Good Morning, Midnight is a book about an older woman, a
woman past her prime. On the face of it she’s lonely, discarded. She has little
money, is living in Paris it seems in some kind of exile, she is past her prime,
no longer exactly pretty or desirable. It is a claustrophobic kind of story,
the kind where you see quite intimately her thoughts and experiences making for
a discomforting read. I think this is why I struggled so much with it the first
time around, but it is worth the effort of bearing with it.
The story jumps around a bit from her present in Paris, to
the times she’d been in Paris before, to a marriage which fell apart after the
death of her child. The protagonist is a drinker, and it’s not clear if she
drinks because she’s an alcoholic or to expunge the daily deprivations and
humiliations of life from her mind. She’s hypersensitive, always fearful of
judgment or criticism from the people around her, from being exploited. These
fears seem ridiculous, yet it soon becomes apparent they are not without
reason.
There are some interesting dichotomies presented in the
story. One the one hand you get the sense that the woman is lonely. She is old,
she is alone, she is terrified of the man in the next room in the shabby hotel
she is staying in. She spends much of her time by herself, drinking in the
selection of bars she’s deemed ‘friendly’ or watching movies alone at the
cinema. Yet as the novel progresses, you begin to wonder if this isn’t her
choice? Whilst she seems lonely, she also seems to hate people. In fact she
expresses this herself in some depth:
“’You want to know
what I’m afraid of? All right. I’ll tell you…I’m afraid of men – yes, I’m very
much afraid of men. And I’m even more afraid of women. And I’m very much afraid
of the whole bloody human race…Afraid of them?’ I say. ‘Of course I’m afraid of
them. Who wouldn’t be afraid of a pack of damned hyenas?’
She spends much of her time prowling the streets of Paris,
remembering past humiliations and difficulties. She seems almost paralysed by
her fear, her hatred of other people; unable, because of this, to fulfil her
desires. Yet it’s not clear what her desires are. Does she want to be in a
relationship? Does she want to be like others? Does she want to drink herself
to death? Her inability to decide, to follow through on her decisions is a
constant battle she has quietly with herself all of the time.
There’s a sense that this is a character out of control, yet
at times she shows cast iron control. This is another dichotomy in the book.
Because we see the endless bubbling, the violence of her thinking, this creates
a sense of madness, of ‘raving’ as she refers to it herself. Yet at the same
time she is able to parcel her day into neat little packages of events, she
seems outwardly respectable. A quiet women having a drink in a bar, repulsing
(to a degree) the approaches of men. Is she raving, or is she just perceptive?
She cannot accept the strictures of society, does not want to ‘play the game’
of men and women, of social acceptability. She is caught between wanting to be
herself and wanting to be what she’s expected to be. It is a battle her mind
seems incapable of winning.
The moments I most enjoyed in this book were the moments of
extremely sharp perception, of judgement. Like here, as she observes the
behaviour a mother and daughter in a fashion shop she worked in at the time:
“’Come along, mother,
do let’s go. Don’t be silly, mother. You won’t find anything here.’
There is a long glass
between the two windows. The old lady complacently tries things on her bald
head.
The daughter’s eyes
meet mine in the mirror. Damned old hag, isn’t she funny?...I stare back at her
coldly.
I will say for the old
lady that she doesn’t care a damn about all this. She points to various things
and says:
‘Show me that – show me
that.’ A sturdy old lady with gay, bold eyes.
She tried on a
hair-band, a Spanish comb, a flower. A green feather waves over her bald head.
She is calm and completely unconcerned. She was like a Roman emperor in that
last thing she tried on.
‘Mother, please come
away. Do let’s go.’
The old lady doesn‘t
take the slightest notice, and she has everything out of both cases before she
goes. Then: ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I’m very sorry. I’m so sorry to have given you
so much trouble.’
‘It’s no trouble at all,
madame.’
As they go towards the
door the daughter bursts out. A loud, fierce hiss: ‘Well, you made a perfect
fool of yourself, as usual. If you want to do this again, you’ll have to do it
by yourself. I refuse, I refuse.’
The old lady does not
answer. I can see her face reflected in a mirror, her eyes still undaunted but
something about her mouth and chin collapsing…Oh, but why not buy her a wig,
several decent dresses, as much champagne as she can drink, all the things she
likes to eat and oughtn’t to, a gigolo if she wants one? One last flare up and
she’ll be dead in six months at the outside. That’s all you’re waiting for, isn’t
it? But no, you must have the slow death, the bloodless killing that leaves no
stain on your conscience…”
The bloodless death. This is something that the book is
concerned with, our protagonist seeking, it seems, her own death. Death by
excess, death by accident. Yet it is the bloodless death she seems to be on the
path towards.
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