Good review @TonyDP I thought it started well but around the halfway mark it fell away badly and is one King novel that I’ve never picked up again. Definitely one of his lesser efforts.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
I knew going in that this wasn't one of his more well regarded efforts but as I've resolved to try to go through all his bibliography (I'm at about 80%) I figured now was as good a time as any to tackle it.
Question for the King experts: I still need to track down a few of his earlier works but have 4 more unread novels on the shelf: The Green Mile, The Outsider, The Institute and Holly. Which should I tackle next? I know I shouldn't read Holly before The Outsider.
BTW, King announced in a very recent podcast that his next book will be another Holly Gibney story which he has already been working on for some time. He also said he has been doing research for a third Talisman book but there are still no guarantees on whether he will actually write that or not.
I can’t argue with the resident King expert 😉 but The Institute is definitely King at the top of is game also, and a good ending which a lot of his novels don’t have.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
@CoolHandBond, I was leaning towards The Institute before Barbel's recommendation as I like to alternate between King's older and newer efforts and the plot sounds interesting. It will definitely be next on the docket.
@Barbel, Just finished Book 2 of The Green Mile and after the slog of getting thru Dreamcatcher, this is going a lot faster and much, much more enjoyably. King was definitely on his game with this one.
Pul Edgecombe is an elderly man, living out his last remaining years at a retirement home. While waiting for the inevitable, he begins to put pen to paper as he recounts the story of his time in Cell Block E at the Cold Mountain Penitentiary, and his encounter with John Coffey, a giant of a man condemned to die for the rape and murder of two little girls.
Unable to reconcile John's gentle nature and incredible power to heal the sick and dying with the heinous acts he is accused of committing, Paul and the guards of Cell Block E, also known as The Green Mile, are forced to come to terms with their own definitions of right and wrong and the spiritual consequences of what they will soon be compelled to do in the name of the law.
At turns funny, sad, uplifting and depressing, the book explores the concepts of faith, bigotry and the racism rampant in the South during the early 20th century amidst the backdrop of the Great Depression. By the time I'd reached those final dark pages, where it is revealed just how old Paul, now all alone and waiting for death, really is, and by extension the incredible power John possessed, the book had taken me on a roller coaster of a ride and elicited so many emotions.
The Green Mile was originally a serial novel, published in six separate installments, in the tradition of classic authors such as Dickens. When the final installment was published, King had the distinction of being the first author to have six books on the national bestseller list at the same time. It is one of King's all time best stories and definitely worth taking the time to read.
@TonyDP I am so happy you enjoyed it! It's a beautiful and ultimately satisfying tale, with unforgettable characters and events.
King has said he'd like to revise it someday, to even out the ways the serial becomes a novel and correct some mistakes but I think it's just fine the way it is. There is a genuine magic to his writing.
I can understand where he's coming from; each section begins by summarizing the previous entry and it is a strange cadence for a continuous novel. Still, I agree with you; the serialized nature of the story makes it unique and I don't think any revisions are necessary either.
The Institute is next, though I'm going to take a day or two to process The Green Mile a bit more first. I also have a medical appointment tomorrow that I want to get out of the way.
After that, all that's left in my current library is The Outsider and Holly. I'll admit to not being the biggest Holly Gibney fan so reading those two back to back might be a bit much. There's still a few earlier works of his that I haven't read (Carrie and Christine, a few of the Bachmann entries and a few more). I may try to track down hardcovers of a few of those to mix things up.
@CoolHandBond, I remember seeing it a long time ago. Having now read the book, I'm pleased to see just how faithful the movie actually was to the source material. Going to have to watch it again some day.
@Barbel, I just found a nice 50th anniversary edition of Carrie on Amazon for a good price. I think that will be a good buffer for the two Holly Gibney books when I get to them.
BTW, what's the consensus on Blaze? It's also available at a good price right now.
THE GREEN MILE was originally an experiment by Stephen King--he published a few chapters every month, in paperback, just as Dickens published his novels. He even did his writing just ahead of publication, a la Dickens. I read it that way, and it was kind of fun.
Speaking of Dickens, I just finished Barbara Kingsolver's Pulitzer Prize-winning DEMON COPPERHEAD, which rewrites DAVID COPPERFIELD set in modern American Appalachia. It works very well, and I was impressed by how Kingsolver was able to find present-day horrors to match Dickens's 19th-century ones: a cruel foster-care system instead of cruel privately-run schools and workshops; cheap drugs taking lives instead of tuberculosis, etc. Very much worth a read, especially if you know your Dickens.
Britney Spears comes across as the ultimate pop survivor in this personal memoir. Not so much a troubled princess with all the expected diva trappings as a multi-talented old fashioned star who has been used and abused by the people who surround her, from agents, lawyers, boyfriends, husbands and worse her own blood family. A short and piecemeal work that highlights the downward spiral of fame and fortune and the exploitation people exact when the dollar signs come calling. It would be too easy to criticise Britney Spears as naïve, although that clearly is a huge part of the problem, but the naivety extends from that same abuse – that finding fame at such a young age and becoming the family’s millionaire meal ticket prevented her from garnering a stable worldly education. Swathed instead in a world of recording studios, award shows, tours, publicity and all those trapping of overnight success most of which the poor lass has forgotten it meant so little to her, she learnt virtually nothing of her own rights as an individual. Manipulated almost from the off by a mother who recognised her potential and scurried her off to New York as a pre-teen and lived off the profits from The Mickey Mouse Club, Britney’s story of an adult victim of ongoing psychological abuse is a raw and quavering lesson to women [and men] who find themselves in a similar position.
My anger, is reserved mostly for the American legal system and its practitioners which failed for thirteen years to explain Miss Spears's own legal rights to her on the never proven grounds she was incapable of understanding them. This is a world famous pop star who has provided handsomely for her whole family – including a husband and two sons – for a decade, won awards, written music and lyrics, kept steady accountancy, toured, choreographed, produced, acted and has just been through an extremely messy divorce with a partner who is denying her access to her children and yet she was the person they considered unfit to manage her health and her finances because, essentially, she was suffering acute postnatal depression. It is scandalous. Her grabbing, grubby family get no sympathy from me either. They’ll tell it differently I am sure, but the restrictions mentally, physically, financially, socially and career-wise placed on Britney by her father are not only shocking but unfathomable. For thirteen years Britney was allowed $2000 a month allowance from her earnings, while she paid the lawyer appointed by the courts $460,000 a year to keep her father’s ‘rights’ in place, a public relation’s company she did no work for pocketed 5% of all her earnings, her dad paid himself over $6m annually, the list is endless. Monstrous is an overused word, but it springs to mind. The judge who approved the ‘conservatorship’ ought to be struck off. I am amazed too that incidents of Britney's public shaming by her elder brother and her younger sister go unpunished or uncommented by the parents - and others - effectively justiftying the abusive behaviour and the negative insults. Miss Spears's blind and defeatest acceptance of these situations allows us to understand how her unstable and overbearing upbringing mightily influenced her compliant behaviour.
There are enormous gaps in Miss Spears’s story. [Her family disposed of a life’s worth of written material during the conservatorship, so the gaps are understandable.] But what remains is a clear indication of a woman who was expected to grow up fast, missed the essentials of adolescence, and – as she admits – regressed in later life to discover as an adult what she missed as a child. The drinking, rebelliousness, the want-to-be-loved – she heartbreakingly describes at one point the joy of simply being hugged because nobody had ever held her close – is entirely understandable, reaching out to try and source what you never had. It is amazing she managed to record so many great records given the stress and strain she was always and immediately under: from the off a sudden growth spurt after the release of her first single meant her breasts increased in size leading to speculation she’d had implant surgery.
While the book isn’t very well written, at least it isn’t ghost written. This really is Britney Spears’ voice. I don’t mean this ingenuously, but the simplicity of the piece is what stands out. Yes, I would have liked more detail, but I don’t think that was necessarily the point of the book, which is more a hymn to survival and a swift kick back at the exploiters. Much of the book made me think of Elvis Presley and the dispiriting way his manager manipulated a homespun boy and his good will to achieve his own financial gain, eventually to his cash-cow’s ruin.
I’m not sure what the future holds for Britney Spears [has she made any new music since 2021, I don’t know] but I certainly hope for her sake it is a lot more pleasurable than the crap she’s had to put up with. If I was her, I’d retire and stick two fingers up at the whole leeching industry, family, ex-lovers, lawyers, agents, friends and all as nobody seems to have lifted their fingers on behalf of her best interests for decades.
A novel that lacks a happy heart, crammed as it is with arguments, disagreements, conflict, misunderstandings, ultimate tragedy and pages of unfulfilled emotions, Where Angels Fear To Tread was E.M. Forster’s first published work, written when he was just twenty-six. The naivety shows, not so much in the author’s observations of Edwardian upper-middle-class morals, but in the unevenness of the unfolding relationships. His prose would become better defined as his writing progressed and his people more rounded. Here they tend to by ciphers for the landscapes they spring from: Philip Herriton is a solid, staid university graduate; his sister is an uptight spinster; his mother a formidable matriarch and patron of the dull country town of Sawston. This trio of stuffy Englishness concoct to disturb and disrupt lives at every turn based purely on their identity as arbiters of acceptable behaviour. By which they mean acceptable English behaviour. Meanwhile flighty widow Lilia Herriton is spending her inheritance by traveling to Tuscany with her friend, an uptight nurse, Caroline Abbott, and both women fall for Italy and the Italians with contrasting results, an occasion of opposites attracting. The roguish romancer Gino Carella is a gold-digging gigolo full of the joys of the world, but lacking all the resources, hence he seeks rich women to ponce off. The association with land and society is less well-observed in Gino and Italy, so the novel feels lopsided when the action switches to the town of Monteriano, tending to feast on the immorality of Italian ways [by which I mean Gino’s ways] which contrasts heavy-handedly against the uptight Englishness. This is an unsubtle work. Many of Forster’s themes – unrequited love, landscape, societal expectations, primitive lust – are already prevalent, but he isn’t in full control of what he’s attempting to say about these big ideas. For all that, there is certainly descriptive skill and a sureness of narrative touch which would mark his later works as ‘classic’. The novel is very short and pulls unexpectedly at the emotions, which I suppose should work in its favour. Disappointing though it may be in terms of E.M. Forster, Where Angels Fear To Tread is still acres ahead of vast percentages of other novels.
The sub-genre of fictional biographical melodrama known by the German term bildungsroman was popular in the late 19th Century. These days we’d probably class them as a sort of forerunner of the ‘coming of age’ novel, following as they do the lead protagonist’s life through childhood to adulthood and beyond. Mainly though, a bildungsroman focusses on philosophical themes, notably religion, psychology and morality and how the three intertwine. E.M. Forster’s second novel, The Longest Journey, follows its central character, Frederic Elliot [or Rickie] from his days as a Cambridge undergraduate through marriage, unfulfilled dreams and a failed teaching career to his eventual misguidedly heroic death. Surrounding Rickie is a host of prudish individuals in thrall to their intellect and neglectful of emotion. The women, naturally, see life the other way around. A father and son from the peasant class who know no boundaries and refuse to submit to convention throw everyone’s lives into chaos with tragic results.
While The Longest Journey may be Forster’s favourite of his novels, and has ardent followers, its main problem, one which needs to be overcome for the story to provide any enjoyment, is the longwinded and obtuse philosophical meanderings the characters embroider their speech with. Forster seems to have given us the dullest collection of people on earth. The nature of bildungsroman is such that characters become ciphers, representations of ideals good or bad, and hence they fail to live up to reality in both behaviour and in thought. Even the women share an innate insight into emotions without ever displaying any, themselves becoming nothing more than poor examples of their own notions. Framing every decision as an ethical conundrum makes for exceptionally dull reading. The occasional snippet of humour perks up the prose, but these moments are few and far between; similarly the death count is rather high, although everyone passes away in single line descriptions of the most perfunctory manner. Forster can’t even give his hero a decent send-off; three sentences is all he gets.
One feels that the arguments of Rickie, Stewart Ansell and Co are an excuse for Forster to pedal his own brand of neo-religious philosophy. The author seems to recognise that this style of drama doesn’t always work: Rickie’s attempts to publish a series of short stories based around the metaphysical mythology of nature all fail, but his novel of boy-meets-girl happy-ending romance is a success. I concur with Rickie’s audience. While Forster’s debut novel Where Angels Fear To Tread had some structural issues and was overly intense in character, at least it was never dull, sharing humour and some tension to propel the story. The Longest Journey misses most of that, even the arguments seem genteel. The lack of forthright emotion among the relationships – of which there was plenty in Angels, even if it tended to the hysterical – hinders one’s ultimate satisfaction. Some pleasant descriptions of landscape and place can’t fill that void however hard Forster tries to paint a genuine picture.
Dare I say “one for the intellectuals among us” and leave it at that.
A disturbing debut novel from an author regarded as one of Britain’s modern finest. Set in the sweltering summer of 1976, fifteen year old Jack and his siblings Julie, Sue and six year old Tom are suddenly thrust into an adult world of grief and responsibility, one they are incapable of adjusting to thanks to an unconventional upbringing. Their mother takes ill after their father dies and endures a bedridden sickness, but on her passing, the three elder children decide not to tell the authorities for fear of being separated and lodged in foster homes. Convincing themselves they are protecting each other, and most importantly protecting young Tom, they bury their mother in the cellar of the ramshackle family home and welcome one summer of independence. Everything, however, comes at a cost. Sibling rivalry turns to an incestuous love affair, a re-enactment of childhood games, and instead of growing emotionally the quartet regress, becoming the children they seek not to be, creating new games of fantasy and reality which ultimately lead to discovery.
Ian McEwan made his name with this book, which is confusingly both subtle and sordid at once. It is perhaps – with the benefit of time – that we understand the novel’s problem stems from the first-person narrator being the older boy, thus much of the author’s prose is taken up with the wonderings of a testosterone rampant teenager, narrowly avoiding the pornographic but coming exceedingly close. The argumentative trio of Jack, Julie (who is two years older) and Sue (who is two years younger) at times feels very true to life, as does the aimlessness of a hot summer. The book also relies on a suspension of disbelief: that the children and the parents have no friends to speak of and are virtually isolated other than Julie’s dolt of a boyfriend. It is the youngster, Tom, who seems to make friends most easily, yet even he has the awareness of mind never to invite his friends home. The situation begins to feels too convenient for McEwan’s story. This was the days when the gas and the electric were regularly metered, when milkmen delivered to your door, policemen shared a beat, rag n bone men called, bin men picked up trash, yet none of this is mentioned, as if the children’s world in completely separate from the real one we all understand. The old house stands almost alone among demolished prefabs; but no neighbouring kids seek adventure in the ruins. Like the central scenario, what surrounds it becomes an imagined world, not a realistic one and is rather hard to accept.
A good start to a great career, but better was to come.
12 year old Luke Ellis is kidnapped from his home in the middle of the night and spirited away to The Institute, a facility in the middle of nowhere where children with psychic abilities are subjected to cruel experiments and made to participate in shady government plots. But the people who run the Institute have grossly underestimated Luke's intelligence and resourcefulness, and the tests they are conducting are changing him and the other children in ways they could never have imagined.
The Institute is very much a paranormal thriller which covers a bit of the same ground as Firestarter, another King novel about a child with unnatural abilities. While there are some genuinely disturbing passages, scares really aren't the focus here. That said, the passages where Luke and the other children are tortured and made to suffer were pretty uncomfortable to get thru. And while the story of The Institute is wrapped up in a satisfactory manner I did find that some plot threads were left vague or unresolved at the end. I'm a bit of a stickler for bad people getting their just desserts and that didn't always happen, at least not within the text.
The novel was a fast and entertaining read. I tend to take my time with books these days but I got thru this one quickly, finishing the last 200 pages or so in a single session. Overall, the Institute was a well done story and one that King could easily revisit down the road if he were so inclined as the final pages reveal that there's much more to the organization than we might have thought.
I agree, there's enough left open to justify a sequel. I enjoyed this one, and look forward to visiting it again one day.
I'm on a re-reading kick at the moment, specialising in Solar Pons who is an expy of Sherlock Holmes. I've covered a few of those here, and since the stories are pretty similar I'm not mentioning individual titles any more.
@Barbel, @CoolHandBond, If I were to levy one criticism at the book it would be what happens (or more precisely what doesn't happen) to Dr. Hendricks. He got off way too easy at the end.
By the way, two more books came in. The collection has gotten pretty big...
That's a very good collection. I had to look closely at some of the covers, since I of course have the UK editions. I put some pretty bad pics up some time ago.
Those two are shorter than usual, you should be able to tear through them quickly.
@Barbel, I'm taking a page out of your book and going off in a different direction for a little bit, circling back to some short stories by a few authors that I want to revisit.
The Summer of Stephen King will resume very quickly though. I think The Outsider will be next as I've been putting that one off for a while and want to cross it off the list.
Agreed, I think you'll enjoy it. Though take your time getting there; re-reading is an underrated pleasure, imho. Life's too short to read everything for the first time.
Comments
Good review @TonyDP I thought it started well but around the halfway mark it fell away badly and is one King novel that I’ve never picked up again. Definitely one of his lesser efforts.
Yes, I agree, not one of his best. The film isn't great, either.
I knew going in that this wasn't one of his more well regarded efforts but as I've resolved to try to go through all his bibliography (I'm at about 80%) I figured now was as good a time as any to tackle it.
Question for the King experts: I still need to track down a few of his earlier works but have 4 more unread novels on the shelf: The Green Mile, The Outsider, The Institute and Holly. Which should I tackle next? I know I shouldn't read Holly before The Outsider.
BTW, King announced in a very recent podcast that his next book will be another Holly Gibney story which he has already been working on for some time. He also said he has been doing research for a third Talisman book but there are still no guarantees on whether he will actually write that or not.
The Green Mile , for sure. It's up at the top of his output.
The Green Mile it is....
I shall re- enjoy it vicariously and look forward to discussing it once you're ready. I'll have more to say than I had for Dreamcatcher!
I can’t argue with the resident King expert 😉 but The Institute is definitely King at the top of is game also, and a good ending which a lot of his novels don’t have.
@CoolHandBond, I was leaning towards The Institute before Barbel's recommendation as I like to alternate between King's older and newer efforts and the plot sounds interesting. It will definitely be next on the docket.
@Barbel, Just finished Book 2 of The Green Mile and after the slog of getting thru Dreamcatcher, this is going a lot faster and much, much more enjoyably. King was definitely on his game with this one.
I loved The Institute but Green Mile is top- rank King (pun intended).
The Green Mile by Stephen King
Pul Edgecombe is an elderly man, living out his last remaining years at a retirement home. While waiting for the inevitable, he begins to put pen to paper as he recounts the story of his time in Cell Block E at the Cold Mountain Penitentiary, and his encounter with John Coffey, a giant of a man condemned to die for the rape and murder of two little girls.
Unable to reconcile John's gentle nature and incredible power to heal the sick and dying with the heinous acts he is accused of committing, Paul and the guards of Cell Block E, also known as The Green Mile, are forced to come to terms with their own definitions of right and wrong and the spiritual consequences of what they will soon be compelled to do in the name of the law.
At turns funny, sad, uplifting and depressing, the book explores the concepts of faith, bigotry and the racism rampant in the South during the early 20th century amidst the backdrop of the Great Depression. By the time I'd reached those final dark pages, where it is revealed just how old Paul, now all alone and waiting for death, really is, and by extension the incredible power John possessed, the book had taken me on a roller coaster of a ride and elicited so many emotions.
The Green Mile was originally a serial novel, published in six separate installments, in the tradition of classic authors such as Dickens. When the final installment was published, King had the distinction of being the first author to have six books on the national bestseller list at the same time. It is one of King's all time best stories and definitely worth taking the time to read.
@TonyDP I am so happy you enjoyed it! It's a beautiful and ultimately satisfying tale, with unforgettable characters and events.
King has said he'd like to revise it someday, to even out the ways the serial becomes a novel and correct some mistakes but I think it's just fine the way it is. There is a genuine magic to his writing.
PS I take it you're reading "The Institute" next?
I can understand where he's coming from; each section begins by summarizing the previous entry and it is a strange cadence for a continuous novel. Still, I agree with you; the serialized nature of the story makes it unique and I don't think any revisions are necessary either.
The Institute is next, though I'm going to take a day or two to process The Green Mile a bit more first. I also have a medical appointment tomorrow that I want to get out of the way.
After that, all that's left in my current library is The Outsider and Holly. I'll admit to not being the biggest Holly Gibney fan so reading those two back to back might be a bit much. There's still a few earlier works of his that I haven't read (Carrie and Christine, a few of the Bachmann entries and a few more). I may try to track down hardcovers of a few of those to mix things up.
I liked both of those Holly titles but putting a different one between them sounds sensible. Lucky you, there's still some good books to go.
Another 👍🏻 for The Green Mile, and the film version is also excellent.
@CoolHandBond, I remember seeing it a long time ago. Having now read the book, I'm pleased to see just how faithful the movie actually was to the source material. Going to have to watch it again some day.
@Barbel, I just found a nice 50th anniversary edition of Carrie on Amazon for a good price. I think that will be a good buffer for the two Holly Gibney books when I get to them.
BTW, what's the consensus on Blaze? It's also available at a good price right now.
THE GREEN MILE was originally an experiment by Stephen King--he published a few chapters every month, in paperback, just as Dickens published his novels. He even did his writing just ahead of publication, a la Dickens. I read it that way, and it was kind of fun.
Speaking of Dickens, I just finished Barbara Kingsolver's Pulitzer Prize-winning DEMON COPPERHEAD, which rewrites DAVID COPPERFIELD set in modern American Appalachia. It works very well, and I was impressed by how Kingsolver was able to find present-day horrors to match Dickens's 19th-century ones: a cruel foster-care system instead of cruel privately-run schools and workshops; cheap drugs taking lives instead of tuberculosis, etc. Very much worth a read, especially if you know your Dickens.
Blaze is a minor work, not outstanding in any way. Enjoy Carrie!
THE WOMAN IN ME – Britney Spears (2023)
Britney Spears comes across as the ultimate pop survivor in this personal memoir. Not so much a troubled princess with all the expected diva trappings as a multi-talented old fashioned star who has been used and abused by the people who surround her, from agents, lawyers, boyfriends, husbands and worse her own blood family. A short and piecemeal work that highlights the downward spiral of fame and fortune and the exploitation people exact when the dollar signs come calling. It would be too easy to criticise Britney Spears as naïve, although that clearly is a huge part of the problem, but the naivety extends from that same abuse – that finding fame at such a young age and becoming the family’s millionaire meal ticket prevented her from garnering a stable worldly education. Swathed instead in a world of recording studios, award shows, tours, publicity and all those trapping of overnight success most of which the poor lass has forgotten it meant so little to her, she learnt virtually nothing of her own rights as an individual. Manipulated almost from the off by a mother who recognised her potential and scurried her off to New York as a pre-teen and lived off the profits from The Mickey Mouse Club, Britney’s story of an adult victim of ongoing psychological abuse is a raw and quavering lesson to women [and men] who find themselves in a similar position.
My anger, is reserved mostly for the American legal system and its practitioners which failed for thirteen years to explain Miss Spears's own legal rights to her on the never proven grounds she was incapable of understanding them. This is a world famous pop star who has provided handsomely for her whole family – including a husband and two sons – for a decade, won awards, written music and lyrics, kept steady accountancy, toured, choreographed, produced, acted and has just been through an extremely messy divorce with a partner who is denying her access to her children and yet she was the person they considered unfit to manage her health and her finances because, essentially, she was suffering acute postnatal depression. It is scandalous. Her grabbing, grubby family get no sympathy from me either. They’ll tell it differently I am sure, but the restrictions mentally, physically, financially, socially and career-wise placed on Britney by her father are not only shocking but unfathomable. For thirteen years Britney was allowed $2000 a month allowance from her earnings, while she paid the lawyer appointed by the courts $460,000 a year to keep her father’s ‘rights’ in place, a public relation’s company she did no work for pocketed 5% of all her earnings, her dad paid himself over $6m annually, the list is endless. Monstrous is an overused word, but it springs to mind. The judge who approved the ‘conservatorship’ ought to be struck off. I am amazed too that incidents of Britney's public shaming by her elder brother and her younger sister go unpunished or uncommented by the parents - and others - effectively justiftying the abusive behaviour and the negative insults. Miss Spears's blind and defeatest acceptance of these situations allows us to understand how her unstable and overbearing upbringing mightily influenced her compliant behaviour.
There are enormous gaps in Miss Spears’s story. [Her family disposed of a life’s worth of written material during the conservatorship, so the gaps are understandable.] But what remains is a clear indication of a woman who was expected to grow up fast, missed the essentials of adolescence, and – as she admits – regressed in later life to discover as an adult what she missed as a child. The drinking, rebelliousness, the want-to-be-loved – she heartbreakingly describes at one point the joy of simply being hugged because nobody had ever held her close – is entirely understandable, reaching out to try and source what you never had. It is amazing she managed to record so many great records given the stress and strain she was always and immediately under: from the off a sudden growth spurt after the release of her first single meant her breasts increased in size leading to speculation she’d had implant surgery.
While the book isn’t very well written, at least it isn’t ghost written. This really is Britney Spears’ voice. I don’t mean this ingenuously, but the simplicity of the piece is what stands out. Yes, I would have liked more detail, but I don’t think that was necessarily the point of the book, which is more a hymn to survival and a swift kick back at the exploiters. Much of the book made me think of Elvis Presley and the dispiriting way his manager manipulated a homespun boy and his good will to achieve his own financial gain, eventually to his cash-cow’s ruin.
I’m not sure what the future holds for Britney Spears [has she made any new music since 2021, I don’t know] but I certainly hope for her sake it is a lot more pleasurable than the crap she’s had to put up with. If I was her, I’d retire and stick two fingers up at the whole leeching industry, family, ex-lovers, lawyers, agents, friends and all as nobody seems to have lifted their fingers on behalf of her best interests for decades.
WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD – E.M. Forster (1905)
A novel that lacks a happy heart, crammed as it is with arguments, disagreements, conflict, misunderstandings, ultimate tragedy and pages of unfulfilled emotions, Where Angels Fear To Tread was E.M. Forster’s first published work, written when he was just twenty-six. The naivety shows, not so much in the author’s observations of Edwardian upper-middle-class morals, but in the unevenness of the unfolding relationships. His prose would become better defined as his writing progressed and his people more rounded. Here they tend to by ciphers for the landscapes they spring from: Philip Herriton is a solid, staid university graduate; his sister is an uptight spinster; his mother a formidable matriarch and patron of the dull country town of Sawston. This trio of stuffy Englishness concoct to disturb and disrupt lives at every turn based purely on their identity as arbiters of acceptable behaviour. By which they mean acceptable English behaviour. Meanwhile flighty widow Lilia Herriton is spending her inheritance by traveling to Tuscany with her friend, an uptight nurse, Caroline Abbott, and both women fall for Italy and the Italians with contrasting results, an occasion of opposites attracting. The roguish romancer Gino Carella is a gold-digging gigolo full of the joys of the world, but lacking all the resources, hence he seeks rich women to ponce off. The association with land and society is less well-observed in Gino and Italy, so the novel feels lopsided when the action switches to the town of Monteriano, tending to feast on the immorality of Italian ways [by which I mean Gino’s ways] which contrasts heavy-handedly against the uptight Englishness. This is an unsubtle work. Many of Forster’s themes – unrequited love, landscape, societal expectations, primitive lust – are already prevalent, but he isn’t in full control of what he’s attempting to say about these big ideas. For all that, there is certainly descriptive skill and a sureness of narrative touch which would mark his later works as ‘classic’. The novel is very short and pulls unexpectedly at the emotions, which I suppose should work in its favour. Disappointing though it may be in terms of E.M. Forster, Where Angels Fear To Tread is still acres ahead of vast percentages of other novels.
THE LONGEST JOURNEY – E.M. Forster (1907)
The sub-genre of fictional biographical melodrama known by the German term bildungsroman was popular in the late 19th Century. These days we’d probably class them as a sort of forerunner of the ‘coming of age’ novel, following as they do the lead protagonist’s life through childhood to adulthood and beyond. Mainly though, a bildungsroman focusses on philosophical themes, notably religion, psychology and morality and how the three intertwine. E.M. Forster’s second novel, The Longest Journey, follows its central character, Frederic Elliot [or Rickie] from his days as a Cambridge undergraduate through marriage, unfulfilled dreams and a failed teaching career to his eventual misguidedly heroic death. Surrounding Rickie is a host of prudish individuals in thrall to their intellect and neglectful of emotion. The women, naturally, see life the other way around. A father and son from the peasant class who know no boundaries and refuse to submit to convention throw everyone’s lives into chaos with tragic results.
While The Longest Journey may be Forster’s favourite of his novels, and has ardent followers, its main problem, one which needs to be overcome for the story to provide any enjoyment, is the longwinded and obtuse philosophical meanderings the characters embroider their speech with. Forster seems to have given us the dullest collection of people on earth. The nature of bildungsroman is such that characters become ciphers, representations of ideals good or bad, and hence they fail to live up to reality in both behaviour and in thought. Even the women share an innate insight into emotions without ever displaying any, themselves becoming nothing more than poor examples of their own notions. Framing every decision as an ethical conundrum makes for exceptionally dull reading. The occasional snippet of humour perks up the prose, but these moments are few and far between; similarly the death count is rather high, although everyone passes away in single line descriptions of the most perfunctory manner. Forster can’t even give his hero a decent send-off; three sentences is all he gets.
One feels that the arguments of Rickie, Stewart Ansell and Co are an excuse for Forster to pedal his own brand of neo-religious philosophy. The author seems to recognise that this style of drama doesn’t always work: Rickie’s attempts to publish a series of short stories based around the metaphysical mythology of nature all fail, but his novel of boy-meets-girl happy-ending romance is a success. I concur with Rickie’s audience. While Forster’s debut novel Where Angels Fear To Tread had some structural issues and was overly intense in character, at least it was never dull, sharing humour and some tension to propel the story. The Longest Journey misses most of that, even the arguments seem genteel. The lack of forthright emotion among the relationships – of which there was plenty in Angels, even if it tended to the hysterical – hinders one’s ultimate satisfaction. Some pleasant descriptions of landscape and place can’t fill that void however hard Forster tries to paint a genuine picture.
Dare I say “one for the intellectuals among us” and leave it at that.
THE CEMENT GARDEN – Ian McEwan (1978)
A disturbing debut novel from an author regarded as one of Britain’s modern finest. Set in the sweltering summer of 1976, fifteen year old Jack and his siblings Julie, Sue and six year old Tom are suddenly thrust into an adult world of grief and responsibility, one they are incapable of adjusting to thanks to an unconventional upbringing. Their mother takes ill after their father dies and endures a bedridden sickness, but on her passing, the three elder children decide not to tell the authorities for fear of being separated and lodged in foster homes. Convincing themselves they are protecting each other, and most importantly protecting young Tom, they bury their mother in the cellar of the ramshackle family home and welcome one summer of independence. Everything, however, comes at a cost. Sibling rivalry turns to an incestuous love affair, a re-enactment of childhood games, and instead of growing emotionally the quartet regress, becoming the children they seek not to be, creating new games of fantasy and reality which ultimately lead to discovery.
Ian McEwan made his name with this book, which is confusingly both subtle and sordid at once. It is perhaps – with the benefit of time – that we understand the novel’s problem stems from the first-person narrator being the older boy, thus much of the author’s prose is taken up with the wonderings of a testosterone rampant teenager, narrowly avoiding the pornographic but coming exceedingly close. The argumentative trio of Jack, Julie (who is two years older) and Sue (who is two years younger) at times feels very true to life, as does the aimlessness of a hot summer. The book also relies on a suspension of disbelief: that the children and the parents have no friends to speak of and are virtually isolated other than Julie’s dolt of a boyfriend. It is the youngster, Tom, who seems to make friends most easily, yet even he has the awareness of mind never to invite his friends home. The situation begins to feels too convenient for McEwan’s story. This was the days when the gas and the electric were regularly metered, when milkmen delivered to your door, policemen shared a beat, rag n bone men called, bin men picked up trash, yet none of this is mentioned, as if the children’s world in completely separate from the real one we all understand. The old house stands almost alone among demolished prefabs; but no neighbouring kids seek adventure in the ruins. Like the central scenario, what surrounds it becomes an imagined world, not a realistic one and is rather hard to accept.
A good start to a great career, but better was to come.
The Institute by Stephen King
12 year old Luke Ellis is kidnapped from his home in the middle of the night and spirited away to The Institute, a facility in the middle of nowhere where children with psychic abilities are subjected to cruel experiments and made to participate in shady government plots. But the people who run the Institute have grossly underestimated Luke's intelligence and resourcefulness, and the tests they are conducting are changing him and the other children in ways they could never have imagined.
The Institute is very much a paranormal thriller which covers a bit of the same ground as Firestarter, another King novel about a child with unnatural abilities. While there are some genuinely disturbing passages, scares really aren't the focus here. That said, the passages where Luke and the other children are tortured and made to suffer were pretty uncomfortable to get thru. And while the story of The Institute is wrapped up in a satisfactory manner I did find that some plot threads were left vague or unresolved at the end. I'm a bit of a stickler for bad people getting their just desserts and that didn't always happen, at least not within the text.
The novel was a fast and entertaining read. I tend to take my time with books these days but I got thru this one quickly, finishing the last 200 pages or so in a single session. Overall, the Institute was a well done story and one that King could easily revisit down the road if he were so inclined as the final pages reveal that there's much more to the organization than we might have thought.
I agree, there's enough left open to justify a sequel. I enjoyed this one, and look forward to visiting it again one day.
I'm on a re-reading kick at the moment, specialising in Solar Pons who is an expy of Sherlock Holmes. I've covered a few of those here, and since the stories are pretty similar I'm not mentioning individual titles any more.
I love The Institute, it’s his best novel since 11/22/63 (2011) in my opinion.
@Barbel, @CoolHandBond, If I were to levy one criticism at the book it would be what happens (or more precisely what doesn't happen) to Dr. Hendricks. He got off way too easy at the end.
By the way, two more books came in. The collection has gotten pretty big...
That's a very good collection. I had to look closely at some of the covers, since I of course have the UK editions. I put some pretty bad pics up some time ago.
Those two are shorter than usual, you should be able to tear through them quickly.
@Barbel, I'm taking a page out of your book and going off in a different direction for a little bit, circling back to some short stories by a few authors that I want to revisit.
The Summer of Stephen King will resume very quickly though. I think The Outsider will be next as I've been putting that one off for a while and want to cross it off the list.
That’s a lovely collection @TonyDP
The Outsider is very, very good.
Agreed, I think you'll enjoy it. Though take your time getting there; re-reading is an underrated pleasure, imho. Life's too short to read everything for the first time.
Wow. Books. Hardback books. That's a seriously rigid collection @TonyDP