What Book to Read?

New writers these days seem to have to do a lot of their own publicity. So it isn’t surprising that along with everyone else who writes a book blog, I get requests to write reviews of books that might not catch the eye of mainstream reviewers. And though they may not be books I would normally gravitate to, it seems only reasonable to read and write about them if that is going to give their authors a bit of publicity.

In this case, the book falls into a category I haven’t written about before: chick lit. I do not mean anything disparaging by this label. Being mostly about women, chick lit suffers the same disparagement as does romance fiction. And while the Mills and Boon style of romance may be rubbish, some of the greatest works of English literature are romances. OK, I don’t think it’s likely that the chick lit genre will produce something of the quality of Pride and Prejudice, but neither do I think it should be automatically dismissed.

Chick lit addresses issues faced by modern women, especially those around identity, and relationships with friends and family. The search for a partner is important, but does not dominate the agenda as it does in romance fiction. Coffee at Little Angels deals with a group of eight friends, and while half of them are male, I think this is essentially a book about women, for women.

Maxine, Sarah, Kaitlyn, Melanie, Josh, Phillip, Grant and Caleb identified themselves as a group at their high school in a small town in South Africa.  They were not all equally friendly: ‘You don’t get to choose your friends when you live in a small town. There are simply people in your general age group who you make do with because you don’t have a choice’.  Partner swopping and jealousies didn’t help either.  After school, several of them moved away, and effectively lost contact. But when some ten years later Phillip is killed in a hit and run accident, they get together again for his funeral.

The book is about the thoughts and feelings of the characters, and the relationships between them, both in the past, and now that they see each other again. None of them is really happy or satisfied with their life. The action takes place over three days and is mostly located in the nameless small town, where the only place you can get decent coffee is at the Little Angels coffee shop. This is not a book where plot is of over-riding importance, though there is a bit of a twist at the end. Indeed the narrative is constantly broken up by Larter’s device of telling the story in short bursts in the first person from the perspective of all eight participants, including Phillip – both before and after he dies. When each character is speaking, their circumstances are what distinguish them from each other. Their language, both in thought and conversation, is hip and modern; no doubt Ms Larter writes as she speaks. But none of the characters has a distinctive voice.

The town may be dilapidated, the hotel cold and its furnishings threadbare, but these white South Africans nevertheless exist in a modern western world with a gen Y sensibility. The fact that one is married to a black woman and another is gay does not really challenge this. I think Larter is most powerful when she looks outside this bubble and includes the black population of the ‘township’ which lies outside it. Phillip has been doing charity work there, though its hopelessness depresses him. His friends find evidence of his work, and acknowledge the impact of AIDS on ‘a dying nation’. ‘It’s easy to have a superficial knowledge of these kinds of things. It’s easy to agree or act appalled when people say stupid things like HIV is God’s way of cleansing the planet. But to know it for what it is? To really know it. We don’t.’ This awareness changes the lives of at least some of the group. They also reject the stuffy impersonality of the funeral service in the local Dutch Reform Church, and join the black Africans singing and dancing outside. ‘It is perhaps only in this country that so many people mourn death by celebration,’ one of the characters notes. This may be standard fare in South African novels, but it is moving to an outsider.

Nadine Rose Later is twenty-nine, and lives in South Africa. This is her first book. You can find out more about her from her blog.

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There’s just one more novel I’d like to comment on in my current fixation with romance fiction.

Kingsley Amis (1922 -95) would probably have been surprised to think that he had written a romance. (Certainly he considered Jane Austen to be snobbish and ‘second rate’.) Lucky Jim, published in 1954, can be seen as a war between Jim and everything that he hates – arty pretentiousness, academic laziness (though Jim is hardly a shining light in this area) and emotional manipulation. Some see it as a satire on the ‘redbrick’ universities, though equally it could be seen as an attack on the way in which the vices of the traditional universities like Oxford got transferred into the newer ones. But for all this, it has the conventional structure of a romance. Jim and Christine meet, their relationship faces obstacles, and these are ultimately overcome.

Jim Dixon is a junior History lecturer of no particular academic achievement in an unnamed provincial university, still on probation, and anxious to make a good impression – or rather to correct the bad impression he has already unintentionally made. He is a very ordinary young man of no particular social class, but with a flat northern accent – enough to mark him out as being different from many of his colleagues. He is attempting academic life because he doesn’t think he would be any good as a school teacher. But he is bored with his subject, mediaeval history, despises his boss, Professor Welch, and feels uneasily that he is being drawn into a relationship he doesn’t really want with Margaret, a colleague in the department. At an ‘arty’ weekend at the Welches’ house, he meets Christine, the girlfriend of the Professor’s son, Bertrand; she seems to sum up everything in a young woman that he wants but can’t have. After a series of very funny social disasters, culminating in the shambles of Dixon’s public lecture on Merrie England, each of them rejects their previous emotional entanglement, and they end up together.

The book differs in two main ways from a traditional romance. First, the main character is male, and the story is told from his point of view. He feels out of his depth with women, especially women like Christine. ‘The notion that women like this were never on view except as the property of men like Bertrand was so familiar to him that it had long since ceased to appear an injustice. The huge class that contained Margaret was destined to provide his own womenfolk’. When he gets to know her a bit better, things seem just as hopeless. ‘The girl was doubly guilty, first of looking like that secondly of appearing in front of him looking like that’. When Christine proves friendly, he can scarcely believe it. Dancing with her, he can barely resist ‘breaking out into an imbecile smirk of excitement and pride’.

Second, Christine’s feelings are never really explained, and she remains very much just a symbol of what Dixon wants but doesn’t think he can get. ‘You don’t think she’d have you, do you? A shabby little provincial bore like you’, a jealous Margaret screams at him. And it isn’t really clear why Christine does like him.

I haven’t much enjoyed anything else that Amis wrote. I find it interesting that it is just where he departs from the concerns of female romance writers that I find him lacking in his other books – his relentlessly male approach, and his disregard of, and even disrespect for women. 

Lucky Jim is incredibly funny. This is partly because of the inner dialogue in Jim’s head, as in the following example: ‘The bloody old towser-faced boot-faced totem pole on a crap reservation, Dixon thought. “You bloody old towser-faced boot-faced totem pole on a crap reservation,” he said’. It is also partly because of the hilarious situations he gets himself into, and partly because he overcomes such deserving targets as snobbery and pretension. And it is the humour that lets him get away with a character like the unregenerate Jim. While Lucky Jim fits the romance formula, it may be popular despite this rather than because of it. But it’s still well worth reading.

 Lucky Jim also made it onto Time’s All Time 100 list. You can find out more about Lucky Jim here.

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While I’m on my current kick about romance fiction, I thought I’d write about book that isn’t a traditional romance, but plays with the romance formula. In it, boy meets girl, their romance meets obstacles, but these are overcome. Or are they? John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman was published in 1969. Fowles didn’t set out to write a typical romance. Rather, he was consciously using the nineteenth century romantic convention in a modern way.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman is set in Lyme Regis in 1867, a hundred years before Fowles, who also lived in Lyme, started writing the book. Charles Smithson, a young man with expectations of inheriting his uncle’s title and estate is engaged to pretty Ernestina, daughter of a wealthy merchant. He needs no profession, and dabbles happily enough in the sciences, particularly palaeontology; he is stirred by the ideas of Darwin about evolution. But he is vaguely dissatisfied with his life. Walking one day with Ernestina on the quay, they come across a mysterious woman dressed in black, Sarah Woodruff, and Charles is immediately disturbed by her face. He learns that she is supposedly awaiting the return of a French sailor she nursed back to health, and had an affair with, making her a complete social outcast. He meets her again apparently by accident. And he gradually finds himself becoming obsessed with her, ‘like an intolerable thirst that has to be assuaged’. She represents to him what he will give up if he goes ahead with his unadventurous marriage to Ernestina.

So we have a romance, but with a twist – who is the romance going to be between? Will it be Charles and Ernestina, who have to overcome the obstacle of Charles’s attraction to the ‘other woman’ in order to settle down in rational happiness? Or will it be Charles and Sarah, who have to overcome the obstacle of Charles’s conventional view of the world?

I’m not going to say which it is. But rather like Mr Rochester, Charles has to lose almost everything before he can find his beloved again. And Fowles has written the story with two alternative endings. Readers can choose which they prefer – and consider how far the conventional romance structure places constraints on the free will of characters set within it.

Fowles departs from conventional romance fiction in other ways. The story begins as if it is being told by a first person ‘I’ who is reporting the past from the present, as in ‘This remarkable event took place in the spring of 1866, exactly a year before the time of which I write’. The author offers observations and comparisons with the present day, and comments about modern consequences of actions at that time. This is the god-like view many nineteenth century writers took to their stories. Then, without warning, the writer breaks off and addresses the reader. ‘Who is Sarah? Out of what shadows does she come? I do not know. The story I am telling is all imagination. These characters that I create never existed outside my own mind’.  And he goes on to question what is real and what imaginary. ‘We are all in flight’, he says, ‘from the real reality’. But you can read the story without paying too much attention to these postmodern musings.

This novel of course stands on its own without reference to its place in romance fiction. Indeed it made it onto Time’s All Time 100 Novels list (actually since 1923). But I still find it interesting to consider how Fowles has used the romance formula to such clever effect.

The Time All Time list can be found here.

More about John Fowles can be found here.

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In my page about the history of romance fiction, with its formula of  ‘boy meets girl, their relationship encounters problems but everything ends up happily’, I noted that after a period where it rightly had a bad name, romance fiction now seemed capable of new development. That might have been a bit optimistic, since one of my examples of regeneration was A.S. Byatt’s Possession: a romance, published as long ago as 1990, and the other was Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, published in 1996. This latter was in any case hardly ‘new’, as it is modelled on that great romance, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Certainly plenty of romances have been written recently, but few that I know of have revitalised the genre.

One that perhaps does so is Prodigal Summer (2000). There are three different, but linked stories in the novel, only one of which could be said to fit the romance formula. But the underlying theme is the drive of all creatures and plants to find a mate or in some way to contribute to reproducing their species. Prodigal summer is ‘the season of extravagant procreation. It could wear out everything in its path with passionate excesses, but nothing alive with wings or a heart or a seed curled into itself in the ground could resist welcoming it back when it came’. Romance is an expression of the human subset of this drive.

The first of the stories, told in the chapters entitled Predators, concerns Deanne Wolfe, an ecologist in her forties who has chosen to live a solitary existence in a mountainous national park in West Virginia where she observes nature and acts as a park ranger. Her dream is that she will be able to authenticate her sighting of a coyote family she thinks may have moved back into the region from which coyotes were exterminated by hunters. Then she meets Eddie Bondo, a hunter by profession. Girl meets boy, there are obstacles to their relationship, which are (sort of) overcome, for a (sort of) happy ending.

The second of the stories, told in the chapters entitled Moth Love, concerns Lusa, an entomologist newly married to Cole, a farmer in the valley at the foot of the mountains. Her story is not a romance; it deals with death, the other part of the ecological cycle, though there is also regeneration in it.

The third of the stories, told in the chapters entitled Old Chestnuts, concerns two bickering elderly neighbours, Nannie Rawley, who farms an organic orchard, and Garnett Walker, a devotee of chemical sprays. While they don’t find romance, it isn’t really giving anything away to say that they finally find friendship.

One of the pleasures of the book is the ways in which these stories are linked, just as ecosystems, and small farming communities, are linked. Each story contains echoes of the others, and all contain echoes of the wider ecological statement that Kingsolver is making. What happens when a predator is removed from the landscape? What happens when a loved person is removed? What happens when someone or something from outside is introduced into to an organic system? Are the changes always good or always bad? When are old ways better than new ways? None of these links or echoes or the questions they raise are forced; they arise simply as part of the story.

Like the prodigal summer itself, Kingsolver’s language is often lush, particularly in the Predator chapters, and I sometimes found them a bit heavy going. But it was worth persisting. Lusa’s story is told with a lighter touch, and Nannie’s and Garnett’s interactions are at times positively funny.

Kingsolver rightly prides herself on ‘trying something completely new with each book’, so don’t look to her for another romance. She probably didn’t mean this novel to be one. But if you view humans as part of an ecological system, the attraction between men and women – romance – is something you can’t avoid.

You can find more about Barbara Kingsolver here.  Click here to read about another of Kingsolver’s books which is completely different.

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