The Monster

The Monster

 

My grandparents’ house was a 1920’s semi with an impressive, curved bay window at the front, stained glass in the door and a small kitchen at the back of the house, added on as an afterthought, as if cooking and feeding a family weren’t the hugely involving occupation that it actually was.  It seemed a dark house to me and I was always grateful that when I was inside it there were lots of people crammed in to make a noise.  I felt that it would have been a desolate space when it was empty, somewhere I might’ve held my breath and trod very carefully.  We were not so close to my father’s family because my father was not close to anyone and only maintained relationships due to the work that my mother put in, hosting Sunday lunches and Christmases for his four siblings and his five children, two of which were hers.  In addition to my mother’s efforts there would be a bi-annual tea at my grandparents’ house.  By the time I, and then my sister, came along, my father’s second family, my grandparents were elderly.  Or rather, my grandmother, some sixteen years older than her husband, my father’s step-father, was elderly.  She seemed to find movement difficult, or an inconvenience, so the work of hosting fell to my grandad.  He was more than up to the task.

 

The food was always the same, plentiful and traditional.  These teas were when I got to eat two things that I did not get to eat on any other occasions that I can remember.  Firstly, pickled onions.  A pickled onion with cheese is one of life’s greatest pleasures.  To a child raised on a bland palette, the spicy heat of the onion cutting through the creamy mustiness of the cheddar made my eyes water.  My father would always say how much he liked pickled onions as he and I made a beeline for them as soon as tea was served.  But for some reason they never found their way into our own home.  The second treat was a sherry trifle.  Trifle has all the elements of any great pudding, that is to say, cream, custard, sponge and fruit, with the added indulgence of alcohol.  Why we do not eat trifle so much as a nation, I cannot understand.  I was a greedy child and I am a greedy adult.  I think because I was raised by my mother who is a born puritan, I took any opportunity as a child to fill my boots.  The temptation that trifle presented was why it never made an appearance on our kitchen table.  Anything with that much cream would have been considered downright sinful by my mother who worshipped at the alter of Rosemary Conley and aimed to cut every type of fat out of her own diet and that of her household.  Small amounts of sugar were allowed as a treat.  A few squares of chocolate on Friday, sometimes even milk chocolate!  Otherwise, indulgence was restricted to Rich Tea biscuits which my mother bought religiously because ‘nobody likes them very much, so they will last’.  I think of my mother saying this with great conviction and I think that nothing sums up her character more than her attitude towards biscuits – it is advisable not to have what you really want or what you really enjoy because you might lose your mind.  Instead, there was safety and therefore comfort, in the bland snap of a Rich Tea biscuit.  Because yes, sometimes, she would snap them in half so as to pace her already measured pleasure.  Nothing divides our characters more than this attitude to pleasure.  Whether I am as I am as an act of rebellion is hard to say but it certainly explains the residual guilt I often feel after any form of pleasure.  If the world was ending soon, I’d be shovelling huge, dense mouthfuls of trifle in my mouth, delirious with the thought that I’d die before the guilt set in.

 

Despite my gluttony, these family teas exist in my memory as quite glamourous affairs.  Indeed, there is undoubtable glamour in trifle; not a beige, steaming pile to be obliterated by gloopy custard, as we traditionally know the English pudding but an exquisite feast of blood red fruit suspended in shiny jelly, layered elegantly and aesthetically with sponge, cold, set custard and then pillowy, velvety whipped cream on top, perhaps with a scattering of flaked almonds for the truly sophisticated consumer.  All served in a trifle dish which, still today, I consider as a particularly curvaceous and beautiful piece.  I keep the sherry trifle alive but my own children are less enamoured, seeming not to understand a pudding if it does not consist of chocolate in some form.  But I’ve said too much about trifle because the food was only part of the experience of these gatherings.  They were a chance to see relatives who I did not know well, in their natural habitat.  My father had two brothers and two sisters, all of whom were quite different from him.  For a start, my uncles and one aunt smoked cigarettes as if they were their life source.  My father has always been strongly risk-averse and could never inhale smoke into his lungs, or do anything at all that was bad for his physical health.  In this way, and perhaps only in this way, he and my mother were aligned. But my father’s siblings would stand around in the tiny kitchen, blowing their smoke out of the back door and chatting their chat which was full of a dry humour that seemed effortless and cool, with none of the intensity that flavoured my father’s talking.  My aunt is still the most glamourous and amusing woman I know.  She quit the cigarettes before they killed her but unfortunately they got the better of my father’s older brother, killing him before he reached sixty.

 

Whilst the grown-ups were engaged with their talk, we children would run from the front sitting room, where my mother and other aunt would sit with my granny, to the dining room where we would stop and stare briefly at the food laid out on the enormous, oval, mahogany table, to the kitchen and back again, in the frenetic way of a pack of children.  We rarely ventured upstairs.  Upstairs was unnaturally silent.  Because all the doors were shut, the landing was in darkness.  Occasionally, my Aunt Judith would take my baby cousin Rose upstairs to change her nappy, or try and get her to sleep in one of the bedrooms that I’d never seen inside.  As in all large families, there is nearly always an unspoken command of ‘don’t wake the baby’ that may have explained why we rowdy cousins didn’t bound upstairs to continue our games.  As soon as one of us so much as stepped foot on the staircase in the hall, we became cowed and whispering, as if crossing a boundary to an unknown territory where we were suddenly unsure of the rules of play.  But there was an occasion, I think I must have been about six or seven, when we became more daring.  The consequences of this risk-taking were, I recall, absolutely terrifying.

 

My grandmother always had a lodger.  This was very common, I think, after the second world war and for some decades afterwards.  Not that people don’t have lodgers today but back then, particularly amongst the working class, a spare room was seen as wasted potential.  The idea of not putting somebody in there and charging money was a frivolous oversight.  Lodgers, as I recall, were always men.  Looking back, it seems perfectly reasonable that we children would be stopped from taking our noise on a rampage upstairs when there was a paying guest trying to enjoy some peace and quiet in their own room.  At the time, however, these men were an ominous presence.  We never saw them.  We were told, sometimes, that they were at home but we never saw them come or go.  We never heard anything from the room at the top of the stairs that they stayed in.  One lodger, for some undisclosed reason, or undisclosed to we children, my grandmother thoroughly disliked.  Women of a certain age speak their minds because my other granny was exactly the same; if they feel dislike towards someone, they speak it; not to their victim’s face but in the course of gossip, never fearing that this might come across as ungenerous or unkind.  My granny would say that her current lodger was a monster.  She said it with a dramatic, lip-curling disgust.  To me, as an anxious child, I took this description very literally.  Upstairs in the house where we played, resided a monster.  But fortunately, the monster was contained in his own realm and we never saw him.  As a concept, he was so separate from the family that it seemed he was not really a living, breathing presence but more, as my grandmother put it, a creature from a fairy tale.  

 

Until, one day, he was real.  In a game that must have made me so giddy as to forget, temporarily, the dangers that lurked high up in the house, I ran towards the top of the stairs, laughing so that laughter took over my whole body.  My cousin Jess running after me, shrieking as well, neither of us really aware that we were edging further and further up the staircase.  Suddenly, and I registered it on Jess’s face before anything else, the door of the lodger’s room opened and standing up there above me and looking right at me, was the monster.  I suppose he was just going to the bathroom, or perhaps he wondered what the commotion was but in my mind he was absolutely furious at me, specifically me, for ruining his peace.  On seeing him I screamed and continued to scream, as I fled down the stairs.  The grown-ups were seated around the table as I burst into the dining room, screaming in terror, “It’s the monster, I’ve seen the monster!”  My grandmother held her arms open to me and I buried my head in her lap as she stroked my hair and made soothing sounds.  

“Stupid man!” I remember her saying, as my face remained hidden from everyone as I sobbed into her lap.  I remember the comfort of being able to bury my face.  It seemed possible to have these strong emotions, in front of all these grown-ups, if my face and my slowly surfacing shame, were not visible, and in turn, if I could not see them looking at me.  When I finally calmed down, I lifted my head out of granny’s shelter.  My mother looked flushed and smiled her embarrassed smile; not directly at me but into the middle of the table.  When I recount this now, I think of all the times I was told, as a child, that I was too sensitive, or that I needed to calm down, to count to ten.  I learned, before I learned much else, that displaying emotions was distasteful.  Still, if I find myself talking on a subject that I’m passionate about, I catch myself gesticulating and talking fast and I am flooded with the heat of shame, that I have let myself slip out of myself and that the people I’m talking to will be silently wondering how to move away from this unacceptable display of feeling.  Nearly always, my response to shame, is to put food into my mouth.

Taste, by Stanley Tucci - A Review

 

When I began Stanley Tucci’s Taste, the language seemed very basic after the academic sophistication of Olivia Laing, whose book I read previously.  However, once stuck in, I realised that simplicity is not quite the same as basic.  Tucci has an endearingly generous and avuncular style of writing that is aptly colloquial and allows his subject matter to shine.  Coming to the French/Italian Alpine borderland for a ski trip, I realised that I had not packed any books for my children.  Shocking oversight, I know but then they usually pack their own reading material.  So, given the safe content of this book and the accessibility of the language, I have been reading it to the children at bedtime.  They are loving it!  Even the section about slaughtering a goat with a blunt knife, an atypically gruesome memory from the actor’s childhood, was met with awe rather than disgust.

 

The real charm of this book is its complete lack of culinary snobbery.  Indeed, it is not a book about cuisine but a book about food.  Tucci was the child of hard-working Italian immigrants who brought the recipes of southern Italy to the state of New York and embraced the food of their new home as much as honouring the food of their motherland.  That meant that whilst the smell of meatballs scented the house on Sunday mornings, the family also enjoyed an abundance of tiny crabs from the Hudson river and Corn on the cob that is also grown in New York state.  What Tucci seems to marvel at, is how his parents, with minimal financial means, were able to give him a childhood of such flavoursome richness.  At a time when most families grew some sort of food in their gardens, it highlights how little we now appreciate raw ingredients.  It made me want to eat a sun-ripened tomato straight off the vine and be able to differentiate one variety from another.  I enjoy food and cooking enormously but to eat seasonally and with a real respect for the best ingredients is something, due to time constraints, that few of us allow for these days.  Therefore, the subtitle to the book is profound as much as it is accurate: My Life Through Food.  

 

The way that our eating habits have changed over the decades is as much social commentary as it is food porn.  The latter appeal is, of course, strong.  Tucci relays in detail the ‘religion’ of pasta, setting out why certain shapes should not be eaten with certain sauces, or the history of ragù.  If you are someone who can take pleasure in reading a cookery book, then this book provides recipes and history and storytelling combined with such charm that, as reader, I longed, perhaps as much as Tucci, to be able to time-travel back to the suburbs of east coast America in the seventies and sit down with his family for a typical mid-week feast.  However, knowledgable as Tucci maybe on Italian/American cuisine, despite being in possession of an English wife, he is embarrassingly lacking in knowledge of English cuisine.  He shows himself up in one chapter by stating how much he has learned to appreciate the Festive English tradition of sticky toffee pudding after the Christmas lunch, accompanied by a glass of Port.  Stanley, you plonker, this is not a thing.  Surely there was an agent or an editor who read this and cringed so convulsively that the offending passage would be removed?!

 

When Tucci describes his beloved grandfather, he seems to capture the essence of this love-letter to his upbringing when he writes:

 

            ‘Like many Italian immigrants of that era, the life he led was a very simple one.  A family, a steady job and a garden were the bastions that tethered him firmly to this world and protected him from the swift swirling chaos of the twentieth century.’

 

I think, if most of us are honest, we would admit to wanting more than this, and the twenty-first century has certainly encouraged us in our ambitions.  But in striving and fixing our gaze on some distant point in the future, we have forsaken something of such priceless worth that we are all lacking the rich and satisfying flavours of the past.  It was a past that understood that all life is celebrated by sitting and eating food together; food that has been made with love.

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart, a review

 It's a happy thing, when an author writes a second novel that is even better than the first.  Especially when the first was so stupendously excellent.  We have a rare talent in Douglas Stuart.  He is able to bring the most unglamorous of settings to life so vibrantly that as much as the reader might be repelled by the squalor of early nineties tenements in the east end of Glasgow, we are also fascinated enough to want to peer a little more closely into this world of difference; this unknown landscape of language and violence and doocots.  I'm pleased to be in Glasgow again, pleased that Stuart knew there was much more to give the reader from the frontline of a history that is not often told.  And what's a doocot?  A doocot is a dovecote but if you still need help, they are structures for housing pigeons, containing compartments for the birds to roost and lay eggs.  

Young Mungo follows the coming of age of Protestant Mungo Hamilton who, we are told early on, "would do anything just to make other people feel better."  As Stuart begins to illustrate the brutal environment of the housing estates where Mungo lives, with the descriptive power of Dickens, we realise that a boy like Mungo may not fair well in this environment of toxic masculinity.  One day, Mungo stumbles across James, another boy with a gentle nature who also happens to be a Catholic.  James has rebuilt an old doocot and occupies himself caring for his pigeons that he houses within.  These gentle, star-crossed lovers, beautifully symbolised by the Wolfgang Tillmans' picture on the book's cover, are destined to be crushed by the environment in which they have to live.  This creates a tension throughout the novel in much the same way that a tension manifested in Shuggie Bain.  However, in Young Mungo, the feeling of tension explodes in the last chapters of the novel when the plot seems to race towards its final crescendo of multiple acts of violence, in which we understand that being brutalised is not a choice but a necessity in order to stay alive.  

The plotting and pace of the book are some of the qualities that give it the edge over Shuggie Bain.  Equally, the characters are more multifaceted in Young Mungo.  The mother in Shuggie Bain was in some ways, too good to be true.  Although we view her through the lens of the adoring young son, the lines she speaks are often so articulate and formidable it is hard to believe that she is really the uneducated drunk we know her to be.  In Young Mungo, the mother figure Mo-Maw is more believable than the rose-tinted, Tart-with-a-Heart depiction that we get from Shuggie.  We learn from the outset that Mo-Maw is transformed by drink into her grotesquely self-serving alter ego Tattie-Bogle.  Mo-Maw is at worst this drunken monster and at best painfully negligent in respect of her child-rearing.  It is clear that it is too late for this woman to be redeemed.  Instead, Stuart gives some of the best lines to Mungo's sister, Jodie.  Jodie is the sober voice of an already disillusioned youth who is tirelessly trying to rescue her own and her brother's lives from the clutches of poverty.  She is eminently quotable, providing memorable commentary on the chaotic lives around her. When she and Mungo finally find Mo-Maw, who has been absent some weeks, Jodie delivers a stinging dressing down to her mother, 

"You don't fucking visit your own weans.  Ya mad auld bitch.  You come home every night and make sure they've been fed and cleaned and then ye tuck them into bed.  You make sure they have done their homework and have had enough to eat for their lunch and then if you are fucking lucky ye get ten minutes peace to yersel afore ye start it all a-fuckin'-gain."  

She shows her mettle again in chapter ten when she decides that she and Mungo must intervene in the domestic violence they can hear from the flat below theirs.  This chapter is an exemplary short story. It could stand alone as a perfectly constructed narrative with beginning, middle and end; what it shows, with such subtlety and nuance, is the many ways in which poverty corrupts and perverts.  It is evidence of Stuart's skill as storyteller, something that seems unlabored in its fullness.  I can't wait for his third book.

A Book Review of The Secret History by Donna Tart

 

Towards the end of the Summer, perhaps after so much 'Summer reading', I was slowing down and failing to fully engage with the books that I was reading.  I felt that I needed something really engrossing and plot-driven to draw me back into the world of fiction.  Actually, perhaps I just needed to read some non-fiction for a while but I tried to think about the books that were renowned for being unputdownable.  The Secret History, a book I'd always meant to read, was hailed by people I knew as just such a book.  Readers who had an academic background in literature, as well as friends I knew who had never read many books at all, were all agreed; The Secret History was a book to make you forget the real world.  I had previously read Donna Tart's second novel, The Little Friend, and had responded to it, I think, like many people.  It was a highly accomplished coming of age novel set in small-town America.  But that is not how the story is initially offered up.  From the opening scenes, the reader is lead to believe that we will, by the end of the novel, discover the great mystery of a young child's death that has rocked this small community.  And we don't.  The literary world felt robbed of a sufficient denouement.  However, I think what Donna Tart was doing with The Little Friend was attempting to right some of the wrongs of The Secret History.  On balance, I would say that her latter offering is the better written novel.

Firstly, there are too many characters in The Secret History.  There is no general rule for how many central characters a novel should have.  If there was, Tolstoy would've broken said rule.  But weakly drawn characters who exist as plot devices should be kept to a minimum or done away with completely.  Of the six main characters, I would say that at least three of them are completely two dimensional.  The short-hand for these characters' personalities is that one is gay and the other are a brother and sister twin duo, possibly involved in an incestuous relationship.  That little bomb shell is dropped in at the end, presumably in order to keep you interested in these empty characters.  Incest, unless you're writing a novel about incest, is a rather desperate attention-grabbing sub-plot but to call it a sub-plot is generous.  It is thrown into the narrative as if as an afterthought towards the end of the novel; it makes sense of nothing, and if The Secret History were an essay it would be like breaking that cardinal rule of... don't introduce a new idea in the conclusion.

Another peculiarity of the book is how few female characters there are.  The incestuous twin is the only main female character and as I have ventured, not a fully realised character, although we are meant to view her sympathetically.  All the other vey minor female characters are unlikeable.  I can't think of a male author writing a book mainly peopled with female characters.  Presumably this was deliberate and experimental but as characterisation is such an area of weakness in this novel, it may be one of the reasons that the book doesn't hang together cohesively.  If we can agree that these characters are surplus to requirements then it is fair to deduce that they exist to pad out the text.  If a writer sets out to write a psychological thriller, they really ought to read Patricia Highsmith first.  They would then understand that pacing your plot is not the same as padding out your plot.  If, after reading Ripley or Strangers on a Train, you come to the conclusion that you cannot get under the skin of your characters, certainly not enough to persuade your readers that your characters should get away with a crime, then go away and work out where your writing skills lie.  To be fair, I think that's what Tart did which is why she came back with The Little Friend.  Her central character in that book, the child, Harriet, comes to life fully on the page and we care deeply about her safety throughout some frightening experiences. However, in The Secret History, I wanted the lot of them to be caught.  That weird group of implausible students who were meant to be so clever but always seemed so obtuse; we were meant to believe that strange things happen in such strange circles.  This, in part, is justification for the very unlikely first murder.

This is perhaps one of the key points; this group of students who come to the fateful decision to kill a friend (sorry not sorry) are like a parody of students at a semi-elite university in a north-eastern leafy town in America.  Perhaps in this way, The Secret History, published thirty years ago, has not stood the test of time because I don't think there exists such mystique surrounding the student lifestyle; the student experience no longer feels elitist but now is part of the main stream.  Sally Rooney has written about students but her focus was never the day to day experience of study in the way that Tart focusses greedily on every aspect of tertiary level education.  She expects us to believe that just such a group of gothic, weirdo classicists would exist without ever bothering to give them real psychologies or real dialogue.  They are representative of 'students', a special category of person who we lesser mortals cannot really understand.  Only now, everyone has been to university and can say, "it is not really like that".  On the point of feeling outdated, another curious element of the book is that sex does not feature in any detailed sense.  Most novelists today will not shy away from sex scenes; it is considered as a fundamental part of a character's life and even if only the emotional impact of intimacy is documented, the reader recognises the realism of the world the character inhabits.  In The Secret History, sex is hardly alluded to and certainly not described.  We know that our narrator, Richard, has sex but it is never made an event, rather we are told that he was too drunk to recall what happened.  This is one further example of not fully realising her characters; it feels dated as writers accept now that realism is a 'worts and all' approach to the psychological elements of a character's life.

The Secret History is not one of the best psychological thrillers but it was a debut novel, and it is almost unfortunate for Donna Tart that it became such a cult success.  She didn't write another novel for ten years.  If it hadn't been such a success perhaps she would have come back with something honed and better-crafted sooner.  As it is, there is some great writing in The Secret History.  Tart is very good at describing PTSD, the way our world shifts after trauma but for the rest of the world, life is unchanged and maddeningly mundane to witness.  She is also very good at slowing down pace at moments of action.  In some ways this disconnect between unfolding drama and the slowness of our thoughts is almost comical.  In one of the final scenes, Richard is shot in the abdomen and his slow acceptance of the fact of this, is detailed with almost deadpan humour which serves to pace the dramatic scene unfolding simultaneously, "I put my hand over the hole in my shirt.  Bending forward slightly, I felt a sharp pain.  I expected everyone to stop and look at me.  No one did.  I wondered if I should call it to their attention." Not only do we recognise the occasions when we assume that our pain must have communicated itself to others when in fact, the other players are oblivious but this also reaffirms Richard's position, as always, on the periphery of the friendship group, as any good narrator should be.  In this way, Tart is similarly good at describing the aftermath of Bunny's murder, all the friends assuming that someone must know, someone must have smelled it on them but life continues completely unchanged, events even playing to their advantage.  

These insights are where the writing showed most promise.  Perhaps Tart herself would be surprised that people still read The Secret History thirty years after she wrote it.  It's legend, if not its refinement, has certainly stood the test of time.

I HATE MEN, Pauline Harmange

 

Yesterday, I went out for dinner.  Sitting on the table next to me were two men, I would guess in their early fifties.  They were all low-slung jeans and bomber jackets and the obligatory paunch.  They, well, one of them, talked really loudly about a lot of shit: cars and nice restaurants he'd eaten in.  Whenever the young waitress came to the table he made lots of funny, suggestive, flirtatious jokes.  I say funny but I suppose I mean gross and revolting, more accurately.  During one hilarious interaction he told her that he and his fat friend were going to be waiting for her after her shift to take her out and show her a good time.  And the young girl smiles and tries to pretend that she's enjoying the sad banter from the ageing dullard.  Why does she?  I guess it's her job to some extent but I also guess she knows that if she is sullen, if she fails to laugh at his 'jokes', perhaps even, if she tells him to shut his leering face, at that moment he will turn.  "Can't you take a joke?" "Takes herself a bit seriously, doesn't she?" "Must be on her period" Some examples that might be fired at her.  She will unlikely have the upper hand in this situation, she will unlikely silence him.  And it was at this moment, as at many moments, when I would have liked to have handed her 'I Hate Men' by Pauline Harmange. This small, mighty book, more of an essay, in fact, should be handed out to all girls around the age of fifteen.  This is an age when they are mature enough to engage but young enough that the patriarchy has not solidified their way of thinking into a defeated acceptance of misogyny; into a mindset of, how do I avoid misogyny? Be pretty, be slim, take up no space, be quiet, smile, care, breed, don't breed, be sexy, be chaste etc etc etc.  Rather, suggests Harmange, turn your world on its head and take a totally different approach.

Harmange's argument is that misandry is not just a legitimate response to misogyny, 'a principle of precaution', as she puts it but a way of fostering a new-found sisterhood.  Misandry would pose no threat to men, not in the way that misogyny poses to women.  The playing field is not level.  We will not, through our hatred of men, become rapists, murderers, stalkers, domestic abusers as men are but rather we will come together as a necessary means of action.  The book is, perhaps contrary to the impression created by the title, incredibly optimistic.  Harmange ends with, 'Soon the patriarchy will topple and we shall dance among the ruins of the old order.'  It certainly made me want to dance.  My favourite chapter was 'Mediocre as a white dude' which, as well as being insightful, was very funny; there is nothing dry about this little book.  Harmange gives excellent advice when she writes, 'Whenever I'm beset by doubt, I think about all the mediocre men who've managed to make their mediocrity pass for competence.' She puts a little Asterix here *You know exactly who I'm talking about.  Hahaha, which nation's leader would you pick?

Few things are more powerful than a writer who takes your defeat and pity and shame, seems to recognise it accurately and invites you to turn all of it into anger.  Unapologetically this is what Harmange does and it is liberating and poignant to read the angry words and the call to arms; 'Our anger insists that men take responsibility for their behaviour and spurs on our revolution.'  I wish that I had had this book when I was younger.  Harmange, it will be no surprise to learn, is French.  When the book was first released in France there was a media frenzy after somebody (a man, obvs) tried to get it banned.  It garnered some lucrative notoriety through this, although I don't believe that it ever was banned so you are able to go out and buy many copies and hand them out to your nieces and daughters and maybe, even, the odd man.

Instagram

 

I recently took two of my older children on holiday for a post-exam city break to Palma de Majorca.  It was hot, there was a pool overlooking the harbour.  We spent quality time together without their younger siblings.  We explored the city, ate tapas, swam in the sea.  How lucky we are.  Equally, the hotel we stayed in was crap and under-staffed, water poured through our bathroom ceiling at one point and we had to change rooms.  It was two miles out of the city with very little in the way of entertainment close by.  Everything was twice the price that we would have expected.  Evening meals did not come in at under a hundred euros. We all shared a room and I discovered that both my children snore.  In some kind of fiendish plan, if I got one of them to turn over and thus cease, the other would then start up.  I was permanently exhausted.  Then there were the arguments about how we would spend the day, with my son always up for some kind of expedition and my daughter wanting to drink (expensive) cocktails by the pool all day.  And then our flight was delayed by 24 hours necessitating and extra night's accommodation and a lot of plans rearranging.

My instagram feed was, perhaps inevitably, full of pictures of the bluest skies and seas, myself from a strategic angle in a bikini, delicious food and beach vistas.  This is how my Instagram feed looks.  I saw this quote above today and I thought, 'well, of course!' Does anybody not realise this? But it seems that some people consider only posting the best bits to be inauthentic.  I take issue with this.  There are plenty of accounts that you can follow if you want to zoom in on misery and I think that's fine.  Make this space what you want it to be.  For me, Instagram is scrap-booking.  It has an almost entirely aesthetic value for me and these are the sorts of accounts that I follow.  I will hold my hand up and say that I quite wittingly cherry-pick the best bits and post those.  Sometimes, the weeks are full of nothing but shit and then there is some beautiful light filtering through the trees and I capture it and share it and cling onto it.  I do this because it makes me feel better, in the moment and when I look back.  It seems like the moments of quiet loneliness, where things go wrong and we wonder why we bother, and getting up and functioning is hard; these moments look after themselves just fine. But if we're not careful, in a landscape of constantly negative and frightening newsfeed, the precious moments might just get lost in the noise.  That isn't to say that I am advocating suppressing sadness or gaslighting our own travails.  Rather, take it to counselling.

If this sounds like an environment of fakery, I would argue that the connections I make on Instagram, although physically distant, are incredibly energising and, yes, real, to me.  You really can bond over a mutual appreciation of beauty, with people outside of your four walls, your town or your country.  What moves somebody speaks volumes about their inner life and values.  I will never trivialise the significance of a new dress or cushion because these are the things that distract us with their colour, they allow us an outlet of creativity in a largely uncreative world.  And it is the colour that I am seeking on Instagram.  I follow relatively few blue tick accounts because they are often not curated by the account-holders themselves, and I follow even fewer accounts set up to promulgate a single cause.  I have long since done away with Twitter and Facebook because of their bear pit environments but the little squares of people's precious moments helps me to feel connected to a bigger world than my immediate environment.

When I look back at my holiday pictures, courtesy of Instagram, where maybe I've cropped out an unsightly building or lightened the exposure so that our expressions are more visible, I am reminded of the ornate architecture that I may never see again, the heat on my skin, the aftermath of a joke, how nice my new dress felt to wear.  If Instagram didn't come along when it did, I would've continued to make scrap books and albums, the only difference now is that more people get to see my pictures (lucky souls).  Someone from my hometown, I discover, has just visited the tiny town on the north coast of Majorca that my son and I travelled to by train.  These tentacles of appreciation and connection are new but shouldn't be viewed suspiciously.  Let us at least allow that the digital age has some good in it.

BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU

 

        'Aren't we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended? After that there was no chance for the planet, and no chance for us.  Or maybe it was just the end of one civilisation, ours, and at some time in the future another will take its place.  In that case we are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something.'

Sally Rooney is a young and brilliant writer, accurately capturing the hesitancy of the zeitgeist.  I say this before I write a somewhat critical review of her latest offering.  Beautiful World, Where are You (without question mark, so passé) has divided my social media feed ever since it came to publication, so I had to delve in and see for myself.  Like her previous novels, Beautiful World explores the relationships between four characters who, in this case, are a bit older, all hovering around the significant age of thirty and in the grips of existential inertia. The passage above seemed to me, when I read it, to sum up the heart of the book and also encapsulates, nebulously, my own view of the younger generation.  Because, although Rooney's characters are a little older in this novel, she is still really writing about a younger generation.  These characters live in house-shares, are unmarried and childless, essentially only responsible for themselves but nevertheless, carry with them a great weight. What is the weight? 

It is what I notice in the young: A caution and a cynicism that stops them in their tracks.  A lot of the novel focuses on the female characters' inability to prostrate themselves for the men that they profess to love; to hold something of themselves back at all times.  As a feminist, I feel that I should enjoy this as a manifestation of female power, except these characters are definitively without power.  And as a reader, I would love at least one of the characters to prostrate themselves for something, to run towards the fear, to care, to indulge.  Because then, something might actually happen.  It is tempting, whilst reading, to feel that the main thing weighing on these young people is their astoundingly boring personalities.  They may indeed be very real.  Rooney is concerned with what is real now, which is why the long emails between the female characters that form a big part of the narrative are, I assume, her own stream of consciousness.  At times, I wasn't sure if I was reading Alice's or Eileen's words.  They were largely interchangeable.  The content of these emails was genuinely interesting and I would welcome a book of essays from Rooney but it was a little lazy.  The two male characters were much more identifiable because they were so different.  Perhaps Rooney only really knows women who are like herself, or Alice, or Eileen.

So it's a novel where not much happens and this is my natural terrain as a reader.  Only, Rooney is not much bothered with giving us any aesthetic pleasure from her prose.  It is frustratingly and presumably, deliberately, flat. At the end of the non-epistolary chapters, the narrative switches to the present tense where the narrator gives an overview of the scene that has just played out; a sort of zooming out of perspective which is deliberately visual.  In this way, the nod to cinematic effects and the flat prose suggest that Rooney is now so secure in the knowledge that her novels will be televised that she is jumping ahead and writing for the screen.  Or, that her natural medium is actually drama.  In a recent interview, Rooney claims that her prose is 'secondary to the characters'.  Perhaps she might consider, in her next novel some attempt at using language to elevate or provide humour, or, goodness me, perhaps to entertain.  No spoilers here but don't pick up a Sally Rooney novel if you're looking for humour. I think the best way of describing this book is in culinary terms.  It will do you good and as such, it is uncompromising in its wholesome credentials but in order to really enjoy it, which I believe Rooney would consider basic, you need to refine your palette.