extreme legibility

The Siege at Krishnapur by J. G. Farrell (Modern Library, 2012; originally published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973)

 

The Siege at Krishnapur is an odd, dark, rather brutal book about a native Indian mutiny in the 1850s that traps a small community of British citizens and their servants and hangers-on in a poorly fortified compound for several grueling months, where they all suffer (and many die) from warfare, lack of water and food, cholera and other diseases.

Farrell seems to find most of these people (justifiably) reprehensible and ridiculous, and takes much humorous delight in their ever-worsening suffering.  Yet the reader can't help feeling a little sorry for them, as the hardships and discomforts they endure are so thoroughly and vividly described.  So the book has a strange, off-putting yet extremely engaging tone, and reading it is an intense and discomforting experience.

Farrell is an excellent writer -- good with both characters and place, all of which are described, or actually recreated and enlivened, with complexity and brilliance.

 

 

*A Shower of Summer Days by May Sarton (Rinehart & Company, 1952)

 

This early novel of May Sarton's (and the only one I have read) is set in Ireland, among the Anglo-Irish gentry, sometime in the early 1950, when the Empire was crumbling, in one of the great country houses not incinerated in The Troubles.

Charles and Violet (Dene) Gordon return, after many years in Burma, to Dene's Court, the house that Violet grew up in and has inherited, but which has been left derelict and disintegrating during their long absence.  They are both beautiful charming people and love one another (despite Charles' discreet infidelities) and  go about establishing a third act for themselves in the beautiful house, which they restore to habitability, if not its former grandeur.  Charles manages the estate and Violet does the flowers.

Into this idyl Violet's niece Sally arrives, banished from America where she has grown up with her mother, Violet's sister Barbie, and her American father, because she has made an inappropriate romantic engagement with an actor (even though he's handsome and rich).  Sally initially feels that Dene's Court is a prison and that her aunt and uncle are her jailers, but rather (too) quickly succumbs to the charms of the house, Charles, and Violet, falling passionately in love with all three.  By the time Ian, her fiancee, arrives and jilts Sally (and falls in love with the irresistible Violet), we know that Sally has become a Dene, and like her ancestors, will always return to Dene's Court, which she will, in due time, inherit.

The graceful and beautifully descriptive writing is the finest thing about this book.   Sarton gives her characters complicated and well-spelunked interior lives, but it is her poet's attention to the  house itself and the world and weather surrounding it that gives the reader the deeper and more lasting satisfaction.  One sometimes wishes the annoying characters would clear out so that one could enjoy the house and the demense (a new word for me and frequently used here, meaning land attached to a manor and retained for its owner's use) without their sometimes tedious interruption. 

 

Told By An Idiot by Rose Macaulay (Boni & Liveright, 1924)

 

Told by An Idiot is a social history of England disguised (not all that successfully) as a family saga.  It follows the Gardner family from the final  years of Victoria (1890) through the fin de siecle, and into the Georgian and Edwardian Ages, detailing much of the politics, social mores, fashions, and culture of these periods -- sometimes interestingly and sometimes (often?) not.

The Gardner patriarch is the least believable character, a caricature of a religious man who cannot settle upon a religion, and so tries them all.  This allows Macaulay to satirize many sacred cows (and other religious flora and fauna), but it quickly seems like the gimmick it is and becomes tiresome.  The mother, a sort of Christian martyr, supports her husband's fecklessness with unwavering (and unbelievable) devotion and good cheer.

There are six children, whose different characters allow Macaulay to conveniently explore different topics: Victoria, Marcus, Sydney, Rome, ?, and Una.  Because there are so many of them and so much of the book concerns itself not with the family but with general socio-political lectures, none of these second-generation characters are very much developed, except for Rome, a free-thinking and passionate woman who decides not to mary and leads a sensuously indulgent and independent life (a self-portrait of the author?).

This book retains Macaluay's witty and irreverent style of narration, but is encumbered, and finally undone, by its ambitious yet misguided premise.