Of Books and Bicycles

I’ll admit I’m a newbie when it comes to ghost stories. I’ve read some, I’m sure, but it was a long, long time ago, and I don’t remember any details. So I don’t have much of a basis of comparison to work with here. What this book taught me, though, is that the circumstances in which one reads a ghost story matter a lot. Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black is only 150 pages long and probably should be read in as close to one sitting as possible. When I had the chance to sit down with this book for more than a few minutes at a time, I got caught up in the atmosphere and enjoyed myself. When I read only small pieces of it before putting it down again to go on to something else, I became too distanced from the story to feel much of the spookiness and suspense.

I did enjoy the illustrations in my edition of the book (the one pictured above); the black and white sketches helped create a sense of what the almost other-worldly landscape must have looked like. I enjoyed the book’s atmosphere more than the story itself; the story is fairly simple and straightforward and not so difficult to figure out, even for someone like me who is generally very bad at figuring things out. But Hill does atmosphere very well, and I liked the descriptions of the town where the people obviously have deep, dark secrets; the house separated from the town by a causeway that is under water when the tide is in; the absolutely unforthcoming driver who carries the main character back and forth; and the terrifyingly shifty and treacherous quicksand reminiscent of the shivering sands in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone.

The story is told by Arthur Kipps, who is surrounded by his happy family but haunted by memories. He decides to write his story down to try to make his ghostly memories disappear once and for all. The story he has to tell takes place when he was much younger, an innocent and confident young man, eager to make his way in the world. He receives an assignment to sort through the papers of a woman who has recently died, a Mrs. Drablow who lives on the coast and whom, he discovers, no one in the town wants to discuss. While at Mrs. Drablow’s funeral, Arthur sees a woman who has seemingly come out of nowhere and who suffers from a some kind of a wasting disease. He asks about her later, but it turns out no one else has seen her, and no one will answer his questions about her. He brushes this aside and continues on with his work, but, of course, this is not the last he sees of the mysterious woman.

And then we are plunged into a familiar dynamic: Arthur knows he is getting himself into a very strange, very creepy situation, and the more time he spends at Mrs. Drablow’s house the more this feeling is confirmed, but he is determined to do his work well, no matter what the consequences. Why should he let a ghostly woman dressed in black keep him from completing his task? Why should he be afraid of spending the night in Mrs. Drablow’s house, even when he knows it is haunted?

Well, he learns why. I liked the fact that — and now I will get to some spoilers — the plot revolves around a mother who is forced to give up her child born out of wedlock. To separate a mother and child is to violate the natural order to such a horrific extent that a terrible revenge is sure to follow. Hill makes clear that the fate of women who have made “mistakes” in love may vary, but it is never good:

A girl from the servant class, living in a closely-bound community, might perhaps have fared better, sixty or so years before, than this daughter of genteel parentage, who had been so coldly rejected and whose feelings were so totally left out of the count. Yet servant girls in Victorian England had, I knew, often been driven to murder or abandon their misconceived children. At least Jennet had known that her son was alive and had been given a good home.

The community has a whole has had to pay a high price for this cruelty. Individual families might perpetrate the wrong on an immediate level, but it is a cultural sin and the culture pays.

On a lighter level, I also liked the role the dog Spider played. Spider was probably the character I cared about most, in fact. The scene where she almost gets lost in the quicksand is the most harrowing one in the book. One of the most frightening things I can think of is a dog who is thoroughly freaked out and frightened for reasons we can’t understand. Surely that dog knows something we don’t?

I didn’t think this was a great book, but I thought it was a competent one, and it makes me a little more curious than I was before about other ghost stories and about what else Susan Hill has written.

If you would like to read more posts on the book, check out the Slaves of Golconda blog and the discussion forums. I hope to see you there!

I’m deep in the middle of the semester now, and in need of shorter books and lighter reading, since my time is limited and when I do have time, I often don’t have energy. So I thought I’d continue my reread of the Anne of Green Gables series, which I began over a year ago with a group of Anne devotees. The second book in the series is Anne of Avonlea, and it takes Anne from her sixteenth year to her eighteenth, during which time she — unbelievably to contemporary readers — becomes a school teacher. How can someone sixteen be in charge of teaching a room full of children of all different ages? It’s a reminder of how different a time it was when Anne was alive (or alive in someone’s imagination).

I enjoyed the book and found it just the thing for my frazzled brain, but … I had some doubts too. I remember reading through the whole series multiple times as a child, but I don’t really remember which books were my favorites and which weren’t. I’m guessing that this one wouldn’t have been a favorite, though, largely because the pace is slower than the first Anne book, and it could use some more narrative tension. Both the first and the second books are very episodic in structure and take Anne through one adventure after another, but in the first book, Anne is a brand new character and this keeps her adventures intriguing. They are often very funny as well. In the second book, we know what to expect from Anne, and that’s pretty much what we continue to get — lots of imagination, impulsiveness, and rash actions repented of later. It’s charming and amusing, but it doesn’t surprise anymore, and there’s no other plot arc or source of tension or suspense.

I’m also not sure what I think of Anne’s brand of imagination, either. She lives in — or at least frequently retreats into — a dreamworld of fairies, elves, dryads, and other mystical creatures, and I have no problem with this whatsoever, but when Miss Lavendar and Paul Irving arrive on the scene sharing similar imaginative fancies, I wonder where they all picked up such similar ways of dreaming. Did they all grow up reading the same kinds of stories? Was every imaginative person of the time dreaming in the same kind of way? All this stretched plausibility a bit, which made me feel more at a distance from the story than I expected to be.

But, that said, I already have the next book in the series on the way through Book Mooch (Anne of the Island), and I’m looking forward to reading it, maybe soon or maybe in a year or two. I do like Anne, and I like the process of reading through the series again. I may read through other childhood favorites as well, as the mood strikes. Doubts and mild disappointments as I reread books don’t bother me too terribly much, and they are always interesting to think about.

I go through stages of listening to audiobooks on my commute to work (about 40 minutes each way) and then not, and now I’m in a stage where I’m listening to them avidly. After finishing Elizabeth Strout’s Abide with Me, I turned to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and then to Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, which I just finished on the drive home tonight.

Listening to Rebecca was a fabulous experience; it’s my first encounter with a du Maurier novel, and probably not my last. It’s a perfect book to listen to. It’s from a first-person perspective, first of all, which means there’s an intimacy to the voice (a literal voice, of course, not metaphorical) that pulls me into the story. It’s also such a moody, atmospheric novel, and having someone read it to me increases that sense of atmosphere. I respond to the words, of course, but also to a tone of voice and a manner of pronouncing those words, and that tone and manner enrich the whole experience.

I probably don’t need to tell you what a wonderfully fun book it is — such a good story, such interesting relationships among the characters, such a complex situation and a suspenseful ending.

Murder on the Orient Express was also enjoyable to listen to, but it didn’t go quite as well as Rebecca did. I’m wondering if it isn’t as well-suited to listening as du Maurier’s book is. The problem was that it was very hard to keep the details straight. Murder is one of those puzzle-type mysteries where all the evidence is given and it’s possible for the reader to piece it all together (or at least I think it might be — I could never accomplish such a feat myself, so I can only assume that others with minds better suited to the task could). Hercules Poirot and the two men who work with him go over the evidence again and again, scouring it for information and clues. All this was hard to keep straight when I couldn’t flip back and forth in the book to double-check information.

So now I’m thinking I should listen to books that emphasize character and atmosphere rather than ones that require me to keep track of a complicated plot or remember a lot of information. But it’s also true that I’m drawn to character-driven books anyway, so perhaps the audio format just confirms and perhaps enhances the biases that already exist.

Both books showed me that the audio format makes the techniques authors use to generate suspense much more transparent. Since I couldn’t flip a page or two ahead or even look down to the bottom of the page to see what was coming, I had to sit there waiting breathlessly for the narrator to say the words that would clear up the mystery. When Hercules Poirot has gathered everyone together at the novel’s end to go through the evidence one last time and to reveal the solution to the mystery, I was acutely aware of the way Christie has him stop right before the final revelation to make a digression designed to drive the reader crazy with suspense. The ending of Rebecca felt exactly the same way. With a regular book, an author can’t control the order in which you read the words and can only hope that you experience the suspense he or she was trying to create. You can skip ahead on a CD, of course, but it’s not nearly as easy as flipping through the pages of a book skimming for revealing information.

About a week ago, Hobgoblin handed me a book and said he thought I would like it. This usually means I smile politely and say thanks and then put the book away. Hobgoblin does this to me when I recommend a book, too. In fact, I’ve praised Infinite Jest so highly and told him he should read it so often that now I’m worried he won’t. This time he handed me Christopher Morley’s Parnassus on Wheels and said it was about books and that it was a really fast read. I was in the mood for something exactly like that, so I broke with tradition and started reading.

And it turned out to be a whole lot of fun. It’s a book that celebrates reading and the love of books in a humorous, whimsical kind of way that is thoroughly charming. It reminds me quite a bit of Alan Bennett’s book The Uncommon Reader about Queen Elizabeth learning to love reading. The books have a similar sensibility; they portray reading as simultaneously a great amusement and also an activity that can change your life. Once you have begun reading, you have no idea where the habit will take you.

The story is told in the first person by Helen McGill, a woman who lives on a farm in Connecticut with her brother, Andrew. Andrew was once a steady, reliable person, but then he took to reading, and then to writing, and then he became a famous author, and now he can’t be trusted to do his share of the farm work. Helen finds this intensely irritating, and she does what she can to thwart Andrew’s ambitions, and to try to keep him from wandering around the countryside gathering material for his next book.

Helen is a fun narrator; she has a self-confident, matter-of-fact, no-nonsense tone, and she is frequently hilarious. Here’s how the novel opens:

I wonder if there isn’t a lot of bunkum in higher education? I never found that people who were learned in logarithms and other kinds of poetry were any quicker in washing dishes or darning socks. I’ve done a good deal of reading when I could, and I don’t want to “admit impediments” to the love of books, but I’ve also seen lots of good practical folk spoiled by too much fine print. Reading sonnets always gives me hiccups, too.

She is also capable of adventure, although this quality catches her by surprise. When a man drives up to her farm with a wagon full of books claiming that he wants to sell it to Andrew, she realizes she needs to act quickly. The man is Roger Mifflin, and he has spent years traveling around the countryside selling people books from his collection. He has loved his trade, but now he wants to retire to Brooklyn to write the story of his adventures, and he believes he can persuade Andrew to pick up where he is leaving off and become an iterant salesman himself. Worried about being abandoned, Helen makes an impulsive decision and buys the wagon herself, and the next thing she knows, she is off on an adventure, traveling around the countryside selling books herself, with Roger Mifflin for company, at least for a while.

So the novel tells the story of her adventures — how she sees more of the world than she ever had before, sees just how much Roger is in love with books and reading, and learns how transforming books can be.

It’s a light and amusing book, but it argues for a particular way of thinking about reading. Roger Mifflin makes a number of long speeches such as this one about what he is trying to do when he sells books:

You see, my idea is that the common people — in the country, that is — never have had any chance to get hold of books, and never have had any one to explain what books can mean. It’s all right for college presidents to draw up their five-foot shelves of great literature, and for the publishers to advertise sets of their Linoleum Classics, but what the people need is the good, homely, honest stuff — something that’ll stick to their ribs — make them laugh and tremble and feel sick to think of the littleness of this popcorn ball spinning in space without ever even getting a hot-box! And something that’ll spur ’em on to keep the hearth well swept and the wood pile split into kindling and the dishes washed and dried and put away. Anyone who can get the country people to read something worth while is doing his nation a real service.

It’s the idea of literature pleasing and instructing both — it should be thrilling and fun, and it should also inspire people to be better, more industrious human beings, which will, in turn, make America a stronger country.

Part of the charm of this book is its idealism, and it’s fun to get caught up in the happy mood, even if in my darker moments I don’t buy the idealism at all. The book almost crosses into an irritating naïveté, but it doesn’t quite (for me at least); it is saved by not taking itself too seriously. The humor keeps everything light, and the narrator’s practicality keeps everything in perspective.

And now when I’m in the mood for it, I have the sequel, The Haunted Bookshop to look forward to.

I finished this book about a week ago and have thought of it off and on since then, and I’m still not entirely sure what I want to say about it. There were times when I thought it was incredibly moving and insightful, times when I thought it dragged a bit, times when I loved what it had to say about families, and times when I got annoyed because I couldn’t keep the minor characters straight. I suppose ultimately I don’t think this is a perfect book, but it offered a lot ot think about.

The story is a harsh one, and I was drawn to it for that reason. It has a tone I don’t often find in women writers (although I won’t pretend to have done an exhaustive survey) — blunt, dark, bleak, and open about the harsher and seedier aspects of life. It’s not a hopeless book, but it’s one that won’t let you forget how much people can suffer. I wouldn’t want to read sad books like this one all the time, but now and then I find I want to read someone who looks directly at the harsher, uglier sides of life.

The first-person narrator is Alison, a woman in her forties who ekes a living out of part-time jobs. While she once was beautiful, the hard life she has lived has worn her down, and she now has hepatitis and suffers from a damaged arm that gets in the way of the cleaning job she tries to hold on to. The novel follows Alison through the course of one day as she walks to work and then to a friend’s house, and finally to the woods just outside her city in California. Lengthy flashbacks tell the story of Alison’s youth and young adulthood.

Alison became a model at a very young age and found herself swept up into a world where beautiful young women care so much about having great careers and becoming famous super-models that they are willing to do whatever it takes to live out their dreams, and male agents and photographers take full advantage of all the opportunities for sexual exploitation this provides. It’s a life full of money, glamour, drugs, parties, and casual sex. Alison heads to France where her modeling career really takes off, as a fabulously wealthy and powerful agent takes her on as his girlfriend. Her family back home in New Jersey has little idea what Alison has gotten herself into, but they are too passive and caught up in their own troubles to do anything to bring Alison home.

Alison’s meteoric rise is followed by a catastrophic fall as her boyfriend rejects her and she returns home to New Jersey to become a student again and try to turn her life around. She moves to New York to work at temp jobs and to try to work her way back into the modeling world, with only partial success. It’s in one of her temp jobs that she meets Veronica, a woman significantly older than Alison is, and who bewilders Alison with her brash attitude and her outlandish taste in clothing. The two become friends, improbably, and although Alison doesn’t quite understand why she is drawn to Veronica and she sometimes fails to be a good friend to her, the two stay in touch. When Alison finds out Veronica has AIDS, she becomes even more important in her life.

Veronica seems an unlikely character to name the book after, since there are long sections of the book that don’t concern her at all, and we aren’t introduced to her until after we have been reading for a while. But it’s Alison’s friendship with Veronica that provides a center to her story; she is a question the story picks at again and again as Alison tries to figure out what Veronica has meant to her. From her perspective as a more mature woman looking back on her life, it turns out that Veronica has meant a great deal.

There is a lot of beauty in the writing here; Gaitskill describes Alison’s habit of thinking about her life through music particularly well, and although she is distanced from her father, this is something they share. For both of them music is a way of trying to communicate the longings they can’t find words to express. The entire book feels like an effort to express those things that are so hard to put into words. Alison tries to understand the experiences that have shaped her life, but sometimes the most she can do is to ask questions, to speculate, and to marvel at what has happened.

At times the pacing felt uneven, and the minor characters come and go without much definition and sometimes without much interest, but still, there is much to enjoy and contemplate here.

So my mystery book group met this past Saturday to discuss Cornell Woolrich’s The Black Angel, and, as usual, it was a great discussion. It was the kind of discussion where many if not all of us left the meeting with different ideas about the book than those we had originally — not necessarily that we liked the book any better, but that we understood new things about it. Or perhaps I should just speak for myself — my understanding of the book is different now than it was before. I still have mixed feelings about it, but they are mixed in a different way.

The book is classic noir (or that’s what the cover calls it) from 1943, written from the first person point of view of Alberta French, a woman whose husband has just been arrested for murder. He has supposedly murdered his lover, and Alberta has the shocking experience of discovering the dead body and her husband’s unfaithfulness all at once. While recovering from the shock, she decides her husband is innocent, that she’s willing to forgive him, and that she wants to do what she can to find out who the true murderer is.

The one clue in the story is a matchbook with the personalized letter “M” on it that Alberta finds at the crime scene. After finding the matchbook, Alberta stumbles across the murdered woman’s address book, and soon she is off on a quest to meet all the people listed under “M.” One of them has to be the real murderer.

I’m a sucker for a good plot device, and I liked this one, at least at first. It’s fun to watch Alberta try to worm her way into the lives of each of her possible suspects. Each encounter with a suspect turns into its own little episode in which Alberta goes places and sees things she’s never seen before, and these stories can be wild and suspenseful. The first two of these episodes work well. Alberta finds herself in some horribly seedy dives on the Bowery (the novel is set in New York City) as she meets the dead woman’s former husband, and then she runs into a doctor who turns out to be a drug dealer — or rather, he expects Alberta to be the drug dealer.

But from there the novel goes downhill fast. I found the next two episodes entirely unbelievable. The plot starts to move too fast, and it feels as though Woolrich started to get tired of his whole scheme and wanted to rush through to the end. I started the book willing to suspend my disbelief quite a bit, since it didn’t seem right to demand strict realism from this book given the genre, but even my low expectations were violated. It’s such a bad feeling to get jolted out of the world of the story like this, one moment enjoying the suspense and the next laughing scornfully at the ridiculousness of the whole thing.

Other people in my book group found Alberta an annoying character and an unbelievable one, but I liked her voice, at least at first. There was something about her straightforwardness and her desperate recklessness that appealed to me. But Becky’s point that she might be an unreliable narrator made me think of her in a new way. She is very young and she seems so innocent and so sweetly devoted to her husband that it’s easy to fail to take into account that over the course of the novel she does some pretty awful things, including the drug dealing and much worse. She justifies it all by saying that it’s to save her husband, but after thinking about the lengths to which she goes, I can’t help but question her sanity. She is so focused on discovering the truth that she is incapable of seeing anything else. What does it mean, really, to be willing to do just about anything for the sake of love? And is that a love anybody in their right mind would want to share?

I don’t know the noir genre very well, but I’m curious if anybody knows any other examples that have a female narrator. This book felt very different to me than the other examples we have read so far, Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key and Ross Macdonald’s The Underground Man, and part of the difference is that it’s a woman who is narrating the story (and part of it, of course, is that the other two are better written). She’s not a very emotive narrator, by any means, but there is a vulnerability and openness to the voice that I haven’t found elsewhere. It didn’t feel very “noir” to me for those reasons, and I began to wonder if part of what it means to be “noir” is to be from a male point of view. But I’d love to hear otherwise if that’s not true.

So, after that very interesting read, we are turning to Paco Ignacio Taibo’s The Shadow of the Shadow. This is an author I’ve never heard of (as Woolrich was as well), and I’m looking forward to discovering something new.

I picked up Antonia White’s Frost in May not knowing at all what it is about, and I was amused to find that it’s about a young girl beginning life at a Catholic boarding school — I say I was amused because it seems that nearly everything I’m reading these days has a religious or spiritual theme to it. I’m still slowly reading through Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart, which is about a spiritual approach to suffering, and then there is Elizabeth Strout’s Abide with Me, about a pastor and his relationship with his congregation. And now Frost in May, which is all about intense religious devotion. But White’s book is harsher and darker than the other two, and much more critical of organized religion.

The main character, Nanda, comes from a family that converted to Catholicism, and Nanda feels an ardor and devotion to her new religion that perhaps is unique to converts. It means she is an outsider in her new school, however, The Convent of the Five Wounds, where most of the students come from families who have never been anything but Catholic. She is an outsider for other reasons as well: she doesn’t come from money as most of the other students do. This is a very common set-up for a novel, I suppose — young child struggling to find her way in a new environment that she finds bewildering, surrounded by people who aren’t like her at all — but White does an excellent job making a frequently-told story fresh and fascinating.

The novel’s opening scenes show Nanda trying to find her way through a bewilderingly complex set of rules that governs every part of the girls’ lives. It’s shocking to discover just how circumscribed and controlled the girls’ lives were. Nanda is told how she should walk and eat, and in what position she should sleep at night (on her back with her arms crossed on her chest). She and her schoolmates are not allowed to have “particular friendships,” and if they are caught spending too much time with any one girl, the two are separated. Their reading is almost entirely limited to devotional works, with only occasional indulgences in the most serious and uplifting fiction available. And the list of limitations and requirements goes on and on.

Nanda accepts all this, for the most part, because she really and truly wants to be a good Catholic, and although she is secretly terrified of receiving a call to be a nun herself, she adores the disciplines and practices of her religion.

But she starts the book as an outsider, and she remains one; she struggles and struggles to be the kind of person the nuns think she should be, but she never quite gets it right, and eventually the seeds of rebellion are sown.

White does an excellent job capturing the feeling of the convent school; the book is focused almost exclusively on the school itself, so that it becomes its own world, impervious to everything outside it. The convent is somewhere outside London, but that hardly matters; all that matters is the atmosphere of the school itself. When Nanda’s parents visit, she feels horribly awkward and unhappy at the way her mother does everything wrong — she is too loud, too happy, too willing to mock what Nanda holds dear. She is relieved when her parents leave and the familiar order is restored. Even though the nuns can be cruel, and they do what they can to rid her of her pride and individuality, she rejoices in all her sacrifices and deprivations — until the point when she doesn’t.

The book isn’t perfect — I thought some sections in the middle languished a bit and some of the plot and character maneuverings seemed awkward — but still, it’s a wonderful portrait of what it’s like to be a serious, idealistic, devout child and then teenager, caught up in an intricately-structured and carefully-controlled world, trying to live up to everyone’s high expectations, including her own. And it’s a fascinating picture of one version of the religious life — a particularly harsh and harmful one, although one that’s full of beauty too.

I mentioned the other day that I listened to Elizabeth Strout’s novel Abide with Me, and that book has convinced me that I should probably take a look at her other books as well. It’s a quiet, thoughtful character study, and I liked its insights into small-town life and what it’s like to try to be a spiritual leader when one’s life is falling apart.

The novel is set in a small town in Maine in the late 1950s, and the main character is the pastor of the Congregational church, Tyler Caskey, who just a year ago lost his wife and is now trying to cope with his grief and take care of his two young daughters. In a long flashback, Strout tells the story of how Tyler met his wife, Lauren, a woman from a much wealthier, more stylish family, and how the two of them settled into their new life in town. The congregation fell in love with Tyler, but could never quite accept Lauren, with her monied, Massachusetts background, her suspect love of fashion, and her complete disinterest in leading prayer groups. Tyler and Lauren were deeply in love, but it was a young, sudden, and inexperienced kind of love, and it quickly becomes clear that the two of them are headed into trouble, until one day Lauren gets sick and soon she is gone.

So Tyler is left on his own to grieve and to figure out how to lead an entirely new kind of life. And things quickly begin to fall apart. His daughter Katherine has failed to make friends at school and mutters things like “I hate God” in church. His housekeeper disappears under suspicious circumstances. He has trouble writing sermons. His mother pesters him to find a new wife. His congregation has begun to distrust him. And Tyler doesn’t know how to respond to any of this.

The character of Tyler is the triumph of this book; he is wise, kind, earnest, slow but with charisma, and an excellent deliverer of sermons. He believes with all his heart in everything he preaches and tries as best as he can to be a good person and to do his job well. He’s also naive and afraid of conflict, and it’s these qualities that get him into trouble. When his congregation starts to turn against him, he can’t understand why, and he doesn’t grasp that he needs to act quickly to change their minds. He believes that being a good person and doing his best is enough. It’s heartbreaking that these beliefs just aren’t true, and it seems unfair that people like Tyler have to learn lessons in the really painful way he does.

The book’s other triumph is its portrayal of small-town life, particularly small-town life in rural Maine in the 1950s. Tyler’s wife Lauren is a foolish character in a lot of ways, but surely everyone would sympathize with her horror at the boredom and isolation she experiences. Her mother-in-law gives her a book on how to be a pastor’s wife, and when she playfully begins to read it out loud to Tyler, she soon stops, bewildered by the advice she gets. Many of the other women in town are just as bored and unhappy as she is, and when one woman tells another to “just make the beds, then you’ll feel better,” it’s hardly encouraging. The picture of small-town life and 1950s pre-feminist frustration Strout creates is a familiar one, but she treats the subject with subtlety and acuteness and it never feels stereotyped.

So now I’m eager to read more of Strout’s books. Olive Kitteridge would be a logical next place to go, as it won the Pulitzer, and there is also Amy and Isabelle. It’s fun to find another author whose work I’d like to follow.

Victor Hugo’s The Last Day of a Condemned Man is fiction written with a purpose, and when someone writes fiction in order to make a point, as opposed to wanting to create great art, I can’t help but have my doubts about quality (although does that great art/political purpose opposition really hold up? Not sure.). Hugo’s book (kindly sent to me by Oneworld Classics) isn’t great art, I think, but it does do some interesting things fictionally, and it makes its political point in a powerful way.

It’s a book about the death penalty, and this edition opens with a preface by Hugo outlining his objections to the practice, so there is no doubt as you begin the story itself where Hugo stands. The novel takes the form of a diary written by a man living out his last days before he faces the guillotine. We aren’t told immediately, but eventually we find out he has committed murder, and there is never any doubt about whether he is guilty or not. The man writes down his thoughts and feelings over the course of the days leading up to his execution, and we follow him right up to the point before he is led away to his death.

What is interesting about the book is the way it allows you to imagine what it must be like to know you are about to die, that you will have a particularly gruesome death, and that crowds will be watching and cheering as your head is severed from your body. Hugo captures the torments his character goes through with enough detail and vividness that you can’t help but get caught up in the fear and turmoil. Here’s an example of what I mean:

They say it’s nothing, that you don’t suffer, that it’s a gentle end, that death is much simpler like that…. are they sure you don’t suffer? Who told them that? Has anyone heard of a severed head covered in blood that got up on the edge of the basket and shouted to the crowds: “That didn’t hurt?”

Are there any dead people who have come back and thanked them, saying: “It’s well designed. Leave it as it is. The mechanism is fine.”

Was it Robespierre? Was it Louis XVI?…

No, not at all! Less than a minute, less than a second and the deed is done. If only in their minds, have they ever put themselves in the place of the one who is there when the heavy chopper comes down and bites into flesh, severs nerves, shatters vertabrae… What! Half a second! Any pain is avoided…

Hideous!

Hugo also does a great job of describing the settings in which the condemned man finds himself, particularly the crowd scenes as the man is shuttled about to various cells before his execution. He makes you feel what it is like to be the center of attention at the point when one of the worst things that could possibly happen is about to happen to you:

In the clamour all around me I could no longer tell cries of pity from shouts of delight, laughter from groans, voices from noises; it was all just buzzing in my head, like an echo in a cooking pot.

Unthinkingly my eyes read the shop signs.

At one point I was seized with a bizarre curiosity to turn round and see where I was going. It was my mind’s last act of bravado. But my body didn’t want to; my neck was paralysed as if in anticipation of death.

I’m against the death penalty, so I’m not sure how someone who thinks otherwise would respond to this book, but if imagining how horrible it must be to face execution could sway anybody’s opinion, then this book could do it. The argument seems to be that execution is too awful a penalty to impose on anyone, and while that may not be the best anti-death penalty argument out there, it certainly is an argument well-suited to fiction. Fiction is particularly good at helping us understand what it’s like to be somebody else and at inspiring us to imagine things we have never experienced, so why not use its powers to inspire pity and terror in readers in order to persuade them to be merciful?

In addition to The Last Day of a Condemned Man, the Oneworld Classics edition contains another anti-death penalty work, a short story called “Claude Gueux.” The story is about how the justice system turns a man who stole something out of desperation, we aren’t told what, into a murderer. Society is arranged in such a way, the story argues, that pushes people toward crime, and then once they have committed that crime, it punishes them cruelly. There are stronger arguments to make against an unjust society than these works offer, but they still accomplish a lot: they make you think and feel and imagine what it must be like to be condemned.