I wish I had more time… whom do I kidding, I wish I had more resilience to read more fiction. The work has been somewhat exacting as of late; this and the overall direction in which the wind blows sway me towards other escapistic ways of relaxing that are less mentally demanding than reading. I’ll leave it to your imagination to guess which ways those are. So, without spending more bits of pretentious prose on myself, I present to you the very few novels that I managed to page through over the last several months.
Graham Greene
I confessed last year to my undying love to everything Graham Greene. A burnt-out case is another one of his novels investigating not only, as the author put it, “various types of belief, half-belief, and non-belief”. Among the topics are: the meaning and the inescapable yoke of one’s vocation, the pervasive and insidious nature of success and how it can harm even those immune to vanity, what it means to be “good” in actions if not in professed thoughts and intentions, and much, much more. More than enough for such a modest, in terms of the word count, novel. The author failed in one thing only, and he did it quite graciously. The novel is set in Congo, not in a real country with documentary-like attention to detail, but in something intentionally more fictional, surreal, dark, mysterious, close to the very heart of darkness.
This Congo is a region of the mind
says he,
the kind of setting, removed from world-politics and household preoccupations,
where the questions of belief can be examined with little interference from these external factors. In fact, however far may Greene’s Congo of the mind be distanced from world-politics and household preoccupations, it was never completely removed from them. As in a region remote, but not inaccessible, in such Congo of the mind the issues of belief inevitably get intertwined with the full spectrum of human life’s complexity, enriching the experience that the novel grants and making the characters and their struggles perhaps even more relatable than the author intended.
Terry Pratchett
Curiously, a few people who know me, independently, at different times in my life suggested that I’d probably read all of his novels. While such feat is not impossible, and in my own eyes this suggestion is quite flattering, I must humbly admit that aside from Good Omens (joint with Neil Gaiman), I’ve read only maybe 10 Pratchett’s books, all from the Diskworld series. The thing is, I can’t tolerate much comic fiction in one sitting. Although the genre provides quite an amusing and engaging read, apparently, for some of us, there’s such a thing as “too much fun”. Have to be serious from time to time, haven’t we?
So my most recent additions to the list are Wyrd Sisters and Equal Rites, the first two in the Witches series of the Discworld novels. What can I say? That’s typical Pratchett. In a good sense, because there’s no “bad” sense about typical Terry Pratchett, a world-renowned master of fantasy comedy. I can definitely recommend these two books to people who’d like a Pratchett’s novel with magic, and with the kind of a down-to-earth milk-curdling commonplace everyday magic of witches, not the world-shattering universe-altering bookish magic of wizards from the Rincewind novels (Color of Magic, anyone?).
John Steinbeck
Beginning with an epigram in a form of a quote from the 15-th century morality play The Somonyng of Everyman, The Wayward Bus, first published in 1947, is an allegorical novel that in a way holds the mirror to the post-war USA. However, the novel is not a kind of American Tragedy-Pilgrim’s Progress amalgamation turned by an evil witch into something designed and destined to bore you to death. Yes, The Wayward Bus is allegorical and its characters epitomize various social strata and personal qualities (at the same time!) almost to the point of being stereotypical. Speaking of which, I couldn’t go patiently past a perfect piece of red scare:
They had expropriated the oil; in other words, stolen private property. And how was that different from Russia? Russia, to Mr. Pritchard, took the place of the medieval devil as the source of all cunning and evil and terror.
Well, well. Take that, you bourgeois Pritchards, from Steinbeck who, by the way, supposedly was on the FBI watch list or something for his left-ish views.
And so what if the novel’s allegorical? The writing is good. By no means is this a stiff morality play! On the contrary, this is something that can be read for fun, forgetting to check to which single Virtue or Sin each character corresponds (it’s way more complicated than this anyway). It was a lot of fun for me to enjoy the immense satirical power of Steinbeck on a short trip in the wayward bus of life that carries american society (a representative or exagerrated one?)… where exactly? Nobody knows! The ending is intentionally open, and the subsequent fates of the characters, while hinted upon, are eventually left to imagination.
Charles Dickens
I’ve seen somewhere that A Tale of Two Cities is one of his less typical novels. Well… I can’t say I agree with that. I’d say it’s on a par with something like Bleak House, although for a Dickensian novel, A Tale of Two Cities is on the shorter side. But otherwise… There’s certainly at least the same level of social critique as in his other writings. The characters still at times feel less like people and more like walking exaggerations of various traits. At times, less so.
Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.
This is about Sydney Carton, who felt almost relatable before he became overly heroic.
But come on. Who am I to discuss Dickens? If you’d like some not extremely long, entertaining, almost historical Victorian fiction featuring love and sacrifice with a backdrop of bloody aristocrats whose actions lead to bloody revolutions that destroy people’s lives, than this one is definitely a thing for you.
Sinclair Lewis
This is not the socialist writer Upton Sinclair who’s also on my reading list. This is another Sinclair, whose Arrowsmith I absolutely adore, having read it in two languages. That is, mind you, not only because prof. Gottlieb laudes my scientific field of choice while disparaging organic chemistry, all in one go.
Organic chemistry! Puzzle chemistry! Stink chemistry! Drugstore chemistry! Physical chemistry is power, it is exactness, it is life. But organic chemistry — that is a trade for pot-washers. No.
Aaaah… feels fresh in 2024, almost 100 years after the original publication of Arrowsmith.
But I digress again. Today we should be talking about It Can’t Happen Here of 1935. In some sense this is a dystopian novel. More significantly, this is a stark warning against the rise of fascism in the USA of that time. That is, the novel’s setting is in the USA, but the plot would be equally applicable to some other places. And times. With an everyman a provincial newspaper editor by necessity turned underground rebel fighter as the main protagonist, It Can’t Happen Here warns us that it can and will happen here if we’re not vigilant, and quicker than we might imagine at that. At times the pacing of the story feels a bit hurried, with almost the lightning-speed populist-bullshit-greased transition from flawed democracy to a fascist dictatorship, the latter featuring racial persecution, mock trials, concentration camps, paramilitary organizations, and all the other paraphernalia. Such a rapid pace limits the size of the novel, which is a positive thing in this genre, and also reflects both the writing speed (the warning should’ve been delivered on time to have an effect) and the fragility of democratic institutions, which are hard to maintain but can be ruined in a blink of an eye. So, without further ado, go and read the thing. It may not be the highest pinnacle of literary craftsmanship, but its message is as relevant now as it was then.
Stay sharp, everyone, and do not embrace any kind of fascism-in-disguise, however sweet its deceitful populistic songs may sound to your ears.