Minor Characters: Women and the Beat Poets

Minor Characters by Joyce Johnson

The girl friends of the beat writers (Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs etc) didn't really get a look in at the time - usually off camera and in the small print.  On the book cover, you can just see Joyce deliberately blurred to the left of Kerouac in this iconic image.  But, they were poets and novelists in their own right, pioneers of female liberation, often with tragic consequences.   Unlike the men, the girls weren't having the swinging, brilliant time we might imagine, but instead trying to have relationships with lovers who were commitment phobic, and leading lives maimed by drink, drugs and abortion. Joyce's best friend, the poet Elise Cowen, finally jumped out of a seventh storey window after several failed relationships, including one with Ginsberg, and a botched abortion.

Joyce Johnson, now a successful  award-winning author, but not the household name of her lover, Jack Kerouac, tells the story of those lives with insight and compassion.  Of her own life she says:

'If time was like a passage of music - you could keep going back to it until you got it right.'

But there are no rehearsals - you just have to improvise and learn to live with the wrong notes.

This book is a very good read if you want to know the flip side to the romantic story.

Some Light Summer Reading

I’ve been working quite hard recently, have Italian exams looming and so not had much time for books that need a lot of concentration.  So I’ve been enjoying a bit of frivolous reading.

I read about Dee Weaver’s novel ‘The Winter House’ on the Strictly Writing blog and was intrigued enough to download a sample and then buy the book at the generous price of £2.14.

Dee is one of a new breed of Indie authors by-passing the publishers and going straight onto Kindle and other E-book platforms.   The Winter House is a gothic romance with elements of the supernatural and the pagan.  Dee is a pagan herself and knows the world of alternative relation well.  While not a believer in religion of any kind, re-incarnation, or the supernatural, Dee made me suspend my disbelief for the duration of the story.  It brought back the rather guilty pleasure I used to feel reading my mother’s Victoria Holt novels  - but Dee’s are very, very, much better written and the comparison should probably be with the Mysteries of Udolpho, Castle of Utranto, Northanger Abbey and others in that genre.   I notice from my trawls around the book world that novels with elements of the paranormal are coming back into fashion again.

The plot is quite complicated, involving a haunting and a state of possession, but begins when two people glimpse a house through the bare winter trees and become determined to own it.  Both are convinced that they have been there before, and then .......  very strange things begin to happen.

The Glassblower of Murano,  (a much pricier £4.67 on Kindle) by best selling author Marina Fiorato, was recommended by DoveGreyReader, so I approached it with great anticipation.  It had all the ingredients I like - a 17th century Venetian story of mystery and suspense involving a famous glass blower called Corradino Manin, and his beautiful 21st century female descendent  who goes from England to Venice in search of a new life.  The novel weaves back and forth between the two stories and quickly lost my interest.  I found the structure a bit clunky and the writing less than satisfying.  There was a distinct absence of rich historical texture and an unwillingness to go deeper into the issues and ideas the subject matter raised (unlike the Venetian novels of Michelle Lovric for instance).   The plot was just a bit too much Mills and Boon for me (another blog reviewer has described it as historical chicklit!) and the writing nowhere near as good as Dee Weaver’s.    Mainstream publishing really lost out here against the Indie E-book and I won’t be buying any of Marina’s other books.    Apparently she secured a £250,000 advance for her Venetian series, so my small abstention won't make any difference to her at all!

John Banville as Benjamin Black

Booker prize winner John Banville also writes crime novels under the pseudonym Benjamin Black.   His detective figure is a taciturn, hard drinking, consultant pathologist called Quirke and the novels are set in 1950s Dublin, which Banville/Black remembers as a dark place.
I've never been convinced about writers using pseudonyms to write in another genre - when the reader knows who the author really is, it seems pointless. But Banville makes a case for this - believing that Benjamin Black is another persona who allows him to write in a very different - much less literary - way. It's odd to hear John Banville admit that (as Black) he has suddenly been drawn to story-telling 'on the brink of old age' and that the crime novels came out of a fascination with the character of Quirke -  during the interview Banville/Black says;  'John Banville has never been much interested in his characters', whereas Benjamin Black apparently is.  The whole interview can be found at www.benjaminblackbooks.com

In the first of the series, Christine Falls, Quirke is drawn into a baby-smuggling racket between Ireland and America through the involvement of his brother-in-law. Warned not to pry, Quirke finds himself a the centre of a criminal network using the Catholic Church's orphanages, which in the 1950s were vast. It was relatively easy in those days to make a donation to the church and adopt a baby privately - my own cousins were adopted that way.

In the second book The Silver Swan, an old friend rings Quirke to ask him not to do a post mortem on his wife because he doesn't want her body to be mutilated. Quirke immediately suspects another motive and his secret post mortem reveals that her death might not have been the suicide everyone has assumed.

There are three more in the series to date, Elegy for April, The Lemur and Death in Summer (just out in hardback).

The books are very well written - as you'd expect - but I'm not enamoured of 1950s Dublin, which is portrayed as a dark and violent place, and I don't have much sympathy for the dour, rule-bending Quirke. What the books have is a kind of honesty - the ends don't tie up neatly and it isn't always possible to bring the criminal to justice particularly where church and state are involved. There is also that fascination with character rather than plot, which is often missing in the crime genre. Apparently John Banville admires Georges Simenon, and you can certainly make parallels between Quirke and Maigret.  Other bloggers (eg Kimbofo) have suggested that the books are outside the crime genre altogether and should be classed as 'literary mysteries'.

Christine Dwyer Hickey: Last Train from Liguria

I seem to be on an Italian reading kick at the moment and what’s even spookier, on an Italian/Irish mix which chimes perfectly with my own confused genetic make-up!

Christine Dwyer Hickey is a best-selling, award-winning, Irish author who has up to now slipped beneath my radar - I tend not to read the book review pages very often and rely on word of mouth and favourite book blogs to get ideas for reading.  This one came from Dove Grey Reader - love or loathe her brand of cosy, country cottage fireside, everyone’s favourite aunty, blog content, you can’t argue about DGR’s influence when it comes to recommending books.  And she is always fair - avoiding books she can’t give wholehearted support for.  As an author there’s nothing I’d like better than to see one of my books on her blog, and I find many a brilliant read from its pages.

Last Train from Liguria is the kind of novel you lose yourself in - so rich in character and dialogue you never want the journey to end.  And the language is equally rich - as if the novel was written by a poet.  Does Christine D-H write poetry?  I wouldn’t mind betting that she does.

The two main character have both gone to Italy for different reasons - Edward escaping from a crime he committed under the influence of Irish Whiskey, Bella propelled there by her father who is embarking on a new life and doesn’t want to be encumbered by a neurotic, anorexic, spinster daughter unable to recover from the death of her mother and the conviction that it is her duty and her role to look after him.  ‘You’re my daughter,’ he tells her.  ‘Not my wife.’

Edward and Bella are employed by the beautiful, but mysterious, Signora Lami to look after her autistic son.  But as Mussolini’s dictatorship begins to threaten genocide it becomes necessary to make a clandestine journey across Europe.

This is beautifully written and it keeps you reading for the beauty of the language alone. I read it on Kindle (ridiculously cheap at 99p!) and I’m now wishing that her other books were available in the same format.

Andrea Camilleri: The Montalbano Mysteries

I love crime fiction and have become addicted to the Italian detective Salvo Montalbano, created by the Italian author Andrea Camilleri.  The novels are set in Sicily and you can feel the heat radiating up from the arid landscape, and smell the sea - just right for someone feeling nostalgic about Italy.

At first glance the central character isn't particularly endearing - he's a complete bastard to work for, tetchy, jealous, egotistical, but one hundred per cent straight in a landscape where most people can be bought.  That's why his dedicated team stay with him.   Though why his long distance girl friend puts up with him is more than I can fathom.  He is totally commitment phobic and treats her even worse than his police officers.  But then, as I've observed over there,  Italian women seem to expect very little of their men.

What is good about the novels is the quality of their plots. The complex structure of the rival police forces in Italy allows for almost unlimited complication, and then there's the existence of the Mafia.   There's no lack of killing in Sicily and even the most extreme violence seems credible in that setting.

I've read the first 5 novels and so far each one of them has held my attention from beginning to end and I'm starting to develop a soft spot for the irritable Sicilian.  It's partly the food - he's addicted to good cooking - sea bream grilled with garlic and lemon, home made pasta with a delicate sauce made from octopus,  aubergines grilled with parmesan .......    I'm salivating just thinking about it.   The novels are  a combination of Morse and Masterchef and - judging by the number Camilleri's sold - it's a winning formula.

Sue Gee: The Mysteries of Glass

I have recently re-discovered Sue Gee. A couple of years ago I read ‘Reading in Bed’ after I heard an episode on BBC radio. It made me laugh, and I really enjoyed it. I marked her out as an author I should read more of. But somehow she had slipped from my view. Then I found her novel ‘The Mysteries of Glass’ on a second hand book stall and saw that it had been listed for the Orange Prize.

I was riveted from page one and read every word of the beautifully structured prose. It’s set in late Victorian England and the central character is a young, idealistic curate posted to his first parish in a remote country location. He is innocent, virginal, and is shocked to find himself deeply in love with a woman within a few days of his arrival. Especially as that women is the Vicar’s wife, trapped in a loveless marriage with a man twice her age.

This is how it begins.

‘Richard entered the room. He saw the cold winter light at the casement overlooking the churchyard; the faded carpet, and horsehair ottoman; the round table with a pile of Blackwood’s Magazine; the oil lamp. He took in the plainness and darkness of it all, the leaping flames of the fire almost the only colour in the room, for the cat asleep on the fireside chair was the most solid black, and the young woman standing by the mantelpiece had hair and skin as pale as milk, and her gown was as pale as a dove.’

In this country parish the Victorian double standard is rife and Richard is pitched into a world of such moral complexity his simple religious faith is inadequate to deal with it. There are no lurid sex scenes, or melodramas, just a quiet intensity building to an ending that is exactly right. I’m now going to seek out every other book by Sue Gee and take them off to Italy with me, particularly The Hours of the Night and Letters from Prague.

I was surprised to find that she is not a young writer - she’s been around, publishing novels, since 1980. Currently programme leader at Middlesex university and, like all of those writers who need to teach Creative Writing to survive, reading for the necessary Ph.D in Creative Writing. A complete waste in my opinion - she should be writing another wonderful novel.

Ali Smith; Accidental

Just every now and then you read a novel that really does knock your socks off.   This one is so experimental and off the wall that it genuinely astonishes.  Ali Smith's textual fireworks are amazing.  There's a section written in sonnet form (the character's whole life has turned to poetry) and most of the narrative is stream of consciousness, inside the head stuff though refreshingly written in 3rd person.   And it convinces.  Each character's thought process is unique.  Only the central character - the hub around which all the others revolve, is missing from this.  We see Alhambra/Amber from every point of view except her own.  She is a Mystery.  But she is also a magical, healing, and sometimes destructive,  force.

The family is in deep trouble, though they are all in denial.  They have taken a holiday home in Norfolk and are playing at happy families.  But the step-father, Michael, a university lecturer (or more accurately lecher)  is running away from complicated affairs with his students; the mother, Eve, is trying to pretend that she is writing a book, but is suffering from writer's block; the son, Magnus, is suicidal because he believes he has caused the death of a girl at school; and the 12 year old daughter, Astrid,  has withdrawn into a silent, obsessive world because she is being bullied.   No one is telling anyone anything.

Until a young woman walks through the door and takes up residence.  The family are so dysfunctional no one asks anyone else whether they have invited her.  And once Amber  has her feet under the table nothing can ever be the same again.  She is both the maggot in the apple and the good genie in the lamp - handing out wishes.

This has to be one of the most original novels written in the last decade - the pyrotechnics are wonderful, but its unconventional nature makes it very difficult to review.  On Amazon readers either thought it 'wearisome drivel' or 'the best thing I've ever read....  this book will change your life....'   For me it's a clever, post-modern exercise in playing with traditional ideas of narrative and a good example of prose poetry.  The writing is so original I was always hooked enough to read on.  The Accidental really deserved its Orange Prize listing and Ali Smith deserves to win a whole shed load of prizes!