May Selection 2008
The Book Club meets once a month (usually the second Tuesday of the month) in Castlebar Library at 8.00pm. Check events page for next meeting. (Previous Book Club selections)
Books for May meeting, 2008
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore
Judith Hearne, alone and lonely, unpacks yet again. The silver-framed photograph of her dead aunt is positioned in a place of honour, as ever, on the mantelpiece of "whatever bed-sitting-room Miss Hearne happened to be living in".
Within sentences, Brian Moore, in this his first and finest novel, leaves no doubts; his anti-heroine appears to be as defeated as is her new room in this "run-down part of Belfast ". A second picture is unwrapped, a coloured oleograph of the Sacred Heart, "His eyes kindly yet accusing". The clues are already mounting, Judith Hearne, clearly beaten by life, continues to be dominated by her dead aunt and a religion that for her is more concerned with ritual than belief. Judith addresses the aunt's photograph, informing her that this once smart residential area has become flatland.
Quickly she moves on to more practical matters. She has picture hooks with her but needs a hammer before she can hang the Sacred Heart over her bed. The quest brings her downstairs to her new landlady, Mrs Henry Rice. There she meets Bernard, the repulsive son "all bristly blond jowls, tiny puffy hands and long blond curly hair, like some monstrous baby swelled to man size". Judith is shocked that this "ugly pudding" possesses a "soft and compelling" speaking voice.
So adroitly does Moore enter the often bizarrely jaunty mind of Judith Hearne, unloved, genteel spinster, that it seems as if she is speaking directly to us. Like an animal accustomed to being kicked, she expects to be rejected by any male she encounters. Moore's approach to the telling, the precise evocation of a decay shared by most of the characters as well as Belfast itself, appears initially to share something of the tone of Joyce's Dubliners - and Joyce is obviously an influence. Yet this novel is far closer to William Trevor's vision of boarding house life in London . Judith's hopeless predicament is pathetic and partly traceable to her aunt's domineering influence, and her own weakness, at times of crisis, for alcohol. Moore remains detached and as interested in exposing the religious hypocrisy and repressive social attitudes prevailing in Belfast , the native city he fled yet always admitted to never having fully escaped, as he is in her. Judith, despite her self pity, is a fantasist with a flair for subconscious self delusion.
With the arrival of Jim Madden, the landlady's widower brother, back home after some 30 years in New York, Moore reiterates the theme of self delusion. Unlike Judith with her shaky grasp of correct behaviour, Madden is incontestably crude. For Judith he is a possibly attainable, if lame and no longer young, future husband; for him she is a potential business partner, no more.
Throughout the narrative Moore brilliantly shifts the viewpoint between characters who always think and act true to themselves. Among the many inspired set pieces are the Sunday afternoon teas at Professor O'Neill's home during which Judith is endured rather than enjoyed. Published in 1955 and never out of print, The Lonely Passion displays the psychological astuteness Moore would bring to his subsequent diverse, moral fictions.
From the weekly series in which Eileen Battersby revisits titles from the literary canon - Irish Times, Eileen Battersby, March 2008
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
The winner of the 2007 Commonwealth Prize and short listed for the Man Booker, Lloyd Jones's novel is set in a village on the Papua New Guinea island of Bougainville during a brutal civil war there in the 1990s. Jones covered it as a journalist, and this delicate fable never shies away from the realities of daily life shadowed by violence. As Matilda, the 13-year-old narrator, begins her story, a blockade has begun. Helicopters circle, the generators are empty and all the teachers have fled. Apart from the presence of pidgin Bibles, civilisation might never have touched the village.
One white man remains. Like Waugh's Mr Todd, Mr Watts has a home in the jungle and an abiding love for Dickens; unlike him he believes in the power of literature to set minds free. Assuming the responsibilities of teaching, he dreams of making the classroom "a place of light". Though the children hope the promised introduction to "Mr Dickens" will provide anti-malaria tablets, aspirins and kerosene, in Great Expectations they discover something just as vital as medicine and fuel: "a bigger piece of the world" that they can enter at will. In the fertile soil of Bougainville, Mr Watts's cultural seed has taken root and flourished.
At first, Jones focuses on the escapist pleasures of reading. The sheer foreignness of Dickens's world, with its rimy mornings, marshes and blacksmith's forges, captivates the class. Like many a reader before her, Matilda falls in love with the orphan Pip, building him a beachfront shrine. But as the war draws closer, the subversive nature of stories is highlighted. When Pip is mistakenly assumed by "redskin" soldiers to be a rebel fighter, the boundary between fiction and reality dissolves. "The problem with Great Expectations," a frustrated Matilda at one point declares, "is it's a one-way conversation." She couldn't be more wrong.
Just as Great Expectations changes Matilda, instilling in her a moral code, so the environment in which it is read changes the book. Faced with malarial government soldiers and rebel "Rambos" drunk on jungle juice, Mr Watts becomes a latter-day Sheherazade, recounting Pip's tale in nightly instalments designed to avert disaster. The yarn he spins combines elements from many lives: his own, Pip's and those of the beleaguered islanders. In this dazzling story-within-a-story, Jones has created a microcosm of post-colonial literature, hybridising the narratives of black and white races to create a new and resonant fable. On an island split by war, it is a story that unites.
There is a fittingly dreamy, lyrical quality to Jones's writing, along with an acute ear for the earthy harmonies of village speech. People are "silly as bats" and "argue like roosters"; big bums are mentioned frequently. While his characters embellish their stories readily, his own approach is more controlled. The simplicity with which he describes the atrocities that take place is devastating. But it is the great faith that Jones has in literature, to effect change no less than to offer solace, that gives this extraordinary book its charge. Mister Pip is the first of Jones's six novels to have travelled from his native New Zealand to the UK. It is to be hoped that it won't be the last.
The Guardian, Olivia Lang, July, 2007
Rarely, though, can any novel have combined charm, horror and uplift in quite such superabundance
The Independent, DJ Taylor, July 2007
Some useful book club links (external links: open new window)
- Reader's Area of this site
- Reader's Review site with active discussion board
- Book Group Links: A selection of sites compiled by the Salt Lake City Library.
- Great Books Foundation: The grandfather of them all
- Reading Group Choices Online: Over 550 guides from publishers. 150 can be printed from the site
- Reading Group Guides: A very useful selection of reading group guides from Random House Publishers
- Writer's Resource site for writers of all abilities