Reading Matters

'Truth or Fiction' by Jennifer Johnston

Fiction - hardcover; Headline Review; 160 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Jennifer Johnston does a nice line in slightly kooky characters, and her latest novel, to be published on November 16, is no exception. Desmond Fitzmaurice, one of two main characters in Truth or Fiction, is a doddery old writer who's fallen into obscurity. He lives a rather privileged existence in a house on the Dublin waterfront, where he is waited on hand and foot by his second wife, the dour-faced Anna. For all intents and purposes he seems to be a gentle old soul prone to sentimentality and a hankering for times gone by.

But then London-based journalist, Caroline Wallace, enters his rather mundane world and this version of a polite, well-mannered chap nearing the end of his life, gets turned, ever so slowly, on its head. Caroline, who's been dispatched to interview him on the eve of his 90th birthday, isn't entirely sure what to expect. When she arrives the first thing she does is tell Desmond that:

"My editor asked me to come and interview you. She would like to bring you back to life again. She feels your work is too important to be let fade away, as it has. She would like me to reassess your work and also to do a feature on your lifestyle. How you live, how you have lived, the interlocking of your life and work."

Desmond is not entirely enamoured with the intrusion:

"You wish to take the unimportant garbage of my life and stir it in with the important, with my work. You wish to make me intelligible to the masses. I never wrote for the masses to read."

And yet, there's something about this new-found attention that wins Desmond over. Before long he is introducing Caroline to the important people in his life and confessing a succession of sordid events. But how much of what he tells her is truth, and how much of it is fiction? 

The beauty of this novel, Johnston's 16th, is not so much her typical restrained and unpretentious prose style, nor the fast-moving narrative that largely comprises dialogue, but her very human characters with their flaws and foibles. That Caroline arrives in Dublin reeling from a marriage proposal made by her partner of 10 years adds an extra layer to the story, for how much of her anger is affecting her opinion of Desmond? And why is she so angry in the first place?

Once again Johnston has delivered an entertaining and effortless read, one that can quite comfortably be read in an hour or two. It's a welcome return to form after her slightly disappointing Foolish Mortals; I only wish I hadn't raced through it so quickly, because it could be a long wait for her next one.

'The Gates' by Jennifer Johnston

Fiction – paperback; Headline Review; 167 pages; 1998.

First published in 1973, The Gates is Jennifer Johnston's second novel, although at just 167 pages in length it feels more like a novella and can be easily consumed in one sitting.

It has a very simple linear narrative in which Minnie McMahon, aged 16, returns home to Ireland, where she is in the care of her elderly uncle, "The Major", and his forthright housekeeper, Ivy. Having completed her "expensive education" in England it is now time to decide what she wants to do with the rest of her life. 

Here, free from the domineering clutches of her English aunt who keeps thinking that "if she tidies me up a bit, and shoves me into the London social whirl, some ghastly chinless wonder will lose his head and marry me," she unwittingly falls for Kevin, the local lad from a poor family who works for The Major. When Ivy points out that she's wasting her time and would be better to return to England and a secretarial college, Minnie insists that she is merely following in the footsteps of her late father, a socialist journalist, who married "beneath him" and was ostracized from the family because of it.

When she hatches a plan to help Kevin steal the extravagant gates that belong to the English Italianate-style mansion house in which she grew up you know there's a disaster in the offing...

In fact the gates are rather symbolic of her family's slide from Protestant Ascendancy, 150 years earlier, to the current situation in which The Major struggles to pay for the whiskey that keeps him functioning while the estate falls into a state of "peaceful decay":

Ornate, flamboyant, garlanded with carved flowers, they hung eight feet high between two stone pillars, topped by smiling lions. [...] Nowadays the gates hung open, pale with weather and age. The avenue that curved for half a mile under the tunnel of elms, was rutted and overgrown. The tiny pillared gate lodge had not been lived in since 1922, when it had been the scene of one of the Civil War's minor incidences. Nettles grew up now through the empty windows and in the height of summer foxgloves peered over the walls. No one any longer bobbed and smiled, or passed the time of day as the Major drove  in and out.

This is a book about youthful naivety and misunderstandings between people. But it also explores the uncertain role of the Anglo-Irish in the new independent Ireland and how they grappled with changing attitudes to religion, wealth and class.

It is far from being Johnston's most accomplished work, but it gives glimpses of her future talent and there are some passages in which Minnie talks to the ghosts of the house (a kind of metaphor for her troubled conscience) that are reminiscent of the magic realism in 1998's Two Moons.

Please note, other Jennifer Johnston books reviewed on this site include: Foolish Mortals, The Christmas Tree, The Invisible Worm, The Old Jest and The Gingerbread Woman.

'Foolish Mortals' by Jennifer Johnston

Fiction - paperback; Headline Review; 312 pages; 2007.

If I had my wits about me I'd be reading Jennifer Johnston's back catalog in the order in which the books were written, so that I could appreciate her development as a writer. However, I'm not that well organised, and when I saw this book in Waterstone's the other day, while I was doing some last-minute Christmas gift buying, I snapped this one up for myself.

This morning, curled up in bed, I read it cover to cover and, not for the first time, wished my rating system featured half-stars. If it did, I'd probably award Foolish Mortals -- Johnston's most recent novel -- three-and-a-half stars: it's not one of Johnston's best, although it is by far her most accessible novel. The literary flourishes that characterise most of her books (or the ones that I've read so far) are not here, save for one character -- Henry -- telling his side of the story in the first person, while the rest of the story is narrated in the third person.

The book opens with Henry lying in a hospital bed, drifting in and out of consciousness. We later learn that he's been involved in a serious car accident in which his wife, Charlotte -- the driver -- was killed. Save for a lot of broken bones, he's quite okay but his memory has been shot and it takes time for him to piece the past together.

So here I sit in this hospital room broken in pieces and little by little the past is revealing itself to me. Things I want to know and things that might be better left unremembered. How great it would be if you could only remember the good bits, the noble thoughts, the generosity, all the bits we hope for ourselves. Dreams, prayers, discard the blackness, let all the muck slide away.

Henry's amnesia is a great device for Johnston to throw in the "reveals" that normally irritate the hell out of me -- see my review of Andrew Sean Greer's The Story of a Marriage for my thoughts on that particular literary device -- but in this context they're appropriate and don't seem as if the author is using them to show off.

Unfortunately, because the narrative relies on the unveiling of so many "secrets" to work it means I can't say much more about the storyline without ruining the plot for everyone else. But without giving anything away, Foolish Mortals is about the coming together of a dysfunctional family -- Henry's Canada-based brother, his first wife Stephanie, his almost-grown children and his 80-something mother, the rather gloriously eccentric Tash -- with the car accident as a catalyst and everything climaxing with a wonderful Christmas dinner.

It's delightfully kooky in places, although it never strays into outlandishness. The rambling family nature of the story does bring other authors to mind -- Anne Tyler, Anita Shreve and, dare I say it, Maeve Binchy -- but it still retains that distinctly Jennifer Jonhston feel with its economical use of language, its strong female characterisation and its deft analysis of ordinary human life. It was also refreshing to read a book by this writer set in New Ireland (as one of the characters dubs it) instead of some undefined period in history. I enjoyed it as a piece of literary "fluff" but if you're looking for a serious introduction to Johnston's work, this is probably not the place to start.

'The Christmas Tree' by Jennifer Johnston

  Fiction - paperback; Fontana; 168 pages; 1982.

As I work my way slowly but surely through Jennifer Johnston's rather extensive back catalogue -- 15 novels at last count -- I'm constantly surprised and delighted by the quality and consistency of her writing. This one, first published in 1981, only serves to confirm my high opinion of her under-appreciated talents. In fact, no sooner had I finished this than I wanted to turn back to the first page and read it all over again because I so thoroughly enjoyed it.

Judging by the title alone The Christmas Tree sounds like it could be sentimental claptrap -- and the somewhat dated illustration on my cover doesn't do much to dispel that assumption. But this is truly a case of never judge a book by its cover, because what lies within is an exquisitely written tale about an Irish woman who returns home to die, and not once does Johnston resort to mawkishness or saccharine touches to achieve a deeply affecting story.

As ever, Johnston treats her readers with intelligence and lets them fill in a lot of the gaps. She's not one to spell things out -- she does a lot of show and not much tell -- and I like that kind of approach, although, admittedly, it may not be for everyone.

For most of The Christmas Tree I was trying to figure out the year in which the story was set. Beyond the odd clue here and there -- a pair of old fur-lined boots in the cloakroom "that my mother must have bought some stage during the war, when to keep warm was more important than to look elegant" and a Polish Jew whose deformed fingers were broken by soldiers who "should have really killed me too" --  I could only assume it was not long after the Second World War.

What we do know is that the London-based lead character, Constance, 45, is a failed writer and suffering from leukemia diagnosed shortly after the birth of her first child. She's returned to her childhood home in Dublin -- now lying empty after the death of both parents -- to die on her own terms. Her infant daughter is in the care of an older sister, Bibi, who is bossy, prone to fussing and can't understand her refusal to go to hospital.

Here, with a whiskey bottle for company, Constance writes to her child's father -- Jacob Weinberg, a Polish Jew she met on a sojourn to Italy -- to tell him that he now has a daughter. While she waits for his response, she arranges for a live-in carer, 18-year-old Bridie, to take charge of the house and to help her work on her final book, which she wants to be published posthumously. Meanwhile all medical care is delivered by Bill, a former boyfriend, now family doctor.

This may seem like a rather dull premise for a book, but Johnston makes it sing by employing three interwoven narrative threads that reveal little nuggets of information that make you want to read on and on. The first narrative -- told in first person from Constance's point of view -- is about her impending death as Christmas slides ever closer; the second is about her rather spontaneous romance with Jacob Weinberg in Italy; and the third is a kind of look-back on Constance's familial relationships with a kind but distant father, a cold somewhat uncaring mother, and an overbearing, but more popular, sister.

There are several themes running throughout The Christmas Tree, not the least of which is death: how we deal with losing loved ones and how we deal with our own impending expiration date.

You get the sense that Constance, a headstrong, stubborn and independent woman, is not prone to regrets, but as she reflects on her life she does wonder whether she has made the right decision to lead the rather solitary life that she has lead.

Suppose I had married Bill and we had gone to Connemara and had six children, would we have been better people? Happier? Would I have comprehended more in that isolation than I succeeded in doing in the isolation I created for myself? Would I have been able to write, in those circumstances, the books that I wanted so much to write?

A large part of Constance's history is that she does not really know or understand her coolly indifferent parents, and she tries to reconcile this as she recalls specific incidents from her troubled past.

I had always felt that after my mother's death I would find some kind of release, the awareness for the first time of an identity. It wasn't that we hadn't been great friends or even communicated with each other in any important way. On the contrary I had always seemed to be a source of great irritation to her, a curious disappointment. The fact that I had been born the wrong sex had been the first major setback, from which our relationship never really recovered.

Her father, a successful lawyer, was happy to support her move to London, but he remains largely unfathomable and she never feels that he truly loves her. Long after she's abandoned the writing career for a dead end job in an advertising agency, her father comes visiting and takes her out for a meal. He then makes an astonishing admission: he once had dreams of being a writer and had enjoyed a modicum of success writing short stories and plays when he was a student at Cambridge. He gave it all up because he "lacked commitment".

'You look at your children as they grow, mature a bit, and will, yes, will, that somehow they will succeed in having some of the attributes that you yourself regret having lacked. At least...' he flushed away the painful taste of the smoked salmon with some sherry '...some development of the qualities that you find admirable in yourself. Is it a failure of some sort if you only see your own weakness in your children? I wonder'

She felt the question was rhetorical and didn't say a word.

Can you imagine the pain of hearing that from your father? No wonder then that Constance has developed a rather spiky character -- indeed, Jacob calls her a hedgehog: "The first signs of trabble [trouble] and you roll up into a ball and put your prickles out." He also berates her for deflecting everything with humour. "Foolishness. Joking. Flippant joking. You are always joking, Constance," he tells her. "I would like to see you cry."

This is a short, all-too brief novel but all the major issues we have to confront during our lifetimes -- from choosing a career to having children, from never being able to escape the past to not ever truly knowing the people we should be closest to -- is encompassed within its 168 pages. There's no doubt that The Christmas Tree is a totally absorbing tale, but it's also one of the best I have ever read about the human condition. This is the kind of literature that makes you goggle-eyed with the sheer beauty of it. It's not exactly a festive read, but it is a memorable one.

'The Invisible Worm' by Jennifer Johnston

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 181 pages; 1991.

Irish novelist Jennifer Johnston has, in recent times, become one of my favourite writers. This book, her ninth, was first published in 1991. The cover* of my Penguin edition (which I acquired at no cost from BookMooch) is deceptive, because this is not the historical novel I came to expect but a very modern one about the long-lasting impact of child abuse on one woman's life.

Despite the somewhat horrific subject matter, Johnston has created a delicately realised and completely unsentimental tale. In any other author's hands I'm afraid this story about a family's secret past would be elevated to melodrama, with everything spelt out in minute detail. But Johnston's strength is her ability to weave a complicated narrative using an economical palette of words. As ever, it's the things she does not say that make The Invisible Worm such an interesting, compelling read.

Set in an unspecified era -- is it before the Second World War, immediately afterwards or in the 1980s, I could not tell -- Laura Quinlan's quiet existence is shattered by the presence of Dominic O'Hara, a former priest turned school teacher, who keeps her company whenever Maurice, her busy, but rather doting husband, is away on business. It is clear from the outset that her platonic relationship with Dominic has an undercurrent of sexual tension, but she seems happy to leave it unfulfilled.

Laura is 37 and childless, though not for want of trying.

I did try to have a daughter.
I believe in continuity, the handing down of secrets; I want someone else to hear the whispers, the breaths from the past, as I have always done; someone else to be stirred by the tremors of memory.
Some of the tremors of memory.
I did try. All those seeds were rejected.

A recluse who lives in a lovely big house by the sea, she spends her days reading and gardening. Occasionally she gives dinner parties for Maurice's colleagues, where she is renowned for her "very good cake". But on the whole she seems a lonely, troubled woman who refuses to engage with other people or other places, content to stay at home and "guard this mad museum, the curator of my ancestor's folly".

When the story opens Laura is getting ready to attend the funeral of her father, a man held in such high regard by others that the Irish president and a "distinguished congregation" attend the service. But Laura's inner thoughts -- "The hole that they dig for you won't be deep enough, dear Father" -- reveal a hatred that seems slightly repellent, if intriguing, to the reader.

It's only later, when she meets Dominic, that she feels compelled to tell him a little of her dark, hidden past, as if she is confessing her sins to the priest he once was. And slowly, while the pair get to work unearthing the much-neglected summerhouse that once belonged to her long-dead mother, layers of the family's history are peeled back to reveal the rotten core. The denouement, when it comes, is heart-thumpingly shocking, matched only by the quiet devastation of the aftermath.

For anyone contemplating reading The Invisible Worm I offer a couple of caveats.

This is a simple story, but it jumps backwards and forwards in time and the lack of detail in the bare-boned prose takes a little getting used to, particularly if you are not familiar with Johnston's style.

There are little literary flourishes to contend with too, such as the constant switching between third person and first person narratives, which can make things confusing, and the sometimes ambiguous conversations between characters, full of interruptions and stilted language, can be difficult to comprehend. The secret, I have found, is to read Johnston's novels -- this one included -- in large chunks, rather than snatches here and there. You need to let the language wash over you so that you can find the rhythm of it. You will then find it difficult to let go.

* The cover shows A Summer Afternoon by Sir William Orpen, an Irish painter who died in 1931.

'The Old Jest' by Jennifer Johnston

Fiction - paperback; Flamingo; 158 pages; 1984.

This classic text by Irish writer Jennifer Johnston won the Whitbread Award for the best novel of 1979, the year in which it was first published.

It's set immediately after the Great War in an unspecified village by the sea, a short train journey from Dublin. Here 18-year-old Nancy, an orphan, lives with her Aunt Mary and her invalid grandfather, a veteran of the Boer War. It's summer and Nancy is on the brink of adulthood, excited about starting her new life, but reluctant to bade goodbye to childhood.

Secretly in love with her neighbour, Harry, a city worker who treats her like a younger sister, she knows deep down inside that he will never reciprocate her feelings: he's too busy wooing another villager, the haughty Maeve Casey.

Nancy, naive but headstrong, spends much of her time alone at the beach, where she discovers a secluded hut -- "built by some railway workers many years before, cleverly hidden in among the granite blocks, which protected it from the sea wind" -- that she makes her own.

During one visit she discovers, much to her annoyance, that someone else has been using the hut, and before long she meets the intruder, an older man, in hiding, whom she befriends. And then, one day, he shows her his gun...

This is a typical Jennifer Johnston book, told in sparse but highly evocative prose. Her protagonist Nancy is acutely believable -- although she appears strangely unworldly compared to today's teenagers, a product, perhaps, of the time in which the book is set.

What I liked most was the author's reluctance to spell everything out, forcing the reader to join the dots and interpret all the very many things left unsaid or unexplained. But that is very much a Johnston trademark and one that works to particular advantage here, least of all because the story has a very dark heart -- should you fight for your family or your country? -- that would lose its impact should it be spelt out in black and white. In fact, it's the shades of grey that Johnston specialises in that makes many of her books, not just The Old Jest, so beautiful and perfectly self-contained.

And the ending -- a powerful wallop that ties everything up in a neat package -- makes it all the more satisfying to read.

'Two Moons' by Jennifer Johnston

 

Fiction - paperback; Headline Review; 232 pages; 1999.

Two Moons is another startling novel by Jennifer Johnston, who  writes in a crisp, clear style reminiscent of so many of her Irish counterparts.

A kind of cross between Colm Toibin's The Blackwater Lightship and Salley Vickers' Instances of the Number 3, this book is part comedy and part family drama, but has an element of spiritual "fantasy" that gives it an unusual twist -- although some readers may find it too "inventive" for their liking.

Essentially it is a story about three generations of women, two of whom live together -- Mimi, the elderly grandmother, and her daughter, the stage actress Grace -- in a house overlooking Dublin Bay.

As Grace readies herself for an upcoming role in Hamlet, the family equilibrium is thrown off-kilter by two major events: the appearance of an angel, who can only be viewed by Mimi, and a surprise weekend visit by Polly, Grace's London-based daughter, whose new boyfriend leaves a lasting impression that lingers long after he leaves.

To say any more would spoil the plot of the book. But it has a raw emotional urgency coupled with a few  unexpected "kinks" in the storyline that kept me turning the pages. The characters -- especially Mimi -- are very well drawn, and Johnston's writing is taut but sophisticated: she knows how to move a scene along using crisp dialogue, few details and little else.

My only quibble is the overuse of the moon motif -- the Two Moons title comes from the reflection of the moon in the ocean -- and the fact that pretty much every scene depicted involves wine -- whether pouring, drinking or spilling it -- which began to wear very thin very quickly.

On the whole, Two Moons is a bittersweet story about love, betrayal and growing old while trying to come to terms with disappointments of the past. It's a quick read with a kind of fairy-tale twist -- wonderful, if you like that sort of thing.

'The Gingerbread Woman' by Jennifer Johnston

 

Fiction - paperback; Review; 213 pages; 2000.

This beautifully succinct novel tells the story of two lonely 30-somethings, both coming to terms with personal tragedies, who forge a tentative -- and rocky -- friendship, almost by accident, on a cliff top overlooking Dublin Bay.

Clara, a freelance writer and lecturer who lives in a house filled with clutter and an overgrown garden, is recovering from major surgery and nursing a broken heart after a failed love affair in New York.

Meanwhile Laurence (Lar), a teacher from Northern Ireland, is mourning the loss of his wife and 10-month old daughter, who were killed two years' earlier.

Both characters have much in common -- they are dealing with loss and grief, and the claustrophobia of familial concern -- but they deal with their problems in vastly different ways. Clara is outspoken, blunt to the point of rudeness and self-deprecating; Lar is filled with hate and quietly stewing in his own anger.

However, as the story gradually enfolds we see that it is Clara who finds it difficult to express herself, other than on the written page, while Lar opens up to strangers, expunging his guilt and pain like verbal diarrhoea.

With no real plot to speak of, the narrative force of this novel revolves around each character's growth and journey to self-realisation. It is not a romance novel -- the friendship between the two is purely platonic -- but it is a novel about the fragility of the human heart.

Johnston, who is an acclaimed writer in her native Ireland, is a master at drip feeding information so that the reader is never quite sure what is driving her characters to say and do certain things. Then a certain fact is revealed that slots neatly into place and everything suddenly makes sense. I am sure I said 'a-ha!!' out loud several times while reading this book as fragmented pieces of information began to join up in my head to form one cohesive -- and intriguing -- whole.

My only quibble is that I found it hard to believe that a single woman would invite a strange man, who is "sick in the head" as she puts it, to come and stay with her for a few days... but then maybe this just demonstrates Clara's naivety and trusting nature, traits which have landed her in trouble in the past.

Ultimately The Gingerbread Woman is a very sad and emotional book, but it is a compelling tale about hope, second chances borne through friendship and human resilence in the face of personal tragedy. I loved this near-perfect book and did not want the story to end and will definitely be reading more by this wonderfully talented writer.