A Small Amount of Catching Up - Part 1

After a horrible bout of RSI and/or nasty neck pain (which made it very painful to both type and read), I am slowly getting back to fairly normal health - yay :)  So, it's time to catch you up with a little of what I have managed to read recently: slowly...

*****
Of course, it's good to start the way you mean to go on, so my first mini-review will be a slating of Henry James' The Wings of the Dove.  Yes, yes, he's very clever, wonderful psychological treatment etc etc, but Henry James is everything that non-readers imagine classic literature to be - impenetrable, over-wordy, meandering and (most importantly) completely up itself.  I've tried with Mr. James, I really have, and there were times where I thought I was glimpsing the good in his writing; however, these few moments of enjoyment were drowned in the sludge of words and lack of momentum.  The story?  Sick rich girl has money, and everyone else wants it (but never actually says it of course).  Apologies to all James fans, but it's three strikes and out for old Henry - I just don't like his style...


*****
Now someone whose style suits me a little better is Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, and after reading the wonderful Quicksand, I immediately snapped up a two-book edition on the Book Depository, the first of which was The Key (translated by Howard Hibbet).  This is a he-says-she-says novel with a difference as it is entirely constructed of extracts from the diaries of a man and his wife.  The extracts show the somewhat perverse turn their marriage takes when the husband decides to spice up their sex life with some rather unorthodox measures.  While both the husband and wife become aware of their spouse's diary, both strongly deny that they would ever actually look inside, thus violating their partner's privacy, but how much can we trust what they are telling us - and who are they really writing their diaries for?


The Key is another wonderful, slow-burning, sexually-charged story, and the idea is an intriguing one.  However, it's not as good as Quicksand and suffers a tad in comparison  The ending is definitely very similar, and it does appear to run out of steam a little, surprising for what is a fairly slim book.  I would also warn potential readers that it does contain a storyline that is actually quite shocking to...  Look, I'm getting onto very dodgy moral ground here, and I don't want to start any kind of cultural debate, so I'll tread lightly and just say that many people will find some of the actions the husband takes ever-so-slightly disturbing.  Let's move on...


*****
Now, I do love a bit of Dostoyevsky, and Devils (translated by the famous Constance Garnett) is a lot more than a bit of Dostoyevsky.  Another rolling epic tale, it depicts events in a small rural town where a group of young anarchists is stirring up the locals, confusing the authorities and preparing for a particularly unspeakable crime.  It's based on a real event, and the novel is every bit as good as some of his more famous works, another wonderful combination of tight plotting, psychological suspense and well-written crucial scenes.

It's funny though that when people talk about Dostoyevsky, it's always as a brooding, masterful writer, someone who writes books to be waded through, akin to walking across a vast river of treacle, yet his books are often a joy to read.  As well as being real page turners, his novels can contain wonderful scenes of humour - yes, Dostoyevsky is funny!  The first part of Devils is especially amusing, culminating in a meeting where about a dozen of the main characters meet under unexpected and confusing circumstances, reminiscent more of Oscar Wilde than Tolstoy.  Of course, with the subject matter being what it is, things do take a turn for the more serious later, but never let it be said that Dostoyevsky neglected the lighter side of the art of literature...

*****
So that's the first of my mini-catch-up pieces; there'll be more to come when I can bring myself to return to the computer.  Forgive the brevity and the shallowness of the reviews - hopefully there's something there to make it all worthwhile :)

36 - 'What Maisie Knew' by Henry James

I do try. From time to time, I pick up a Henry James book, and I tell myself that this is a very famous author with wonderful insights into the human condition, convincing myself that this time will be different, this time I'll really enjoy it.

Never works.

Unfortunately, this time was no exception. The major feeling I had on completing 'What Maisie Knew' was one of relief, which is never a sign of a fun time had by all. Less than 300 pages, but it seemed like an eternity. So what went wrong?

Let me just clarify my opinion before I am summarily arrested, tried and executed by the HJ Fan Club (of which at least one of my faithful followers is a member...). I am not saying that I didn't like this book; I did, to a certain extent. I am not saying that it's not a good book; there is plenty to appreciate about the story and the style. The problem is that where with my previous read, 'Middlemarch', I was stealing as many minutes as possible from the day to read the next chapter or two (or ten), with this book, I pretty much only read on the train to and from work and spent large amounts of time staring out of the window. At fog (it's almost Winter here in Melbourne, and yes, it does get cold). This is the third James novel I've read, the others being 'The Europeans' and 'The Bostonians', and I'm beginning to wonder...

The story itself is an interesting one. A young English girl is used as a pawn in the messy divorce of her parents with both wanting custody of her only to annoy the other as much as humanly (or diabolically) possible. Maisie, the young heroine of the peace, entusted to the care of a governess, is made to shuttle from one house to the next and back again, all the while being exposed to the less-than-polite behaviour of her (frankly idiotic) parents. When both remarry, their game changes from one of keeping Maisie to that of trying to offload her onto the other, a game that becomes further complicated when the two step-parents become fond of Maisie, and consequently, each other. At the end of the book, Maisie, slightly older (and, hopefully, wiser) has to finally decide where her loyalties lie.

The action is seen entirely through Maisie's eyes; she is present in every scene, and this is both a strength and a weakness. The reader experiences events through the filter of Maisie's youthful naiveity and must piece the story together from the fragments gathered by the young girl. However, this style of story-telling also has the effect of being, in my opinion, slightly repetitive. The novel consists mainly of endless conversations between two of the adults which Maisie tries to follow and conversations between the little girl and one of her guardians where the adult uses her as a sounding board for their thoughts, not really talking to her at all.

The biggest issue I have though is with the language used and especially the convoluted style James uses to write his books. Never using one word where three clauses will do just as well, he spends page upon page on expressing something other writers would fit onto the back of an envelope. Although it is probably this very style which endears him to a lot of people, I am not a big fan (and secretly think that it was sometimes done just to show that he could). I suspect that having gone through the tangle of double negatives and multiple relative clauses James delighted in pouring out, whatever I read next will seem like one of my daughter's picture books (which are very good by the way; lots of princesses and animals, although not usually in the same story).

Yes, as a writer he is fit, but (to misquote a song you may or may not know) don't he know it. Henry James is the literary equivalent of a busty blonde flicking her hair back and sauntering along the beach, a trail of love-struck admirers in her wake. Ugly metaphor? Probably. Harsh? Not if you had read the ten-page essay accompanying my edition of 'What Maisie Knew' where James outlined what he wanted to do in the book and what issues he had with finding the right voice for his protagonists - and where he basically said that it was brilliant and he was a genius (I paraphrase; I don't have time to copy it out the way he said it). I'll probably give him another go, particularly as I haven't read some of his most famous works ('The Portrait of a Lady', 'The Wings of the Dove'), but I'll give myself some time to build up to the effort. And that, after all, as I said at the start, is what disappoints me; while reading should be a pleasure, reading anything by Henry James seems like more of a chore.

OK, I'm ready for the handcuffs...