Sense & Sensibility by Jane Austen

This was the only Jane Austen novel I hadn't read so it was time to fill the gap. Of course I knew the story; living with a wife who's staple diet is re-watching Jane Austen adaptations I must have watched Sense & Sensibility more times than is good for my sense or sensibility. The 1998 Ang Lee/Emma Thompson film is the go-to version but there is also the excellent 2008, BBC, 3-part TV series by that master of adaptations Andrew Davis.

But what of the book itself? I have to say the first chapter is dire. In four pages we are told of an inheritance of the Norland Estate so convoluted I didn't know who'd got what or why they'd got it. I read of an old man, a nephew, a niece, a second marriage, a son, a grand-son, two step-sisters, a Henry, a John and two Mrs Dashwoods and was lost.  I ploughed on until at last I came to the death-bed scene where the film adaptations begin and the familar story started to unfold.

But there was a problem. How could I get to know Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, letting their personalities slowly develop in my imagination when Emma Thompson and Kate Winslett were already in residence, personalities fully formed? Robert Hardy, Alan Rickman, Hugh Grant and the rest of the cast were also in residence. But as you read the book you realise the actors don't quite fit, there is a disconnect between the words on the page and the characters on screen. Jane Austen's prose is sliced up and simplified for the viewer; the screen shows us the characters, the houses, the streets and landscapes, no imagination required - there is no time to pause or reflect. But the reader faced with the richness of Austen's prose, her language, her style, and her keen commentary on Georgian society has to slow down. We re-read a sentence or a paragraph, adapt to her prose, begin to appreciate her wit, and her subtle attacks on greed, convention and corrupted values.

Wealth & Status

I was struck by how forceful those attacks were. Right at the off we have the new Lord of the Manor and newly rich John Dashwood discussing with his wife how he should fulfil the promise he made to his dying Father of assisting his three half-sisters.

When he gave his promise to his father, he meditated within himself to increase the fortunes of his sisters by the present of a thousand pounds a-piece....Three thousand pounds! he could spare so considerable a sum with little inconvenience.”

Mrs. John Dashwood did not at all approve of what her husband intended to do for his sisters...She begged him to think again on the subject. How could he answer it to himself to rob his child, and his only child too, of so large a sum?
“It was my father’s last request to me,” replied her husband, “that I should assist his widow and daughters.....
“Well, then, let something be done for them; but that something need not be three thousand pounds."

....
“Perhaps, then, it would be better for all parties, if the sum were diminished one half.—Five hundred pounds would be a prodigious increase to their fortunes!”
“Oh! beyond anything great! What brother on earth would do half so much for his sisters, even if really his sisters! And as it is—only half blood!"

.....
"A present of fifty pounds, now and then, will prevent their ever being distressed for money, and will, I think, be amply discharging my promise to my father,"

Later in the book, Edward Ferrars has been disinherited by his mother because he is engaged to Lucy Steele. He is offered a clergyman's Living by Colonel Brandon but John Dashwood can hardly believe this and asks Elinor if it is true:

“It is perfectly true.—Colonel Brandon has given the living of Delaford to Edward.”
“Really!—Well, this is very astonishing!—no relationship!—no connection between them!—and now that livings fetch such a price!—what was the value of this?”
“About two hundred a year.”
"He might have got I dare say—fourteen hundred pounds. .... I suppose, however, on recollection, that the case may probably be this. Edward is only to hold the living till the person to whom the Colonel has really sold the presentation, is old enough to take it. Aye, aye, that is the fact, depend upon it.”
Elinor contradicted it, however, very positively; ....
“It is truly astonishing!”—he cried, after hearing what she said—“what could be the Colonel’s motive?”
“A very simple one—to be of use to Mr. Ferrars.”

Men & Women

The differences in social and legal standing between men and and women are also ammunition for Austen's sharp pen, particularly when it comes to marriage.

Mrs Ferrar's intended bride for Edward was Miss Morton, with a fortune of £30,000, certainly not the penniless Lucy Steele. John Dashwood tells Elinor that Robert Ferrars is not only to take Edwards inheritence but also his place as suitor to Miss Morton:

“We think now,”—said Mr. Dashwood, after a short pause, “of Robert’s marrying Miss Morton.”
Elinor, smiling at the grave and decisive importance of her brother’s tone, calmly replied,—
“The lady, I suppose, has no choice in the affair.”
“Choice!—how do you mean?”
“I only mean that I suppose, from your manner of speaking, it must be the same to Miss Morton whether she marry Edward or Robert.”
“Certainly, there can be no difference; for Robert will now to all intents and purposes be considered as the eldest son;—and as to any thing else, they are both very agreeable young men: I do not know that one is superior to the other.”

Towards the end of the novel Willoughby who has married Miss Grey for her fortune, hears of Marianne's illness and Elinor has to listen to his wining attempt to justify his actions:

You had made your own choice. It was not forced on you. Your wife has a claim to your politeness, to your respect, at least. She must be attached to you, or she would not have married you. To treat her with unkindness, to speak of her slightingly is no atonement to Marianne—nor can I suppose it a relief to your own conscience.”

“Do not talk to me of my wife,” said he with a heavy sigh; “she does not deserve your compassion. She knew I had no regard for her when we married. Well, married we were, and came down to Combe Magna to be happy, and afterwards returned to town to be gay.

Passion & Patience

Elinor is the heroine of the story; the rock of her enduring patience is the calm centre for her family and a refuge for the turnbulant passions of Marianne. Here's how Austen introduces Marianne:

Marianne’s abilities were, in many respects, quite equal to Elinor’s. She was sensible and clever; but eager in everything: her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation. She was generous, amiable, interesting: she was everything but prudent. The resemblance between her and her mother was strikingly great. 

Marianne in conversation with her mother cannot understand what Elinor sees in Edward Ferrars:

Edward is very amiable, and I love him tenderly. But yet—he is not the kind of young man—there is something wanting—his figure is not striking; it has none of that grace which I should expect in the man who could seriously attach my sister. ...

Oh! mama, how spiritless, how tame was Edward’s manner in reading to us last night! .... I could hardly keep my seat. To hear those beautiful lines which have frequently almost driven me wild, pronounced with such impenetrable calmness, such dreadful indifference!”

“He would certainly have done more justice to simple and elegant prose. I thought so at the time; but you would give him Cowper.”

In the Ang Lee film Edward reads The Castaway by William Cowper - Austen's favourite poet:

"No voice divine the storm allay'd,

No light propitious shone;

When, snatch'd from all effectual aid,

We perish'd, each alone:

But I beneath a rougher sea,

And whelm'd in deeper gulfs than he."

“Nay, Mama, if he is not to be animated by Cowper! .... it would have broke my heart, had I loved him, to hear him read with so little sensibility. 

Later Marianne probes Elinor to see if she and Edward are engaged

...

“I do not attempt to deny,” said she, “that I think very highly of him—that I greatly esteem, that I like him.”

Marianne here burst forth with indignation—

“Esteem him! Like him! Cold-hearted Elinor! Oh! worse than cold-hearted! Ashamed of being otherwise. Use those words again, and I will leave the room this moment.”

Following Marianne's despair at losing her soul-mate Willoughby she discovers that Elinor has known of Edward's engagement to Lucy Steele for months and is mortified that she has been so insensitive to Elinor's suffering:

“How long has this been known to you, Elinor? has he written to you?”

“I have known it these four months. When Lucy first came to Barton Park last November, she told me in confidence of her engagement.”

At these words, Marianne’s eyes expressed the astonishment which her lips could not utter. After a pause of wonder, she exclaimed—

“Four months!—Have you known of this four months?”

Elinor confirmed it.

“What! while attending me in all my misery, has this been on your heart? And I have reproached you for being happy!”

“It was not fit that you should then know how much I was the reverse!”

“Four months!” cried Marianne again. “So calm! so cheerful! How have you been supported?”

“By feeling that I was doing my duty.—My promise to Lucy, obliged me to be secret. I owed it to her, therefore, to avoid giving any hint of the truth; and I owed it to my family and friends, not to create in them a solicitude about me, which it could not be in my power to satisfy.”

Marianne seemed much struck.

“I have very often wished to undeceive yourself and my mother,” added Elinor; “and once or twice I have attempted it;—but without betraying my trust, I never could have convinced you.”

“Four months! and yet you loved him!”

“Yes. But I did not love only him; and while the comfort of others was dear to me, I was glad to spare them from knowing how much I felt. 

Marianne was quite subdued.

“Oh! Elinor,” she cried, “you have made me hate myself for ever.—How barbarous have I been to you!—you, who have been my only comfort, who have borne with me in all my misery, who have seemed to be only suffering for me!—Is this my gratitude?—Is this the only return I can make you?—Because your merit cries out upon myself, I have been trying to do it away.”

Duty & Integrity

The guiding virtues that stand out in Sense and Sensibility are duty and integrity. Austen contrasts those who fulfil their obligations and stay true to high moral standards with those who put self before self-sacrifice and profit before principle. Apart from Elinor's unwavering moral compass, Edward Ferrars stays true to his promise to Lucy Steele despite falling in love with Elinor and falling out of favour with his mother. And Colonel Branden seeks out his first love Eliza despite her affair and adopts her daughter as his ward. He remains true to his love for Marianne while she, in the midst of her infatution for Willoughby, treats him with indifference.

Reading Sense and Sensibility to fill the Austen novels gap was a reminder of why she is rated so highly as a novelist. Yes, the modern reader has to adapt to the density of her prose - you have to read carefully and can't skim. But if you love language, her sharp observations and her descriptive power there's a feast to be had, a rich four course meal with vintage wines, an elegant, candle-lit table, sparkling conversation and an evening of pure pleasure stretching before you.

Image from Folio Society Edition

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Parallels between The Odyssey and Joyce's Ulysses

James Joyce’s Ulysses is a modern, mock-heroic reimagining of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey. Set entirely in Dublin on a single day (16 June 1904), the novel shifts the external, multi-year physical battles of ancient Greece into internal, psychological journeys.

The structural blueprint relies on a strict schema where three main characters anchor the epic roles:

• Leopold Bloom is Odysseus (Ulysses), the wandering everyman.
• Stephen Dedalus is Telemachus, the searching son.
• Molly Bloom is Penelope, the wife waiting at home (though, unlike Penelope, she is unfaithful).

The table below outlines the sequential parallel connections across the 18 chapters (episodes) of both works.

---

Part I: The Telemachia (The Search for the Father)

Like The Odyssey, the first three chapters entirely bypass the main hero to focus on his symbolic son.

#	Ulysses Episode	Odyssey Section	Brief Parallel & Summary
1	Telemachus	Telemachus at home	Stephen is usurped in his home. Just as Telemachus is crowded out of his palace by parasitic suitors, Stephen Dedalus faces the mockery of his roommate, Buck Mulligan, in a rented Martello tower.
2	Nestor	Telemachus visits King Nestor	Seeking council from an elder. Telemachus travels to wise old King Nestor for news of his father. Stephen, working as a schoolteacher, receives narrow-minded, anti-Semitic advice from his headmaster, Mr Deasy.
3	Proteus	Telemachus meets Proteus	Wrestling with shifting shapes. Telemachus learns how to capture Proteus, the shape-shifting Old Man of the Sea. Stephen walks along Sandymount Strand, wrestling with the fluid, changing nature of reality, language, and his own identity.

---

Part II: The Odyssey (The Wanderings of Bloom)

The focus shifts to the epic hero as he navigates the obstacles of the external world.

#	Ulysses Episode	Odyssey Section	Brief Parallel & Summary
4	Calypso	Odysseus captive on Calypso's island	Imprisoned by a nymph/domesticity. Odysseus spends years trapped on Calypso’s island, yearning for home. Leopold Bloom is introduced trapped in his routine, making breakfast for his wife Molly, who remains in bed like a reclining goddess.
5	Lotus-Eaters	The narcotic Lotus-Eaters	The escape into numbness and bliss. Odysseus’s crew eats the lotus flower and forgets their home. Bloom wanders through Dublin, picking up a love letter under a pseudonym, visiting a church, and indulging in the sensory bliss of a warm bath.
6	Hades	Odysseus visits the Underworld	A journey into the realm of the dead. Odysseus travels to Hades to speak with fallen comrades. Bloom attends the funeral of his acquaintance Paddy Dignam at Glasnevin Cemetery, reflecting heavily on mortality and his own deceased father and infant son.
7	Aeolus	The God of Winds	An onslaught of empty words and hot air. King Aeolus gives Odysseus a bag of winds that blows his ship off course. Bloom visits a chaotic newspaper office where the air is thick with the metaphorical "winds" of rhetoric and journalism.
8	Lestrygonians	The cannibal giants	The visceral, consuming trap of appetite. Odysseus loses most of his fleet to savage cannibals. Bloom walks through Dublin at lunchtime, disgusted by the animalistic way men gorge themselves on food in a local restaurant.
9	Scylla & Charybdis	The rock and the whirlpool	Navigating deadly philosophical extremes. Odysseus must steer between a six-headed monster and a deadly whirlpool. At the National Library, Stephen navigates a treacherous intellectual debate about Shakespeare, balancing rigid dogma against fluid theory.
10	Wandering Rocks	The dangerous floating rocks	A montage of a fractured city. This minor Homeric danger is bypassed by Odysseus, but Joyce uses it to showcase 19 short vignettes of various Dubliners wandering the streets, blindly passing one another like drifting stones.
11	Sirens	The seductive Sirens	The intoxicating snare of music. Odysseus ties himself to the ship's mast to hear the Sirens' seductive songs safely. Bloom sits in a hotel bar, deeply moved by the tragic singing of traditional Irish ballads while trying to ignore his wife's infidelity happening across town.
12	Cyclops	The one-eyed giant	Blinded by narrow-minded rage. Odysseus blinds the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, who flings a boulder at his escaping ship. In a pub, Bloom faces down "The Citizen," a bigoted, one-eyed Irish nationalist who aggressively hurls a biscuit tin at Bloom's head.
13	Nausicaa	Princess Nausicaa	A fleeting moment of youth and desire. The young princess Nausicaa rescues a shipwrecked, naked Odysseus on the beach. At Sandymount Strand, a limping teenage girl named Gerty MacDowell silently flirts with Bloom, providing a moment of voyeuristic escape.
14	Oxen of the Sun	The slaughter of the sacred cattle	The defilement of life and creation. Odysseus's starving crew destroys the sacred cattle of Hyperion, bringing down divine wrath. Bloom visits a maternity hospital where carousing medical students disrespect the sacred nature of childbirth with crass jokes.
15	Circe	The sorceress who turns men into pigs	The hallucinatory grip of base desires. The enchantress Circe transforms Odysseus’s men into swine. Bloom follows a drunken Stephen into Dublin’s red-light district, entering a surreal, nightmare-like brothel where internal anxieties and repressed fantasies take physical shape.

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Part III: The Nostos (The Homecoming)

The final section brings the father and son together to reclaim the home.

#	Ulysses Episode	Odyssey Section	Brief Parallel & Summary
16	Eumaeus	The loyal swineherd's hut	The father and son finally unite. Odysseus meets Telemachus in disguise at the shelter of his loyal swineherd. Bloom rescues a severely intoxicated Stephen from a street brawl and takes him to a cabman’s shelter to sober up, establishing a quiet bond.
17	Ithaca	The return to the kingdom	A cold, mathematical reclamation of home. Odysseus returns home to slaughter the suitors occupying his palace. Bloom brings Stephen back to his house. Written entirely in a cold, catechism-like question-and-answer format, Bloom accepts the reality of his unfaithful home.
18	Penelope	Penelope's loyalty and sleep	The final, sensual affirmation of love. While Homer's Penelope tests Odysseus to prove his identity, Joyce finishes with an unpunctuated, shifting stream-of-consciousness monologue from Molly Bloom. As she lies in bed, she reviews her lovers but ultimately concludes with her ecstatic, life-affirming memory of accepting Bloom's marriage proposal.

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A Christmas Carol - published 1843

Dickens began A Christmas Carol in October 1843 at the age of 31.  It was completed in six weeks; the final pages being written in early December. He built much of the work in his head while taking night-time walks of 15 to 20 miles around London. Dickens's sister-in-law wrote how he "wept, and laughed, and wept again, and excited himself in a most extraordinary manner, in composition".

Dickens arranged to pay for the publishing himself, in exchange for a percentage of the profits. The final product was bound in red cloth with gilt-edged pages, completed only two days before the publication date of 19 December 1843. Priced at five shillings (equivalent to £31 in 2023), the first run of 6,000 copies sold out by Christmas Eve. 

The novella was adapted for the stage almost immediately. Three productions opened on 5 February 1844, By the close of February 1844 eight rival A Christmas Carol theatrical productions were playing in London. 

The author of Vanity Fair, William Thackeray wrote: 

Who can listen to objections regarding such a book as this? It seems to me a national benefit, and to every man or woman who reads it, a personal kindness. The last two people I heard speak of it were women. Neither knew the other our the author and both said by way of criticism, “God bless him”. A Scotch philosopher who nationally does not keep Christmas Day, on reading the book sent out for a Turkey and asked two friends to dine. This is a fact. Many men were known to sit down after perusing it and write off letters to their friends, not about business but out of the fullness of heart, and to wish old acquaintances a happy Christmas. Had the book appeared a fortnight earlier, all the prize cattle would have been gobbled up in pure love and friendship. Epping denuded of sausages and not a Turkey left in Norfolk. His Royal Highness’s fatstock would have fetched unheard of prices and Alderman Bannister would have been tired of slaying.

As for Tiny Tim, there is a certain passage in the book regarding that young gentleman, about which a man could hardly venture to speak in print or in public, any more than he would of any other affectations of his private heart. There is not a reader in England, but that little creature will be a bond of union between the author and him, and he will say of Charles Dickens, as the women said just now. “God bless him”. What a feeling is this for a writer to be able to inspire, and what a reward to reap.

In 1874, Robert Louis Stevenson, after reading Dickens's Christmas books, vowed to give generously to those in need. One American businessman was so moved by attending a reading that he closed his factory on Christmas Day and sent every employee a turkey. The Queen of Norway—sent gifts to London's crippled children signed "With Tiny Tim's Love"

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Snippets from Dickens

From Little Dorrit

The debtors in the Marshalsea prison had come to regard insolvency as the normal state of mankind, and the payment of debts as a disease that occasionally broke out

Time will show us, the post of honour and the post of shame. The general’s station and the drummer's. The peer’s statue in Westminster Abbey and the seaman’s hammock at the bottom of the deep. The mitre and the workhouse, the woolsack and the gallows, the throne and the guillotine. The travellers to all are on the Great High Road. But it has wonderful divergences and only time will show us whither each traveller is bound.

His brother Frederick of the dim eye, palsied hand, bent form, and groping mind, submissively shuffled at his side, accepting his patronage as he accepted every incident of the labyrinthian world in which he had got lost. 

Bishop, mentally perambulating among paths of peace, was altogether swallowed up in absence of mind.

Mrs General had no opinions. Her way of forming a mind was to prevent it from forming opinions. She had a little circular set of mental grooves or rails on which she started little trains of other people’s opinions, which never overtook one another, and never got anywhere. Even her propriety could not dispute that there was impropriety in the world; but Mrs General’s way of getting rid of it was to put it out of sight, and make believe that there was no such thing. This was another of her ways of forming a mind—to cram all articles of difficulty into cupboards, lock them up, and say they had no existence. It was the easiest way, and, beyond all comparison, the properest.

Mrs General was not to be told of anything shocking. Accidents, miseries, and offences, were never to be mentioned before her. Passion was to go to sleep in the presence of Mrs General, and blood was to change to milk and water. The little that was left in the world, when all these deductions were made, it was Mrs General’s province to varnish. In that formation process of hers, she dipped the smallest of brushes into the largest of pots, and varnished the surface of every object that came under consideration. The more cracked it was, the more Mrs General varnished it.

From Dombey & Son

(Mrs Dombey has died. giving birth to a son.)

That small world of Mr Dombey’s household subsided into their several places in the domestic system. That small world, like the great one outdoors, had the capacity for easily forgetting its dead; and when the cook said, “She was a quiet, tempered lady”. and the housekeeper said, “It was the common lot”, and the Butler said, “Who'd have thought it?”, and the housemaid said, “She could hardly believe it”, and the footman said, “It seemed exactly like a dream”, they had quite worn the subject out and began to think their mourning was wearing rusty too.

Domby sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great armchair by the bedside, and Son lay tucked up warm in a little basket bedstead, carefully disposed on a low settee immediately in front of the fire and close to it, as if his constitution were analogous to that of a muffin, and it was essential to toast him brown while he was very new.

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Samuel Johnson according to Boswell

I picked up an old, hardback copy of James Boswell's London  Journal from a charity shop. It was a revelation; full of detailed portraits of those he met, verbatim conversations, and his own moral failures. But it is his account of the life of Samuel Johnson for which he is best know. Here are few snippets of Johnsons very forthright opinions:

 He who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else.

Wickedness is always easier than virtue. For it takes a shortcut to everything. It is much easier to steal £100 then get it by labour.

On Alexander Pope:

Pope  had genius.
A mind active, ambitious and adventurous, 
Always investigating, always aspiring. 
In its widest searches, still longing to go forward. 
In its highest flights, still wishing to be higher. 
Always imagining something greater than it knows. 
Always endeavouring more than it can do.

On Reading

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Works of imagination excel by their allurement and delight by their power of attracting and detaining the attention. That book is good in vain, which the reader throws away. He only is the master who keeps the mind in pleasing captivity; whose pages are perused with eagerness, and in hope of new pleasures are perused again, and whose conclusion is perceived with an eye of sorrow such as a traveller casts upon departing day.

On Paradise Lost by Milton

The want of human interest is always felt. Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened and look elsewhere for recreation. We desert our master and seek for companions.

On Resolutions

'I have now spent fifty-five years in resolving; having, from the earliest time almost that I can remember, been forming schemes of a better life. I have done nothing. The need of doing, therefore, is pressing, since the time of doing is short. 

Idleness is a disease which must be combated; but I would not advise a rigid adherence to a particular plan of study. I myself have never persisted in any plan for two days together.

Foreign Affairs

The Europeans have scarcely visited any coast but to gratify avarice and extend corruption; to arrogate dominion without right and practice cruelty without incentive;

The taxation issue  iin the American colonies that led to the War of independence, was being argued over in England. Boswell was sympathetic to the colonists. Johnson said:

"They are a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them  short of hanging"

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My Reading Year - 2025

"At my back I always hear, Time's winged chariot drawing near."

Books, books, and more books. Retired, yet not enough time. In "Mort", Terry Pratchet's zany take on the life of the Devil's apprentice, there is a giant room in the Devil's house full of egg-timers, one for each person on Earth and each hissing away as the sands of time for every life run out. How much time do I have left? What books must be read before the grim reaper pays a call? This year it had to be ULYSSES by James Joyce. If not now, when?

I prepared for this assault on one of the Everests of literature by reading, Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, and Dubliners, both of which I enjoyed. But Ulysses is another kettle of fish. I did some research and watched some YouTube videos, but the best decision was to buy a guide to Ulysses by Patrick Hastings. He writes: "Lots of stuff is going to fly over your head - let it." It did, so I did.

Ulysses is partly based on Homer's Odyssey, the story of the Greek hero Odysseus as he journeys home from the Trojan war, a journey that takes 10 years. In Joyce's Ulysses, the unheroic Leopold Bloom journeys round Dublin in a single day. Odysseus's wife, Penelope waits faithfully for her husband; Molly Bloom entertains her lover. I enjoyed the challenge; it was a good read - some sections I skimmed, others I loved.

Having read Ulysses the next goal had to be The Odyssey itself. I bought a new, widely praised translation by Emily Wilson in which she matches Homer line for line. "I must admit when I heard we were reviewing The Odyssey, I thought 'Oh no, it's going to be wordy and dull'...but it wasn't, it really felt fresh and alive and exciting." -- Sophie Hannah, BBC Radio 4, Saturday Review.

It was good to connect with an ancient text from the 8th Century BCE that has influenced story-telling every since, and piece together half-remembered legends from childhood. Then there were the inter-locking myths of a myriad of Greek gods added to the mix. The poor weak human beings in these tales are simply pawns in an endless game of cosmic chess. As Thomas Hardy writes in the closing lines in Tess of the d'Urbervilles:

"Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess."

Following the dive into Greek myths, came another dive via a book group choice, into the oldest known written story, the Epic of Gilgamesh from the Summerian civilisation of 1800 BCE. It was written on clay tablets in Cuneiform script and discovered in the ruins of Ninevah in the early 19th Century. Another interesting read with links to the biblical story of Noah and the flood.

A final foray into the world of legend was Roger Lancelon Green's account of the Arthurian legends. More stories half remembered - the Sword in The Stone, the Knights of The Round Table, the Quest for the Holy Grail, Merlin and Mordred, and the death of Arthur.

We humans have always loved a good story. We have created, myths and legends, gods and godesses, heroes and heroines, noble quests and dastardly deeds. We have told stories, sung songs and recited sagas round the fire in huts and halls, crofts and castles, pubs and palaces, and still do.

Two of our book group choices directly referenced myth and legend, but then I realised they all did in different ways. To understand ourselves and give meaning to our existence we turn away from stark, cold facts and feed our minds with endless stories. As Jeanette Winterson writes in Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit:

If you read yourself as fiction,

It’s rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.”

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Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

 

Watching the start of a News Agent’s podcast with Emily Matlis on screen, I was shocked to hear her say:

 “I'm going to ask you to leave. I'm going to ask you to leave the studio because you cannot be present for the conversation that we now need to have.

The guest who she asked to leave was Sarah Wynn-Williams the author of  “Careless People”, a book that tells the story of her time as a Facebook employee and why she left the company, and a book that is subject to a lawsuit brought by Meta and which she is not allowed to promote in any way.

Back in 2009, Sarah Wynn-Williams was a young New Zealand diplomat working in its embassy in Washington. This was still the early days of Facebook after it had changed access to its App from university and school students to anyone with an email address. Wynn- Williams in her idealism, could see there was enormous potential for Facebook to change the world. She says in her book it was obvious politics would happen on Facebook and in turn politicians and governments of every opinion would not only use the platform to communicate but also to manipulate opinion. She saw the need for  Facebook to forge relationships with governments round the world.

She joined the company and soon became involved in Facebook’s international outreach eventually becoming Director of Global Public Policy.

Careless People tracks the change from her naïve expectation that by connecting people Facebook would be a force for good in the world, to the growing realisation that the driving force behind Mark Zuckerberg and his inner circle, was how Facebook could generate vast amounts of money by expanding into more and more countries, provided of course they didn’t have pay out vast amounts of tax.

There was a slow accumulation of wake-up moments for Wynn-Williams which eventually led to her resignation from the company. One such was Facebook’s use by the military in Myanmar to monitor and coerce its own citizens, and even more significant was the relationship with China where it was clear the Chinese government would only give Facebook access to their vast market if they in turn had access to all the Chinese users' personal data.

Then there was the clear evidence from the 2016 US election that Trump had won the presidency against the odds by his campaign’s ruthless use of Facebook to bombard voters with posts that had little regard for the truth. Also the manipulation of the algorithms to target vulnerable people such as teenage girls, anxious about their body image, with adverts and information tapping into those anxieties.

Careless People is a fly on the wall account of personalities, discussions, and disputes played out in meetings and on the international stage. We witness Facebook factions fighting for their stake in the enterprise and Mark Zuckerberg, guru, obsessive, growing richer by the minute and seemingly unable to see that this child of his Havard days was becoming an out-of-control raging monster creating havoc across the globe.

The book is a compelling read. It’s short chapters are full of humour that race along but while you enjoy the pace of the ride at the same time you are shocked and deeply concerned to see so much power, wielded by so few and with so little concern.

Meta Response to the News Agent's Podcast

"This former employee is trying to use the legal process to sell books, which an arbitrator already ruled broke the agreement she signed with a company when she accepted a large severance payment years ago. Her book is divorced from reality, disparaging and riddled with false claims."

To watch that episode of the News Agents click this image, which shows Sarah Wynn-Williams receiving The Freedom To Publish Prize at the British Book Awards - awarded jointly to Sarah Wynn-Williams and posthumously to Virginia Giuffre for Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, which recounts the abuse she said she suffered at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and others.

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Stoner by John Williams

According to Dante, over the gate of hell is this sign; “Abandon hope all ye who enter here”. This my single line warning to readers of Stoner because it is a hell of a book to step into.

How a book begins often sets the tone and John Williams does this in a masterful way. Page one is a pen portrait of Stoner, an image of failure and depression. Williams is like an artist painting from a palette of greys and browns with hardly a hint of colour.

He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor….few students remembered him. His name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all.

Turning the page his parents and their farm are painted in:

Stooped by Labour - gazed without hope - arid patch of land - long moments that she had to endure - eyes were pale and blurred - small eggs from a flock of spindly chickens - at 17, his shoulders were already beginning to stoop - a lonely household  - weary movement of a body - unpainted timbers sagged around the porch - the colours of the dry land, grey and brown, striped with white - sparsely furnished - floors unpainted planks, unevenly spaced, cracking with age up through which dust steadily seeped. His father grew slower and more weary with the passing months.

Williams is unsparing as he sets the tonal landscape of the novel, noun by noun, adjective by adjective. The gloom seeps into the reader's mind. This is book is going to be a slog.

When I first read it, I couldn't understand what the fuss was about. I didn't enjoy it and gave my copy away. I had a vague memory of a teacher of English Literature at an American University but that was all. Yet it does feature in lists of 100 best books, including. The Reader's Choice of 100 best books in The Guardian – equal 37th with Frankenstein.

Second time through as my book group's choice, I tried to see more clearly why some rate it highly. There’s no riveting plot, no memorable characters, if light does break through the gloom it is swiftly snuffed out. To cap it all, Williams sadistically finishes off poor Stoner on the last page, thus depriving the poor man of a happy retirement.

Stoner, leaves his depressing family and the depressing farm and goes to live with depressing relatives. He studies agriculture but attends a lecture on English Literature and has an epiphany. This seems to be the spark to ignite vitality and hope within him and you think, ah, now we're going to get a different Stoner and a different story. Now we move on from the grim trudge of his early years into the glorious sunlit uplands. But no, poor Stoner trudges on.

Out of nowhere he sees a woman at a party. He doesn't know her. She looks nice. He has little romantic spark, she has even less. They marry out of some grim, conventional necessity and spend their lives regretting it. Surprisingly, they have a child who brings some life and joy into Stoner's humdrum life. But having given Stoner a taste of happiness and raised a glimmer of hope in the reader that a door has finally opened and better things lie ahead, the author for some perverse reason slams the door shut.

Yet another glimmer of hope is the arrival of Katherine Driscoll and once again the clouds roll away, the sun bursts through and the ever-optimistic reader heaves a sigh of relief.  Stoner has moments of pleasure, an oasis of joy in the remorseless dessert of his existence They doesn't last long. She leaves. He never sees her again.

An academic dispute with Hollis Lomax that drags on through much of the novel reveals Stoner as a man of deep integrity. His reverence for literature and  the academic ideal will not allow him to pass one of Hollis' students. Hollis exacts a cold revenge, Stoner is demoted to introductory English classes, all hope of promotion dashed.

He has little victories here and there but as the first page of gthe novel states, his life is undistinguished and unmemorable. 

So why do people rate it so highly?

“Stoner is a perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving that it takes your breath away.” New York Times. 

Our bookgroup was divided. One member put up a strong defence, describing the novel as a portrait of that time in America:

Stoner is a story not just of one man but perhaps of a whole generation. The setting is the period from 1891 through to 1940, the key period being from 1910 through to 1940 and it was set in Missouri. These years cover WWI, prohibition, the 1929 financial crash, the 1930s Depression, the Dust Bowl, and culminates in WWII. Stoner’s Mother believed, life was a long moment to endure. When you think about the period in which he lives, what were the mores of the time, you then start to understand this is what he's actually writing about. This generation, the hard times they went through and the constraints under which they lived.

Another member said:

It was a little life. It was Stoner's life. He led his life as far as I could see, as honourably as he could. The revelation that came to him when he was doing literature and the reading of the Shakespeare sonnet came as an unexpected shock. He realised for the first time the whole world of beauty and wonder that lies in literature. This he held sacred and he was not going to let it be defiled by a student who was plagiarising or by a professor.  He lived his life as honourably as he could. We don't use the word honourable anymore. I do think the novel is about an honourable man. And that came through to me in spades. I think it is a masterpiece.

These are interesting defences of the novel, yet for me you need light and shade and Stoner was almost all shade.

Henry Thoreau in his book, Walden, writes: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”

It’s as though Williams knew this quote and decided to turn it into a novel. Stoner led a life of quite desperation..

I’ve now read Stoner twice and will not read it again.

The Sonnet that inspired Stoner's love of literature:

Sonnet 73: That time of year thou mayst in me behold

By William Shakespeare

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see'st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed whereon it must expire,

Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.

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Empire of The Sun - J G Ballard

Empire of the Sun is set in Shangahai in WWII and tells the story of the internment of foreign nationals in the city through the eyes of a young British boy. It is a very good read for several reasons:

• It had the gripping power of an eye-witness account as it mirrors Ballard's own experiences.
• It was war seen through the eyes of boy, a completely different perspective from that of an adult.
• It was set in a place and period of which I was ignorant - Shanghai in 1930’s-40’s with a confusing mix of nationalities seemingly unaffected by the war in Europe so it was good to tread new ground.

I started to read but quickly became confused. It’s all very well living inside the head of an intelligent, unusual boy, but what was going on? Who was who and what was what? Why were the Japanese in charge in Shanghai in 1940 and not the Chinese?

I had to orientate myself. So, I looked up a basic map of Shanghai in those years, including finding out where Jim's home in Amherst Avenue was. Then I did some research to find out why there was an International Settlement and a French Concession. The 1937 Sino-Japanese war explained the presence of the Japanese who had invaded China and were fighting the Chinese Nationalist army. The Nationalists were also facing a Communist insurgency and adding to the confusion were the Chinese War-Lords seeking to exploit war for their own ends.




Despite educating myself on the place and period, when I picked up the book again, I was back in a very confused world because I was back in the mind of a boy, seeing with his eyes, thinking his thoughts. He too does not know what is going on. Jim sees Japanese planes as wonders of aviation, to be admired, not feared. War is exciting images in magazines – a Boys Own adventure story, not death and destruction. As he goes to church, school and garden parties, in his imagination he is commanding a tank or flying a fighter plane. Then the Japanese attack Pearl Harbour, his world collapses, he finds himself alone and he needs to survive.

The book is excellent in telling the story of Jim’s survival. He is independent, free-spirited and courageous. Even when the harsh realities of the camp threaten starvation and death, he inhabits his own reality where death is simply the separation of the soul from the body. As he lies exhausted and starving in the stadium he wonders if he is already dead.

“Whatever happened, he would survive. He thought of Mrs Philips and Mrs Gilmour and their discussion of the exact moment at which the soul left the body of the dying. Jim’s soul had already left his body and no longer needed his thin bones and open sores in order to endure. He was dead, as were Mr Maxted and Dr Ransome. Everyone in Lunghua was dead. It was absurd that they had failed to grasp this.”

Ballard brings in the wider war in bits and pieces as the prisoners would receive it. The dropping of the A-bomb is done brilliantly:

But a flash of light filled the stadium, flaring over the stands in the south-west corner of the football field, as if an immense American bomb had exploded somewhere to the north-east of Shanghai. The sentry hesitated, looking over his shoulder as the light behind him grew more intense. It faded within a few seconds, but its pale Sheen covered everything within the stadium, the looted furniture in the stands, the cars behind the goal posts, the prisoners on the grass. They were sitting on the floor of a furnace heated by a second sun.

Ballard is using poetic licence here. The distance is too great for the flash to be witnessed.

Jim has an instinct of what he must do to survive and quickly learns to meet people’s needs using the time-honoured currency of barter.

The book is also the story of the chief victims of all wars, the helpless civilians who are caught up in a murderous conflict they can do nothing to control. We see the hero’s and the cowards, the self-giving and the self-serving, those with inner strength and those too weak to endure.

Survival of the fittest plays out in its most animal form. An unbending will for personal survival and a ruthless indifference to the suffering of others seemed to give you the best chance of going on living, yet we place Dr Ransome in a different moral universe from Basie and wonder, how would I behave?

“..those who worked hardest for others, like Mrs Philips and Mrs Gilmour and Dr Ransome, often held beliefs that turned out to be correct.”

This was an intriguing novel and very well written. Ballard pushes the war into the background and concentrates on a few well-drawn characters to depict the boredom, struggle and horror of life in a prison camp. He shows us a primitive world where everything superficial in adult life Is stripped away and the true nature of the individual is revealed. In this world is a child, uncontaminated by the sins and cares of adulthood, who, though his innocence, imagination and optimism sees everything differently. This contrast is what makes The Empire of The Sun such a compelling read.

A few quotes:

For the first time he felt able to enjoy the war. He gazed happily at the burnt-out trams and tenement blocks, at the thousands of doors open to the clouds, a deserted city invaded by the sky. It only disappointed him that his fellow prisoners failed to share his excitement

To their credit, in Jim’s eyes, neither the Americans nor the Dutch and Belgians in the camp wasted their time on nostalgia. The years in Lunghua had not given Jim a high opinion of the British.

All in all, Jim felt, the Americans were the best company, not as strange and challenging as the Japanese, but far superior to the morose and complicated British.

But Jim was glad that the Mustangs were so close. His eyes feasted on every rivet in their fuselages, on the gun ports in their wings, on the huge ventral radiators that Jim was sure had been put there for reasons of style alone. Jim admired the Hayates and Zeros of the Japanese, but the Mustang fighters were the Cadillacs of air combat.

Jim, they’ll fight. As you’ve loyally maintained, the Japanese are the bravest soldiers in the world.’
Well …’ Talk of bravery embarrassed Jim. War had nothing to do with bravery
The Japanese are brave,’ Jim conceded. ‘But bravery isn’t important now.’
I’m not so sure. Are you brave, Jim?’
‘No … of course not. But I could be,’ Jim asserted. ‘I think you are.’

It would be a pity for Mr Maxted to die just as his Studebaker arrived to take him back to the Shanghai nightclubs.

An immense pathos surrounded the throttle and undercarriage levers; the rivets stamped into the metal fabric by some unknown Japanese woman on the Mitsubishi assembly line.

Jim despaired. For so long he had invested all his hopes in this young pilot, in that futile dream that they would fly away together, leaving Lunghua, Shanghai and the war forever behind them. He had needed the pilot to help him survive the war, this imaginary twin he had invented, a replica of himself whom he watched through the barbed wire. If the Japanese was dead, part of himself had died. He had failed to grasp the truth that millions of Chinese had known from birth, that they were all as good as dead anyway, and that it was self-deluding to believe otherwise.

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How Should One Read A Book? – Virginia Woolf

Extract from her essay of the same name.

Suppose we were to go into a library and ask ourselves, how am I to read these books? What is the right way to set about it? There are so many and so various. My appetite is so fitful and so capricious. What am I to do to get the most pleasure out of them? And is it pleasure or profit or what is it that I seek?

No one is going to lay down the laws about reading. Here in this room full of books, if nowhere else, we breathe the air of freedom. Here, simple and learned man and woman are alike. Reading is so simple, a mere matter of knowing the alphabet, yet so difficult that it is doubtful whether anybody knows anything about it. Paris is the capital of France; King John signed the Magna Carta. Those area facts, those can be taught. But how are we to teach people so to read Paradise Lost as to see that it is a great poem. or Tess of the D’ Urbervilles to see that it is a good novel? How are we to learn the art of reading for ourselves?

Directly we begin to think how one should read a book, we are faced by the fact that books differ. There are poems, novels, biographies on the bookshelf. Each different from the other as a tiger from the tortoise, a tortoise from an elephant. Our attitude must always be changing, it is clear. From different books we must ask different qualities. But if we remember, as we turned to the bookcase, that each of these books was written by a pen which consciously or unconsciously tried to trace out a design, avoiding this, accepting that and venturing the other. If we try to follow the writer in this experiment from the first word to the last without imposing our design upon him then we should have a good chance of getting hold of the right end of the string.

To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges, but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker; become his accomplice. Even if you wish merely to read books, begin by writing them.

Woolf speculates how Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy might approach writing about meeting a beggar in the street.

Where Jane Austen describes manners, Hardy describes nature. Where she is matter of fact, he is romantic and poetical ... Some may complain Jane Austen is too prosaic or Thomas Hardy too melodramatic, but we have to remind ourselves it is necessary to approach every writer differently in order to get from him or her all they can give us. … Great writers often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly. They bend us and break us. To go from Jane Austen to Hardy, is to be wrenched and distorted this way then that.

Everyone is born with a natural bias of his own, in one direction rather than another. One will instinctively accepted Hardy’s vision rather than Jane Austen's. And reading with the current and not against it, is carried on easily and swiftly by the impetus of his own bent to the heart of this author’s genius. But then, Jane Austen is repulsive to him. He can scarcely stagger through the desert of her novels. Sometimes this natural antagonism is too great to be overcome, but the trial is always worth making.

If then this is true, that books are of very different types and to read them rightly we have to bend our imaginative powers, first this one way, then another, it's clear that reading is one of the most arduous and exhausting occupations.

Reading is not merely sympathising and understanding, it is also criticising and judging. When the book is finished, the reader must leave the dock and mount the bench. He must cease to be the friend. He must become the judge. So we ask, is it good or bad? What kind of book is it? How good a book is it? … If we're asked our opinion, we cannot give it. Parts of the book seem to have sunk away, others to be starting out in undue prominence. Then perhaps it is better to take up some different pursuit, to walk, to talk, to dig, to listen to music. If we distract ourselves by some other occupation or just go about our daily business, the whole book floats to the top of the mind complete. Some process seems to have been finished without once being aware of it. The different details which accumulated in reading assemble themselves in their proper places. The book takes on a definite shape. It becomes a castle, a cow shed, a gothic ruin, as the case may be.

Now one can think of the book as a whole, and the book as a whole is different. And gives one a different emotion. … Holding this complete shape in mind, it now becomes necessary to arrive at some opinion of the book's merits. For though it is possible to receive the greatest pleasure and excitement from reading, it is not so profound or so lasting as the pleasure we get when the second process, the after reading is finished and we hold the book clear, secure, and to the best of our powers, complete in our minds.

But how, we may ask, are we to decide any of these questions? Is it good or bad? How good is it? How bad is it? Not much help can be looked for from outside. We cannot go to the critics. There is nothing more disastrous and to crush one’s own foot into another person's shoe. It is not by reading critics, but by realising our own impression as acutely as possible and referring this to the judgments which we have formulated in the past – the books we have read and the opinions we have formed.

So then, to sum up, have we found any answer to our question? How should we read a book? Clearly no answer will do for everyone, but perhaps a few suggestions.

In the first place, a good reader will give the writer the benefit of every doubt; the help of all his imagination; will follow as closely, interpret as intelligently as he can.

In the next place he will judge with the upmost severity. Every book he will remember as a right to be judged by the best of its kind. He will be adventurous, broad in his choice, true to his own instincts, yet ready to consider those of other people.

It is true that we get nothing whatsoever except pleasure from reading. It is true that the wisest of us is unable to say what the pleasure maybe. But that pleasure, mysterious, unknown, useless as it is, is enough.

That pleasure is so curious, so complex, so immensely fertilising the mind of anyone who enjoys it, and so wide in its effects that it would not be in the least surprising to discover on the Day of Judgement, when secrets are revealed and the obscure is made plain, that the reason we have grown from pigs to men and women, come out from our caves and dropped our bows and arrows, and sat around the fire and talked and drunk and made merry, and given to the poor and helped the sick, and made pavements and houses, and erected some sort of shelter and society on the waste of the world, is nothing but this: we have loved reading.

The only important thing in a book, is the meaning it has for you.

Somerset Maugham

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