February 2019 book review part 1

HUMBOLDT’S GIFT, by Saul Bellow
Charlie Citrine is living quietly on the profits of a successful Broadway play he wrote, later adapted to a movie. But he continues to be distracted by his brilliant, but sometimes unhinged poet friend, Humboldt. And that isn’t his only problem. He annoys a minor gangland figure in Chicago, where most of the action in this book takes place who, rather than blowing his head off, insists Citrine help his girlfriend write her PhD, which, as it happens, is on the subject of... Humboldt. I guess that’s an offer you can’t refuse...

In 1976 Bellow was being considered for the Nobel prize, in no small part because of his extraordinary novella Seize the Day, and it is said that this book, as out were, sealed the deal. It’s easy to see why. Bellow has created an entirely original style, lyrical, funny, insightful and sometimes deeply moving. Try this as a sample, as the protagonists are driving out of New York City:

“...The car went snoring and squealing through the tunnel and came out in bright sunlight. Tall stacks, a filth artillery, fired silently into the Sunday sky with beautiful bursts of smoke. The acrid smell of gas refineries went into yours lungs like a spur. The rushes were as brown as onion soup. There were seagoing tankers stuck in the channels, the wind boomed, the great clouds were white. Far out, the massed bungalows had the look of a necropolis-to-be...”

THE AMBASSADORS, by Henry James
A middle-aged bachelor is sent to Paris by the matriarch of a wealthy New England family to retrieve her son, who, she fears, has abandoned himself to its fleshpots. But when he finds his quarry, he realises that this is far from the case, unless you count a noblewoman he has become attached to, and, unfortunately, is married...

Like Saul Bellow, Henry James established a distinctive literary style which is all his own, but which to today’s readers can seem a little impenetrable. Par example:

“...They baffled him because Sarah - well, Sarah was deep; deeper than she had ever yet had a chance to show herself. He didn’t say that this was partly the effect of her opening so straight down, as it were, into her mother, and that, given Mrs Newsome’s profundity, the shaft thus sunk might well have a reach; but he wasn’t without, between the two women, a resigned apprehension that at such a rate of confidence he was likely soon to be moved to show how already, at moments, it had been for him as if he were dealing directly with Mrs Newsome...”

The book is littered with long, complicated sentences of this kind, which make it necessary to read them over several times to catch their meaning. But despite that, the book does cast its spell, as we become more and more fascinated to find whether our protagonist will persuade his charge to come home to his fortune, or in the event go native and stay with him. And not all the writing is prolix. Sometimes James can use brevity to great effect:

“‘...I know what you’re saying. Quit this!’
       ‘Quit this!’ But it lacked its old intensity; nothing of it remained; it went out of the room with him...”

THE WILD PLACES, by Robert McFarlane
Bewailing the despoliation of the British countryside that has being going on for hundreds of years, but which then took off with unprecedented speed following WW2, our man goes in search of unspoiled places that have not yet been obliterated. His odyssey takes him to Ireland’s Burren, the savage coast near Cape Wrath and also to the barren coastline near Orfordness in Suffolk. Finally he realises that wild places need not be on the outer limitsof our tiny island, but in unexpected places close to ‘civilisation’, sunken trackways, even motorway verges, which in reality are rarely visited by human beings.

As we delve deeper into this wonderful book,  two things become clear: that McFarlane produces prose of exquisite beauty, and that this man is as hard as flint. When he camps, he takes only a sleeping bag and bivouac sheet- no tent for him. And he’ll camp out in the most inhospitable weathers, winter in the Cairngorms, for instance, even settling down on a frozen pond in order to observe his surroundings in the way he wants. This book, quite literally, is a revelation.