SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS

When the Japanese invaded China in 1937 and French Indo-China in 1941, all part of Japan’s expansive efforts to establish the Greater East Asia Prosperity Sphere, the handwriting should have been on the wall for the colony of Singapore, one of Great Britain’s most important military and economic centers, located as it is between India and China. Hubris, and the sense that their military power could not be realistically challenged, however, led to Britain’s lack of military preparedness and the astonishingly quick takeover of Malaya and Singapore by the Japanese in 1942, handing the British what Winston Churchill called “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history.” Author J. G. Farrell recreates these traumatic days in Singapore as the final novel in his “Empire Trilogy,” which, like Troubles (1970), about the Easter Rebellion in Ireland (1916) and The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), about the Muslim Mutiny in India in 1857, combines Farrell’s cynicism, black humor, and sense of absurdity with his uncompromising honesty about colonialism–Britain’s greed, its colonial “mission,” its superior attitudes, and its cruelty toward the local people they consider their “subjects.”

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One of Henry James’s earliest novellas, Daisy Miller (1878) follows the activities of a wealthy, and brashly confident, young American woman as she audaciously challenges European society in Vevey, Switzerland, and in Rome, having fun, doing what pleases her, and leaving staid European society gasping in her wake. Daisy Miller, whose father is in the US and whose mother is her ineffectual “chaperone,” is a free spirit in a society bound by unstated but rigid “rules,” determined to do whatever she wants, whenever she wants, with whomever she chooses. Frederick Winterbourne, an expatriate who has spent most of his life in Geneva, is attracted to Daisy, but his bonds with his stuffy aunt, Mrs. Cosgrove, and her friend, Mrs. Walker, both of whom govern ex-patriot society in Europe, leave him ill-equipped to deal with Daisy’s flouting of society’s conventions. When she is obviously attracted to Mr. Giovanelli, a singer/musician of no social standing, and when she is seen with him publicly in places that a “nice” girl would not grace at night, her reputation is threatened, and anyone associated with her is tainted. (To see the full review, click on the title at the top of this excerpt.)

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Published by Random House of South Africa, The Hero of Currie Road presents two kinds of stories. About half of them are about individual boys under Alan Paton’s care at the reformatory–sensitive and insightful tales about young teenagers at crossroads, often inspired to lead honorable lives but without the ability, always, to make the right choices. The second group of stories is about the white world, mostly adults, who reflect the ingrained attitudes of apartheid which have permanently limited the attitudes, aspirations, and achievements of the native majority population–and which Paton sometimes despairs of ever changing. All the stories from his first collection, Debbie Go Home (known as Tales from a Trouble Land in the US), from 1961, are included here, as are the stories from his 1975 collection, Knocking on the Door. Together they show Alan Paton in his most personal, most revealing moments, in which he frankly states opinions that he cannot make in his novels, a form for which “the inexorable rule is that you must put your story first, not your politics or religion or your anger about the Group Areas Act.” (To read the entire review, click on the title of this excerpt.)

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In what many call her most autobiographical novel, Virginia Woolf creates a warm and intimate portrait of a family which resembles her own–her parents, brothers and sisters–and the friends with whom they enjoy their summer vacation on the Isle of Skye in the Hebrides. Mrs. Ramsay, the mother of eight children, is the linchpin of the fictional family. She adores her husband, and though she often feels she fails him, she persists in smoothing his way so that he can work, managing the house and children, and inviting large groups of his students and friends to visit. Often strict and always right, Mr. Ramsay loves being the center of praise, but rarely praises others, and is often insensitive to the hopes and dreams of his children. No unifying plot and no unifying voice tie the three sections of the novel together, and many of the early characters play little role in the ending, yet in her hands the novel “works.” Woolf captures not only the passage of time but also the effects of time on all of her characters as they continue their lives, however changed, following in the footsteps of experimental writers like James Joyce, and taking literary chances which place her work with the best of the twentieth century. (Click on the title to see full review.)

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