an overly personal post about books
And this, I suppose, is my monthly (audio)book post.
I’m actually really thrilled that itunes/iphone has brought narrative back into my life. I love novels and memoirs and narrative history, but on top of the reading I have to do for work, make it through about two print books a year. But I can get through even a long audiobook in a month or so-mostly while driving (depressing as that is) but some while running (which is win/win, yes?).
You probably know this because I’ve been nattering on about it for a month or so now, but I finally finished the three books of Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy. This was a re-read/listen-I read them all when they came out from 1991-1995. I found them as enormously affecting as I did the first time around-possibly even more so.
If you haven’t heard of them, they start from the actual interaction of two historical figures-the poet Siegfried Sassoon and the psychologist/anthropologist WHR Rivers, when the latter treated the former for shell shock at Craiglockhart Hospital in Scotland in 1917. The later books follow Rivers and an assortment of mostly fictional characters through November of 1918 (Sassoon proves to be a kind of stalking horse-he shows up again, but ceases to be a POV character). They are, I suppose, mostly about war and memory (both personal and cultural) and masculinity. Barker, however, shoehorns just about everything that happened in that year into the narrative.
I mostly wanted to post about the novels because they are so different in style than Wolf Hall, the last historical novel I posted about. Wolf Hall is a technical tour de force: 600 pages of a single point of view, all of it tightly embedded in a characteristic thought process. You are hardly ever told what this character (Thomas Cromwell) is like-you just learn what he’s like by understanding how he thinks about the world. It’s a textbook example of the “show don’t tell” dictum-and no less compelling for being so doctrinaire.
The Regeneration novels are shorter and cruder. They fly in the face of a lot of the rules you hear about how to write. Regeneration, the first one, hands out POV to everyone but the dog (and would probably give it to the dog if a dog came on the scene), skipping between characters’ POV within single conversations, something I hate. The Eye in the Door, the second novel, curtails the POV thing, reducing it to Rivers and two OCs, but is as talky as all get out. Characters rehearse their own mental states and political convictions with ridiculous degrees of articulation. The third novel, The Ghost Road, restricts POV even further, cutting it to only Rivers and the fictional character Billy Prior (they are the only characters who carry through all three novels), but makes its cross-cultural comparisons (between Edwardian England and the Melanesians head hunters who were the subject of Rivers’s anthropological research) with all the delicacy of large anvils.
But the thing it, it doesn’t really matter. Even I forgave the POV stuff for the power of what was being said. The talky stuff is interesting. The cross-cultural comparisons are no less thought-provoking for being anvilistic. And all three novels have scenes not just of gut-wrenching emotional impact (the horror and waste of trench warfare, the use of electro-shock therapy on soldiers suffering from shell shock, the treatment of COs in British prisons) but also of tremendously poignant emotional intimacy (both sexual and otherwise).
So, here’s the thing. If I were trying to give someone a model for how to write, I would point them towards the Mantel book. But if I were giving someone-especially someone who doesn’t read a lot of novels-recommendations about what to read, I would send them to the Barker novels.
Which doesn’t make sense, right? Surely one would want to write what you would want people to read. But I think it takes a quality other than skill to write something like the Regeneration novels. I’m not sure what. Something that’s half compassion and half courage? I wouldn't know how to advise people on how to write like that.
I also spent some time thinking about why I found the books more affecting this time around. I think it must partly because the world has seen so much more war since 1995-a new (and ongoing) round of engagement with the problems of sending young men and women to fight in (dubious) battle and the issues those people face when they come back.
Also, the first time I read the books I was closer in age to the soldiers. Now, I’m not only closer in age to the doctor who treats them, but also have spent those twenty years in a profession where being a mentor to younger people becomes more and more important (as a teacher/role model, not a healer, thank goodness), so I was completely pulled into that story in a way I wasn’t before.
And, yeah, now I am also the mother of sons-whose capacity (and desire) to be (probably quite good and enthusiastic) soldiers seems much more apparent to me than that of the men my own age I knew when I read the books the first time. The Barker novels are remarkable, I think, for being so strongly anti-war while also not just insightful but also deeply compassionate/accepting about masculine aggression and the power of violence. And it made me think about my own ambivalence-my kind of atavistic pride in my boys’ physical strength and courage (and yes, warlikeness) and my corresponding unease with it.
The novels, of course, take up the Abraham and Isaac story-given the context, how could they not. But they made me think about mothers who give their sons up to wars. I dug up a link to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Mother and Poet -- worth a read if you’ve never read it.
Happy weekend, folks! I went for a run this morning and it was raining so hard by the end of it my earphones slipped out of my ears and I had to take off my glasses and run blind. Very strange-like being under water!
I’m actually really thrilled that itunes/iphone has brought narrative back into my life. I love novels and memoirs and narrative history, but on top of the reading I have to do for work, make it through about two print books a year. But I can get through even a long audiobook in a month or so-mostly while driving (depressing as that is) but some while running (which is win/win, yes?).
You probably know this because I’ve been nattering on about it for a month or so now, but I finally finished the three books of Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy. This was a re-read/listen-I read them all when they came out from 1991-1995. I found them as enormously affecting as I did the first time around-possibly even more so.
If you haven’t heard of them, they start from the actual interaction of two historical figures-the poet Siegfried Sassoon and the psychologist/anthropologist WHR Rivers, when the latter treated the former for shell shock at Craiglockhart Hospital in Scotland in 1917. The later books follow Rivers and an assortment of mostly fictional characters through November of 1918 (Sassoon proves to be a kind of stalking horse-he shows up again, but ceases to be a POV character). They are, I suppose, mostly about war and memory (both personal and cultural) and masculinity. Barker, however, shoehorns just about everything that happened in that year into the narrative.
I mostly wanted to post about the novels because they are so different in style than Wolf Hall, the last historical novel I posted about. Wolf Hall is a technical tour de force: 600 pages of a single point of view, all of it tightly embedded in a characteristic thought process. You are hardly ever told what this character (Thomas Cromwell) is like-you just learn what he’s like by understanding how he thinks about the world. It’s a textbook example of the “show don’t tell” dictum-and no less compelling for being so doctrinaire.
The Regeneration novels are shorter and cruder. They fly in the face of a lot of the rules you hear about how to write. Regeneration, the first one, hands out POV to everyone but the dog (and would probably give it to the dog if a dog came on the scene), skipping between characters’ POV within single conversations, something I hate. The Eye in the Door, the second novel, curtails the POV thing, reducing it to Rivers and two OCs, but is as talky as all get out. Characters rehearse their own mental states and political convictions with ridiculous degrees of articulation. The third novel, The Ghost Road, restricts POV even further, cutting it to only Rivers and the fictional character Billy Prior (they are the only characters who carry through all three novels), but makes its cross-cultural comparisons (between Edwardian England and the Melanesians head hunters who were the subject of Rivers’s anthropological research) with all the delicacy of large anvils.
But the thing it, it doesn’t really matter. Even I forgave the POV stuff for the power of what was being said. The talky stuff is interesting. The cross-cultural comparisons are no less thought-provoking for being anvilistic. And all three novels have scenes not just of gut-wrenching emotional impact (the horror and waste of trench warfare, the use of electro-shock therapy on soldiers suffering from shell shock, the treatment of COs in British prisons) but also of tremendously poignant emotional intimacy (both sexual and otherwise).
So, here’s the thing. If I were trying to give someone a model for how to write, I would point them towards the Mantel book. But if I were giving someone-especially someone who doesn’t read a lot of novels-recommendations about what to read, I would send them to the Barker novels.
Which doesn’t make sense, right? Surely one would want to write what you would want people to read. But I think it takes a quality other than skill to write something like the Regeneration novels. I’m not sure what. Something that’s half compassion and half courage? I wouldn't know how to advise people on how to write like that.
I also spent some time thinking about why I found the books more affecting this time around. I think it must partly because the world has seen so much more war since 1995-a new (and ongoing) round of engagement with the problems of sending young men and women to fight in (dubious) battle and the issues those people face when they come back.
Also, the first time I read the books I was closer in age to the soldiers. Now, I’m not only closer in age to the doctor who treats them, but also have spent those twenty years in a profession where being a mentor to younger people becomes more and more important (as a teacher/role model, not a healer, thank goodness), so I was completely pulled into that story in a way I wasn’t before.
And, yeah, now I am also the mother of sons-whose capacity (and desire) to be (probably quite good and enthusiastic) soldiers seems much more apparent to me than that of the men my own age I knew when I read the books the first time. The Barker novels are remarkable, I think, for being so strongly anti-war while also not just insightful but also deeply compassionate/accepting about masculine aggression and the power of violence. And it made me think about my own ambivalence-my kind of atavistic pride in my boys’ physical strength and courage (and yes, warlikeness) and my corresponding unease with it.
The novels, of course, take up the Abraham and Isaac story-given the context, how could they not. But they made me think about mothers who give their sons up to wars. I dug up a link to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Mother and Poet -- worth a read if you’ve never read it.
Happy weekend, folks! I went for a run this morning and it was raining so hard by the end of it my earphones slipped out of my ears and I had to take off my glasses and run blind. Very strange-like being under water!