May 18, 2007
Poppy Shakespeare by Clare Allan
Clare Allan’s Poppy Shakespeare is one strange book. It received rave reviews when it came out in hardback last year, was much-hyped all around, and I’ve been reading all about it for ages, and it still managed to be nothing like what I had expected. Part of that, of course, is that it hasn’t got much precedent. I’ve read of this book compared to works by authors as divergent as Chaucer and Ken Kesey, and though we’ve got the perspective of a mad girl, The Bell Jar this ain’t. No, the one adjective applied over and over to this book is “original” and it’s a very fitting one.
Poppy Shakespeare is a comedic social commentary employing elements of both satire and the fantastic. This is the story of N, a patient at the Dorothy Fish, a day centre in a fictional psychiatric hospital in North London. The thing is, however, that N and co-patients have no desire to be discharged. So isolated from mainstream society (the divide represent by Borderline Road which runs around the hospital like a moat) and so comfortable within their place in a rather absurd system, they scheme to display more symptoms and up their diagnoses. The wrench into this system arrives in the form of Poppy Shakespeare, a rather stroppy but decidedly normal woman who has been admitted to the Dorothy Fish against her will. Her claims of mental soundness are interpreted as a reluctance to confront her problems. When she tries to engage a lawyer to help her out of her predicament, she finds she is only eligible for legal aid if she is diagnosed as mentally ill. The spiral goes downward from there, as told by N who watched it happen, or perhaps was more culpable than she might let on.
The object of Allan’s satire is the “results-oriented” approach which has been employed in Britain during recent years toward state services such as education, social services, and mental health. Patients at the Dorothy Fish begin to be randomly discharged so that the hospital can boast high rates of curing– even if the cure usually leads to the patients’ suicide. And none of this sounds like very funny stuff, but it is. This is partly because of N’s perspective and her language–blunt, colloquial, playful and true to her character. Allan doesn’t shy away from the sordid, but turns it all the way on its head until it becomes a joke. And what is comedy if not blurring the line which is sanity, but then the message is ever-present, just below the humour. This is a novel which is doing many things.
It’s not easy, however. When I finished it I saw its worth, and Allan is clearly a spectacular writer, but the novel wasn’t altogether enjoyable to read. And that’s not just because of the bleak subject matter (actually there is very little bleakness here). Though N’s voice was perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this book, it went on long sometimes. Though typical of the character, her narrative takes a long time to get on track. Her perspective is not capable of percieving depth of character, though at times this is just the point– that in such a system, depth gets lost. And I do get the feeling that with any such criticism of this book, I could find a way to explain what Allan is doing. Here is a novel that is more “interesting” than “good”, but I don’t mean that in an altogether bad way. Though I do feel that the novel could have benefitted with a little more editing, some tightening up, on the whole Clare Allan has successfully realized her vision. A vision of a part of society most of us are not usually privy to, and for that alone, I think, it’s worth a look.
May 17, 2007
A little pocket of time
Do check out the third installment of What is Stephen Harper Reading? Politics aside (though not that they should be), Martel has enclosed a wonderful letter along with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie, celebrating books and reading. He also has photos of the library at Laurier House in Ottawa, which was home to Sir Wilfrid and William Lyon Mackenzie King. Martel writes, “How did they manage to read so much? Perhaps Laurier and King were excellent at time management. Certainly television wasn’t there to inform them in part and otherwise fruitlessly devour their hours. Or was it that reading was a natural and essential element of being a respectable, well-rounded gentleman? Was it some ingrained habit of the privileged that gave these two prime ministers permission to spend so much time reading?”
Martel continues, “Reading was perhaps a privileged activity then. But not now. In a wealthy, egalitarian country like ours, where the literacy rate is high (although some people still struggle and need our help) and public libraries are just that, public, reading is no longer an elitist pastime. A good book today has no class, so to speak, and it can be had by anyone. One of the marvels of where I live, the beautiful province of Saskatchewan, is that the smallest town—Hazlet, for example, population 126—has a public library. Nor need books be expensive, if you want to own one. You can get a gold mine of a used book for fifty cents. After that, all that is needed to appreciate the investment is a little pocket of time.”
May 17, 2007
Better Days
And so we post a photo of feet in honour of days better than this one. Tonight has been awfully scabby for a variety of reasons, none of which have to do with the greatness of expensive feta or my wonderful husband. Now reading Poppy Shakespeare and The Girls is coming up next. I am always drowning in the periodicals I subscribe to, all of which arrive in the same day or two. And so the moral of the story is that I’m not about to run of reading material anytime soon, no sir. The other moral is that the day flies by too quickly.
May 15, 2007
Wooden leg first
I think it’s quite cool that my rereading of A Good Man is Hard to Find coincided with Flannery O’Connor in the news, as a new letters archive is opened. Maud Newton provides excellent coverage, as well as links to previous O’Connor posts she has written. I especially like her “But it is a wooden leg first”.
“If you want to say that the wooden leg is a symbol, you can say that. But it is a wooden leg first, and as a wooden leg it is absolutely necessary to the story. It has its place on the literal level of the story, but it operates in depth as well as on the surface. It increases the story in every direction, and this is esentially the way a story escapes being short”.
May 15, 2007
'Ave a cuppa tea
It’s Right Said Fred Day over here at Pickle Me This. Yes indeed, we’re back in the world of 9-5 and therefore online minutiae is taking over. It all starts with a cheesy sixties compilation we were listening to at work, which was more than a bit British and contained the novelty song “Right Said Fred” by Bernard Cribbins. No one had ever heard this song before, but I quickly fell in love with it. And so we wikipedia’d our way over to the Right Said Fred (the bad early 90s duo) page to see if there was any relation, and lo and behold there was. And that page brought all the memories back; who remembers the follow up hits? We find the videos: Deeply Dippy and Don’t Talk Just Kiss. How about Brian Orser skating to Deeply Dippy?! And while we were over at ye olde Youtube, we plug in Bernard Cribbins’ “Right Said Fred” to see what we come up with, and we get results. This video contains a recording of the song that started it all, and is three small and very adorable children acting the whole thing out. It’s very cute. And then what do you know? It was home time.
May 14, 2007
Glorious youth circa late 1990s
Fun was had! Mucho family, and lobsterfest with my favourite cousins. Saturday my dad took us shopping for baseball gloves (we love catch) and now we’re all kitted up for the big leagues. Last night we hit downtown Peterborough with Mike my best friend 6 and hilarity reigned. I drank too much beer and a tall tri-coloured drink, behaved like an adolescent and was ill the next morning. Recovering just in time to have my Muv and Farve take us out for brunch in celebration of my finishing school, and we sat with a view of the lake and the food was delish. We had such a good time with my parents all weekend, but then it made Stuart miss his. Thankfully we’ll be seeing them three weeks from tonight.
My mom is moving, and so I had to do something about the last few boxes of my stuff in her house. One looked vaguely interesting, so I brought it home. Sorting through tonight, and I find the most extraordinary things: the “novel” I wrote when I was eleven, which was really long and all about dragons and princesses and the kind of story I never had any interest in, but precocious children in other books always wrote about things like that, so I thought it was the way. Story books I made throughout elementary school (I had an early gift for the rhyming couplet, but not so much for staying inside the lines). Essays from grade nine English (“teenagers today are too worldy for religion” said I). Terrible articles I used to write for the “teen” page in our local paper (“violence is something that affects people in many places”). I was pleased (and surprised) to find out that my grade thirteen and first year uni English papers were not as terrible as I had feared, and that I did not entirely make my TA’s want to kill themselves. Oh the list goes on, pages and pages and treasure. But the best is an entire journal of Bad Teenage Poetry, written between 1995-1998. Back when nobody understood me, I was jealous of my best friends, and thought that poetry had to be obligatorily weird (“I found the meaning of life/ in my glass of orange juice”). Oh, but the angst I knew.
Your knife has dug deeper/ into me than any other/ I feel the metal slice/ cut me and I bleed/ You use your knife for a purpose/ but you didn’t succeed/ I am not destroyed.
And can you believe that that actually is edited, as the original was so awful that any poetic sensibility I have come to possess wouldn’t allow me to transcribe it as is? Oh what fun. And all of this has underlined why I have zero interest in Facebook.
May 14, 2007
Flying the Flag
Though there was something vaguely attractive about the melody, I thought that the UK’s entry for last year’s Eurovision was stunningly terrible. But then I heard this year’s. A new standard has been set for atrocious.
May 11, 2007
Friday morning
Zadie Smith has a short story in The New Yorker. They’re going on about novel first lines over at The Guardian Books Blog; I was pleased that my personal favourite was noted (“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York”). And we’re away to Peterborough this weekend (the ultimate tourist destination). It’s a long weekend too, because we made it that way. Tra-la.
Oh, and log on now to Diggerland.com.
May 10, 2007
Stories in the Air
What a treat was mine this eve, as my fairy godmother had delivered me her ticket to the Kama Readings; she couldn’t attend. And so I went in her place, and saw/listened to Camilla Gibb, David Adams Richards, Thomas King and M.G. Vassanji. The readings were an absolute pleasure. Gibb read from Sweetness in the Belly (my favourite book of 2006); Richards read a beautiful passage from The Friends of Meager Fortune; King and Vassanji both read short stories from recent collections. I do like to sit and listen– it is a test for me, as anyone who has ever been interrupted by me would surely realize. It requires effort, but I always feel wonderful after– like I’ve been working a muscle. And I like the idea of readings, of stories in the air. The ones floating about were certainly wonderful tonight.
Now reading A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor. The man in the elevator today examined my cover (quite forcefully), and said “You’ve got to love the Irish”. I really didn’t know what to tell him. Coming up: Poppy Shakespeare and then The Girls— both popular novels whose premises have kept me shying away, but I’m finally too curious. And I’m still reading Stephanie Nolen’s 28 Stories of Aids of Africa which is amazingly captured, and I’m slowly working through.
David Adams Richards amused everyone tonight with his story of the time he set his hair on fire. Guffaws all around. Though some of you will remember why my laughter was very much in sympathy. He, however, did not set his aflame at karaoke.
