What Book to Read?

I haven’t spent all the holiday season reading crime fiction. My book club mostly reads contemporary works, but we decided this time to venture into the classics. So I’ve also been reading A Tale of Two Cities (1859) for the first time in fifty years. All I can remember from my earlier reading is how noble I thought Sydney Carton was, and though I’m now probably much more critical about other aspects of the book, I still find what he does very moving. Sentimental, aren’t I?

The book is often thought to be about the French Revolution. The revolution is the occasion for the climax of the tale, but it’s actually a story of love and revenge. It begins in 1775, so the famous opening lines – ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’ – don’t actually apply to the Revolution itself (unlike Wordsworth’s lines – ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!’). Mr Jarvis Lorry, of Tellson’s Bank, is on his way to Paris to meet Dr Manette, who has recently been released from long and unjust imprisonment in the Bastille. It then jumps five years to the trial of the Frenchman Charles Darnay at the Old Bailey for treason, and our first meeting with Sydney Carton. In this section, the love story dominates, though the action switches from time to time to Paris where to poor of the city are becoming desperate. The third section begins in 1789, and jumps to 1792, when Charles Darnay is drawn back to Paris. There are numbers of characters and many twists and turns in the story; Dickens can always be relied on for a good plot, even if he sometimes tends to melodrama.

Dickens is often highly acclaimed for his prose, and certainly there is a lot of it. No piece of action, no description or reflection by the author can pass without an elaborate embroidery of words. Even the smallest incident is given its full due. Dickens doesn’t let a good idea get forgotten, and there are many wonderfully sustained images throughout the story, such as Mr Stryver shouldering his way through life, or Madame Defarge knitting in her wineshop. His writing can be superb, but it can also be frustrating, particularly where the language is highly coloured or the syntax convoluted. I find some of the passages give detail far beyond what is necessary, and there are others that don’t seem necessary at all. For example, of what relevance to the story is Mr Stryver’s decision not to propose to Lucie Manette? While the plot is ultimately quite coherent, I guess that writing in weekly instalments allowed – or even required – Dickens to let his prose have its head.

Dickens has, as always, stock characters, and some of these are unconvincing. Lucie is too beautiful, good and lovable, Miss Pross is too devoted, and Charles is rather too noble. Madame Defarge, on the other hand, is too implacably evil. But Jarvis Lorry, the soft hearted man of business is a joy. I assume Jerry Cruncher is supposed to be funny, but I found he grated on me. And what of Sydney Carton? Does he merely serve a role in the plot, or is he a convincing character? I’m not sure I’m the best judge of that.

Reading it now, the book immediately raises the issue for me of whether historical literature – and it was historical even when Dickens wrote it – has to be true to history. We know Dickens didn’t study the events of the revolution; he took his details from the historian Thomas Carlyle. The picture he presents of what happened is terribly skewed as to causes and effects. There is no mention, for example, of the role middle class members of the Third Estate played in what happened; all that he is interested in are the poor of Paris and the hated aristocracy. Dickens presents the Paris crowd as bloodthirsty and anarchic, but not entirely to blame; he also shows the aristocracy as corrupt and selfish. He sees the condition of the Paris crowd as a ‘frightful moral disorder’, but believes it is ‘born of unspeakable suffering, intolerable oppression, and heartless indifference’. To suggest the enmity between the Paris crowd and the aristocracy was the driving force of the revolution distorts what really happened, but suits the story. The battle between these forces is personified by Charles Darnay and Madam Defarge – though of course Darnay is not representative of the nobility, thus allowing Dickens to highlight the injustice of the Terror. London comes out of it rather better than Paris.

There is perhaps no real answer to the question of where a novelist should stand in relation to historical reality, or rather, there are as many answers as there are novelists and historical realities. It does worry me, though, that generations of readers may think Dickens’s version of the French Revolution is accurate, and be thereby misled about what actually happened. But as I said above, I think it is the story of love and revenge that is really important to the author. He wasn’t trying to write history.

This is a very partial account of the novel. You can read more about some of its other major themes here.

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I notice that I have recently posted about several books that deal with Jewish experience in Europe up to and including World War II. That experience was so terrible and so memorable that it’s hardly surprising that many writers want to explore it. In addition to Jewish experience, this book also looks at a slice of German war-time experience and while the view is scarcely typical, it is a humane and moving one.

Liesel Meminger, the book thief of the title, is a young girl who lives with foster parents in a small town just outside Munich in the early years of the war. Her story is told, most unusually, by Death. ‘I could introduce myself properly, but it’s not really necessary. You will know me well enough and soon enough … It suffices to say that at some point in time, I will be standing over you, as genially as possible. Your soul will be in my arms … I will carry you gently away.’  As narrator, Death comments on the action, and sometimes complains of his workload, but does not intervene in the story; he merely puts it forward as an attempt ‘to prove to me that you, and your human existence are worth it.’

It is, as Death says a ‘small story’. Liesel and her brother are travelling with their mother to meet foster parents who, though are scarcely less poverty stricken than she is, will give them a home. But the boy dies, and after he has been buried, Liesel picks up a book that one of the grave diggers has dropped – her first book theft. After a difficult beginning, Liesel comes to love her foster parents, especially her Papa Hans, who teaches her to read and opens up to her the joy of words. She makes friends with the boy next door; they play and eventually steal together, first food, then books.  She begins writing her own story –The Book Thief. Against this coming of age story is set the realities of Nazi power and Germany at war, brought home with compelling force when Hans agrees to hide a young Jewish man in his basement.  Death tells the reader in a preface how it will all end. Or as he (?) says later: ‘I don’t have much interest in building mystery … It’s the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest and astound me.’ Thus Liesel’s simple, even domestic tale acquires a broader relevance and meaning.

The other notable thing about the book is Zusak’s style of writing. Throughout, there are asides from Death, almost directives to the reader, which stand out in the text by being indented. For example: A Guided Tour of Suffering.

To your left, perhaps your right,
perhaps even straight ahead,
You find a small back room.
In it sits a Jew.
He is scum. He is starving.
He is afraid,
Please – try not to look away.

These give the story a bitterly wry note. There is further very dry humour in asides such as a comment on Jews being marched through the town to the nearby Dachau camp: ‘They were going to Dachau, to concentrate.’ But most of all it is Zusak’s unusual use of language that is so striking. In an early description of Liesel, ‘you could still see the bite marks of snow on her hands’. Frau Diller had ‘a refrigerated voice and even breath that smelt like Heil Hitler’. At a bonfire of books to celebrate Hitler’s birthday, ‘The orange flames waved at the crowd… Burning words were torn from their sentences’. And in the air-raid shelter, ‘Stillness was shackled to their faces’. This extensive use of metaphor is startling, and effective.

Liesel’s story comes to stand for broader issues about German responsibility for the Holocaust. Some of the characters in the book are active Nazis, most go along with Nazism, and a few stand against it. Not surprisingly it is Death that makes the judgement: ‘The Germans in basements were pitiable, surely, but at least they had a chance. The basement was not a washroom.’

Zusak was born in 1975, and before this (2005) had written fiction for older teenagers. The Book Thief is a remarkable achievement.  You can see here what he says about his next book.

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This may not be a great novel, but I think it is a very good one.

The ‘book’ is the Hebrew codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah. Brooks has taken the real life rescue of the Haggadah by a Muslim librarian from Serb shelling sometime during the siege of Sarajevo, 1992-1995, as the starting point for an imaginative exploration of how the book, created in her story in the 1490s (but probably even older) travelled from Spain to Venice then ultimately to Bosnia. The ‘people of the book’ are ‘the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it’.

The story starts in 1996 with Hanna, an Australian museum conservator, who is asked to ‘stabilize’ the rescued Haggadah so it can be displayed as a symbol of hope for the future in the shattered city. Hanna is technically good at her job. ‘But there is something else, too. It has to do with an intuition about the past. By linking research and imagination, sometimes I can think myself into the heads of the people who made the book.’ She finds tiny clues in the binding that give some indication of where it has been, and for each clue the narrative switches to an explanation of how and by whom this clue came to be left. Hanna’s exploration links the other stories, but she also has a story of her own which contains one last twist in the history of the book.

The history of the Haggadah’s journeys is filled with violence, intolerance and persecution. It is sobering to be reminded just how institutionalised anti-Semitism was in Europe throughout this period. Some of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 were accepted by the city of Venice, but were still restricted to living in the ‘Getto’, and forced to wear red caps as a sign that the blood of Christ was on their heads. The Nazi and Ustashe fanatics of WWII drew on a long history of persecution. The Roman Catholic Church, through the Inquisition, also played its part in the misery inflicted on the Jews. But there are also examples of generosity and bravery across cultures. Bosnian Muslims twice saved the Jewish book – in fact as well as in fiction – and there are other examples of love and kindness. That ‘diverse cultures influence and enrich one another’ is the real message of the novel.

The story is well crafted and highly readable. There is a sense in which the structure is contrived, in that the reader always learns far more than Hanna can possible find out through her investigation of the remaining fragments of the book’s history. But fiction is contrivance, to be admired when done skilfully, as it is here. I perhaps remain a bit unconvinced by elements of Hanna’s story: for example, did her mother have to be quite so terrible? But to describe it as one critic does as a ‘clichéd personal story’ is going a bit far.  And I can see why Brooks included the final twist which makes Hanna a participant in the long history of the Haggadah, not just an observer.

Brooks won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel March (2005) which speculates on the life of the absent father of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, away fighting in the American Civil War. She certainly can write. And her research for People of the Book (2008) seems meticulous. I was somewhat surprised therefore to read a suggestion that the story could be seen as some kind of up-market Da Vinci Code, only slower paced. Apart from both having religious themes, I can’t see that they have anything in common. This has a strong moral core entirely absent from Dan Brown’s work. If I were to make any comparison, it would be with the porcelain expert in Nicole Mones’s A Cup of Light, but I think this is a much better book – see my post on Mones’s.

One minor point intrigues me. The Sarajevo Haggadah is illuminated, which surprised art historians who had thought that Jews at that time shared the same prohibition as Muslims on using figurative art for religious purposes. As Hanna notes, the Sarajevo Haggadah changed this view. In Brooks’s story, its illustrated nature is almost accidental, not theological. Is she suggesting that art historians don’t really know what they are talking about?

You can read more about Geraldine Brooks here, and about the Sarajevo Haggadah here.

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Jacob Jankowski is ninety – or maybe ninety-three; he’s lost count. He lives in a nursing home, where he is ‘scolded and herded and managed’, and all too frequently treated as a patient rather than a person. Then one day a circus comes to town, and the ghosts of Jacob’s past come ‘crashing and banging’ back.

It is 1931. He is twenty three, and close to finishing his final year of veterinary science at Cornell University. But he is overtaken by family tragedy, and in a moment of crisis, leaves university and jumps a train. This turns out to be a circus train carrying the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. Jacob gets a job as vet and menagerie worker, and finds himself in a whole new world, part glamour and spangles, part deception and greed, and part friendship and love, but also hatred and murder.  The story then moves between Jacob’s life in the circus, and his life in the nursing home. Both are told in the first person present tense, so it is as if he is living the past, rather than just remembering it.

Both plot and character development are adequate rather than inspired. Jacob’s adventures with the circus have an air of ripping yarns about them and at twenty-three he is a nice boy, caring, brave and passionate, but only as the story requires. At ninety-three he is feisty and pugnacious, also as the story requires, but life in the nursing home is something of a cliché. I couldn’t really distinguish the Jacob of twenty-three in the Jacob of ninety-three, though perhaps none of us would recognise ourselves in our youth. There is a twist to the story as set up in the prologue which is clever, but ultimately seems to me a bit pointless. One reviewer thought it a ‘terrific revelation’, but I thought Gruen was cheating a bit.

What makes the book memorable for me are the details Gruen has plucked from the rich history of the American circus in depression era America. She has obviously done her research meticulously, and writes convincingly about moving the circus from place to place, feeding and training the animals – especially Rosie the elephant – and putting on the show. The period photos of circus activities which accompany the circus chapters are wonderful vignettes of a time gone by. She also does a good job with the social and economic realities – the rigid distinction between workers and performers (which Jacob to some extent bridges), the collection of ‘freaks’, the illegal alcohol consumption during Prohibition, the practice of ‘redlighting’ (pushing unwanted workers off the moving train) and the ruthless attitude to what is deemed expedient – whether people or animals. Indeed the wanton cruelty of some of the circus staff to animals is made painfully clear.

It is not surprising that few people questioned this cruelty in 1931; it was a brutal time. Indeed the circus could perhaps be seen as a metaphor for depression era America. ‘The whole thing’s illusion, Jacob, and there’s nothing wrong with that,’ one character says. ‘It’s what people want from us. It’s what they expect.’ But the illusion is built on exploitation of people and animals, just as in those years the American dream of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was an illusion built on hardship. One resident of the nursing home claims he once carried ‘water for elephants’. Jacob says this is a lie, though how he knows this is not explained. It appears in fact that no one carries water for elephants: they drink so much they have to be led to water. From this it follows that carrying water for elephants would be a very difficult task. Perhaps in the title Gruen is making a point about the difficulty of sustaining an illusion. But if so, she certainly does not pursue it, and I may be seeing more than is intended. She does not, furthermore, raise the issue of whether making animals perform in circuses is itself cruel. Jacob at ninety-three is as excited by a circus as he was at twenty-three.

You can read more about Sara Gruen here. A film, Water for Elephants (2010), has been made based on the book (2006), and you can see a trailer for it here.

PS. I noticed a review in the London Review of Books that looked in some depth at the relationship which I discussed briefly in my previous post between the book, the TV series and the film of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. You can read it here.

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