2022 wasn't the absolute best in terms of reading, though I did, obviously, read some books. Our book group has dwindled to pretty much just me, Ruth, Helen and Ali, and although we enjoy meeting once a month to drink wine and chat, discussing the book seems to form an ever-smaller portion of the evening. Still useful to be forced to read things you perhaps wouldn't have chosen yourself, though, as with the first book on the list below, which I actually read and reviewed last January but didn't get around to posting the review.
'The Handmaid's Tale' by Margaret Attwood
I’ve put off reading this for some time as I don’t like dystopia much – I realise it’s probably meant to be depressing but most of the time I feel I can do without that. However, not all of my book group feels the same way (which is as it should be) so this was put on the reading list two or three years ago, but as I couldn’t make the meeting where we were due to discuss it, I skipped reading it at the time. Now, however, a member of the group has put the recent sequel ‘The Testaments’ on our list and we’re supposed to be discussing that at the end of January. I was warned that TT wouldn’t make a lot of sense unless I’d read THT. The upshot is that I’m having to read the two books one after the other, which I wouldn’t ideally have chosen to do. Intend to spend February reading nothing but Mills & Boon and comics.
The story is set in the fictional Republic of Gilead. Offred is 33 and lives (and ‘works’, after a fashion) as a ‘Handmaid’. Women are divided into functions: there are Wives (of the Commanders), Handmaids and Marthas (a servant class). And there are Econowives, the wives of the poorer men, who have to do everything. And then there are ‘Unwomen’, who are only referred to vaguely, and we don’t really get to know what they are, but presumably women without any useful function. Somewhere in the book it’s stated that old women aren’t really seen around Gilead. There’s a war going on somewhere. And who are the Eyes?
‘Offred’ is not her real name – she’s no longer allowed to use her real name – but a signifier that indicates which Commander’s household she is a part of (Fred's, in her case). Handmaids are younger women whose function is to bear the children for the household, if the Wife is unable to have any. To this end, they’re expected to have regular relations with the Commander of the household, in the presence of his wife. This follows a regular Ceremony at which the whole household is present and the Commander reads to everyone from the Bible.
It isn’t clear how long Offred has lived like this, but it’s suggested that it’s all a relatively recent change. Stores selling cosmetics and jewellery have been shut down (Offred and her fellow Handmaids steal butter to use as hand cream). But women are protected now, and kept very safe. Apparently. (Rita and Cora, the household Marthas, are talking about a fellow Martha recently shot by ‘Guardians’ while taking too long over fumbling for her security pass. “Doing their job, said Cora. Keeping us safe.”)
I thought THT was excellent, if a depressingly horrifying vision. We can infer that Gilead is meant to occupy part of what’s currently the US – there are glimpses of a world outside, as with the scene with the Japanese tourists who ask to take photos of Offred and her walking companion, and ask them if they’re happy. Offred hasn’t always lived like this. She used to have a husband and a child, but has no idea what’s happened to them. Then a major social upheaval happened and she and other women underwent training at the Rachel and Leah Re-education Centre, meted out by ‘Aunts’, where they were instructed in their new role. Transgressors are severely punished. Black vans with eyes on the side sometimes turn up and take people away. Has the same fate befallen Offred, at the end? It’s ambiguous as we’re not sure whether she’s been rescued by the Mayday underground. We’ll never know.
'The Testaments' by Margaret Attwood
I did, in fact, read ‘The Testaments’ directly after ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ (go me) but didn’t write any sort of review of it at the time. I thought it was very good, and a worthy sequel. The Book Group meeting itself ended up being somewhat annoying as Helen insisted on steering the discussion rround to a TV adaptation I hadn’t seen and which appeared to have altered the story a bit. And after I’d gone to all that bloody effort.
‘The Testaments’ shared the 2019 Booker Prize with Bernardine Evaristo’s ‘Girl, Woman, Other’ (as commented on here). ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ was first published in 1985, so this sequel was a long time coming.
'The Birthday Present' by Barbara Vine
Never quite seen the use in established authors trying to write under pseudonyms, if their publisher is just going to slap e.g. ‘Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine’ on the cover of the book, as in this case. Anyway.
The story is set around 1990 and centres on Ivor Tesham, MP for the fictional constituency of Morningford. It’s narrated by Ivor’s brother-in-law Rob Delgado (married to Ivor’s sister Iris), and also partly narrated – or so it initially appears – by one Jane Atherton, a friend of Ivor’s late mistress, whose killing forms the catalyst for the activity of the story. The ‘birthday present’ of the title is a mock-abduction of Ivor’s mistress Hebe Furnal. Ivor pays two men £500 to “abduct” Hebe – Lloyd Freeman, a struggling actor who drives for a minicab company on the side, and Dermot Lynch, who services Ivor’s car. The two men are to abduct Hebe as she is walking down the road, dressed up (Hebe has been told where to be, and to expect to be picked up), handcuff and gag her and drive her to Rob and Iris’ Hampstead mews house, which Ivor has arranged to borrow while they’re away in Norfolk for the weekend. Hebe is duly picked up, but is never delivered to her intended destination because the car is in a collision with a lorry and both Hebe and Lloyd Freeman are killed, and Dermot Lynch is seriously injured.
The rest of the story has two strands, the first being Ivor’s initially successful attempts to stop the abduction story being linked with him and shattering his parliamentary career. Somewhat luckily for Ivor, Dermot has suffered what would now be termed ‘life-changing’ head injuries, meaning he’s unable to let on re Ivor’s role in arranging the pickup, but Ivor’s still twitchy so he pays Dermot’s family an allowance of £10,000 a year “to make their lives easier”. For quite a while Ivor thinks he’s in the clear, but the nature of his involvement in the crash does come out in the end. The other strand follows the perspective of Hebe’s friend and alibi Jane, and Jane’s interactions with the late Hebe’s husband, with her mother, and later with Ivor and the Lynch family as Jane gets the idea that she might have some sort of hold over Ivor. Jane seems initially a benign character, but we later realise that she’s a somewhat strange lady.
‘The Birthday Present’ was published in 2008. I quite enjoyed it, probably more than I’ve enjoyed the two previous Rendells (as opposed to Vines) I’ve read. Ruth bought this copy secondhand to tide her through the duller moments of our week in Norfolk in May 2021, and I thought I might as well read it before re-consigning it to charity.
'The Guilty Feminist' by Deborah Frances-White
This book was named after DFW’s podcast of the same name, which I have never listened to. As far as I could gather, the title of the book is meant to represent the conflict she (and doubtless many other women) feel between believing feminist ideals on the one hand and on the other hand, wanting to look good etc. She begins every chapter with a quote starting “I’m a feminist but” and then proceeding to set out some behaviour she or her podcast guests are guilty of that they presumably don’t think is very feminist.
DFW sets out her ideological stall early on by declaring that her book “includes trans-women as women” and that “the future isn’t binary” (whatever that means). She makes use of terms such as “queer positive”, using the term “queer” seemingly as an umbrella term for gay people AND a whole bunch of other people, which I’m possibly too old to tolerate. In fact, this ideology doesn’t permeate the bulk of DFW’s text and I couldn’t help feeling that it had cropped up in the intro and in footnotes as a nod perhaps to her publisher or to keep sections of her audience happy. It’s amply clear from most of DFW’s text (leaving the footnotes and the odd whack-job interviewee aside) that she is perfectly clear on what a woman is (examples: on page 40 she refers to “female MPs”; she discusses the early sexism faced by Hillary Clinton; she makes reference on page 107 to men’s superior upper body strength).
Selecting two areas of irritation before getting on to being complimentary. DFW seems to use “gender” sometimes as synonymous with “sex” and sometimes to mean gender identity, which does confuse things rather. If gender isn’t fixed, as she seems to claim, and people can identify their way out of being a woman, then why do we need feminism? In a footnote in the chapter ‘What’s Feminism For?’, DFW states “It is important to acknowledge that there are more than two genders, and that some people identify as non-binary, which means they are neither male nor female”. Surely it means that they IDENTIFY as neither male or female, not that they ARE neither male nor female? Does this reflect a view that you are what you identify as? But the terms “male” and “female” are even now usually used to refer to biological sex, so this is confusing. (The regressive nature of gender identity ideology is evident at a number of points in this book, more in the comments of DFW’s interviewees than in her own comments. Zoe Coombs Marr’s comments on p.112-113 that she has “never felt any real connection to the signifiers of my gender” – yes, that’s just called not conforming to sexist stereotypes. Plenty of women have not been doing that for decades. It’s not a new thing.)
Secondly: although I am not one to bang on about élites, class etc: her monologue in the “Hear Us Roar” chapter about Donald Trump left me slightly uncomfortable. “Many white women in America voted for their white tribe over their female tribe this election.” Those could have been poorer white women, who might have voted for Trump not because they (necessarily) liked him personally but because they thought that a Trump presidency would improve their economic situation and that of their men and families. I heard DFW’s comments here as tone-deaf luxury beliefs.
Despite all the above, I did enjoy much of the book. Good things: her writing style is quite engaging. Speaking of her upbringing as a Jehovah’s Witness, she says “I suspected that my body would lead me nowhere dark or degenerate because no one would ever be attracted to it”. Her chapter on women’s attitudes to their bodies (“Drink the Kool-Aid – Just One Calorie”) and the diet industry is pretty good. I liked the view that joining a gym, buying a diet book, denying oneself certain foods are a contract the mind is making with the body: if I do X, you will do X. As opposed to working WITH our bodies to fuel and nourish them, and being realistic about the likely pace of change. In the chapter “The Power of Yes”, she says some quite good stuff re confidence, and how saying yes and saying no can be habits. I found the “Enemy Lines” and “There Is No ‘Try’” chapters readable and interesting.
DFW is an Australian who now lives in the UK. The Guilty Feminist was published in 2019.
'Should We Stay or Should We Go' by Lionel Shriver
In 1991, when Cyril and Kay Wilkinson are in their early fifties, they make a pact to commit suicide together on Kay, the younger’s, eightieth birthday. Careers in the NHS, plus the long-drawn-out decline of Kay’s father, have led them to the conclusion that they don’t want to stick around beyond a point where life has ceased to be tolerable and they have become a burden on others. Cyril, a retired GP, has acquired two doses of Seconal, kept in a black box in the back of their fridge until the allotted time.
The book presents 12 parallel scenarios each showing a different way things could have gone – some good, others horrific to varying degrees. I had a go at summarising the various scenarios:
- Kay texts her daughter Hayley from the loo (actually, this event might have happened in all the scenarios – I wasn’t quite clear on that). Hayley plus medics turn up. Cyril sneaks off with the tablets and takes them. In due course, Kay meets Ellis and lives for another 12 years before being knocked down and killed on her mobility scooter.
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They decide against taking the tablets – though not before Cyril has posted a letter to the Met letting them know that there will be two dead bodies in the house. The next morning, Kay goes out to try to retrieve the letter – she is successful, but is knocked down and killed on her walk back to the house.
- Kay takes the tablets, but after she dies, Cyril has a change of heart. Some time later, while writing his memoirs, he suffers a catastrophic stroke resulting in locked-in syndrome.
- A couple of years after making the pact, Kay changes her mind and they decide instead to actively plan for old age. They live frugally and take out long-term care insurance. They move to an expensive assisted living facility in their early 70s – but end up feeling sidelined and cut off. Cyril has a stroke, and they have to move into Tier Two of the facility, for the less able.
- They change their minds, but police arrive a couple of days later once they receive Cyril’s note. They are rebuked for wasting police time, but then left to get on. Kay later develops dementia.
- Hayley turns up the same evening, following receipt of her mother’s text, swiftly followed by paramedics who take the Seconal off Cyril. Cyril and Kay’s children get them detained under Section Three of the Mental Health Act, and they are taken to Close of Day Cottages, where they languish under the directorship of Dr Mimi Mewshaw. They manage to escape, but caught between a motorway and the advancing staff of Close of Day Cottages, they run into traffic.
- They try to escape from Close of Day Cottages, quickly get caught and are sentenced to solitary confinement for three years.
- They decide against taking the tablets. Kay enrols in a drug trial, but doesn’t tell Cyril. The medication has dramatic rejuvenating effects. The drug, Retrogeritox, is later approved for use by the general population. The upshot is that nobody grows old and dies anymore.
- They check out the expensive facility under 4. (‘Journey’s End’) but decide against it. They were OK for a while, but then the economy collapsed in the 2020s and they were reduced to penury. The whole country, and eventually their home, is taken over by migrants/asylum seekers (it’s not entirely clear which), and they’re reduced to living in their own attic, before being murdered.
- Similarly to 9., they decide against Journey’s End. Then Cyril is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and Kay with ALS (so it is referred to in the book, but motor neurone disease to us Brits). They decide to have themselves cryogenically preserved until such time as a cure has been found for their illnesses. It doesn’t end hugely well.
- Cyril moots the idea of a suicide pact, but Kay rejects it. In this scenario, it does go hugely well for them. Kay retires early and wins interior design awards in her second career. Cyril’s memoir is a bestseller and he writes a string of follow up books. They live into their hundreds and die peacefully together in their own garden.
- ‘The Last Last Supper’. They bicker a bit, but then do the deed.
The book is set in the context of significant contemporary UK events, namely Brexit and the COVID-19 lockdown – ironically, the UK has just gone into lockdown in the period immediately leading up to the ‘suicide date’. I thought it was very good on the whole, though seems to go off the rails a bit in the couple of chapters featuring Close of Day Cottages and Dr Mimi – a) were there seriously grounds for the children getting their parents sectioned? And b) Dr Mimi is pure ham – we’re in movie territory at this point. Strangely the chapter about cryogenics is less hammy and more believable. (The Dr Mimi chapters made me think of the bit where IMO We Need To Talk About Kevin goes off the rails from its excellent beginning, with Kevin producing his sister’s glass eye and cackling, etc. Shriver’s an excellent writer but this sort of thing is possibly a bit of a weakness.)
All that said, the book is a thought-provoking look at ageing and old age, and the extent to which it’s (not) possible to prepare for every possible scenario.
'Take Up Thy Bed and Walk' by Lois Keith
Subtitled ‘Death, Disability and Cure in Classic Fiction for Girls’. A fascinating study of the treatment of illness, disability (particularly paralysis) and death in children’s fiction and the development of this over the course of the twentieth century. Keith argues that in many of the books studied, disability/illness isn’t really that; it’s being used as a metaphor, and as something that has to be resolved through either cure or death. Disability as symbolizing dependency and weakness, and the linking of physical weakness to moral and spiritual infirmity.
Keith’s specific focus is eight books written between 1847 and 1915, all apart from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre written for children. Each is included for its treatment of death or disability/severe illness. All except two were books I have read, albeit when (much) younger. I had never read – or in fact even heard of – Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians, and although I was aware of Pollyanna Grows Up as a sequel to Pollyanna, I’ve never read it, probably because I didn’t enjoy the first book enough to bother.
In the chapter 'Too Good to Live', Keith discusses the saintly and doomed characters of Helen Burns in Jane Eyre and Beth March in Little Women, both resigned to their lot and looking forward to going to a better place. These characters, Keith argues, are merely devices against which the more active and rounded heroines of these books define themselves. (Keith mentions that she read Jane Eyre while of primary school age, which surprised me as it isn’t a children’s book, but she does note that it was an abridged edition. Perhaps because of her age at the time she first read it, it was evidently the early chapters detailing Jane’s grim childhood that made the most impression, and they are the reason for its inclusion here. I read it much later into my teens and mainly remember the romance and intrigue of Jane’s time at Thornfield Hall with Mr Rochester – though it’s possible of course that I blanked out the bleak early chapters.)
In 'Learning to be Perfectly Good', Keith discusses the journey travelled by the heroine of What Katy Did, like Little Women a late nineteenth-century American novel for girls and a book I loved as a child. I do remember reading its two sequels, though Keith only mentions these in passing. Katy’s transition from boisterous, headstrong girlhood to patient, serene womanhood is effected via the device of an accident which renders her unable to walk for the first half of her adolescence. Keith argues that it isn’t until Katy has learned the necessary lessons and become ‘good’ – helped by the saintly Cousin Helen – that she is allowed to walk again, by which time she has become the Heart of the House (and spends a fair bit of her day choosing menus and writing poems for her younger siblings, if my long-ago memory serves).
In 'The Miracle Cures', Keith discusses the vague afflictions of Clara in Heidi and Colin in The Secret Garden, and their sudden recoveries from these in a way that makes the reader wonder what on earth had been supposed to be wrong with them in the first place. Keith notes the use of healthy activity in the open air as a curative device – both these children recover once they get out of doors and start interacting with nature.
In 'A Study of Disability, Class and Gender', Keith discusses Eleanor Porter’s Pollyanna and its sequel Pollyanna Grows Up, focusing both on Pollyanna’s accident during the first book which renders her, like Katy, unable to walk for a period of time, and on the character of Jamie in Pollyanna Grows Up, apparently more plausibly (and permanently) disabled via some childhood condition aggravated by poverty. Porter argues that unlike with Pollyanna, who is of good stock and therefore must either die or recover, Jamie is poor and therefore we know that he is permanently crippled and not going to stage either a saintly deathbed scene or a miracle recovery. The ‘gender’ aspect is because Porter discusses the character of Jamie against the character of Jimmy Bean in the same book, arguing that Jamie’s disability feminises him (similarly to Colin Craven’s in The Secret Garden) especially when set against the hale and hearty Jimmy. It’s an interesting argument but I’m not sure I’ll feel compelled to read Pollyanna Grows Up – I’d agree with Keith that Pollyanna is a lower-quality book than the others under discussion.
(I do have to take issue with Keith’s assertion that “Like Enid Blyton’s novels, Pollyanna is a difficult book to read once you are past ten years old.” If Pollyanna is a difficult book to read it's because its heroine is quite annoying. I do, however, still occasionally enjoy skimming a Malory Towers or Famous Five book even now.)
In 'Misrule, Rebellion and Death', Keith discusses Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians. This book was published in 1894 and has apparently never been out of print in Australia, but it’s one I don’t remember ever having heard of before – Keith does note that it never achieved the same recognition in Britain as the other books she discusses. Keith evidently picks it because of its startling treatment of its heroine, Judy, a 13-year-old girl and one of a large family of unruly siblings. Like the heroine of What Katy Did, Judy is a boisterous, unladylike girl on the cusp of womanhood, and therefore presents a problem as she can’t be allowed to continue in this vein. Keith contends that there was a distinct scarcity of authors who handled this question in a remotely positive way. Jo March in Little Women, chastened by the death of her saintly sister, embraces housewifery and subsequently gets married. Katy Carr’s accident and subsequent (albeit temporary) paralysis provides a means for her to change completely and become ladylike. Ethel Turner took a firmer course of action and kills off Judy by having a tree fall on her. I have to say I don’t think I’ll be seeking out Seven Little Australians at this late stage.
In the last two chapters of the book, Keith looks at how disability has been treated in more recent books for children, before moving into a more general discussion of attitudes to disability and to wheelchair use in particular. Keith is substantially concerned with representations of disability in fiction – understandably so as she evidently became disabled herself as a young adult due to an accident. She makes an interesting contention in the conclusion that – even today – the public has more appetite for stories of ‘miracle cures’ than for things that would actually help disabled people, such as increased accessibility, the suggestion being that the thought of having to accept disability is intolerable to non-disabled people.
And one that got away, at least for the moment:
'In the Closet of the Vatican' by Frédéric Martel
I picked this up a few years ago while browsing in a bookshop and thought it looked interesting. The cover seems designed to draw the reader in to what promises to be an exciting tale of intrigue and sleaze. I’ve spent at least a couple of months attempting to wade through it but have still only managed 210 pages out of the total 550.
Briefly: Martel claims his book is an exposé of “the structurally homosexualized nature of the [Catholic] Church”. Evidently he spent four years on the investigations that informed the book, and claims to have carried out hundreds of interviews with clergy of all ranks with, additionally, a team of 80 researchers engaged in document-gathering. Martel maintains that his aim is understanding the “secret and collective way of life” of homosexuals within the Vatican, some of whom have been the ones to most strongly push back against attempted reforms to the Church’s stance on homosexuality. Martel contends that the more homophobic a cardinal is in public, the more likely he is to be homosexual in private. He may well be right, and it’s certainly an interesting area.
However ... it gives a whole new meaning to the terms “wordy” and “rambling”. It’s also rather disjointed. On the one hand, Martel will make a comment along the lines of “and then, of course, there was the notorious Cardinal della Spungifusilli”, but will then proceed to say no more about said cardinal, leaving you as the reader to Google them to find out what exactly it was they did. At the other extreme, he goes into vast amounts of detail that lead the reader to lose the thread of the point he’s trying to make. There were several points when, on reading “here it is necessary to go into details”, I found myself thinking “Please God, no”.
The back and inside covers of the book are plastered with fulsome praise for the work, the most OTT of which is probably the comment from a James Alison of Theologian, who refers to “my wonderment at the dimensions of what has come into view”. Andrew Sullivan of New York Magazine refers to it as “a bewildering and vast piece of reporting”, which could be taken either way.
ITCotV was published in 2019. Martel is French; my edition was translated by a Shaun Whiteside. I may revisit it at some point in the future but, much as I don't like to abandon a book without finishing it, have shelved it for the moment.
