1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die
Page 61
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The Midwich Cuckoos
John Wyndham
Lifespan | b. 1903 (England), d. 1969
First Published | 1957
First Published by | Michael Joseph (London)
First Movie Adaptation | Village of the Damned (1960)
The Midwich Cuckoos sets a science fiction story of hostile alien invasion in the apparently tranquil setting of an English village.
“Cuckoos lay eggs . . .”
Midwich is a tiny and unexceptional rural village where very little ever happens, until a mysterious force envelops it, and everyone falls unconscious. Soon after, the inhabitants wake to find that everything remains normal, and most have no ill effects. However, it becomes clear that every woman of childbearing age is simultaneously pregnant. The resulting children are extraordinary: uncannily alike, remarkably well developed, and endowed with a telepathic sense that allows all to know exactly what one has learned. Unsurprisingly, they prompt a great deal of unease in the village and, in classic sci-fi style, a professor arrives to investigate the phenomenon. What follows is a compelling struggle between the children, the villagers, and the authorities around them that quickly takes on global proportions.
This synopsis may seem familiar, because although it was initially popular as a novel, the story is probably better known as a result of the two filmed versions (the first considerably superior), both rather unnecessarily titled Village of the Damned. This novel has also had an enduring influence on successive generations of science fiction writers. Although The Midwich Cuckoos has undeniably dated, as with many of Wyndham’s novels—the most popular being The Day of the Triffids—it nevertheless powerfully epitomizes the concerns and questions that preoccupied writers following the end of the Second World War and during the Cold War that followed. The fear that is engendered in Midwich by the possibility of invasion, infiltration, and pollution is masterfully manipulated by Wyndham in terms of the domestic, the personal, and the body. He also brilliantly captures the uncomprehending intrusion of Cold War propaganda and politics into the most unlikely setting—little England. MD
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Voss
Patrick White
Lifespan | b. 1912 (England), d. 1961 (Australia)
First Published | 1957
First Published by | Eyre & Spottiswoode (London)
Nobel Prize for Literature | 1973
An artist’s impression of White’s dogged hero appears on the striking cover of the first edition, which made the novelist’s name.
“His legend will be written . . .”
The novel with which Patrick White first achieved international fame is both a love story and an adventure story, and yet it is neither. Set in Australia in the mid-nineteenth century, the novel dramatizes an expedition, led by Johann Ulrich Voss, into the center of the vast Australian continent. At the same time, it follows the growing relationship between Voss and Laura Trevelyan, wealthy daughter of one of the sponsors of Voss’s voyage. Laura, like the colonial society to which she belongs, never leaves the fringes of the continent. But as Voss penetrates deeper and deeper into the dark heart of the country, Laura travels with him, telepathically or in spirit, so that a relationship which begins somewhat frigidly in the drawing rooms of colonial Australia reaches a passionate, feverish intensity in the harsh, otherworldly conditions of the interior.
This tale of love and exploration has many antecedents. Voss’s dogged, driven attempt to penetrate the land resembles Marlow’s journey in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The precise attention to nineteenth-century sensibility lends the drawing-room scenes an unmistakable quality of Jane Austen; and the intensity of the personal relations sometimes reads like Lawrence transposed to the outback. But while Voss’s journey and his difficult relationship with Laura have all these overtones, the most striking feature of this novel is its discordance, its unnavigable strangeness. The land itself is the most imposing presence, and the deadly vastness of the unmapped interior exerts an extraordinary influence on the European culture that the colonists bring to it. This culture is remade by the silent land that Voss seeks to penetrate, just as the novel form is refashioned from this confrontation with the hidden depths of the desert. PB
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Jealousy
Alain Robbe-Grillet
Lifespan | b. 1922 (France)
First Published | 1957
First Published by | Les Editions de Minuit (Paris)
Original Title | La Jalousie
Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy is one of the most famous examples of the nouveau roman‚ or “new novel‚” which tried to extend the limits of the realist approach to novelistic plotting, setting, and characterization. The style is one of rigorous objectivity that is restricted to the visual description of the planes and surfaces of the observable world and the stances and gestures of human figures. The reader is denied any direct access to the thoughts of either the nameless narrator or the people he observes. Looking through a venetian blind (jalousie in French), he watches his wife engaging in what looks like an affair with his neighbor, Franck. He makes no attempt to comment or reflect on what he is seeing—in fact he never uses the pronoun “I” at all.
The true originality of the novel lies in its ability to communicate the force of jealousy despite the self-imposed limitations of its objective style. The reader gradually becomes attuned to the repetitions and minute variations of the text and eventually forms the impression of a consciousness constituted and consumed by jealousy. The narrative style brilliantly captures the behavior of the jealous lover, whose obsessive attention to detail manages to see in every stray glance and unconscious gesture evidence of a hidden betrayal. The flat, filmic mode of narration perfected here has been tremendously influential for later postmodern writers attempting to describe the curious depthlessness of a world seen primarily through the lens of the camera. SS
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The Birds
Tarjei Vesaas
Lifespan | b. 1897 (Norway), d. 1970
First Published | 1957
First Published by | Gyldendal (Oslo)
Original Title | Fuglane
Not to be confused with Daphne du Maurier’s short story and screenplay for Hitchcock’s shlock avian-horror movie, this is a far more restrained and poignant affair from one of Scandinavia’s pre-eminent twentieth-century writers. And this—along with The Ice Palace—is probably Tarjei Vesaas’s finest novel.
The Birds tells the tale of the sibling relationship of a simple-minded boy, Mattis, and his elder sister, Hege, who is his emotional and physical carer. They live together by a lake deep in the Norwegian hinterland, but Hege is wearying of her enclosed world of self-sacrifice. The catalyst for change comes when Mattis, role-playing the part of a ferryman, brings home his one and only genuine passenger. Jørgen is a traveling lumberjack who needs a roof for the night, especially as Mattis’s leaking boat has left his rucksack partially soaked. Hege is at once flustered and attracted by this new arrival—much to the consternation of Mattis. The dynamics of their relationships are acutely observed and the denouement is particularly haunting, as well as revealing a partial clue to the title.
Vesaas was the foremost exponent of the style called landsmål or “country language,” or Nymorsk (“New Norwegian”), as it was later known. Couched in a completely believable dialog, The Birds describes highly charged relationships and experiences in a stunningly primordial landscape. The novel can also be taken as allegorical and symbolic—a heartfelt plea for tolerance of outsiders. JHa
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The Once and Future King
T. H. White
Lifespan | b. 1915 (India), d. 1964 (Greece)
First Published | 1958
First Published by | C
ollins (London)
Full Name | Terence Hanbury White
The return of the magic sword to the Lady of the Lake as visualized by British illustrator Henry Justice Ford in 1902.
“Whoso pulleth Out This Sword of This Stone and Anvil, is Rightwise King Born of All England.”
T. H. White’s complex and often brilliant retelling of the Arthurian legends was written over a twenty-year period as a sequence of four novels and first published as a single volume in 1958. It is best known for the rather saccharine Disney cartoon of the first book, The Sword in the Stone (published in 1939; movie released in 1963). The Once and Future King was based on Thomas Malory’s ambitious prose romance of the Arthurian court, Le Morte d’Arthur, written in the fifteenth century. White does not update the story, but he is always conscious of the parallels between the brutality of the dying Middle Ages and the rise of fascism in his own lifetime. In the course of the four published novels, Arthur grows from a gangly, nervous youth (“the Wart”) into a vigorous military leader. He is eventually forced to emulate the actions of the Nazi-esque Celtic forces assembled by his nemesis, Mordred, in an attempt to try to preserve the innocence of England. The result is disastrous and, as he rides out to meet his death, Arthur concludes that only without nations can humankind be happy. There are some magnificent set pieces, notably when the Wart, transformed into a perch by Merlin, is nearly eaten by the pike, Mr. P., who warns him that the only reality is that of power.
The Once and Future King is a messy sequence of novels that is not properly integrated, as the author acknowledged. Still, it is a powerful, disturbing work about the evil that men can do and the desperate struggle for values in a hostile world. AH
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The Bell
Iris Murdoch
Lifespan | b. 1919 (Ireland), d. 1999 (England)
First Published | 1958
First Published by | Chatto & Windus (London)
Original Language | English
The Bell is generally agreed to be Iris Murdoch’s best early novel. The plot, which clearly belongs to the Anglo-Irish literary genre of the “big house” novel, involves the tense, unhappy relationships between a group of characters on a retreat at a Benedictine monastery, Imber Court. Here they hope to resolve the issues that trouble them in the world outside. They represent a cross section of weak and confused humanity whose spiritual needs prevent them from integrating properly with their fellow men and women, but whose lust for life precludes them from being able to accept a contemplative life cut off from the world. The main figure is Michael Meade, an expriest and schoolteacher struggling to suppress his homosexuality and who is racked with a mixture of guilt and frustration. The plot revolves around the plan to restore the cracked bell of the community, a labor that proves endless and futile. The unstable community starts to disintegrate after the arrival of two outsiders. Dora Greenfield is the unhappy wife of Paul, a scholar studying documents at the Abbey, who is unsure whether to end their marriage. Toby Gashe is a young man who finds himself attracted to both Dora and Michael.
The Bell established Iris Murdoch as a major figure in British fiction. It poignantly explores the tragic interaction of a group of people who need to balance their own needs and desires against those of others, as well as understand how far life can or should be lived in terms of spiritual ideals. AH
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Borstal Boy
Brendan Behan
Lifespan | b. 1923 (Ireland), d. 1964
First Published | 1958
First Published by | Hutchinson (London)
Full Name | Brendan Francis Behan
Borstal Boy is Brendan Behan’s account of life for a “paddy” in an English Borstal (young offender institution). From a working-class Republican family in Dublin, Behan was arrested in Liverpool in 1939 in possession of IRA explosives. Sentenced to three years’ Borstal detention, he served two and was then expelled from England at the age of eighteen.
Part of the beauty of Borstal Boy, a novel he was to write seventeen years later, is the skill with which it recaptures the contradictions that make up the “young offender.” Behan himself appears in the text as a riddle of pride, fear, loneliness, and aggression. He is at once a cynically knowing critic of the pieties of both Irish nationalism and English imperialism and a homesick boy; aggressively at home with his fists in the macho culture of his institution, and tempted to gentleness and desire by the bodies and strengths of his Borstal comrades.
Magistrates, screws, detainees, friends, foes, priests—all are drawn with a respect for both the differences that separate and those that unite. The result is a fine social history of interwar England, as well as a classic of prison literature. What sets Borstal Boy apart from other such classics is the generosity of Behan’s anger and his skill as a writer in exposing the many ways in which prison dehumanizes all who come into contact with it. PMcM
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Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon
Jorge Amado
Lifespan | b. 1912 (Brazil), d. 2001
First Published | 1958
First Published by | Livraria Martins Editora
Original Title | Gabriela, Cravo e Canela
“I continue to firmly believe in changing the world . . .”
Jorge Amado
In 1930, the newly elected president of Brazil, Getulio Vargas, publicly burned Jorge Amado’s first six novels—intending to warn Brazil’s intellectuals of the consequences of expressing dissident politics in literature. Amado eventually won a seat in congress for the Communist Party, but decided he was “of better use to the people as a writer than by spending my time on party activity.”
Amado grew up on his grandfather’s cocoa plantation at Itabuna, in the northeast province of Bahia. At this time, wealthy plantation-owning men were preoccupied with asserting their masculinity through promiscuity. Amado was exposed to the misery of female workers, a familiarity that he used to situate his portrayal of the intoxicating, sensual, and ever-happy Gabriela, whose skin looks like cinnamon and smells like cloves.
Gabriela is a modernist text, questioning the traditional double standard that requires married Brazilian men to be loyal to their masculinity and women to be loyal to their husbands. This double standard is played out in the love story between Gabriela and Nacib, who hires her to cook in his bar. Nacib’s jealousy at finding his beloved Gabriela in bed with another leads him to pressure her into marriage, but the potential entrapment that this represents threatens to squash the innocence and freedom that makes Gabriela so potent.
Gabriela’s situation became a platform for the inequality of women (who, according to the Brazilian constitution, only became equal to men in 1988). Gabriela’s characterization reinforced the stereotype of Brazil as a Third World country, but it did so through a woman standing outside a society whose essence she nevertheless embodied, thus speaking of and to Brazil’s most invisible citizens. JSD
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Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Alan Sillitoe
Lifespan | b. 1928 (England)
First Published | 1958, by W. H. Allen (London)
Movie Adaptation Released | 1960
Author’s Club First Novel Award | 1958
“For it was Saturday night, the best and bingiest glad-time of the week . . .”
From the outset of his writing career, English author Alan Sillitoe found a vibrant catalyst for his imagination in Nottingham, the region he had grown to know intimately since birth. Yet his debut novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, was more than simply an exercise in regional realism. In a narrative that makes nimble transitions between the naturalistic and the mythical, Sillitoe describes the progress of Arthur Seaton from factory floor to fractious love life, creating an unsentimental, pseudo-autobiographical picaresque novel. Arthur’
s riotous enjoyment of the “best and bingiest glad-time of the week,” as he drinks in pubs and chases girls, is a “violent preamble to prostrate Sabbath.” In his evocations of Arthur’s everyday detailed perception of Nottingham’s once resilient environment under change, Sillitoe does perfect justice to the local people and regional place, scrupulously mapping a townscape that is barely resisting the parasitic “empires” of suburbia, which are encroaching on it. Sillitoe returned to this “Seaton saga” in Birthday, published in 2001, aligning himself with Balzac in conducting across the decades what he described recently as a “Nottingham comédie humaine.”
Central to this ongoing project, Sillitoe’s imaginative geography has contributed richly to the postwar regional novel’s stylistic and thematic scope. By using his personal acquaintance with Nottinghamshire’s cartography, he articulates with formidable precision a prospective map of what the county could potentially become. Sillitoe’s fiction is never straightforwardly realist: it often blends urban verisimilitude with visionary speculation in order to demonstrate how an author can allow factual experiences of indigenous place to inform a fable of social possibilities alive in its midst. DJ