Playing with History

Although I have written books set in a past time or inspired by old works, According to Natty is my first straightforwardly historical novel. While I needed a realism of setting, there wasn’t much realism of story in my 1911 set novel about huge, breaking, mind-control machines and the eighteenth century setting of Odes to the Big City was a fantasia created out of the literature than a real place.

But the Lichfield in According to Natty is a real place and the four residents of Breadmarket Street were real people. I loved my research stage. Aside from the continuous joy I take in anything that could be seen as procrastination, it meant I could read about the things I’m already so interested in. Yet, it was an odd research, because I had to remember that it was all in aid of creating a plausible fiction.

It’s a completely different mindset than I’m used to when I write fiction, with different constraints and freedoms and different needs pulling in different directions. First, you have to let the research lead you somewhere but then you have o use imagination to flesh it out but still keep it within the borders created by the research and then you have to make it work as a proper narrative with functional fictional characters. 

My take on the young Samuel Johnson could prove a little controversial (if it gets a readership, I haven’t even finished the first draft yet). Johnsonians are very attached to Samuel, as am I, but it seems pretty clear that young Sam was not the nicest of people. Even the old, established, settled Samuel Johnson was hard work but even he admitted that he used to be harder work, not even trying to be sociable until he was 30 (and the book ends when he’s 27). What’s more, it doesn’t take much reading between the lines of descriptions of his early life to see something of a tyrant in him. When he has his friends carry him to school, or pull him across the ice, they are presented as spontaneous acts of respect to his youthful intellect but they could as easily be acts he forces on his friends. Samuel seems to treat many of his childhood friends poorly, or transactionally - using Edmund Hector to transcribe the book he was commissioned to translate.

Whats more, there are good character reasons to depict a pricklier Samuel Johnson. He’s a genius but constrained by his body, with increasingly deteriorating mental health and strained against narrow expectations of his community and his family. It makes character-sense for him to have a chip on his shoulder. Even more compellingly, from a narrative point of view, the book is told from the viewpoint of his little brother, Nathaniel. We know Samuel’s own guilt in later life towards his brother, but there’s also this sense in how Nathaniel was left out or stands at the sidelines of anecdotes that Samuel simply didn’t notice him very much. Whats more, Samuel seems to be the most obvious and likely antagonist to Nathaniel, they are both rivals for the affection in their house and the esteem from their town. 

Whereas the problem of Samuel is that he’s so written about that a fictional representation of him needs to thread some tight needles, Nathaniel is almost a complete unknown. Samuel represents him pretty consistently as decent enough bloke but seems to imply he’s pretty unremarkable. To be honest, I reckon this was pretty accurate. It makes sense that someone growing up in a house full of nagging and the melancholic states of father, Michael and Samuel himself, that Nathaniel would grow up into something of a people-pleaser, a conciliatory figure with an easy sociability and laid back attitude - a decent bloke. Even in our one remaining text by Nathaniel, a letter when he was in his deepest despair, prepared to run away to America, blaming his family for not supporting him, Nathaniel ends with a cheery note of love and thanks for supporting him. So I think the easygoing nature was not an act, but a response to his environment.

Yet, as the protagonist of a novel, he needs a little more desire and agency. Yes, he has the desire to have a closer relationship with his family, especially Samuel, but he needs something outside of that to want. This is where I have gone completely off-piste. I have decided that Nathaniel is captivated by visual beauty. I have him keenly aware of colour and texture from an early age. His first struggle in the book is between wearing something beautiful (that Samuel had outgrown) or giving in to Samuel’s wish that he not wear it. What’s more, I’ve made this fictional desire for beauty into the reason he gets into (possibly legal) trouble. We don’t actually know what Nathaniel did wrong, but in my version he stole/finagled his way into materials to create a beautiful book. 

It makes a sort of sense to me. The Johnsons are a family surrounded by books, he has near him access (or at least awareness) of the stunning St Chad’s Gospel - if I give Nathaniel a want, the it’d be to make a stunning book. I also like the notion that Nathaniel is the only Johnson to really appreciate books, as a physical object at least. Sarah resents books with their clutter and unsaleabilty, Micheal sees them as advancement, Samuel guts them for knowledge but only Nathaniel has a pure love of the thing in itself. And it’s what dooms him eventually. 

The other real difficulty I’ve had writing my research is to stop calling Samuel, Johnson. There’s a bunch of Johnsons in this thing.

An Author to be Lett by Richard Savage

It’s time to go deep into Grub Street, into the late 1720s. Pope has released his first version of The Dunciad anonymously and is collecting the praises and attacks in his next version. He’s hired a Grub Street hack with dubious, noble parentage who has recently been pardoned off a death sentence for murder,  to dig up the dirt on his victims, that man is Richard Savage. 

In 1729, Pope published the official Dunciad, with many of the notes influenced by Savage’s muckraking and Savage himself released his own work against the dunces, An Author to be Lett in which he played the part of Iscariot Hackney, the epitome of all base practices and pride of Grub Street. 

Born among ill omens, Iscariot quickly grew up to be the tattletale of the class, setting boys against each other and masters against boys. He also developed a love of pulling wings off flies, legs of insects and harming stray dogs. This, he says, set him up to be a wit, as “to be a great wit is to take a Pleasure in giving everybody great pain.”  He also developed a skill for pilfering, which would help him become a great plagiarist later on. 

Set with a “propensity to sneer at all Mankind”, he is set on his way to be a writer. Of course his first publisher is Edmund Curll. He manages to cheat Curll of some money but is easily counter-cheated and put into servitude in translating things from the French “they never wrote” and other literary chores. 

He was once pleased that some of works were passed off by a Lord as his own in private, a joy that was stolen when the Lord then published them. He has a reputations as, “a great Joker, and deal in Clenches, Puns, quibbles, jibes, conundrums and carry a good whichits.” He also attacks authors who publish under their own names but writes under other authors pen-names to aid his sales. He also writes technical works he knows nothing about by misusing indexes and dictionaries and creates pretend dialogues from Henley’s Oratory. 

He’s developed a skill at all kinds of ephemeral poetry, especially those praising flash-in-the-pan successes. He dedicates works to people who would never appreciate them and is a ghost writer for a member of parliament, a man so low even Iscariot treats with contempt. When parliament is in session he makes a living writing for either party, when it’s not, he makes do by writing prophecies and tales of ‘wonders’. He often hears these stories being praised and hates the public for taking to them.

He’s tried his hand at theatre but not hit the big times and offered himself as a government spy but was rebuffed. As he says, he’s tried “all Means (but wha Fools call Honest ones) to make a Livelihood. His latest wheeze is as a tutor to boys on the grand tour. He can crib any academic knowledge he needs from the same Grub Street anthologies he writes and knows the really important things to know t be successful in the task is where the comfortable beds and good food are. If he’s really good, he’ll know where the free young women are as well and set them up with his charge. By doing this, he boasts, he’ll have saved up enough money to retire to Switzerland or Wales.

He ends by imagining how famous he should be considering he is “a Perfect town Author.” He hates anyone who hates him and looks down on anyone who helps him, as helping him shows how pathetic they must be. He’s sold hundreds of copies of his works, mainly because he retitles them and releases them as new, something he’s learned from Curll.

Finally, he says where he can be found for hiring. A number of gin-shops, nightly rent rooms and other low-down places. There, from Hockley-in-the-Hole (a well known Highwayman hangout) he’ll be happy to make any deal with any possible client.

In this work, Savage succinctly and colourfully lays out every attack on Grub Street. The venality of it, the lack of morals or gratitude, the bare attempts at wit and learning, the bile. It’s a Dunciad stripped of its poetry, it’s heroic trappings and its creative flourish. It’s plain dealing, no-holds-barred invective.

It’s also something of an accurate self-portrait. Savage was turned down as a spy, he did deal in invective and muckraking, he did betray or belittle everyone who ever tried to patronise him. He even tried to retire to Wales but got bored and died in a debtor’s jail in Bristol. Yet, Savage was greatly appealing to the young(ish) Samuel Johnson who befriended him soon after and turned the story of his life into the prototypical tale of the artist too elevated for this harsh world.

Were there writers like Iscariot Hackney in Grub Street. Probably. But there were many other stories, tales of people accomplishing great things or simply being able to live based on their writing. These Grub Street writers created modern newspapers, dictionaries, close-reading, literary criticism, advertising, agony-aunt, lifestyle pieces, cookbooks - and so many other things. It’s hard to remember when reading works by Pope and his group, but they were the losing side of the early eighteenth century culture war. Their ideal of gentleman writers using time-established classical forms and modes was on it’s way out. The hacks won, Iscariot Hackney was triumphant - and the new age of social media is busily sweeping away the world they built. Who knows what the next will be?

Review: Re-re-read According to Queeney by Beryl Bainbridge

 I’ve not been one to re-read books on the whole, but I’ve just re-re-read According to Queeney. This is even stranger because it’s not a book I’ve ever particularly loved, yet it’s one that’s often had an important part in my life. It was one of my earlier jaunts into the eighteenth century, reading it first ( I think) in 2009 and then as the first book of the Dr Johnson’s House Reading Circle in 2015. 

When I was struck with the notion that I could write a novel about Samuel Johnson and his younger brother, Nathaniel, I could use Beryl Bainbridge’s work as a reference point. My book is (at present, I’m still in the first draft) called According to Natty. Finding myself caught in the weeds of my own work a little, I thought I’d read According to Queeney with the intention of seeing what lessons it could teach me about my own work, and perhaps decipher why I’ve always been a little lukewarm about it despite it being almost tailor-made to  my interests.

The book tells the story of Samuel Johnson’s relationship with the Thrale family during the latter years of his life. It’s structured into seven chapters of between 20-40 pages which deal with events in a year or two of that relationship. The book is told in a third-person perspective, not an omniscient one, but tied to a character, yet it could detach and pass from character to character at any time. 

I became a little obsessed with tracking this point of view because it seemed to go all over the place. Each chapter seemed to have a primary point of view, whether it was Mrs Desmoulins in the first, Mrs Salusbury in the second or Queeney in the third but it had no loyalty to tha character and would pass off from one to another and maybe again back to the primary. In dinner party scenes, or occasions where there were lots of characters it would almost be anchored to the table and pass around, dipping in and out of people as it went. It was smoothly done, and the move from one to another was motivated by the ebb and flow of conversation and emotion, but it paradoxically left a lot of the characters feeling flat, like the reader was lightly skimming lots of people.

Interestingly, for a novel called According to Queeney, it’s not often from Queeney’s perspective. The older Queeney delivers a brusque letter after each chapter, where she describes what she remembers now. These are often in contrast to the supposedly ‘true’ depictions within the chapters themselves. Queeney develops (but tries to hide) her suspicions that Samuel and Hester’s relationship was more physical than emotional and she forgets things like her own loosing of an amber necklace and stealing of a replacement. These add ambiguity to the chapters themselves, as well as providing useful skims over time to set up the next one. 

My own novel also adopts a third-person perspective which, although being a little elastic, is tethered to Nathaniel, the person the book is ‘According to’. I really liked when Beryl Bainbridge did stick with Queeney, her confusion (and at times disgust) at the strange goings-on of the adults in her life was really interesting. I liked that she very much had her own goals and motivations. I loved her simple, positive relationship with her father, a man who is a bit of an idiot in many representations of the Thrale set, but whose straightforward love for Queeney makes him seem more grown up than the self-absorbed Hester and Samuel.

Queeney also goes on a few little adventures of her own, like the time she wanders out and finds the ‘mad’ girl in the church who steals her necklace. It’s a good reminder to give Nathaniel a life away from his to-be famous brother, even if s positive relationship with him is one of his desires.

I remembered the book as being a miserable one, but with a sense of farce and was very surprised that it’s only the second chapter that really deals with comic misunderstandings (though the book in general seems to be about different understandings and interpretations - hence the roaming POV I suppose). In this chapter, Samuel thinks Mrs Salusbury is peeing in the garden, thinks he sees a man drowning in the duckpond and strips off to save him, and is mistaken by Mrs Salusbury for a ghost. I’d have liked a little more of this stuff.

That’s also the chapter that introduces the buttons with dogs on them and the fan, which are turned into a ghost story by Samuel. The buttons are then a source of different memories when Queeney remembers being forcibly slapped for playing with them, but Hester remembers her choking on them. There’s then a portrait in Lichfield of a man missing a button and this gets tied into it somehow, it’s all very mysterious.

The subject of my book is Nathaniel Johnson, and he’s mentioned a few times in this one. There’s a story about him as a child falling down some stairs, blaming Samuel for the injury and Samuel being punished for it. There are also suggestions of Nathaniel being chained as a madman and possibly killing himself. I’d like to know where Beryl Bainbridge got these ideas from, I imagine she made them up as my research hasn’t pointed to anything in these directions.

A quick glance at user reviews of this book suggests that many readers had a problem with all the names thrown up in it. Not only are there the key characters of Samuel, Hester, Queeney and such, but there are also the people who shared a house with Samuel, the circles of friends they mention, the people those circles of friends gossip about, various staff and employees - lots of people. What’s more, circling in and around their viewpoints and thought processes muddles them up further. While I want to convey an entire small town on characters and a world beyond it, I plan to make my focus the four members of the Johnson family and hope my readers feel part of it.

I suppose the lesson I chiefly learned was to trust my own instincts in the structuring and viewpoint of my novel. I’m telling a different story, with different characters and am, myself a different person - so there’s nothing wrong with telling it differently. 

Review: Beware the Cat by William Baldwin

 

In the spirit of the anonymous animal tales I read last summer, I read Beware the Cat,  a work written in 1553 (though not published till later because of its anti-Catholic sentiments) that some academics have argued as the first novel written in English. That does depend a lot on the working definition of a novel, but novel or not, it’s a fascinating and captivating work.

It starts with a later rhyming introduction, implying that the cat in the title refers to Cat-holics, and that they hide their sharp claws under their fluffy exteriors. This prepared me to read the book as anti-Catholic allegory, but it turns out the cats in the book actually have a different function and that we must beware them for a different reason. 

Then the dedication has the author say that he’s passing on a story told by a Gregor Streamer, and that he’s written it so accurately to the way it was told to him that the reader will “dout whether he speaketh or readeth”. (This book is written in the nonstandard spelling of the time but is not too difficult, certainly not Morte D’Arthur levels of difficult).

The story starts on the 28th of December 1552 and a group of men are having a sleepover around the house of the King’s Master of Revels, George Ferrers. This man really existed and the book includes a number of real people, fictional people and fictionalised versions of real people in one big stew - an interesting, almost meta-fictional element to this early piece of fiction. The lads of all had their first sleep, back in the days when sleep was split into two parts, and they spend the time before the next sleep in discussing whether animals, and cats in particular, have their own kind of intelligence.

There are stories about cats talking, of them hearing of the death of one ‘Grimalkin’ (a name often used for witches’ familiars) and even on taken revenge on her death. There’s a lot of talk of superstition, of Ireland, especially the gullibility of the Catholic Irish but members of the sleepover really attest they heard stories of witches and talking cats from unimpeachable sources. There’s talk about witches being able to inhabit cats nine times, hence the cat having nine lives. Other talk about people who swap between being wolves and humans every other seven years, and talk of cats eating people alive and of other people roasting cats.

Streamer, a fictional character, says he has the final word on cat intelligence and he will tell the story on the proviso that nobody interrupts him. He says how he was staying with John Day a (real) Tudor printer who had premises near Aldgate. There’s a creepy, almost gothic-tale build up of the place as the gate has the preserved torsos of traitors, a practice he declares as against Biblical law. While he is there he is kept awake by the yowling of cats and he creeps into an empty room to watch them.

What he sees looks like a law court, with a grave, judge cat and a hyperactive cat for the defence. A roof tile falls and disturbs this court, at which Streamer “whip’t into” his room because he’s worried the cats might think he threw it at them and come after him. He becomes obsessed with divining what the cats are saying to each other and he gets a book by (real writer) Albertus Magnus so he can create a means to understand them.

How he creates his mixture is my favourite part of the book, it’s ludicrous and gory and ridiculous. He goes into St John’s Wood, which is till a wood at this point, to get a dead fox, a dead kite and various other dead animals. He upsets some hunters by mentioning hedgehogs, because apparently they are the result of witches - a superstition I’d never heard before. As he does these things he does them with special magic words like, “Shavol swaghameth gorgono liscud” and Iulsheley huthotheca liscud’” - I really enjoyed the silly magic words. He’s also doing this in accordance with various astrological principals, which he describes. Then he takes all the guts, livers, spleens and such and strains, pulps, fries, drinks, distills and does all sorts of disgusting things with them. At one point he tricks a small boy into eating ‘a cat’s toord’ and laughs at him, which seems hypocritical when considering all the gunk he’s ingested.  

He then makes special ear pillows, which he straps to his head. These boost his hearing so he can hear everything and these are described in a wonderful, rhyming list;

“The barking of dogs and grunting of hogs,
The wailing of cats and the rumbling of rats,
The gaggling of geese and the humming of bees,
The rousing of bucks and the gaggling of ducks,
The singing of swans and the ringing of pans,
The crowing of cocks and the sewing of socks,
The cackling of hens and the scratching of pens,
The squeaking of mice, and the rolling of dice,
The calling of frogs and toads in the bogs,
The chirping of crickets and shutting of wickets,
The screeching of owls and fluttering of fowls,
The routing of knaves and snorting of slaves,
The farting of churls and fizzling of girls,
And many things else, such as ringing of bells,
And counting of coins and mounting of groins,
The whispering of lovers, the snaring of plovers,
Of groaning and spewing, and baking and brewing,
Of scratching and rubbing, and watching and shrugging”

Having got his enhanced hearing under control, he listens to the cat court. They are trying a cat for not being promiscuous and she’s given the extenuating circumstances. There’s a story about a secret Catholic priest and a madam who shrives herself frequently so she can carry on her exploitative ways. She even involves the cat in her deception, blowing pepper in the cat’s face to make it cry so she can claim the cat in a woman transformed for not seeing to her husband often enough. 

Some of the stories the cat tells have a Chaucerian bawdiness to them. A prankster glues walnut shells to her feet and the tap-tapping is interpreted by the superstitious secret Catholics as a devil. This involves a who kerfuffle with a frightened bare-arsed boy and a priest, where the priest ends up with his face up the boy’s arse as he shits himself with fear. She also exposes a cheating love by biting and scratching his testicles as he hides behind an arras, so the husband sees a “bare ars’t gentleman strangling me with his stones in my mouth”. Some of these stories reminded me of later books like The Surprising and Singular Adventures of a Hen or Pompey the Little. 

The conclusion is reached, that we should beware the cat because they see all our “noughty living” that we try and hide, and they tell each other about it. It’s not that cats are an allegory for Catholics, it’s that they are domestic spies and, if they wanted to, they could tell all our secrets. 

The version I had was an Amazon print on demand thing. Although repackaging out of copyright works and flogging them on Amazon is a bit of a con, when they are done well and formatted nicely (as this one was) they are so much better than the old print on demand classics or bad scans where the pages were sometimes unreadable. The only thing missing from this copy were the glosses in the margin, which apparently add gags and fun stuff, but I don’t have the hundreds of pounds for a more accurate copy - and this was very readable and full of good stuff.

I’m not sure whether it counts as a novel, it’s a far looser, baggier thing than that but it is a striking work that feels remarkably fresh. While some of the attitudes are very much of their time (it does take part in that charming genre of fiction, misogynist literature) the handling of speech, character and frame feel bright and modern. As for whether cats can speak, I did once live in a place where the cat next door’s meow sounded very much like my name. I never found out what the cat wanted with me though.

Re-read Review: A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Laurence Sterne

I first read A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy fifteen years ago when I was going through my first flush of eighteenth century novels. Seeing as I read, Tristram Shandy, Boswell’s Life of Johnson and London Journal, The Vicar of Wakefield and Fanny Hill, I found A Sentimental Journey to be so-so. I remarked that while it didn’t frustrate me as Tristram Shandy did, nor did it delight me as much. I also noted that the comedy servant, Fleur, didn’t do much comedy-servanting.

It tells the story of Parson Yorick from Tristram Shandy, who is challenged when he describes something being organised better in France. Realising he’s never actually been, he immediately pops across to Calais, has a little wander about, stays in Paris for a couple of months and makes plans to move on to Italy. Then Laurence Sterne died, rendering the title inaccurate. The book has a really weird relationship with Tristram Shandy, as one of the most famous pages of that book is the black page mourning Yorick’s death, yet Yorick also has the last line in the book. In this, Yorick talks about his parishioner, Walter and mourns the death of Uncle Toby - which means it slots between some parts of Tristram Shandy and not others (which probably says more about that book than any other).

Yorick is not a typical traveller, he’s not after tourist destinations, he’s after sensations and emotions under the catch-all term of ‘sentiment’. These aren’t just how he feels about things, but also the physical effects. On arriving in Calais he gets himself a bottle of cheap plonk and drinks it. This gives him a warm generosity of spirit where he forgives the King of France for a rule where, if he died in the country, he items go towards the crown. As well as this generosity of spirit, he feels a rush of blood to his face and head, a sense of muffled warmth - the physical effects of the alcohol as well as the emotional.

It’s as he is congratulating himself on his feeling of generosity that a monk enters the room, looking for alms. He suddenly finds that whilst he is a big-hearted, giving sort of person who’d share his last penny with a penniless scamp, he doesn’t want to give money to the monk. In fact, he’s angry with the monk for asking him for money and tells him out-right. However, it’s then he sees a beautiful woman and he sees the monk speaking to her. He imagines how the monk is telling her how rude he is and that the woman will think less of him so his attitude to the monk changes and he goes to make up with the monk. In making up, he and the monk swap snuff boxes - his is a fine tortoiseshell number and the monk’s is a cheap horn one. It actually turns out that the woman doesn’t care about what the monk says about Yorick and he’s wasted his time and snuff box to impress her but from then on, the sight of his new horn snuff box remind him to try and be more open and generous.

All this to-do in Calais about monks, beautiful women and snuff boxes takes an hour in Yorick’s life but fifty pages in the book. It’s a book with an odd relationship with time, speeding up and slowing down as later, in Paris, there’s a time skip of a month. It’s because the book measures time by the sentiment created and merely wandering around Paris for a while doesn’t feed this need.

The big drama in Paris is to do with his passport. In his rush to leave England and explore the continent, he forgot that France and England are at war. He even joked with a friend that being imprisoned over the channel would save him money in the long run. At first he tries to minimise the problem, not looking at it squarely in the face but an encounter with a starling in a cage brings his mind back to it. Now imagining what the truth of imprisonment might be, he’s prepared to be as obsequious and fawning as possible to get his passport. He even plays on his famous surname (and possible ancestor) to get onboard with a Shakespeare-loving, French aristo. He doesn’t even kick back at the aristo’s assumption that he is, himself, a jester, admitting that he does jest, though nobody pays him for it.

The aristo even has ideas of why Yorick is in France, sniggering that he has come not to spy out the nakedness of the land; but the people. Yorick responds in spluttering disbelief, saying that he has too much respect for women and that he “conceives every fair being as a temple, and would rather enter in and see the original drawings and loose sketches hung up in it, than the transfiguration of Raphael itself.” He’s trying to say he wants to see what’s in people’s hearts but this sets the aristo sniggering again.

This is another theme in the book. It just so happens that Yorick’s innocent misunderstandings always lead to implied sex, or almost-sex. He may be innocently buying some material, doing the door dance with a woman, sharing a carriage or taking her pulse but so many of his behaviours lead to him being near, or alone with, beautiful women. At the end of the book, due to a classic eighteenth century inn mixup, he finds himself grabbing the fille de chambrés…end of volume two. That interruption during the action is typical of the book, if Tristram Shandy is a novel with impotence being a guy theme, A Sentimental Journey’s main organising principal is the coitus interruptus. This is exacerbated by Sterne’s death interrupting the book half way through. 

 

The version I read this time was the Shandy Hall one with illustrations by Martin Rowson. These are brilliant, wonderfully striking pictures with Yorick always being accompanied by an angel and demon on each shoulder, reacting events. The only thing is, given Rowson’s style, Yorick and all the other characters are depicted as extremely ugly. Yorick is illustrated as a thin, cadaverous man who also manages to have multiple chins, and an almost sharklike set of teeth. The tone of the book is light and faux-innocent but the tone of the illustrations are of ugly lechery. 

I can see why A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy didn’t grab me as much as the other books I read that decisive year, and I do find it a less exciting book than Tristram Shandy but it is still full of fun double-entendres, silly scenarios and an open acceptance of humanity, faults and all. The comic servant didn’t have much of a chance to comic servant though. 

Top Ten Books of 2024 (5-1)

The second, and highest rated batch of books of 2024 has a surprisingly large amount of non-fiction compared to my usual choices. They are also all books I’ve written about on the blog this year. 

As usual, I’ve made a list-challenge of the books I’ve read this year. 

Number Five

Patterns of Love - Oliver Other

I’m pretty surprised that I’ve included this at all, let alone picked it as one of my top five. It’s long, it’s frequently boring and it features views and politics utterly different to mine (let alone how it creates a ludicrous nightmare dystopia of views I broadly hold). Yet… yet… it stuck with me in a way that many of the other books I’ve read this year haven’t. It’s held me longer and deeper than Proust did, It’s stranger than many other books, rougher and thornier. 

I wrote about it extensively here.

Number Four

Johnsonian Gleanings - Aleyn Lyell Reade

I’ve read a number of these and every time I have, I’ve been blown away by the attention to detail and sheer work. There’s something amazing about how a project which started as a work of genealogy became something which revolutionised the understanding of Samuel Johnson’s earlier years. 

I had to include them as a group, not just because of how useful they’ve been in developing my current novel but also for the enjoyment I’ve found in them.

I’ve read a number of them but here I reviewed volumes III and X. 

Number Three

The History of the Lichfield Conduit Lands Trust - Percy Laithwaite

It seems ridiculous that my third favourite book of the year is a very local history of a small town but this book was more than useful to me, or informative but surprisingly sharp and funny. Local history bores have that reputation for being boring - I think it’s because they quibble over details and also because they talk about recent history. This book takes in a whole sweep of time and is not afraid of a good anecdote.

I talked about it in more detail, here.  

Number Two

Selected Writings - Abiezer Coppe

Of course a selection of slightly unhinged religious texts is my second favourite book of the year. I loved the writing of Abiezer Coppe, his passion, his command of rhythm and arresting detail, his freedom of expression (or his very false restraint when ‘repenting’). It’s surprisingly entertaining,

I’ve talked about it more here. 

Number One

The Life of Orator Henley - Graham Midgely

This had to be the top of the list. I’ve been making a list of my top forty favourite books for my fortieth birthday and The Life of Orator Henley is the only book I’ve read this year to make it in the list. It’s engagingly written and managed to recast someone who’s always seemed a bit of an idiot as someone who is a bit of an idiot but also something of a hero. I rather loved Orator Henley after this book, and that’s an impressive thing. 

 

More about it here.

For a special mention, 

Another fairly flawed book that still succeeded in staying with me, Outstared by a Bullfrog is a novel by Alex Burrett, whose short story collection My Goat Ate It’s Own Legs showed a variety of invention and a fondness for the bizarre. The novel is similarly inventive and odd, taking in a narrator’s life story but also sending him on a metaphysical adventure where he discovers the truth of his own life and the truth about God. 

Sent hurling through an office block window, the narrator finds he can astral-project, revisiting important moments and people from his life. He goes back to his first sexual encounter; in a moonlit pool on a camping trip, his greatest defeat at the hands of a kick-boxing kayaker, memories of his dearly missed, wisdom spouting Nan and many others. Throughout the journey through his life, he discovers a crumpled up face who nudges him into higher planes of existence. 

It’s a book that seems undisciplined at first, a series of scenes, but they layer on each other to tell a life of near misses and failure, of moral cowardice and lapsed opportunity. Something that seems incidental at first will turn out to be a major clue to his next destination and events revisited turn out to be very different from how the narrator remembers them. It’s not a book that can be predicted, always being a little wriggle ahead. 

There’s a confessional element to the book that is very raw. The narrator is not any worse than most, but his chance to examine his life lets his see his own weaknesses and they are not always the weaknesses found in fictional characters. We see the narrator’s secret lusts, his ignoble wishes and private his moments which frequently surprise. The book starts with God catching him masturbating, which he takes as a sign that the deity has a particular interest in his life, another mystery he has to solve. 

There are some striking sentiments, whether it’s “a young person’s funeral is a protest march” against death, or a realisation of love being sparked by the way a person makes a cup of tea. There are discussions about famous aphorisms and advice, the narrator being a great collector of them but coming to a realisation that other people’s wisdom is only useful to a certain extent.

Where I had difficulty with the book was its blokey-ness. The narrator made a promise to God not to have sex for ten years, and as a result he has a hang-up around women and sexual matters. Most of the female characters are defined in sexual terms, and a surprising number of them fall for our narrator despite his admitted hesitancies. While Burrett clearly enjoys describing beautiful bodies and sexual shenanigans, I found it a little relentless for my personal taste.

Where the book really excels is the ending, where the title comes into play. The book has been twisting and turning and found itself in a really sweet place, with the narrator finding his peace and looking forward to life. He then crashes his car, plunges through the mirror and lays dying. It feels like a cop-out at first, but his spirit goes back to the land of Gods - where all the deities of the world are nothing but giant children on a school trip.

His own guardian deity is a wheelchair bound child who can do nothing to stop the big boy (the Abrahamic God) from picking him up and laying him out for dissection. The narrator realises  that God won’t dissect him while he maintains eye contact, so he prepares to outstare God. He is nothing but a frog on a dissecting table, but if he’s going to be a frog, he’ll be a bullfrog. Not only did I find this a powerful ending, both pitiful and heroic, there is something really catching about the notion of outstaring God. It’s an image that’ll linger for a while.

While a little rough around the edges, Outstared by a Bullfrog has an energy to it that would be missing if it were a little smoother. It also sticks in the mind sharper than a more conventional book, especially the narrator’s fate at the end.