This was a hard novel to read. Not hard in the James Joyce sense--Nadine Gordimer didn't make up words (though there were a handful of Afrikaner terms that sometimes took some puzzling or looking-up). Quite a lot of it was written in a stream-of-consciousness style, and what made it harder was the difficulty in deciphering whose consciousness is being streamed. Eventually, I had to give up trying to figure whose thoughts or words were whose at any given moment, and simply take in the novel as a whole, and try and sort it out later.
So: Nadine Gordimer is a South African writer and liberal. During the old apartheid regime, some of her works were banned in her native land, and she was a member of the illegal ANC. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. The Conservationist was published in 1974 and was a co-winner of the Booker Prize that year.
The protagonist, Mehring, is a rich and successful South African businessman in his 40's. He lives a life on the road, mostly for business, flying to Europe, Japan, Brazil. When he's back in South Africa, he spends his weekends at a farm he bought in what is apparently an attempt to bring back--what? His youth? Not really--his memories of youth seem primarily centered around his first seduction, that of a married woman more than twice his age during the war years. An idealized home for a family? Except he's extremely divorced and completely detached from his only son. Eventually, he uses his farm as bait: an idyllic getaway and trysting site for whatever woman he's currently pursuing.
It's hard to tell the women apart, actually. There is a female voice, very strident and liberal (and privileged) throughout the novel that is never explicitly identified. His ex-wife? Or perhaps a consolidation of all the women he's ever lusted after?
Except that "lusted" implies passion of some kind, and Mehring does not appear to have any. Virtually the only passion he shows is anger at black children collecting the eggs of guinea fowl on his farm: he hates to see the fowl disappearing.
While the majority of the book is told from Mehring's approximate point of view, others do come to the forefront occasionally: Jacobus, the farm overseer, who handles the day-to-day running of the farm, Jacobus's family members and underlings, the Indians who run the local general store. All of these people live in the margins of society, most of them surviving despite illegal working status due to bribery or anonymity.
Perhaps the key to the book is the dead body that is discovered at the beginning of the novel. A black man is dead, quite possibly murdered. The police claim to have limited resources and are unable to take care of matters immediately, so they take the extraordinary step of burying the body, with the intention of digging it up again later and investigating it at some unknown point in the future. Of course they never do, and Mehring would submit a strongly-worded complaint to the authorities--but he can't be bothered. Ultimately, the only matters he takes an active hand in is chasing after women far younger than himself--or perhaps he only seemingly is the active party in those cases, and is really drawn in, irrelevant of his own actions.
Gordimer is a wordsmith with a poetic use of language. Her descriptions of people and places are also vivid and beautiful. More's the pity that reading the novel is such a frustrating experience. Everyone is passive, waiting for the end, possibly a destructive one--perhaps this was a novel that had a greater impact prior to the end of apartheid, since we now know that the system ended relatively peacefully via reform rather than violent revolution.
In the end, a difficult read that was more of a chore to get through than any other novel so far on this journey. It was possible to take pleasure in some of the detail, but the larger forms did not seem worth the effort.
Next up: 1974's other Booker Prize winner, Holiday by Stanley Middleton.
Showing posts with label Best of Booker Shortlist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Best of Booker Shortlist. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Saturday, November 20, 2010
The Siege of Krishnapur by J. G. Farrell
If there is one genre which certainly thrived in the 20th century unlike any previous era, it would be black comedy. Perhaps only a civilization that made it through two World Wars, several genocides, and a constant stream of existential threats could have learned to treasure what is essentially gallows humor on a vast, unhinged scale. And since all of that did happen, it remains a popular theme to this day.
Except that most black comedy is terrible. For the rare masterpiece of the genre, Dr. Strangelove for instance, there are hundreds of smirking, snarky, terrible stand-up comedians (mostly white and male, I should point out) who confuse sarcasm for wit. Yes, they can get quite dark, but for comedy, they'll do what all comedians have done since the dawn of time: make jokes about genitalia.
The Siege of Krishnapur, the 1973 novel by J. G. Farrell (one of six Booker Prize winners to be later shortlisted in 2008 for the 40th anniversary "Best of Booker" award), is a masterpiece of black comedy in that, through all of the darkness, it never actually stops being funny. Like Farrell's previous novel, Troubles (which I loved), The Siege of Krishnapur is a very funny book about something extremely unfunny. In the last book, it was the Irish War of Independence. Here, it's the Indian Uprising of 1857. That particular event involved native troops in a mutiny against their British East Indian Company overlords through a wide swath of northern India, resulting, eventually in appalling atrocities committed by both sides. Today, some historians view the mutiny as the first battle in a war of independence which would finally reach fruition ninety years later.
The novel tells the story of the fictional town of Krishnapur where the British have a long-established presence. Mr. Hopkins, known throughout the novel as "The Collector", is the leading East India Company authority in the region, and knows that something is afoot. He can hear the rumblings of mutiny, and so, quietly prepares a defense against a possible uprising. Meanwhile, he lives the life of a Victorian gentleman who believes firmly in technological progress, as especially embodied by the Great Exhibition.
Meanwhile, young George Fleury, a poet and idealist by nature, visits India with his widowed sister. After first arriving in Calcutta, he falls in love with Louise Dunstaple, who basically rejects him out of hand--justifiably, as he is a self-righteous drip. The characters travel to Krishnapur, and Fleury has a number of chances to humiliate himself in front of whole new audiences: especially the first native Indian he meets, the son of the local Maharajah. Fleury is completely oblivious to how completely insulting he himself is.
Not long after their arrival, however, come rumors of the (historical) mutiny at Meerut. When a general who had previously pooh-poohed the danger of a rebellion arrives bloody and half-dead on his horse, it is clear that war has begun. The Collector manages to bring together the local westerners in the main Krishnapur residence of the company, and defends it with a few able-bodied soldiers, various superannuated veterans, some still-loyal Indians, and various people with no other useful purpose (i.e., Fleury). Their armaments are small and numbers are few compared to the vast army of Indians poised against them, but thanks to an easy-to-defend position and a number of cannon, they manage to hold off the Indians for some time.
However, life in a siege is not something a well-bred Victorian gentleman or lady was ever prepared for--suddenly, English gentlefolk who had been living a life of luxury were forced to undergo deprivation of food, cleanliness, privacy, and worst of all, domestic help. The ladies find themselves shocked and appalled that they must share quarters with the black sheep of their number--Miss Hughes who, heaven help us, lost her virtue. A fallen woman!
There are many eccentric characters to be found--the Anglican minister who copes with the desperate situation by trying to convince Fleury of the literal truth of the Bible, completely oblivious to the dangerous situations he harangues the younger man in. The pair of doctors who completely disagree about everything, and whose treatments for cholera are totally diametrically opposed. The magistrate, an atheist, who is the last word in cynicism. And the Collector himself, who sees his world of bric-a-brac slowly crumbling, as does his faith in civilization and progress.
And horrible things happen. Many of the English defenders die gruesomely. Those who are even slightly wounded find those wounds becoming serious, thanks to pre-Pasteur medical treatment--and those with serious wounds invariably die. Many are wiped out by cholera. Meanwhile, the Indian besiegers never seem to grow fewer and number, and, to add insult to injury, Indian sightseers bring picnic lunches to watch the English get wiped out.
And yet, it's funny--whether it's the juxtaposition of all-too-proper Victorian etiquette with a siege situation where people receive a ration of a handful of flour a day, or the ridiculous behavior of eccentrics like Fleury or the "padre", or simply slapstick situations, as when Fleury and a soldier friend scrape black beetles off a naked woman, using the only tools they have at hand--covers torn off a copy of the Bible.
The situation gets more and more desperate--the defenders eventually retreat to a smaller and easier-to-defend redoubt, finally to one smaller yet. Eventually, they run low on ammunition and are reduced to shooting the head of Shakespeare, torn from a library bust, from a cannon. Yet the threat of certain death isn't enough to stop the compulsive eccentricities of some of the defenders.
What this novel has to say about humanity is not pleasant to contemplate: that we hold onto our prejudices and illusions to an absurdly unhealthy degree? That even in the most dire circumstances, self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment matters more than the survival of our fellow man? That our imagined progress and cultural superiority can be wiped out in an instant?
Yes, it's a black comedy. Therefore, a more cynical version than what might actually happen in reality. Perhaps even far more cynical.
But still...
Next up: I take a brief break from the Booker Prize to read Haruki Murakami's 2005 novel, Kafka on the Shore.
Except that most black comedy is terrible. For the rare masterpiece of the genre, Dr. Strangelove for instance, there are hundreds of smirking, snarky, terrible stand-up comedians (mostly white and male, I should point out) who confuse sarcasm for wit. Yes, they can get quite dark, but for comedy, they'll do what all comedians have done since the dawn of time: make jokes about genitalia.
The Siege of Krishnapur, the 1973 novel by J. G. Farrell (one of six Booker Prize winners to be later shortlisted in 2008 for the 40th anniversary "Best of Booker" award), is a masterpiece of black comedy in that, through all of the darkness, it never actually stops being funny. Like Farrell's previous novel, Troubles (which I loved), The Siege of Krishnapur is a very funny book about something extremely unfunny. In the last book, it was the Irish War of Independence. Here, it's the Indian Uprising of 1857. That particular event involved native troops in a mutiny against their British East Indian Company overlords through a wide swath of northern India, resulting, eventually in appalling atrocities committed by both sides. Today, some historians view the mutiny as the first battle in a war of independence which would finally reach fruition ninety years later.
The novel tells the story of the fictional town of Krishnapur where the British have a long-established presence. Mr. Hopkins, known throughout the novel as "The Collector", is the leading East India Company authority in the region, and knows that something is afoot. He can hear the rumblings of mutiny, and so, quietly prepares a defense against a possible uprising. Meanwhile, he lives the life of a Victorian gentleman who believes firmly in technological progress, as especially embodied by the Great Exhibition.
Meanwhile, young George Fleury, a poet and idealist by nature, visits India with his widowed sister. After first arriving in Calcutta, he falls in love with Louise Dunstaple, who basically rejects him out of hand--justifiably, as he is a self-righteous drip. The characters travel to Krishnapur, and Fleury has a number of chances to humiliate himself in front of whole new audiences: especially the first native Indian he meets, the son of the local Maharajah. Fleury is completely oblivious to how completely insulting he himself is.
Not long after their arrival, however, come rumors of the (historical) mutiny at Meerut. When a general who had previously pooh-poohed the danger of a rebellion arrives bloody and half-dead on his horse, it is clear that war has begun. The Collector manages to bring together the local westerners in the main Krishnapur residence of the company, and defends it with a few able-bodied soldiers, various superannuated veterans, some still-loyal Indians, and various people with no other useful purpose (i.e., Fleury). Their armaments are small and numbers are few compared to the vast army of Indians poised against them, but thanks to an easy-to-defend position and a number of cannon, they manage to hold off the Indians for some time.
However, life in a siege is not something a well-bred Victorian gentleman or lady was ever prepared for--suddenly, English gentlefolk who had been living a life of luxury were forced to undergo deprivation of food, cleanliness, privacy, and worst of all, domestic help. The ladies find themselves shocked and appalled that they must share quarters with the black sheep of their number--Miss Hughes who, heaven help us, lost her virtue. A fallen woman!
There are many eccentric characters to be found--the Anglican minister who copes with the desperate situation by trying to convince Fleury of the literal truth of the Bible, completely oblivious to the dangerous situations he harangues the younger man in. The pair of doctors who completely disagree about everything, and whose treatments for cholera are totally diametrically opposed. The magistrate, an atheist, who is the last word in cynicism. And the Collector himself, who sees his world of bric-a-brac slowly crumbling, as does his faith in civilization and progress.
And horrible things happen. Many of the English defenders die gruesomely. Those who are even slightly wounded find those wounds becoming serious, thanks to pre-Pasteur medical treatment--and those with serious wounds invariably die. Many are wiped out by cholera. Meanwhile, the Indian besiegers never seem to grow fewer and number, and, to add insult to injury, Indian sightseers bring picnic lunches to watch the English get wiped out.
And yet, it's funny--whether it's the juxtaposition of all-too-proper Victorian etiquette with a siege situation where people receive a ration of a handful of flour a day, or the ridiculous behavior of eccentrics like Fleury or the "padre", or simply slapstick situations, as when Fleury and a soldier friend scrape black beetles off a naked woman, using the only tools they have at hand--covers torn off a copy of the Bible.
The situation gets more and more desperate--the defenders eventually retreat to a smaller and easier-to-defend redoubt, finally to one smaller yet. Eventually, they run low on ammunition and are reduced to shooting the head of Shakespeare, torn from a library bust, from a cannon. Yet the threat of certain death isn't enough to stop the compulsive eccentricities of some of the defenders.
What this novel has to say about humanity is not pleasant to contemplate: that we hold onto our prejudices and illusions to an absurdly unhealthy degree? That even in the most dire circumstances, self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment matters more than the survival of our fellow man? That our imagined progress and cultural superiority can be wiped out in an instant?
Yes, it's a black comedy. Therefore, a more cynical version than what might actually happen in reality. Perhaps even far more cynical.
But still...
Next up: I take a brief break from the Booker Prize to read Haruki Murakami's 2005 novel, Kafka on the Shore.
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