Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition
In Competition No. 2675 you were invited to submit a book-jacket blurb for a well-known work of fiction that is designed to be as off-putting as possible. You were on sparkling form all round this week, especially Marion Shore, Robert Schechter and John O’Byrne. The winners, printed below, earn £25 each and in a photo finish the bonus fiver goes to Chris O’Carroll by a nose.
At last, a book that children and adults alike can turn to for a comprehensive analysis of the sexual mores and socio-economic paradigms that defined England in the 1930s. Mary Poppins is a stern young spinster employed by the Banks family (a name that alerts the reader to author P.L. Travers’s subversive critique of the capitalist caste system) in the constricting, traditionally female field of childcare. A romantically yearning but erotically repressed member of the downtrodden servant class, Poppins fights back with the help of her dangerous imagination, drawing the Banks children into a series of fantasy scenarios that leave her young charges simultaneously exhilarated and disorientated. Her ambiguous relationship with a chimney sweep — that most Freudian of professions, in which a man dirties himself by penetrating tight domestic spaces — adds transgressive spice to this challenging allegorical adventure.
Chris O’Carroll
Here is a novel that courageously confronts and challenges one of the most entrenched taboos of modern Western society: that of the ‘age difference’ between a couple who share their lives. Until now the passion of a middle-aged man for a 12-year-old girl has been censured as a morally repellent perversion — truly ‘the love that dare not speak its name’. In Lolita, however, it is presented as natural and wholesome, whatever stratagems become necessary to escape the narrow disapproval of the ‘respectable’. It is, more-over, a love that is finally reciprocated and consummated. Not that the author has descended to prurient, cheaply arousing detail. Anyone seeking pornographic thrills will be frustrated by the sophisticated style of the novel, dense and allusive, the language of a learned polymath who demands a strenuous ‘hinterland’ of cultural knowledge from the reader. Surely a novel that will conquer prejudice.
Basil Ransome-Davies
It is 1805, and in St Petersburg Princess Anna Mihalovna Drubetskoy presses the wily Prince Vassily Kuragin for preferment for her son Prince Boris. Prince Vassily, however, has his own problems, namely how to marry his dissolute son Prince Anatole to Princess Marya Bolkonsky, daughter of Prince Nikolay Andreivitch Bolkonsky, and his daughter Princess Elena to Pierre Bezuhov should the latter inherit the wealth of the dying Count Kirill Vladimirovitch Bezuhov. In Moscow, Count Ilya Andreitch Rostov, Princess Anna Mihalovna’s cousin, has squandered his estate, and is urging his son Count Nicolay to marry well. Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, brother of Princess Marya, leaves to join General Mihail Ilarionovitch Kutuzov, whose army is all that lies between the Emperor and Moscow. The effect on the lives of these and the many other characters teeming through the pages of his novel is told in generous measure by Count Leonid Nikolayovitch Tolstoy.
Noel Petty
Who hasn’t known those desperate adolescent moods when the whole world seems like a conspiracy to deprive you of any satisfaction, when people are blindly unresponsive to your wishes and fail to comprehend the inner sensitivity and burgeoning moral awareness that lift you above the common herd of conformists, time-servers and phoneys? In this remarkable novel, the hero-narrator Holden Caulfield speaks for all those who have been neglected, scorned or exploited as they seek, in a spiritual journey that may take them to the depths as well as the heights of experience, to validate the authentic self that will distinguish them from the corrupt and compromised world of so-called maturity. No author has been more eloquent than Salinger in giving the angst and self-pity of a middle-class teenager the status of tragic suffering, before crowning it with an epiphany at a duck pond.
G.M. Davis
A feeble-minded young man lives a life of useless pleasure in London, until he is inveigled into crime by a bullying relative. Admirers of the grimmer works of George Gissing will appreciate this author’s remorseless chronicling of his anti-hero’s increasing desperation as he struggles to escape the consequences of his actions. Daringly, Wodehouse makes the simpleton himself the narrator of the story, so that for 200 pages we are trapped within the confines of his limited sensibility as he struggles to make sense of his plight, his only intellectual resource a collection of tags vaguely remembered from a wasted education. Cunningly, the book’s subtext implies a quasi-Marxist analysis of class relations, as the hopelessness of the book’s anti-hero is contrasted with the resourcefulness of those doomed to spend their existences in the servants’ hall.
George Simmers
Meshed into a nexual matrix dense with allusion and freighted with psycho-philosophical profundities, the onion-layered heart of The Name of the Rose is a murder mystery investigated by Brother William of Baskerville, a medieval Franciscan monk. However, with its ludic sense of post-modern playfulness this is no ordinary monastery whodunit. In accordance with William’s belief that ‘the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from an insane passion for the truth’ the crime is only solved — no need to turn to the last page! — by having no solution; text collapsed into subtext and only context can pretend to have meaning. The digressions — which rival those in Don Quixote — raise the longueur to an art form. Not for nothing is the author a semioticist and socio-linguistician. He has produced not so much a novel as a ‘novel’ experience. But as the good friar says, ‘De hoc satis’. Come read.
W.J. Webster
No. 2678: NEW LEAF
You are invited to provide the New Year’s resolutions of well-known fictional villains (please specify). Please email entries (150 words max.) to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 8 December.
NB The early closing date is because of New Year printing deadlines.
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