Book Review: The Lessons by Naomi Alderman

Read: April 2010

The Lessons in one Tweet-sized chunk:
An uncomfrotably familiar tale of youth, and how the lessons in life often come too late. 

“We could, you know, hara-kiri, right here in the kitchen.”…

“Why would we do that?”…

“Because our lives are over, James. This is it. The end. We will never have a time like this again.”

These words, spoken by the erratic Mark Winters as his university course draws to a close, sum up one of the attitudes Naomi Alderman seeks to dispel in The Lessons: the pervasive and destructive notion that one’s university years constitute ‘the best days of your life.’ That saying, and all that it encompasses, is the raven perched perpetually upon a chamber door screeching “never more” at the characters, and as its words grow louder, so the desperate mania drives them on, tension building, towards something ominous.

James is a first year student at one of Oxford’s illustrious colleges. His older sister has told him how to get the most from Oxford but now that he is there he feels isolated and falling behind the pack. And when he injures his knee slipping on a patch of ice he finds that he can no longer keep up. Oxford, it seems, has broken him in one semester.

But things change for James when he meets Jess, a warm and generous girl who seems to like him. She introduces him to the wealthy and charismatic Mark Winters and his bright world of decadence, parties and love affairs quashes the blankness enveloping James. Together with Jess and a few others, James moves out of the college dorm and into Mark’s crumbling Georgian mansion, to share his charmed life. There they reside, a small group of close friends living on food delivered from Fortnum and Mason. But no matter how hard they seek to hide from it in the sequestered grandeur of that hidden house, life eventually catches up and when university ends they find that all their studying and parties have not prepared them for the difficulties of adult life.

The Lessons begins with a wonderfully vivid image of waste and excess, in which a feast has been cast into a swimming pool, with the greens and reds of a panettone’s crystilised fruit dissolving in the water. And throughout, there is a feeling that something terrible is going to happen, that all the wealth and excess, all the stretched taut tensions will result in tragedy. Without being particularly sexual, it is full of with desire laden undercurrents that make it intensely erotic, and keep the reader turning the page compulsively.
There is a sense that Naomi Alderman, who received her first degree from Oxford, has experiences to exorcise from her time there, delusions about Oxford to challenge, and this comes through into the prose.

“What is Oxford? It is like a magician, dazzling viewers with bustle and glitter, misdirecting our attention. What was it for me? Indifferent tuition, uncomfortable accommodation, uninterested pastoral care. It has style: the gowns, cobbled streets, domed libraries and sixteenth-century portraits. It is old and it is beautiful and it is grand. And it is unfair and it is narrow and it is cold. Walking in Oxford, one catches a glimpse through each college doorway, a flash of tended green lawn and ancient courtyards. But the doorways are guarded and the guardians are suspicious and hostile.”

Oxford does not fare well. Yet one of Alderman’s greatest achievements in The Lessons is that even with the very vivid descriptions that bring Oxford to life, she manages to convey a more universal depiction of university. The student’s attitudes, the mentality of newly won freedom clung to lest it evaporate in thin air. At times I felt that she was writing the words I had felt but not articulated, and this was incredibly powerful.
Just as Oxford’s spires loom large over the characters, two celebrated novels dominate The Lessons: Brideshead Revisited which has become almost a caricature of Oxford, and The Secret History, a tale of power and self-destruction in a similar closely knit group of students. With the former, there are a number of close plot and character resemblances.  James and Mark are essentially Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte, and their homosexual undertone is brought into the foreground. Like Charles, James is a passive character, drawn to the powerful Flyte-like Mark, a troubled character for whom a wealthy and privileged upbringing has resulted in a dangerous lack of self control. His Catholicism, which he clings to fervently, has given him a world view of glorious suffering, of saviour and sacrifice which is reflected in his relationships with the surrogate family he gathers around him.

It is this surrogate family that most recalls Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. The characters of Jess, Emmanuella, Fran, Simon, James and Mark bear resemblance to those in The Secret History as does the texture of their interaction. Their group dynamics are familiar; there is an atmosphere in which independence and freedom are careering dangerously out of control. And, just as in The Secret History, the narrator is driven by an obsession with beauty. “Beauty is a lie, but it is so hard to spot,” mentions James, as he thinks back not only to Oxford, but the lustre of wealth that so beguiled him. Like Richard in The Secret History, his fatal flaw is “a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs” and each of them, drawn to a picturesque, emotive world they never dreamed of belonging to, sacrifices much of their selves in the process.

Yet while the resemblance to both Brideshead Revisited and The Secret History is apparent, the latter is a slightly false one, for the characters in The Lessons pale in comparison to The Secret History. Emmanuella, particularly, seems lost to plot and narrative, but Fran, Simon and most frustratingly of all, Jess, lack a voice of their own. Of course, to a certain extent this is due to James’s obsession with Mark which prevents him seeing anyone else as a real person, but it is frustrating, nonetheless. They are massively undercooked, cardboard cut-outs to stand in the sidelines and tell us something about Mark and James, rather than fully rounded characters. James is a blank slate who seeks out a strong personality in whose reflection he can define himself. He’s similar, in many ways, to Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, with Mark playing the life of the party Gatsby-esque hero. But neither fully convinces. James is too blank, and Mark’s appeal is not always clear to the reader. Most of the time he comes across as a foolish rich boy without respect for anyone around him.

Similarly, while the roughly fifteen year scope of The Lessons is a virtue that allows it to introduce wider themes of university and life, the plot is not dense enough to surround the reader within it, and the narrative too short so that the tension and austere sense of place that builds up within the first half at Oxford gradually dissipates thereafter.

For this reason The Lessons is inherently flawed. The weak characters let it down and I felt it tailed off towards the end. It’s one of those novels that flatters to deceive, and as such doesn’t quite achieve all that it sets out to. Yet despite this, there is an ominous sense of impending doom which, combined with a well judged portrayal of the expectations of life which are contained within universities, make it a compelling and readable novel in which the lesson, in the end, is one of self discovery.

“What is it that one learns from life? I had always supposed that I would accumulate some wisdom as my life progressed. That, as in my progress through Oxford, some knowledge would inevitably adhere to me. I suppose I hoped that love would teach me.
But the very question is redundant. It is ridiculous to think we can learn anything from so arbitrary an experience as life. It forms no kind of curriculum and its gifts and punishments are bestowed too arbitrarily to constitute a mark scheme. There is only one subject on which the lessons are in any way informative.
The man in the mirror is me, I thought. For good or ill, that’s me.”

7 out of 10

Viking, April 2010, 9780670916290, 280pp

This book is one of six Summer Reads chosen by Writers’ Centre Norwich this summer. For more information see www.summerreads.org.uk

Book Review: Geek Love - Katherine Dunn

To celebrate the 200^th review on Books, Time, and Silence, I am re-posting 10 of my favourite reviews.

On this final morning I’m taking a step into the bizarre with Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love.

Read: January 2008

Geek Love in one tweet-sized chunk:
Giving new meaning to the term ‘nuclear family’, Geek Love is defined not by its freak-show setting, but the common humanity inherent within.

“'When your mama was a geek, my dreamlets’, Papa would say, ‘she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around, hypnotised with longing.”

Despite its freak show characters and setting, Geek Love is one of the most tender-hearted novels you could hope to read. It works because at no point is it sick, grotesque, tasteless or glibly shocking. Katherine Dunn’s talent is in making this very remarkable story feel like the most natural thing in the world. And it is. Because Geek Love is a novel about families, and individuals within families, and the crazy world which exists outside them.

Narrated by Olympia, a bald, hunchback, albino, dwarf, Geek Love tells the story of the Binewski family, and their rise to fame. For Al and Lil Binewski have grander plans than circus geeking for their Binewski Fabulon troupe. Together they hit upon the idea of breeding their own freak show. So during each pregnancy Lil guzzles drugs and pesticides, douses herself in radiation, all in the hope of producing freaks compelling and original enough to keep the circus afloat. Giving new meaning to the term ‘nuclear family,’ Lil gives birth to 5 living children, each fantastic in their own unique way. First out comes the limbless Arturo, Aqua Boy, megalomaniac, entertainer, preacher and eventually, cult leader. He is followed by the musically talented Siamese twins Electra and Iphigenia, beautiful and alluring and each as individual as they are united. The Lizard Girl comes third, green tinted and with one tail shaped leg but she dies suddenly and mysteriously aged 2. And then there is Olympia, unremarkable, unprofitable, who sleeps under the sink. Finally comes Fortunato, almost rejected for his apparent normality, he turns out to possess strange telekinetic powers and an angelic temperament. Led by this motley crew of performers, the circus grows beyond all recognition, raking in audiences in ever greater numbers.

But as within any family there are internal tensions, people pulling in opposite directions, and Arturo will not quit until the whole family is subjected to his twisted, power-crazed ways.

Most characters in novels act as personified ideas, or plot developers. It is rare to find a family whose entire dynamic just exists, naturally and without pretence. And it is all the more remarkable since the characters in question are, physically at least, far from the norm.

With a constantly evolving plot, complex and engaging characters and easily readable style, Geek Love is a book to become thoroughly engrossed in. The characters are as fabulously drawn as any I have read, equal even to those in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. They each inhabit their own skin and minds completely, think independently and diversely. You can almost picture their bodies in the shape of the words, living, breathing, dreaming, loving, hating. From the cold-hearted, vindictive sneer of Arturo to the loving honesty of Fortunato, the independent personalities of the twins and the unrequited love of Olympia, it is impossible not to love them all. Love them because in each of them lies that spark of recognisable complex humanity that is so rarely found in literature.

The whole basis of Geek Love is the inversion of society’s view of physical perfection. Despite their external differences the Binewski children do not grow up shunted, embarrassed or gawked at. They are treasured, worshipped, made special by their different forms. Al refers to them as his ‘rose garden’ his little ‘dreamlets’. They look down upon the ‘norms,’ pity all those whose bodies are unremarkable and whose lives are so much harder because of it. Indeed, their hierarchy is based upon the scale of abnormality, a scale in which Olympia is considered the lowest and Arturo the highest form of creation.

Geek Love doesn’t warn against judging character by its skin. It is not as simple as that. Rather it gets under that skin, into the life and mindset of its characters, rejecting the very notion of physical normality. Utterly original, it is a cult piece of literature which deserves to be read even more widely than it currently is.

8.5 out of 10

The Secret History - Donna Tartt

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a review as: “a critical appraisal.” The word ‘critical’ implying an inherent need to assess faults as well as strengths. This creates a problem for anyone seeking to review The Secret History because to my mind it is almost faultless. There can have been few more universally acclaimed novels written in the last fifty years.

Struggling to find his way at an exclusive New England college, Richard finds himself drawn towards a group of privileged students studying in a sequestered ancient Greek class under the tutelage of the eccentric Julian Marrow. They study everything – from the furies to Plato – and with a thirst for knowledge which Richard has never encountered before, intent on recreating the past in everything they do. But as they become increasingly immersed in the classical world of their imaginations they become obsessed with the idea that to be free one must lose themselves completely, as Euripides puts it to be “more like deer than human beings.” In search of this they begin to push the boundaries further and further and in doing so become embroiled in a complex web of deceit which threatens to destroy them all.

Set amidst the claustrophobic gothic setting of a New England college this is a psychological tale of friendship and murder. Donna Tartt has created one of those rare books; an intelligent and complex literary novel, beautifully written and wonderfully portrayed yet which remains eminently and delightfully readable. The characters are intimately and realistically drawn, so believable you feel as though you have known them for years. During the rare moments I was able to lift my head from the page and engage with the real world I found myself discussing their personality traits as though they were old friends, such is the ability of the author to draw the reader in and make them feel truly part of the action. There are few more intense or claustrophobic works and the effect of this is to surround the reader, at once both inviting and threatening and the only way out is to keep reading, until the events have run their course and you can finally recommence your everyday life.

The style of writing is thick and tactile, satisfying in an all encompassing way which few writers can achieve. And it is wonderfully beautiful. But as the characters observe, beauty is terror, and there’s plenty here of each. Take this fabulous passage:

“After class, I wandered downstairs in a dream, my head spinning, but acutely, achingly conscious that I was alive and young on a beautiful day; the sky a deep deep painful blue, wind scattering the red and yellow leaves in a whirlwind of confetti.

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful we quiver before it.

That night I wrote in my journal: ‘Trees are schizophrenic now and beginning to lose control, enraged with the shock of their fiery new colours. Someone – was it van Gogh? – said that orange is the colour of insanity. Beauty is terror. We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us.’”

Such passionate, absorbent and sensuous prose, The Secret History is simply a joy to read. Donna Tartt has created a masterpiece. This is a modern classic drawn from antiquity that will take you on a journey of epic proportions.

Okay, I have found a criticism for this most exquisite of books: at six-hundred pages it is not nearly long enough. I wanted it to go on forever. Hinc illae lacrimae. Hence these tears.


10 out of 10