Monthly Archives: May 2006

I’m not really liking Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black. I’m about 300 pages into it (out of over 400), so I’ll finish it, but at this point it feels a little too much like work. The plot seems to be picking up a bit now, but the middle section is slow. It seems to me that Mantel has an interesting concept and good characters, but I’m not sure what she’s doing in terms of plot. The opening section was great, with Alison doing her show, channeling voices from the spirit world, and the part where we get background information on the characters’ childhoods is interesting, but after that, where are we going? I’m not sure why the characters are doing what they’re doing, why Morris, Alison’s spirit guide, disappeared, and why this new guy Mart is now in the picture.

I have to say, also, that I’m not all that interested in mediums and psychics and spirit guides and tarot cards and the whole world Alison lives in. I like to think that I can get enjoyment from reading about just about anything, if it’s done well – that I can use my imagination to understand and absorb new things – but either I have a real block against Alison’s ghost world or Mantel isn’t doing it very well because I’m just not into this subject. I’m willing to admit this might be my problem.

I will grant that the descriptions of the highways, the new, ugly shops, the sleazy public halls, and the housing development Alison and Colette live in that is now falling apart are quite well done. The landscape Alison and Colette move in is a degraded one with bizarre poisoned white worms, a plague of dying rabbits, and the children’s playground mysteriously roped off and marked as dangerous. It’s a cheap, ugly, tawdry world, and it’s no wonder people in this novel are fascinated by the prospect of the world they will enter after death, since this one is so depressing.

So, I’ve begun this scholarly book on the early novel, William Warner’s Licensing Entertainment – it’s a book I should have read for school a long time ago but didn’t, and now I’m returning to it because I find the topic interesting. I love eighteenth-century literature, and particularly the novel; I find the story of the “rise,” or emergence, or development, or history, or whatever you want to call it, of the novel fascinating, and this book gives a new perspective.

One of the things this book argues is that our contemporary worries about entertainment and new forms of media are not actually new – these worries existed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries too, when the novel was just getting going and when technology made books easier and cheaper to print. The forms of media are different – people then were uncertain about the effects of reading novels, while people today are more likely to be concerned about other forms such as television and video games. And I don’t mean to imply that all these forms are equivalent in their effects on a culture. But people in the eighteenth century argued that the novel was dangerously focused on pleasure and was morally corrupt. They saw it as people see “lower” forms of culture today, as cheap, often sexually-scandalous pleasures:

Novels have been a respectable component of culture for so long that it is difficult for twentieth-century observers to grasp the unease produced by novel reading in the eighteenth century…during the decades following 1700, a quantum leap in the number, variety, and popularity of novels led many to see novels as a catastrophe to book-centered culture…Any who would defend novels had to cope with the aura of sexual scandal which clings to the early novel, and respond to the accusation that they were corrupting to their enthusiastic readers.

Can you imagine seeing the novel as a catastrophe to book culture? And today some people worry that others aren’t reading novels. Here is one commentator, Clara Reeve, from the end of the eighteenth century writing about novels in the earlier part of the century:

The press groaned under the weight of Novels, which sprung up like mushrooms every year …. Novels did but now begin to increase upon us, but ten years more multiplied them tenfold. Every work of merit produced a swarm of imitators, till they became a public evil, and the institution of Circulating library, conveyed them in the cheapest manner to every bodies hand.

And these novels were corrupting the youth. This is Warner again; the phrases he’s quoting come from another eighteenth-century commentator, Vicesimus Knox:

This saturation of culture by novels defeats that most time-honored method for protecting the innocence of youth from “the corruptions of the living world” – namely, physically secluding them from the “temptations” and “vice” of that world. Still worse, when novels are transported into the “recesses of the closet” used for free private reading or writing, they insinuate themselves into the mental life of the young reader, where they can “pollute the heart,” “inflame the passions,” and “teach all the malignity of vice.”

So some things have changed, some haven’t. We’re worried about the effects of new forms of entertainment on those who consume them. We’re still worrying about the vast numbers of novels out there and their supposedly low quality. We still think our reading culture is debased and getting worse. We still have people worrying about the corrupting influence of some novels and wanting to ban or censor them, although the act of reading a novel itself isn’t as suspect. Except, as Alberto Manguel describes, many are suspicious of those who devote hours to novel reading, and probably many of us have had parents who were anxious about the hours we spent reading as a child. There’s something about the privacy of the act that makes people nervous.

I like reminders that our culture’s current-day worries are actually quite old. Those who worry about “scandalous” content in contemporary novels should go read Aphra Behn’s Love Letters or Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess. They might be in for a surprise.

I just finished Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, which is a beautiful, very satisfying read. It won the Booker prize in 2004. The story is about a young man, Nick, who moves in with the Feddens, the family of a university friend. This family is wealthy, the father a recently-successful Tory politician. Nick is in love with the son, Toby, and fascinated by the parents and daughter, and he lives with them observing them and loving them as well as passing judgment on them.

Nick gets labeled an “aesthete”; he is writing a dissertation on style in Henry James, and he has a wealth of cultural knowledge and opinions, and now he has the chance to leave his middle-class background behind and live in relative luxury. He is an outsider in many ways – an outsider to the Fedden’s world of money and influence and an outsider because of his sexuality. The book is a coming-of-age story: Nick explores his identity, his sexuality, and his relationship to the larger world of politics and money as he moves through his early 20s.

The story takes place in England in the 80s, and the rise of the Tories and Margaret Thatcher is in the novel’s background, with their severe economic policies and mistrust of social misfits. Nick finds himself more and more of an outsider to this world as the book goes on; as Gerald Fedden gets more and more successful, rich, and powerful, Nick’s deceptions and rebellions grow.

What moved me most about the novel is the close and careful observations of the narrator, a third person narrator centered on Nick’s consciousness. We get many, many descriptions of the intricacies of conversation, shifting moods, and facial expressions, in a very Jamesian manner. Much of the novel is taken up with party scenes, parties where much political lobbying and social competing goes on, and we see Nick carefully winding his way through conversation after conversation, sensitive to every nuance of what is said and implied. I love this kind of observation and analysis – what can be more interesting than thinking about the way people act and talk, their motivations and desires? The plot moves slowly, but I never found it boring; the heart of the novel is in the human interaction, not in exciting plot twists, although they are here too.

Beauty haunts the novel – the line of beauty is from William Hogarth’s 18th-century work The Analysis of Beauty, and it is an “S”-shaped curved which he thought is a part of every successful work of art. Nick chases after beauty, in books and art, in men, in life, and he sometimes finds it. His pursuit of beauty is at odds with the political culture around him, which values efficiency, industry, and economic growth over matters of aesthetics. It seems to me that a number of contemporary writers are interested in aesthetics and what role beauty might have in our culture – Zadie Smith’s book On Beauty comes to mind as does Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just. I’ve read neither book, but I wonder if this is a trend.

I enjoyed getting lost in the world of the book. It’s a much wealthier, more sophisticated and cultured world than I’ll ever be a part of, and so as a reader, I was curious about it all and also aware that these characters wouldn’t think much of me, most likely. But in reading, that’s okay.

I’m planning on reading Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black next.