In April I read Poor Things by Alasdair Gray, Mariana by Monica Dickens, The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer and Richard II by Shakespeare. I’ll post two blog posts specifically about Richard II this month, the first about the fall, the theatricality and the poetry of Richard II, the second about what makes a king, Richard and Bullingbrook, which is a better king. I won’t say more about it here. Overall I enjoyed it, way more than I expected. I was intimidated by Shakespeare’s history plays, but so far I enjoyed both Richard III and Richard II.
Mariana by Monica Dickens
It was first published in 1940. It’s an autobiographical novel about a girl’s childhood and growing up in the 1920s and 30s. It’s a hot water bottle comfort read. I thoroughly enjoyed it. But I imagine by the end of the year when I do my year end review and awards, I’ll not be able to remember very much what the story is about but only that I enjoyed it enormously while I was in the middle of it. I’d be glad to be proved wrong, and yes it’s quite exotic to read about the life story of “a certain sort of girl at a certain time in a certain place”, but for me, the story is quite ordinary, the beauty is in the writing itself.
In chapter one, our protagonist Mary is alone at home in a dark stormy night in the middle of nowhere because she has escaped for a long weekend of solitude from the crowd who try to cheer her up but tire her out while her husband is fighting the Second World War. There’s a fire, an oil lamp, a cup of coffee and a dog. She wants to call home to find out if there’s a letter from her husband but finds that the storm has brought the lines down. She sits back and turns on the radio as usual and hears the news that her husband’s ship struck a mine and sank. She can’t phone anyone from home, she can’t walk to the village in the storm. She has to wait till the morning. The rest of the book is her lying wide awake thinking about the past, the years that lead up to this evening, all the everyday things that make her who she is. Chapter two goes right back to the beginning of her childhood and the book tells the story about her family, her schools, her falling love until the last chapter, when we’re back with her in the house again. It’s the morning and she has to go to the village and face reality. It’s excellent.
Poor Things by Alastair Gray
It’s very different to a normal novel, for many reasons.
Firstly when I took it off the shelf in Waterstones and flipped through it, it immediately says you’re looking at an unusual novel. There are a lot of illustrations: portraits of people, drawings of different parts of human body usually found in medical books, maps and photos of historical places and events. The font in big chunks of the book is in italics.
Next, let’s look at the title page of this novel. The novel is called ‘episodes from the early life of Archibald McCandless M.D. Scottish public health officer; edited by Alasdair Gray’. Right from the title page, Gray starts to play with the readers. It says he only edited this, while obviously he’s the author and creator of every word in this book.
The story itself continues to blur the line between fiction and reality. The introduction talks about how a local historian Michael Donnelly discovers a book on a rubbish heap, which is interesting enough that Donnelly and Gray decide to publish it. Michael Donnelly is likely to be fictional and the author has entered himself into his fictional world.
The book is made up of the introduction, with this striking line that “in the final week of Feb 1881, at 18 Park Circus, Glasgow, a surgical genius used human remains to create a 25 year old woman”; then the memoir of McCandless, about the said woman; at the end of the memoir, a letter from McCandless’ wife commenting on the life of the said woman, the identity of who, by the end of the introduction, has dawned on me that she is the said woman herself! Then there are notes from the editor.
As we get into McCandless’ memoir itself, we see quite quickly that this is a new Frankenstein story, the first paragraph of the introduction states it plainly ‘a surgical genius used human remains to create a 25 year old woman’. This creature, apart from the fact that she’s a woman, has a very different life experience compared to Victor Frankenstein’s creature. In the first part of the book, she mostly wreaks havoc in several men’s lives and the story is quite funny.
But the story gets much deeper and more surprising, and I won’t spoil it. By the end of the book, you’re presented with two accounts of a person’s life and you have to make up your own mind about which is true. Which is fact and which is fiction and which would you rather believe. I know which one I’d rather believe and it surprises me! It’s a wonderful work demonstrating the power of words, and the genius of the author obviously. I enjoyed it very much.
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
This is one of the key titles I planned to conquer this year – I heard so much about it. Honestly, I was pleasantly surprised, and relieved about how friendly this book is. I was so relieved I was almost underwhelmed. I expected this to be hard going but rewarding and inspiring – like a Shakespeare play basically. But it’s not like Shakespeare. It reads like a very normal short story collection. So if you’re intimidated like I was, there is no reason to be at all.
One of the reasons I was underwhelmed I suspect is because I read the 1951 translation by Nevill Coghill. One of you left me a very passionate comment pleading with me not to read the modern translation. I’m so sorry I couldn’t take your advice. It was such an intimidating mountain to climb I worried that I would never even leave my front door if the mountain is in middle English. But now I know how high the mountain is and it’s a manageable height, I promise I will read it again in Middle English. At this point, I’m just very glad I made it to the end of the book.
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of twenty-four stories written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400, mostly in verse. The tales are presented as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together from London to Canterbury. We’re introduced to a big group of people in the General Prologue, which is like an introduction to the book. For the rest of the book, a person, for example the miller would tell their story, called the Miller’s Tale. Some of the tales are proceeded by a prologue, like the Reeve’s prologue. Between two tales, there are usually some comments from the hosts and conversations between the group. And that’s the structure of the Canterbury Tales.
Just to give you a flavour of the tales. They are on many subjects, tortured noblemen pursuing love, a young wife cheating on her ancient husband and humiliating a local clergyman, a virtuous woman’s unfortunate life story and her reliance on and deliverance from God, the murder of a Christian child and the grief of his mother, a cock and his hens debating about the meaning of dreams, three greedy men meeting a poor old man who is Death, a knight of King Arthur on a quest to find out what is the thing that women most desire, a marquis cruelly testing his faithful wife, another young wife cheating on her ancient husband, on a tree this time, Sir Gawain bestowing magical gifts – that story is interrupted by the host I really want to know what happens in the end but we would never find out!
The stories are great fun to read. But then what. Another reason I was underwhelmed I suspect is I’m not appreciating it properly, like how I didn’t with Shakespeare. I have many questions. What have I missed? Why is it such an important and famous piece of work? Surely not only because it’s old and written in the common tongue of the people? What’s the significance of Chaucer’s pairing of the storytellers and the tales they tell? Are there themes that link the stories up or are they really just random stories that Chaucer makes up? If you know, please leave me a comment.
A Day of Small Things 