SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS

Booker Prize winner Graham Swift has never shied away from literary challenges, and with this novel he tackles two issues which few other writers would even attempt, much less succeed in overcoming. This novel is almost totally about death in all its aspects, with no humor to leaven the heavy mood and the profound sadness which the novel ultimately evokes. And, making his subject and themes even more difficult to bring to life, he creates a main character and many peripheral characters who are inarticulate people who think in clichés and deal with the everyday challenges of their lives in “tried and true” fashion. The reader quickly becomes aware that these characters have few, if any, thoughts about the larger world, any perceived role they might have in it, and even how they might differ, in the grand scheme of life, from the animals on the farm to which they have devoted their lives. Still, Swift manages to create a novel which inspires the reader’s complete empathy with his limited main characters who stay true to their limited views of life and their limited expectations. His novel becomes, ultimately, a study of how an unreflective, uneducated everyman handles the disasters that fate and time deal out to him, over which he believes he has no control.

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Mario Vargas Llosa opens this fictionalized biography of Roger Casement as Casement awaits a decision on his application for clemency from a death sentence. As he reconstructs Casement’s life as a reformer and advocate for benighted native populations being exploited by various countries and corporations, he returns again and again to Casement throughout the novel as he rethinks every aspect of his life. Casement concludes, in most cases, that he acted honorably – or tried to. An advocate for indigenous populations exploited by governments and corporations, Casement has revealed the horrors of the Congo under the rule of Leopold II, and of Amazonia at the turn of the century, when a Peruvian entrepreneur controls vast quantities of land over which he has total control. His rubber company has many London investors. Ultimately, Casement believes that the Irish who are being ruled by the British have similar problems to indigenous populations, and he acts against the British and must face the consequences.

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Considering the esoteric subject matter, the hypnotic charm of this biography comes as a complete surprise. Though I had expected the book to be good, I had no idea how quickly and how thoroughly it would engage and ultimately captivate my interest. Through this sensitive author/artist, the reader shares the quest for information about five generations of his family history, delights in the discovery of his family’s art collecting prowess, and thrills at his ability to convey the charms of a collection of 264 netsukes from the early 1800s. Despite the sadness that accompanies the Anschluss in Vienna and leads to the loss of the family’s entire financial resources, the novel is far from melancholic. Ultimately, he connects with the reader, who cannot help but feel privileged to have been a part of this author’s journey of discovery.

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It is difficult to think of Alice Thomas Ellis, the pen name of Anna Haycraft, without also thinking of some of her equally talented contemporaries – Beryl Bainbridge, whom she mentored, Penelope Fitzgerald, Muriel Spark, Jane Gardam, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, Penelope Fitzgerald, and others – all of whom also wrote brilliant, often satiric, darkly humorous, and psychologically astute novels about women and families, primarily in the 1970s and 1980s. Ellis’s first novel, THE SIN EATER (1977), pays homage to the Welsh tradition of the sin eater, someone who would come to the household of a recently deceased person, and enact a short ritual in which s/he would “eat” the sins of the deceased so that s/he could then safely pass on to a happy afterlife. In this novel, the Anglo-Welsh patriarch of an old family is dying in Llanelys, and his children and their spouses gather at the estate to await the end. Stunning imagery, delicious turns of phrase, and lively dialogue make the narrative sparkle. In PILLARS OF GOLD Ellis writes some of the wittiest dialogue ever, crafting a hilarious tale in which one of the neighbors is missing and the neighborhood does not want to report her absence to the police for fear of being wrong. Then a body matching the description of the missing woman is discovered in a nearby canal. More satire of contemporary life.

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Seventy-year-old Harry Chapman has been ill at home, and has just been admitted to a hospital for diagnosis and treatment. Confined to bed for the next two weeks, Harry, a writer, cannot help sharing his thoughts and “suppositions” with the reader and sometimes the hospital staff, recreating conversations and bringing family members, friends, and literary characters to life. But Harry does not stop there. Books, poems, plays, and paintings are also a vivid part of his on-going reality, and some of Harry’s favorite literary characters and his most admired fellow writers cross the borders of reality and fiction to work their way into his memories of real people and real events. His attention constantly jumps around, but it is through these seemingly random memories, stories, favorite poems, and observations about life that author Paul Bailey succeeds in bringing Harry to life and creating a “real” person for the reader. Ultimately, author Paul Bailey creates a novel in which Harry becomes an everyman on an odyssey, one in which he seeks answers to life’s most basic questions of what life means and whether the journey has been worthwhile.

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