In this May issue of ‘World of Words’, I review a novel and an academic paper.
Mrs Osmond (John Banville 2017)
On finishing The Portrait of a Lady (1881) by Henry James, I felt my bookshelf calling out to me. Standing there and looking for what…I wasn’t sure… it slowly dawned on me that I was searching for a particular book. I couldn’t remember the name or the author, but I had a memory of its pale green hardcover. Hannie, who was one of the members of a book club that I led, gave it to me as a gift. Just as I was about to give up, Mrs Osmond revealed itself to me. John Banville took up telling the story of Isabel a century and a half after Henry James had stopped doing so. Apparently, like Banville, I too wasn’t yet done with this spirited heroine of literature, so much so that Mrs Osmond called out to me without my even consciously recollecting that it had anything to do with James’s masterpiece. I started on it at once. Fascinating to see how each of these celebrated authors uses information gaps. While James skips time and flashes back to fill in the narrative, Banville kept me turning pages with cliff hangers, because just as one gap in the narrative was filled, another took its place. I felt I got to know the characters in greater detail in the sequel. However, I missed the allusions, the almost enigmatic approach James has to characters in The Portrait of a Lady. Banville is more direct, and in this his style departs from that of James. But he also uses metaphors generously and as behoves his pastiche, an almost exaggerated use of words in lengthy sentences. Both novels share the tension, if I may go so far as to suggest it, between the values of the Old and the New World. What particularly struck me in Mrs Osmond was the impact it made on me by characters outside of the privileged classes: in particular, a poor, distraught man weeping aloud in Paddington Station whose brief appearance in the first pages of the novel takes hold of the protagonist Isabel, and the latter’s maid Elsie Staines, who plays a critical role in the plot. Besides these, an old Italian caretaker, a London carriage driver, a servant boy, a concierge and others like them people the narrative adding another dimension to it. In the original, James never appears to let go of the sight of a ‘certain young woman affronting her destiny.’ Feminists in particular may rejoice in reading Mrs Osmond, but to reveal why may be a spoiler.
Link to the Guardian review of Mrs Osmond
Author Charles Finch on Henry James and John Banville
‘The British People Are Not Stupid’ Collective Vanity and Populist Myths of Communal Intellect’ by Chris Farrell (Etnofoor: Volume 33 – Issue 1)
This issue of the journal focusses on vanity. Chris Farrell, an American anthropologist, chose Stanley, a small town in the northeast of England as a fieldwork site to research the complaint that sections of the British people have about ‘being talked down to’ because of their support of Brexit. He lived there over several visits – pre and post the Brexit referendum, and ‘hung out’ with his interlocutors, who he refers to as his friends, frequenting bowls clubs (same as the Italian bocco or French petanque), a site of much social activity for this group composed mostly of elderly white men. Deconstructing the words ‘intelligence’ (which he links to as being rewarded by success) and ‘stupidity’ as its opposite, he goes on to show how some of the men of this group acquire status as they individually represent a collective intelligence of Britain, which in turn comes with a feeling of ‘I am always right’ and ‘righteousness’. Britain’s role in oppression, slavery and discrimination is a blind spot. To their minds, Britain has always been an ‘intelligent historical actor’. The whole idea that people had had wool pulled over their eyes and didn’t understand what they were voting for when they chose Leave over Remain is seen as an insult to their intelligence. Interesting how, Farrell’s friends in Stanley ‘perform’ intelligence, a highly valued characteristic in this society, through banter and wit. Farrell explains in detail why he doesn’t refer to them as working class, but as engaged in ‘a performance of class’, by which they have, through their banter, in the environs of the bowl club, managed to separate themselves from the rest of the town. At the centre of these performances is vanity. While reading it, I could imagine one individual, dressed more smartly than the rest, who gets to set the tone and dominate, while others listen and approve. I was particularly struck by how Farrell, an academic, presented the ideology of his friends in Stanley in an ethnographic issue focussing on vanity, which to my mind has a negative connotation, without judgement. However, he clearly argues that his friends situate themselves ‘in the politics of vanity’.
What I am presently reading…
John Banville’s trilogy: The Book of Evidence, Ghosts, and Athena.