Just after author Yukio Mishima finished the final novel in his “Sea of Fertility” tetralogy on November 25, 1970, he disemboweled himself in a ritual suicide—seppuku—committed in the presence of four members of his private army. He was then beheaded, in accordance with ritual. Mishima, aged forty-five, believed whole-heartedly in the strengths of the old Japanese emperors and in the strong, aristocratic culture that had evolved from the samurai. He never forgave Emperor Hirohito for denying his godliness at the end of World War II, and he despaired of the political wrong-headedness he saw on both the right and the left a generation after the war. Spring Snow, written in 1966, is the first of the four novels of what is generally regarded as his masterpiece, a series which explores the essence of life, the spiritual beliefs which make that life meaningful, the obligations of man to a wider society, the relationship of chance to free will, and the glory of dying for one’s beliefs. By using a historical approach, with each of these novels taking place later than the previous one, and by repeating his characters, Mishima allows the reader to see Japanese cultural and social history change over a fifty-year period. Spring Snow begins in 1912.
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In this 1910 story of Edwardian England, Forster illustrates the conflicts between the superior attitudes of the aristocracy and a developing feeling of obligation toward the “lower” classes which World War I will soon bring into sharp relief. Margaret and Helen Schlegel are intellectual and sensitive to the arts, with compassionate hearts for those less fortunate.
Immensely sympathetic to the economic position of the poor and women, Forster illustrates their financial dependence on others. Margaret, who secures the reader’s total sympathy, is charged with educating a close-minded dolt like Henry to be kinder and more empathetic towards the people he considers below him, but she achieves only limited success. Filled with incisive observations and great wit, the novel follows the narrative pattern of a melodrama, but Forster’s sensitivity to both sides–the practical and conservative values of Henry vs. the emotional and idealistic sides of Margaret and Helen–elevates the novel above the tawdry.
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Graham Greene’s most elaborate and personal examination of the good life–and the role of the Catholic church in teaching what the good life is–revolves around an unnamed “whiskey priest” in Mexico in the 1930s. Religious persecution is rife as secular rulers, wanting to bring about social change, blame the church for the country’s ills. When the novel opens, the church, its priests, and all its symbols have been banned for the past eight years from a state near Veracruz. Priests have been expelled, murdered, or forced to renounce their callings. The whiskey priest, however, has stayed, bringing whatever solace he can to the poor who need him, while at the same time finding solace himself in the bottle. Pursued by a police lieutenant who believes that justice for all can only occur if the church is destroyed, and by a mestizo, who is seeking the substantial reward for turning him in, the desperate priest finally decides to escape to a nearby state. (To read the full review, click on the title of this excerpt.)
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Indicating in the subtitle that this is “A story of darkest Earl’s Court,” Hangover Square is set in what was, in the 1940s, a seamy, low-rent district of London, a place in which those who were down on their luck, out of work, or homeless could manage to scrounge through life. Bars and cheap entertainment provided evening activities for people who often did not get up before noon. George Harvey Bone, the main character here, is out of work. Like the other unemployed and under-employed people he associates with, he lives on the fringes of the entertainment business-part-time actors and actresses, managers, and movie makers who party long and hard, fueled by massive quantities of alcohol. George’s drinking might have triggered his earliest “blackouts,” but here they have become more frequent and more debilitating–psychotic episodes of schizophrenia which end with the demand that he kill Netta Longdon to save himself.
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If you have never heard of Patrick Hamilton, you are not alone. Described by the [London] Daily Telegraph as “a criminally neglected British author,” Hamilton wrote nine novels from the 1920s through the early 1950s , along with the famous dramas of Rope and Gaslight. Almost Dickensian in his sympathetic attention to London’s poor and struggling classes, Hamilton may finally be gaining the widespread public recognition he so richly deserves. A writer of enormous gifts, Hamilton’s sense of time, place, and voice bring backstreet London in the 1930s alive with sense impressions. At the same time, he creates characters the reader instinctively cares about, even when they are being foolish. In Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, three overlapping novellas filled with dark humor focus on three different characters associated with a pub called “The Midnight Bell,” providing a close look at ordinary people living at the margins of society and doing the best they can in often fraught circumstances.
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