Holiday reading

Hail, readers! Yup, this is the second post in one single day. I've got a lot to say to the world, and I'm not afraid to put it all down in this blog. So for part two of my holiday re-cap, we'll be looking at what I read this holiday, why I read it, and how you should read it too if you haven't already.

Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut

I love it when you take a book out with you somewhere, and your memories of reading it are fused with the sights and smells around you. For me, the last few chapters of Cat's Cradle - which I tore through in a fit of delight - will always be indelibly connected with Chinese villagers working by the roadside as my bus sped into the curvy hills around Yangshuo and down a rocky path, past dusty villages towards the Yulong river. It's not an entirely wrong sort of landscape to associate with Vonnegut's godless world, in which disenchanted islanders live in a hopeless sort of state, governed by power-crazed idiots. Reading Vonnegut's furious conclusion, in which the self-styled prophet Bokonon thumbs his nose at God as all around him the world lies in tatters, I thought of the pointlessness and misery of some of our existence, and the crazy rules and lives that are meted out to us by governments and religious leaders. It sort of made sense in this context - although the lush beauty of the surrounding mountains gave my heart some relief from Vonnegut's dystopian vision.

To say that Vonnegut's book is angry, biting and contemptuous of the modern world and its violence and superstition, is to give an impression of a dour book without heart. Yet Cat's Cradle bristles with life and hilarity - a sort of raging comedy - and is sometimes truly moving, even as Vonnegut strives to disconnect us from his narrative and his characters by cutting the book up into short chapters and routinely plunging his story into the realm of the farcical. To begin with, I wasn't sure what he was up to, and his world didn't make sense to me entirely - but as the book gathered speed and Vonnegut began to show that he had entire control over these characters and this invented world, I started to marvel at his vision and his cleverness. Briefly: Cat's Cradle deals with one man's attempt to piece together the life story of Dr Hoenekker, the inventor of the H Bomb. In the process, he stumbles across the lives of his children, and ends up with them on a pointless island with its own stupid religion, where the end of the world is about to take place. Vonnegut creates his religion (Bokononism) gleefully, writing hilariously daft prayers and chants that pepper the book, and also invests this hopeless island of his own creation with a sort of manic, believable life. Along the way, he very sharply skewers war, patriotism and religion, and it's a joy to behold. The greatest moment of the book is when he lets his guard down for one chapter, dropping his virulent, cynical tone to give voice to one lone reasonable character, who pleads for an understanding of our human barbary. In this chapter, where he memorably says that instead of honouring the war dead with marches and parades, we should paint our bellies blue and roll in the mud, we see a great despair and humanity in Vonnegut's prose. It's a startling book, and it made me feel quite tingly with excitement at its originality of tone and purpose.


Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love, by Sheila Rowbotham

From one opponent of war to another: one of the causes that the mighty Edward Carpenter adopted throughout his astonishing life was pacifism, which he took up in his seventies during the First World War. It made sense, given his opposition to the British Empire and his sense of interconnectedness in world cultures, and given, too, his interest in the human individual and a return to simplicity in life. In this context, war, pollution, and the ravages of modern British life registered for Carpenter as a blot on human existence, which he fundamentally believed to be spiritual.

If this makes him sound like a Victorian hippie, he wasn't. He was first and foremost a socialist, committed to social reform, who lobbied the government from a variety of associations that he fronted or participated in, such as the Fabians. His belief in spirituality and a simplicity of life ran somewhat counter to his carnal appetites, for he was a gay man advocating free love - and he was aware of this contradiction in a life both spiritual and fundamentally material. What is so tremendous about him is his energy in fighting for these causes, and his intellectual interest in taking up new fights and embracing new ideas. His reading, from Heidegger to Marx via Freud, Plotinus, Plato, Walt Whitman, Rabindranath Tagore and countless other writers, made me feel at once defeated (I will never have that understanding and intellectual ability) and inspired - inspired to understand the world through the philosophy and fiction of these great people.

Sheila Rowbotham's somewhat hefty biography makes for a thrilling read as you count all the causes that Carpenter had a hand in getting off the ground: recycling, women's rights, gay rights, nudism, free love, socialism, back-to-basics living, pacifism. He championed his beliefs with real conviction, and was always interested in his time, and in people. Rowbotham's book is also very clever in highlighting his real quality, which was a capacity for friendship - although I think it could have made a more pointed connection between this talent and his sexuality, especially since he was himself so interested in Platonic love. Where Rowbotham does hit the mark, though, is in observing how Carpenter's queerness made him able to fight for other causes, because of a feeling of otherness which would have opened his eyes to other suffering. I loved this study in marginalisation, where a man makes the most of his public position, while using his insight into difference and intolerance, to struggle for others.

A few complaints about the book, which is very poorly edited. There were so many mistakes in syntax and vocabulary, it sometimes came close to ruining the experience. I read about Alf Mattison's "fiancé Florence Foulds", about Carpenter being "empathic", "clambouring along the stony beach", having "self-depreciating charm", and "pouring over" photographs (all italics mine). I kept reading the word 'dubiously' used for 'doubtfully', and also read about people being "signalled out for comment" instead of being singled out. The Adamses are referred to on separate occasions as "the Adames" and "the Adams", and I lost track of all the hanging clauses after a while - but here's one f'rinstance: "Like Carpenter, always ready to help young talent, he [George Bernard Shaw] fell for Lena Connell". Here, Rowbotham means that Shaw was like Carpenter in that he was always ready to help young talent, not in that he fell for Lena Connell. Carpenter was decidedly homosexual, which is one of the main points of the whole biography.

Still, it's a fantastic book, brilliantly researched, and one with a cast of characters who made me feel very happy. I fell in love with George Hukin, the tender northern knife-grinder who Carpenter was besotted with and who was very fond of Carpenter in return. Hukin nevertheless married a woman and wrote a heartbreaking letter to Carpenter expressing a wish that they could all sleep together in one bed. He and Carpenter stayed on good terms for the rest of Hukin's life, and he pops up throughout the book as an ever noble soul. I also loved George Merrill, Carpenter's later lover, who placed lavender under guests' pillows and pinched E. M. Forster's arse when he visited Millthorpe. I loved Edith Ellis and her ballsy letters and opinions, and Olive Schreiner with her modern haircut, and the Fords, and the Salts, and the Mattisons. These people are drawn with great affection, and Carpenter's world seems to come alive. It's chiefly worth reading, though, for its humane and intellectual understanding of all the movements and writing that Carpenter embraced, and for its appreciation of this incredible life.


The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald

Which makes it three excellent books that I read this holiday. I'm still making my mind up a little bit about whether it's a consummate masterpiece or merely a very excellent book, but it was certainly a real tonic, and I haven't read anything so original since - oh balls, since Cat's Cradle - but you get the picture. The Blue Flower is marginally the better book, I think, since it is so truly different, and always so faithful to its subject and tone. It has such an oddness to it, which means that you can never really know the characters, and yet you somehow feel their inner lives, from displaced comments that they make, or some slight observation in the narration. The tone is always one of slightly absurd, always wry detachment - but the book is also suffused with a true beauty in its prose; a beauty which is nevertheless exceedingly tamped down, and which plays second fiddle to dialogue and a kind of personal philosophy.

Oddly, The Blue Flower is the book out of these three that I have the least to say about, even though I am sure that it is the best of all three - I think because it is so extraordinarily self-contained, and answers so many of its own questions. It is about the nature of art, and the nature of desire and selfhood, and it elegantly shows that we can never really know other people - but that the act of creation, and particularly the telling of stories, allow us to bridge some of that psychological divide. I loved Fitzgerald's insights into the mind of her characters, especially Fritz's friend Karoline. Elsewhere, the strange main family are drawn with great affection, and the central character makes for quite an original composition - all the more incredible given that Fitzgeral is conspicuously embroidering onto the early life of the man who would later become the poet Novalis. It's an astonishing act of creation.