Review: I LOCK MY DOOR UPON MYSELF by Joyce Carol Oates [re-read]

The language is slow and lazy and languid. Although less than a hundred pages long, this is a powerful novel, if a quiet one.

It tells the story of Edith Margaret Freilicht (nee Honeystone) – or Calla as she was named by her mother, the name she speaks to herself and gifts rarely to others. Calla Honeystone is a strange child whose mother dies at her birth. She is a wild redheaded child who turns into a strange and introverted woman who is married off to an older man called George Freilicht.

His physicality repels her, but over time and familiarity he touches the pity inside her, and she cedes him access to her body. Bearing him 3 children who are tended by his family as she shows little interest or concern for them. After the painful birth of the third child she reclaims her body, and he is almost as relieved as she to return to a celibate state.

Calla lives in her head, which we, unlike everyone else, are given controlled and limited access too.

When she meets the water diviner Tyrell Thompson who comes to the farm to see if he can earn himself a ‘gift’ in exchange for finding the place to drill for a well, Calla realises he is the broad, tall black man she has been watching by the river. She follows him around the land as, uninvited, he seeks for water on the Freilicht property, opening up to him in ways her in-laws, watching from the windows of the house have never seen her respond to anyone before.

She has seen very few negroes in her lifetime. Occasionally on a visit to the city she has seen some of the younger folk, now liberated from slavery. “...but their blackness, their essence-that had been owned. And now in this city amid the heterogeneous white population of the city they were so relatively few in number-like small dark carp in an immense school of fiercely golden carp, depending upon God knows what precarious law or whim of nature to survive. Like me they are outcasts in this country. No, not like me: they are true outcasts”. [p40]

In Thompson she has found a kind of kindred spirit in his outcastness that whilst she acknowledges is more authentic than her own, she is drawn to him, and soon they become lovers.

Calla has always been whispered about, but now the whispering becomes louder as the rumours and gossip of the relationship between a white married woman and a black itinerant tie the tongues of the townsfolk together.

To tell much more of Calla’s story would be to deprive a new reader of too many of the twists and turns of the journey.

The novel presents us with a woman who is forced into a life that she hasn’t chosen, and yet she does not fight it overtly. She fights by withdrawal into herself, as the book’s title infers. She becomes powerful inside herself, ultimately going her own way, taking the reader’s sympathy with her. However, it is also the case that you can see that even in the quiet path she has taken, she is leaving destruction and damage behind in the lack of engagement, love or concern for the children she has given her husband, as she herself says in one place, she thought he wanted them.

This is also a novel about the African American experience. Although not blatant in its exploration, in a handful of paragraphs Oates subtly weaves a powerful chunk of that experience into this story.

Joyce Carol Oates is probably one of the least formulaic writers working over the past 50+ years. Each novel varying in style, genre, intention. There are themes, she often writes about the disenfranchised, she is concerned especially with the lives of those with the least. She is often poking around in the darker corners of people’s worlds, where death and violence lurks. This is one of her more linearly written novels, whose size is deceptive.

She rarely writes comfortable novels and often writes novels it is hard to feel warmth for the characters, sometimes even hard to empathise with them, but what Oates almost always does is permit you to understand what even the most difficult of characters does and why. If she does not do this, she does not do it with intent.

THE LONDON LIBRARY : I died and went to heaven

If there is one improvement I might suggest to make the London Library ‘absolute heaven’ instead of just ‘heaven’ it might be that as well as coffee, they sold chocolate! But perhaps its better they don’t!  

I had the delicious opportunity of visiting this wonderful literary institution last week as a precursor to becoming a member and (as if there was ever any doubt) my desire to join was only heightened. When time was up, my eyes were casting about to see if there was any dark desk I might hide beneath in order to get locked in overnight! 

This is the library I dream about. A library that has books that may not have left their place on the shelves for 30, 50, 100 years, but is still there, winking at the passers-by and ever optimistic that its time will come to be liberated from its regal home and taken out again into the big wide world for a visit. 97% of the books in this 1 million plus book collection are available to be taken out on loan by its members. This isn’t the library for you if you are only interested in the latest editions to the publishing cannon (although a small number of new books are purchased each year to keep the collection growing), nor if you are seeking specialist research in a narrow field, this was a collection of books gathered to feed the intellectual hunger of the literary masses during the 19th & 20th Centuries. Started by Thomas Carlyle because he apparently found he waited too long for his requests at the British Library, it has been the treasure-trove and retreat of many of the great writers and readers since that time. Unlike the British Library you walk the stacks yourself, peruse, browse and then retreat to a reading desk, an armchair or a computer desk and submerge yourself in your new find.

As well as an extraordinary collection of books, the library subscribe to a fascinatingly broad collection of periodicals. I can see myself losing a day just grazing some of these, from Anatolian Archaeology to the Dublin Review, The Norfolk Ancestor, to World Interiors, the Wildean and back again! And nothing gets thrown away, weeded or remaindered. Periodicals are eventually bound and shelved, books suffering from the wear and tear of being lovingly read and enjoyed receive restoration and tlc.

The annual membership fee for a regular person on the street might feel like an ouch at £395, but it is payable in instalments (monthly or quarterly – if I’d known that earlier I’d have probably joined years ago!), and there is a supported membership for those who would find the full membership too much of a burden. When I think about it, it’s probably my book budget for 4 months, on a good year, so.... Will it reduce my book budget in the long run? Unlikely. Unfortunately if I love a book I have to have it in my own collection, perched and ready to dive into my outstretch hand at the drop of a bookmark! However, it will lead me to new horizons, and even lost horizons perhaps, as this looks like my very own Shangri-la! In April I hope to become a member, and I imagine it will be for life (though not all at once!).


 http://www.londonlibrary.co.uk/index.htm

Photograph (c) London Library 2005, taken by Shira Klasmer

Review: Trespass (Rose Tremain)

Tremain is one of those writers whose books are often very different, and this is definitely the case between this novel and her prize-winning last novel. That’s not to say that this isn’t a prize-winning book.

Set mostly in France, the story revolves around two sets of adult siblings. English Veronica and Anthony, and French Audrun and her brother Aromon. The thing that links both sets of siblings is that they are all damaged by their upbringing and by careless parents. They all harbour self blame and some of them are constantly attempting to compensate for acts they feel responsible for.

It is quite hard not to give too much away with a novel of this kind. However as the novel progresses you discover that each character has suffered and been responsible for a trespass. The trespasses may be literal or figurative, metaphorical but, all the same real. Anthony, dissatisfied with his now less than celebratory life decides to visit his sister in France, and when he gets there begins to feel his only chance of creating a future is to leave his old life behind and move to France. His search for a possible home leads him to Audrun and Aromon. The book opens with one kind of scream, and in a sense concludes with another.

At one point I was very put in mind of Dirk Bogarde’s French novels (though as it is years since I read these it was a ‘sense’ more than anything concrete), but no sooner had I thought this, than he gets himself a mention, in his role in the film Death in Venice.

This is a deftly structured novel which keeps you page turning. You become deeply involved with these deeply disturbing stories.

Review: Pollard (Laura Beatty)

This is a beautifully crafted, evocative and alive debut novel. We see Anne fleetingly as a misplaced adult at the opening of the book, the village outsider. But this is the story of a child who doesn’t even fit into her relatively mis-fit family, who seeks solace in the wood near where she lives. Leaving home aged 14 with nothing but a wheelbarrow of miscellaneous tools and objects liberated from her father’s shed, Anne takes up residence under a Pollard Ash tree in the depths of the wood. She learns how to survive within the wood, she learns how to prosper and to grow.

Foraging one day Anne meets Steve who lives with his aging mother and runs the local dump, and with whom she strikes up a friendship of support. Steve teaches her some of the survival techniques he has learned in the armed forces. In return for food and companionship, Anne works at reinvigorating some of the detritus that ends up at the dump, and with her care and attention Steve can sell it on to earn a living. It gives her a purpose and a connection, however tenuous, to the world outside the wood.

Gradually, in the wood, she is no longer an outsider to herself. She fits, she has a place in this fertile and living place. And Beatty makes us hear and breath and smell the wood. Only when the world outside encroaches within her world does Anne become insecure again.

Anne and the wood are sculpted with great warmth. As are some of the friendships she makes. I did feel however that the ending needed something else. We needed to be more fully led back to the life of Anne in adulthood, as this was not fully drawn at the outset, and I did feel I’d been left hanging a little at the close of the novel.

Review: The Spectator Bird (Wallace Stegner)

In the first few pages I thought we were back in ‘Angle of Repose’ territory with a man looking back on his life, and I guess on some levels we are. However ‘The Spectator Bird’ takes a different direction. Stegner is skilled at setting down layers of soil and dust and sand. Seventy year old Joe Allston, a retired literary agent lives with his wife Ruth, and they are chugging along, Joe watching the changes of old age on his neighbours and himself, when out of the blue he receives a postcard from a friend from the past. The memory sends him back to a series of diaries he made when twenty years earlier he and his wife spent several months in Denmark, the place where his mother originated from.

From this point there are two stories running, the story of now, as Ruth persuades Joe to read to her those notebooks each night, she sitting snug in their bed, and he sitting in his usual reading chair. The second story is the story contained in those notebooks of the complex intertwining of lives and histories as they become ensnared in the life of their landlady in Denmark, and coincidences occur that wind the history of Joe’s family with hers.

In the here and now, Ruth is on a mission to find out the truth of something that she never knew for sure, can she find out? Will it change anything if she does? In the past, and the past within that past, there are traumatic discoveries, gains and losses that I don’t feel I want reveal. Each reader should discover those twists and turns for themselves. But what I will say is that sometimes the journey made me a little breathless.

Both ‘Angle of Repose’ and ‘The Spectator Bird’ were written by Stegner in later life, and testify to the intensity and acute detail he achieved in describing the life of an aging person. The fragility and the strengths, the richness of life and the frailness of the body. And in most instances the determination to go on. To continue to that final, inevitable moment.

With both these novels, very shortly into them, I knew that they would be novels I would be reading again. I am an inveterate re-reader, and possibly 10-17% of books I will read again, but very few leave me knowing I will re-read them when I am barely half way through them.