Our final book club was held on Wednesday 27^th August and focused on Jez Butterworth’s smash hit play Jerusalem, which was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2009. At this session, our usual ‘older readers’ were joined by two of our MA students: Jess Day from the MA in 21^st Century Literature and Alex Bevan from the MA in English Studies. This made for some particularly interesting cross-generational discussions around some of the play’s themes of Englishness, land, identity and belonging.

Some members of the group found the characters’ frequent use of swearing, vulgar talk about sex, and the prolific references to drug taking off-putting. But it was interesting that after listening to an interview with Jez Butterworth, and after watching clips of the play, many of the same group members were able to value the play’s deeper significance. The group also appreciated the charisma of the main character, Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron, played mesmerizingly by the great Shakespearean actor, Mark Rylance, and through reading the play aloud and discussing it as a group, there was a much greater recognition of the play’s comedy.

Themes discussed in previous sessions – such as identity, nation, belonging and change – came up again in this session, and readers felt that these themes seemed to be a common preoccupation of twenty-first-century texts. This was an interesting and perhaps provocative text to end the book club on, but although not everyone liked the play, readers were highly engaged with it and enjoyed talking about it!

July’s book was Caryl Phillips’s 2003 novel A Distant Shore. It tells the story of two individuals who form an unlikely friendship in a small town: Dorothy a white, middle-aged schoolteacher, and Gabriel/Solomon, a refugee from an unnamed African country.

We began by focusing on the first few paragraphs of the novel, which set up a particular image of contemporary England as socially and geographically divided. A couple of readers identified a concern in the character of Dorothy with an idealised past – an image of England (and her own childhood) that perhaps never existed and that is linked with a sense of respectability and dignity shared by Dorothy and Solomon. The novel opens with the lines: ‘These days it’s difficult to tell who’s from round here and who’s not. Who belongs and who’s a stranger.’  and this question of who is the stranger began to permeate our discussion. We draw parallels between Dorothy and Solomon as both experience a sense of alienation in the small community, complicating the notion of belonging. The word ‘tribe’ stood out and ran through the discussion as suggesting not only the specific context of tribal warfare in Africa experienced by Gabriel, but also the various ‘tribes’ we fit into in Britain: class, race, gender.

The non-linear chronology and fragmented psychological realism of the novel were both challenging and engaging as readers are forced to piece together events in the protagonists’ lives and slowly build a picture of their characters through details revealed at different points in the novel. We spent some time discussing the effect of this structure and while some found it frustrating, others found illuminating points of contrast in the process of piecing events together. We considered the implications of the narrative technique of multiple viewpoints and asked if one of the effects of this is to question the possibility of ever reconstructing a ‘true’ or historically accurate version of events. While this might remind us of the fallibility of memory in texts such as Penelope Lively’s Oleander, Jacaranda, it is especially pertinent in the context of seeking asylum, where the need for a verifiable story secures the asylum seekers right to refuge.

We ended the session by returning to the question of belonging and some readers felt that this had been a theme in a number of the books we’ve been reading in the group. Perhaps, we thought, this is a question that is of particular concern for writers in the twenty-first century, who diagnose the contemporary moment as peculiarly fragmented.

FURTHER READING:

Caryl Phillips was born in St Kitts and brought up in Leeds, UK. He is a prolific author of fiction and non-fiction. His historical novels tend to address slavery and the black diaspora. Of particular interest to readers might be Cambridge (1991), Crossing the River (1993) and The Nature of Blood (1997 – about world war two and the establishment of Israel). Phillips’s non-fiction takes the form of essays collected in The European Tribe (1987 – about his travels in Europe as a black Briton) and A New World Order (2001 – in which Phillips examines his ‘roots’ in the Caribbean and Africa).

We met up on 25^th June, 2014 to discuss Doris Lessing’s Alfred and Emily (2008). The book is an interesting one in many ways and one that overtly fosters discussion. Set in the early decades of the twentieth century, Lessing engages with the rhetorical question of how her parents’ lives might have been different if World War I had not happened. Some of the members had read one or more novels by Doris Lessing before (The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook were both mentioned in this context), but none of the group had read Alfred and Emily before. Some members were reading Lessing for the first time. A year before the book was published, Lessing’s won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her comparatively recent death (November 2013), also informed the choice of book.

In the centennial anniversary year of the start of World War I, this was an interesting moment in which to discuss this book. There are other interesting topics which Alfred and Emily raises: historical issues linked to nursing and hospital care before the advent of the NHS; issues of life writing and its relationship (in this case) to fiction; questions of inter-generational tensions, especially linked to new opportunities for women; questions of colonialism linked to Lessing’s discussion of her childhood in and return to Africa. We discussed all these topics during the course of the session, which was lively throughout, but two issues dominated it.

A few of the reading group members struggled with Lessing’s decision to rewrite her parents’ lives in fictional form. The crux of this difficulty seemed to oscillate around the fact that Lessing’s choice to write an alternative life for her parents brought to the fore questions of ‘truth’ (or lack of truth) which would otherwise be out of place when reading fiction and, for some, this proved a real stumbling block. One reader repeated that she could not enjoy the book at all, because she kept thinking, while reading it, ‘But this is not true’.

That question of truth was quite closely linked to a sense of personal injustice in relation to Lessing’s portrayal of her mother and father respectively. There was a perception among reading group members that Lessing’s mother was depicted very critically (possibly over-critically) in the novel, while her father was treated disproportionately sympathetically. The family aspect of the novel was one with which all of us could identify, albeit that we might choose to identify with it from differing perspectives (as mothers, as sons, as daughters, etc.) and an energetic discussion of those issues and how they impinged on our own lives followed.

By the end of the session, although I wasn’t convinced all the group members enjoyed reading Alfred and Emily, I was pretty sure they had enjoyed telling me why they hadn’t liked it!

Professor Lucie Armitt

In the third session of the book club [Wednesday, 21^st May], we read American novelist Nicole Krauss’ second novel The History of Love which was published in 2005. Whilst it is difficult to satisfactorily summarise, The History of Love, ostensibly, tells the story of Leo Gursky: a man alone [apart from his friend Bruno], towards the end of his life, living close to a son who doesn’t know him and a woman, Alma, whom he has never stopped loving, despite a period of long and fraught separation. This narrative strand crosses in the novel with that of a young girl [another Alma, named after the first], whose mother is translating a novel called The History of Love.

The History of Love is highly wrought [both emotionally and formally] and one of the first things we discussed in the group was its complexity. Some people in the group were put off by the novel’s complex structure which works in several time periods, locations and characters [not to mention at least one ghost], that are sometimes difficult to hold apart from each other. Certainly, The History of Love is a novel that makes you work for the plot. Others in the group, however, were sufficiently engaged with the novel to want to read it again and found that, the second time around, the novel had plenty more to offer. This led into an interesting discussion where we thought about the ways in which readers might invest, to a greater or lesser extent, in the ‘what happens’ of a novel.

One of the novel’s plot twists involves the character Bruno, friend and neighbour of main character Leo Gursky. The novel tenderly and acutely depicts friendship and the intimacy that comes from knowing someone from childhood into old age. From there, we moved in several different, all equally productive, directions. We talked, intermittently, about the novel’s depiction of loneliness and its effects, and the ways in which Leo Gursky anatomises and embodies this loneliness and other emotions, locating, for example, ‘disappointment in myself: [in the] right kidney’. We then moved into a close reading of a moment at the beginning of the novel where Leo prepares himself to be a life model, a scene that reveals much about The History of Love’s preoccupation with themes of recognition, in/visibility, and the ways in which being alone for long periods might undo the divide between having a sense of oneself as a subject or an object. Finally, in connection to this scene, we thought about how drawing might render the body and one’s relationship to it in certain ways. The session closed with a more general discussion of the idea of identity and language [particularly Yiddish] in The History of Love. What happens to the continuity of identity, for example, when one stops using the language of one’s childhood and starts to speak in a different tongue?

In the second session of the book club (Wednesday April 23rd) we read poems from the Forward Anthology of Poetry 2001-2011. This anthology is a selection from the Forward anthologies published each year from the Forward Prize one of the big poetry competitions that tries to bring poetry to the attention of the nation. I introduced the discussion by noting that poetry which in Victorian times was widely read and valued by many middle class ‘cultured’ readers, is now a tiny fragment of the book market and little read except in school and university. I hoped to suggest that a poem could say and do things that no other art form can. A novel for instance is a very complicated and lengthy machine for saying something about life, whereas a poem is a supremely flexible instrument and can say all sorts of things in all sorts of ways. I also hoped to show that reading and discussing a poem slowly together can be enjoyable! Certainly the poems in the anthology had provoked strong feelings. Some were strongly disliked, though we also said this was not necessarily a criticism. Some were very much enjoyed – sometimes the same poems. Of the three poems we read in our session Anne Wigley’s Durer’s Hare was one of the most popular and we saw how it seemed to be simply a brilliant description of a painting but really was about the painter’s artistry in capturing the elusiveness of life and perhaps also about its own effort to capture a visual image in words… We also read George Szirtes’ ‘Song’ addressed to the South African anti-apartheid politician Helen Suzman, and U.A.Fanthorpe’s ‘A Minor Role’ thinking about the use of language, metaphors and imagery, and the additional meanings behind apparently simple words. A little snapshot I hope of the different things contemporary poems can do.