David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas

     Various friends have recommended this novel highly over the years; someone selecting it as their choice in our book group has finally got me to read it, and I’m glad I did, despite finding it annoying and frustrating at times.

It’s another of those late 20^th century, very long and rambling novels, almost shaggy-dog stories really, with enough varied subject-matter to arouse one’s interest and more than enough narrative skill to keep one hooked, although early on I did wonder where on earth Mitchell was going with it. At times I was reminded of Anthony Burgess, at others of Neal Stephenson’s astonishing Baroque Cycle. Sequentially in time we work our way from the early nineteenth century through six stories, to our present and then into the future, and then cycle back through them to where we began; there are various links and connections skilfully woven in between the stories, too. If you realise early enough that this is what will happen, you do also then begin thinking about Mitchell’s overall plan and direction.

For me the most interesting sections were a sort of future utopia based on current North Korean society, which was a real tour-de-force, a variation on the innocence/ experience trope, and I could see many traces of ideas from Daniel Keyes’ excellent Flowers For Algernon, as well as passing acknowledgement of Huxley and Orwell, in terms of unpicking the differences between utopia and dystopia. I remember from my teaching days being rather surprised at how many students said they would be quite happy to live in Brave New World. They had a point, sometimes unshaken by my next question, ‘OK, but would you be human?’ The recycling of the fabricants recalled both quite a few of Philip Dick’s SF novels, and also Harry Harrison’s Make Room, Make Room, which was the source of the cult 1970s film Soylent Green…

The central, post-apocalyptic future world is really well-conceived and described, and finally convinced me about how good the whole novel was. Again, there are echoes of earlier novels, particularly Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker which I found reflected in Mitchell’s narrative style and use of language.

Mitchell’s ultimate question seems to be whether entropy is finally drawing the human species on to eventual self-destruction. My feeling now – some twenty years after its first publication – is yes, but Mitchell wants us to examine our thinking and realise that a better world may be possible, despite his not having described one in any of the various strands of his novel. Our response to our world, and the choices we make, depend on how we look at that world, how we visualise things and describe them, and in the end the stories we create about the past and the future, because it’s the stories that persist rather than what actually happened…in other words we create our realities and we could therefore create different or better ones, if we looked at ourselves differently, thought differently and described our world and ourselves differently. At least, that’s my take on this epic at the moment.

It’s a thought-provoking novel at many different junctures, and Mitchell attempts to reflect his thesis in the way he has structured the cyclical stories, but I did think that this wasn’t fully clear, and tended to obscure his meanings… A stunningly good read, though.

Jean Giono: Le Grand Troupeau

     I first came across the French writer Jean Giono as a student of A Level French literature half a century ago, with his novel Regain, which was about the gradual rebirth of an abandoned rural village. Not idyllic, not hippified, but bloody hard work done by people who loved the land and understood its importance. I have made a mental note to track it down and re-read it.

This novel (translated into English as To The Slaughterhouse) is about the devastating effects of the Great War on French rural society, on villages hundreds of miles from the front lines. Who is to manage the countryside, the land and the beasts, once the men have gone off to war, many killed and many others mutilated so that even though they return, they cannot work the land? The troupeau (herd) in the French title is both the abandoned or requisitioned animals and the men gathered into battalions for the slaughter. The peasants who find themselves armed and at the front lines in short order are completely lost, disoriented, often wounded and left to die.

It’s an incredibly powerful novel, impressionistic in many ways, disjointed and at times understated, yet clear in its focus on rural life and the organic connections between people. The war is brutal and vile, yet at the same time backgrounded as alien to the positive forces Giono is interested in. Women are forced to be stronger than they can be; we see the devastating effects of the news of deaths on women and the older men back at home in the faraway villages. One truly heart-wrenching scene is the rural mourning ritual for an absent corpse. Nor does Giono ignore the sexual longings and desires of the women deprived of their menfolk, either. An account of trying to bring about an abortion a century ago was quite graphic. And when he wants to shock, Giono spares nothing: there is a truly obscene and detailed description of swarms of rats and how they start eating fresh corpses; then crows arrive and do their bit too… Some soldiers go mad, haunted by visions of their dead comrades.

I found the novel quite hard to read in French: there is much slang and rural vocabulary and idiom from over a century ago, and dictionaries were not often much help. The overall effect is quite different from English fiction about that war, with a much more powerful sense of utter waste, and the total futility of it all. The times come across as deranged, insane.

In the end, I found it rather too disjointed and hallucinatory, perhaps because it was just so utterly alien from my experience, even though I have considerable familiarity with the literature of this period. It recalled Henri Barbusse’s famous Le Feu, which was also a very challenging read a number of years ago. Giono had been there, and his vision of the solidity and solidarity of the ordinary people, the peasantry of France and its potential for renewal of society, was at least partly a reaction to those four years of mayhem: he does leave us with glimmers of hope at the end.

Ernst Wiechert: The Simple Life

     Literature set in the Great War is fairly well-known and accessible; literature set in the aftermath, exploring attempts to come to terms with that horror rather less so. And the more I’ve gradually discovered and read, the more powerful it seems, and the more I realise the extent of the trauma of the survivors.

Wiechert wrote this novel after the Nazis released him from what was basically a warning imprisonment in the concentration camp at Buchenwald. What is the former naval captain, who commanded a ship at Jutland, to do with himself? What can his life mean now? Well-meant advice from a priest suggests meaning comes through work. He abandons wife and son and home and treks into the depths of the forests of East Prussia (Wiechert’s homeland), returning to earth and nature as manager of an estate fishery and living in a hut on a small island. He is joined by his former first mate, who saved his life during the naval mutiny at the end of the war.

His life becomes a cleansing, redemptive, un-religious though spiritual experience; withdrawal from the world leads him to an almost timeless, contemplative state, and we come to understand how devastating the war must have been for so many people. I was often reminded of the French author Jean Giono, who lived, experienced and wrote at the same time, and remembered studying his novel Regain for A-level: it’s also about forsaking the world to bury oneself deep in nature…I must track it down and re-read it.

I’m really not sure how good a novel it is; it’s flawed in some ways. The idyllic simplicity seems at times too good to be true, and the relationship with the granddaughter of the retired general on whose estate the fishery lies, feels ever so slightly creepy in our post-Lolita days, though it’s never a sexual one, and that possibility is clearly ruled out.

There is the mutual incomprehension of father and son, the perennial difference between generations, and the son and his peers imagine that they will regain the glory of the German navy through their efforts.

It’s also a novel about the end of an era, with things never the same again – echoes for me of Lampedusa’s The Leopard, certainly – the Prussian aristocracy is dying out, and for us there is the added hindsight: Hitler’s war is to come, and East Prussia ceases to exist in 1945, divided between Poland and the Soviet Union, the German population extirpated.

I’ve now read this novel four times; it’s one of my all-time favourites. How it speaks to me has changed over the quarter century since I first read it. Sadly, it’s a novel very much of its time, and consequently will probably vanish into obscurity. It’s a novel about ageing, growing older, and what that means for a thinking person (remember Socrates’ dictum, ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’!) It’s about acceptance of oneself, who one is and who one has become, coming to terms with one’s lot, one’s life and one’s achievements. It’s about the hope, the wish for contentment and a sense of achievement. I think it’s marvellous. And the theme is haunting: from Psalm 90 ‘Swift as a breath our lives pass away.’