Madame Bovary

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This maybe a basic opinion but it is hard to enjoy a book where there is no one to root for. Flaubert’s ironic detachment and mockery of his characters is counterbalanced by moments in which their point of view is depicted with a hyperrealistic focus that engenders sympathy. Emma is a reckless fantasist but Flaubert’s sweeping florid style goes some way to endear her to the reader, to the point where her horrible fate feels cruel. She is a Quixote who’s obsessed with love rather than adventure, and some (like Harold Bloom) can be smitten. I still found her quite stressful to be around, perhaps because my parsimonious (bourgeois?) temperament finds debt horrifying.

So who survives in a world where enchantment and naïveté are punished so brutally? The scheming Lheureux is a transparent villain, the agent of Emma and Charles’s downfall. The book ends with Homais, the Voltaire-obsessed neighbour whose meagre capabilities establish him as a person of renown through sheer tenacity. He isn’t a leech like Lheureux, but his activity in the field of ideas is hardly above board either. Flaubert treats him as a figure of fun, and perhaps his success should be seen as an indictment on the imaginative potential of the society that Flaubert is writing about. But perhaps it’s also a model for enduring in such diminished circumstances.

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Persuasion

Persuasion by Jane Austen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When I read this in school I felt frustrated by the propriety which delayed the reconciliation of the couple. I wasn’t reading closely enough, because Austen explains very well why Wentworth’s pride and resentment prevented him from immediately pursuing Anne again once he had made his fortune. It is also made clear at the very beginning of the novel that while Anne was persuaded out of accepting his offer of marriage, she had persuaded herself soon afterwards (when all of Wentworth’s promises of a brilliant career were fulfilled) that she had made a mistake. Austen is very severe with her heroine however. At the very end, Anne insists she was right to be persuaded, because it was the dutiful thing to do, even if the consequences were unhappy. Austen and Anne are not utilitarians.

This is a short and highly patterned novel. The contrivances of the plot arrange characters and scenarios in such ways as to continually suggest ironic echoes of the central dilemma of Anne rejecting Wentworth. Louisa’s self-assurance in the first half is a foil to show Anne’s superiority. And Mr Elliot and Mrs Clay in the second half are like something out of a crime novel – utterly psychopathic operators in the marriage market. Lady Russell is not quite so villainous, although it’s very hard for a modern reader to be sympathetic with her prejudiced outlook. This book is justifiably seen as Austen’s most accomplished achievement, and I’m finally in agreement with that view.

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The Fall of Hyperion

The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is best enjoyed when you accept that the central figure of the Shrike will remain ambiguous. And not in a Gene Wolfe sense where some hidden coherence can be unearthed if you study the text hard enough. Simmons uses the Shrike as the catalyst for plot and tension, and its actions are not consistent with the motivations of any one faction. It is there to look cool, be menacing and to make things happen around it.

Everything else in the book fits together quite neatly. The final stretch is impressive in piling on revelation upon revelation. There is a lot of set up to get to that point, however, and the beginning of the book is rather tedious. The pilgrims arrive at the Tombs with not much to do, and there’s a lot of random wandering around which dissipates the momentum built up at the end of the first book. The structural device, of one person at the heart of government dreaming the actions of the pilgrims, is also weaker than the Canterbury Tales-derived storytelling competition in the first book. It’s telling that the first person narrative is abandoned at the end.

Basically, this is an overly ambitious series that doesn’t quite live up to the expectations it sets up. But it’s still worth reading, not least because of the baroque and fantastical world-building Simmons is so good at (doing the opera part of space opera very well). And its concerns about treacherous AIs nods to a very 90s cyberpunk attitude that would feed into bigger pop cultural events like the Matrix films.

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The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I couldn’t hack the original Middle English and settled for the Coghill translation – which is very readable and has sparse but occasionally entertaining endnotes. The big innovation here is the potential for irony inherent in contrasting the description of the teller of the tale with the tale itself, and how some tales comment on and undercut the tales around them. The showstoppers are the first one-two of the Knight’s Tale and the Miller’s Tale, and then the extended character work of the Pardoner and Wife of Bath’s account of their lives. I also liked the Summoner’s Tale which, like the Miller’s, climaxes in a fart joke, and the Merchant’s exploration of jealousy and cuckoldry that ends in ridiculous sexual antics up in a tree. The more pious tales are less interesting – the testing of a wife’s faithfulness in the Clerk’s Tale is sadistic, the Monk rattling off examples of hubris is monotonous, and the Prioress’s tale of a child killed by Jews is depressing. Chaucer is at his best when questioning the sexual politics of his day, and at his worst when fretting about the sinfulness of his stories and the status of his soul.

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Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota #4)

Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The trolley problem argument at the forefront of the series thus far is now superseded by an even bigger conflict between different visions of the future. Do we focus inwardly on mapping human psychology, conquering death and building utopia on Earth, or do we focus outward on the painful project of colonising other worlds. Palmer is a keen student of science fiction, and it’s fun to consider this dilemma as a way of contrasting the 60s new wave with classic space opera. The book presents this as an either / or proposition, in that the Earth becoming too comfortable reduces the incentive to look elsewhere, and Palmer is very good at continually reversing the reader’s perspective of which side should come out on top. Of course, at the end an accommodation is made, but the journey is a fun one.

Eventually, at least. This is a long book, at the end of a long series, and for me the first third really dragged. Palmer gets a little too bogged down with her new narrator, and I just wanted to get back to Mycroft and the war. She is at her most impressive when upending expectations with each successive chapter, and the book really picks up when she gets back into that groove. Ultimately I found the series interesting rather than compelling. But the ideas it brings to play leaves many more gripping works of speculative fiction in the dust.

The underlying question about the reliability of the narrative we have, given our narrator sees ghosts, says he has witnessed miracles and believes in a living god, is rendered moot for me by the book’s metatextuality – its overt geeky references to its influences, from Homer, the French Enlightenment and science fiction. Whether Bridger and Jehovah are elaborate conspiracies isn’t as interesting a question for me as the metaphors they present if they are ‘real’ in the fiction of the book. Bridger’s ability to bring his fantasies into reality suggests a comment on how human ingenuity reverse engineers discoveries from our imaginations. Jehovah wrestling with the problem of evil generates torrid existential emotions about our own consciousness embodied in a universe that is both accommodating and indifferent. It is slightly mysterious why Mycroft, who as a student of Voltaire and Diderot should be sceptical of providential thinking, would buy into Jehovah’s claims so completely. But that perspective is used to test out absolute values against the contingencies we face. The long final chapter is a showcase of Palmer’s impressive commitment to thinking through the problems she puts forward, and her optimism that an imperfect world can be made just a little more perfect.

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Jacques the Fatalist

Jacques the Fatalist by Denis Diderot
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is structured around the tension between determinism and free will. Jacques the ‘fatalist’ believes everything that will happen is already written in the great scroll on high. He is correct, except that he is a character and his fate is actually written in a book by Diderot. And that book is a deconstruction of the novel – Diderot constantly intervening to speak directly to the reader and reminding them of his authorial power over the narrative. And he insists upon subverting standard expectations of the novel. So what actually happens is chaos – Jacques and his master tell each other stories that keep being interrupted. The fatalist is caught up in a world which is constantly being reconfigured around him, to the point where his fate not only impossible to predict, but a joke.

The result of this dichotomy is never spelled out, but one inference is that if the universe has an author they are a capricious one. The other is that the world is so unpredictable and our motivations so inscrutable that it leaves enough gaps to suggest we can will things freely. Jacques is a servant to a master who is set in his ways, but he is adept at manipulating him to the point where their roles almost reverse. He may be fated to do so by his character (or his author) but is that also not an example of the freedom he has?

The introduction by David Coward points out how the book’s experimentalism and metafictional elements anticipates 20th century deconstructions like Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Mileage may vary on how amusing you find Diderot’s constant harangues to his reader, and the mischievous insistence on constantly undermining his own storytelling. There’s something juvenile about it for sure, but in its own way it is an authentic expression of Diderot’s own character, who also thinks, and wills, freely.

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