Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift)

This is one of the best things I have ever read. It is almost a cliche now to describe Gulliver’s Travels as a biting satire, but it is utterly true - and a wonderful one to boot. In a shortened, picture form, Gulliver’s Travels is one of the world’s most popular children’s book so the plot feels familiar and almost nostalgic. Along with rice cakes and marmite sandwiches, reading it took me back to my childhood. Suddenly I was eight again and running around the playground.

The story goes a bit like this. Gulliver leaves his wife and child to go travelling, and from then on has a set of the weirdest, most fantastical adventures ever set to paper. Shortly after leaving, Gulliver shipwrecks and stumbles upon Lilliput, the renowned land of little people that can walk around on his hand. After the ensuing adventures and a journey home, Gulliver embarks on a further bold voyage, but this time his ship flounders on Brobdingnag, a nation of giants where suddenly it is Gulliver who finds himself a little person. Next, after leaving, he finds all sorts of odd peoples – a floating island in the sky, magicians who can conjure the dead – and finally a land of wise and logical horses, the perspicacious Houyhnhnms. Alongside these omnibenevolent nags, he makes a discovery that turns his blood a-chill. Here, he encounters the infamous ‘Yahoos’. A savage, untameable, splenic animal that seems to bear more than a passing resemblance – in looks and habits – to the species of which Gulliver is a committed member: the unhumble human...

It's wonderful

There is just something so special about this book. It might not be the most significant aspect, perhaps, but I even loved the 16th century-style writing style. For example, every proper noun is capitalised, and letters starting with ‘h’ are always preceded with ‘an’: I saw with mine Eyes, an Hundred Savages advancing upon my poar Self.  This must have been standard at the time, but it now lends the books a delightful realism. I’m sure it gets edited out of a lot of modern editions, but I think that’s a mistake.

Gulliver’s personality binds the whole thing together like an egg in cake batter. His most striking characteristic is an ostentatious gallantry. Beached on Lilliput, and captured by the little people, he quickly pays tribute and accepts the rule of the tiny Lilliputian king, even though he is no bigger than his face; soon describing him as ‘my gracious majesty’. Ultimately, Gulliver feels entitled – being a British citizen of Her Majesty the Queen – to be treated civilly and with decorum. He expects to be welcomed into the court of every king, and for his needs to be met – food, wine and a new ‘suit of cloaths’ wherever on the globe he finds himself. This entitlement can lead him to be dreadfully naive, at times unaware of clear and present danger. 

What makes us human?

Yet what makes the book interesting is how Gulliver sees the world. It is a fascinating sum of contradictions. Gulliver is overtly proud of his country, and acts as an ambassador wherever he goes. But he also embarks on new life-styles with gusto. In three of the places he visits, he settles, stays for years, learns the language and embraces their lifestyle - even though it’s almost the opposite of his own. However, Gulliver thinks of his own society as far more sophisticated and on a ‘higher level’ than any of the civilisations he visits. In fact, nothing gets him questioning his homeland, until he meets the Yahoos....

The Yahoos are a breed of savage humans. Gulliver is repulsed by them because he sees the character of the despicable Yahoo’s mirrored in humans, and the character of the horses as far superior. So, he never quite manages to critique British society and it’s institutions – something that is changeable – but just the human character – which isn’t (especially not en masse). 

I think that’s quite significant, and clearly a Swiftian commentary on something. I see it as saying a range of things from a kind of Thatcherite proclamation that society doesn’t exist, to the idea that culture is just the emergent phenomena that arises out of the character’s of the people that live there. I think that’s dead wrong - and actually so would most sociologists today. Institutions are incredibly important, but Gulliver is only concerned with character. I can’t quite tell which side of the fence Swift himself sat on – but since his most vicious critique is on personality traits, I’ll put flag down and say that he got this one wrong. He savagely critiqued humans character - and finds fault with the echos of our animal urges in the way we live, but he didn’t stop to mention how amazing it is that we’ve developed institutions that work well despite all our Yahoo-like greed.

Life Lessons

I think I missed a lot of the satire in the book – especially since I’m not au fait with the subtleties of George I’s court – but I think I got the main point, and it’s exceptionally clever. By creating and describing so many fantastical species – little men, big men, magicians, talking horses – the book is essentially an exercise in frame setting. It is priming us, by poking fun at imaginary beings, to be able to picture ourselves objectively. Gulliver rocks up at Lilliput and finds a bunch of weird little people, but what if he rocked up in Britain, what strange species would he find there? Humans. 

Swift want us to take a long look at what we really are. For him it’s obvious. We’re just savages, monkeys, a slave to our urges. And we've painstakingly built a society that pretends we’re not. That’s problematic, because it means we’re literally unaware of how stupid some of our actions are. Once you start looking as Jonathan Swift wanted us to look, everything becomes ridiculous. From living in houses that are so far superfluous to our needs, to border conflicts, to political slanging matches. This is all comes from animalistic, primal urges – which are just stupid. And yet we pretend that there’s a good intelligent reason for everything, that things are the way they are for a reason. As a culture, we do not live rationally. Our selfish, grubbing instincts are built into the very fabric of our society. But, as I mentioned earlier, that’s only half the story. Actually, society is brilliant, amazing, incredible - and it’s a testament to human ingenuity that we’ve managed to design ourselves a system that succeeds not despite, but because of, the character of the human race. 

And yet, we can do more. We can continue to strive towards building a better world. To be better, to live better together, and to help those that get left behind. It's not all doom and gloom, but there's no time for complacency either. Let's get cracking...

Jude the Obscure (Thomas Hardy)

Thomas Hardy must have been a little bit of sadist. He spent his life writing books that are fun and easy to read, full of characters that you can’t help caring about. And then he utterly destroys their lives, brutally and completely. Typically they suffer a bellyful of misery and then die. Usually they aren’t even immoral, but good, innocent people who are trying their hardest to get by, until the world destroys them. Jude the Obscure is no exception.

Jude Fawley has big dreams. From a young age, he has looked over at the neighbouring city – Christminster – and fallen in love with its lofty steeples enveloped in mist. Although born in meager circumstances, he dreams of moving there and becoming a scholar in one of its majestic Churches. In this vein, he takes a job as a stonemason, and studies the classics with every free moment he gets. Unfortunately, being a little naive, he falls into the clutches of Arabella – a devious and comely minx – who tricks him into getting married. It’s short-lived though, and they soon separate; prompting Jude to finally move to his beloved Christminster. Unfortunately, in a bitter blow, the city rejects him, and he takes solace at first in booze and then in his cousin Sue. Sue is a breath of fresh air – pretty, moral, intelligent, free-thinking but frigid and slightly eccentric. Soon Jude is fast in love with her, but she is pushed around on every passing zephyr of her moral whim, and that leads her to act rather erratically. At one moment pursuing her heart – and her love for Jude – and the next punishing herself for her own licentiousness. I won’t ruin the ending, but, since it’s a Thomas Hardy, you can be sure that Arabella pops back into the picture, and all the characters’ lives goes to hell in a miserable handbasket.

“You have never loved me as I love you – never – never! Yours is not a passionate heart – your heart does not burn in a flame! You are, upon the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite – not a woman!” 

My thoughts

Thomas Hardy has shown with this book that he is a fantastic writer. I often find that he writes books that wantonly tug on your heartstrings. His plots can seem quite crudely put together to try and make you cry. However, I found the first three quarters of Jude superbly subtle. The books gives a delicate treatment of the mental structures that people and communities make for themselves – and the damage they can do. Ultimately though, it seems Hardy can’t help himself, and the story descends into the usual quagmire of heartache. It’s a shame, because the suffering seems quite forced. The last chunk relied on an improbable run of bad luck, and a set of seemingly unrealistic actions by a main character, who suddenly acts capricious and cruel. I believed it all, apart from the doom. 

Reading Jude in the 21st century is quite a bizarre experience. The whole of the impetus for the plot – and people’s actions – is something that has so little relevance today. The driving force is the absolute rigidity of the institution of marriage. Marriage was quite different in Hardy’s time: the man was expected to be completely dominant with the women as his property.  Not only that, but the precepts of marriage – no divorce allowed, no sex outside marriage – (which a lot of people still believe in today) were so fixed that to break these covenants wasn’t just wrong, it was deeply evil. And evil to the point that communities would happily shun someone who broke them, driving them out of a job and a town. I was awestruck by just how much power there can be in a dead piece of paper.

So people in Hardy’s time let their mental beliefs about marriage have very large and often negative effects on their lives. People boxed themselves up in a set of very restrictive rules to live by. I think by describing this, Hardy gives a very salient demonstration of just how powerful the internal worlds we create for ourselves can be. Make no mistake, in the lives we live today we all have beliefs that are boxing us up; we just don’t know what they are yet.

I liked it

Jude the Obscure is a vivid hymn to internal struggle, to making the most out of the world, and simply trying your hardest to get by. But it’s more than that. It’s a subversive call to take arms against beliefs – and people – that disempower you. It’s a chronicle of the consequences of living a life based on what other people say. Ultimately, this is Hardy shaking the world by the shoulders and crying ‘for God’s sake, think for yourself’. And that’s deeply relevant today. Of course, the story is depressing. But then life is sometimes...

Candide, or Optimism (Voltaire)

Oh what a wonderful book! The best possible book in the best possible world!

The story revolves around the unfortunate exploits of a young, thoroughly decent chap called Candide. He lives an idyllic life in a German castle belonging to the Baron Thunder-ten-Tronckh. Candide is much influenced by the teachings of a philosopher, the inimitable Pangloss, who tells him that everything in the world is perfect and happens for a reason. Unfortunately, after kissing the baron’s daughter in a fit of amorousness, Candide is booted out of the castle by the baron, and thereafter falls victim to a terribly calamitous and unfortunate series of events. He is forced into the army, whipped, lashed, beaten, and enslaved. He suffers an earthquake, a ravaging storm, and scores of malicious thugs. He sees his hero Pangloss reduced to a syphilitic invalid, and his love, the Baron’s daughter, raped and disemboweled. He travels the world, but everywhere rejects him until, finally in a turn of fate, he discovers the hidden city of El Dorado; a place that abounds in great riches and where everything really is for the best. But he foolishly decides to leave, and then promptly loses all his riches to a thief. These legion of horrors test Candide’s innate optimism, but whilst he sometimes questions himself, he never abandons his core belief - the Panglossian mantra that everything is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds.

My thoughts

I absolutely loved this book. Perhaps my mental image of 18th century people is unjustly primitive, but I also found it astonishing how open Candide is about sexuality, violence, and, well, the real world. The Victorian’s generated a fair bit of good literature, and I think that skews my impressions of the past. I tend to think of everything before the last century as repressed and puritanical. But it just isn’t so - the Victorian’s, in that regard, were an odd bunch, and many of the books of the past freely discuss ‘the facts of life’.  Candide also surprised me with its working knowledge of the globe. For a book written in the 18th century, the narrative trots around the world as much as any James Bond film - even heading to South American countries like Peru. I don’t know why that should surprise me; the Spaniards discovered/invaded/pillaged South America 250 years before, but, in my experience, simply not very much 18th century European literature references Peru, why is that?

Candide reminded me a little of Don Quixote (which I also loved. As a quick aside - I feel that reading 50 of the best books without including Don Quixote to be a little remiss. It’s long been one of my favourites). The main characters in both books are optimists who befall terrible calamities. Don Quixote and Candide both, to a certain extent, live in a world in their head. And the tone of both books is similarly sarcastic and magnificent. Of course, there are many differences too.

Candide is such a joy, and yet there is so much deep thinking in it. The book, as its subtitle suggests, is written on the theme of Optimism. Pangloss is a die-hard optimist with the slogan ‘everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’. In the beginning he clearly has this philosophy simply because everything in his world, in the castle of the Baron Thunder-ten-Tronckh, is pretty perfect, so he extrapolates that everything must be. But then, things turn sour when leaves the castle, contracts syphilis, and gets hanged. Now things aren’t actually ‘best’ for him - in fact, they’re pretty terrible - so his optimism changes to accommodate his original axiomatic belief. Now, either things happen ‘for a reason’ - suffering is necessary to get you to the best place, OR it simply must be worse in all other possible worlds. I think Voltaire is trying to show that everything is not for the best. Because although optimism seems like a positive world-view, it’s actually quite pernicious. It means suffering must be ‘necessary’ or a ‘punishment’ or have some deeper purpose. When it doesn’t. Suffering is simply an unpleasant, ignoble, banality that we have to put up with, sometimes without any reason or cause. And that’s the human condition, it’s what makes us human.

The last word

The most important thing to note about Candide is that it is an absolute delight! The writing style is that of an adventure story, and the pace is incredibly fast moving. It’s a romp around the far-flung places of the globe, and its tone is sarcastic and full of fun. It is just an utterly great read. I think it’s a lot deeper than that too, but it is worth pointing out since the perception of classics is often of dusty, stuffy, tortuous tomes. Candide isn’t - it’s an adventure, a bawdy, funny, fast-moving, global, rip-roaring, dramatic roller-coaster of a book.

 

Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys)

I hated this book. Which is a shame, because I actually quite enjoyed reading it; I found it thought provoking and evocative. The hatred was insidious, creeping up on me after I had put the book down...

Wide Sargasso Sea tells the story of Antoinette, a girl brought up in colonial Jamaica in the 19^th century. Her family used to own a plantation, but falls into poverty after the death of her drunk, lazy father. They are despised by the Jamaican’s living around them. One day, hostile neighbors storm Antoinette’s house, setting fire to it, and killing her brother. After spending the rest of her childhood in a nunnery, Antoinette marries a man, Mr. Rochester, in an arranged marriage. At first they seem intoxicated with each other, but he hears rumours that Antoinette’s mother was crazy, and fears madness is in her blood too. He becomes distant, capricious and cruel, and this precipitates the very thing he fears; Antoinette’s slide into madness.

This book was written as a prequel to Jayne Eyre. I think that’s a good idea, and the execution is quite clever – but since I haven’t read Jayne Eyre, I can only really judge Wide Sargasso Sea on its own.

“I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.”

Why I hated this book

So why did I hate Wide Sargasso Sea? I think there were four key reasons.

Firstly, I hated how complicated it made life seem. Wide Sargasso Sea suffers from the ‘literary delusion’. Moments in our lives are – fundamentally – fleeting and ephemeral. They are gone in a breath.  Literature, on the other hand, writes about a world whose essence is the opposite; sentences in books are permanent and re-readable. I think this creates an inherent tendency for fiction to overstate the complexity, meaning and importance of every day life. A real person might have complicated motives, but they are mostly instinctive, half-formed and transitory. In literature, too often, motives are fully formed, intricate and imbued with a wider symbolic meaning. Wide Sargasso Sea falls dangerously far down this hole. Everything is just so, clinically complicated. I felt like I was wading through treacle.

“I watched her die many times. In my way, not in hers. In sunlight, in shadow, by moonlight, by candlelight. In the long afternoons when the house was empty. Only the sun was there to keep us company. We shut him out. And why not? Very soon she was as eager for what's called loving as I was - more lost and drowned afterwards.” 

Secondly, I hated its attitude towards mental health.  In Wide Sargasso Sea, mental illness is described in an incredibly imprecise, wishy-washy manner. This book was written in the sixties, and I think its attitude has dated badly. It reminds me of a world of lobotomies, and ‘raving loonies’.  The book describes Antoinette acting a bit oddly, but to me seems to lack a real curiosity about anything real that’s going on in her head. What kind of mental illness is she suffering from? What logic is she using to justify her behaviour? How is she trying to cope with it? I understand it is supposed to be symbolic, but it just seems like a shoehorned, generic plot device to bring the drama to a crescendo. Even as symbolism, does it make any sense? A country might be dealing with a conflicting sense of identity, but where does madness come into it?

Thirdly, I hated its attitude towards men. The main male character, Mr. Rochester, acts emotionless, cold and almost pathologically towards Antoinette. Even in the beginning of their relationship, for example, he is described as being overcome with desire for her and fulfilling it ‘without even a caress’. As their relationship progresses, he calls her by the wrong name, stops speaking to her, and eventually sleeps with another girl within Antoinette’s earshot.  Since Mr. Rochester narrates large swathes of the book, there is a great opportunity to understand the motivations behind that kind of vindictive behavior and to get inside the male psyche. Except its squandered. Mr. Rochester simply describes himself acting like a bastard without any explanation. To me that expresses an astonishing lack of curiosity as to the motivations of the main character in the book.

Fourthly, I hated its attitude towards women. The plot in summary: a women with a troubled background grows up and marries a man who falls out of love with her because he thinks she’s mad. This causes her to turn mad. Is this great feminism? That could almost be saying ‘women are what men make them’. I don’t think that’s the message the author intended. But Antoinette Crosby is portrayed as a strong, independent women, who has managed to survive an exceptionally tough upbringing. And yet she goes mad because her husband falls out of love with her.

In Fewer Words

The following metaphor might seem below the belt – but I’ll let it stand. Wide Sargasso Sea is written in hazy language. Lots of the action happens in the gaps between sentences. The characters are driven into bizarre actions and illogical feelings for unclear reasons. When you sing in the shower, it sounds great partly because the water obscures your voice and lets your brain imagine it is hearing something operatic. Perhaps Wide Sargasso Sea is great in exactly the same way.

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson claimed that he got most of the inspiration for his writing from lucid dreams. Jekyll and Hyde came to him in a nightmare - his wife concerned at his fitful sleeping cries, woke him.  Disappointed he replied ‘'Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.' 

The book opens with Mr. Utterson, a prosecutor, who is friends with a friendly and scholarly man, Dr Jekyll. He has been hearing from various sources about the dastardly exploits around London of one Mr. Hyde. Hyde, gossip tells, had recently wantonly trampled over a girl in the street. Mr. Utterson is concerned as he knows that Jekyll has some kind of relationship with this fiendish Hyde. In fact, Jekyll has given Hyde unrestricted access to his house to come and goes as he pleases. Fearing his friend is under some dark influence, Utterson makes some enquiries. These become even more urgent when Mr. Hyde is believed to have brutally murdered an MP. Finally, Utterson discovers the truth in a letter from Jekyll. It explains that, with the aid of a ghoulish medical concoction, he has managed to split his personality into a good part and an evil part. However, now having run out of potion, he must remain permanently as the infamous and degenerate Hyde. 

My thoughts

This story is phenomenally well known. So much so that the main characters ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ are commonly used to describe anyone whose personality is somewhat changeable. Our cultural knowledge of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is so strong that actually reading the thing feels like going back to your house and finding everything in a slightly different place. There is much less exciting dual personality, good vs. evil, action than you would expect from a book that typifies the genre. Even the title, ‘Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ feels weird and wrong. 

Jekyll and Hyde is thought-provoking though. To an extent, living in society necessitates suppressing our basest urges. You could think of it like a clown’s balloon. As we squeeze one part of our personality into an acceptable shape, all that energy just pops up somewhere else. I think it’s also quite familiar to feel a distinct shift between modes. We talk of ‘bottling things up’ and then letting them go, or ‘blowing up’. And we notice this in our friends too. Part of the reason I think Jekyll and Hyde is so well known, is it speaks to the truth of this. People often do seem to have different sides to their personality, and this novella is the archetypal narrative of this.

Stories help us understand the world around us. They give us a structure to events. From religious stories to fairy tales and fables each contains pinches of reality, triple distilled down to its very essence. Jekyll and Hyde, then, describes something quite fundamental in the human experience. I think it was the first story to capture  our changeable nature in a way that resonates with the world we live in.

Welcome to the dark side

Whilst Jekyll and Hyde is an exemplar story, I think its morality is quite subversive - and very different - to that of our times. I see it as a deeply and fundamentally a Christian narrative - which is odd because Louis Stevenson rejected Christianity. To me the basic moral takeaway is: don’t dabble with your dark-side, because it will consume you. The plot condensed into one sentence would  be: Jekyll releases some of his inner base urges, finds he can’t control them and get stuck as his shadow self.

Some say that, actually, Dr. Jekyll went too far in suppressing his animalistic urges - when he released the valve it came out like an explosion. But I don’t think that really makes sense. Mr. Hyde is far darker than Dr. Jekyll is good. Jekyll is, if anything, a normal member of society, not some bastion of saintliness. He isn’t helping old ladies cross the street or donating his money to orphan children. In fact he dabbles in a dark laboratory dissecting animals, and says that although he tries hard to be pure he continually experiences dark urges. Hyde, on the other hand, is a murderous thug, almost sub-human in his capacity for evil and lack of regard for social norms.

So to me, the story wants to tell us that in every human there is a bottomless pit of evil which can’t be allowed out without devastating consequences. That sounds very evangelical. Taking one more small step of conjecture, it almost seems that Louis Stevenson took on board all of the teachings of Christianity about the nature of humanity, and rejected just the spirituality. By doing so, perhaps he felt forced into taking the pessimistic view that there was then nothing we could do to control the animal inside all of us. Stevenson even appears to have lived a little of the libertine lifestyle too. 

By my reading, Jekyll and Hyde isn’t really an exploration of good and evil, it is really just a study of the evil - the animal - inside of us.

The last word

Jekyll and Hyde is a short little book - worth a read if you've got an hour to kill. What more could you ask for? It’s a little gripping Victorian horror that explores the consequences of living a double life, but more importantly it’s a good look at the philosophy of what it is to be human.

Three things Moby Dick will teach you about life

Moby Dick is a must read. But it doesn’t belong on a top-shelf of stuffy classics coated in dust. It lives, and breathes, and everyone needs to read this book. 

‘Call me Ishmael’, the book begins, and from there it’s a headlong descent into an obsession-fuelled madness. And, because the levels of meaning run deeper than a whale’s dive, it will challenge your mind and take you places - weird, strange places - that you otherwise wouldn’t go. And that doesn’t just mean a whale-ship off the Cape Horn; it’ll take you on a journey down into your own mind too.

If you want to see everything, do everything -  and who wouldn’t -  reading Moby Dick shouldn’t just be on your bucket list, it should be on tomorrow’s to-do.

Here’s the top three things that Moby Dick will teach you.

1) Walk the line

There’s a fine balance between being passionate and obsessed. Reading Moby Dick will teach you exactly what it takes to find that balance.

You cannot necessarily trust the people around you to tell you when you’ve crossed the line into obsession. The captain, Abraham, manages to convince the crew to go on his crazy whale hunt. He is convincing and evangelical and unwilling to listen to reason. 

Every achievement requires some kind of single-minded focus. And being blinkered to criticism can be necessary for success. However, if you are obsessed with something - especially if it’s the wrong thing - it is unlikely that you will be able to accept good feedback. And that means people won’t want to give you it. 

It’s a tough balancing act. If you are put off by every negative comment, you won’t be able to do anything significant. But if you don’t listen to criticism, you might spend years doing the wrong thing, wasting your resources.

Moby Dick shows us how to find that midpoint. Listen to specific people you trust. But most importantly, be the judge of your own actions. The best way to tell if you are obsessed with the wrong thing is seeing its effect in the world. Do you have to say or do crazy things to justify your beliefs. Are you circumventing the globe chasing your very own white whale?

2) Meet your shadow

Abraham, the captain, becomes obsessed with killing a white-whale that ‘reaped’ his leg. This famous obsession is infinitely interpretable. The ferocious, unbending anger that Abe feels towards the Sperm-Whale, ultimately, is symbolic of the anger that is inside us all. Abraham’s fury, pointless and driven, has lived in all of us at some point: with a boss, parent, friend, or partner. We’ve all felt that flash of white rage when you just want to put your fists up and fight. 

Moby Dick forces you to confront your inner demons - and experience the futility of them. By letting you live, vividly, the nightmarish, logical conclusion of this blinding anger, it will let you see - feel - how utterly foolish it is. It shows you that you’ll end up bent on ripping up the world with hate, chasing around the world something that only exists inside your mind.

3) Do your dues

Decks need scrubbing, food needs making and whales need catching. In the life of an adult there is a certain amount of life-admin that just needs to be done. You’ll always need to wash up and polish your shoes. Work needs to get done.

Moby Dick teaches you that however tumultuous life is, there is nobility in keeping your life in order. A ships deck gets dirty constantly, it always needs cleaning. How much easier to let it stay dirty. But being able to create a home is one thing that separates us from animals. And a well-run ship is the one thing that keeps the tempestuous ocean at bay.

Moby Dick is a foundational piece of literature, and reading it is an experience to be treasured. Like all great novels, when you’ve made the journey and look back - you'll be able to enjoy more than just the view. It will change you too.



***

Moby Dick is available on Amazon - only two pounds!

Madame Bovary

Madam Bovary is a novel that tells the most well-trodden of stories. A bored housewife, Emma, cheats on her boring husband Charles, an average provincial doctor. And yet this book is something very special. 

Delving a bit further into the plot doesn’t show us why though. Emma marries Charles, but soon realises she can’t love him. She despairs and becomes increasingly difficult and capricious. Struggling to deal with the paucity of love in her marriage, and her burgeoning passion and emotion, she gets swept off her feet by a passing rake. Emma’s heart opens and the world rushes in, but her life soon begins to untangle.

Cinematic

The plot isn’t what makes this book. It’s all the other stuff. Flaubert’s writing is, at its best, wonderous. Tens of pages go by with nothing but description of Emma’s emotional state. It feels real, immediate and alive. Her hopes and dreams, and passions are written of in the same way, and with same artistry, as the provincial world they live in. I especially enjoyed the description of Emma living vicariously through mediocre books.

‘You head is empty, he continued, the hours slip away. From your chair you wander through the countries of your mind, and your thoughts, threading themselves into the fiction play about with the details or rush along the track of the plot. You melt into the characters, it seems as if your own heart is beating under their skin’

The writing seemed to me very like a film. There are defined sets-pieces - in the opera, at a funeral, in the pub. And these sets are described vividly, with the characters moving through these scenes much as they would in a film. There’s other cinematic elements too. Often scenes take place with contrasting visual motifs - a philosophical conversation next to a dead body for example. And much as it is cinematic to continually reference certain visual patterns, Flaubert returns again and again to certain key descriptions, like Emma’s boots.

Looking deeper

I like some of the critical interpretations too. Many see Madam Bovary as an exploration of 19th Century gender identify. I can understand that - Emma refuses to exist in the cage of ‘doting housewife’, and she seeks to free herself and explore her passions and pleasures. And by doing that she takes on some masculine traits, to the extent that, with her last lover, she acts as the man, and he the women. 

I can see how Madam Bovary explore class relationships as well. In a way Emma is the prototypical bourgeois, shopping, getting into debt, always wanting more, more, more. The writing is noticeably non-judgemental, but the facts of Emma’s personality engender the same revulsion that I understand Flaubert felt for that ‘Parisian’ way of living. Emma is unable to enjoy simple things, and notably only disdains the beauty of the countryside around her.

My thoughts

I found this book easy to read. The joy of the writing is such that your eyes feel like they are bouncing over the words, everything flows so. It’s an easy book to read fast. In fact, I think it’s a good book to read faster than you normally would, even to the extent that you’re not comprehending every single word. Doing this for me, built up these descriptive scenes into incredibly vivid mosaic worlds in my minds eye.

For me, the description of Emma’s inner world was my favourite part. I didn’t find though, despite a touching plot, that it tugged on my heart strings. Emma is quite dislikeable - she’s capricious, selfish, insatiable and doesn’t seem to care for her child. I found it difficult to really care what happened to her. So I read the book critically, not caught up in the rush of Emma’s passions, but observing it all like a beautiful flower. 

‘never touch your idols; the gilding will stick to your fingers’.

Life+

Reading Bovary made me feel optimistic about life. For Emma, passion covers her life like a lacquer. Without it, life is flat, dull and depressing. With it, life is open to almost infinite meaning and pleasure. I took that, perhaps wrongly, as endorsing a kind of ‘make your own meaning’ existentialism. 

Perhaps the emotional varnish isn’t just there in life. Maybe you have to make it and work at stoking your emotional fire. You don’t have, like Emma to find it in adulterous liaisons; it can be anywhere. The joy is, learning to be creative with your emotions - learning to get more out life by feeling great things - isn’t just play acting. If you feel it, it’s real.

Which translation?

I picked my translation quite carefully - and was influenced by Julian Barnes review in the London Review of Books. I went for the translation by Wall. Lydia Davis's translation has been whipping up quite a storm, but I purposefully didn’t go for it. I like to read translations that are most faithful to the original even if that makes the text sound a bit jerky or old-fashioned. I tend not to notice that, but actually Wall’s translation was neither, and I thought it superb. There were a fair French words left in, and words that I didn’t know, but I like that too.

It’s petty, but something else prejudiced me against the Davis's translation. In the bookshop I could only find it in Penguin ‘deluxe’ edition which I hate. For some reason they irregularly cut the pages (perhaps to seem old fashioned). I think it’s ridiculous. Firstly, I can see the pattern in the rough cut pages, so it looks cheap and imitative like the handwriting font on a computer. Secondly, I think it takes a lot of the beauty out of book. I love new books! Why would I want them to look old when I buy them. They’ll look tatty enough when I’ve finished reading.