The Casson Family series by Hilary McKay:Book review

To drink with this

Hot chocolate with marshmallows

Comforting, sweet and reminiscent of childhood. Nuff said.

What’s what

"People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book'.” Martin Amis

I would like to respectfully disagree with Martin Amis. There should be no shame in writing or reading books aimed for children, the best of these being just as thought-provoking and meaningful and enjoyable as anything you will get from Booker prize winning literature. A children’s writer must anyway aim their novel at children of varying ages, of varying levels of comprehension, and the most accomplished design books which have layers of meaning which will be appreciated more by older readers. I probably have my dad to thank for all the amazing books written for children which I have read since entering adulthood. I passed all my library books on to him after I finished them, and he read Alex Rider, Sweet Valley High et al and discussed them with me as seriously as if they were the Dickens novels I moved on to eventually.

I loved Hilary McKay’s The Exiles series when I was growing up, but the Casson family series was after my time - the first was published in 2001, by which time the Dickens’ years had begun. The series focuses on an eccentric dysfunctional-yet-really-pretty-wonderful sprawling family living in modern-day England. There are four children with strong and distinct personalities, two well-meaning but mostly absent parents, and assorted friends such as Derek-from-the-camp, and Michael the driving instructor.

Indigo explained to him that in England summer was when you carried your coat around instead of wearing it. Only for a few reckless days in August, said Indigo, could it be safely left at home. Indigo's Star, pg 203

The first three books in the series (Whitbread award-winning Saffy’s Angel, Indigo’s Star, Permanent Rose) are near perfect. The plot is minimal but the characters are wonderfully realised and I gobbled these books up at the rate of one a day during a stressful week at work. Having the Cassons to come home to felt like immersive yet mild and cuddly therapy.

Eve looked at Rose, and she did not laugh. She understood about hearts, even if she did not understand about money. She put an arm round Rose and hugged her tight. Indigo's Star, pg 144

The small details here are the ones which make this such a vivid world to drop into; Eve, the mother, swigs a mixture of instant coffee and coca cola to keep her going while working on her paintings in the shed at the bottom of the garden; nobody ever cooks except Indigo, who dreams up delights like grilled cheese on top of curry; there are several generations of guinea pigs running loose through the house and garden.

McKay’s writing is full of wry, warm humour and flawed but lovable characters. She deals with serious issues without easy resolution or resort to cheap moralising or oversimplification. Dad Bill moves out to live with a girlfriend for a while; Saffy is adopted and struggles with her place in the family; Indigo is bullied at school. None of these events dominate the plot but are all just part of the overall picture of family life.

He had drifted away from them all into another life, with hardly a backward glance. Still, he had come home when she asked him to and he had bought Tom the black guitar. He was good and he was bad. Indigo's Star, pg 254

Caddy Ever After and Forever Rose don’t quite meet the incandescent pitch of the first two books in the series. The point of view shift from third to first person and the increased focus on Rose bring a feel of scattiness and a shortage of detail. These are minor points however, and the series comes to a satisfying end.

There is a nostalgic sense to McKay’s writing which I can’t quite pinpoint. Maybe it’s the non-attention of the parents, so essential in YA literature, or the big messy squabbly family. The series doesn’t feel quite contemporary despite being written within the last few years. This is Enid Blyton meets Jacqueline Wilson, without the fussiness of the first or the brash and often quite bleak take on modern life of the second. Whatever McKay’s magic formula, this series was a lot better than most books by non-brain injured writers I’ve read this year.

Verdict

If I knew any nine year old girls I would impose this on them straight away, in between their mandatory Buffy viewings.

On the small screen

I’d like to imagine this as a children’s tv show, but I don’t think this type of programme is in vogue. Even when I was a teenager this would have felt old-fashioned.

Rose did not say any more, but she and Indigo stayed out for a long, long time, wishing, and watching the stars, the steady ones and the ones that passed with red and green lights across the sky. Indigo’s Star pg 266

Highbrow/Lowbrow

Let’s all choose to ignore Martin Amis. Hilary McKay’s fiction is damn good

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins: Classic Review

Drink with this: Gin and tonic.

Gin, as well as our classic under review, was hugely popular in the Victorian age. Tonic, originally containing quinine, was added to create a refreshing, anti-malarial drink ideal for empire-building in steamy climates. Therefore the gin and tonic is where mass popularity and aristocratic sensibilities meet. Invented eleven years after the publication of TWIW, so drink alongside to be as avant garde as the novel itself.

The Woman in White has never been out of print since 1859. This kind of enduring popularity is hard to dismiss. (But I intend to anyway.) When first published, it represented a remarkable innovation in terms of narrative structure and thematic concerns. But like any good ideas, the features which originally made the novel stand out have since been explored, exploited and improved on by so many authors that their original incarnation feels dated, and even irritating.  This is not to say the novel isn’t still worth reading. As a study in Victorian mores and in the context of 19^th century literature, it’s fascinating. It just doesn’t necessarily stand alone as an enjoyable and suspenseful read in the way it seemingly did 150-ish years ago. 

 It is often described as a precursor to the detective story, but it really bears no resemblance to the modern detective novel. Collins’ characters fumble around for whole chapters, clueless about what’s going on. Meanwhile the reader skims impatiently through, having figured out the ‘mystery’ pages ago. It is de rigeur in the genre nowdays for the ending to leave certain details unexplained. (See: Stieg Larsson, Jo Nesbo) The careful advanced signaling of every single secret in the novel felt clumsy in comparison.

                                                                                                 

"If the cinematic idea of the male gaze can exist in literary form, it undoubtedly exists here."

                                                                                                      

TWIW was revolutionary in its heyday for its treatment of motifs such as forbidden secrets hidden underneath a veneer of respectability, and its examination of the lack of legal standing afforded to married women. But even by the standards of its contemporaries, its investigation into woman’s rights feels unsatisfactory. Tenant of Wildfell Hall, for example, (Anne Bronte) takes a much more impassioned and considered look at the same issues, which also happens to be from the viewpoint of the character affected. And compared to other sensation novels of the Victorian era – Lady Audley’s Secret, anything by Oscar Wilde, and even Dracula – TWIW seems rather tame.

My biggest issue with the novel was its treatment of female characters. If the cinematic idea of the male gaze can exist in literary form, it undoubtedly exists here. Wilkie’s female characters never really felt believable to me. The clammy, leering presence of the author was something I was uncomfortably conscious of in every scene which involved a woman. Laura, the ostensible heroine, is stripped of both agency and voice in the novel, while also running the gamut of insulting female stereotypes. (Attractive dimwit, subservient angel, child-like romantic heroine, hysterical/insane woman).

 Marian, with her intelligence and bravery, arguably represents a more positive portrayal of a woman; yet each of her admirable qualities is filtered through the prism of her ‘masculinity’. She is clearly established as a ‘deviant’ woman, unworthy of sexual consideration except by the monstrous Count Fosco. Only within this context is she allowed to act as narrator, and engage with the male characters on their own terms.

                                                                                                  

"Too tedious to enjoy in an ironic ‘so bad it’s good’ kind of way" 

                                                                                                  

 Even within the genre of gothic romance, The Woman in White stretches credulity to its utmost limit. In Dickens’ capable hands, melodrama and coincidence are intrinsic parts of the world he creates and the themes he develops. Compared to his masterful command of these devices, Wilkie’s writing feels like a desperate attempt to keep the story trundling along, by any means possible.

It’s hard to evaluate TWIW fairly today. Too tedious to enjoy in an ironic ‘so bad it’s good’ kind of way – just as Kipling is too racist for this game – it is better appreciated as product of its times than by comparison to its modern equivalents.

Verdict: Worth reading, but only while taking part in an elaborate drinking game. Rules as follows – shot every time a woman faints/has hysterics. Chug every time Collins uses six words when one would do. Drink every time the ‘working classes’ are described in a condescending manner.

On the big screen: There have already been several films and TV series made of this, none of which I’ve seen. The book’s narrative structure, with first-person narratives from various characters, make it well suited for film adaptation. The fact that Laura is a pathetic idiot would be no obstacle to Hollywood success. I would love to see a Todd Haynes take on this, with the gothic melodrama amped up.  

Highbrow/Lowbrow: It’s a Classic, which automatically makes it highbrow, although it wasn’t regarded this way in the 19^th C.

Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood: Book Review

Drink with this: a Grasshopper.

 Sweet and frothy enough to dispel the grotesquery of Atwood’s dystopia.  The aggressive jade of the crème de menthe echoes the obsessive focus on nature recurring throughout the novel. Thick and sickly creaminess brings to mind the novel’s heavy-handed approach to allegory.  

Atwood is a writer I feel I should like more than I do. I loved The Handmaid’s Tale of course, but that’s a given really, no more profound than stating a fondness for cake, or an appreciation of bellinis. It’s easy to enjoy. Oryx and Crake I liked too: but in general Atwood’s writing strikes me as clever but lacking emotional depth. She skilfully creates vividly realised worlds, wrought by the powerful fault lines of the ideologies she explores. But her characters fail to engage the reader, and the ultimate impression is one of a writer bent on exhibiting literary techniques rather than constructing a compelling narrative.

Year of the Flood is no exception to this.  It follows two female characters, Toby and Ren, who seem to be the sole survivors of a devastating plague which has a struck an already blighted futuristic world. Sadly, Atwood doesn’t put her descriptive abilities to use actually telling us about the disaster which has hit Earth.  We don’t even get any satisfyingly gruesome passages describing the aftermath, along with all its de rigueur dystopian features. (Frenzied looting, city-wide stench from rotting corpses, realisation that the disaster has been worldwide.) The first half of the book lamentably sacrifices this kind of apocalyptic action entirely for scene setting and character development.

Despite her focus on the characters, I didn’t find either Toby or Ren particularly sympathetic. This might have been because of their involvement with the cult the book revolves around, the God’s Gardeners. Cults are bizarre and irritating, and if they have to be the subject of  books I don’t think it’s too unreasonable to expect some brainwashing and similar seedy practices from them. Atwood hints at some unscrupulous undertakings, but quickly moves on to explore in more detail their love for bees and celebration of organic vegetables. Tongue-in-cheek sermons and hymns at the start of each chapter are an attempt to inject some humour into the novel. But these passages are poised uncomfortably on the edge of satire, never quite coming close enough to compensate for the tedium of reading them.

Atwood’s treatment of environmental issues is one of the stronger aspects of the novel. She has argued that the bleak themes she develops in YOTF are all extrapolated from existing technologies and societal trends. There is definitely some basis for this in terms of her investigation into climate change and genetic engineering, and it’s great to see a mainstream novelist exploring these ideas. 

However, the world view she presents is rooted in an essentially pessimistic view of humanity. While I’m not an optimist by any stretch of the imagination, (on a good day, my attitude to life is similar to Eeyore’s) this is not the dystopian future I like to envisage. John Wyndham and Stephen King have taught me that there is one plot only appropriate to the post-apocalyptic novel. By right, it goes like this: massive disaster caused by error of a few misguided individuals; everyone dies bar a  few isolated strangers; process of rebuilding commences following struggle for survival; attempts are made to recognise and move on from mistakes of the past for the sake of future generations.

The final part of this plot structure is crucial. Atwood’s characterisation felt two-dimensional as there’s no opportunity for her characters to achieve any kind of redemption, or realisation that things must change. Even before the plague, they are annoyingly self-righteous.

As the God’s Gardeners, they stand apart from the mistakes made by humanity.  The sole real event of the book therefore changes virtually nothing – the cult continues to operate unscathed in much the same way as it did prior to the disaster.  Of course there are meant to be biblical parallels here, with only the chosen few surviving. Atwood seems to have intended the book to be a kind of fable, rather than a realistic depiction of human nature. 

Her CorpSeCorps is a corrupt organisation straight out a Bond film, or Alex Rider novel, with almost complete omnipotence and omniscience. Maybe I am a blind optimist after all, but I found the total control exerted and the lack of any kind of organised revolutionary movement a strain to credulity.  This was essentially my main objection to the novel. Being asked to swallow completely implausible plot details feels patronizing, and detracts both from my enjoyment and from the overall impact of Atwood’s message.

Verdict: Despite this overwhelmingly negative review, this book does deal with some important issues. Don’t buy, but borrow from the library, to scare yourself into taking climate change more seriously.  And feel free to skip the sermons.

On the big screen: I would however be interested in seeing a Hollywood adaptation of this. What this book needs is Spielberg to come in and force the plot into a 120 hour sentiment-fest, with all the dross cut out and the action increased. Susan Sarandon could definitely play Toby, and Jennifer Lawrence could pull off Ren. However, if we’re imagining a page to screen adaptation which is actually faithful to the spirit of the novel, then David Lynch all the way. I think he could take the more bizarre elements and make them beautiful.

Highbrow/Lowbrow: Closer to The Road than The Stand