Reading Challenge update: Three classics

Some of my recent reading

In January I signed up to the Reading Challenge on Jera’s Jamboree (details here). Shaz was encouraging us to step outside our comfort zone and read books we might not have considered before.

I decided to read something from EVERY category listed and you can see how I am getting on by looking at my blog page here.

Occasionally I intend to do a review. I started with Chris Beckett’s sci-fi Eden trilogy, which you can read about here. This time I am making notes on three classics I have read recently. They are from different genres and “of their time” but each brings vividly to life a society far removed from our own.

Raymond Chandler: Fahrenheit 451 (published 1953)

Poster for François Truffaut’s 1966 film adaptation of Fahrenheit 451

I have always been a fan of science fiction and had been meaning to read this dystopian classic for a long time.

In my mind’s eye I had images from the famous 1966 film, even though I have never seen it. The cinematography and 1960s fashions are so iconic that probably everyone would recognise them.

The plot of Fahrenheit 451 describes a future America where books are banned and “firemen” start fires instead of putting them out, burning any books that are found after tip-offs from neighbours or having been sniffed out by the Mechanical Hound.

Bradbury was responding to the political repression of the McCarthy era (1947-1956) but also worried about the effect of mass media on literature. In the book most people have decided of their own accord to stop reading books. Nowadays we would call it “dumbing down” – and I wonder what the author, who died in 2012, would have thought about America in 2017.

The hero is Guy Montag, a fireman whose wife Mildred is addicted to pills and advertising-filled TV and numb to reality. They have no children. Guy meets a neighbour, a free-thinking teenage girl, Clarisse, who inspires him to question his whole life and work.

Interestingly, in the film Mildred is called Linda and Julie Christie plays both female characters, which makes me want to see the film even more, to see how she pulls it off. Clarisse is redrawn as a young teacher and lasts the length of the movie, while in the book she disappears very quickly. There are other differences in the plot, too, which you could read about here.

The book seemed shorter than I expected, but that may have been because it rushes on at quite a breathless pace with an unusual combination of fast action and rich literary vocabulary. Although it is written in the third person, the reader is very much inside Montag’s head.

Inspired by Clarisse, Montag steals and reads a book himself, rebels and ends up fleeing the city to join up with a wandering band of like-minded people, each remembering a whole work of literature for posterity. I had trouble believing that – the idea that you could really memorise a whole book.

Somewhere in the background the country is at war, and in the end the city Montag has left is destroyed by bombs (atom bombs?) in an instant. It’s time to build up a new society.

Fahrenheit 451 (apparently the temperature at which paper catches fire) is well worth reading, but it has a very straightforward plot compared to modern science fiction. I suppose Bradbury had every right to keep it simple as he was one of the first to tackle his themes.

Charlotte Bronte: Shirley (published 1849)

The BBC’s North and South drama of 2004, starring Richard Armitage, led me to read Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley

I read this book after hearing an episode of Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time radio programme about Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel North and South, published in 1855.

The programme mentioned that this had been partly inspired by Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley of six years earlier. There were common elements of northern textile mills and Luddite uprisings. Shirley is set in Yorkshire in 1811-1812, in an industrial depression towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

I loved North and South – both the novel and the BBC TV series, which starred Richard Armitage as mill owner John Thornton. It was very easy to see him as Shirley‘s mill owner Robert Moore.

But as a book Shirley does not hold together as well as North and South. If you take it as a love story it ends satisfactorily all round, but it makes a meal of it.

It is very much of its time, when ladies had leisure. I’m not sure many modern readers would have the patience for this long, slow read with its sometimes obscure Biblical references and vocabulary. On the other hand you might enjoy the challenge!

Like North and South, Shirley is narrated in the third person by an omniscient author.

The structure is strange – the Shirley Keeldar of the title does not appear until at least a third of the way through the book and by then you think the main character is surely young Caroline Helstone, who is taught French by Robert Moore’s sister and idolises him. Shirley is a rich and headstrong heiress who befriends Caroline but for a long while you wonder who is going to end up “getting the man”.

There are also various characters introduced and seldom heard of again, such as the three curates we meet at the beginning. And to be honest there is not enough of Robert Moore! We spend most of the novel with the womenfolk.

With hindsight and a satisfactory happy ending I have warmed to the book, which has never been made into a film or TV series. It could probably be done – but only by speeding up the plot!

Raymond Chandler: The Big Sleep (published 1939)

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in Howard Hawks’ 1946 film of The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep is a crime novel set in Los Angeles in the 1930s, of a style usually know as “hardboiled”, a word that just reminds me of sweets. I always thought the description was “noir”, but perhaps that is applied to films rather than books.

I enjoyed this book, but there was no way I could read it without hearing Humphrey Bogart as wise-cracking private investigator Philip Marlowe, who narrates the book in the first person, in short snappy sentences. Thanks to the film, I couldn’t help seeing the atmosphere in monochrome with a lot of rain, even though, when I went back to check, I found the book does mention colours.

Right from the first page I had to chuckle at Marlowe’s clever choice of words. Here’s how he describes a mansion he has been called to:

“Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots of the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and though that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying.”

I think this sums up his character – despite his cynical outlook, he is eager to help and has a sense of chivalry. Not that this stops him killing bad people.

The plot is complicated and I’m not sure it matters that much. It’s not really a “whodunnit” as most of the time we are not even sure what has been done, apart from the starting point, where Marlowe is asked by rich old General Sternwood to look into the problems of his two wild daughters, one of whom is apparently being blackmailed by Geiger, a Hollywood bookshop owner.

Marlowe stakes out the residence of Geiger, who runs a pornographic lending library but also takes compromising pictures of rich people. At 7.20 there is a flash, drunken giggly laughter, then three shots, a harsh sigh and a soft, messy thump. Marlowe breaks in and finds Geiger dead and Carmen Sternwood looking drugged and crazy:

“She was wearing a pair of long jade earrings. They were nice earrings and had probably cost a couple of hundred dollars. She wasn’t wearing anything else.”

It’s a good read and a lively journey through a world of racketeers, with the police department very marginal to the plot. Character and setting are paramount and I didn’t even noticed the “famous” plot flaw that we never find out who killed the Sternwoods’ chauffeur. When challenged, Chandler famously said: “Damned if I know.”

I enjoyed it and will probably also read Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely and The Long Good-Bye, which happen to be included in the same Kindle/Penguin volume with The Big Sleep.

By the way, the “Big Sleep” of the title is explained near the end of the book. It’s a euphemism for death. I wonder if the owners of The Big Sleep Hotel chain know that?