Category — book review

Title: Fahrenheit 451
Author: Ray Bradbury
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Pages: 190 (incl. afterword and interview)
ISBN: 0-345-34296-8
Price: $7.99 (CDN)

When I first read Fahrenheit 451, I was in grade nine, and though I liked it, I was too young and inexperienced a reader (and person) to get much more than the basics of the plot from it. When I tried again in university, I abandoned the protagonist, Guy Montag, and his wife, Mildred, in their parlour, hashing it out over the books Guy had been secreting away in the duct work. Finally, in October of last year, while visiting with my grandparents in Stratford, Ontario, I saw a copy of the 50th anniversary paperback of Fahrenheit 451 sitting on the shelf in Fanfare Books and I bought it (my previous copy was lost in one of my many moves all over Ontario) and tried reading it again.

The third time was the charm; this time, I really read it. I didn’t just skim it, I didn’t turn the pages and let osmosis do the rest, I really read it. I really thought about what I was reading, and the more attention I paid to the words and ideas, the more I felt like I was seeing pieces of our present and glimpses of our future.

This books gave me the chills.

The plot is still more or less as I remembered it from grade nine: Guy Montag is a Fireman, and his job is to start fires. He burns books that have been banned, because their contents make people think, and that makes them unhappy. It isn’t until he meets Clarisse McClellan, a young girl considered crazy because she enjoys thinking and imagining, that Montag begins to question the world he lives in, but when he does, his world falls apart pretty quickly.

As the story moves forward, as I met all  the characters and really listened to what they were saying and thinking, I kept being surprised by the parts that were so much like our own world. Consider this passage from the book:

Montag’s wife has overdosed on sleeping pills, and Montag has called in help to rescue and revive her. Two machines are brought in by two operators: one to pump her stomach clean, the other to replace her pill-saturated blood with clean blood.

The operator stood smoking a cigarette…”Got to clean ‘em out both ways,” said the operator, standing over the silent woman. “No use getting the stomach if you don’t clean the blood. Leave that stuff in the blood and the blood hits the brain like a mallet, bang, a couple thousand times and the brain just gives up, just quits.”

“Stop it!” said Montag.

“I was just sayin’,” said the operator.

“Are you done?” said Montag.

…”We’re done.” His anger did not even touch them. They stood with the cigarette smoke curling around their noses and into their eyes without making them blink or squint.

“That’s fifty bucks.”

…”Neither of you is an M.D. Why didn’t they send an M.D. from Emergency?”

“Hell,…you don’t need an M.D., case like this, all you need is two handymen, clean up the problem in half an hour.”

It’s as if an overdose is no more problematic than a leaf-clogged gutter. Just clean it up, and bob’s yer uncle. No need for a doctor, or personalized attention at all. Just send in a couple of guys with a machine.

While I sincerely hope that our health care system will never get to this point, I can relate to the impersonal treatment that Montag’s wife receives. I know not all doctors are like that: bored, indifferent, and kind of rude – but too many of them are. I’ve had appointments with doctors who spent the entire appointment staring at a laptop and barely even glanced at me. I would have bet money that if you’d put me in a line-up five minutes later, they wouldn’t have been able to pick me out.

This passage about schooling in Montag’s world (as spoken by his boss, Beatty) caught my attention too:

“School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually gradually neglected…Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally ‘bright’, and did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn’t it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.”

Sounds like our modern ideas about social promotion to me. And given that classes are getting larger and that teachers have very little authority over their students, I could see there being a proposal to shorten the school day, lighten the homework requirements, and forego discipline altogether – and I could see that proposal getting some serious consideration, too. I know, and have known, teachers – even English teachers – who have overlooked poor spelling and grammar because “the ideas were good”. They didn’t want to fail a student and deal with angry parents, hurt feelings, or the possibility of having what little authority they do have undermined by an unsupportive administration who passes the kid anyway. I could talk for pages and pages about the bullying epidemic going on in our schools today – and it’s not just the “bright boy” who is being bullied either, there’s a lot of kids who get tormented everyday by their so-called peers for a lot of different reasons, or no reason at all.

And Beatty says this to Montag in regard to books:

“You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right?…Coloured people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book…Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely brilliant with information…And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.”

We still – still! – ban books because the subject matter is upsetting in some way; because the book might bring to light or trigger our less than savoury characteristics and beliefs:  racism, homophobia, cruelty, murder, greed, corruption, religious intolerance, cowardice, rudeness, selfishness, and any number of other flaws. We seem to prefer that the uncomfortable bits of books be taken out, or cleaned up and sanitized. We would rather speak incomprehensible, ‘politically correct’ gibberish to each other than speak plainly, because we don’t want to risk upsetting anyone. We’d rather ban a book (or burn it) than explain it or learn from it.

Montag and Beatty, their observations and explanations, the similarities of their world to mine…this book raises so many questions for me! It makes me wonder, is Ray Bradbury right – are there too many machines now? Are we in the process of building Montag’s world for ourselves? Is our technology helping us, or holding us back?  Are we getting further away from each other despite all the technology that is supposed to make it simpler to come together? Have we developed too many ways for us to escape real life and forget how to be truly human? Are there too many false things to lose ourselves in? Are we going through life with our eyes shut? Do we ever really see anything, or are we just taking a quick glance at things because that’s what everyone else is doing? Are we becoming more stupid, more insipid, more greedy and entitled and remorseless?

Some days, the pessimistic and melancholy days, I think we are up the creek as a species and I simply assume that this vision of ourselves will one day be a reality. Other days I feel hopeful that we’ll be OK, that’ll we’ll stop before it’s too late to take it back, and that we’ll avoid forcing ourselves to live in Montag’s world. But, most days, I wait to see what happens, and I try to keep from becoming part of the problems we have, I try to avoid the things, and behaviour, and stupidities that could lead us to Montag’s world.

I don’t always succeed in this, but I always try.

Title: Charles Dickens: His Life and Work
Author: Stephen Leacock
Publisher: Fitzhenry & Whiteside
Pages: 266
ISBN: 1-55044-767-3
Price: $7.50 – $45.00 (USD – paperback, previously owned only)

I’ve been reading since I was four years old (my first book was a hardback Disney Book Club version of The Three Little Pigs, which I read to my mother), and since then I’ve devoured just about any book I can lay my hands on, but rarely with much thought for the author. Who writes all these words for me to enjoy? What are they like? What sort of lives did they (or do they) lead? What compelled them to write? What sort of conditions did they favour when writing their works?

Despite being a great lover of the written word, despite enjoying several Dickens novels immensely, and even despite carrying around a copy of A Christmas Carol like an adult version of a blankie or teddy bear, I hadn’t really given much thought to the mind of the man who wrote them. This book answered all my questions and them some.

Leacock begins where all biographies begin: with childhood. Charles Dickens’s childhood was not a happy one for the most part; debt, penury, and – finally – debtors’ prison and a blacking factory loom large in Dickens’s early years. His family were good people, but not from illustrious backgrounds, not terribly good with money, and full of overly-ambitious schemes that often came to nothing.

I won’t go through the entire timeline of Dickens’s life. Most people who enjoy reading his books know the basics anyway: a rather unlovely childhood, his rise to fame, his extraordinary public readings of his own work (along with memorable trips to America, and all his editing pursuits and endeavours in England), illness, and then death (not much of eulogy from me, is it?).

But it’s Stephen Leacock’s style of writing that really pulls you in and makes you want to learn more about Dickens. He is cheerfully and politely honest about his subject – this is one of the few biographies I’ve ever read where the person being written about has been presented as a whole person with faults, foibles, and outright character defects, along with the more laudatory stuff about their genius, fame and delightful little quirks. Here, in this book, Dickens is a giant and a legend, but he’s also a man like any other.

I wasn’t surprised to learn that Dickens was intelligent – that’s very clear from his books – but I was a little disconcerted (and slightly amused) to learn that for all his characters who lived in terrible poverty, for all the awful mistreatment of children that he depicted, and for all the crime, unkind people, cruel villains, and even murderers, that live in the pages of his novels, that he was actually not very interested in the politics of how people ended up in those predicaments, nor was he exactly a crusader for children’s rights. He had opinions, and he was unafraid of voicing them in his books and poking fun at those public figures that caught his attention, but he wasn’t out with a bit of bristol board stapled to a rake handle protesting either.

I was surprised to learn that he wasn’t exactly a great guy to be married to. He married a lovely woman, had ten children with her (and when I think of those little Dickenses running about in short pants and tiny dresses, all I can think of is the nephew’s line in the 1951 film version of A Christmas Carol, “…And how is Mrs. Cratchit, and all the small assorted Cratchits…” as though they were a box of chocolate covered nuts or something) and then, when most of their children were grown and had lives of their own, he rather cruelly forced her to move out and live apart from him. She moved out with nary a bad word against him, and the children that were still young enough to be living at home continued to be raised by their aunt (whom Dickens held in high regard, though not in a romantic way).

Dickens had always seemed to me to be a very “happy endings” sort of guy, there are always happy marriages in his books between loving and lovely characters, but his own marriage was a shambles. Dickens seemed to think his wife rather slow and stupid, but really, compared to Dickens, most people would seem rather slow and stupid. It seems unfair to put away your wife of many years, the mother of your many children, simply because she cannot keep up intellectually with someone who was very much above average intelligence.

Of course, given the attitude of the day toward women, small wonder if maybe she actually was a little slow and stupid. Women were decorations for the home and hearth in Dickens’s time; a bit comfort and someone to make babies with. They were housekeepers (or they at least managed the household), and were not given opportunities to be anything more. It’s easy to give little in the way of intellectual stimulation when you’ve never really had any yourself. To make matters worse, even if she had been an intelligent little spitfire, Dickens wouldn’t have wanted her anyway, because he agreed with the prevailing attitude of the time toward women. Mrs. Dickens was damned if she did, and damned if she didn’t.

It ended up being a great lesson between the image (one I didn’t even know I’d been building in my head) of the man, and the man himself. Even then, celebrities led lives that diverged quite a lot from the popular public images of them.

I enjoyed reading about his trips to America (he offended the Americans on the first one, and made up for it on the second) and his public readings of his own works (so powerful were his characterizations of his own works that people fainted, screamed, cried and generally carried on and had to be carried out).

But, most of all, I enjoyed Stephen Leacock’s writing; his honesty and candour about Dickens’s world and life; it has given me a new way of looking at and reading Dickens’s work. I can now see hints of the man, and some of the people he knew, in the characters he created. I know that many authors draw on the people they know – to some extent – when creating characters, but knowing which people are being drawn from really gives you a sense of being in the inner circle.

If you’re at all curious about Dickens as a person, this is a great book to start with.

Title: The Great Man
Author: Kate Christensen
Publisher/Year: Doubleday/2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-51845-1
Pages: 305
Price: $10.91 (USD – paperback)

The book opens with the New York Times obituary of Oscar Feldman, an influential artist of the 1940′s and 50′s, who – unlike his abstract art contemporaries – focused solely on painting female nudes. The obituary praises his work (“ballsy almost to the point of testicular obnoxiousness”) and talks a little of his personality and family. He is survived by his wife, Abigail, their son Ethan, and his sister Maxine (also a painter).

What the obituary fails to mention is that Oscar led two lives and had two households; the other was with his long-time mistress, Claire St. Cloud (called Teddy by her friends) and their twin daughters, Ruby and Samantha.

The relationships between the women in the book are complicated: Maxine despises Teddy (and Oscar too, really) and refuses to acknowledge the children Teddy had with Oscar. Teddy doesn’t like Maxine much either, but can’t quite understand the depth of Maxine’s venom. Teddy is best-friends with Lila – and though they haven’t been lovers for years, is sometimes possessive of Lila’s attention the way a lover would be (which eventually complicates things a little). Lila is still dependent on Teddy’s opinions to a certain degree and is a little uncertain of herself. Abigail seems to be the calmest of them – there is no real outrage that Oscar cheated on her and had children with another woman; she seems calm to the point of indifference which many people mistake for a lack of understanding on her part about the sort of man Oscar was – but she knows perfectly well.

These complications have an element of soap opera drama about them that would obscure the story if told by a lesser writer, but in Kate Christensen’s hands, these complications enhance the story, because more than Oscar’s roving eye and carnal appetites, each woman knows the secret behind two of Oscar’s most lauded paintings, Mercy and Helena – a secret they’ve all kept, even from each other, and must now keep from the two writers digging up information on Oscar for the biography they are each writing.

One of the best parts of this book is how Christensen handles the issue of truth. Truth ends up being something in the eye of the beholder, there is no absolute truth. Each woman in The Great Man has her own picture of Oscar, in some ways those pictures are similar (as are the women themselves) and in other ways they divulge so greatly that it creates resentment and indifference. It makes you wonder how well you can ever really know another person – even if you share their bed and daily life. How much of that life shared is the truth of who a person is?

The weakest part of the book for me was the ending. The complications, the old animosities and relationships, and even the secret about Mercy and Helena are wrapped up too neatly and quickly and are a little jarring. I didn’t quite buy it given how complex the characters and feelings are – or maybe it was just that there didn’t seem to be the same sort of thought put into reaching the endings they came to.In fact, I think only Maxine’s ending seemed possible – and even that was rather abrupt. Another 50 pages might have eased into it better and made it more believable.

Still, it’s going to be difficult to read one of Christensen’s other books – Jeremy Thrane, waiting on my TBR pile – without pining a little for Teddy’s clever wit and Maxine’s incredible bluntness. My life hasn’t been filled with lusty artists and love affairs, but I can’t help but hope that I will be even half as interesting and lively as these women are in their 70′s.

The Great Man is a great read – the writing is excellent, the characters are refreshing and interesting (and have no fear of four letter words, sex, or sensuality) and it was a world I was sorry to leave so quickly.