Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

 I’d heard a lot of conflicting reports about Gone Girl, even before acquiring the battered second-hand copy that’s been sitting on my shelf for a good few months unread. I think the conflicting reports really put me off reading it, no one wants to start a book thinking they’re going to hate it, and originally Gone Girl wasn’t going to be in my #TBR20 list. Plus someone at work vocally let out the ending, having seen the film and thought it ‘terrible’, which also put me off (and nearly resulted in a lynching of that individual). Then I let my daughter pick a book for me, and for some reason she was determined that Gone Girl was going to be it.

Thus committed, I decided to put Gone Girl higher up the list. I sighed. I cursed the weirdly soft cover that makes my fingers itch just thinking about it. I cursed the press and the reviews I’d read and the underlying feeling of certainty that I was just going to hate it. Then I started reading. Then I read some more, and before I knew it I’d finished the book. Did I hate it? No. Is it a great book? No.

In case you don’t already know the story, Gone Girl is the story of a marriage coming apart. Nick and Amy have been married 5 years. They were forced to move from New York, Amy’s home, to Missouri (Nick’s home) due to redundancies and sickly relatives. Then, on the morning of Nick & Amy’s 5^th wedding anniversary, Amy goes missing. Somehow Nick doesn’t seem as sad about it as he should be, and soon the suspicion falls to him; perhaps because that’s exactly how Amy planned it.

The story is told in alternating chapters from Nick’s then Amy’s point of view. It soon becomes very apparent that neither Nick nor Amy are very nice people. In fact Amy, it appears, is something of a psychopath and Nick is an adulterous coward and a liar. I think that pretty much sums them up. I can understand the number of people who have complained that neither are sympathetic characters.

Fortunately for me I am not put off by unsympathetic characters, and in fact I rather enjoy them more than sympathetic ones. This whole novel swings back and forth between the two characters as they sink deeper and deeper into their own depravities. In Amy’s absence both characters come to appreciate something about the other, that perhaps they are better together than apart whilst recognising that neither is exactly ‘catch of the year’. As Nick reflects here:

“[…]Amy was blooming large in my mind. She was gone, and yet she was more present than anyone else. I’d fallen in love with Amy because I was the ultimate Nick with her. Loving her made me superhuman, it made me feel alive. At her easiest, she was hard, because her brain was always working, working, working – I had to exert myself just to keep pace with her. I’d spend an hour crafting a casual e-mail to her. I became a student of arcane so I could keep her interested: the Lake Poets, the code duello, the French Revolution. Her mind was both wide and deep, and I got smarter being with her. And more considerate, and more active, and more alive, and almost electric, because for Amy, love was like drugs or booze or porn: There was no plateau. Each exposure needed to be more intense than the last to achieve the same result.”

Okay, so the punctuation is a bit iffy, but this is the 21^st Century and no one cares about that now, right (forcing myself not to care)? Gone Girl covers a lot of ground about fakery and what is ‘real’, the difficulties of establishing a true and honest identity in an era defined by relentless advertising and media, in which the idea of ‘self’ has never been more under attack (or so it seems. Always hard to judge against earlier eras). This is particularly drawn out in the character of Amy who, it appears, is always playing a role whether it’s ‘Amazing Amy’ the character from her parents’ series of books, obsessive Amy, the ‘too nice to be true’ Amy from her diary, or ‘Cool girl’ which is an identity I encountered in this book then saw all over the place. As Amy describes here:

“That night at the Brooklyn party, I was playing the girl who was in style, the girl a man like Nick wants: the Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gangbang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry: they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, co-workers, strangers – giddy over those awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe this kind of woman exists and might kiss them.”

This kind of social commentary peppers the book, with Amy and Nick’s disastrous relationship serving as a pivot for a deeper view of human interaction in the media age. It makes for an entertaining read. At its heart the concept is a bit silly, and the execution edges on the ridiculous, but even so I enjoyed watching Nick and Amy slowly tear each other to pieces realising along the way that perhaps they were still the best person for the other. The lengths to which they each will go to punish the other are extraordinary, and in the end the story is not in any way believable, but it is fun and entertaining and rotten to the core and I enjoyed it. 

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

I had this crazy idea all of a sudden, that I was going to go and read as many of the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction longlisted books as I could. This was a moment of madness; I am already committed to TBR20 (with 3 books still to go), and the longlist is called a longlist for a reason (dur, because it is long) and somehow this whole idea spiralled me into a fundamental question about my relationship with reading, this blog and what I’m doing it all for. Which is perhaps an entry for another day when my mind is clearer and I’ve worked it all out. Anyway, the point is that it’s against this backdrop that I read Station Eleven and in some ways it is the book itself which prompted the question. Not necessarily a terrible thing.

Station Eleven is a post apocalyptic novel. The story begins with a play, a production of King Lear. The actor playing Lear, Arthur Leander, has a heart attack on stage. A man watching the play, Jeevan Chaudhary, a trainee paramedic, tries to save him. He fails. As Arthur’s body is rolled away Jeevan comforts a child actress, Kirsten, who plays a non-speaking role as one of Lear’s daughters – something of a dreamlike scene – who had grown fond of Arthur. As Jeevan leaves the theatre he is contacted by a friend who works at a hospital about a virulent strain of flu which is flooding the hospital. Everyone is dying. So the story begins.

Within a week most of the population has died. There is no way to know how much. The usual happens: the lights go out, TV goes off, the internet shuts down, people shoot people in the streets, food runs out, etc. The story of Station Eleven centres around those people connected to the Lear actor, Arthur Leander and we see both the before and after story, again all centring around Leander. We learn of his ex-wife, Miranda, who was an artist, creator of a series of graphic novels called ‘Station Eleven’ from which the title of the book comes. Station Eleven is an advanced space station that is designed to resemble a small planet. It was stolen by Dr. Eleven, a man who took his name from the station, after the Earth was overtaken by a hostile force. Now Station Eleven hides in deep space and its inhabitants are torn between remaining hidden, accepting their new lives, or returning to Earth. As with most worlds, there is an underclass – the Undersea – rebels who seek to return to their roots. The comic book serves as both a reflection of this new world and an idea of how it could be.

The story spins back and forth between the before and after, though rather deliberately. The stories of each of the protagonists unfolds as they each come to terms with their existing world and the world that is unfolding. There is some beautiful writing along the way, like here:

“No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities.”

There are also some interesting references, like the line from Star Trek Voyager “Survival is insufficient” which as a Seven-of-Nine fan was kind of nice to see there, and there’s a sense that this is a post apocalyptic novel for a new generation, though the references back to Shakespeare are frequent. I think there’s a cleverness there that I’ve missed, but there’s a general sense of a cleverness missed, a self-referencing, the plot a little too deliberate and the slipping back and forth through time more deliberate than unsettling.

Though I was not in the best frame of mind for reading Station Eleven, I’m not sure that’s why I didn’t really like it. There are a few core things which made this a book that was difficult for me to like. For a start, I’m not a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction; I think on this genre there is simply nothing left to say (that may, of course, simply be my lack of imagination) or perhaps nothing left to say that McCarthy’s The Road didn’t already do with impeccable brevity. I don’t think Mandel brings anything new to it here. Yes, she talks of the internet, of the plenty which is not appreciated, the toys we would have to give up and their marvellous complexities: mobile phones, laptop computers, etc. The theatre continues. Some people regret the passing, some people revel in it.

Then there was Station Eleven itself, the comic book. I liked the comic book, I liked the themes it covered and I found myself more interested in the idea of the comic book than the book I was reading. I wished Station Eleven existing, I’d read it. But I’m not sure the point of it gelled here. It just seemed strangely ancillary, and it wasn’t alone. There was a lot that seemed strangely ancillary, disjointed. The prophet, the book about Leander’s life, Clark, the tattoos. Perhaps Mandel was trying to point out that life post-apocalypse would be disjointed, disconnected; that there would be gaps, stories untold, that life would not be a seamless narrative. But that’s how it is now; there is no seamless narrative.

It’s not a bad novel, it would be wrong for me to say that. I enjoyed, to a degree, reading the book and it’s well written and interesting. Perhaps it is simply my prejudice against the post-apocalyptic novel expressing itself here, but for me this book just didn’t quite work; something about it just wasn’t fully realised. It felt like an unfulfilled potential, that Mandel was skirting around something brilliant and just didn’t quite grasp it.

What it did achieve was the huge questioning around how and why I read. Something about reading this book, the feeling of missing the mark, made me realise that reading had become almost a soulless activity. That the books that are great, the ones that really move me are infrequent. This has become particularly true since I’ve been reading more. The more I read, the more infrequently the books that mean something to me become, the more books that I read the more ‘middling’ ones crop up. And it becomes more infrequent for me to return to a loved classic. I think this is something that worries me, that the more driven I am to read the latest and latest books, the further away I become from the re-read, the delving into a familiar friend, the books that stir something meaningful in my mind. I think I am in danger of becoming nothing more than a consumer, and that’s not what I want to be. There is reading as an act of consumption and reading as an act of nutrition. I feel I have moved too far away from the latter. That’s not what reading is for me.

Reflections on reading Virginia Woolf

A few months ago I set out to read everything by Virginia Woolf. Over the months this task has morphed into reading all the fiction by Virginia Woolf, with her non-fiction – essays, letters – to follow on. Partly this change was because of my commitment to the #TBR20 initiative, which I didn’t want to be entirely populated by Virginia Woolf books; partly this was down the need to return all the Woolf books I’d borrowed to the library – for some reason they wouldn't let me hold onto them indefinitely. So in the end I managed to read all Woolf’s novels and, at some point later this year, I’ll start working my way through her non-fiction writing. I’m looking forward to her letters in particular.

So what did I learn from this? Was it a worthwhile exercise? Yes, I think it was. My early attempts at reading Woolf were fraught with conflict. I’d tried Mrs. Dalloway, I’d read Orlando. There was something about both of these books that I struggled to reconcile myself with, and in my wider reading of Woolf that hasn't changed. These books are not the exception; I found myself polarized by her catalogue: some books I loved, thought were wonderful; others I had to force myself through. Is Woolf a great writer? Undoubtedly. Some of her novels are astoundingly good, and even when she’s not on her ‘best’ form, she is still extraordinarily good. She has a sharp eye for character, I have encountered no other writer who has Woolf’s capability for skewering the essence of a person in a mere handful of words. She had an eye for ‘scenes’ and this eye pierces her work with some memorable short observations, like the little old blind woman in Jacob’s Room who, even now, I can see. She has a capacity for fun, as demonstrated in Night and Day; she is never sentimental or mawkish. She is a poet, her writing is vivid and memorable even if sometimes it descends into chaotic, feverishness that is hard to follow.

It would be hard to rank Woolf’s novels, I suspect that different people will have very different experiences of her work. I have heard from many people who love Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando, but find her other works impenetrable. For me, the standout works were To the Lighthouse (which I think is her absolute best), Jacob’s Room and The Waves. Of these The Waves was hardest to follow, her most poetic and ‘difficult’ work, but I think if you can approach it without trying too hard to understand it, just let the prose wash over you like the waves on the shore, then the extraordinary beauty of it becomes more clear. Next for me would be Night and Day and then The Years. I have a great fondness for Night and Day, it is a personable and lovable book. Dalloway and Orlando are books with which I have a complicated relationship. I want to love them both, but I don’t. Maybe my views on those will change in the future, I think Dalloway in particular needs multiple readings to draw out its worth. The Voyage Out is a good introduction to Woolf for anyone who wants to start reading her without leaping into her more experimental works. That leaves the ones I didn’t like: Between the Acts and Flush. I struggled to find redeeming features in either of these books.

To the Lighthouse, though. That’s a book that I would be happy to read over and over. It is a magnetic read, beautifully written and absorbing. It is a true testament to Woolf’s ability as an artist that she could take such a seemingly insignificant event and draw every drop of quiet drama from it. It is a masterpiece that everyone who loves to read ought to read. To the Lighthouse is the book, in my opinion, that shows Woolf at her best and earns her a well-deserved place in the literary canon.

What I haven’t mentioned here is Woolf’s diary which is the book that propelled me on this journey through Woolf’s books. I have only read the abridged version, the version Leonard Woolf edited to show Virginia’s life as a writer, but would like to read the full unexpurgated versions one day. In her diaries we learn of Woolf’s writing journey, her tortures and triumphs and we also see something of the woman, her concerns and her desires. It makes for an enlightening read, and I would recommend this to everyone.

I am so glad I spent some time discovering the treasures in Virginia Woolf’s writings. It is not a journey I have finished, in fact I think it is a journey I am still at the beginning of. I still have to read her non-fiction works and I’d love to read her letters too. I suspect I will re-read a number of her works over the coming years: Jacob’s Room, The Waves, Dalloway, Night and Day and my beloved To the Lighthouse which I could read and read and read again. If you haven’t yet discovered this marvelous woman’s writing, please do. 

Tracks by Robyn Davidson

Sometimes there are books you pick up and you know instantly that you’re going to love them. For me, Tracks was one of those books. It may have helped that I had already watched the movie, and it was this that had prompted me to decide to read the book anyway, but I’m not convinced that explains it entirely. Instead there is something about the cadence of the early paragraphs, the feeling of the words spinning me straight into the mind of this woman “There are some moments in life that are like pivots around which your existence turns – small intuitive flashes, when you know you have done something correct for a change, when you think you are on the right track. I watched a pale dawn streak the cliffs Day-glo and realised this was one of them. It was a moment of pure, uncomplicated confidence – and lasted about ten seconds.”

Tracks is the true story of how Robyn Davidson set out to cross the Australian desert accompanied only by camels. She arrived in Alice Springs, a town for which she expresses little affection, equipped only with an idea, a dog (Diggity) and an independent streak. Davidson had no money, no real knowledge of camels and no support network in the local vicinity. Consequently she spent much of her early time in Alice Springs being taken advantage of, working rubbishy jobs, not really getting anywhere, hating the misogyny and the nasty attitudes towards the indigent Aboriginal population.

A considerable part of the book describes how Davidson put off, by any means possible, actually starting out on this journey. For a start, she knew next to nothing about camels and had to learn from scratch. This resulted in an exploitative relationship with a local camel rancher called Kurt whose behaviour was manipulative and abusive. Eventually she exits this relationship, but does so without getting hold of the camels she needs. Later on when she does acquire her camels, the problems she faces continue to grow. The camels are frequently sick, one of her first camels has to be euthanized due to illness, and when they’re not sick they’re wandering off. This trend continues on her trek.

I enjoyed the honesty that Davidson conveys in this early part of the story. That she was torn between going and not going becomes apparent, and some of her behaviour suggests that not going is the preferred option. She recognises this in herself, in her uncompromising nature which will not allow her to borrow the money she needs to start the trek. Then she encounters Rick Smolen, a photographer for National Geographic who convinces her to allow the magazine to sponsor her trip. She agrees, but at a cost: Rick must photograph her along the way and she must allow the magazine to report on her journey. Thus she embarks on a love/hate relationship with both Rick and the magazine which crops up at regular intervals throughout the trip (pretty much whenever Rick appears to take photographs).

The trip itself is the real meat of the story, and Davidson is equally honest about this. A lot of the time she hates the journey, the endless walking, the pain, the camels disappearing, the heat, the sweating, the drab food. Yet there are moments of sheer transcendence, as she describes here:

“And as I walked through that country, I was becoming involved with it in a most intense and not yet fully conscious way. The motions and patterns and connections of things became apparent at a gut level. I didn’t just see the animal tracks, I knew them. I didn’t just see the bird, I knew it in relationship to its actions and effects. My environment began to teach me about itself without my full awareness of the process. It became an animate being of which I was a part[…] What was once a thing that merely existed became something that everything else acted upon and had a relationship with and vice versa. In picking up a rock I could not longer simply say, “this is a rock,” I could now say. “This is part of a net,” or closer, “This, which everything acts upon, acts.” When this way of thinking became ordinary for me, I too became lost in the net and the boundaries of myself stretched out for ever.”

This is not just a story about a journey, but also a story about a place and time. Whilst Davidson is a key character, so is the desert, so is Australia and so are the Aboriginal people who make their home in this seemingly barren land. Davidson reflects widely on the position of Aboriginal people in Australian society and the cultural identity of the people themselves. That she generated a high degree of respect and admiration for these oft put down people is heavily apparent throughout the book, and whilst drawing the line at a complete understanding the nature of Aboriginal links to the land become more apparent to Davidson as she traverses the desert. I always find talk of the Aboriginal beliefs soul-stirring and this was no different hear. Davidson shares with affection her time travelling with Eddie, an aged Aboriginal man who helped her across a difficult part of the desert. I think this part of the story was the most heartwarming for me.

She also discusses in some depth the misogyny inherent in Australian ‘outback’ culture, and the way in which being absent from it freed her from social conventions. I’m not sure Davidson set out to write a feminist book, but throughout her musings she is also unable to contain her absolute belief that women, people, can achieve anything they set their minds to. As she explains here:

“I was now a feminist symbol. I was now an object of ridicule for small-minded sexists, and I was a crazy, irresponsible adventurer (though not as crazy as I would have been had I failed). But worse than that, I was now a mythical being who had done something courageous and outside the possibilities that ordinary people could hope for. And that was the antithesis of what I wanted to share. That anyone could do anything. If I could bumble my way across a desert, then anyone could do anything. And that was true especially for women, who have used cowardice for so long to protect themselves that it has become a habit.

The world is a dangerous place for little girls. Besides, little girls are more fragile, more delicate, more brittle than little boys. ‘Watch out, be careful, watch.’ ‘Don’t climb trees, don’t dirty your dress, don’t accept lifts from strange men. Listen, but don’t learn, you won’t need it.’ And so the snail’s antennae grow, watching for this, looking for that, the underneath of things. The threat. And so she wastes so much of her energy, seeking to break those circuits, to push up the millions of tiny thumbs that have tried to quelch energy and creativity and strength and self-confidence; that have so effectively caused her to build fences against possibility, daring; that have so effectively kept her imprisoned inside her notions of self-worthlessness.”

I have noticed a trend in my more recent reading, something I seem to seek out, to desire. It appears in this book in buckets, it was present in A Woman in the Polar Night, in Full Tilt, in Lost Paradise and A Book of Silence. It is this idea of transcending the limits of human social construct, of reaching a moment of pure blending with the world, of being present and at one and at peace. I crave it. I wish I knew why, but until I do I am willing to keep seeking and finding it in wonderful books like this. Tracks is quite different in character to the movie (for those who have seen it), it is more raw and brutal, it is more present, Davidson breathes hot dust and sand through the pages. She sees with honesty and frailty; she is human, she is alive and she is free.

The Table of Less Valued Knights by Marie Phillips

There are certain things that don’t happen in my reading activities very often: books which I read in a day and funny books. The Table of Less Valued Knights surprised me by being both of those. I picked it up on a whim on a visit to the library on a day I was crazed from book acquisition starvation towards the end of my TBR20, which I seem hell-bent on never allowing myself to finish. I still haven’t finished. It’s been three months now, I may never buy another book.

Anyway, ignoring my book-buying withdrawal symptoms, I was attracted to this Baileys Prize longlisted book because it is different from the books I ordinarily read. It’s not serious for a start (except when it is) and it’s set in King Arthur’s court making it fantasy/historical which is a genre I generally avoid like the plague. Yet what I found was a very fresh, very entertaining, very current story about the danger of appearances and the stupidity of putting people, and fiction, into stereotypical boxes.

Our stories follows Sir Humphrey du Val, one of King Arthur’s knights. Specifically a knight of the ‘Table of Less Valued Knights’. To explain:

“For there were two other tables in the Great Hall of Camelot, two tables less sung of by storytellers and balladeers, in fact barely mentioned at all. One was known as the Table of Errant Companions. Oval in shape, tucked in the shadowy space beneath the minstrels’ gallery, it housed those young upstarts who aspired to the Round Table, who busied themselves with minor quests and prayed for a precious chair in proximity to Arthur. The other table, to be found in the draughtiest corner furthest away from either of the fires, was rectangular, and had one leg shorter than the other so that it always had to be propped up with a folded napkin to stop it from rocking. It was home to the elderly, the infirm, the cowardly, the incompetent and the disgraced, and was called the Table of Lesser Valued Knights.”

It is Pentecost, and the Knights are waiting for the Pentecost quest to arrive. Sir Humphrey is bored, hungry and irritable. Less Valued Knights are not permitted to go on quests. When the Pentecost quest arrives, it is a strange man: Edwin, who claims to be King of Puddock though, as Humphrey observes “Puddock had a queen now. So this must be her husband. But surely that made him Prince Consort?” It is a theme which recurs often in the book. Edwin’s wife, the actual queen, has been kidnapped, and the Pentecost quest is therefore to discover her kidnappers and recover her. The quest falls to the knight which volunteers the fastest, which in this case falls to Sir Dorien Pendoggett, the Errant Companion who took Humphrey’s place at the table. Humphrey is not pleased.

As Humphrey is hanging around the hall later, sleepless and grouchy, a lady turns up. Lady Elaine, it seems, is a damsel in distress (not quite the typical kind) whose fiancé had been kidnapped just as they were to ‘plight their troth’. Humphrey sees an opportunity here, suspecting that the Lady Elaine’s quest is, in fact, the ‘true’ Pentecostal quest given that a damsel in distress ‘trumps a king’ in quest hierarchy. In such circumstances, Humphrey should wake Arthur’s court and allow the true knights to compete for the honour of fulfilling Lady Elaine’s quest. However, Humphrey decides to cheat the rules and take the quest for himself. He wakes his half-giant squire, Conrad with whom he has a shared and complex history which includes the story of how Humphrey is demoted to the Lesser Value’ table, Jemima the elephant (Conrad’s ‘steed’) and together they set out to find the Lady Elaine’s missing  fiancé.

If one thing is true about this story, it is that nothing is quite what it seems. The Lady Elaine is not a traditional damsel in distress, Sir Humphrey is not the traditional knight and Conrad not the traditional squire. Edwin, The King of Puddock is no king and his kidnapped wife, the Queen Martha, is not entirely his wife, entirely kidnapped or entirely female. Phillips spends much of the novel ever-so-slightly perverting the traditional roles in a traditional story of this type, with amusing side effects. In the process she also highlights the hazard of making judgement on appearances or convention and the differences in treatment between men and women – this particularly seen through Martha’s story, as described here:

“She hadn’t realised how different life was for me. They looked her straight in the eye when they spoke, asking her questions and listening to her answers, treating her with the easy, casual respect of equals. She liked it, but she was thrown by the expectation that she would have something to contribute to the conversation. The frustration that she had felt as a girl her entire life – that nobody believed her to be competent at anything – was replaced by the terror that her competence was now assumed. Either way, her actual abilities didn’t seem to come into it.”

This is an amusing, satirical novel which is also extremely entertaining to read. It addresses the question of gender bias and gender opportunity through humour and a slightly offbeat cast of characters who never quite act in the way you’d expect them to. Gender is not its only target: traditional power roles, the image of the ‘knight in shining armour’, marriage, sexuality, jealousy and appearance are all targets of Phillip’s satirical eye. And in the traditional, perhaps the only traditional sense here, way of a good satire it’s strikingly and uncomfortably accurate. I found The Table of Less Valued Knights a very engaging read that sneaks its message in with a joke, until you realise it isn’t really sneaky at all: it’s the carrot-eating elephant in the room – she’s called Jemima and she’s about to poop all over your nice, new shoes.