billybookblog

*contains spoilers* As I stated in my blog about Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (Volume 1), the complete text, consisting of all twenty-one Books, was published in its entirety for the first time in 1484 by William Caxton. Penguin Classics, however, are good (great, in fact) enough supply an updated version in two still lengthy but much more digestible and separate volumes. You can of course read the text in its more complete and original form in Malory: Complete Works (published by Oxford Standard Authors), but if you’re getting into the medieval tales of knight errantry for the first time, I’d suggest the Penguin editions as a reliable toe-dipper. It’s at this point, in Le Morte D’Arthur (Volume 2) , when Malory begins to address the issue concerning the title of the work: the actual death of King Arthur. But before everything begins to unravel, and before the knights of the Table Round descend into nihilistic and violent chaos, we are first reminded of what made this rather...

*contains spoilers* One of the first things that occurred to me on picking up Jane Austen’s revered masterpiece, Emma , was that I’d not yet read it! Honestly, Billy… But I made up for this piece of sacrilegious neglect on my part by diving eagerly into this text. Emma is considered one of Austen’s best completed works, ranging up there with her two most famous pieces, Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility , though I think it is possibly the best of hers I’ve read so far! In her own estimation, Austen declared Emma to be a character “whom no one but myself will much like”, which is to some extent quite true. On reaching the halfway point in the novel, which itself comes about halfway through Volume II of III, I discussed Emma’s character thus far with a friend: “She’s really fucking annoying”, he said, and I didn’t completely disagree. And here’s why: Emma Woodhouse is spoilt. She’s constantly fussed over by her father (who himself regularly complains and requires attention a...

*contains spoilers* In 1899, at a time when Victorian Britain was proud and vocal about its imperialist domination in many parts of the world, Joseph Conrad, born in Ukraine in 1857 as Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, brought down this not-quite-a-novel-but-a-bit-more-than-a-novella with a righteous smash, shattering the unfounded notions of British superiority with an earthquake that still rumbles and resonates under our feet today. It’ll disconcert any number of us budding writers to learn that English was only Conrad’s third language – his first and second being Polish and French respectively – so reading this particular text is an indictment on our own linguistic skills as well as our general lack of awareness about Britain’s negative impact on the world (take Brexit as a recent example of the nation’s current, overall naivety regarding international relations, trade and diplomacy). As a Brit reading the text, it’s difficult not to look at oneself awkwardly in the mirror of the st...

*contains spoilers* Between the years 1225 and 1230, Guillaume de Lorris worked on and completed his portion of this novel, called Roman de la Rose , which was taken up by Jean de Meun and completed between the years 1269 and 1278. In fact, the only reason we know of Lorris’s identity at all is because Meun mentions him in his own portion of the text, giving a firm justification for the idea of paying homage to one’s literary forbears. Thanks to Meun’s attentive assignation, we are luckily not burdened by the prospect of having to refer to this text as part apocryphal. Though it came later – some hundred years or so – this text constantly brought to my mind the allegory contained in William Langland’s Piers Plowman through its use of the personification of abstract human qualities and actions such as Courtesy, Chastity and Fair Welcome. Once more we have a young man on the brink of adulthood drifting off to sleep by a river, and the images and messages that come to him in a resulting ...

*contains spoilers* In 1803, Jane Austen finished her first novel for publication, and was paid £10 by Benjamin Croft & Co. for her hard work. Unfortunately, this novel sat unpublished by Croft for six years, and, on asking in a very strongly worded letter whether they had lost the first manuscript and, if so, would they like a second, Croft offered to return the original for same price they had paid for it six years before. Unfortunately, Austen was at this time in some financial difficulty, and could not afford to buy back the manuscript – instead, she decided to turn her attention to finishing the other novels she had begun since then: Sense and Sensibility , Pride and Prejudice , and Emma (you may have heard of them). The novel which remained unpublished until her death in 1817 is the one about which I am writing now – Northanger Abbey – and was thankfully bought back from the publisher after the success of the three previously named works made that endeavour possible. In 181...

*contains spoilers* In 1910, the literary critic Desmond MacCarthy wrote “Impressionism encouraged an artist to paint a tree as it appeared to him at the moment under particular circumstances”. Henry James, the painter of the portrait about which I’m writing now, was very much of the same mind when it came to literature. I was even more convinced on this on finding out that James asked for his own portrait to be painted by the noted Impressionist artist John Singer Sargent, as James himself appreciated the notion that his image was to be a personal interpretation of the artist’s mind as much as it was to be his own, corporeal, physical form. Somewhere in between the objective form and the artist’s interpretation lies an unreliability that is aptly reflected in the narrator of this beautiful piece of work’s delivery as he toys with the reader in both knowing perfectly and yet not being quite sure exactly how a character feels. In this way, James bridges the gap between Victorian Realism...

*contains spoilers* I laughed…a lot. And I needed it – I’d been feeling down, and I heard this would be a good pick-me-up. Published in 1954, though smelling distinctly of a wartime Britain (our protagonist, James Dixon, for example, tries and fails to ration his cigarettes, and owns only a few pair of trousers, which often have to be stitched by his landlady), Kingsley Amis’s first novel, Lucky Jim , is what many have referred to as the cornerstone of the Angry Young Man movement of the mid-twentieth century. The university setting would confirm this, where our young, new lecturer, most commonly called Dixon by others throughout, is struggling to settle in and assure his position and salary, and ends up making a bumbling fool of himself in attempting so. Dixon certainly gets help from the narrator, whose uncertainty on matters only compounds this sense of confusion and lack of concern shown by those in academic positions at the unnamed university; “He’d read somewhere, or been told, t...

*contains spoilers* I’ve been wanting to read some Anthony Trollope for a while, and so, in my rush to find a book of his to stuff into my cabin bag for the band’s trip to America, I reached for the most reasonably-sized volume I could find: Doctor Thorne . Along with this choice I also took with me Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (which is the subject of my previous blog), Virgil’s The Aeneid (this particular edition is a more recent translation delivered in a wonderfully poetic prose, which differs nicely from the more constricted but yet still beautiful verse translation of Cecil Day Lewis’s), Homer’s The Odyssey (which I’m studying as part of a Classical Civilisation AS course, and I’ve already read many times – but still…), Charlotte Brontë’s Villette , and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim . How I managed to whittle down from the twenty books I’d originally picked to this expansive and yet concise collection is a struggle I shall protect you from. Anyway, so Doctor Thorne is th...

*contains spoilers* As with an awful lot of Medieval texts, Malory’s incredible collection of tales of knight errantry, Le Morte D’Arthur , is heavily indebted to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (or A History of the Kings of Britain ), which also features, I might add, the Leir which Shakespeare eventually took as his own, troubled, titular King Lear . But more than anything else, Malory’s key inspiration was quite possibly his incarceration in London’s Newgate Prison for some rather violent and lurid crimes, during which time he wrote the tales in light of his own situation as a “knight prisoner” (his own words, there). Well, this is part speculation. There are several Malorys of this period who could also have written this expansive collection, but this incarcerated Malory is the one that seems to hold most water among many historians of British Medieval literature. The version I read is one based on William Caxton’s only-remaining printed edition published in 1484,...

*contains spoilers* In the year 1949, a decade after initially attempting to write in his own, native, Russian language the embittered story of a man besotted with a “nymphet”, Nabokov finally decided to take the tale that was “throbbing” within him in the intervening years and turn it into a full-blown novel written rather astoundingly in sublime English. In his own beautiful explanatory style, Nabokov stated in his afterword to this text, which itself is a sort of zombie-like addition to the twisted narrative preceding it, that his “private tragedy…is that [he] had to abandon [his] natural idiom…for a second-rate brand of English”, though he is terribly unfair to himself in this respect. He writes with an intimidating flourish of confidence in one of the many secondary languages he spoke, and more crucially in which he wrote, exceeding the articulation many other authors would struggle to attain in their first and only language. Even in writing this summary I find myself awkwardly in...

*contains spoilers* Flaubert once famously declared “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!” But what did he mean? The two persons could not have been more different, nor could they have led more different lives – unless one of them turned out to be Martian. Emma Bovary, in her inherently aspirational character, is a social creature intent on mingling with the finest of mid-nineteenth century French society, regardless of her or her long-suffering husband’s low status. She is especially attracted to the professionals and the aristocracy, and in order to elevate herself to her inwardly canonised ideal, her abstract notion of perfection – that unattainable divineness imposed on her by her experiences in a convent in Rouen at a very young age – she becomes their plaything. And it is this pursuit for the ideal perfection that essentially leads her to madness and death. Flaubert, meanwhile was a recluse who mingled only with the literary clique when he had to – and was most notably a man: that privilege...

*contains spoilers* Although not as laden with aptronyms as Dickens’s social novel Hard Times , which was notably serialised just before Gaskell’s North and South in Dickens’s own publication Household Words in 1854, the two bear some rather striking resemblances. And though the one would be considered more matter-of-fact and to-the-point than the other (not surprisingly Hard Times over North and South , taking into account Dickens’s literary and social prestige), Gaskell’s credentials as a genuine Northern Lass should be sympathised with and given most credence, narratives aside. As the title suggests, Gaskell takes us from the North to the South, back and forth, to and fro, and not just between London and Darkshire (which stands in for an industrial Manchester of the nineteenth century), but Hampshire and some small towns in between. Starting in the neutral zone of aristocratic London, Gaskell gives us scope for the different modes of bourgeois and working-class toil either side o...

*contains spoilers* In Chandrapore, India, is where we lay our scene…it’s the early twentieth century, and the British colonial Christians, who find themselves bored and tired of the heat and leisure more than anything, control and keep in line the native Hindu and Muslim population. The arrogance of our British colonial past is often a cringe-inducing affair to read anywhere and anytime, and it stinks of the classism that still chokes our televisions, universities and workplaces to this day: “But of course we’re better than them, darling; they’re council-housed and on benefits, and yet still they just won’t help themselves”, one can feasibly imagine a Tory minister pontificating over their bread maker. If only all our daddies provided us with lifetime support measures such as a trust fund, a private/Oxbridge education, and a secret backdoor into one of London’s top TV companies through family friends. This not-so-subtle allusion to David Cameron’s past, present and future fiscal and s...

*contains spoilers* What to say…what to say…what to say. There’s just so much – I suppose it’s more a case of what to leave out. Let’s begin with the basics: so our protagonist, Lemuel Gulliver, is a surgeon who loves the idea of travelling, and so he decides to set sail under a captain and his crew, and along the way always seems to find himself shipwrecked. After each expedition, he manages to get home to England, but cannot help but set out on new adventures, leaving his wife and children back home to worry about him. These new lands Gulliver finds himself waking up to, however, are not what you’d quite expect… Now, Swift has established a wonderfully inventive conceit here, one that allows him to flex and fold his keen social, natural, political, theological muscles. As Gulliver finds himself in the miniscule Lilliput, a place where the inhabitants are comparatively small – six inches to Gulliver’s guessing eye – Swift gives Gulliver and the reader a perspective that is far-reachin...

*contains spoilers* There are several reasons why I have opted to blog (for the mean time, anyway) on only the first two Books of Edmund Spenser’s remarkable epic poem, The Faerie Queene , but the easiest to admit is that there is just so much to talk about that I feel the one, all-inclusive blog wouldn’t give the text sufficient justice to speak of its various qualities. This poem deserves the adjective ‘epic’ in all respects: for starters, it is a substantial work, consisting of seven books (in my Everyman edition, anyway – it depends which one you manage to find), each book made up of twelve cantos, the cantos themselves each having approximately 40-60 stanzas within; it is also an allegorical work, much like The Divine Comedy or Piers Plowman that came before it, which hopes to imbue an already weighty narrative with important social, political, cultural and religious messages. Boiling down to the make up of the stanzas, we see something quite unique, which makes this whole exper...