Bookworm Builder

A day after I put down The Old Man and the Sea I found myself on a boat in the Atlantic trawling for Marlin just like the old man in Hemingway’s novel. Unlike the old man, we were on a huge commercial fishing boat, not a skiff. We had all the latest fish finding equipment and state of the art rods. After failed attempts at the big game, the skipper stopped the boat and we fished the deep sea for smaller fish. I caught 3 Pandora’s and a poisonous Weever fish. Nothing on the 1500 lb Marlin in the novel but I was pleased. After the fishing, the fish being inedible, were put back. A much nicer fate than being turned into bait! I’ve always loved the sea so this book spoke to me, offering a glimpse into a life lived hard and honestly.

The book itself is simple. A tale of one man fishing. It may seem boring, but the intricate strength of detail which Hemingway offers, really brings the story to life. The old man goes to sea after 84 days of having caught nothing. Others in the town pity and ridicule him for his failings but he maintains his determination and heads out, knowing that his fish is waiting for him.

The old man rows out to sea and sees dolphins as he leaves the beach; he, “could see the slight bulge in the water that the big dolphin raised as they followed the escaping fish.” Just like the old man  we left the harbour in Lanzarote and a school of dolphin covered the sea from boat to the horizon. They dipped and cut playfully through the surface of the water. They are majestic creatures to look down on the deck from. On a small boat, with them jumping over your head, I’m sure they would be much more frightening. Their crashing speed mirrors the unpredictable fickleness of the sea.

He catches Tuna for bait and food with ease but his prize is on the Marlin. The fish is strong and resistant to the man’s attempts to reel him in. The old man waits patiently, speaking to the fish, waiting for it to yield to his will. The old man is at sea for three nights before he catches the fish. Unable to pull the fish aboard the old man ties him to the side of the boat and heads towards shore, guided by the stars.
On the way back the dead Marlin is attacked by sharks who take chunks off of his side. The old man fights against them, killing a few at first and proceeding to injure the last few. He gives his last to stop the shark from eating his prize, but fails. All they leave is the, “white naked line of his backbone and the dark mass of the head with the projecting bill and all the nakedness between.” The man’s failure is enduring and speaks through the generations. In life many strive against stacked odds but end up losing. It is the natural way of modern life. Tired and defeated the old man goes back to his shack, the boy joins him again and everyone in the town notices the size of the Marlin carcass on the side of the boat.

The story is beautifully simple, yet the descriptions are pristine and polished. The Victorian flowery narrative is replaced by Hemingway with a stripped down text, perfect in its honesty. The story is the battle of one man against the natural world, with its fierceness and unforgiving furiosity. Throughout, the old man’s respect for the fish fails to wain;

“The fish is my friend too,” he said aloud. “I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill              him. I am glad we do not have to try and kill the stars.”

Slaughterhouse 5 centres around the fire bombing of Dresden by Allied forces on the 13th, 14th and 15th of February 1945. Considered one of the best anti-war novelists, Vonnegut shows the atrocities of the second world war as not being limited to those at Hiroshima. The Dresden Blitzkrieg killed many more civilians than Hiroshima and and unlike Hiroshima the international community remained silent. Although both were terrible massacres, Dresden seemed to have been lost to history.

The main character, Billy Pilgrim is an optometrist who finds himself the subject of time’s whimsical desire. He travels through time to points in his own life, often prompted by memories of the war. His travels include an all expenses paid holiday to a zoo on another planet called Tralfamadore. There he is put on display to the great excitement of the natives where he is also encouraged to have sex with a famous starlet; Montana Wildhack.

As well as an interstellar traveller, Billy is a prisoner of war in Germany. He is physically and psychologically averse to the life of soldiery, too tame for the horrors of war. Even as a prisoner he is presented as farcical example of a pistoleer. Vonnegut paints him as wearing; “silver boots now, and a muff, and a piece of azure curtain which he wore as a curtain.” Based on another soldier Vonnegut encountered, Pilgrim doesn’t belong and his extraterrestrial adventures are an escape from his fears of the past.

To label Slaughterhouse 5 as an anti-war book is wrong as it is to label it a sci-fi novel. Moulding the two genres allowed Vonnegut to produce a piece of literature much bigger than itself. By using Tralfamadore Vonnegut becomes distanced from the massacre which he witnessed. The creatures of Tralfamadore see life in the 4th dimension; time; “The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral.”

By using science fiction Vonnegut enables himself and his character to create an ironic register in something which brings most to tears. This is Vonnegut’s power. By sustaining a bleak humour in such a fearsome topic, he can condemn the war gratuitously through irony.

Animal Farm is often one of the first ‘proper’ books encountered by secondary school students yet it was never taught on my curriculum. I think it was replaced, for me, by Lord of the Flies. Having read 1984 I was already familiar with the Orwellian themes of language as power and dystopian manipulation. In Animal Farm I found these ideas artistically entwined into a children’s story. Orwell tells the story of post revolution Stalinist Russia and localises it using the farm-yard animals to satirise the key figures.

Orwell uses elementary prose to deceive the reader and accentuate the atrocities of the animals on the farm. The animals, fed up with the totalitarian Mr Jones who “sets them to work, [he] gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving.” The animals overthrow his brutal command replacing it with “Animalism” and its doctrine of the seven commandments. Over the course of the story, it becomes clear that the equality set out in the commandments is flawed. Certain types of work and animals become more equal than others. The revolution by the animals becomes a futile endeavour which criticises human nature as being driven to excel and oppress.

The pigs, modelled on the leaders of the revolution: Major as a mix of Karl Marx and Lenin, Napoleon as Stalin, Snowball as Trotsky are controversial and comical  comparisons to make. The manipulative pigs use a myriad of suppressive techniques to subdue and crush the resistance of the other animals who are less intelligent than them. For example the sheep can only bleat “four legs good, two legs bad” rather than being able to evaluate the seven commandments. Orwell shows that intelligence and cunning are forces of oppression in the wrong hands.

The ignorance of the animals, unable to comprehend their victimisation is doled out by their own kind is haunting. The way they work themselves to death in a false collective comradeship is poignant and starkly sympathetic to the plight of the working people who soviet Russia supposedly stood for. A delightfully bleak read, Orwell’s animals highlight the propensity for evil in originally well-meaning pursuits of liberation.

I remember reading that after one Steinbeck novel it is very difficult to resist devouring the rest. I finished the Grapes of Wrath and was hungry for more tales of 20th century Americana. In East of Eden, Steinbeck took the grand family narrative and populated it with his ancestors. The story is based on Steinbeck’s family history intertwined with mythological embellishments. The two are intertwined so subtly that what is true and what is not is indistinguishable, even the most unbelievable events take on an air of reality. According to the books blurb the two families are forced to relive the fall of man and the fratricide of Cain and Abel.

Although these Biblical stories are supposed to underpin the story, I found them an unnecessary accompaniment and sometimes confusingly obvious. The references offer little added validity to the story which often happens with such obvious reliance on previous works. The Trask sections are linked to the Cain and Abel story. First, the sons of Caleb Trask, Adam and Charles and then Adam’s sons, Caleb and Aron. The link is largely based in the competition of the sons for the love of the father, jealousy ensues with ill fate following behind it.

In the sections about the Hamiltons, I found a much more accessible character in Samuel Hamilton. Samuel is supposed to be the father of humanity, Adam. By far my favourite character, Samuel embodies the pure and untainted nature of the original man. Samuel and his family live in oppositional circumstances, the area which they farm is difficult and barren, where water is scarce. Samuel provides an image of Adam after the fall, dealing with the adversity of a post Edenic life. He maintains his personal goodness in dire circumstances.

The most difficult character in the novel is Cathy Trask. Steinbeck presents her as a self-sufficient psychopath who causes harm  to whoever she chooses. She is beautiful yet deadly and her crosshairs eventually fall on Adam Trask. Cathy is not the most believable character in the novel, her actions like those of her whorehouse are at best rumours yet she embodies the primary malevolent force in the book. The novel is very androcentric with Cathy, the only independent female character being rendered as a vile and spiteful creature.

Although the novel could be construed as misogynistic, this approach speaks to the struggle of masculinity in today’s society. If we for the moment focus on the male characters, there is a lot to be said for what makes a good man, or person. On the building site, masculinity has evolved into a hyperrealised form of itself. It is the place where the most extreme forms of machoism can be identified. Samuel’s masculinity is not rooted in the dominance of women, number of sexual conquests or alpha male shows of aggression. He is a ‘good’ man from how he deals with adversity and struggles to survive in a world naturally geared towards our failure.

As a man it is easier for me to suggest this direction and to metaphorically sweep the Cathy problem under the carpet. There are definitely issues around Steinbeck’s presentation of women, yet I don’t consider this a reason to disregard this book as chauvinist drivel when there are, clearly, lessons in it to help aid the reversal of the devolution of masculinity.

Although it has its merits I wouldn’t consider East  of Eden in the same league as The Grapes of Wrath. Although for Steinbeck it was his masterpiece its personal aspect leaves it slightly inaccessible, lacking the humanity and the bleak struggle essential to his early work.

I’ve just got back from a refreshing week away in the Canary Islands so I will have a number of books coming in for review. They are Slaughterhouse 5, The Bloody Chamber, The Old Man and the Sea and Animal Farm.

I read John Steinbeck’s masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath earlier this year; the first book I read for pleasure after University. Pleasure was not easily found between the pages of the novel except for a dull cathartic ache as my eyes held back the tears and my mouth retained gasps as the Joads journeyed Westward.

On a scaffold, surrounded by Polish, Romanian and Bulgarian men, I could not help noticing similarities between their journey and the journey in the novel. Both groups follow work aimlessly, seemingly hopeful for the security that capital provides. Both groups away from home, strangers in a new land and similarly ostracised by the natives. Referred to as “Okies” one of the most striking themes in the novel was the contempt the migrants received from their own countrymen. Steinbeck shows that the idea of American comradeship fades to nothingness when people’s livelihoods, children and capacity to survive are at stake. Where the Joads find no solace in the West, the Eastern Europeans find some degree of security, yet who is to say financial security doesn’t imprison rather than secure?

The Joad family are left destitute as a result of the increasing grip of the “monstrous” banks paired with the drought which devoured Oklahoma’s agriculture. They load up all their belongings and two barrels of salted pork on a rickety truck and head to California. Their lack of foresight is based on the hopeful promises of  recruiters who had;  “come through with han’bills—orange ones,” each announcing the need for labour in the Californian orchards. The closer they get, the clearer the picture becomes. California’s Eden, where the family envisioned a fruitful bounty swiftly becomes a land of punishment for unknowable sins. Like Tantalus in Hades whose fruit is always out of reach, the Joads work in the orchards, unable to eat the fruit which they were so close to they could taste.

The narrative gradually increases in its relentlessness. Like the Joads journey, the prose slowly meanders, building up to moments of unfathomable pity. Hope is always apparent but as soon as it is recognised, Steinbeck swiftly jeopardises it. He tests his characters resolve, putting them under intense strain to see how they react.  Tom Joad, the eldest son, having returned from prison on a murder charge, embodies the growing need  for resistance and revolution. Occasionally in the book, Tom is on the brink of fighting back but eventually he fades into insignificance; defeated by the power of economy and reduced to live in a blackberry bush. The historical reference of the novel maintains the feeling that the hope is superficial and created. The extreme poverty of the migrants is known through historical record. This was something in the back of my mind, throughout.  Essentially, the story moves towards an already established ending. The only ones who seem ignorant to the certainty are the Joads.

Politics today seems concerned with the issues of immigration and the effect that it has on society as a whole. Where reporting seems limited is on the personal experience, the reason and the lives of these people, driven out of their homes by the power of capitalism. The Grapes of Wrath provides a lens through which the trials and tribulations of migrant and immigrant communities can be viewed. Capitalism and the people it discards are as vulnerable as they were 75 years ago.

The ending is one of the most sublime, angering and fantastic pieces of literature that I have ever read. I will not spoil it for those of you who have not read it. All I will say is that Steinbeck masterfully revives hope, not in a poetic or theoretical manner but in physicality. By reducing the “Okies” to animals; hope is simply based in the continuation of life.