The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

I’ve been meaning to read Pynchon for a while now, and stumbling across The Crying of Lot 49 in the library, I decided to start with one of his shorter novels. Showing a complete lack of culture on my part of any kind, I came to the conclusion that I had made a wise decision. The book, I enjoyed immensely (any novel that describes the violent finale of a Jacobean revenge play as like a Road Runner cartoon in blank verse is worth reading for that line alone) but Pynchon’s prose is so dense, and the avalanche of ideas so unrelenting, that it is entirely unsuited for the commute to work by train and its attendant bouts of motion induced narcolepsy.

Back to the story: The Crying of Lot 49 follows Oedipa Maas, former lover of Pierce Inverarity, who has just died and rather inconsiderately named her as joint executor of his will. Leaving behind her disk jockey husband, Waldo ‘Mucho’ Maas, at their home in Kinneret, CA, she drives south to San Narciso, where Pierce had extensive business dealings. Checking into a motel, she is surprised by the arrival of her co-executor, a lawyer called Metzger, who has brought a bottle of wine with him.

He turned out to be so good-looking that Oedipa thought at first that They, somebody up there, were putting her on. It had to be an actor. He stood at her door, behind him the oblong swimming pool shimmering silent in a mild diffusion of light from the night-time sky, saying, “Mrs Maas,” like a reproach. His enormous eyes, lambent, extravagantly lashed, smiled out at her wickedly; she looked around him for reflectors, microphones, camera cabling, but there was only himself and a debonair bottle of French Beaujolais, which he claimed to’ve smuggled last year into California, this rollicking lawbreaker, past the frontier guards. “So hey,” he murmured, “after scouring motels all day to find you, I can come in, can’t I?” Oedipa had planned on nothing more involved that evening than watching Bonanza on the tube. She shifted into stretch denim slacks and a shaggy black sweater, and had her hair all the way down. She knew she looked pretty good. “Come in,” she said, “But I only have one glass.” “I,” the gallant Metzger let her know, “can drink out of the bottle.”

Actually, Metzger is an actor, or he was once. One of his films is being shown on the television that night, back from the days when he was a child star. He tries to explain the plot of Cashiered, but the reels are being played in the wrong order and Oedipa is having trouble keeping up:

“But,” began Oedipa, then saw how they were suddenly out of wine. “Aha,” said Metzger, from inside a coat pocket producing a bottle of tequila. “No lemons?” she asked, with movie-gaiety. “No salt?” “A tourist thing. Did Inverarity use lemons when you were there?”

All this booze is bound to lead to horseplay, and Oedipa and Metzger embark on an affair. It’s the first of many peculiar happenings as Oedipa discovers that Inverarity’s legacy is proof of an alternative mail service called Tristero, locked in a centuries long conflict with Thurn & Taxis, the first official mail courier of Europe. Finding the muted trumpet logo of Tristero all over California, Oedipa believes that she is on the verge of uncovering an enormous conspiracy. Of course, it could just be an elaborate hoax, or even a product of Oedipa’s over analysed mind...

The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter

I’ve been meaning to read Angela Carter for a while now, and after a failed attempt at The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (in retrospect, not the best place to start with her novels) I picked up The Magic Toyshop from the library. An absolute treat full of powerful surreal imagery and Carter’s strong feminist writing, it’s a formidable early work in her career.

Melanie is fifteen years old and fears that she will die unloved and a virgin. One night while her parents are away, she wanders out into the garden in her mother’s wedding dress but is locked out of the house. Her desperate attempt to get back in through her bedroom window by climbing up the apple tree see the dress destroyed and Melanie goes to bed distraught. The next day she and her brother and sister are told that their parents have died in a plane crash.

After this spellbinding beginning, Carter sends the newly orphaned Melanie, along with siblings Jonathan and Victoria, to live with her Uncle Philip, a toymaker in South London. He lives in a cold house without running hot water over his toy shop with his wife Margaret, who hasn’t spoken a word since they were married and communicates through a blackboard, and her brothers Francie, a sensitive musician, and the volatile Finn, a talented painter who spies on Melanie and kisses her in the ruins of Crystal Palace park one night. Philip dominates the household, forcing the children to work for their keep and forbidding Melanie to wear trousers.

Uncle Philip’s toys are hand-crafted wonders, but his main passion is for puppets, creating puppet shows in the shop’s basement for his wife and the children to watch. After Finn drops one the puppets, the belligerent and brutish Philip demands that Melanie acts in his next show instead – a rendering of Leda and the Swan in which Melanie plays Leda, molested by a huge mechanical swan...

Philip’s tyranny over the women finally breaks when Finn gets drunk and destroys the swan. The next day Philip is out of the house, leaving the place in near revolution. Free for a few hours, the brothers play music and rejoice:

Francie sat in the kitchen with his fiddle in one hand and a half-empty bottle of whisky in the other. “Jesus,” he said to Finn, “You made free with the Scotch last night!” “It was Chrismas, after all,” said Finn. “Besides, I was thirsty in the middle of the night.” “I can see that,” said Francie half derisively. “You must have been drunk as a lord, waving your little hatchet.”

Finn, especially, gets stuck in:

He was drinking Scotch again. Soon he would become sentimental. But he was not grinning at her; she was glad his satyr’s grin was safe on the face of the devil in the painting, never to embarrass her any more... “You’re drunk.” “I expect I will be, presently.” “You are quite your old self.” “No. Let’s not exaggerate.” And he was straining to be happy. It was not spontaneous, he was trying too hard. Melanie was sorry for him and moved closer to him. They sat together on the table. Francie’s whisky was almost done.

As they run out of booze, Finn gets sent out for more supplies:

When the pubs opened, Finn went out and returned clinking many bottles of Guinness, though Melanie did not know where he had got the money. “I got Guinness to prove we’re Irish,” he said. Francie and Finn pressed Melanie to drink a few mouthfuls of the treacly stuff... Finn unwisely gave Guinness to Victoria and suddenly she sank down and out on the rug, with her head between the dog’s paws. The room took on a debauched and abandoned look.

Philip will have to return at some point though, and when he does, the result will be apocalyptic...

Not After Midnight by Daphne du Maurier

I’m plundering Daphne du Maurier’s short stories again, this time an account of an ill-fated trip to Crete.

The narrator, Timothy Grey, a teacher at a minor public school and amateur painter, beings his story with the confession that he has been brought down by an affliction that he picked up on his hols. What could it be? A dose of the clap, a skin condition?

I am a schoolmaster by profession. Or was. I handed in my resignation to the Head before the end of the summer term in order to forestall the inevitable dismissal. The reason I gave was true enough – ill-health, caused by a wretched bug picked up on holiday in Crete, which might necessitate a stay in hospital of several weeks, various injections, etc. I did not specify the nature of the bug. He knew, though, and so did the rest of the staff. And the boys. My complaint is universal, and has been so through the ages, an excuse for jest and hilarious laughter from earliest times, until one of us oversteps the mark and becomes a menace to society. Then we are given the boot. The passer-by averts his gaze, and we are left to crawl out of the ditch alone, or stay there and die.

Not giving too much away, he goes on to relate how he had gone to Crete to paint for a week. The hotel was quiet and not badly appointed, although to the unease of the staff, he insists on moving to a chalet that later transpires to have been previously occupied by a man who had drowned in the sea nearby only two weeks before. Grey is unperturbed by this and carries on with his painting. In fact, the only disruption to his peace and quiet is the presence of a loud and abusive American called Stoll and his silent wife. The man drinks like a fish, and, according to the hotel bar-man, he’s even making his own hooch in their chalet:

“The girls say he brews his own beer. He lights the fire in the chimney, and has a pot standing, filled with rotting grain, like some sort of pig swill! Oh, yes, he drinks it right enough. Imagine the state of his liver, after what he consumes at dinner and afterwards here in the bar!”

Following them into the nearby town one night, Grey is confronted by the Stoll, who is keen to extol the virtues of his home-made supply: 

“...The beer they sell you here is all piss anyway, and the wine is poison.” He looked over his shoulder to the group at the café and with a conspiratorial wink dragged me down to the wall beside the pool. “I told you all those bastards are Turks, and so they are,” he said, “Wine-drinking, coffee-drinking Turks. They haven’t brewed the right stuff here for over five thousand years. They knew how to do it then.” I remembered what the bar-tender had told me about the pig-swill in his chalet. “Is that so?” I enquired. He winked again, and then his slit eyes widened, and I noticed that they were naturally bulbous and protuberant, discoloured muddy brown with the whites red-flecked. “Know something?” he whispered hoarsely. “The scholars have got it all wrong. It was beer the Cretans drank here in the mountains, brewed from spruce and ivy, long before wine. Wine was discovered centuries later by the God-damn Greeks.” He steadied himself, one hand on the wall, the other on my arm. Then he leant forward and was sick into the pool.

Grey’s curiosity gets the better of him and he follows them again, this time to a deserted beach. It soon becomes apparent that the Stolls, keen divers and swimmers, have discovered an ancient shipwreck that has not yet been found by anyone else. In the past three years worth of holidays to the island they have stripped it bare. Thinking that Grey might be onto their game, Stoll’s wife leaves Grey an ancient rhyton (an ornate classical drinking vessel) decorated with Silenos, drunken tutor to the God Dionysus.

The next day they are gone. Grey is about to depart himself, but the Stolls have left him one last present in the care of the bar-keep:

He bent down and brought out a small screw-topped bottle filled with what appeared to be bitter lemon. “Left here last evening with Mr Stoll’s compliments,” he said. “He waited for you in the bar until nearly midnight, but you never came. So I promised to hand it over when you did.” I looked at it suspiciously. “What is it?” I asked. The bar-tender smiled. “Some of his chalet home-brew,” he said. “It’s quite harmless, he gave me a bottle for myself and my wife. She says it’s nothing but lemonade. The real smelling stuff must have been thrown away. Try it.” He had poured some into my mineral water before I could stop him. Hesitant, wary, I dipped my finger into the glass and tasted it. It was like the barley-water my mother used to make when I was a child. And equally tasteless. And yet... it left a sort of aftermath on the palate and the tongue. Not as sweet as honey nor as sharp as grapes, but pleasant, like the smell of raisins under the sun, curiously blended with ears of ripening corn.

With a few hours to kill before he has to drive back to the port, he decides to check on the deserted cove once again. Realising he’s dying of thirst, he takes another swallow of the home-brew, this time drinking from the rhyton. Taking the boat back, he looks into the water and spots the wreck that the Stolls have looted. Pinned under the anchor is the husband who has definitely had his last drink. Terrified, Grey throws the rhtyon into the waves:

It did not sink immediately but remained bobbing on the surface, then slowly filled with that green translucent sea, pale as the barley liquid laced with spruce and ivy. Not innocuous but evil, stifling conscience, dulling intellect, the hell-brew of the smiling god Dionysus, which turned his followers into drunken sots, would claim another victim before long. The eyes in the swollen face stared up at me, and they were not only those of Silenos the satyr tutor, and of the drowned Stoll, but my own as well, as I should see them soon reflected in a mirror. They seemed to hold all knowledge in their depths, and all despair.

So Grey’s curse is Dipsomania, brought upon him by the poisoned beer... Or has the shock of seeing Stoll’s murdered body under the water tipped him into madness and alcohol dependency? As in the previous story, Don’t Look Now, du Marier leaves the supernatural elements of the tale delightfully ambiguous...

The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing

I picked this up after reading a rather interesting article on Huffington Post about Doris Lessing and the 50th anniversary of the Golden Notebook. It’s a book that still divides opinion; personally, I didn’t like it, but I enjoyed The Grass is Singing and wasn’t prepared to write Lessing off as an author simply on the fact that I just couldn’t get on with her most famous novel. However, the writer in the HuffPo handily suggests five other books to get on with, and this is one of them.

Set in the 1980s, the story follows Alice, a leading figure of the Communist Centre Union, a fringe Marxist revolutionary group. She has just moved into a squat in London with Jasper, a gay man with whom she is obsessed, and who ruthlessly exploits her affection, stealing her benefit money and scrounging off her family before frequently rejecting her for a week’s drinking binge, or pushing her aside when he becomes infatuated with the charismatic leaders of the group. Alice has, over the years, been reduced to the status of a domestic slave, her life dedicated to looking after Jasper and other members of the communes and squats they live in. She cooks, cleans, sorts out the electricity and gas, and when she needs money, she steals off her parents as well.

I have to admit that I found Jasper the most repellent character I have ever encountered in a novel. A nasty, self-serving ponce who has ruined not only Alice’s life, but that of her mother Dorothy – their years of staying rent free at her home bankrupted Dorothy and drove her out of her house – I longed for him to receive his comeuppance. Alice at least has the benefit of being utterly deluded. Her naivety in both her commitment to Jasper and in her devotion to the revolutionary cause is breathtaking and she seems completely unable to see that their group is being manipulated by the KGB, as well as getting itself into dangerous territory by trying to link up with the IRA. Although they are rebuffed by the Irish, they decide to start up a bombing campaign anyway, and despite their complete amateurism, they manage to cause bloody and violent carnage.

Just before the bomb is set to go off, Alice decides to visit her mother, now living in a tiny flat that she can’t afford to heat. Sitting wrapped in blankets next to a switched off gas-fire, Dorothy is drowning her sorrows:

The armchair her mother had been in had books stacked up beside it to the level of the arm. On the shelf above the gas-fire was a bottle of whisky and a glass, a third full... She half got up – she did not need to do more – reached over for her glass of whisky, and took a firm ration of it, her mouth a bit twisted. Grant’s whisky. Oh yes, Dorothy might be poor, though Alice bitterly, but she wasn’t going to drink anything but her brand of Scotch.

Alice, away with the fairies as ever, laments the fact that Dorothy has had to leave the family home. Mother tries to spell it out, once again, in words that her daughter might understand. She’s wasting her time:

“It’s funny,” she said, “How you simply don’t seem to be able to take it in.” If Alice seemed unable to grasp an essential point about the situation, then Dorothy was unable to take in an essential fact about Alice. “Why can’t you?” she inquired, not of Alice but of the room, the air, something or other. “I simply cannot make you see ... the point is, I would be there now, at home, if it weren’t for you and Jasper. No, Alice, I am not blaming you, I am blaming myself.” Another good gulp of Scotch. At this rate she would be tight soon. Then Alice would leave! She hated her mother tight; it was when she began saying all those negative things.

Quite unable to understand what her spoiled, selfish behaviour has done, and that she in turn is wasting her life (Dorothy’s simple suggestion that degree educated Alice get a job and do something with her time meets a prim retort from the crusading leftist that there are three million people unemployed) she leaves in a state of muddled outrage. Dorothy is now alone with the bottle and the unlit fire and the next day five people will lose their lives.

Don’t Look Now by Daphne du Maurier

Death in Venice again. Daphne du Maurier’s haunting novella was famously turned into a film with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christy but the source material is well worth checking out as well.

British couple Laura and John are on holiday in Venice, a hastily arranged break that takes place after the death of their daughter. Laura is withdrawn and consumed by grief, John unable to reach her. At lunch at the end of their stay, they notice two old ladies watching them, one of whom claims she is psychic and that she can see their little girl’s spirit sitting between them...

John reckons it’s all bunkum, but the change in his wife is instantaneous and her misery lifts. Unwilling to break the spell, John goes along with her, up to a point. He also decides that they ought to go out and enjoy themselves. He suggests a restaurant and pooh-poohs the idea of eating in the hotel:

“God, no!” he exclaimed. “With all those rather dreary couples at the other tables? I’m ravenous. I’m also gay. I want to get rather sloshed.”

They find a restaurant in a part of Venice they don’t know, reached by a tortuous route. When they get to their table, the first thing he does is order a drink:

“Two very large camparis, with soda,” John said. “Then we’ll study the menu.”

Over Laura’s shoulder he sees the two old ladies again. Convinced that they’re being followed, he tries to distract her, but she sees them and goes for another long confab about the astral plane. For John, the evening is ruined:

“All right,” thought John savagely, “Then I will get sloshed,” and he proceeded to down his campari and soda and order another, while he pointed out something quite unintelligible on the menu as his own choice, but remembered scampi for Laura. “And a bottle of Soave,” he added, “With ice.” The evening was ruined anyway, what was to have been an intimate, happy celebration would now be heavy-laden with spiritualistic visions, poor little dead Christine sharing the table with them, which was so damned stupid when in earthly life she would have been tucked up hours ago in bed. The bitter taste of the campari suited his mood of sullen self-pity, and all the while he watched the group at the table in the opposite corner, Laura apparently listening while the more active sister held forth and the blind one sat silent, her formidable sightless eyes turned in his direction... He began on his second campari and soda. The two drinks, taken on an empty stomach, had an instant effect. Vision became blurred. And still Laura went on sitting at the other table, putting in a question now and again, while the active sister talked. The waiter appeared with the scampi, and a companion beside him to server John’s own order, which was totally unrecognisable, heaped with a livid sauce. “The signora does not come?” enquired the first waiter, and John shook his head grimly, pointing an unsteady finger across the room. “Tell the signora,” he said carefully, “Her scampi will get cold.”

Cold scampi is the least of their problems. The psychic sisters warn John that they must leave Venice as his life is in danger. Advice that he fatally chooses to ignore...