The Dance Continues - Book II of A Dance to the Music of Time

The second book of A Dance to the Music of Time is called A Buyer's Market.  This novel follows Nick's first few years out of college.  He is living in London and working at a publishing house that publishes art books. 

I found the second book much more enjoyable than the first, probably because I knew what to expect and was not holding it up against Catcher in the Rye.  Taking it for what it was, I was able to slow down and enjoy the clever controlled phrasings of the author and submerge myself in the narrator's world.  The characters from the first novel continue to dance in and out of Jenkins's life, and there is a definite sense of building.  These first three novels appear to be Act I, in which the world and characters are being established before the second act comes to rattle them all up.

I can't say that I have any clearer idea what the novel is about, or what Powell is saying about the world around us.  I have the vague notion that Powell is pointing to the time between the two World Wars as a transitional time in modern culture.  The upper-class propriety of the university-educated boys in the first novel was punctured by the upward mobility of Sunny Farebrother and Widmerpool, and those issues of class seem even more prominent in this second book.  Sunny and Widmerpool were still part of the dinners and dances of culture in the first book.  Here, the main figure who frames the novel is Mr. Deacon, a painter who had some exchanges with Nick's parent when Nick was a boy.  Running into him as an adult, Nick gets on friendly terms with Deacon and their worlds overlap, bringing Nick into a more solidly middle-class environment.  Deacon and Gypsy Jones are like characters out of a Dickens novel, fun but not entirely scrupulous, and they make the sense of the social order seem less stable and more fluid than before.  I feel, in short, that class is at issue in the novel, but what in the end is Powell's interest is still a mystery to me.

I do love the idea of making an epic story out of what seems a rather mundane set of circumstances.  Due to Powell's careful construction, I have full faith in his ability to bring all the disparate narratives (which will certainly be getting still more disparate) together in meaningful ways down the road.  There is an impressive tightness in the layering of incidences that suggests a formidable discipline at the core of the novels.  Just as an example, the figure of E. St. John Clarke is raised by Widmerpool in the opening chapter when he discusses a bit of art criticism published in the papers.  Clarke is again mentioned in passing at a party in a following scene, and crops up one or two more time before we learn that Members (one of Nick's acquaintances from university) is a secretary to Clarke.  So even though the man himself never makes an appearance, he haunts the conversation of the novel.  By doing so, along with similar careful references, Powell feels in complete control of his story, like a Pynchon without the added level of absurdity.

I am also interested in the sense of time in the novel.  The past and present co-exist like a picture book with overlays.  As Jenkins encounters a new experience he tells us both what he thought at the time and that such thoughts were the product of the too narrow experience of youth.  Later, he assures us, he will be able to look back at this moment and understand what was really at issue.  As he says at the end of the second book,

This is perhaps an image of how we live.  For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected; so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity.

This is one of the reasons, I think, that the novel feels weak in plot at this stage.  These are moments that have gained significance only in latter years of the narrator's life.  These were not the tales he would have told a year after their happening, but they are the tales that lay the groundwork for where his life is to take him.  At this point, I can gladly be patient for the story to build and take me someplace meaningful.

Before I go, I would like to pose a question to my non-existent co-readers.  What is up with the individual titles in this series?  How is the second book A Buyer's Market?  Who is buying?  Who is selling?  And what is being sold?  Deacon's art?  His antiques?  Memories?  And what was questionable in the first novel, A Question of Upbringing?  These titles make no direct reference to what's happening in the novel, and I can't help but feel that they are some type of clue to Powell's root concerns in the novels.  Any help would be appreciated.

I will pick up the series when I reach 1955.  For now, it is on to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

A Dance to the Music of Time - Twelve Times!

The '50s look to be a hard decade on this list.  I don't mean that the books look more challenging than usual, but that there are a few surprises.  First, I saw that The Lord of the Rings was listed as one book, even though it was published as three.  But I suppose that is a fair grouping, since Tolkien intended it to be one book and wrote it as such. So, the authors of this list managed to fit 102 books, into their list of a hundred.  Imagine my surprise then, when I was looking up the next book on the list, A Dance to the Music of Time, and discovered that this title is actually an epic collection of 12 books!  Moreover, they were not written as one book.  Volume One, A Question of Upbringing, was published in 1951, the second book in 1952, the third in 1955, all the way up to the last book being published in the mid-70s.  So now we are up to 113 books.  They are tricksy!

 The whole of the novel, I am told, follows our narrator, Nick Jenkins, throughout 50 or so years of his life.  The books appear to follow strict chronological order, and this first book, A Question of Upbringing, begins somewhere in the 1920s at Oxford for the three years Jenkins is at university.  And while Jenkins is a first-person narrator, and while the book follows his life, it is less about him than about all the people he encounters.  He is very much like Isherwood's camera in The Berlin Stories.  (Actually, that's another book that was built out of two books!  That puts us at 114!).

According to an interview with the Paris review (http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3475/the-art-of-fiction-no-68-anthony-powell), Powell knew he wanted to write a very long piece of fiction.  Here's how he explains it:

 Well, this is rather a long story. You see I haven't any great talent for inventing plots, and indeed it seems to me that even the best writers are inclined to churn out the same stuff in eighty thousand words, although it's dressed up in a different way. And so I thought that there would be all sorts of advantages for a writer like myself to write a really long novel in which plots and characters could be developed, which would cover this question of not doing short-term plots—doing rather larger ones, in fact. But of course I didn't know at the beginning quite how long all this was going to be . . . I knew there would be a great number of novels, and about, I suppose, halfway through I realized that I should have to do at least three about the war. Well, having done six before, it seemed the obvious answer to do three to end it up with, because I think it's quite a good idea to have some sort of discipline imposed on yourself in writing, and therefore I deliberately wrote the last three with the idea of ending it up and doing the neat twelve volumes. But I have to admit that in 1951 I didn't know there'd be exactly twelve.

 He is right about this novel not having much to do with "plots."  There are only four chapters in the book, each about 60 pages long, and each acting like something of a short story.  We follow his encounters, mainly, with three other boys who were friends or acquaintances his first year at school:  Stringham, Templer, and Widmerpool.  There are things that happen (and some stories are quite amusing unto themselves), but for the most part, Powell focuses on the interplay between characters.  And I'm wishing I had more to say about that interplay.

My enjoyment of this novel suffered somewhat from following fast upon Catcher in the Rye.  Caulfield's narration in Catcher is so alive and fresh and wild, that Jenkins's proper English and detached tone felt leaden.  Both novels were about young men away from home at school, but Holden's adventures and encounters were much more gripping.  As it is, I'm not even sure what the significance of A Dance to the Music of Time is, and I have not grasped its greatness yet, or why it is considered such a literary achievement.  Something tells me that I need to read much more to appreciate what the book is doing, so I will leave analysis to later books, which I will read in the order they were published with the rest of the list.  I am about to embark on the second book, A Buyer's Market, and should get a better sense of what Powell is doing from there.

This is what I know for now.  The first novel opens with the narrator watching men work on a street corner where they had made a kind of camp as they work by the hurricane lamps in the growing dark.  The images of these men moving in and out of and around the light makes the narrator think of Poussin's painting, A Dance to the Music of Time:

These classical projections, and something in the physical attitudes of the men themselves as they turned from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin's scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing Outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays.  The image of time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.

And that is the image and theme that ties together the next twelve books.  And while I am not in love with the first book, I am hopeful that their will be a reward over the course of the novels, a power built up over time.

Catcher Me If You Can

I hadn't read any Salinger since my college days, and I was excited to get to read him again, as well as a little scared.  My sister had recently attempted to read Catcher in the Rye and had told me that she "just couldn't do it."  I was afraid that Holden wouldn't be the person I remembered, our old friendship strained as one of us moved on in life while the other stayed in his same old circles.

Instead, our reunion was a happy one, and we got on like we had never been apart.  Salinger has an incredible talent for taking hold of a moment and having the details feel simultaneously offhand and poignant, both casual and powerful. 

One of the interesting things I find again and again on this journey through these 100+ novels is how varied the novels are aesthetically, and how much work it is to transition from one work to another.  Each novel is like moving into a foreign country, and the unfamiliar language and customs are jarring at first.  The culture is of course not going to change for your convenience, so you must to the changing if you don't want to be miserable during your stay.  If you're lucky, when it comes time to collect your things and catch the next train, you will be able to feel like you understood and appreicated where you have been.

Sometimes the people in the foreign land are cold and formal and unfriendly, and you never feel like you fit in.   But occasionally, you feel at home from the moment you pull into the station.  The people are warm, the landscape familiar and exotic at the same time.  You understand the language and fall into step with the natives without any effort.  That was my experience coming back to Catcher in the Rye.

Catcher in the Rye is more of a character study than a novel.  Holden Caulfield is the novel.  Moreover, he does not have a character arc; he does not progress or grow through the course of the novel.  He does not learn something that makes him see the world differently.  If you don't like Holden, you are not going to like the novel.  If you are taken in by his charm and depth, however, then you are in for a wonderful experience.

I found Holden to be touching and captivating.  When I read the book in my early 20s, I was struck by the toughness of Holden, his outward signs of worldliness.  He roams the streets of New York like an old pro, smoking, drinking, going to bars, being visited by prostitutes, and walking through Central Park in the deep dark of night.  He seemed to be jaded and too fast grown, looking for the innocence he no longer possessed, to protect the innocence symbolized for him by his sister Phoebe and by the children playing in the rye at the cliff's edge.  His obsession with phonies was a rejection of the false world of adults that he had been thrust into, diametrically opposed to the honest innocence and natural interaction of kids.

On this reading I had the perspective of being older, of having a son of my own, and I felt a tenderness toward Holden that made me love him all the more.  For all his posturing, he is precisely where most 16-year-olds are, in that awkward place between childhood and adulthood.  He himself has the very innocence he seeks to protect.  For example, his wondering about where the ducks in Central Park go when the pond freezes over kills me, as Holden would say.  He has such a genuine love for all the people in his stories, even as he tells you how much he can't stand them.  As much as he critiques the other boys in the various schools he attends, he has something nice to say about everyone.  He even concludes the novel with that sense of loss over all the people he encountered, even the kids he didn't like.  Even his language, which attempts to sound tough, simultaneously  sounds childish and sweet.  Salinger concluded Holden's narrative with him sitting on a bench watching Phoebe ride the merry-go-round, bawling because she "looked so damn nice."  I can't think of a more perfect ending, because I felt just like Holden, only it was he who was on the merry-go-round, circling New York City and the people of the story, reaching for the gold ring, as I sat on the bench worrying about him falling, but not interfering.  As I said earlier, Holden doesn't have a character arc, so it is literally like a merry-go-round that takes us nowhere over the 48 hours that the novel covers,  And like Phoebe, who chooses the same mount to ride after circling the ride, Holden selects the same course of action again and again.

Salinger is a master of his craft, and I find his style to be very powerful.  First-person narratives are always a challenge because you need to be in character and still say something meaningful.  The usual solution to this problem is to have the narrator have a few verbal tics to throw in occasionally and then tell the story you want.  Given how particular Holden's talk is, it should by all rights become overpowering and tiring, perhaps satisfying the needs of a short story, but never sustaining the needs of a novel.  But Salinger makes it work again and again.  And more importantly, he mines the language of youth for its poetry.  Holden has a detail that sums up everyone he encounters.  Jane, for example, never uses her kings in checkers; she just keeps them on the back row.  When Holden's roommate takes Jane out on a date, Holden, being sixteen, has a hell of a time processing his emotions about the possibility of Stradlater making time with Jane.  The inevitable result of Holden's immaturity and powerful emotions is a fight, which ends with Stradlater kneeling on Holden's chest, pinning his wrists to the ground:  "He kept holding onto my wrists and I kept calling hims a sonuvabitch and all, for around ten hours.  I can hardly even remember what all I said to him.  I told him he thought he could give the time to anybody he felt like.  I told him he didn't even care if a girl kept all her kings in the back row or not, and the reason he didn't care was because he was a goddam stupid moron."  These phrases echo like refrains in a song, gaining power and force with each repetition.  Holden just about breaks my heart.

I have gone on long enough, so I will spare you my thoughts about Catcher in the Rye as a first criticism of the American Dream and feeling of optimism that grew throughout the 50s as the American economy grew stronger and stronger (that bit about needing your luggage to not be better than your roommate's is brilliant!).  We won't talk about his red hunting hat or his crying when Phoebe gave him her Christmas money, or Phoebe's playing Benedict Arnold in the school play.  Feel free to talk about those things yourself, or anything else that struck you about the novel.

The Lion, the Witch and the What What!

We made it to a new decade!  1950!  24 years down, 56 to go!

And now we have made it to C.S. Lewis's classic The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (without the Oxford comma!).  This is the first children's work in the bunch, and I think it is the only one, and its presence in this list gives us a little insight into what puts a novel into the top 100.  For my taste, any of Roald Dahl's works is better written, more entertaining, and more riveting than this book, but none of Dahl's novels made the cut.  This could just be a matter of taste, but I suspect it has to do with the classic standing of Lewis's piece.  I touched upon this angle to Time's selection of novels when discussing Hammett's Red Harvest.  The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a watershed novel, a standard against which every other children's story of adventure is measured.  The book is such a part of our cultural language and thought that it practically demands placement in the list.

I don't have much to say beyond that observation because a ton of type has already been spent on this book that I couldn't possibly say anything new.  Surprisingly, this is the first time I have read the book (I wasn't much of a reader as a kid--I saw the cartoon that aired on TV).  And I was surprised by how I wasn't in love with it as I read it.  There were some fantastic passages and perfect descriptions.  The entire scene in which Aslan sacrifices himself was powerful, the best scene in the book.  The description of the statues coming back to life like a flame taking to newspaper ("stone folds rippled into living hair"!), was perfectly evocative.  But a couple things left me scratching my head.  Father Christmas?  Really?  A ton of fairy tales have that moment when the hero is given a gift that will turn the tide down the way, so Lewis is in a fine tradition here, but Santa Clause?  And while I loved the phrase "always winter and never Christmas," I can't endorse the appearance of Santa.  And why was Susan given a bow if she never makes use of it.  The horn is a fine gift and gets a blow, but Susan definitely got shafted in the gift-giving department (and in the plot department over all, I say).

And that ending?  Really?  The kids grow to adulthood in the kingdom as kings and queens, not missing their mother or any other family.  Okay, I guess I could see that; they have each other after all.  But then they tumble through the wardrobe and find themselves kids again?  Who wants to go from being twenty-something and independent to a teenager?  From a king to an 8th grade kid?  Count me out!

Desert-ed

As I've noted many times in these entries, I know very little about most of the books I am reading here.  And I am perpetually amazed at my inability to see where any of these novels end up.  See my last entry about Greene's The Heart of the Matter for a perfect example of an unexpected turn.  I'd like to think that my failure to predict has nothing to do with my being an inattentive or weak reader.  Instead, I think that it is because I don't know what the novel is about until the ending twists my neck along with the plot.

It will not surprise you to learn, then, that Paul Bowles throws me for yet another loop with his novel The Sheltering Sky.

At the start of the novel, Bowles sets up the characters, their competing desires, and the tensions that will fuel their interactions.  Port and Kit are independently wealthy New York intellectuals who are traveling in Northern Africa to see some part of the world untouched by the war.  The couple is estranged sexually, though they still have many affections for each other and appear to be best friends.  Port is searching for something genuinely not European or American, something original, something primal.  Kit, while very like Port, would much rather be in Italy or France.  Neither likes the heat, the people, or the Europeanized city that they begin in, but Port wants to move deeper into the Sahara desert, fascinated by its raw wildness.  Port wants a solitary experience, but he wants Kit to share it with.  Kit is a believer in omens and sign and does not care to glimpse into the power beyond them.  Even the recounting of dreams shakes Kit to her foundation as she fear what's at the route of them.  In one of the happier moments, Port and Kit rent bicycles and go riding out to the dunes, where they park and watch the sunset.  For Kit, "Sunset is such a sad hour."  But for Port, "It was such places as this, such moments that he loved above all else in life. . . .  And although he was aware that the very silences and emptinesses that touched his soul terrified her, he could not bear to be reminded of that."  He hoped she "would be touched in the same way as he by solitude and the proximity to infinite things," but of course, they merely terrified her.  But for this critical difference, the two seem very well suited to each other, and both overthink their actions and reactions and fail again and again to make the connection they want.

Complicating matters is their traveling companion, Tunner, a good looking man several years younger than they who was captivated by the couple and gladly followed them to Africa.  He is a perfect foil for Port.  Tunner appears to be shallow with a surface of kindness and good-spiritedness that drives Kit crazy.  The other Eurpean characters are Mr. Lyle and the woman he claims is his mother. 

It is among these characters and their interaction that the stage is set, and foolishly I thought the stage was set for interpersonal drama.  We have a love triangle (Tunner has a crush on Kit, and the two have a shared night in a train car while Port has traveled ahead with the Lyles).  We have growing tension as the group travels deeper inland away from civilization that they understand and amenities they are used to.  Mr. Lyle turns out to be a thief and makes off with Port's passport, and when Port takes Kit further inland without his passport to avoid meeting Tunner who is returning with his passport, it seems that they couple is bound for trouble.  Will the couple work things out?  Will the love triangle resolve or explode?  Will the missing passport and the inability to prove his identity land Port in trouble with the authorities?  On that final bus ride into the Sahara, port becomes ill, and we wonder will the lack of hospital care force Kit and him into a precarious position?

And just as everything is set up, as all the questions are floating before the reader, the plot crumbles in our hands.  Port dies after an extended period of delirium.  And after hiding the fact of Port's death, Kit steals off into the desert in the middle of the night.  The entire last portion of the novel follows Kit as she encounters strange Arab merchants who take her for a lover and then a wife, disguising her as a boy.  Then after she escapes, she encounters another Arab whom she takes for a lover before he steals all her Francs.

What?!

I did not see that coming.  And it's at that moment, that I always need to re-approach the first two-thirds, the setting up of the story.  Either the writer panicked in the middle of his book and went running off in a blind direction, or the points he built up earlier were not about what I thought they were about.  And sure enough, it becomes apparent that Ports infidelities with Marhnia and his obsession with the blind dancer are not about his infidelities any more than Kit's is.  The girls are that true experience with another world that Port is questing for.  Meanwhile Bowles is letting us know what Kit is like faced with the limits of her knowledge.  Tunner is there not to set up a love triangle, but to propel Port into the desert where he can die alone in a tete-a-tete with the nothingness of being.  That moment is what the novel builds too.  In fact, we are given hints that this is where we are going from the very beginning.

In the first chapter, Port wakes from a nap, and Bowles describes the moving in and out of nothingness, into and out of the room around him, and Port's calm.  This scene is echoed in Port's dying scene in which he enters and leaves the room, balancing between something and nothing.  Losing Port, Kit must face the ugliness of existence and the loss of her only love.  Her experience is further tainted by her guilt and anger, and the result is something of a psychotic break.  Her fear of the nothingness of death is greater than her fear of life and she wanders out into the world no longer afraid wanting to forget all her experiences and knowledge.

Now what happens to her after that is either reality or purely fantasy.  It is gripping and bizarre, but my brain kept revolting against what it was being fed.  I do love the ending however, where Kit re-encounters "civilization" a broken woman who belongs neither among the living or the dead.

The moral of the story (my story, that is) is that we often mistake our misreading of a book for the mis-writing of the tale.  We need to be willing to assume that the writer told the exact tale that he or she wanted to tell, and our anger and frustration that it did not go where we thought it would go (and wanted it to go) is not to be blamed on the book itself.  Part of our job as reader is to wrestle with the text and pull out the meaning that's there.

If you can experience The Sheltering Sky for what it is and not get caught up in what it is not, you are in for a real treat.

The Matter at the Heart of the Heart of the Matter

Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter is all about Scobie, the high-ranking police official of an unnamed African community in the British Empire.  How the reader responds to Scobie and his philosophies is how the reader responds to the novel as a whole.  I found myself in a complicated position when thinking about Scobie because always at the back of my mind I was trying to divine what Greene himself thought about Scobie.

As readers, we almost always look for the author's attitude toward his or her subject, and we normally don't have to look that far.  We know pretty early on that Orwell is not a fan of Big Brother.  We know that Isherwood is not a fan of the Nazis and that he is deeply in love with all his characters.  We know how the author's feel because they make it so easy to like some characters and so difficult to like others.

Greene, on the other hand, is incredibly subtle with his character.  Other characters pass judgment on Scobie, but they are not reliable evaluators of the man.  Wilson, for instance, hates Scobie for a number of reasons, and his declaration that Scobie does not love Louise or anyone but himself are hardly worth anything.  Louise loves Scobie, and she also feels that the only person Scobie loves is Scobie.  Helen feels the same at times, but Louise and Helen are his lovers, and it is unclear how far they see into Scobie's character.  So it is left to us to determine what kind of man is Scobie.

Perhaps he is a good man who falls into a web of lies and deceit that eventually undo him both morally and physically.  Yes and no.  This is definitely the story of Scobie's decline, but to see the crux of the matter as the political intrigue that pretends to be at the heart of it all is to miss the larger point.  I initially thought it was just such a book, one about the political world around Scobie that conspires and pressures him into an ever-tightening circle.  The book has all the trappings, and Greene lays them out brilliantly.  Scobie is an upstanding man.  His compassion for a father and fellow Catholic leads him to do his first immoral thing, burn inconsequential letters instead of handing them over to the censors.  His desire to give his wife what she desperately wants leads him to take out a loan from a crooked Syrian, putting himself in Yusef's debt.  At the same time, Wilson is in town as a spy, who shortly has it in for Scobie because Wilson falls in love with Scobie's wife and embarrasses himself by letting Scobie witness his tears.  While Louis is gone, Scobie takes on a lover, and in an effort to please her, he writes a compromising letter that is intercepted by Yusef's men and used to blackmail Scobie into breaking the law by smuggling diamonds for Yusef.  The Louise returns unexpectedly and Scobie cannot break it off with Helen or his wife and feels he must keep his deception up.  As everything gets tighter, Scobie goes to the one man who knows all his secrets, and tells Yusef his worries.  When Ali, Scobie's servant and companion is killed, Scobie has no one to turn to.

That's great writing! Right!?  That's a crazy good web of problems for poor Scobie to stumble into one turn of the screw at a time!  I'd swear this book was a kind of thriller, and I enjoyed myself immensely through the first two-thirds of the book as thing ratcheted up for our protagonist.  But then, after Ali dies, the screws stop turning altogether.  No one breathes down Scobie's neck.  Yusef disappears.  Wilson quits hounding him.  The outside concerns vanish, and we are left with only the internal worries and pressures of Scobie and his Catholic beliefs.  The build up was false and was never about what it seemed to be about.  We are like Wilson, who confronts Scobie only to be told, "The things you find out are so unimportant."  Because what we quickly learn is that the mad descent of Scobie's morality, all those pressures acting upon him, were there primarily to put his mortal soul in danger, not his personage.  The final third of the novel is about the safety of his soul, not his skin.

Now as readers we are charged with the task of evaluating Scobie's logic and attitudes about God and salvation.  Up to the final third, I had not given Scobie's personality much thought.  He was my protagonist.  He was a decent guy.  He seemed pretty level headed.  He thought and felt deeply, even if we didn't agree on everything.  But once I was done with the novel, and I was left trying to figure out the importance of what finally happened, I had to go back and study him closely--I had to study him closely to find out if Greene left me any clues.

In the end, I don't know.  And to be blunt, I don't know because I am not Catholic or even religious.  Clearly Greene wanted this to be thought of and discussed even among Catholics (especially among Catholics?).  But as with other Catholic novels on this list (and there seems to be a lot of them--Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Power and the Glory, Brideshead Revisted), I cannot trust my own instincts to interpret the novel because my assumptions and beliefs can run perpendicular to those of the authors.  Nevertheless, we are allowed and invited to make analysis (and even judgments) no matter our religion, so I will forge ahead.

After re-approaching Scobie at the close of the novel, I found that I glossed over his attitudes toward his fellow human beings.  At first I loved his obsession with pity, because it was such a unique concern:  "He had no sense of responsibility towards the beautiful and the graceful and the intelligent. They could find their own way.  It was the face for which nobody would go out of his way, the face that would never catch the covert look, the face which would soon be used to rebuffs and indifference that demanded his allegiance.  The word 'pity' is used as loosely as the word 'love':  the terrible promiscuous passion which so few experience."  And I loved what seemed like a generosity of spirit: "Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst."  I dismissed the notion expressed by Wilson and Louise and Helen that he loved no one but himself.  But as Louise expressed that very sentiment to Father Rank in the final pages of the novel, the Father responds, "And you may be in the right of it there too."  Did Scobie love anyone else, or was he only able to feel pity and responsibility?  And in spite of his glorification of pity, pity is a lopsided emotion, one that places the pitier in a position of superiority over the pitied.  Scobie's detachment seemed to me more and more pathological.  His affair with Helen, which was odd even on the first read through, just seemed odder as he never had a moment of pleasure with her.  He went from non-committed to responsible and full of pity.  He put himself in a position of power over his wives when he says that he "formed" them in his school, that he turned them into miserable creatures.  The more I looked at Scobie, the more he seemed to have a God-complex, a conviction that he was the only one who saw things as they were.  He even compares his suicide to Jesus's crucifixion.

Perhaps Greene intended this re-interpretation of Scobie, or perhaps he meant his reader to be suspicious of Scobie from the start.  Or perhaps, he felt that Scobie was in the right, that he saw things accurately.  What Greene wanted, we can never know, nor does it really matter in the end, because a work of literature is far more than intention.  In it's consumption, the novel fuses with our DNA and is rewritten in our brains and comes out as a new thing, a synthesis of the original words and our interpretations, perceptions, and feelings.

1984 - Interactive Reading Group - Take 1

Hey Y'all!  We are trying something new here, so let's jump in and see how this goes.

The next book on the list is 1984, which is a phenomenal book, and a book that everyone should read and most people want to read, so I am hoping to have some people play along.  I will post my regular blog about the novel when I have completed reading it this time through, but before then, I am starting this thread to let anyone who wants to to make comments about the book.

So all you have to do to play is click on the comment area below and leave a comment.  It can be anything you want: something you love about the book, a great sentence, a cool idea, a diatribe on Orwell's use of pronouns--I don't care!  If you think it and want to share it, throw it in there.  It's a reading/discussion group for anyone who wants to play.  I've made a few comments below to get thing rolling.

I myself will be absent for the next week or so (I promised the family I would read the last two books in the Hunger Games series so they can discuss it openly!), but then I will be back and in full swing.  Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves.  Go get your copy of the book and dig in!