited Melanie very well- how about Lucy? Why is she willing to abase herself? Why is Bev complicit in Lucy’s harebrained decisions? Has Lucy’s sexual orientation made her differently attuned to life? Is it PSTD? I cannot answer these questions. But clearly Holland is not her idea of a safe haven like Lurie and the reader think it is. On the other hand she had found happiness working the land in South Africa and thinks she can give it a go, with the help of Petrus. Her father cannot help, he is increasingly irrelevant, jobless himself, his house in town burgled. Yet…how is she so placid when Pollux is found peeping into her bathroom, so irritated with her father for interfering? How does she end up pregnant? Is it a bid to tie the land to herself, produce a child of the soil? Will she be successful? Is she bending to the wind or has she been broken? Will she rise again?

Lastly, the character of Petrus: – I did not like him. It is all right to say my people, your people and propose all kinds of arrangements, but Petrus knows what he is about, and if he cannot  see it, he is no better than Pollux, the jackal boy. I am not a white or black man, I am a brown woman and Coetzee can show me all the parallels between Lurie and Petrus, I will not be lured by that kind of sophistry. Maybe Petrus and Isaacs are projections of Lurie, but if so, Lurie has done a good job of convincing me.

So?

But where is the story going? Where is the disgrace in the transfer of power? I have to agree with TS from the book group that perhaps it is the story of South Africa. It is an indictment of South Africa, of the apartheid system that allowed men like Lurie advantages, of the current law and order situation that has reduced Lucy, a good woman to such abject straits. Like all of Coetzee’s works, it is a protest and a cry on behalf of the voiceless- Lucy and the dogs, Byron’s Teresa and men like Lurie who are unable to age gracefully.  Advocacy at its finest.

And I like that semi colons have been dispensed with, that commas are the way to go. Oh, and I love the creative process as Coetzee describes it, apropos ‘Byron’s Italy,’ the opera that consumes Lurie as the book draws to a close.  I could go on. I could transcribe the book.

Read the book every five years. 

American Pastoral by Philip Roth

When I read a book, my head swims with ideas and questions and a multiple other troubling matters. The more a book worries me, the less am I willing to ‘like’ it. (Like how I am uable to let go after my reread of Disgrace. I will have to either read ‘Scenes from Provincial Life’ or ‘Gone Girl’ before I am fit for society.) And that is exactly what has happened with American Pastoral, Philip Roth’s 1997 offering and part of his great American trilogy (with The Human Stain, and ‘I married a Communist’). I was hooked from Chapter 1, then set adrift, leaving me flailing for concrete ground. Hmmm, let me quit the high-flown semantics, quickly get to the meat of the story. We can analyze and argue later.

American Pastoral is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, fictional writer, and Roth’s alter ego. Zuckerman is in his seventies here, a survivor of prostate surgery that has left him impotent and weak of bladder, a solitary pathetic figure nourished we presume, only by his writer’s curiosity and the satisfaction of regularly realizing his creative potential. Nathan runs into a man from his past, Seymour ‘The Swede’ Levov, who their entire Newark neighborhood once idolized, apparently because he was blonde, blue eyed, steep jawed and fantastic in sports. Believable enough; it is pointed out anyway that in those high school days of the forties, when Zuckerman’s ilk of second generation Jewish immigrants had just stepped onto the first rung in the ladder to assimilation, Swede Levov appeared to have arrived there already, showing them that it could be done. (One also infers that Levov’s lack of swagger imbued him with an aura: of the established one, of, should I say it, the well meaning, reticent Anglo Saxon at the top of the food chain!)

But on meeting him after all these years the star-struck Nathan is disappointed to find a bland, self-satisfied man, insisting on rubbing the lonely Zuckerman nose in cozy photographs and triumphant tales of family achievement. Zuckerman responds by consigning Levov to the boring platitude spouting multitude, one beneath the eagle eye of the author-narrator. However, a co-incidental meeting a few years later, makes Zuckerman realize how utterly wrong he has been in his reading, for the Swede, despite his obvious success in the diverse fields of sport and business and love, had been laid low by his beloved daughter’s destiny. Perhaps she had brought her fate upon herself, but it is no less horrifying to a parent for all that. That piques Zuckerman’s interest and he sets about dreaming up a ‘plausible’ version of what could have happened, a version that forms the substance of the book.

Philip Roth

How plausible Roth is, is borne out by the reception his book has received, for it cannot all be attributed to virtuosity, however much one likes the author’s gorgeous rants, or finds evocative the human interaction portrayed, or thinks interesting the descriptions of human endeavor – cattle farming, plastic surgery, glove making, feeding cake, take your pick. The American Pastoral has remained one of the most widely read and critically acclaimed American novels to date, and this will have to be because Roth writes the truth. But why am I not satisfied? Is it because in the best traditions of contemporary novelists he refuses to make one point (you already know I am thinking Disgrace here), but starts up a story abounding in any number of points, if only you picked them up? Is this the fate of the novel in the post analytic world where even evil has been teased into nothingness, where the author inevitably loses his direction? Yes, I have digressed here.

Back to the book. Just like the framing device of the novel is handled by Nathan Zuckerman, the body proper of American Pastoral is told from the bewildered perspective of Swede Levov, who while dealing with the aftermath of his daughter Meredith-Merry’s violent revolt, tries to understand what went wrong. In doing so he gives us nuggets to sift through the filter of our own experience, knowing as we do, the ultimate dénouement, (a brief history of Swede Levov’s life is contained in the “prologue”). Swede Levov goes back and forth in time, reveling in fond memories of an uncomplicated past, speculating on the reasons for his daughter’s breakdown - whether it was the lack of a religious foundation, or her being an only child, or her stuttering disability and perhaps their less than perfect parenting response to it, (but then again, who could claim perfect parenting strategies), or a very inappropriate kiss between Swede and a growing Merry (now this one is more worrisome). We get sucked into the game, as he anguishes. Is the Swede too smug, too unwilling to see a problem until it hits him on the head? Does he mirror the American experience? The Swede is constantly surprised by people around him – he does not worry that an intelligent, stuttering child of clearly glamorous parents could be miserable, thinking it enough that he finds her wonderful, he has no idea how important lack of appearance (of looks, class, and intellectual achievement) is to him and to his wife, he is not riled by the nasty remarks of the incorrigible Marcia Umanoff, most importantly he is not goaded by the violence coursing around him, so apparent in the bizarre events of the dinner he hosts towards the end of the book. 

We also wonder if the Swede’s moving away from his tribe (a Jewish identity), in the name of an assimilation that has not really happened, creates a vacuum in his child’s life that she tries to fill with her own individually created belief systems? Or is it only a case of crisis paralysis, for as the book progresses, Swede Levov seems unable to take any coherent action vis-à-vis his daughter. I could not help taking my musings further- so much land and so few people - you either farm the land or you squire it, or you move beyond the suburban. Is America creating little family islands brooding in provincial isolation, tinderboxes ready to explode anyway? It is amazing that one can get so carried away about the imaginary doings of imaginary characters. 

But still. Kuch khatakta hai. Ennomo neruderethey! And the more I think, the more I feel that it is the character of the Swede that does not sit right for me. He sounds wonderfully good childy in his John Appleseed fantasy, right up to when his daughter reaches adolescence. But is it possible that such a man would achieve all his dreams? In my limited experience, our gifts and talents give us a start in life, but what one makes of a business or a marriage requires character, and while self-delusion helps, it is never enough. The Swede could not have been such a babe in the woods, such an innocent if he came this far. And I do get it; there is an underside to him, steely or weak you decide, the side that does not see alternative scenarios, that walks away from a broken engagement, a broken marriage, the faith. I suppose he finds it more difficult to walk away from a broken child, but would such a character anguish like that? Who knows? I had to ask others. 

Tarun was like – Swede Levov realizes that he cannot accommodate his daughter in the life he has made for himself, and that is his tragedy. Alright. I went to the book discussion. 

Madelyn felt the book was pitch perfect in its portrayal of America. Having grown up in a New York neighborhood next door to many Jewish families, she could identify with the setting and that in itself, was exhilarating. Madelyn also found the development of the novel symptomatic of what she felt was happening in America, ‘the descent of the collective dream of the American Pastoral into the individual American berserk’. She appreciated also, how American history had been swept into the scope of this novel –World War II, the race riots, the Vietnam war, the weathermen, Angela Davis, the sexual revolution, the Watergate scandal. If Madelyn had to pick one inexplicable wrong move – by Levov/ Zuckerman/ Roth, it would be the kiss. She could not see how such deviance could so normally be woven into the story. My take is that the Swede gives himself away in more ways than one, through that incestuous kiss – in effect it is an admission that Merry’s stuttering is a terrible affliction that needs drastic recompense. I have to admit however, that the episode came across rather self consciously clever in a post Freudian way.  In the tradition of Woody Allen and Portnoy… 

I saw also in Roth’s writing, a delineation of the Jewish identity, how it explained many things to me, and how uncomfortable that made me. I did not need these sociological inputs about a people after the history lesson of Master and Margarita. Does reading great fiction make one an armchair ethnologist? Mamta asked how this story would have panned out in an Indian context- she felt an Indian middle class household would have never moved beyond Meredith, her story would have become theirs. Shivalik felt that the novel was really about America, the story of a nation that discovers itself veering off a blameless course to a happy ideal, as it gets blindsided by events. Possible. The sweep of the novel is American; why should there not be an allegorical significance?

 

Of course everyone wondered about Merry’s breakdown and the causes for that- the mother, the lax upbringing, an isolated life. It was interesting that I had read ‘Some Girls’ by Jillian Lauren just a week before starting American Pastoral.

 

'Some girls' is the memoir of a suburban New Jersey girl who rebelled against her Jewish middle class parents and ended up in the sex trade, ultimately landing in the harem of a Brunei prince. As airport reads go, it is superbly written, but what I took away, was that a kid from a perfectly boring-normal western background, brought up by well meaning reasonable parents could end up as the pet of a bored sultan. There are similarities between Merry and Jillian. Both of them felt disconnected at home perhaps, (Merry because of her insecurities, Jillian because she was adopted), both grew up in very well off Jewish households but in cosmopolitan neighborhoods; they probably felt alienated from their suburban peers. But more interesting was the difference between the real and fictional stories of a girl gone wrong. There was real violence in Jillian’s home. That key ingredient for someone to become unhinged - Roth hints at sexual abuse, but he is half hearted about it, would it have made sense instead, to have hinted at violence in the home?

I cannot end the review without registering a protest against the portrayal of a religion so moderate in its outlook as a kooky violent group, even from the warped perspective of a demented Meredith. Jains are vegetarians but scrupulously clean, but more importantly a basic tenet of their faith is ‘anekantavada’. Anekāntavāda encourages its adherents to consider the views and beliefs of their rivals and opposing parties. Proponents of anekāntavāda apply this principle to religion and philosophy, reminding themselves that any religion or philosophy—even Jainism—that clings too dogmatically to its own tenets, is committing an error based on its limited point of view. Roth could have surely picked another religion to project as fanatic. Maybe he was being ironical.

But the book makes you think. It is important and readable. Pick it up. 

The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov

I love Russian books. My introduction to adult literature was through a collection of short-stories by Gorky, a book I received as a prize in Middle School. I may not have understood all of it but I appreciated it.

I was also very much the product of the Cold War era. Non-aligned India leaned left, the Indian Air Force flew MiG-21s, my father spoke Russian, our family possessed Soviet memorabilia from his only trip abroad. And books from Russia were cheap. I grew up reading ‘And Quiet Flows the Don’.  As I read more I grew to love Lara and Aksinya and Levin and Ivan and Mitya and Grushenka. I loved the honest and fierce sensibility of the Russian writers, their brilliance that gave full play to drama but controlled it, in page after page devoted to the terrible search for an elusive truth and happiness.

And then I took up The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov’s offering that has upended all my notions of Russian Literature. This is not a book that systematically plumbs the depths of human experience. Instead, it calls to mind flying fish leaping to evade the predators lurking below. If you will, dolphins coming up for air. If there is a tinge of hysteria in this experiment in magical realism, that, I suppose accounts for the realism. 

Mikhail Bulgakov

This book was written in secret, in Russia between 1929 and 1940, at the time of the Great Purge, when repression, deportations and sudden disappearances were the order of the day, when writers kept packed suitcases in the hallway, preparing for the proverbial midnight knock on the door. Bulgakov came from a family of priests and had served in the White Army; moreover he was a playwright who in the best Russian tradition wished to portray reality as he understood it, his understanding often at odds with that of a totalitarian regime. He was a prime candidate for the lethal moniker ‘Enemy of the state’. Writing a subversive novel like the Master and Margarita was a risk, but it might have also been its author’s redemption. Indeed Mikhail Bulgakov had no immediate hopes of its publication as he raced to finish this masterpiece before he died.

'The Master and Margarita' opens one hot spring evening in Moscow, with the arrival of supernatural forces in the form of a Professor Woland and his assistants. Professor Woland strikes up conversation with two men – a literary critic and a poet. To elucidate his point, he goes on to narrate a fascinating account of the events surrounding the Crucifixion. He also predicts precisely the gruesome death of the critic listening to his story. What follows is mayhem, a series of inexplicable and magical events that rock Moscow. The poet who has witnessed the death of his friend and the supernatural abilities of this Professor (of Black Magic) finds himself in a lunatic asylum. There he meets the Master, a man who has suffered a nervous breakdown following the rejection of his life’s work, an account of the life of Pontius Pilate. The Master talks of  Margarita, the love of his life. Meanwhile Margarita, in order to rehabilitate the Master makes a Faustian bargain with the devil, Professor Woland that is, for he has been identified as such by common agreement. 

By the end of the book, the Master and Margarita achieve a semblance of closure as have the various Muscovites traumatised by the antics of the Devil’s coterie. So have Pontius Pilate, and significantly, a pathetic sinner, suffering for eternity for having suffocated her child.

Personally I found the Moscow narrative tedious (alright, it was painful in the extreme; it reminded me that there is a certain repetitive quality to Russian writing, and while it achieves closure for the writer, is seldom enjoyed by the reader. A case in point is Gorky’s story, character study really, of his ‘Travelling Companion’). However, I believe ‘The Master and Margarita’ makes an instant connection with people of that time and place, sending a jolt of pleasurable recognition of the travails they experienced. Bulgakov’s flights of fantasy - the witch’s Sabbath and Lucifer’s ball to give two examples, were too over the top for me. But I was in thrall to his story of Pontius Pilate, of a man who knew where justice lay but did not see it done, and suffered for it. With a few strokes of the pen – the overpowering scent of rose oil, the scorching sun, a splitting headache, a wrinkled olive tree, Bulgakov recreates first century Judea. It is a literary tour de force and a testament to Bulgakov’s genius. After I finished the book, I immediately reread the Pilate chapters, and it was every bit as enjoyable the second time around. I think I also began to understand the appeal of Christianity in Europe.

I have always wondered about the hold of an essentially pacifist religion over a basically  forceful race. It could be that people choose the religion that they need, just as the undoubtedly aggressive Mongols of Chengezed heritage gravitated to a religion that means Submission. But I wonder now, if European Christendom did not identify with Pilate. Any religion founded on martyrdom must give rise to a protective and assertive-aggressive outlook in its followers. So it should be with Sikhism and so it is with Shia-Islam. Come to think of it, modern day Zionism. A sense of ‘never again’, perhaps.

The dog and Yudhishthira ascending to heaven (ignore Bhima)

So, I called my mother with my little epiphany. She surprisingly heard me out, and then surprised me further by asserting that Bulgakov must have been exposed to Hinduism! The basis for her assertion is in his play White Guard. A character, Zhilin, asks God why he welcomes Bolsheviks into heaven, when they do not even believe in him. God replies that it is all the same to him whether the soldiers believe in him or not. He says, “Zhilin…you have to understand, that for me you are all identical – killed in the field of battle.” This is too similar to the story of King Yudhishtira of the Hindu epic Mahabharata, who dismayed to see his mortal enemies, the ‘unrighteous’ Kauravas in heaven, asks Zhilin’s question. He too is told that the Kauravas have died in battle and have a right to heaven.

Then there is the imagery of Pilate’s dreams. In his dreams Pontius Pilate argues happily with Christ  as they ascend a sort of moonlit celestial stairway, followed by Pilate’s faithful dog (all men are bad says Pilate, no they are good says Christ, but they agree that cowardice is the worst of all human failings). This picture too, recalls Yudhishtira who refused to ascend to the heavens without his faithful dog.

 Rushdie: Bulgakov was an influence

Mamta felt that all characters were various aspects of the writer. Shivalik found it impossible to pigeonhole the book, although Rushdie’s books, in particular the Satanic Verses are comparable. In some sense all characters are reflections of its author, but to my mind, the Master and Margarita represent Mikhail Bulgakov. The Master, the impractical artist who wishes only to live through his work and is crushed by criticism and intimidation, is as much Bulgakov as is Margarita, the ambitious pragmatist, compassionate and vengeful and weighed down by the bargain she has struck with the forces of ‘evil’ to rescue the Master. (Bulgakov owed his survival to the patronage of Stalin, who had liked a play of his, and responded to an open letter with a personal telephone call- leading some to surmise that Professor Woland could even represent Stalin).

The Master offers blessed release to his hero, Pontius Pilate whose courage failed him once. The parallels between the Master, Pilate and Bulgakov are striking. Margarita similarly redeems a woman condemned to be reminded eternally of her act of suffocating her child, again an arresting analogy for the pain suffered by an artist who smothers her own creation. Does suffering and redemption lie within the same person?

If there was something that bothered me it was the strain of revenge seeking, as a balm for one’s torments. Pilate executes Judas in the book and vows eternal enmity with the Jewish Sanhedrin, Margarita trashes the apartment of the literary critic who ruined the Master. There is the unmistakable odour of anti-Semitism, although Bulgakov is objective and precise in his depictions. I have to remind myself that he died before the atrocities of the Jewish Holocaust came to light.

The book is a cry from the soul of an artist forced to acknowledge his powerlessness. A true artist cannot be a pragmatist but when he is beset by forces from without, his art has to twist and swerve into different modes of expression if it is to remain true. So it is with The Master and Margarita. A tough read, beautiful in parts, and guaranteed to leave you thinking for days.

Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset. Maugham

‘Of Human Bondage’ is widely regarded as Somerset Maugham’s masterpiece. I read it on Kindle but the e-book is available for free at http://www.planetpdf.com/planetpdf/pdfs/free_ebooks/Of_Human_Bondage_NT.pdf, all 1241 pages of it.

The novel came out in 1915, when the author was forty-one. The story it tells of Philip Carey and his struggle to find happiness and meaning in existence, closely traces the arc of Maugham’s own striving and experience in the first thirty years of his life. It remains one of his most successful books.

Philip Carey is orphaned at nine and brought to the emotionally unsupportive home of his uncle, the Vicar of Blackstable. Born with a clubfoot, growing up, first with aloof guardians and later, in a school where his disability never allows him to fit in, he finds solace in books. He refuses to prepare for Oxford and goes instead, to university in Heidelberg. He tries accountancy and gives it up to study art in Paris before he finally hits upon a rewarding occupation in medicine. In the course of this journey he muses on religion and philosophy and people, that is, he ponders on the science of life, and after a few rocky affairs finds happiness in the arms of a woman he loves.


Maugham's mother died of tuberculosis like Carey’s mother, and he was sent at the age of nine to his uncle, the Vicar of Whitstable. He hated school (King’s school Canterbury to Carey’s King’s School Tercanbury). It appears he was picked on owing to his small size and the fact that he was more comfortable speaking French than English. He developed a stammer, which like Carey’s clubfoot was a lifelong burden making him self-conscious and shy. Maugham too went away to Heidelberg to study, coming back to try his hand at accountancy before studying medicine. It is natural one would conclude the book is autobiographical. Maugham has however maintained that incidents and people from his own life only formed the ballast for the novel. And of course there is a remarkable divergence in the resolution that Maugham achieves for his creation. Carey sublimates his dreams of art, travel and exotic experience, in the here and now of earning an honest livelihood, finding and keeping an honest love and raising children. Maugham was differently motivated- his homosexuality probably prevented him from aiming for too ordinary a life- Philip Carey came home, where Maugham chose to pursue the itinerant life of an artist.

Now that I have written this, I can’t help thinking of another very autobiographical novel- Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things. GOST very closely traces Roy’s own life story up to the point where the main action of the novel takes place. The resolution of the plot however, has to be widely off-course, vis-à-vis the one followed by Roy herself. Arundhati Roy’s mother Mary Roy is best known for challenging Christian personal law in India, which denied Christian daughters a share in ancestral property. Arundhati Roy’s book is possibly a what-if scenario where her mother accepted the notion that she was living on charity, thus making herself and her children extremely vulnerable in a crisis. It is interesting that one’s own life story in a different context or with a different denouement could make for literary fodder.


Everybody at the discussion liked the book. Pooja, Pulak and Sneha had read it before. It was the first time for Sips, Tarun, Varun and I. Pooja said she suggested the book because she wanted to see if her impression had changed over the years. She was happy to discover she still loved it. She was impressed in particular with the easy readability of the book and the development of Philip Carey’s character. However what struck her the most was his affair with Mildred Rogers. There was something unreal and horrible about that relationship that stayed with Pooja. But most people found the Mildred saga, however awful, very believable. They had seen some close friend or the other caught in the infuriating sort of web that Carey finds himself enmeshed in. I felt that Carey was particularly susceptible because he was compulsively caring of the desolate and destitute- see how he reaches out to the friendless and talentless Fanny Price, or cares for Cranshaw in his dying days. It was all in a piece that Mildred on a self-destruct mode could be relied on to consistently sink into the dire-enough-straits needed to rekindle that relationship – from both ends! Tarun felt Mildred did not care for Philip and that was the biggest turn-on for him. Sneha was just too put off by Philip’s behaviour, his capacity for abasement and humiliation. There was a connection made to Philip’s own feelings of inadequacy and his loveless childhood. Sneha mentioned that Maugham’s marriage had been described as abusive.


Pulak described how the book had marked a turning point in his life, when he began to question the frenetic pace at which he travelled to new parts of the world. He found Philip’s relationship issues natural and he described the weird inadequacies that people could imagine for themselves- Philip Carey with a clubfoot was not an exception but a rule. On the whole what resonated with him was Philip’s quest for a philosophy and a world-view. Pulak also remarked that Philip’s need to care for people could have made him a good doctor.

Rohit agreed with the viewpoints expressed by the group. He too felt that Mildred’s indifference added to her allure and gave us interesting anecdotes to support his theory. Sneha loved the book and liked how Carey’s character develops through the book, and how he appeared to have come out of his shell by the end of the book. He knew his worth and his mind, and was at last, comfortable in his skin; in her words, he does not take any sh__t anymore. Nor does he react too violently - the character has clearly grown. She had initially been sceptical of the ending, finding it too pretty, but felt after the discussion, that everything came together so well in the end and that the book actually headed to a great finish. She and Pooja were both impressed by how well Philip Carey dealt with his artistic ambitions in the context of his ambition to make something of his life.

Varun had not completed the book but he was struck by how selfish Philip Carey seemed to be. There was some debate that self-centred probably described him better and I went on again about his kindness. I suppose a self-conscious person would sooner or later turn into a self-centred one. Varun loved the character of Herr Sung and the group had a good laugh. We have all been trumped by that brand of brazen outrageousness!

There was much discussion on philosophy, ethical standpoints, religious journeys, the change in a character over time and self-knowledge.

Tarun was surprised to find he had liked the book! The Mildred story, and in fact, every page of the book rang absolutely true for him. His take home was that Philip Carey was a drifter with little tenacity to stay a course, probably because the economic imperative was missing. Hmmm… it follows then that the need to persevere came home to him when he sank into poverty. Of course Maugham followed a different trajectory- he persevered throughout and followed his dreams. He did not sink into the humdrum life of a country doctor but broadened not only his own horizons but through his art, that of an age.

I found the prose clunky and tedious, but truth and intelligence have a mesmeric quality that makes the book utterly readable. Think high IQ Reality Television! At the end of the book, I could not help pitying Mildred who despite her rather independent personality, obviously lacked basic survival skills and needed to turn again and again to a man she found repulsive. The protagonist/author makes no attempt to understand the outlook of anyone different from Philip Carey- it is fitting that we will discuss Sense of an Ending at our next meeting which trips up a Carey-like protagonist in his self-centred world-view. Yes, ‘Of Human Bondage’ is more introverted than introspective. Yet, there is a searing honesty and a clear-eyed perspective, which make the book deserving of being called a ‘classic’.

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding

Somewhere along my journey through English fiction I had conceived this notion that the mid to early eighteenth century novelist and playwright, Henry Fielding, was a sort of proto-Austenian writer, but more irreverent, even scandalous, and entirely worth reading. There was something about Fielding and Austen that I had forgotten, something interesting in that it concerned the opinion of one writer on the output of another. At any rate Fielding’s works were in currency while Jane Austen was reading and writing, so I believed there might have been an influence. (For those still in doubt, I am a die-hard Austen fan).

I had also read Ian McEwan’s Atonement and of course Cecilia talks of Henry Fielding to Robbie, but whether the brief mention was positive or critical, I could not have told you, for I am that kind of speed-reader. But the name had been filed somewhere… to be mined when a suitable occasion presented itself.

And indeed an occasion of this sort, that although never consciously envisaged by me, and therefore aimed for, or at any event longed for, but still exhilarating when it came about, did occur, when I was at last given the opportunity to possess a copy of ‘The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling’ by the self-same Henry Fielding, a well-thumbed copy yellowing with age, yet with all its pages intact and with the cover in good condition, all of which led me to suppose that the book had been a well-loved one. The story of how I serendipitously came in possession of this, if not consciously looked for, definitely sub-consciously looked out for tome, is as follows:

The reader may not be aware that in my student days I used to be a Table Tennis or (as I am accustomed to refer to,) TT player of some repute. Admittedly the game played by lady scholars at the Indian Institute of Management Kolkata was not of a high calibre; in fact if I do not misremember there was only one other young mistress of TT contemporaneous to me, and amongst the two us, I was unanimously ranked second. Now dear reader, I have laid the cards on the table, the bare facts are before you, and you will have to agree that however poorly I write or play TT, dissimulation is not a vice I am prone to. You would hence not have any reason to disbelieve me when I attest that while I was Player 2 of 2, I still played a mean game to use the vulgar parlance, and my spin serves and forehand chops could beat the a_ _ _ off many a strapping fellow.

Thereafter my life and more importantly my joints have taken many twists and turns and I am presently arrived in a condition where I would not wilfully take a TT bat, unless the TT bat was taken to me, which being an unlikely event, I have become to the TT table a stranger. How my erstwhile sporting career and my health problems should connect with my obtaining ‘A History of Tom Jones’ however, relates to a matter that I have kept you in the dark about.

I have a son; in fact I have had a son for eight years and a few months. There are some who may remark that by counting the months before I was brought into my lying in, that is to say the months when I contained him within my person, I should rightly estimate the time period as nine years. To these cavillers I would make the retort that if accuracy rather than convention were my objective, I would not be very far off the mark if I reckoned I had a son for only nine months, and then he was born. When I shared this insight with a few older mothers-of-sons in my acquaintance, they took leave (for the older generation is always more polite) to inform me that I was an ignorant twerp, that I should wait until the boy starts seeing other women before arrogating to myself motherly pangs of separation anxiety. Be that as it may, this boy of hardly eight summers, although possessed of all charms and graces that doting maters are easily and readily able to discern, has also acquired in his disposition something that, to use vulgar parlance again, smacks of attitude. He believes sincerely that dear mamma is a good cook, lavishing extravagant praise on my abilities even as I demur- for I would not purloin credit from my domestics especially when the menu has been planned by my husband and the recipe taken from a cookbook. Nonetheless, when I disclosed the true facts of the case to my son, he made the reply that since I was the one who combined the menu and the recipe and the instructions to the cook, my skills were laudable indeed. God bless the child, but while I have little appetite for the false encomiums that come my way, I find it exceedingly more uncomfortable to digest the unpalatable truth that he thinks nothing of my achievements in the field of sport. I imagine the fact that the husband is more inclined to physical effort while I sit all day reading has something to do with these misplaced opinions.

In any case I decided to correct the impression in his young mind by displaying my TT virtuosity. There was a Table Tennis Table provided by the management office of our condominium. What remained was the question of bats. In this matter dear reader, I was in for a surprise in Singapore. In a country that is but a dot on the map of the world, but a dot which prides itself in having garnered the TT Silver medal in the last Olympic games, that is to say a state that is a ‘force’ in the world of Table Tennis, I could find no utensils for the game- to speak plainly, there were no bats to be had for paper or plastic at any of the sporting goods outlets in the city. I persisted doggedly in my quest, until another fever seized hold of me, namely the zeal to acquire a satisfactory proficiency in the Chinese language. I will acquaint you with the particulars of this passion in a different forum; at the present juncture it would suffice to say that not a few months back, I embarked on a pursuit in order to further my language studies. I sought to peruse a book that traced the evolution of the Chinese script. Since this book was said to be available in only one store of a shopping complex- the Bras-Basah complex in particular, there I went, clutching a white chit with the name of the aforesaid bookstore scribbled on it in Chinese characters. Needless to say I stumbled into many a wrong shop before I arrived at my destination, but my aim in narrating this to you is not to bore you, although that may very well be an unintended by-product of my verbosity, but to enlighten you with the important discovery I made in the course of my search, namely, that TT bats are sold in every corner-store stationary shop in Singapore! This must surely account for the popularity of the game in Singapore and the unavailability of the requisite utensils in sports shops.

The said store also sold used books, and the corner of my eye falling on a paperback volume containing the legend “The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling in Six Volumes” that evoked from the corner of my mind- of which I have already made a mention of at the beginning of this article- certain thoughts that had been filed away, my learning that this copy could be purchased in exchange for a mere Five Dollars and my coming in possession of the book and commencing to peruse it was as one and the same thing- to be accomplished immediately and simultaneously.

You get the drift I guess, of the style of the book. Unless you have drifted off and surfed away elsewhere, for which I will have no one to blame but myself. ‘Commencing perusal’ and finishing the book were two different things. The Penguin edition that I have has 840 sepia-toned pages of fading print in Cambria Font 10. I would scorn to supply my readership with such mundane details when literary feats are on show, but given the style, I think it behoves on me to let people know what they are getting into. If you promise to read no more than five chapters a day, you will do well with the book for Fielding is brilliant and immensely entertaining.

The novel is set in Somersetshire and later London, and obviously concerns Tom Jones, a foundling raised by a benevolent country-squire in the teeth of local opposition. Jones grows up into a handsome and good-natured, though hot-blooded young man. He is surrounded moreover, by petty enemies and is eventually forced to leave home and seek his fortune. His adventures and his romance with Sophia Western, a beautiful neighbour, form the substance of the novel. Fielding uses a dominant authorial voice to tell us the story and he often addresses the reader directly while offering up his satirical observations, entertaining digressions and even some abuse! There is acerbic social commentary, biting wit, and in many instances, over-the-top slapstick humour. The book is scandalous and fun - if you are willing to wade through the language of the times.

As the romance between Tom Jones and his neighbour Sophia Western begins to captivate, the reader has to struggle against an impulse to speed-read and get to the story, for speed-reading spoils the pleasure to be had from this book. Fielding’s authorial third person voice is the real hero of the novel and if you were to pay only half heed to what he said while following the increasingly ridiculous antics of the rest of the characters, interesting for a while only in their outrageousness, you are cheating yourself of a great book and doing an injustice to the author. This was my fate. I will re-read at leisure one day.

‘Tom Jones’ surely made a splash when it came out, incensing and delighting different sections of the populace in equally great measures. (Sorry I cannot get the language out of my system!) Apparently it was even blamed for the earthquakes that had rocked London around the time of its publication. The point made was that ‘Tom Jones’ had been banned in France and that they had not suffered any earthquakes!
“
I am surprised that you quote from so vicious a book,” Samuel Johnson is said to have stated. For his part, Fielding appears to have been unapologetic and caustic, even writing a parody of Samuel Richardson’s ‘Camilla’ titled ‘Shamela’! He had a good marriage with a well-born, beautiful and virtuous lady on whom he is said to have modelled his young heroines, but on her death he married his wife’s maid who was pregnant at that time, disregarding existing conventions.

I was quite mistaken in what Austen and McEwan had to say about Fielding. In Austen’s ‘Northanger Abbey’, we have the decidedly unlikeable character of John Thorpe stating that there haven’t been any good novels since Tom Jones- after saying he never reads novels if he can help it. Apparently, Jane Austen had reservations about Fielding and I do not wonder at this. From a feminist perspective I find it difficult to stomach a romance where the hero is so wayward. The acquiescence of so great a heroine as Sophia with the prevailing double standards of the time is troubling to say the least. In my book, if the Goose gets no sauce, neither does the Gander. And in this context I can only quote from Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ -

Ian McEwan in ‘Atonement’ compares Fielding favourably to Samuel Richardson (Austen admired Richardson) through Cecilia, but argues back through Robbie that Fielding compared to Richardson was psychologically crude. Cecilia’s thoughts of rebuttal remain unknown to us but we are all inside ‘Atonement’ at this point and would rather get on with that story…

Our verdict

• Recommend testing for allergies before ingestion.
• Do not try to swallow whole or you may choke on it.
• Strictly for savouring.