I Capture the Castle

I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink” – I Capture the Castle probably has one of the most famous opening lines. 17-year-old Cassandra, our narrator, writes her journal from the castle that her family inhabits, attempting to ‘capture’ it. She is looking for somewhere different to write, to see if it gives her inspiration: “I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring. I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house.”

I enjoyed reading I Capture the Castle, a lovely children’s/young adult classic that I never read when I was younger. Light-hearted and full of humorous episodes, the novel is not without depth. It seems in lots of ways a conventional story, but it does not always take the turns you might expect and it does not end ‘happily-ever-after’.

Some of the funniest incidents are: when Cassandra and her brother, Thomas, lock their father in a tower in the castle to force him to write; when Cassandra and Neil go for a moonlit swim in the moat; and when Cassandra’s sister, Rose (wearing a fur coat), is mistaken for a bear and chased, though this episode is unrealistic and perhaps a little farcical.

When the novel opens, the family is going through a bleak time. Having moved to the castle after Cassandra’s father’s book success, they are now struggling to make ends meet and the reader is made acutely aware of Cassandra’s hunger and cold. Yet, there is a certain glamour to their poverty, living in their medieval mansion. The wealthy American landlords of the castle arrive and uplift as well as complicate the situation. Both Rose and Cassandra fall in love and we see the agony and delight it causes them, especially Cassandra.

She is melodramatic but also strict with herself, making crying a rare ‘luxury’, allowing herself to imagine events because she believes that then they won’t come true, and not writing too much about her feelings because “even a broken heart doesn’t warrant a waste of good paper.” It is a sweet coming of age tale that probably feels quite different when read as a teenager than as an adult and is marked through the change in voice as Cassandra matures.

The novel feels very ‘English’ with its picturesque Suffolk countryside, bizarre traditions on midsummer’s eve, picnics and sudden downpours. The Americans do not appreciate England in the same way. Set in the 1930s but published in 1948, after the Second World War, there is a growing sense of nostalgia for something about England that is lost, as Cassandra also looks back on the innocence of her childhood, no longer “consciously naïve”. A change in tone is echoed in the change in seasons, “A mist is rolling over the fields. Why is a summer mist romantic and autumn mist just sad?” The ending contains disappointment, although Smith also suggests that things will work out, and, in the final line, Cassandra seems to return to her cheerful girlish self.

Dodie Smith’s supporting characters are also unusual but loveable; for example, Cassandra’s talented but morose father who barely speaks, her enchanting and elegant stepmother who used to be an artist’s model, the kindly vicar who seems to see through Cassandra’s calm exterior, offering her tea and cake and encouraging her to simply sit in a church for comfort, and Stephen, the shy and doting lodger, who brings Cassandra poems. Early in the novel, Rose expresses that she wants to live in a Jane Austen novel, and later it seems this wish almost comes true when she is presented with the dilemma of marrying for love or money and Cassandra compares them to the Bennet sisters. The characters really are vividly drawn.

In reading this, I felt the childhood joy of reading a book as escapism and to find out what happens next, but at the same time not wanting it to be over. Cassandra writes that she does not like “brick-wall happy ending[s]” when “you never think any more about the characters” and Smith does not offer us such an ending – her characters will stay with you long past the final pages. She captures so much more than the castle.

Brave New World

Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

This is one of those classics that I’ve been meaning to read for a long time. I’ve often heard it referenced in culture and the news, and as an influence for other literature. It is often talked about in connection with 1984 (a book that you can’t forget). So, I read with expectations and was not disappointed. It is strange, to say the least, and the plot is not always highly convincing, but it does serve as a warning that is still relevant today.

Brave New World was written in 1931 and first published in 1932, but to me, the novel felt later, as it makes some relatively accurate predictions about the future. However, some of Huxley’s ideas feel dated and an imagined future, would now look very different. In an introduction by Huxley, written in 1946, he points to the flaws of his own work, visible with hindsight and an extra 15 years of modern history.

The novel starts off with scientific detail around the genetic engineering of people into social classes. Babies are now grown in “the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory”, and sex is a recreational activity where “everyone belongs to everyone else”. Though it was written before the contraceptive pill, women a form of birth control drugs and wear a belt containing contraceptives. Promiscuity is a virtue and solitude is selfish.

Social conditioning is also in force, and varies depending on social rank. For example, babies of a lower social class are conditioned not to like books or flowers, because they do not help a consumerist society, and prejudices of class are formed through sleep-teaching. The higher in social ranking ride around in helicopters and visit ‘savages’ in the ‘reservations’ for a holiday. Group mentality is key and characters often repeat refrains such as, “everybody’s happy now”, to each other.

At first, it seems it will be Bernard who will question the structures of the Our Ford society, asking Lenina, “wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy […] in your own way, for example; not in everybody else’s way”. But this thread is lost in favour of the more extreme contrast of John the savage who has a polar opposite view of what society should be like. In one of the most moving parts of the novel, John goes to visit his mother who is dying in hospital, and the staff can’t understand why he would want to, why he cares. Children are brought in to watch her die so that they do not grow up fearing death.

Brave New World takes its title from Shakespeare’s, The Tempest. The phrase, “O brave new world, that hath such people in it!” is repeated throughout the novel. The context of this quote reflects the speakers naiveté and the irony is important in Brave New World, where characters take the drug ‘soma’ to stop them feeling when faced with any slight issue. A society free from worry and pain seems idealistic, but what must they give up in order to achieve this?

This is laid bare towards the end of the novel when Brave New World loses its sense of plot and turns into a conversation between John, a ‘savage’, and Mustapha Mond, a ‘controller’. The controller explains that “one can’t have something for nothing. Happiness has to be paid for.” It is obviously didactic, pointing out how a society deprived of art, science and religion, has little meaning.

Like most dystopian novels, books are banned or restricted so libraries only contain reference books. Therefore, there is no Shakespeare. It is obsolete because “you can’t make tragedies without social instability”. There is no need for nobility or heroism because they are “symptoms of political inefficiency”.

1984 is based on a society of severe restriction, whereas Brave New World is based on an overly permissive society. Does that make it any less chilling? Perhaps that makes it more terrifying because it is closer to the truth, a totalitarian state that is less overt. 1984 is a clear dystopia. Brave New World is an apparent utopia where characters are only trivially happy and everything of real meaning and feeling is covered up. This is a novel that asks the reader to consider what it means to be human.

The Woman in White

The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

The Woman in White is considered to be one of the first ‘sensation’ novels. It a mystery told through the perspectives of multiple narrators. Originally serialised in Dickens’ magazine, it was very popular in its time.

The novel is deeply concerned with truth and accuracy. The different narrators are presented to tell their accounts in order to verify the story and tell their side to events. A plan, we are told by Mr Gilmore’s narrative (a lawyer), that is put in place by Mr Hartright (the central narrator) in order to “[present] the story to others, in the most truthful and most vivid manner, requires that it should be told, at each successive stage in the march of events, by the persons who were directly concerned in those events at the time of their occurrence”. The housekeeper also declares that she has been asked to give her testimony: “The reason given for making this demand on me is, that my testimony is wanted in the interests of the truth”.

We also hear much from Miss Halcombe, another central character, through her diary. We learn a great deal about the goings on in the house and Miss Halcombe’s quest to discover more about Sir Percival, the mystery that for a long time goes unresolved. We also see comments upon her personal narrative, for example: “The passages omitted, here and elsewhere, in Miss Halcombe’s Diary are only those which bear no reference to Miss Fairlie or to any of the persons with whom she is associated in these pages”. And, when she falls ill a note appears: “At this place the entry in the Diary ceases to be legible. The two or three lines which follow contain fragments of words only, mingled with blots and scratches of the pen.” These phrases add a sense of reality to the story.

Attention is also drawn, however, to the reliability, or unreliability, of memory. Miss Halcombe comments that, “In the perilous uncertainty of our present situation, it is hard to say what future interests may not depend upon the reliability of my recollection at the time when I make them”.

It is also important to note that there are significant characters in the novel who we do not hear from. Laura Fairlie, who appears weak is never given a voice, nor is ‘the woman in white’, Count Fosco’s wife, or Sir Percival, the main villain of the novel. The absence of their opinions and perceptions means that the account remains biased.

The Count, who appears almost evil in the central narratives, when it comes to his own voice, underplays his part in events and proclaims his innocence. “Why this outburst? Why this withering eloquence? Because my conduct has been misrepresented, because my motives have been misunderstood”. He calls on the reader to empathise with him, to see things from his point of view: “Youths! I invoke your sympathy. Maidens! I claim your tears” and tries to explain away his misdeeds. “Is my conduct worthy of any serious blame? Most emphatically, No! Have I not carefully avoided exposing myself to the odium of committing unnecessary crime?”

The rhetoric of his narrative is powerful and amusing. It makes Count Fosco seem more ridiculous than dangerous. However, his narrative is more sinister when he intrudes on Miss Halcombe’s diary. An entry shows that he has found and read it whilst she is ill, an invasion of privacy and a threat that he is powerful and knowing.

Mr Hartright’s narrative is also amusing and melodramatic on occasion. He writes, in summary of his time away, that “It was my third escape from peril of death. Death by disease, death by the Indians, death by drowning – all three had approached me; all three had passed me by”.

I felt that this novel was unnecessarily long, but this makes sense when it wasn’t originally meant to be read as one book but in excerpts. Moments of The Woman in White are striking and even a little scary all these years later! The image of the ghostly figure appearing on the road to London in the night definitely stays with you: “There, in the middle of the broad bright highroad – there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from heaven – stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments, her face bend it grave enquiry on mine”.

Little Women

Little Women – Louisa May Alcott

It was a little strange going back to this 19^th century classic after all the modern fiction I have read recently, but I enjoyed this simple and heart-warming tale of four sisters as they grow up. It is a bit slow at times, but I grew to identify with the girls and empathise with their struggles.

Little Women tells the story of the March family in New England during the American Civil War. Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy live with their mother, their father away serving as a Chaplain in the war. They each have their own flaws and turn to their mother for help and guidance. The novel has a distinctly Christian message and is linked to Pilgrim’s Progress, as indicated by the preface. Their mother helps them to fight against their human flaws and make the right decisions. She also teaches us the value of work; in one episode, Mrs March lets her daughters take a week off from any chores and do as they please but they get bored. At the end of the week, she takes a day off herself and tells their housekeeper to do the same. The girls make a disastrous dinner without her and learn how they must each do their own tasks to make things run smoothly.

I most liked Jo, the tomboy; she likes to run, to read and to write, she breaks the rules of her gender and she can’t sit still for long. Her best friend Lawrie falls in love with her but she doesn’t reciprocate his feelings and when he goes away, she struggles with loneliness during her sister Beth’s illness and after her death. This novel is not all cheerful and carefree – they go through testing times but it does have a happy ending. Jo eventually marries a German professor and publishes stories.

Though the girls sometimes seem perfect, most of the time we understand that they are not and the author points this out to us: “Now, if she had been the heroine of a moral storybook, she ought at this period of her life to have become quite saintly […] But, you see, Jo wasn’t a heroine, she was only a struggling human girl”. This is somewhat ironic given that Jo is one of the heroines of this story, however, she is not flawless. She is argumentative, impatient and has to try very hard to control her temper and does not always succeed.

Louisa May Alcott also talks to her readers which sometimes adds humour: “Jo must have fallen asleep (as I dare say my reader has during this little homily)”. I feel that this self-consciousness makes it easier to relate to the novel and its characters as it doesn’t take itself too seriously. There is a sweet sadness in the novel; even at the end when the girls and their families come together, we are reminded of the absent Beth. And even in her death, we are reminded of hope in despair in her “beautiful serenity” and their belief that she is going into a “long sleep that pain would never mar again”.

There is also a consciousness of time passing and people fading. The novel takes place over a large span of time; we see the girls from their early teens through to their twenties when they have families of their own. Alcott points out that everything is transitory: “that rosy cheeks don’t last forever, that silver threads will come in the bonnie brown hair […]” It is a novel that teaches us to make the most of life and the simple pleasures, to empathise with people and see the struggles beneath the calm exterior.

To The Lighthouse

I first read To the Lighthouse in a book club when I was in year twelve at school. My initial thoughts were that the book made no sense whatsoever. We brought our thoughts together and between us managed to draw something from it. When I read it again and studied the novel at University it started to make more sense and I even quite liked it. Coming back to it now, I can see it through the context of a lot more reading and experience. As with all books, you experience something new every time, but I find this is especially the case with To the Lighthouse. I don’t think it is surprising to see this on Amazon UK’s list. It is a key novel of high modernism and there is something quite British about the book too.

It is the story of a family and, of course, a journey to the lighthouse. But the story itself seems subsidiary to the way the novel is written and the thought processes it contains. They do eventually reach the lighthouse but this an anticlimax. At first it seems the novel reaches its conclusion because the journey is complete and Lily finishes her painting, saying, “It is finished” and “I have had my vision”. However, the lighthouse still seems unobtainable and does not bring satisfaction; there is also the sense that the ‘vision’ is temporary and that we are merely returning to the beginning.

The opening immediately throws the reader into a story, beginning halfway through a conversation, leading to disorientation and confusion. Woolf continually displays the fragmentariness of thoughts through the irregularities of the narrative. For example, Mrs Ramsay switches from wondering, “What have I done with my life?” to feeling pity for William Bankes, “poor man!” (61), to thinking about square roots and later, pouring trivially over the shapes of the fruit in the fruit bowl, “jealously, hoping that nobody would touch it”, all during a single sitting of dinner. Woolf reveals an endless cycle of thoughts and a disjointed but realistic depiction of the mind.

Consciousness and what this means plays an important part in To the Lighthouse. The ending of the novel suggests that although Mrs Ramsay is dead, to some extent her consciousness lives on in Lily, who takes over as the principal character in Part Three. She is torn between thinking about Mrs Ramsay, calling her name into the house, and wanting to escape her thoughts, “We can override her wishes, improve away her limited old-fashioned ideas”. Lily cannot escape from all Mrs Ramsay represents which reveals an unending sequence in the inability to be free from the past and the endless motion of the seasons, as is also represented by the sea.

In the section, ‘Time Passes’, a sense of times seems lost but its movement is nonetheless important, “night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together”. Unlike the first and final parts of the novel, ‘Time Passes’, as implied by its title, hurries the events of ten years, including deaths, marriages and the First World War, although it also maintains a gentle pace. The passing of the seasons enforces and characterizes the movement and it seems as though the marriage and death of Prue Ramsay for example, (both given in brackets) are merely secondary to the coming of spring and summer bringing “cliff, sea, cloud and sky […] purposefully together”.

The events of the novel are not of central importance; Woolf’s novel is not driven by plot and the use of parentheses implies an acknowledged absence, for example, the absence of the war is encompassed in one set of brackets (a technique she repeatedly uses): “[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay […]]” (99). Thus, it appears only another factor in the cycle of death and life.

Woolf also uses the action of the lighthouse itself to reveal the cyclical nature of her story and potentially life in general.  Like the narrative voice of Mrs Ramsay, the lighthouse beam switches between people and situations, illuminating certain scenes intensely and then moving on, “Only the Lighthouse beam entered the rooms for a moment, sent its sudden stare over bed and wall in the darkness of winter, looked with equanimity at the thistle and the swallow”. I feel this also represents the way that we read and the way our mind picks up new things according to how we are feeling at the time.

Of Human Bondage

Of Human Bondage – W. Somerset Maugham

Now, I have to admit, this book was a struggle at times; it took me over 2 months to finish because I kept giving up. But in the end, I think it was worth the read.  The novel tells the story of the central character, Philip, from his childhood into adulthood and the various struggles he encounters throughout his life. Though it is told in the third person, the narrative follows Philip very closely and we are drawn into his feelings and perspectives. At first, I did not actually find him a very likeable character but came to identify and empathise with him and his thought processes. His failings are human and his feelings are often of loneliness, isolation and uncertainty. He is a very believable character.

As a child, after losing his parents, he lives with his uncle and aunt and then at boarding school. Religion is forced upon Philip by his uncle who is a parish priest and there is a lot of pressure on him to become ordained in later life. Philip prays for his clubfoot to be healed, as he is told that faith can move mountains but there is no change. I think this episode starts off his disillusionment with religion. Later, he remembers this prayer and “smiles bitterly”. He is taught religion and not belief, discipline and not love, and this taints his perspective of Christianity throughout his life, seeing it as something that binds him rather than brings new life.

He seems to spend his childhood longing for freedom but when he finally gets it, leaving school for Germany, he is still not happy. Philip does, however, feel freedom from no longer believing in God. Though, he doesn’t seem to know what to replace it with and searches for meaning. In Paris, he asks his friend, about the meaning of life is and is told, “it’s worthless unless you yourself discover it”. Philip searches for meaning in many places, attempting to begin various professions before turning to medicine, his “third start in life”. Nothing seems to satisfy. As an artist, he paints “with the brain” knowing that “the only painting worth anything was done with the heart”.

Loneliness is central to the novel. Philip’s clubfoot makes him think that people see him differently, after having suffered much torment at school, and hence the feeling becomes intensified. Alone in London on Christmas day, “he had expected wonderful things from London and it had given him nothing”. Similar to Pip in Great Expectations, the big city brings much disappointment. It is large and isolating; the last time he sees Mildred, “she vanished into the vast anonymous mass of the population of London”. London was then, as it is now, overwhelmingly full of people.

Love does not fulfil him either. At first he is “in love with love”, or the idea of romance, with Miss Wilkinson, but she is much older and he grows to be irritated by her. His love for Mildred (a waitress he meets when he becomes a medical student) seems more like an obsession, he is infatuated with her and realises this but is unable to stop himself – bound to his emotions. “It’s awful, love, isn’t it”, he says to Mildred, who is “extraordinarily unfit for the battle of life” and not even someone he likes as a person, when she becomes in love with someone else! Later she takes to him but he no longer feels the same, having already given up the chance of happiness with Norah to be with Mildred in the first place.

Furthermore, Fanny Price, who is in love with Philip whilst they are both studying art, kills herself. The novel is quite bleak and direct when it comes to description: “the wretched woman was hanging with a rope round her neck” and all is “infinitely dreadful in the cold gray morning”. There is a distinct lack of sunshine in the novel in general. Where he lives in London, the river is tidal and creek-like; the city is dark and disappointing. Even in the novel’s opening words, this is conveyed: “The day broke grey and dull”.

The meaning of life is a theme that comes up time and time again. Philip becomes philosophical about life and what it means to be alive: “what was the use of living at all. It all seemed inane […] the rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore”. He observes his uncle dying, “Philip watched curiously the process of death” and concludes that “there was nothing human now in the unconscious being that struggled feebly”. It all seems quite bleak, but paradoxically, Philip sees this as a positive, “life was not so horrible if it was meaningless, and he faced it with a strange sense of power”. He seems to swing between loving and hating the world: “his heart was filled with rage against the cruelty of the world” and “he was overwhelmed by the beauty of the world. Beside that nothing seemed to matter”.

But he does finally find happiness with Sally, deciding that he does not want to travel the world, but be with her and have a simple life in the countryside. They decide to get married, despite her pregnancy being a false alarm, and in complete contrast with the beginning and much of the rest of the novel, at the end, “the sun [is] shining”, bringing hope and optimism that his life has made a turn for the better and finally has some meaning.

Great Expectations

Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

It is hardly surprising to see this on a list of great books, as it is often considered Dickens’ best. Out of the Dickens novels I have read, it is certainly the one I enjoyed the most and found the easiest to read. This is perhaps why it maintains its place as a set text studied in many schools and universities. The novel is another coming of age story that follows its narrator, Pip, from his humble beginnings in rural England, to the city of London.

As a young boy, he lives with his sister and her husband, Joe, a blacksmith, in the Kent marshes. One night he comes across an escaped convict and ends up helping him escape further. Pip is later taken to the house of Miss Havisham, a wealthy and eccentric old woman, once left at the altar, who continues to wear her wedding dress and live in the decaying grandeur of the wedding that never happened. Here he meets the young girl, Estella, and becomes infatuated with her.

Pip’s identity centres on his ‘expectations’; dissatisfied with the ordinary countryside existence as a blacksmith, and hoping for a miraculous transformation, he feels a sense of sadness, ingratitude and shame in his home and the possibilities it allows for his future. Instead he holds the provincial dream of moving to the fantastic city, to make his fortune and impress Estella. This dream seems to be actualised when he meets the lawyer, Jaggers, who provides him with the news of a mysterious benefactor and a fortune: “My dream was out; my wild fancy was surpassed by sober reality”.

Dickens sets him up for a disappointing fall. Pip’s first impressions are that the city is “rather ugly, crooked, narrow and dirty”, with imposing buildings, illicit activity and where religion and justice have become corrupt. Later he concludes that “London was decidedly overrated”. It is dramatically brought down from an ideal to an awkward unattractive reality. Furthermore, the glamorous model of the century, the movement from backwardness and deficiency in the country to riches and success in the city, is satirised as it is equated with criminality; it is only possible for Pip due to criminal funding (Magwitch, the convict Pip once helped, turns out to be his secret sponsor).

Time seems sped-up in the city – the fast-paced living and working is contrasted with the slower movement and changing seasons of the countryside, which is again different to Miss Havisham’s immobility, “as if the stopping of the clocks had stopped Time in that mysterious place”. She does not move on, living in the moment of her crushed dreams and expectations, unlike Pip who is continually involved in the process of encountering the world for what it really is.

The story continues with a fire, several deaths and another escape. Pip feels tainted by London’s crime and grime and having shown disdain for his old life and friends (though he continues to uphold Estella and see her everywhere: “You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here”), Joe is still the one who comes to his aid when Pip falls ill. In the end it is the country mists and “tranquil light”, rather than the city’s supposed glamour, that seem to offer hope for his and Estella’s relationship. Dickens shows us one of life’s ironies: fulfilment often comes when we least expect it.

The Catcher in the Rye

The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger

This is one of those classic coming-of-age novels that people remember. It conveys a sense of teenage angst, but also a much deeper restlessness, the feeling of being lost and uncertain about the future.

Holden Caulfield is a sixteen-year-old school boy who leaves his boarding school early before the Christmas holidays, knowing that he is going to be expelled, and goes around New York aimlessly, meeting up with acquaintances, offending people and generally drifting about trying to find something that fulfils him. He sees the world and people as ‘phony’, is disappointed with life and isolated. The only ones he seems to make real connections with are children, including his clever sister, Phoebe. Their innocence and ability to say directly what they think captures him.

The novel takes its title from the job that Holden says he wants to have, but the idea is actually a mistaken reference to a poem by Robert Burns, “If a body catch a body coming through the rye” – Phoebe corrects him, “If a body meet a body coming through the rye”. He pictures children playing in the rye, running, “And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff […] I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d like to be”.

When he takes Phoebe to the park and watches her on the carrousel, Holden promises he won’t leave but will go home with her after (he has been considering running away). It starts pouring with rain, he feels suddenly really happy “I don’t know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice […] God I wish you could’ve been there”. He likes the simple joy of watching his sister on the ride and not lying to her. He seems, throughout, to want to protect children and their innocence. He is protective of his sister and wants to shield her from the ‘phony’ society; a society he, too, wants to escape and here does so through his imagination. His ideal ‘job’ does not really exist. It is also something away from city life and would not require education – things he is struggling with.

Holden is an easy narrator to relate to since the narrative almost seems like a confession. For example, he tells the reader, “I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful”. This does, however, along with his fragmented narration, make him a somewhat unreliable narrator, but I think this novel is more about how he is feeling than a recording of events – there is no extravagant plotline anyway, but just a rambling account of his few days in New York as he tries to be independent and escape though drink, sex, hollow friendships. But these things only lead to more emptiness and he feels the world is against him. He seems broken, and confides in the reader, “If you want to know the truth, I don’t know what I think about it”. The truth is questionable when he has already told us he is a liar, but it feels genuine. The whole book is characterised by uncertainty.

A passage in the novel I found particularly touching is when visiting the museum and after being at ease talking to the boys looking for the Egyptians, Holden feels peaceful alone in the tomb in the museum. But then he sees ‘fuck you’ written on it and loses faith in people again, “That’s the whole trouble. You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody’ll sneak up and write ‘fuck you’ right under your nose”. He is disenchanted with the world and this only adds to the sense that things will not be put right. He doesn’t seem to be able to rely on others; even his old teacher in whose house he seeks refuge makes a sexual advance on him – or at least this is how Holden interprets it.

The last chapter is not full of hope either – he has been ill, has to see a psycho-analyst and chooses not to write about it, “That’s all I’m going to tell about” – gaps in the narrative add to the unreliability, but also show the difficulty of expressing depression. He gives the reader advice in the final lines: “It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody”. Given that he regrets sharing his feelings with others, our insight seems all the more personal.

Love in the Time of Cholera

Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I chose Love in the Time of Cholera to read next due to the recent death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the interesting news stories about his life and works. I have to say, I was quite disappointed with this one. I think I found the style and characters hard to relate to, though this changed towards the end.

The novel tells the story of Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza. They fall in love young and keep this alive from a distance through passionate letters, hardly having the opportunity to meet. Even when Fermina Daza’s father finds out and tries to separate them by taking his daughter to stay with their uncle, Florentino Ariza manages to track her down and remain in contact. This continues for years until Fermina Daza returns, sees Florentino Ariza at the market and dismisses their relationship and planned marriage entirely.

She marries Doctor Urbino, although their marriage is not happy. Meanwhile, Florentino Ariza has many affairs with various women, with whom he finds passion but not love. The widow meets with him “in the hope of finding something that resembled love, but without the problems of love”. When the doctor dies they reunite and go on a cruise together. In order to prevent a scandal when people Fermina Daza knows try to board the ship, Florentino Ariza sends orders to the captain to not let anyone aboard due to a case of Cholera. But once the cholera flag is raised, no port will accept their ship and they are condemned to sail on forever.

The relationship between love and cholera is explicit throughout. In fact, Florentino’s lovesickness is at one point mistaken for cholera itself leading the doctor to conclude that “the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera”. Hence love and suffering go hand in hand, with both physical and emotional impacts. There also seems to be a link between love and death; at the end, the final surrender to love is signalled by the yellow cholera flag. Their love also seems more real when they are old; at the beginning it is infatuation without substance, a “delirious spring”, but when they rekindle their relationship it seems to have more depth and tenderness. Florentino has written her a new letter; a reflection on life, “as lyrical as the others, as rhetorical as all of them”, but this one has “foundation in reality”. They find something at the end that seems to go “beyond love”, with the knowledge that “love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death”.

The shifts in time between past and present could be linked to the turn of the century setting, in which past, present and future are revaluated. At one point in the novel, during celebrations for the new century, Doctor Juvenal Urbino is asked his opinion and says that “the nineteenth century is passing for everyone except us” – this community is stagnant due to the epidemic, as love leads to the ship’s endless to and fro motion.

The Age of Innocence

The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton

This American Classic tells the story of Newland Archer as he prepares to marry May Welland, who seems his ideal conventional partner. He reconsiders this as he becomes increasingly drawn to Countess Ellen Olenska, who is very different from her cousin May, living alone in New York, and disreputable given her separation from her husband.

Written after the First World War but set in the 1870s, looking back on a lost era, Wharton criticises rather than idealises the society about which she writes, “a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs”. Therefore, the title is ironic; the age is prejudiced and false – an age of hypocrisy rather than innocence.

It is, however, innocent too, to the point of naivety.  They cannot imagine the destruction and chaos that the war will later bring to their comfortable and fashionable lives. May and Archer are both innocent: May not to see through the falsity of the society that surrounds her and conditions her expectations, and Archer to believe that he could escape it with Ellen. Archer is aware of May’s innocence and does not want her to have the kind of innocence “that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience”, but not of his own.

Ultimately choosing duty and tradition over the risk of the unknown passion, Archer lives the conventional life and feels confined by it: “As he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk. The worst of doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else”. Time jumps forward twenty-six years, skipping over May and Newland Archer’s life together. By the end of novel, the world around him has changed – symbolised by the telephone – but Archer has not.

After the death of his wife, in Paris with his son, Archer has the chance to meet Ellen again with nothing standing in the way. But at the last moment, when his son goes up to her apartment, Newland can’t bring himself to follow. He feels, “It’s more real to me here than if I went up” and only gives his son the excuse that he is ‘old-fashioned’. Archer realises that too much time has passed; he will be happier reminiscing about their youth than taking a chance on a meeting that is likely to lead to disappointment. This way he can preserve her idealised form and perhaps still keep the hope alive. The ending leaves us with the turn of the century and much left unsaid as Newland returns to his hotel with only his memory for company.  Not my favourite read so far, though I did enjoy it, I found the ending the most moving and the most real part.