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Selling sex up the river

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Anne Enright is an Irish writer with a startling gift for domesticating the outlandish. In her last novel, about twins separated at birth, she explored the sadness at the heart of tales of freakish sameness. In her latest, based on the true story of a 19th-century Irish concubine, deranged appetites are passed off as endearing peccadilloes.

The novel opens like an arty French film, with some rhythmic coupling in a Paris flat. Eliza Lynch, an 18-year-old beauty with a chronic clothes habit and a pragmatically carnal relationship with her dressmaker, is intent on pleasuring Francisco Solano Lopez, a visiting South American with absurd manners and extravagant tastes. He is the heir-apparent to the dictatorship of Paraguay, she is a black-eyed hussy on the run from a prudent marriage. When she meets Lopez money ‘was running through her hands like water. She tried to catch it, hold it: clutched instead at his neck, or his throat, or his mouth’. Lopez, tiny and intense with wandering hands and eyes and a tyrannical appetite for farce, discerns a potential playmate with a ruthless courage to match his own. Within months of their first meeting the couple have crossed the Atlantic together and are sailing down the River Parana on the way to Paraguay.

The river winds through the rest of the book, which flashes back and forth between Eliza’s troubled journey and the gaudy show she puts on in the years that follow. On the journey out the suspended contempt of her fellow travellers and the watchful loyalty of her servants are a taste of the life which awaits her in the provincial backwater of Asuncion. But the ship is at least free of the respectable women whose obduracy will later define the limits of Eliza’s ascendancy as well as provide Enright with her finest set piece. This is the banquet picnic at which Eliza presides in a lace dress which ‘crawled about her neck and crept down her hands, to be caught in a sort of glittering mitten by the rings she wore’. When the women blank their hostess while eying up her food, Eliza responds by having precious plates of unheard of delicacies thrown into the river.

Enright uses a fractured time-scheme to keep us guessing about the past as well as the future. In the beginning Eliza’s feelings for her frog prince are a cocktail of pregnant need and concubine greed and we watch her play her cards accordingly. Only much later in the novel, just when we might have begun to tire of the seeming unreachability of La Concubina Irlandesa, which is presented entirely in terms of her matchless wealth, do we understand the true nature of her capitulation on the journey out.

After the death of his father Lopez embarks on a series of disastrous wars, and La Lincha turns camp-follower. She bashes away on the piano – its carriage costs lives – while Lopez takes out traitors with his gun – ‘he needed to do it himself these days, like a morning expectoration or a fart’. Sons are born, a daughter dies, and we see the country fall apart through the compromised, unforgiving eyes of a Scots doctor escaped from Greeneland.

Some historical novels – the unsuccessful majority perhaps – leave the reader idly wondering about the factual accuracy of the author’s account of this time or that place. The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch does not allow for any such pedestrian speculation. You both know that it is entirely invented – Enright’s eye and ear are not for the stuff of other men’s records – and feel that it is true in the way that only made-up stories can be. Eliza Lynch stands for all the women in history who have sold sex and hoarded gold and lost their hearts along the way. It is an ancient fable: Enright makes it fresh as paint.

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Doing something about your mind

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Peter Conradi is a retired academic best known for his critical work on Iris Murdoch and, more recently, as her authorised biographer. The biography, though painstaking and full of interesting material, exemplified the difficulty of constricting a linear portrait of a thinker who not only wrote obsessively about mages and the electric currents — for both good and ill — around them but also herself occupied that territory in her relations with friends, lovers, acolytes, pupils and biographers.

Going Buddhist turns this difficulty to triumphant advantage. Conradi’s friendship with Murdoch and their long conversation about matters of religion are one of several connecting threads in what is in effect a long essay about the author’s personal experience of the Path. A portrait of the novelist — ‘plump and short with dishevelled hair … her face open with tenderness and compassion like a mollusc, yet also deeply private, with an intense pudeur and a steely strength’ is made all the more vivid for not appearing central to Conradi’s project. ‘Are you a religious person?’ she asks him, during their first solo talk in 1982. Conradi felt, at the time, ‘an intellectual’s routine contempt’ for the religions he’d met. But shortly afterwards he picked up, and read in a single sitting, a book by the Tibetan Buddhist Chogyam Trungpa. He resolved then to explore Buddhism. Why Buddhism? asks the novelist, for whom religion is a safe subject. ‘Because I had to do something about my mind,’ the critic answers, several pages later. He depicts himself, almost in passing, as something of a wreck, given to crippling panic attacks, capable, at best, of impersonating adult efficiency. The meditator, in the beginning, impersonates other meditators. Only this second impersonation, if it is persevered in, leads to a path instead of a rut. The claims made for ‘sitting’ are in some ways breathtakingly modest — ‘meditation makes nothing happen at all except to slow one down so that one can witness how one always was, but never before quite saw.’ But for Conradi the practice soon becomes a form of mental hygiene which he cannot do without.

Two decades later and the author is too Buddhist to proselytise. What he offers, in a spirit of friendly detachment, is part autobiography, part primer for beginners, part lightly drawn philosophical and social criticism. The best of the book is a discussion of how Buddhism has gone west. Conradi portrays a religion that can accommodate organic change, and champions the intelligent rigour of Western Buddhists more concerned with the future of meditation in the West than with the perpetration of ancient traditions (and divisions) of the East. In the West Buddhism is attractive because it is at odds with the prevailing ethos of the age — Conradi argues that ideas such as unlearning self-preoccupation must have a very different resonance when applied in societies where ties of kinship have all but withered away. He suggests that the value of such ideas is ‘possibly all the more important’. He also tells stories which contrast the shrewdness and pragmatism of Tibetan masters with the lazy confusion of beaded hippies going for the wrong bit — as when, after the death of Chogyam Trungpa in America in 1987, some zealous students took to salting their teacher’s body in meditation posture in accordance, they thought, with ancient tradition. When this was explained to a venerable lama who had travelled all the way from the top of the world, the Tibetan looked baffled and asked, ‘But surely you know about deep- freezes in the West?’

In sections on meditating, basic Buddhism and positive emptiness, Conradi takes the uninformed reader for an invigorating stroll around the ramparts of this most peaceable and pragmatic of world religions. Peaks and crumbling fa

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More mayoral election fever

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Once Upon a Time in the North is not to be confused with The Book of Dust, the big book which Philip Pullman has been promising for some time in interviews about His Dark Materials trilogy and what happens next. It is, instead, a short, elegant, simple story about what happened between two of his best-loved characters — the Texan aeronaut and the talking polar bear — a long time before the events of Northern Lights (1995). And while the title pays tribute to a classic western, and the story itself, although set in an Arctic port, has about it more than a whiff of cowboy gunshot, this little volume nonetheless bears defiant witness to the untranslatable glories of print as a medium. Admirers of Pullman, still reeling from the appalling film The Golden Compass — last year’s sugary shocker of a Christmas schlocker — will be happily reminded of what it was that drew them in to begin with.

The aeronaut, Lee Scoresby, makes a crash-landing on the arctic port of Novy Odense in the balloon he has won in a game of poker. He finds the town in the throes of a mayoral election campaign in which a sinister demagogue is whipping up feeling against the bears of the region, who live on the edges of the town in a menacing atmosphere of cowed resentment. Scoresby is briefly distracted by the vapid beauty of the demagogue’s daughter, but soon pieces together the connection between the demagogue and a powerful mining company, and recognises the demagogue’s henchman as a contract killer from a previous adventure.

In the trilogy the forces of evil are represented by the ecclesiastical authority, and freedom and morality resides with gypsies, witches and feral children. Here Pullman draws on an alternative store of creative prejudice, and it is capitalist energy which is revealed as red in tooth and claw, while the forces of civilisation are represented by a sexily unflappable civil servant and his shy, austere librarian girlfriend. I felt a passing twang for Oskar Sigurdsson, a poet journalist on greedy alert for a story — any story. Shades here of the established author’s habitual dislike of the resourceful hack?

One of the many pleasures of this small, beautifully produced book — cloth-bound, with enchanting woodcuts by the master-engraver John Lawrence — is that daemons are once again restored to their mysterious place in Pullman’s subtly out-of-kilter world. These creatures — animal manifestations of their owners’ souls, with forms revealing of their owners’ personality — were, inevitably, reduced to the status of exotic pets in the cinematic version. Here their reactions to events and interactions with their owners mark them out as a rhetorical device of ingenious and elastic power. The contract killer’s account of how he tied his enemy’s daemon to a horse’s tail is as vivid an account of torture as I have read in a long time.

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The mother’s tale

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‘I’m sick of this story of yours, this idea that it’s about drugs. If you want that to be the story then go away and write one of your f***ing novels about it, OK?’ says the angry son towards the end of The Lost Child, which goes nowhere slowly, despite the rollercoaster ride of publicity it has received.

It is hard not to think that the boy has a point. Why didn’t Myerson do the decently indecent thing and write a novel? Plenty of writers — good writers — make little up, but nontheless deploy the mask of fiction which also provides protection for traduced parents, children, lovers and friends of the nightmare novelist. Perhaps Myerson is professional enough to know when not to write a novel. In this instance, there is the inconvenient fact that there is no story. Instead, we get a series of anguished vignettes of her dope- smoking son that interrupt a failed attempt to uncover a story about an early-19th-century girl, Mary Yelloly, who made up a Picture History of a family of minor gentry. Myerson finds this album of watercolours and captions in the room of a Mayfair book dealer, and flicks through to the end where a pencilled note in another hand tells her that Mary Yelloly died in 1838, aged 21.

‘My heart turns over. You died.’

This meaningless present-tense portentousness sets the tone as Myerson embarks on a trail of houses and graves which no longer exist and Yelloly descendants who treat her with blandly uniform kindness. Her glosses are filled with soppy presumption: on the Yelloly parents, married in 1806, ‘They quickly set about making ten children. What a consolation it must be for them, to create this bursting, joyous family.’ There is no evidence that Mary’s sister’s seven-month marriage was particularly happy, but this doesn’t stop Myerson referring to her ‘achingly lengthy widowhood’. Indeed the amorous effects of brass on the English middle class in Regency England don’t get a look-in, even when the clues fall thick and fast — as, for instance, when the suitors are discovered to have moved between sisters.

Perhaps it’s the boy’s fault. He smoked too much skunk and dropped out of school and was kicked out of home. Earlier he starred in ‘Living with Teenagers’, a startlingly good column which ran for two years in the Guardian. It would have been intriguing to read a book in which the author of ‘Living with Teenagers’ attempted to confront the unhappy relationship between life and copy. But in The Lost Child Myerson doesn’t even acknowledge, let alone examine, her weekly habit.

Last week the boy described his mother’s behaviour as ‘obscene’; in the book he provides a happy ending by consenting to the publication. It is a happy ending because The Lost Child is not really about a teenage boy. It’s about a writing mother compelled to tame the chaos of family life with words. In one of the book’s very few haunting images Myerson describes how, if she refuses to give the boy any money, ‘he sits on my study floor, his whole body blocking the door, his eyes on my face, smiling because he knows I won’t be able to write a word.’ No wonder she paid him to be able to use his poems.

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Spoilt for choice

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It is more than ten years since Natasha Walter published The New Feminism, a can-do look at the ‘uniquely happy story’ of the women’s movement.

It is more than ten years since Natasha Walter published The New Feminism, a can-do look at the ‘uniquely happy story’ of the women’s movement. Then she urged the sisterhood to cast aside the puritanical fixations of yesterday and instead concentrate on politics, pay and the right to work part-time for a year or two without being left behind. At the time I was one of the several crosspatch hoodies who said ‘steady on: patchwork careers are all very well, but what about the uses and abuses of pornography?’ It’s good to see that Walter has now changed her tune. I got it wrong, she proclaims at the beginning of Living Dolls, arguing that the hypersexual culture in which we live is a sign not of equality but its opposite.

As a moral pamphleteer Walter is a vivid chronicler of the culture she deplores. Here is her description of a ‘babes on the bed’ competition organised by Nuts magazine at a club in Southend in the spring of 2007. ‘The first woman to get on the platform was a confident girl with long, fair hair, in high-heeled boots and hotpants, holding a microphone.’ She is introduced by the DJ — ‘This is Cara Brett! She’s on the cover of Nuts this week! So buy her, take her home and have a wank.’ The introduction is completed and Cara takes over. Walter watches:

In the pages which follow, Walter talks to Cara, who comes to the interview with her best friend beside her. Cara earns a living as a ‘glamour model’; the best friend is a law student at university, but fully supportive: ‘It’s in a magazine that people choose to buy — you don’t have to buy it’.

Walter notes that the ‘emphasis on choice is key’. Small wonder, then, that she reports in triumph when Cara’s house of cards collapses into a not quite so uniquely happy confession: ‘A lot of girls don’t know how to make choices. They think that because one girl’s doing it, and everyone’s going wild, they should do it. Maybe that will change one day.’

Walter doesn’t share that wistful hope. Not unless women regroup to reclaim the night, and mothers save their daughters from the sea of candyfloss pink that begins the conforming rot. This surprising yoking together of causes large and small is the most original aspect of Walter’s argument. One doll leads to another — the unprecedented accessibility of internet porn has bred a generation of girls who take their lessons on how to look from the hairless whores with silicone implants they are accustomed to seeing on screen.

The first half of Living Dolls consists of a series of sketchy interviews with girls and young women, students and sex workers, in which the mantra of choice is ripped away to reveal an ersatz world of copycat promiscuity, dieting and plastic grooming which bears little relation to desire and none to empowerment. But still the surveys show a pronounced tendency among the young to see Jordan as a role model. And no wonder, is the conclusion which Walter doesn’t quite spell out, given the way girls are seduced into identikit fashions from an early age. The mother of a daughter herself, Walter is good on the tendency of parents to ascribe the same characteristics differently according to the sex of their children. She goes to a party where a shy, clinging girl is described as quiet and good, while the boy who also opts out is a restless handful.

Walter is less convincing in the second half of the book, when she turns her guns on the scientific literature concerning sex difference. One academic study is pitched against another with wearying inconclusiveness, while the media are in the dock for making news out of difference rather than sameness. But the reason that difference is news is because it is sameness which, quite rightly, must be legislated for. As long as the pieces are in place for any girl who wishes to study engineering, how much should we bother with the left brain/right brain, nature/nurture ping pong so beloved of bores the world over?

I thought this anyway, but with better foundation, after reading Walter’s exposition of the ‘Stereotype Threat’ evidenced by experiments showing that differences in empathy levels between men and women disappear when the subjects don’t know the reason why they are being assessed. Once we accept that much (so-called) research fails to screen out our unconscious determination to conform to social norms we can relax into throwing away both baby and bathwater.

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Triumph and disaster

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The title of this first novel refers to a version of childhood as a magical kingdom where evil can be overturned and heaven and earth remade at the whim of a power-crazed infant. In fact our narrator’s world has already been darkened by the time she is presented by her beloved elder brother with the rabbit she insists on calling God. She has been sexually abused by an elderly neighbour, a Jewish musician who fascinates her with tales of the concentration camp in which he was never interned. The brother discovers the betrayal, promises to keep it a secret and — this all happens in the first 30 pages — terrifies the elderly musician into suicide.

Oh dear — already I am referring to Mr Golan as ‘the elderly musician’ as though I were, in some way, on his side. It is indeed tempting to champion the lonely misfit — if only because his victim, Elly, comes across as a monster without meaning to out herself as anything more troubling than brave and disturbed. In fact she is the best advertisement for letting go of the inner child that I have ever encountered.

Her story begins in 1968 and continues until some months after 9/11, taking in a childhood move from Essex to Cornwall and adult spells in New York and London. The cast is made up for the most part of loving, distracted, faintly zany wouldbegoods. Some work, or have worked, in the theatre, others dream of doing so.

The plot is moved forward by the sort of devices beloved of children’s stories — a win at the football pools, the death and resurrection of a beloved pet, telepathic links between best friends torn apart by wayward parents, lovers reunited by catastrophe.

The novel is shaped by the gap of time between the abuse suffered by Elly as a child and her parents’ understanding, when the brave little girl is revealed in all her brave little girl glory. It is the childish sensibility, not the tricks themselves, which make Winman’s debut so unsatisfactory. Elly tells her story with no idea that the self-conscious prattling of a nevertobegainsaid infant is bad enough when relayed by a besotted parent, but unbearable when narrated by the grown-up child without any corresponding growth of existential understanding.

Elly measures everything that happens according to whether it increases or diminishes her power. This might work in a novel which aimed to unpick the bones of a demonic will to wrap the world in saccharine bounty — Elizabeth Taylor’s The Soul of Kindness is just such a work of art — but Winman’s portrait has no such satiric edge. There are occasional glimpses of something richer and more reflective, as when Elly befriends a girl from a chaotic background and is

transfixed by the possibility of imagination within this home … This wasn’t the quiet symmetry of my everyday … This was a world devoid of harmony … a world of drama, where comedy and tragedy fought for space.

But of course tragedy has to win, hands down, as soon as Elly removes her winsomely protective gaze from this refreshing household.

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Cuckoo in the nest

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Caradoc King, the well-known literary agent, was adopted in 1948 as a baby into a family of three girls, shortly joined by a fourth, presided over by a difficult, unhappy mother and her feebly adoring husband. He grew up unaware of the adoption and has never discovered its motive. His adoptive mother, Jill, the moving spirit behind every family decision, may have simply longed for a boy. If so, she was singularly ill-prepared for standard boyish delinquencies. Young Carodoc liked playing with matches, embroidering the truth, and inspecting — in a spirit of scientific enquiry — the private parts of his younger sister. This memoir describes King’s upbringing in a spacious but sparsely furnished 18th-century house in the Essex marshes, where money was tight and discipline tighter.

Some of the harshness may have been generic to the period. The penalty for King’s fondness for matches was to have his hand pressed onto the scorching metal of the stove chimney. We are never told if his sisters were treated as strictly. The character of Jill is presented as a mystery, yet it resonates through an accumulation of incidental detail, such as her mildly demented injunction that the children were not to smile in photographs because it might seem like showing off.

Carodoc went to primary school in Colchester with ‘I am a liar’ embroidered on his sweat shirt, before being dispatched, aged six, to a tiny prep school in Suffolk run by two brothers and a sister as in a novel by Ivy Compton Burnett. The lies continued — he claimed in a geography class that he had just returned from a holiday at the Taj Mahal (this was in the mid-1950s). But the enlightened sounding regime at Nowton Court — staffed almost entirely by demobbed officers — found a way of going with his mendacious flow, and taming it. Unfortunately the difficult birth of another son propels Jill into the arms of the Catholic church and Caradoc is removed from Nowton House. By then a pattern has been set; King makes up for the awkwardness and inadequacy of his relations with his parents by latching onto the kindness of teachers. He continues to be naughty, but never wants for champions as one school follows another.

This book may look like a misery memoir but it doesn’t read like one. The energy of its problem child protagonist is directed at turning knocks to his own advantage rather than proving his victim status. His disposition is generous, unselfpitying and sanguine. The headmaster at Nowton Court beats him till he bleeds, then puts his arms around him, and later invites him back to the school to make not exactly a pass, but a gentle stab at something not unrelated. He is clearly not the sort of chap to thrive in the current educational climate, but just as clearly a benign factor in the life of Caradoc King. So is Father Roger, the Jesuit headmaster of Belmont Abbey, who treated his young favourite to wine-soaked tutorials and pulled strings at Oxford when he muffed his exams.

It was Father Roger, delegated to the task by Jill, who finally told him, aged 16, about the adoption. King’s overwhelming reaction was relief. Though he exchanged pious letters with his ‘parents’ saying the fact of the adoption made no difference to either side, ‘in 15 months they would each write separate letters saying the opposite’. King was cast out of the family into which he had never fitted, and taken in by Jill’s sister until he left for university.

Decades later King tracks down his birth mother in time to meet her before she dies. Better not give the ending away — suffice it to say that Problem Child is a refreshing celebration of sinners over saints.

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The Daylight Gate, by Jeanette Winterson Claudia FitzHerbert

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The story of the Pendle witch trials in 1612 is well known, thanks to the publication of The Wonderfull Disoverie of Witches in Lancashire by Thomas Potts, clerk to the Lancashire Assizes in which ten of the 12 accused were condemned to death by hanging. But it is also unknown because Potts’s certainties are not ours. We know who was accused of what but not why, although several of the cases collapsed into each other, with one defendant being released after a witness was ‘proved’ to have been in the pay of a Catholic priest. Witchery and popery were equally reprehensible, target culture making it imperative for Potts and his cronies to nail someone for something.

Jeanette Winterson is the latest in a long line of fabulists to be attracted to this mix of information and its opposite, and she swoops on the story like the falcon she gives to her heroine. Alice Nutter, one of the condemned, was an oddity at the time because of her gentry background. In Winterson’s hands she becomes the very model of a modern Mrs Warren, who has made a fortune and lost in love.

She has also dabbled in magic under the guidance of John Dee, but unlike her female lover she has not gone over to the dark side and has since attached herself to a gunpowder-plotting priest who has been tortured to within an inch of his life. Winterson here sets a new standard for the emasculated hero — at least Abelard enjoyed his oats before being parted from his bits.

In fact the love affair between the gay widow and Jesuit plotter is one of several garishly ahistorical strands in this short  enjoyable book. The priest is strangely untroubled by the rules of the faith he is ready to die for — not only is he happily immersed in a love affair with a white witch, he also appears unaware of the sin of suicide.

Alice Nutter is better value, piecing together the danger she’s in on her own. At one point she bumps into an owlish playwright called Shakespeare and asks him if he believes in magic. He answers with a warning: ‘Do not be seen to stray too far from the real that is clear to others, or you may stand accused of the real that is clear to you.’

This Stoppardian interlude is fun, but the power of the novel lies in Winterson’s take on the witches themselves, who are very far from the free-thinking wise women of old-fashioned feminist revisions. The Pendle witch trials have always challenged the witchcraze = misogygny version because the 12 inconveniently included two men.

Winterson presents us instead with a snarling, cursing, incest-riven coven of desperate low-lifers who think nothing of interfering every witch way with a weirdly loitering corpse-robbing nine-year-old girl who turns key witness. And while the magistrate is a would-be decent man, the constable’s boy and the local jailer are also guilty of disgusting practices. In fact The Daylight Gate offers an unexpectedly reactionary vision in which the educated are civilised, while the have-nots are hell.

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A guide to the media circus

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Caitlin Moran’s  bestselling How to be a Woman careered with reckless frivolity from the personal (eldest of eight, home-schooled in a council house in Wolverhampton) to the political (better pornography, larger pants, more body hair). Her latest effort, Moranthology (Ebury Press, £18.99) casts a retrospective glow of gravity over its predecessor. That was a manifesto of sorts; this is proper-job knockabout.

Moran, who writes three columns a week for The Times, gives us a mish-mash of interviews, ‘celebrity watches’ and other ephemera from the past 20 years. Her skill as an interviewer lies not in the killer question but in the way she conveys being there and messing it up. She is gleeful and rueful and on the money: Eddie Izzard has ‘eyes like guns’; Keith Richards’s laugh is like ‘a crow stuck in a chimney’.

She is also a guide to the new media, concocting articles out of twitter feeds and the reactions they elicit: she gets the most hits for banging on about her signature bangs and freakish silver-streak fringe. The unseriousness, perhaps, is in the eye of the beholder.

Moran herself is made of better stuff. She captures the way the media circus addles the nation’s brains, quoting one commentator offering up the royal wedding as ‘an opportunity for optimism about the future’ in the face of ‘DISASTER and DEATH all around the world’ while another announces that the marriage is about to be ‘consummated’ at Westminster Abbey, ‘an event inexplicably left out of The Times’ souvenir 14-page order of service.’

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Winning through

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‘Experiences aren’t given us to be “got over”, otherwise they would hardly be experiences.’ The opening sentence of the first draft of The Bookshop, published in 1978 when Penelope Fitzgerald was 62, didn’t survive in the finished version, but its author had found her voice, and, in a way, her subject. She had learnt how to look back.

She had begun publishing only four years earlier, with a life of Edward Burne-Jones. There followed a thriller, written to amuse her husband as he lay dying, and a second biography, The Knox Brothers. This was about her father, ‘Evoe’ Knox, editor of Punch and author of light verse, and his three brothers, two of whom became priests in different denominations. The book portrayed a group of gifted motherless children rattling around their father’s Edwardian rectory: ‘The boys were beginning to resemble savages, speaking Latin and Greek.’ The youngest, Ronnie, asked, aged four, what he liked doing, replied: ‘I think all day, and at night I think about the past.’ Fitzgerald’s interest in the battle between intellect and emotion, the closeness of belief to its opposite, and her ear for understatement and desperate cheer are all evident in this family memoir. But it was as a late-flowering novelist that she would refine these interests into lucid and extraordinarily compressed works of art.

Fitzgerald’s eight novels were attended with plaudits and prizes in marked contrast with the invisibility of the people she wrote about, or the self that she presented to the world. All her work played variations on the theme of minders not mattering, and matterers not minding. She was the miracle-worker in the middle of that bleak adage.

Why did it take her so long to get going? We learn that, accustomed to the unusual at home in Hampstead, she was miserably brilliant at Wycombe Abbey. Sometimes the worlds collided. When her uncle Dillwyn Knox, a distinguished cryptographer, was late returning her to school, a furious housemistress said, ‘Rules are made to be kept.’ ‘But they are defined only by being broken,’ he replied.

Penelope (‘Mops’) Knox went up to Oxford under the black cloud of her beloved mother’s early death. Her father would never speak of this calamity and remarried shortly afterwards to the much younger daughter of his colleague, the illustrator E.H. Shepherd. ‘All the evidence suggests that Penelope, eventually, got on extremely well with her stepmother,’ writes Lee, but Mary Knox’s voice, like so many others, is oddly absent from this story. Fitzgerald left Somerville in 1938 with a congratulatory first, friends for life and the sang-froid to declare, ‘I have been reading steadily for 17 years; when I go down I want to start writing.’

She did write, reviews for Punch and scripts for the BBC, but experience got in the way of anything longer. In 1942 she married Desmond Fitzgerald, a young Irish Guards officer, who went off, almost at once, to North Africa, and returned with an MC, night terrors and incipient dipsomania. He was called to the Bar, but never prospered. In 1950 the Fitzgeralds jointly took over the editorship of the World Review, a monthly cultural magazine. They lived beyond their means in happy chaos in a large house in Hampstead with three young children.

Penelope seemed completely in her high-brow element, though food was often scarce and Desmond was drinking too much. She immersed herself in a wide range of writers, including Camus, Moravia and, later, Beckett. When her reviewing life began again in the 1980s, Fitzgerald tended to be given big books about the Victorians she had been teaching for years, or the Arts and Crafts movement, which she revered, or Bloomsbury, about which she was more ambivalent. Her interest in the post-war European avant-garde re-emerged in the unsettling and un-English obliqueness of her fiction.

By 1957 the Fitzgeralds were broke and left Hampstead abruptly, the first of several flits. The following years were makeshift, even by bohemian standards. There was a spell in Southwold, Suffolk, where Penelope worked in a bookshop. The children roamed the marshes, and sat outside pubs waiting for their father. If money was short, rows were not. In 1960 they pitched up in a barge on Battersea Reach, where often it was just Penelope and the girls. Her son escaped to boarding school, where he was freer to be crosser; her husband came and went. Penelope began work as a teacher, first at a stage school, then at Queen’s Gate and Westminster Tutors.

All these experiences surfaced in her first four novels. Hermione Lee, dependably inventive in matters of biographical structure, gives herself two runs at each of the early novels — plundering them first as guides to a life which left few obvious clues but many Delphic fragments, and then reviewing her plunder transmuted into remarkably finished works of art.

Offshore (1979), set on the Thames barge, casts a charged chiaroscuro over a particularly painful period without revealing its sources. In 1962 Desmond pleaded guilty to pinching and encashing cheques destined for his more successful colleagues. He was disbarred and ejected from chambers. His brother, who had been a mucker, paid off his debts and never spoke to him again. Penelope appears not to have spoken to anyone else. Six months later her decrepit barge sank and a lifetime’s accumulation of letters and papers were swept away. It was a catastrophe, but it may also have been a sort of camouflage. The loss of their home and everything in it became the terrible thing which happened to the Fitzgerald family at this period, and the explanation both for what happened next and for the gaps and silences that would hereafter attend any reference to the past.

Penelope and her daughters were put up in a series of local authority homeless shelters before eventually moving into a council flat in Clapham, Lee reports, but does not substantiate, hints that Desmond served time in prison before re-joining the family in Clapham, where they stayed for 11 years. All this time Penelope taught at Westminster Tutors, and there are vivid glimpses of her at work both in the margins of her teaching books, talking to the writers she never stopped reading, and in the classroom, warming her sausage rolls on the radiator in the period leading up to lunch. She cared more for the books than for her pupils; it made her a teacher whom few (except Anna Wintour) forgot.

Desmond found humble work with Lunn Poly, facilitating cut-price forays abroad in the lean years which followed. The marriage appears to have settled into something companionable and kind. Desmond shared her interests and was on hand to help with bits of research. All the children, meanwhile, went to Oxford, and married young.

Penelope was undemonstrative in person, but her letters to both her daughters are full of affectionate yearning as well as fond anecdotes about their hopeless father. She had a more difficult relationship with her son, who didn’t keep her letters. Except for a brief period of her own choosing in the early 1980s, she lived with one or other of her married daughters all the years of her widowhood and writing life. She died in 2000.

Her story is a gift to the literary biographer: her oeuvre is manageably compact, intensely personal, its effects challengingly mysterious. The later part of this book expands into Lee’s absorbing appreciation of the last four novels. From the introduction of Gramsci  in Innocence to the culminating mastery with which, in The Blue Flower, Fitzgerald enters into the life of Novalis and his circle, these novels, all set in other times and places, take the meshing of biography and fiction somewhere startling and new.

In other respects, as Lee gracefully acknowledges, Fitzgerald eludes her biographer, as in her lifetime she baffled interviewers by taking a sponge-bag to Booker dinners and saying she would spend the prize money on an iron. Lee’s scoop, in vulgar terms, is the tale of Desmond’s disgrace, which has not been told before, but her unease in telling it is palpable. It is as though, having looked in vain for a paper trail, she is in a hurry to get to the other side of the story, and close it down.

The combination of scholarly caution and (presumably) familial reticence has resulted in a book that is full of interest but also holes. In 1952 the World Review called for writers who ‘are interested in human behaviour and its results rather than in motives and “states of mind”.’ Unusually, perhaps, for a literary biography, Lee’s Life fits this prescription.

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A book for all ages

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The genesis of The Road to Middlemarch was a fine article in the New Yorker about  Rebecca Mead’s unsuccessful search for the origin of the remark, sometimes attributed to George Eliot, that ‘it’s never too late to become the person you might have been’. To Mead this seemed at variance with the concentration in Middlemarch on ‘the melancholy acknowledgment of limitation’. She sets her vain attempt to re-attribute that sentence in apposition to Eliot’s story of  Lydgate, the doctor whose scientific ambitions are dashed in the wake of his marriage to the implacable Rosamond Vincy: ‘I had aspired to make a link in the chain of discovery, and had failed.’ Mead’s project is to ask how her own life story informs her evolving response to Middlemarch. This entails thinking about George Eliot’s life in relation to Middlemarch, and the meaning of both for Mead. In brief, she sets out to show that ‘the book was reading me as I was reading it.’

Her own book is loosely structured around the eight sections of Middlemarch. Zadie Smith has described Eliot’s method of interweaving the many narrative strands in her novel as ‘a riot of subjectivity’: each new viewpoint utterly involves and convinces the captive reader. The arc of Mead’s argument is to demonstrate how the Middlemarch of Dorothea and Lydgate, which first fired her schoolgirl imagination with dreams of escape and intellectual ambition, is also, years later, the Middlemarch of her late onset absorption in the love story of Fred Vincy and Mary Garth, that speaks of the importance of childhood landscape and the need to love ‘something of where one comes from — and have emotional access to that love’. Mead, as a girl, longed to escape her provincial background, and after Oxford she left England for New York, where she still lives. ‘Middlemarch gives my parents back to me,’ she writes, of reading the book in middle age.

It is one thing to draw sustenance from a fully realised work of art, quite another when Mead mines Eliot’s life for parallels with her own. ‘Her abjection is deeply upsetting, even more than a century and a half after the fact,’ she writes of the remarkable series of letters which Marian Evans wrote to Herbert Spencer before settling for George Henry Lewes:

How could she…have thought so little of herself? Yet her despair is also utterly recognisable, particularly to anyone who has pursued a demanding career and lived alone into her early thirties, and has wondered if she might always be alone.

Mead makes much less of aspects of Eliot’s experience which she can’t easily appropriate: the holy wars of Marian Evans’s youth or the startling courage of her middle age when she embraced certain social exile by setting up with Lewes. (During the 24 years they lived together Eliot never accepted invitations to other people’s houses. The world — men — came to her.  Women, except the most stalwart inhabitants of Bohemia, stayed away.) Mead’s insistence, for example, that she has been helped by Eliot to enjoy her stepsons is bizarre: Eliot referred lovingly to Lewes’s children as ‘our sons’, but the facts suggest that she was artist enough both to borrow from their characters and arrange for their permanent absence from home. (Two went to Africa, where they picked up diseases which killed them.)

Conversely, when Eliot’s journal records her impatience with some noisy children on a train, Mead thinks it

surprising and difficult to find Eliot so unappealing… Her letters and journals are fascinating for the light they shed on her struggles and her achievements, and she is often admirable and almost always inspiring in them. But it is much harder to be in her company there, at length, than it is when reading her novels.

Mead, for her part, is never less than companionable when she writes about
Middlemarch and only sometimes maddening when she brings herself into the story, with first-person descriptions of visits to houses where Eliot lived. These read as taster glimpses of the modern footstepping biographer at work and throw little light on the novel or its creator. Martin Amis’s quip that it is eternal human vulgarity to be more interested in a writer than the work is beginning to look dated. No doubt Mead’s publishers pressed her to put ‘more of herself’ into her book about Eliot, and Middlemarch. Is this because we have become more interested in books
about writing lives than in reading the lives of writers?

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Selling sex up the river

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Anne Enright is an Irish writer with a startling gift for domesticating the outlandish. In her last novel, about twins separated at birth, she explored the sadness at the heart of tales of freakish sameness. In her latest, based on the true story of a 19th-century Irish concubine, deranged appetites are passed off as endearing peccadilloes.

The novel opens like an arty French film, with some rhythmic coupling in a Paris flat. Eliza Lynch, an 18-year-old beauty with a chronic clothes habit and a pragmatically carnal relationship with her dressmaker, is intent on pleasuring Francisco Solano Lopez, a visiting South American with absurd manners and extravagant tastes. He is the heir-apparent to the dictatorship of Paraguay, she is a black-eyed hussy on the run from a prudent marriage. When she meets Lopez money ‘was running through her hands like water. She tried to catch it, hold it: clutched instead at his neck, or his throat, or his mouth’. Lopez, tiny and intense with wandering hands and eyes and a tyrannical appetite for farce, discerns a potential playmate with a ruthless courage to match his own. Within months of their first meeting the couple have crossed the Atlantic together and are sailing down the River Parana on the way to Paraguay.

The river winds through the rest of the book, which flashes back and forth between Eliza’s troubled journey and the gaudy show she puts on in the years that follow. On the journey out the suspended contempt of her fellow travellers and the watchful loyalty of her servants are a taste of the life which awaits her in the provincial backwater of Asuncion. But the ship is at least free of the respectable women whose obduracy will later define the limits of Eliza’s ascendancy as well as provide Enright with her finest set piece. This is the banquet picnic at which Eliza presides in a lace dress which ‘crawled about her neck and crept down her hands, to be caught in a sort of glittering mitten by the rings she wore’. When the women blank their hostess while eying up her food, Eliza responds by having precious plates of unheard of delicacies thrown into the river.

Enright uses a fractured time-scheme to keep us guessing about the past as well as the future. In the beginning Eliza’s feelings for her frog prince are a cocktail of pregnant need and concubine greed and we watch her play her cards accordingly. Only much later in the novel, just when we might have begun to tire of the seeming unreachability of La Concubina Irlandesa, which is presented entirely in terms of her matchless wealth, do we understand the true nature of her capitulation on the journey out.

After the death of his father Lopez embarks on a series of disastrous wars, and La Lincha turns camp-follower. She bashes away on the piano – its carriage costs lives – while Lopez takes out traitors with his gun – ‘he needed to do it himself these days, like a morning expectoration or a fart’. Sons are born, a daughter dies, and we see the country fall apart through the compromised, unforgiving eyes of a Scots doctor escaped from Greeneland.

Some historical novels – the unsuccessful majority perhaps – leave the reader idly wondering about the factual accuracy of the author’s account of this time or that place. The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch does not allow for any such pedestrian speculation. You both know that it is entirely invented – Enright’s eye and ear are not for the stuff of other men’s records – and feel that it is true in the way that only made-up stories can be. Eliza Lynch stands for all the women in history who have sold sex and hoarded gold and lost their hearts along the way. It is an ancient fable: Enright makes it fresh as paint.

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Doing something about your mind

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Peter Conradi is a retired academic best known for his critical work on Iris Murdoch and, more recently, as her authorised biographer. The biography, though painstaking and full of interesting material, exemplified the difficulty of constricting a linear portrait of a thinker who not only wrote obsessively about mages and the electric currents — for both good and ill — around them but also herself occupied that territory in her relations with friends, lovers, acolytes, pupils and biographers.

Going Buddhist turns this difficulty to triumphant advantage. Conradi’s friendship with Murdoch and their long conversation about matters of religion are one of several connecting threads in what is in effect a long essay about the author’s personal experience of the Path. A portrait of the novelist — ‘plump and short with dishevelled hair … her face open with tenderness and compassion like a mollusc, yet also deeply private, with an intense pudeur and a steely strength’ is made all the more vivid for not appearing central to Conradi’s project. ‘Are you a religious person?’ she asks him, during their first solo talk in 1982. Conradi felt, at the time, ‘an intellectual’s routine contempt’ for the religions he’d met. But shortly afterwards he picked up, and read in a single sitting, a book by the Tibetan Buddhist Chogyam Trungpa. He resolved then to explore Buddhism. Why Buddhism? asks the novelist, for whom religion is a safe subject. ‘Because I had to do something about my mind,’ the critic answers, several pages later. He depicts himself, almost in passing, as something of a wreck, given to crippling panic attacks, capable, at best, of impersonating adult efficiency. The meditator, in the beginning, impersonates other meditators. Only this second impersonation, if it is persevered in, leads to a path instead of a rut. The claims made for ‘sitting’ are in some ways breathtakingly modest — ‘meditation makes nothing happen at all except to slow one down so that one can witness how one always was, but never before quite saw.’ But for Conradi the practice soon becomes a form of mental hygiene which he cannot do without.

Two decades later and the author is too Buddhist to proselytise. What he offers, in a spirit of friendly detachment, is part autobiography, part primer for beginners, part lightly drawn philosophical and social criticism. The best of the book is a discussion of how Buddhism has gone west. Conradi portrays a religion that can accommodate organic change, and champions the intelligent rigour of Western Buddhists more concerned with the future of meditation in the West than with the perpetration of ancient traditions (and divisions) of the East. In the West Buddhism is attractive because it is at odds with the prevailing ethos of the age — Conradi argues that ideas such as unlearning self-preoccupation must have a very different resonance when applied in societies where ties of kinship have all but withered away. He suggests that the value of such ideas is ‘possibly all the more important’. He also tells stories which contrast the shrewdness and pragmatism of Tibetan masters with the lazy confusion of beaded hippies going for the wrong bit — as when, after the death of Chogyam Trungpa in America in 1987, some zealous students took to salting their teacher’s body in meditation posture in accordance, they thought, with ancient tradition. When this was explained to a venerable lama who had travelled all the way from the top of the world, the Tibetan looked baffled and asked, ‘But surely you know about deep- freezes in the West?’

In sections on meditating, basic Buddhism and positive emptiness, Conradi takes the uninformed reader for an invigorating stroll around the ramparts of this most peaceable and pragmatic of world religions. Peaks and crumbling fa

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More mayoral election fever

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Once Upon a Time in the North is not to be confused with The Book of Dust, the big book which Philip Pullman has been promising for some time in interviews about His Dark Materials trilogy and what happens next. It is, instead, a short, elegant, simple story about what happened between two of his best-loved characters — the Texan aeronaut and the talking polar bear — a long time before the events of Northern Lights (1995). And while the title pays tribute to a classic western, and the story itself, although set in an Arctic port, has about it more than a whiff of cowboy gunshot, this little volume nonetheless bears defiant witness to the untranslatable glories of print as a medium. Admirers of Pullman, still reeling from the appalling film The Golden Compass — last year’s sugary shocker of a Christmas schlocker — will be happily reminded of what it was that drew them in to begin with.

The aeronaut, Lee Scoresby, makes a crash-landing on the arctic port of Novy Odense in the balloon he has won in a game of poker. He finds the town in the throes of a mayoral election campaign in which a sinister demagogue is whipping up feeling against the bears of the region, who live on the edges of the town in a menacing atmosphere of cowed resentment. Scoresby is briefly distracted by the vapid beauty of the demagogue’s daughter, but soon pieces together the connection between the demagogue and a powerful mining company, and recognises the demagogue’s henchman as a contract killer from a previous adventure.

In the trilogy the forces of evil are represented by the ecclesiastical authority, and freedom and morality resides with gypsies, witches and feral children. Here Pullman draws on an alternative store of creative prejudice, and it is capitalist energy which is revealed as red in tooth and claw, while the forces of civilisation are represented by a sexily unflappable civil servant and his shy, austere librarian girlfriend. I felt a passing twang for Oskar Sigurdsson, a poet journalist on greedy alert for a story — any story. Shades here of the established author’s habitual dislike of the resourceful hack?

One of the many pleasures of this small, beautifully produced book — cloth-bound, with enchanting woodcuts by the master-engraver John Lawrence — is that daemons are once again restored to their mysterious place in Pullman’s subtly out-of-kilter world. These creatures — animal manifestations of their owners’ souls, with forms revealing of their owners’ personality — were, inevitably, reduced to the status of exotic pets in the cinematic version. Here their reactions to events and interactions with their owners mark them out as a rhetorical device of ingenious and elastic power. The contract killer’s account of how he tied his enemy’s daemon to a horse’s tail is as vivid an account of torture as I have read in a long time.

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The mother’s tale

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‘I’m sick of this story of yours, this idea that it’s about drugs. If you want that to be the story then go away and write one of your f***ing novels about it, OK?’ says the angry son towards the end of The Lost Child, which goes nowhere slowly, despite the rollercoaster ride of publicity it has received.

It is hard not to think that the boy has a point. Why didn’t Myerson do the decently indecent thing and write a novel? Plenty of writers — good writers — make little up, but nontheless deploy the mask of fiction which also provides protection for traduced parents, children, lovers and friends of the nightmare novelist. Perhaps Myerson is professional enough to know when not to write a novel. In this instance, there is the inconvenient fact that there is no story. Instead, we get a series of anguished vignettes of her dope- smoking son that interrupt a failed attempt to uncover a story about an early-19th-century girl, Mary Yelloly, who made up a Picture History of a family of minor gentry. Myerson finds this album of watercolours and captions in the room of a Mayfair book dealer, and flicks through to the end where a pencilled note in another hand tells her that Mary Yelloly died in 1838, aged 21.

‘My heart turns over. You died.’

This meaningless present-tense portentousness sets the tone as Myerson embarks on a trail of houses and graves which no longer exist and Yelloly descendants who treat her with blandly uniform kindness. Her glosses are filled with soppy presumption: on the Yelloly parents, married in 1806, ‘They quickly set about making ten children. What a consolation it must be for them, to create this bursting, joyous family.’ There is no evidence that Mary’s sister’s seven-month marriage was particularly happy, but this doesn’t stop Myerson referring to her ‘achingly lengthy widowhood’. Indeed the amorous effects of brass on the English middle class in Regency England don’t get a look-in, even when the clues fall thick and fast — as, for instance, when the suitors are discovered to have moved between sisters.

Perhaps it’s the boy’s fault. He smoked too much skunk and dropped out of school and was kicked out of home. Earlier he starred in ‘Living with Teenagers’, a startlingly good column which ran for two years in the Guardian. It would have been intriguing to read a book in which the author of ‘Living with Teenagers’ attempted to confront the unhappy relationship between life and copy. But in The Lost Child Myerson doesn’t even acknowledge, let alone examine, her weekly habit.

Last week the boy described his mother’s behaviour as ‘obscene’; in the book he provides a happy ending by consenting to the publication. It is a happy ending because The Lost Child is not really about a teenage boy. It’s about a writing mother compelled to tame the chaos of family life with words. In one of the book’s very few haunting images Myerson describes how, if she refuses to give the boy any money, ‘he sits on my study floor, his whole body blocking the door, his eyes on my face, smiling because he knows I won’t be able to write a word.’ No wonder she paid him to be able to use his poems.

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Spoilt for choice

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It is more than ten years since Natasha Walter published The New Feminism, a can-do look at the ‘uniquely happy story’ of the women’s movement.

It is more than ten years since Natasha Walter published The New Feminism, a can-do look at the ‘uniquely happy story’ of the women’s movement. Then she urged the sisterhood to cast aside the puritanical fixations of yesterday and instead concentrate on politics, pay and the right to work part-time for a year or two without being left behind. At the time I was one of the several crosspatch hoodies who said ‘steady on: patchwork careers are all very well, but what about the uses and abuses of pornography?’ It’s good to see that Walter has now changed her tune. I got it wrong, she proclaims at the beginning of Living Dolls, arguing that the hypersexual culture in which we live is a sign not of equality but its opposite.

As a moral pamphleteer Walter is a vivid chronicler of the culture she deplores. Here is her description of a ‘babes on the bed’ competition organised by Nuts magazine at a club in Southend in the spring of 2007. ‘The first woman to get on the platform was a confident girl with long, fair hair, in high-heeled boots and hotpants, holding a microphone.’ She is introduced by the DJ — ‘This is Cara Brett! She’s on the cover of Nuts this week! So buy her, take her home and have a wank.’ The introduction is completed and Cara takes over. Walter watches:

In the pages which follow, Walter talks to Cara, who comes to the interview with her best friend beside her. Cara earns a living as a ‘glamour model’; the best friend is a law student at university, but fully supportive: ‘It’s in a magazine that people choose to buy — you don’t have to buy it’.

Walter notes that the ‘emphasis on choice is key’. Small wonder, then, that she reports in triumph when Cara’s house of cards collapses into a not quite so uniquely happy confession: ‘A lot of girls don’t know how to make choices. They think that because one girl’s doing it, and everyone’s going wild, they should do it. Maybe that will change one day.’

Walter doesn’t share that wistful hope. Not unless women regroup to reclaim the night, and mothers save their daughters from the sea of candyfloss pink that begins the conforming rot. This surprising yoking together of causes large and small is the most original aspect of Walter’s argument. One doll leads to another — the unprecedented accessibility of internet porn has bred a generation of girls who take their lessons on how to look from the hairless whores with silicone implants they are accustomed to seeing on screen.

The first half of Living Dolls consists of a series of sketchy interviews with girls and young women, students and sex workers, in which the mantra of choice is ripped away to reveal an ersatz world of copycat promiscuity, dieting and plastic grooming which bears little relation to desire and none to empowerment. But still the surveys show a pronounced tendency among the young to see Jordan as a role model. And no wonder, is the conclusion which Walter doesn’t quite spell out, given the way girls are seduced into identikit fashions from an early age. The mother of a daughter herself, Walter is good on the tendency of parents to ascribe the same characteristics differently according to the sex of their children. She goes to a party where a shy, clinging girl is described as quiet and good, while the boy who also opts out is a restless handful.

Walter is less convincing in the second half of the book, when she turns her guns on the scientific literature concerning sex difference. One academic study is pitched against another with wearying inconclusiveness, while the media are in the dock for making news out of difference rather than sameness. But the reason that difference is news is because it is sameness which, quite rightly, must be legislated for. As long as the pieces are in place for any girl who wishes to study engineering, how much should we bother with the left brain/right brain, nature/nurture ping pong so beloved of bores the world over?

I thought this anyway, but with better foundation, after reading Walter’s exposition of the ‘Stereotype Threat’ evidenced by experiments showing that differences in empathy levels between men and women disappear when the subjects don’t know the reason why they are being assessed. Once we accept that much (so-called) research fails to screen out our unconscious determination to conform to social norms we can relax into throwing away both baby and bathwater.

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Triumph and disaster

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The title of this first novel refers to a version of childhood as a magical kingdom where evil can be overturned and heaven and earth remade at the whim of a power-crazed infant. In fact our narrator’s world has already been darkened by the time she is presented by her beloved elder brother with the rabbit she insists on calling God. She has been sexually abused by an elderly neighbour, a Jewish musician who fascinates her with tales of the concentration camp in which he was never interned. The brother discovers the betrayal, promises to keep it a secret and — this all happens in the first 30 pages — terrifies the elderly musician into suicide.

Oh dear — already I am referring to Mr Golan as ‘the elderly musician’ as though I were, in some way, on his side. It is indeed tempting to champion the lonely misfit — if only because his victim, Elly, comes across as a monster without meaning to out herself as anything more troubling than brave and disturbed. In fact she is the best advertisement for letting go of the inner child that I have ever encountered.

Her story begins in 1968 and continues until some months after 9/11, taking in a childhood move from Essex to Cornwall and adult spells in New York and London. The cast is made up for the most part of loving, distracted, faintly zany wouldbegoods. Some work, or have worked, in the theatre, others dream of doing so.

The plot is moved forward by the sort of devices beloved of children’s stories — a win at the football pools, the death and resurrection of a beloved pet, telepathic links between best friends torn apart by wayward parents, lovers reunited by catastrophe.

The novel is shaped by the gap of time between the abuse suffered by Elly as a child and her parents’ understanding, when the brave little girl is revealed in all her brave little girl glory. It is the childish sensibility, not the tricks themselves, which make Winman’s debut so unsatisfactory. Elly tells her story with no idea that the self-conscious prattling of a nevertobegainsaid infant is bad enough when relayed by a besotted parent, but unbearable when narrated by the grown-up child without any corresponding growth of existential understanding.

Elly measures everything that happens according to whether it increases or diminishes her power. This might work in a novel which aimed to unpick the bones of a demonic will to wrap the world in saccharine bounty — Elizabeth Taylor’s The Soul of Kindness is just such a work of art — but Winman’s portrait has no such satiric edge. There are occasional glimpses of something richer and more reflective, as when Elly befriends a girl from a chaotic background and is

transfixed by the possibility of imagination within this home … This wasn’t the quiet symmetry of my everyday … This was a world devoid of harmony … a world of drama, where comedy and tragedy fought for space.

But of course tragedy has to win, hands down, as soon as Elly removes her winsomely protective gaze from this refreshing household.

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Cuckoo in the nest

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Caradoc King, the well-known literary agent, was adopted in 1948 as a baby into a family of three girls, shortly joined by a fourth, presided over by a difficult, unhappy mother and her feebly adoring husband. He grew up unaware of the adoption and has never discovered its motive. His adoptive mother, Jill, the moving spirit behind every family decision, may have simply longed for a boy. If so, she was singularly ill-prepared for standard boyish delinquencies. Young Carodoc liked playing with matches, embroidering the truth, and inspecting — in a spirit of scientific enquiry — the private parts of his younger sister. This memoir describes King’s upbringing in a spacious but sparsely furnished 18th-century house in the Essex marshes, where money was tight and discipline tighter.

Some of the harshness may have been generic to the period. The penalty for King’s fondness for matches was to have his hand pressed onto the scorching metal of the stove chimney. We are never told if his sisters were treated as strictly. The character of Jill is presented as a mystery, yet it resonates through an accumulation of incidental detail, such as her mildly demented injunction that the children were not to smile in photographs because it might seem like showing off.

Carodoc went to primary school in Colchester with ‘I am a liar’ embroidered on his sweat shirt, before being dispatched, aged six, to a tiny prep school in Suffolk run by two brothers and a sister as in a novel by Ivy Compton Burnett. The lies continued — he claimed in a geography class that he had just returned from a holiday at the Taj Mahal (this was in the mid-1950s). But the enlightened sounding regime at Nowton Court — staffed almost entirely by demobbed officers — found a way of going with his mendacious flow, and taming it. Unfortunately the difficult birth of another son propels Jill into the arms of the Catholic church and Caradoc is removed from Nowton House. By then a pattern has been set; King makes up for the awkwardness and inadequacy of his relations with his parents by latching onto the kindness of teachers. He continues to be naughty, but never wants for champions as one school follows another.

This book may look like a misery memoir but it doesn’t read like one. The energy of its problem child protagonist is directed at turning knocks to his own advantage rather than proving his victim status. His disposition is generous, unselfpitying and sanguine. The headmaster at Nowton Court beats him till he bleeds, then puts his arms around him, and later invites him back to the school to make not exactly a pass, but a gentle stab at something not unrelated. He is clearly not the sort of chap to thrive in the current educational climate, but just as clearly a benign factor in the life of Caradoc King. So is Father Roger, the Jesuit headmaster of Belmont Abbey, who treated his young favourite to wine-soaked tutorials and pulled strings at Oxford when he muffed his exams.

It was Father Roger, delegated to the task by Jill, who finally told him, aged 16, about the adoption. King’s overwhelming reaction was relief. Though he exchanged pious letters with his ‘parents’ saying the fact of the adoption made no difference to either side, ‘in 15 months they would each write separate letters saying the opposite’. King was cast out of the family into which he had never fitted, and taken in by Jill’s sister until he left for university.

Decades later King tracks down his birth mother in time to meet her before she dies. Better not give the ending away — suffice it to say that Problem Child is a refreshing celebration of sinners over saints.

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The Daylight Gate, by Jeanette Winterson Claudia FitzHerbert

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The story of the Pendle witch trials in 1612 is well known, thanks to the publication of The Wonderfull Disoverie of Witches in Lancashire by Thomas Potts, clerk to the Lancashire Assizes in which ten of the 12 accused were condemned to death by hanging. But it is also unknown because Potts’s certainties are not ours. We know who was accused of what but not why, although several of the cases collapsed into each other, with one defendant being released after a witness was ‘proved’ to have been in the pay of a Catholic priest. Witchery and popery were equally reprehensible, target culture making it imperative for Potts and his cronies to nail someone for something.

Jeanette Winterson is the latest in a long line of fabulists to be attracted to this mix of information and its opposite, and she swoops on the story like the falcon she gives to her heroine. Alice Nutter, one of the condemned, was an oddity at the time because of her gentry background. In Winterson’s hands she becomes the very model of a modern Mrs Warren, who has made a fortune and lost in love.

She has also dabbled in magic under the guidance of John Dee, but unlike her female lover she has not gone over to the dark side and has since attached herself to a gunpowder-plotting priest who has been tortured to within an inch of his life. Winterson here sets a new standard for the emasculated hero — at least Abelard enjoyed his oats before being parted from his bits.

In fact the love affair between the gay widow and Jesuit plotter is one of several garishly ahistorical strands in this short  enjoyable book. The priest is strangely untroubled by the rules of the faith he is ready to die for — not only is he happily immersed in a love affair with a white witch, he also appears unaware of the sin of suicide.

Alice Nutter is better value, piecing together the danger she’s in on her own. At one point she bumps into an owlish playwright called Shakespeare and asks him if he believes in magic. He answers with a warning: ‘Do not be seen to stray too far from the real that is clear to others, or you may stand accused of the real that is clear to you.’

This Stoppardian interlude is fun, but the power of the novel lies in Winterson’s take on the witches themselves, who are very far from the free-thinking wise women of old-fashioned feminist revisions. The Pendle witch trials have always challenged the witchcraze = misogygny version because the 12 inconveniently included two men.

Winterson presents us instead with a snarling, cursing, incest-riven coven of desperate low-lifers who think nothing of interfering every witch way with a weirdly loitering corpse-robbing nine-year-old girl who turns key witness. And while the magistrate is a would-be decent man, the constable’s boy and the local jailer are also guilty of disgusting practices. In fact The Daylight Gate offers an unexpectedly reactionary vision in which the educated are civilised, while the have-nots are hell.

The post The Daylight Gate, by Jeanette Winterson Claudia FitzHerbert appeared first on The Spectator.

A guide to the media circus

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Caitlin Moran’s  bestselling How to be a Woman careered with reckless frivolity from the personal (eldest of eight, home-schooled in a council house in Wolverhampton) to the political (better pornography, larger pants, more body hair). Her latest effort, Moranthology (Ebury Press, £18.99) casts a retrospective glow of gravity over its predecessor. That was a manifesto of sorts; this is proper-job knockabout.

Moran, who writes three columns a week for The Times, gives us a mish-mash of interviews, ‘celebrity watches’ and other ephemera from the past 20 years. Her skill as an interviewer lies not in the killer question but in the way she conveys being there and messing it up. She is gleeful and rueful and on the money: Eddie Izzard has ‘eyes like guns’; Keith Richards’s laugh is like ‘a crow stuck in a chimney’.

She is also a guide to the new media, concocting articles out of twitter feeds and the reactions they elicit: she gets the most hits for banging on about her signature bangs and freakish silver-streak fringe. The unseriousness, perhaps, is in the eye of the beholder.

Moran herself is made of better stuff. She captures the way the media circus addles the nation’s brains, quoting one commentator offering up the royal wedding as ‘an opportunity for optimism about the future’ in the face of ‘DISASTER and DEATH all around the world’ while another announces that the marriage is about to be ‘consummated’ at Westminster Abbey, ‘an event inexplicably left out of The Times’ souvenir 14-page order of service.’

The post A guide to the media circus appeared first on The Spectator.

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