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.

The short stories of Chekov

 I read a selection of Chekov’s short stories mostly because it was the last thing on a list of top writer’s favourite books that I had yet to read. Chekov, contrary to popular conception, was a plump, ruddy fellow who enjoyed a good time and a hearty laugh. I always thought him a sickly pale scholar, but not a bit of it.

Chekov is considered one of the world’s best short story writers. His style is utterly compact. The reader travels a long way in a few sentences, and a lot of the action is left ‘off camera’. All of his stories seem to zoom in on something very specific. He writes two different kinds of stories: little comedies that are often a raucous, acerbic criticism of high society, designed to show how ridiculous it all is. And his later ones, which are much more ‘serious’ and tend to have strong morality at their core.

The comedies were my favorite. One of them tells the story of an army corporal who accidently sneezes on a superior. He tries to say sorry, and the superior, with embarrassment, declares there is no need for apologies. The corporal thinks that he is being brushed off because his apology isn’t accepted, so he tries again, and again until he drives the senior official to irritation. Of course, the corporal confuses this for annoyance at the original sneeze, and going home, lays on his bed in complete resignation – and dies.

Another that I enjoyed tells the story of a man being driven home in a carriage on a deserted road. He talks himself into a paranoia that the driver is going to rob him, so he starts trying to make himself seem like a formidable foe. He describes how he has two guns with him and would shoot the driver without a second thought. The driver promptly deserts his carriage and runs off thinking he is being robbed.

 My thoughts

Some of Chekov’s stories have the kind of zinging pithiness of Zen Master tales. I didn’t always get the morality or purpose at their core, but I think sometimes that’s the point, to let us glimpse the meaningless of it all. I remember reading a beginner’s philosophy guide when I was a teenager, and it said that ‘meaning is in the mind, not in the world’. And that my blew my mind - things could mean anything then. Chekov did something similar for me.

I really liked Chekov’s stories, but I don’t think that they are up there with the greats of world literature. His stories are very concise little vignettes capturing a piece of information, emotion, or a comedic moment perfectly. But I didn’t find much else other than humor or poignancy. For example, I didn’t see much symbolism, plot, characters, deeper meaning, or fundamental truths about humankind. Perhaps I missed it. His stories are certainly allegorical – and the later ones are deeply moral. However, I found that the truths buried in Chekov’s stories, were actually more easily discovered in the world.

Chekov had great skill at writing; the succinctness of his sentences is fantastic. I can see why other writers would regard him as one of their favourite authors – his work is like a text-book for writers. And I could perhaps let him contend for the title of greatest short-story writer ever. But maybe I just don’t think short stories can ever be very good.  You put a lot of work in to understand a new fictional world, but the pay off is never really worth it. I love the idea of short stories, but try as hard as I do – I just don’t love them, the poor little things.

Hamlet

This play is - of course - brilliant, archetypal, riveting and confounding all at once. On finishing it, I just wanted to read it again in order to pick up on all the things that I had missed. And then, no doubt, again. In fact, I got the feeling that life wouldn’t be too bad if I just listened to a recording of Hamlet on repeat endlessly, forever.

After one parse, there is just so, so much that I missed. But I think I got a lot too. I read an Open University text with a page of explanatory notes on the left of each page of play - that helped.

Hamlet is a play worth thinking about. Unlike with lots of fiction, asking yourself why the characters act the way they do, trying to go beyond the words into the psychology of the characters is very fruitful. There is always a good reason for everything.

The mentality of Hamlet losing his nerve as he yearns to murder the usurping king seem so... human. Whilst reading - and afterwards - I found myself slotting parts of my life in the Shakespearean mold; the narrative helping me to understand the world around me. Much of life is described in this play.

And of course, it’s a tragedy. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that everyone ends up dying in a heap on the floor. The drama builds and builds, and the tension ratchets up until the final explosive scene. I found the play quite claustrophobic. The plot revolves around a tight band of courtiers and kings who become cloistered, feeding off each others contrivances, grievances and dark impulses. There is no light from the outside world to disinfect this rank pit of emotions.  Their lives become mentally unhealthy, a steaming cesspool of bubbling murkiness and frustrated desire, that eventually overflows into spectacular and chaotic doom.

My thoughts 

I recommend reading Hamlet. I have seen the play on stage twice, watched the film and listened to a radio production. But reading enabled a completely different - and richer - experience. Watching Hamlet as a play allows you to pick up on the context. You can see what’s going on by the expressions and intonation of the actors. It makes the play seem alive.

However, Shakespeare is very densely packed with information. For example take this phrase:

 “The dram of evil doth all the noble substance of a doubt to his own scandal”,

If I heard an actor say that, I might understand the emotion behind the speech, but I wouldn't have time to decode the metaphor. To me, it means ‘a little evil in someone makes us doubt all their good qualities - which is to our detriment’.

I think that’s quite profound. If someone is generally nice, and they act nastily one day we might say ‘now I’ve seen what they’re really like’. Too often people are willing to let a small amount of bad behaviour colour an overwhelmingly positive experience of someone. I find Shakespeare full of this kind of deep insight about life, and it’s easy to miss when simply watching a play.

I bravely attempt a criticism

I can’t really critique Shakespeare (I think it’s a reasonable assumption that the play is operating on a deeper level that I am), but if someone forced me to, I could perhaps come up with one thing. I was slightly disappointed with a plot device in the last act. Hamlet is dueling Laertes with swords. Laertes, taking part in a plot developed with the king, has poisoned his sword in order to try and kill Hamlet. Half way through the duel they - somehow! - switch swords, with Hamlet now holding the poisoned one. Hamlet promptly stabs Laertes with the poison tip who (spoiler alert) dies.

Wait a second - during a duel they somehow manage to swap swords?! This seems such a random, unbelievable course of events, almost as if it were just a device to make sure that both characters die. There was an asterisk in the text that I read saying ‘this might seem crude, but actually during live action this could happen very easily in a scuffle’. I’m not too convinced. Quite a crucial outcome of the play hangs on Hamlet and Laertes accidentally switching swords whilst fencing.

The last word

Should everyone read this?  God, yes.

Germinal (Émile Zola)

I asked a French friend about Germinal, by Emile Zola, and he said that since this book is on the French syllabus, it is often thought about with a groan. That’s a shame, because I loved all the books I read in school. For some people, I can imagine that remembering a novel they were forced to read, takes them back to those dusty, classrooms full of youthful boredom. For me, reading always had the opposite effect; novels I read in school let my imagination soar and transported me to distant worlds far away from the a lecturing, hectoring Mrs Gibbs. I thought Germinal was amazing. This book not only paints a vivid, and necessary, picture of poverty, but also provides some interesting challenges to the economic system we live in.

Germinal tells the story of a miner’s strike in 18th century France. Etienne is a poor but bright drifting worker. Impoverished and hungry, he comes across a mining village and falls into a job hewing coal. It’s backbreaking work. The villagers slog underground all day in the dark and the damp, but are barely paid enough to survive. Etienne becomes deeply radicalized by the suffering he sees around him; the capitalist system that allows this to continue must be immoral and corrupt.  At the same time, the coalmine bosses are trying to reduce the workers’ pay yet further. The villagers are scared that they simply will not be able to live under these harsh new terms. Etienne, with his staunch political views, is well placed to lead the coalminers into a standoff - a strike. This strike becomes bloody and brutal as the workers starve, and the company’s profits dry up. Anger bubbles and festers, and the standoff becomes a war. This is no longer about simply trying to win a bread-line wage. They want to send the whole system to hell. And at the root of it all is a crazy dream – that all men are equal under the sun.

My thoughts

This book is the perfect antidote to Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.  In Atlas Shrugged, unfettered capitalism leads to advancement and beatification of the human race. In Germinal it leads to effective slavery, conflict and suffering. I don’t think Ayn Rand’s was blind to the ‘Germinal’ critique, she just didn’t care. I think she would say that if a man let himself live a miserable existence  - in a coalmine or anywhere else - then he was a fool.  But the two books are perfect to read together. At times, they almost seem to be in dialogue with each other putting forward arguments and counter-arguments. For example, Atlas Shrugged posits that since it is the capitalist that takes the risk that creates wealth, they deserve the rewards. But Germinal neatly undercuts this by comparing these wealthy bourgeois throwing around a little of their money, whilst the workers stake their lives on the company.

Socialism

Germinal isn’t exactly an advocate for socialism. In fact, the socialist beliefs and believers are exposed throughout as somewhat naïve and all too human.  However, it certainly is a shrill voice highlighting rottenness at the core of the capitalist system. 

And I think it’s very effective. The descriptions of poverty in the book are vivid and crushing.  It’s always worth remembering that we belong to an economic system that can treat people very cruelly. And also that it is in our nature to accept and live with it, rather than to challenge it. The kind of suffering that Germinal describes is still endemic in the world today, and I feel far too – dangerously too – complacent about it.  Reading this novel flared up something inside of me, and I found it quite deeply radicalizing.  Whatever the cause, and whatever the reason, and however impossible it is to stop – I think it must be a universal declaration that this kind of suffering is wrong.

It is true though, that for those in the West, Germinal’s central point has become less relevant. The story describes how workers might get trapped in horrible working conditions with a wage that is not enough to survive. Today, the legacy of the Union movement has ensured a certain standard of work safety, and we have a minimum wage, both of which largely prevents the kind of situation that Germinal describes. 

Perhaps then, Germinal can be seen today as a good argument against socialism. A problem – poor working conditions and lower wagers - had a good solution within the current system. Beyond this, Germinal describes the wider rumblings of socialism  - calls to destroy the bosses, uniting all the workers of the world, totalitarianism. But none of this is effectual in the book, and none of it has been effective in real life.

I’d like to make one final moderating point. It’s easy to write a story that focuses on a salient example of human suffering, but it is harder to focus on the things that are not as visible. I’d suggest some things to keep in mind whilst reading. 1) If these miners weren’t employed in a coalmine, they might have been in worse work or unemployed, or dead from starvation. 2) The coal they were producing was powering the industrial revolution. This means a) it was directly improving thousands of peoples lives, powering hospitals, schools and saving lives b) it was a temporary phase the West needed to go through to develop. Billions of people are better off now – and that couldn’t have happened if men didn’t go down coalmines. 3) Worker’s conditions did improve, and worker’s did take a greater share of the profits 4) For most of history nasty jobs were normal, and it is only the capitalist system that has ever liberated people from it.

One more thing

Germinal is a really exciting book that will pull you into a dark and unfamiliar world.  Some of the scenes underground, trapped in bowels of this living mine are scarier and more claustrophic than any horror film I’ve seen.  But more than that, Germinal is a question, a challenge, and a call to arms to stand-up for the disenfranchised of the world.

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.

Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë)

"The action takes place in Hell, but the places, I don’t know why, have English names”  Jorge Luis Borges

I didn’t know much about Wuthering Heights before I started reading it, but I had a vague hunch that it was some kind of society romance. I've since talked to some of my friends about it, and they all think the same thing. I had also lumped it into one of a huge pile of books in the category ‘maybe I’ll get round to it one day’. I don't know how Wuthering Heights got this kind of dull reputation, but it is utterly misplaced. This novel is full of savage, Gothic horror that is cunningly disguised amongst the routines of provincial banality.

The novel starts with Heathcliff, a boy found on the moors and taken in by a father of a young family. Heathcliffe grows up, favoured by the father but despised by the rest of the family except the daughter, Catherine. The two of them have a deep affinity and go for madcap rambles on the windswept and rainy moors. Catherine marries a bland boy, Edgar, and later dies. But Heathcliff's love lives on, deep as an ocean, bending him into a cruel and brutal revenge of Catherine's husbands family and everyone he knows.

“Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I can not live without my life! I can not live without my soul!”

My thoughts

This novel really is savage. In the first chapter the narrator visits Heathcliff, the novel’s main character. As he walks into the house, dogs attack him and push him to the ground. They ferociously nash at his face and arms. Heathcliff, seeing this, looks on and laughs at the blood streaming from his visitors face. This is shocking stuff. Here I was, starting a Victorian ‘romance’ novel where passions are normally kept hidden and under the table, and, in the first chapter, there is explicit and feral violence. Very quickly, this engendered in me an intense feeling of claustrophobia and unease.  I wanted to get out of this devilish house where such human shadows lurk, casually hinting at the darkness inside us all.

Reading Wuthering Heights was quite an uncomfortable experience - Emily Bronte is describing emotions powerful enough to break a human. But I loved the parts where Catherine runs away to the moor. It seemed to me to be representative of the wildness in us all. Stories really give us a narrative structure to understand our own lives - almost like lenses with different tints and perspectives, they hone the glasses through which we see the world.  Catherine breaking free, and running away to the wild moorland of moss and brackish pools of water feels to me deeply symbolic. Twisted, troubled child she is, but who wouldn’t follow her onto the freedom of the moor?